I’m Tim Booth
I’m Jim Glennie from the band James. We’re at the V Festival in Chelmsford.
BREAK (question, not heard on the interview)
Sleepy. Sleeping on the tour bus getting here. Then doing a signing and then eating. Yeah good.
Watching Man City beat Man United. Absolutely fantastic, absolutely wonderful. Then a signing which I actually really enjoyed. Yeah lots of people, but I’m tired. He’s tired.
I look like the partying type don’t I?
You were poorly though, weren’t you? You were a poorly boy.
I’ve been a poorly boy, I was throwing up yesterday.
He wasn’t very well yesterday. Just a little bit more sleep.
It’s amazing. Being third on the bill to Kasabian and The Killers was a surprise. In a way. It’s all a plus really, because we finished in 2000 and come back now. It’s been flying. We’ve been going around Europe and our audiences have doubled and tripled in Europe. It’s the music that’s been doing the work while we’ve been away, which is what we’d hoped. It’s what happened with The Pixies. And we’re really happy with that.
And it’s great to come back because there’s a whole bunch of people out there who don’t know James. People who got into music since 2001 when we stopped and it’s lovely to play to them and people who aren’t James fans who are here to see someone else.
BREAK
Festival setlists pick themselves in that we know that it’s an hour and we know that the majority of people who are going to be here, a lot of them might not know our music, so we play a little safer at festivals than we do at our own gigs. And the songs kind of pick themselves for us, I think.
Having said that, we’re doing two new ones tonight.
We do change the set. From yesterday to today, it’ll be different. We have arguments about it and we’ll be doing one new song today that I’ll be reading the lyrics for because I don’t know the lyrics for one of them as I was writing them a few days ago.
It’s hard because you only get an hour here, which for us is 12 songs and there’s just too many things we want to do. The hard thing is leaving songs out, there’s so much we want to do.
I can imagine it’s harder for Sigur Ros though, they’ve got one song.
For me, probably the first song yesterday. Which is not really good because you don’t want the first song to be the best one of the evening. It gives you a sense of going downhill in the wrong sense of the word. Frustration, yeah, first song.
It was, yeah. It was a big start to the gig yesterday.
And then it all went downhill.
It was a big end as well. We went kind of musical in the middle.
We did.
There’s a song called Upside, which is one of the new ones, that’s really uplifting, which I love. I just love playing it. And it’s one obviously, the crowd don’t go bananas all the way through because it’s not a song that they know. They tend to just stand there and listen. For me, personally, I just find it so uplifting.
The new songs? We’re kind of getting together in a week’s time to start pre-production and rehearsals and finish the writing. We’ve written about 120 pieces of music and we’ll whittle them down to the ones that really pick themselves. It’s probably going to be out in spring.
Early next year. I’d like it before then personally. It’ll be next year, but we’d like it to be early next year personally.
We’ve got our trumpet player back with us, Andy Diagram, who was with us for a couple of years in the early nineties, so there’s going to be quite a bit of trumpet on, I think, because he makes his presence felt. It’s going to be tender, insecure, triumphant, ecstatic. All the kind of things we like and are like in day to day life. Tender, insecure, ecstatic, triumphant. What else? Cocky. All those qualities that we embody.
Share:
