Category Archives: Interview

The legendary James are back with dazzling new album La Petite Mort, so we caught up with bassist and founder member Jim Glennie for a bit of a natter about it all…

You’re playing the Royal Albert Hall in November – that must be pretty exciting. Have you played there before?

It’ll be our third time. It’s a fantastic place, and there’s nothing more ridiculous than walking up to the Royal Albert Hall knowing you’re going to be playing there. It’s surreal, just being some idiot chancer from Moss Side playing at a place like that!

The new album sounds so fresh and full of vitality. What was Max Dingel like to work with as a producer?

We had the songs already so it was more about what we could do with them in the studio. We like the sound of the records Max has done, and we just wanted a bit of weight in there, a bit of beef.

That can be more difficult to get on record than when you’re playing live, but Max is a bit of a boffin in the studio, a bit of a scientist, so he was able to eke something out of it all.

I think it’s got that edge, that power, that bit of rawness that you get live, and you’ve got to be a bit clever to get that on record. He’s done a fantastic job, we’re dead proud of the record and we’re enjoying banging them out live.

You’ve got a busy summer of festivals ahead…

Yeah, we’re playing a ton of foreign ones – Benicàssim in Spain, others in Portugal, Greece, Mexico, Peru… In the UK we’re doing T in the Park, Latitude, Camp Bestival, and we’ve got a big gig in the centre of town in Manchester.

We’ve got a busy summer ahead, but busy in a good way!

One of the most striking aspects of La Petite Mort for me is the synth work. Who’s responsible for that side of things?

That’ll be our keyboard player Mark, we consciously turned him up this time. He’s an amazing keyboard player but constantly turns himself down, unlike most musicians! So we pushed him in the mix and made him much more of a focus.

He’s a funny lad, he really is, although he’s quite quiet. The rest of us are noisy buggers so we’d keep playing over him! We were sure to fix that this time around.

The indie giants’ bassist spoke to Goal about the season, Yaya Toure’s tantrums, the positives of the club’s money on Manchester and wasted talent at the Etihad Stadium

It’s been an amazing season to watch for the neutral but, for anybody involved, it has been heart-stopping at times. I’ve loved it, it’s been painful and you’ve been pulling your hair out at times: ‘We’ve got it … no we haven’t!’ It was a funny old season for City. We had amazing home form but rubbish away at the start for the season, stuffing everybody 6-0 and then went through a wobble but pulled it back at the end and, unbelievably, saw out those last four games.

For me that was the most impressive part of City’s season because ordinarily that wouldn’t be something that City could do; we’d have just crumbled like Liverpool did! They just ground it out when they needed to and City don’t normally do that; they don’t normally have that kind of professionalism and that clinical attitude, it’s normally much more all over the shop and that’s the pain of being a City fan over the years, really.

Has Manuel Pellegrini helped with that winning mentality?

I think City aren’t yet an established team that presumes they’re going to win things. Despite the money that’s been spent, through my adult life we’ve had 40 years of failure and living down the road from the other lot [United] that win everything, that takes a lot of shifting and more than just two or three years of success, that’s deep in the DNA of a club.

I think that’s why you need somebody cool in those situations that can steady the ship and [Pellegrini] did that. You don’t need a manager who can throw his arms up in the air and run down the touchline; we need that steady calmness that can keep the club on course.

We’re not yet a team that expects to win as much as everybody looks at our squad, we’ve had too many years of not winning stuff to suddenly counterbalance that quickly. We’re getting there, getting that mentality of expecting you’re going to win and the confidence that gives you and those last four games were indicative for me of that shift at City; that’s why I was so impressed.

So Pellegrini is the ‘Charming Man’ that City need?

It’s not an easy job – let’s face it, you’re dealing with some players whose egos must be incredible and trying to get them all pulling in the same direction. You saw that with [David] Moyes – how do you get that respect and control? [Sir Alex] Ferguson could just get in there and yell but Pellegrini has got that calm and that respect of the players and it suits City.

Speaking of egos, what do you think about Yaya Toure’s antics of late?

It’s just ridiculous, isn’t it? This gamesmanship in which players and their agents get involved in, it’s just so annoying for the fans because it’s disrespectful. If it was to go on behind the scenes then fair enough but it should never go public and the players shouldn’t get dragged into it. Of course they’re trying to get the best deal that they can for the player but that was just a ridiculous example.

Is it a shame that it’s come so soon after what should be a period of celebration for the club?

It is, absolutely, and Toure has had such an amazing season. He’s been unstoppable and he’s been the difference for City this year, he’s stepped up. [Sergio] Aguero was missing for most of it, struggling getting goals at times, [Alvaro] Negredo lost form, and he just grabbed some games by the scruff of the neck. He just runs at teams and there’s not another player out there like that.

I hope it’s just gamesmanship and the rumours are just nonsense but it’s just difficult for fans because you want to feel that the players are there in your heart and soul and, if somebody wants to leave, then fair enough but when somebody tries to work the situation then it’s not on. You feel a lot of it’s [engineered] and [Carlos] Tevez was the same with his agent; it sullies the player’s reputation with the fans and, if I was a player, I wouldn’t want that – it’s not a clever thing to do.

What impact do you think Financial Fair Play will have on City?

The limitation of the squad in the Champions League is probably going to have an impact. It seems there’s quite a lot of loopholes and ways to get around it, I’m not too sure what I think about it – whether that’s because I’m a City fan but there’s never an equality in funding in football, bigger clubs have more money than the smaller clubs. Unless you say there is ‘x’ amount for everybody to spend and it’s all the same every year, there’s always going to be that inequality. It seems like [Uefa] are pussy-footing around; I don’t know how much of it is just slapping teams across the wrist and taking a few quid in the process.

I kind of like the fact that, out of nowhere, some mad lunatic with too much money can step in, like Jack Walker, and say ‘I’m going to make this club massive’ and suddenly there’s an influx of attention and funding.

Look at Eastlands – it was a terrible part of Manchester, an awful part where you wouldn’t really want to go and there’s been a huge influx of cash there and job opportunities and development – is that a bad thing? Is that bad for Manchester? Is that bad for the game? Looking at the infrastructure of City and the changes around the ground, it’s a very very different part of Manchester now and it’s changing very positively and I can’t really see that as a negative thing.

I think we’ve got to be careful, it depends who we lose from the squad. A lot of players don’t play, we’ve got some amazing players who’ve hardly featured and, as much as we need a large squad, if I was a player I’d want to be playing. We’re still talking about a central defender to pair up with [Vincent] Kompany but I thought [Matija] Nastasic was looking good before he got injured and then it was like he didn’t exist. People were talking about him as if he wasn’t there and then [Martin] Demichelis came in and was there permanently and I don’t understand why we don’t revert back to that partnership.

The rest of the team, it depends on whether [Edin] Dzeko goes or not. I hope he doesn’t go and we’ve still got great players up front but Aguero missed most of the season through injury, Negredo didn’t score for the second half of the season, [Stefan] Jovetic only played a handful of games so, if Dzeko goes, then we’ll need a striker.

But then again, who would come in thinking that they weren’t going to be first or second choice? It’s [a balancing act], having a large squad of top-flight players, and half-a-dozen, a dozen are going to be disgruntled and I don’t blame them.

I feel sorry for the England players – Micah Richards is amazing, he should be somewhere playing every week. James Milner as well. [Jack] Rodwell, [Scott] Sinclair, they just haven’t featured this season. Their careers have ground to a halt. You don’t get many years as a top-flight footballer, 10 comfortably, and to spend three or fours of them not doing anything?

Are they sacrificing their careers for a pay cheque then?

Oh absolutely – for the last couple of years, fair enough. You come in in your early thirties, get a bundle of cash, don’t play every week but, as a young player, to come in and do that, it’s not worth the pennies. [Rickie Lambert’s move to Liverpool] makes sense because with them being in the Champions League, you play a lot of games, and if [Daniel Sturridge and Luis Suarez] are not scoring or injured you’ll get to play but I think when you’re a young player you’re just sacrificing your career and that’s just ridiculous. They’re not going to look back on the glory years of being on the Man City bench for four years, are they?

You’ve got to be realistic looking at the club you’re joining and think: ‘Will I be in that first XI, am I there yet?’ Perhaps you should hang on three years and then you will be but, if you’re not, then you can play instead of sitting there and making up the numbers.

I think City have invested a load of cash in their youth policy and the facilities there and, over the next few years, hopefully players will start coming through but, at the moment, you’re not seeing young City players coming through; I think that is an easy, simple way to try and manage that problem but dragging a player in from another Premier League team who’s on the rise, it’s not a good thing to do, it really isn’t.

Tell us about your album ‘La Petite Mort’ and why you chose the title.

The lyrics are about death and we wanted to reflect that in the title without being too morbid. La Petite Morte is French for the post-orgasmic stage so it is about death but it’s also a little tongue-in-cheek because obviously it’s a serious theme but the album is very uplifting, which is what James do a lot – take a dark lyric and put something uplifting behind that to counterbalance it, which is what the record is full of that.

Your single, ‘Moving On’, seems to reflect that balance.

In the west we’re terrible about dealing with death! It doesn’t exist as far as people are concerned but that’s different when you trace around the world. The Day of the Dead is a celebration of death and all your relatives and those you know who have died and it’s a very positive thing that brings death into everyday life. The people that have died are talked about but in the west we’re useless at this; we pretend it’s never going to happen but it is. I think that’s what we tried to do with the record in a liberating way, drawing attention to it without being dark or miserable.

Some bands just aren’t cool. Coldplay can sample Kraftwerk all they want but they’ll always be a bunch of student union try-hards led by a man who thinks he can team up with Bono to end poverty. James, the Manchester band responsible for stadium-filling hits like “Sit Down”, “Say Something” and “Come Home”, never tried to be anything other than what they were: a diverse bunch of lads trying to make music they liked. Throughout the 1980s, the critics championed their experimental, infectious alternative folk-pop. In the early 90s, when they exploded out of the Hacienda scene and started selling cartloads of records, James became the world’s lamest thing: a “stadium indie” band. They’d become more polished, more mainstream and maybe more boring, but did they really deserve the backlash? If they’d quit earlier, would they be critically revered like all the other great Manchester bands they played with?

“It’s a very UK-based thing. They like you when you don’t know what you’re doing”, guitarist Larry Gott tells me, of the press reaction. “You just stumble clownishly into something and that gives it a sense of authenticity. As soon as you get better at what you’re doing, you lose that sense of authenticity in the observer’s eye because it looks like you know what you’re doing”. The press, Larry says, treated James like a kid that is well-loved until it grows up, at which point everyone decides it’s “a bit of a cunt”. Founding member and bassist Jim Glennie is keen to emphasise that James never got polished and that, even now, they “like the fear, the fear of being on stage and having to make something work. The last thing we’d want to do is polish everything out, which most bands want to.”

The desire to take risks was with James from the beginning. Two kids from Moss Side, Jim Glennie and Paul Gilbertson formed the band in 1982 two weeks after Paul, a disciple of The Fall and Orange Juice (James are named after the brilliant James Kirk, Orange Juice’s original guitarist), persuaded Jim, a self-confessed “football hooligan”, to pick up a bass guitar. A few months later, Jim and Paul, then 16, had snuck into the Manchester student union. “We’d either climb in through a window if we could get in, or get someone to sign you in on the door. If you waited long enough some poor student would do it,” Jim remembers. There, they were impressed by the dancing of a student called Tim Booth: “I was from Leeds and I’d been sent to an English boarding school and ended up at Manchester University studying Drama. I met these guys, I was dancing in a nightclub and they saw me dancing and were stealing my beer. They were 16 but they were still pretty scary”, Tim says.
Once they’d stopped stealing Tim’s booze, Jim and Paul asked him to come out and rehearse with them. “We figured you were in university so you could help us with our lyrics”; Jim tells Tim. “He’ll do, bright lad”! The next day, Tim woke up with Paul’s number scrawled across his hand. Bleary eyed, he called him up and went out to Withington, to a scout hut the band practiced in. Today, Tim remembers it clearly. “Memory’s a false thing anyway, we know that scientifically, but I have strong memories of that day. Within a week we had a gig supporting Orange Juice in Sheffield and I was banging a tambourine and dancing and terrified”.

Soon, Tim became the singer: “I’d never done any singing. I’d never done any lyric writing, ever. I had to write lyrics because they started asking me to sing these songs with the most appalling lyrics. I quote you: ‘I have a way with girls, me being so good-looking. I have a fantasy, I wanna be raped by a woman’. And Paul’s going ‘you’ve got to sing that next weekend’, and I’m going, “Errrr, can I change the words?’” Leaving their proto-Kasabian lyrics behind, James were hard to pin down in the early days. At one show, Tim just read lyrics out, leading future promoters to bill the band as, “James (Not a poet)”. This footage from a 1982 gig at the Hacienda shows their debt to Orange Juice as well as giving you an idea of how far they were from the stadium band they later went on to be typecast as. Though Jim was “terrified” of Mark E. Smith, The Fall were “incredibly supportive” of James and regularly put gave them support slots at their club night.

As with many alternative 80s bands, James had a strong DIY ethos. “In the early days we used to do our own equipment and I remember travelling to Oxford on the back of a butcher’s van, under canvas, illegally, with the drums set up, freezing cold, blood everywhere over the floor because it’s a butcher’s van, a vehicle that wouldn’t go over 40 miles an hour. We ended up being so late we nearly didn’t get to play”, Jim says. The band huddled up in sleeping bags in the back of the van and Larry used to allow the local community to become unwittingly involved in an arts sponsorship program by going round the estates syphoning off petrol for their journeys. A man of the people, he didn’t pick on just one car. The butcher who lent the van got into fat rendering and ended up doing very well selling the fat to cosmetics companies.

James, playing on the roof of the Piccadilly Hotel in Manchester, 1991

“James was a rough, Manchester band”, Tim explains. “It was beg, steal or borrow. The original singer ended up in Strangeways Prison for GBH and the original guitar player ended up in Strangeways Prison for GBH. Thatcher had this enterprise allowance thing, which really helped us because until then, we had to sign on the dole and you had to be back in Manchester and you couldn’t really tour. It was tricky, but that was what was sustaining us”. This enterprise allowance, brought in to keep the official dole figures down, enabled the band to officially go professional. In the eyes of the state, they went from being unemployed lads from the industrial north, to thrusting young entrepreneurs. When they were on the dole, they were terrified that well-publicised gigs or reviews would have the authorities knocking on their door to ask them why they were on benefits when they were clearly coining it as Manchester’s latest, greatest indie band. The first time they were on the cover of the NME, they were still signing on.

The reality, of course, was that James spent years scraping by, rolling through a series of not-quite-successful relationships with Factory Records, Sire and Rough Trade. “For about the first five years, we earned about 30 quid a week, which was about the same as the dole”, says Tim. “And then it jumped after five years, but we had about seven years really without making money. We were just doing it because we loved what we did”. The potential for a big break came when The Smiths fought their record label to bring James along on the 1985 “Meat is Murder” tour. When Marr and Morrissey met, one of the things they shared was that they both had James’ first single. It was their Jagger and Richards meeting on the train station platform moment and James played the part of Muddy Waters. The Smiths were “very kind and generous” to James and covered the early James song “What’s the World”.

During the 80s, there was an impression that James were, as the NME put it, “lefty veggies gone bonkers”. In some ways, this impression has never left, clinging particularly to Tim. Once upon a time, says Jim, this wasn’t too far from the truth and on the “Meat is Murder” tour; Jim ended up giving Morrissey a massage because the great yodeller had a headache. “Back in those days we were a bunch of hippies so the idea of giving someone a massage was par for the course. If someone had a headache, you wouldn’t give them a paracetamol, you’d light a candle and get some oil out. I gave Morrissey a massage and he said, ‘Much better, thanks very much’. He was probably lying”. A few years later, when they were playing Top of the Pops with Nirvana, Kurt Cobain was so nervous he felt like he couldn’t sing. Tim offered him a throat massage to relieve his troubles. Kurt declined.

These idiosyncrasies applied to James’ life outside the limelight, as well. For a start, the band never talked about anything to do with their music. They would just get in a room together and start playing. “We’d have silent rehearsals”, Tim recalls. “Four or five hour rehearsals, four or five times a week. Then Larry joined, in 1984, and because he could actually play, he began to provide the semblance of a structure”. “I didn’t know what key it was in”, says Larry. “I didn’t know anything. Let’s say that 10- 20% of the time the music that the individuals were playing came together into something that was recognisable and you could tell they were actually listening to each other. The rest of the time, it sounded like a music shop on a Saturday afternoon. One’s playing Michael Jackson, another’s playing “Smoke On The Water” and nobody’s listening to each other”.

These were the famous James improvisations and out of the 20% that made sense, came the songs. The rehearsals were taped, so the band would listen back to the tapes and when they heard something they liked, they’d try and recreate it. They’d get the recreation about 40% correct and from there they’d have something fit to record. To this day, none of the band ever brings ideas to James rehearsals. There’s no enthusiastic “Hey guys, I came up with a great chord progression last night”. “We carried on doing this for a long, long, long, long time and it’s still pretty much the basis of how we do things now,” says Jim.

It’s also how they wrote their biggest hits. “Sit Down”, for example, came out of one of the improvisations. “It’s very simple if you listen to it again, like a lot of the best ideas. It’s only three chords, its E, A, B and they just keep cycling round”, says Larry. Tim started singing a melody over the top of it and after 20 minutes of playing the band collapsed in a fit of hysterics. “We just laughed and went, ‘that’s ridiculous’, because we’d just written a Eurovision song contest song or something”, remembers Jim. At the time, the band was falling out with Sire Records and they needed a song to make them feel like they had a future. They kept “Sit Down” for themselves and it became a No. 2 hit in the UK.

This summer, James release their latest album, La Petite Mort, some of which was written in Greece, where the band are enormously, hilariously popular. Listen to any James song on YouTube and you’ll find the comments section dominated by Greeks. There are a whole raft of Greek-language James covers, including this version of “Say Something” by 90s legend Filippos Pliatsikas. James played one gig in Athens in 2001, before they split up and between then and their reformation in 2007, they became mysteriously massive in the Hellenic world. It’s a popularity they’re happy with. The critics may not know what to do with James but the people will always love them.

Tim kindly gave up his time to sit and speak with Grov and what follows is a very interesting and educational look into one of Britain’s finest acts!

One of the threads of this book is rebellion. Do you think mainstream music is an acceptable medium for spreading ideas, truth and rebellion? And do you think mainstream music has lost this idea and become corporate controlled?

I think that it has been. I think it’s in a very conservative place right now. The media has a stranglehold. You can see in the 60s it didn’t know what was going on and in the end it just followed the bands, right up until the 70s. Corporate structures couldn’t keep up with change that was going on and the dissemination of ideas, often mystical ideas. It simply couldn’t keep up with the change that was going on, certainly not with the ideas that were changing the way people were thinking in the west. But gradually the corporations got a grip. And now they’re falling apart again due to the internet and downloading. I like Pete Townsends comment when he said, “A band comes along and it starts a tribe and people get angry and express their stuff, then they get old and then a new movement comes along.” He put the emphasis on “the people learn a new dance”. He had it down to being about the dance quite strongly. I do kind of come from a place where dance is revolution for me and it’s a place where I get in touch with my intuition and get detached from the culture and the culture’s grip on my thinking. So I like the idea that punk had a dance, a specific dance, and House had a dance. So dance is very important to me. It was banned by the Christians in this country for hundreds of years because of what it unearthed and that tends to be way.

At the moment with the Simon Cowell’s and the X Factor style of T.V. it’s becoming just about being famous and a celebrity. The word celebrity does have a kind of vacuous meaning to it. It’s like a dirty word. And you can see the public’s attitude to it on shows such as “I’m a celebrity get me out of here” which is basically a torturous celebrity show … which is quite fascinating because the public love celebrities. They also want to torture them. It’s interesting to have that split of the desire to be one and also to have them hung, drawn and quartered, frequently. But while all this is going on there is some fantastic music being made and some really great bands out there. I’d say better than twenty years ago. But you do have to work hard to find it.

Your lyrics contain much Universal wisdom and very usable philosophy. Have you ever written a song and wondered where it came from?

Just about all of them. I never sit down to write a song about a topic, ever. It nearly always just comes out. And it usually comes out reflecting the intensity within me about something. So even a song like ‘government walls’ which is extensively a government song, was about my anger of living in Manchester and seeing John Stalker basically getting stitched up because he was investigating shoot to kill policy. So even though it was a political song, it was more personal about my anger. As I say I was living in Manchester and he was a Manchester cop, clearly honest, maybe too honest and it got me angry so I wrote a political song. I don’t write many political songs, probably a handful in thirty years, but they come from being angry enough or emotional enough to write it. Nearly all of my songs come that way. And the ones that don’t, come from my unconscious and I don’t even know what I’m writing about. Often I’ll find out a year later. But most of the time I don’t really have a clue what I’m doing?! I’m not a writer to order and it doesn’t come from the conscious part of my brain at all. It reminds me of a fantastic story I heard of a woman living in America who’s considered one of the greatest poets. She is in her eighties now but she describes how when she was in her teens and twenties she was working in the fields and how she could hear poems come rumbling down the hillside like a creature, and have to run as fast as she could to her house and grab a pen and paper to catch the poem. Sometimes she’d make it back and other times she felt the poem pass through her and disappear into the countryside looking for somebody else. When she did catch it she was able to write the complete perfect poem in five minutes or so. Other times she felt it passing through her and she’d literally grab it by the tail and pull it back into her body and write with her other hand as she was pulling it back, and then write it down perfectly but in reverse order. I thought that was the most example of a physical muse I have ever heard.

In the song “Pressures on” off the Wah Wah album you sing “Love is at the heart of everything.” Is this something you strongly believe?

Yes it is. But there are hundreds of words for love, just as there should be hundreds of words for snow. There are so many types of love that it can get confusing, but yes, love is at the heart of everything. When we don’t mess around with it this is an incredibly abundant planet. There is food and water here for people and a cycle which is quite remarkable, and I can’t see that as being anything other than benign. Now if you see death as cruel you may disagree. I see death as part of a cycle so in that case I do see love as being at the heart of everything. But I’ve just had a very interesting lesson where I know someone who brought up their son with complete unconditional love, in a certain kind of way. But it was unconditional love without boundaries and it didn’t do him any good. So again, love can be abused just as anything else can. It must come with a discipline. One of my favourite quotes which I used in a song is “Are you disciplined enough to be free?”

It always amazed me when I saw thousands of James fans singing along to lyrics of such tender and philosophical subjects. I don’t know of another band which has done that on such a scale, if at all. Almost like a modern day equivalent of healing ones-self through tribal chants. Were you aware that something very special and unique was taking place?

Yes! I mean I have been touched by music in the same way. There are other people making music who have touched me in the same way … from Patti Smith to Leonard Cohen. That’s what I was always interested in … the way it hit people.