Phillip Schofield : Come and have a seat at the front. Always a pleasure to have you on the programme. That’s a great housecoat by the way – that’s a heck of a thing. Fabulous. I bet you can go straight back to bed afterwards. Welcome to you. I’ve got a couple of things for you here. First of all this has come from Christine Free who is in Swindon. My daughter Poppy is an avid James fan as you can see from the enclosed photo. There we are. There’s a nice picture there. Had her hair done. Extraordinary. So I thought if we gave that to you, maybe you could send her a picture or something.
Tim : Yeah sure. Find out her hairdresser
PS : If you’ve got time. The other one I’ve got here, we’ll get through the fan mail first of all if that’s alright, this is from Susan. Susan is in Greater Manchester and she’s done a whole load of pictures for you here. Masses of them. All sorts of stuff.
Tim : Who’s that psychopath?
PS : Let me show you the originals. Those are the originals there.
Tim : Thank you.
Jim : Who is it?
Tim : It’s Andy
PS : A bit skinny in that one actually.
Tim : Oh, I’m like that under this coat.
PS : Well you do apparently, I was reading all this stuff on you last night, and apparently is it true that you lose a stone when you’re touring? When you’re performing.
Tim : Yeah. From the beginning of the tour to the end, kind of. Not in one concert
PS : Does that mean you can pig out? You can have those as well. You can pig out in a major way before you go on tour because you know you’re going to lose it before the end?
Tim : Yeah, but not straight before a concert because you end up belching in the middle of a song which isn’t very healthy. As you’ll find out I think.
PS : Oh no, I shan’t be eating, I’ll be far too nervous to do any of that stuff
Tim : No fizzy drinks
PS : Is that right? Thanks for the advice. It’s going quite well actually, I’m quite pleased with it at the moment.
Tim : You’ve got a good teacher
PS : Yes I have. Got a very good teacher. Thank you. Let’s get on with that now. Going back to reading through all the newspaper stuff, live is very important, your live stuff is very important to you. I mean you were singing live vocals this morning on the programme. Is it important for you to get out and do it live.
Tim : Yeah, yeah
Jim : We’ve just finished a really big tour and that was great fun. It’s what we do best at the end of the day.
PS : My brother says it’s one of the best concerts he’s ever seen actually, really enjoyed it and that’s high praise from him by the way. A lot of people would say, apart from your fanatical fans that you’ve got, that it was almost sort of an overnight success. You’ve actually been plugging away at it for quite a while, haven’t you? Eight years or so
Tim : Yeah, me and him have been together about ten years and James have been going about nine.
PS : Did you feel comfortable about slipping out of that cult status and into commercial popdom? Do you want that to happen?
Tim : We needed the money so we didn’t turn it down. Because we’ve been going so long, we write all our songs through improvisation so we can’t change it so it doesn’t affect the way we make our music. We did, I think we’d had enough of being in that cult ghetto which gets tedious after a while and it’s nice to reach as many people as possible. We’re not prejudiced. We like to have young and old and families and their really young kids, it’s great.
PS : It’s alright being cult but it doesn’t pay the mortgage.
Jim : Biggest cult band in the world.