Category Archives: Interview

James know all about the waiting game. After all, they’ve been playing for close to a decade now, waiting with patience for the world to recognise what they and their fans have known for years. James is a doorway through which you’ll find what you’ve been looking for. Sometimes it is achingly beautiful and, at other times, painfully real, and a little frightening. But no matter what, you’ll find it intermingled with the twists, turns and ramblings of the doorman, singer/lyricist Tim Booth, flanked on either side by the strumming duo of Jim Glennie and Larry Got, bass and guitars respectively.

James’ audience finally began to catch up in numbers to the band’s legendary reputation when “Sit Down” broke through the Madchester masses in 1996. “Sit Down” paved the way for stateside exposure and airplay with “Born of Frustration,” the magnificent single from last year’s album Seven. This year’s offering is Laid, due out in September. It is an album whose sound is a combination of the departure of Andy Diagram, horn-player and dress-wearer extraordinaire, and the experience of extensive touring with Neil Young, where James opened his shows with stunning acoustic sets. The acoustic experience is plentiful on Laid, which was produced under Brian Eno, in the studios of Peter Gabriel.

Larry Gott explains, “we went in with the intention of writing that [Laid], and we had other ideas as well.” They had six weeks to record the new album, so James welcomed Brian Eno’s suggestion that they use two studios to record simultaneously. That way, as Larry puts it, “there’s no hanging around – you’re doing two different things,” and, if there was a problem with recording one in one studio, they just worked on something else in the other studio.

The results, from Larry’s perspective, were incredible. After the six weeks were up, James had, in addition to the finished album, an extra album and a half of material, which will be released at a later date. Gott becomes very excited when he discusses this mode of recording. He is energised by the spontaneity, and amount of new material that was generated under the time spent with Eno. Not surprisingly, he looks forward to working with him again.

The tale of James is full of whispers tinged with rumour and murmurs of mythic proportions. From a band who was once known under the moniker Model Team International, boasting Tim Booth as a mascara-clad dancer, to the band you see before you today, laden with experience, full of optimism, and never jaded. Time has given James respect and, longevity. Laid will add on more of the same for those musicians, who dwell in brilliance and live in the realms of genius.

“Born Of Frustration” was the name of the Modern Rock Tracks hit from James’ last Fontana/Mercury release, “Seven,” but it could also sum up the band’s continuing battle to win over audiences in the U.S.

“It can be weird,” vocalist Tim Booth says of the band’s widely varying degrees of popularity in the U.K. and U.S. “We did one gig in England in front of 30,000 people, and then we come out here and it’s ‘James who?'”

Yet Booth says the band actually prefers the support position when playing live. Just prior to the release of its new album, “Laid,” issued Oct. 5, the band concluded a stint on the WOMAD tour, headlined by Peter Gabriel, and last year it toured with Neil Young.

“You’re up there for an hour instead of two,” he says. “It’s kind of more fun playing for an audience that doesn’t know you and winning them over, rather than playing for the converted.”

Mercury is optimistic that this approach eventually will break the band in the U.S. “We will work ‘Laid’ like we have been working James for the last two years–by making friends at retail,” says Mercury Records senior director of marketing Josh Zieman.

The label currently is negotiating with a few chains to include “Laid” in their listening booths and “buy it and try it” promotions, and it is anxious to get James back out on the road. “That’s the way they broke in the U.K., and that’s the way we will continue to work it here,” says Zieman.

“Laid,” produced by Brian Eno, finds James taking a slightly more sombre approach. According to Booth, the sound of the album was at least partially influenced by the tour with Young, on which the band performed acoustically.

“After we toured with him, we didn’t play electric again for three months,” Booth says. “Our ears were sort of tuned to that level of subtlety. The way we did the LP was just a gradual continuation of that, and Brian encouraged that. So we ended up with a fairly laid-back record.”

Mercury has been working the title track of the album at alternative and college radio, and has long-term plans to take James to album alternative. “Off the bat, we are going back to where we had the most success, and we will build from there,” Zieman says. In its second week on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart, the song leaped to No. 15.

James also will make an appearance on “The Tonight Show,” tentatively set for Friday (29). The band hopes to return to the U.S. in early 1994, once again as a support act.

Meanwhile, the sessions with Eno were so fruitful that the band has another album in the can.

“‘Laid’ is the LP we went in to make,” Booth says. “It’s the song LP, but we also did a double LP of mainly improvised stuff.” According to Booth, Eno heard the band jamming and said, “People would like to hear this.”

Yet the rest of the Eno sessions won’t be released until next year. “We’ve kept it under wraps,”

Booth says. “We haven’t shown the record company, except for a few people in London. No one in America has heard it. We don’t want to confuse people. We want “Laid” to be focused on properly, and then we’ll present the strange, artistic younger brother.”

At the time of the Laid release, October 1993, Larry was interviewed by the influential Guitar Magazine.

Here is a transcript of that interview:

‘This is the first interview I’ve done with a guitar magazine,’ beams Larry Gott, ‘so to me this is proof that I’ve really arrived, heh heh!’ Typical really, James released their first single ten years ago yet it was only with 1989’s ‘Sit Down’ that they became anything approaching a success, became at all recognisable, became – whisper it – pop stars. Up until then, they were popularly known for two things; the fact that singer Tim Booth was a bit mad and couldn’t dance and a rather natty and lucrative line in t-shirts. But then came ‘Sit Down’. THAT song has since gone on to become something of a milestone round their necks, a reliable, hummable, anthem that moves otherwise well-adjusted people to spit, ‘Urggh! Stuuuudent bollocks!’ Luckily, James know this. Though their last album ‘Seven’, got them severely panned for moving dangerously near to Simple Minds/U2 bombastic stadium ‘rawk’; territory, they’ve suddenly pulled a fast one and returned with a stripped-down album that’s heavy on acoustic instruments, bubbling with slide guitar and about as far from stadium rock as you can get. James have gone folk… sort of.

And stranger still, they’ve done it with the help of Brian Eno – producer of U2. ‘A couple of years ago’ explains Gott, ‘we went on tour with Neil Young, who was doing acoustic shows, and one of the stipulations of touring with him was that the support bands were all acoustic too. There was us and John Hammond, the acoustic blues player. We were playing in these fantastic amphitheaters across America, on the edges of canyons, places like Red Rocks (yes, where U2 recorded ‘Under a Blood Red Sky’) which is this huge cathedral cut out of the rock in Denver… And There’s 10-12,000 stoned deadheads out there, with their picnic baskets, their beer and their pipes, and they were really laid back but they really listened to what we were doing. It really was a stripped-down sound – Dave (Baynton-Power) was playing on just two drums, there were no synthesizers, no electric guitars, no effects. It was dead dry – when you finished a note, it ended. And the more we played around with this the more we enjoyed it. I think we discovered the power you can get out of an acoustic performance, so we came off that, did an acoustic tour of the UK too, and then immediately went into rehearsals for writing this new album. We realised then that we’d brought this whole attitude with us – we picked up electric instruments again but we played them with a real stripped-down bare feel’.

James’ new LP, ‘Laid’ is nothing short of a revelation. The recent single, ‘Sometimes’, might well be a, erm, reliably hummable, rollicking yet shambling anthem, but this time it’s fuelled by manically strummed acoustic guitars and is one of the rockiest songs on the whole album. Most of the rest is seriously reflective and quiet – the folkish ‘Five O’, the slow wailing ‘blues’ of ‘P.S’ or the gently swaying pop of ‘Say Something’. And more than ever since their early days, ‘Laid’ also sees James songs powered by Larry Gott’s guitar. Having dabbled in all sorts of styles from African (‘Chain Mail’), through the usual indie-pop jangling to Stonesy R&B (‘How Was It For You?’), ‘Laid’ sees Larry getting seriously back into slide guitar, something which he first explored back in 1983.

‘I played it – tentatively – on the first album, ‘Stutter’, on a song called ‘Really Hard’, and that’s the thing about slide for me…I’ve always found it really hard! Your intonation has got to be so spot on, but it seems that in the last 12 months it’s just clicked with me. The slide fits really easily on my finger, playing it is comfortable, and it’s gelled really well with the sort of songs we’ve been writing. It sits great with the violin (played by Saul Davies), ’cause you’ve got two instruments without perfect intonation – effectively without frets – and they really weave around each other. So that’s worked and helped us keep the sound really stripped. I’ve enjoyed playing just simple melodies, and just discovering the possibilities of a slide guitar played in an open tuning.

‘There was a less precious attitude about this album,’ he confirms about Laid’s’ stark contrast to ‘Seven’. ‘With ‘Seven’ we started off producing it ourselves ’cause we hadn’t met a producer that we felt we could relate to, and then we started working with Youth from halfway through the project. Hence it ended up a bit of a mish-mash. At the beginning, because we didn’t have the confidence that a producer would have, we tended to over-fill the tracks, which was such a bad attitude ’cause we then couldn’t get rid of them. There were seven instruments always on the go on ‘Seven’, whereas in this one it’s really pared down.

‘Brian Eno came in at quite a late stage. He liked what we’d done up to that point, and really got interested in the jams we’d been having. He’d listen to these huge jams and come back and say, “You’ve got a whole song in there.” The title track ‘Laid’ came out of one of those huge jams, a song called ‘Lullaby’ too. Brian’s great, and he really came into the fore when we got into the studio, if something wasn’t working he’d just move us on to something else. He insisted we set up live in the studio and just play, and in the end we almost invariably went for the first take. Brian had the confidence to say, “Let it live with all it’s imperfections,” and although the second or third takes might have had the structure down a bit better, they didn’t have the naivete, this strange beauty that the first take had.’

There is of course some irony in James producing their most down-to-earth and honestly rootsy album with someone like Eno, though Gott insists the balding enigma is not quite some studio-bound boffin some people might think. ‘Brian’s not this studious character – he either discovers something straight away, or he forgets it. The thing is, he’s got a good chance of getting something he wants immediately because of all the background work he does. ‘A good example was when I was sitting in the car with him once and he had his notebook which he takes everywhere, and on it were all these dots and lines. There was basically this symmetrical dot pattern with lines going out from a central point and then coming back. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was working out the coefficient of reverb reflections in a pine forest! He’d heard a gunshot in a pine forest a few days earlier and when he heard the shot he noticed it had a particular reverb. It’s because you’ve got an organised plantation of trees, because the forest has been built by The Forestry Commission, and it’s all pine so you’ve got these very tall trunks, poles effectively because all the leaves are at the top,and a very dead floor because all the needles have dropped onto it. And you get a particular reverb because of this. So this is typical Brian – he worked all this out, and then he logs it in his notebook and when he needs that sound in the future he’ll know where to get it. But he won’t waste time laboriously trying to find it in the studio – he’ll know how to get sounds. It’s the best way because the biggest death of creativity in the studio comes from waiting around.

‘We had tapes rolling all the time in the studio – even when we were just tuning up, just in case something interesting happened, and very often it did. Brian set up these huge 14″ reels running tapes at half speed, so we could have all these ideas just jammed for up to an hour. It’s actually a very quick way of working because you discover what you’re writing as you’re actually recording it! And in the end we had an hour and a half of finished songs and this whole load, two and a half hours, of improvisation, including 90 per cent of the lyrics.’

If the folkiness of ‘Laid’ isn’t enough to confuse you, these improvised workouts are due to be separately released as an album next year. This, says Gott, will finally allow people to hear the whole James.

‘We’re still a song-based band, despite this album of experimentation.’ Gott qualifies, ‘but I hope that every album we do changes peoples perception – I know ‘Seven’ certainly did ha ha! But no, this one certainly will. We also wanted to release a Radio 1 live in concert thing we did, but, basically, they just want a ridiculous amount of money. We wanted to release three albums this year just so people would say “what fucking direction is this band going in?!” Still I think it would have confused the record company – it’d be like riding three horses with one arse heh heh!

Gott joined James after meeting bassist Jim Glennie and original guitarist Paul Gilbertson at a guitar lesson. Gott was the teacher, the two young Jameses the pupils. ‘They played me ‘Hymn From A Village’ and I just thought, “God, here I am giving lessons to guys who’ve produced far superior to anything I’ve ever done,” and I just thought, yeah! Not long after, Gott was helping out with James’ live sound and adding the occasional backup guitar, and he soon replaced the wayward Gilbertson full-time. He admits his teaching forte was pointing out the right chords to kids who wanted to play along to their favourite Jam albums, though he insists that this is what learning the guitar is invariably about. ‘You show someone how to play one of their favourite tunes and they’re happy. This is why there’s all these people playing ‘Stairway To Heaven’ or ‘Smoke On The Water’ in music shops every Saturday afternoon – ’cause they’re getting a kick out of it. It should be fun; it’s not a study – or if it is, then take it up really seriously. I was never into that ’cause I’m a lazy player. You won’t hear any flash licks on my records! I much more enjoy playing simple melodies and finding a place where it’ll fit along with these five other musicians. That’s what I love about old blues stuff, or old folk stuff – every instrument has it’s place.

On ‘Laid’, what noticeably cuts through is Gott’s acoustic and slide playing. It’s nothing too spectacular, but it’s also something that’s too rarely heard these days.

‘When I was young, I knew these people who had this amazing American import collection and those records were a big inspiration. They had this record callled ‘Sleepwalk’ by Santo & Johnny which had this beautiful Hawaiian slide playing on it, and it had this purity of tone which really impressed me. I know the lengths that Ry Cooder goes to – using old pickups, using very heavy gauge strings and stuff – to get that sound, and I’m starting to understand the tonality of slide guitar much better. I really love it. As soon as you start adding distortion or playing too loudly it reminds me of those terrible bands of the 70’s that used to freak out on heavy rock slide. I don’t like that; I like the purity of acoustics and dobros.’

Citing influences like Marc Ribot (with Tom Waits), Neil Young, Ry Cooder and Captain Beefheart’s nutty duo of Zoot Horn Rollo and Antennae Jimmy Stevens, Gott’s playing is refreshingly free from any blues-rock stylings. ‘It’s too much of a footprint,’ he argues. ‘I think it’s too easy to pull one of those licks out of the bag. I remember doing this huge big rock lick in rehearsals once and it was so gross, Tim sneered, “Your roots are showing!” I had to drop it straight away heh heh! But even though I play slide, I certainly haven’t got what the early blues players had, and I don’t think anyone has had it since the British blues players stomped all over it with heavy beats and stuff like that. Unfortunately that’s what most people are reminded of when they hear a blues lick; it has that leaden connotation as opposed to the really free spirit you hear in Robert Johnson and now, I think, Ry Cooder – he’s still got it, or he comes close to having it.

‘I think we do manage to avoid cliches as a band, ’cause we all like different things. There’s no common taste as such – the thing we have in common is our experience. All the things we like go into a big melting pot and when it beings to take shape it makes it’s own sense, if you know what I mean. It has it’s own sense and you play to that. It sounds weird but it means you don’t readily get into cliches.

‘In what James do, it’s all about songs, and I think it’s actually important in some ways for me not to stamp my personality on something so much that it’s to the detriment of the song. It’s not about showing off with us. ‘It doesn’t bother me that this record sounds “unfashionable”. The one reason it doesn’t bother me is seeing someone like Neil Young’s track record – the Godfather of grunge puts out ‘Harvest Moon’, a reflective country album! And before that when everyone was expecting him to be getting old, he puts out fuckin’ ‘Arc’! Amazing!’

James’ keenness to sunrise is unlikely to produce anything as extreme as ‘Arc’, but there’s no doubt that in ‘Laid’ they’ve given birth to a little gem. Their record company, Fontana, have certainly got high hopes for the band and even though they’re reluctant pop stars, Gott for one is feeling up to the task.

‘When we wrote ‘Sometimes’ I just thought, “Fuckin’ hell, that’s brilliant! What a stunning piece of work!” And it was written in 10 minutes. But it’s not in your control, it’s not in anybody’s control, it just happens…Thats it, it’s all been a fluke, heh heh!

For the dobro-esque slide work on ‘Laid’, Gott used a Les Paul-ish shaped custom electric resonator guitar custom built for him by Parisian luthier Phillipe Dubreuille. It has an old Telecaster pickup on it at the neck and a transducer mic under the bridge, but it delivers a surprisingly dobro-like acoustic tone.

‘If you notice, all the slide work on the album is really slow. I tried playing slide way back on ‘Whoops!’ and I heard live tapes of that and sometimes my pitching was just awful! The song just got faster and faster as the drummer got more comfortable with the beat, but I just got more and more all over the place. So I’ve cut that out now, and I keep all the slide really simple. With a close mic on my Dubreuille, you can do a good impersonation of a dobro, though after playing John Hammond’s on that Neil Young tour, the difference is quite evident. Still I’m not under the spotlight solo, I’ve just got to cut through the row the others are making, so it’ll do for me!

‘My Strat is still my main guitar ’cause it’s so fundamental to our sound. It’s a 1961 – the one, so I was told. It wasn’t cheap but it sounds great and it was the first real good guitar I had. Up to ‘Seven’ I had a Strat copy with EMGs on it that cost me 70 quid from some dodgy geezer in a club in Liverpool! I got the ’61 from this guy in London called Phil Harris, who hires out very interesting gear. He’d just bought one of those classic ’59 flame maple topped Les Pauls but virtually mortgaged his house to do it, so he needed to sell some other stuff to pay for it and this Strat was one.

‘I also use a Gibson Les Paul Gold Top, and together with my Lowden acoustic and the electric dobro that more or less covers me. The main change for ‘Laid’ is that I’ve gone back to using my old Musicman HD212 which I used on all the previous albums. Until recently I had this huge rack with Marshall preamps and poweramps, put through two 4×12’s, but the more processing I used, the smaller the sound was getting. Now I just go straight into the amp, or just via a tc2290 which is the cleanest processor I’ve used, it doesn’t seem to affect the original guitar sound at all. Then it’s just two Boss footpedals for compression and chorus, though only on very gentle settings’.

“Basically I am James’ A+R(Artiste and Repertoire) agent and that hasn’t got a job description as such. You pretty much have to make it up as you go along. I just do lots of things that need doing, there’s no set agenda, particularly with a band like James. I suppose my job is to steer their career but working with such strong characters like Tim, Jim, Larry and Martine I fit in as piece of the jigsaw rather than in a ‘captain of the ship’ role.”

This works well and, for Alan’s part is made better by the fact that he includes himself as a “massive fan” of the band. “Although you do get a different perspective on the band as a fan working with them. For example, the album is out now, but for me the most exciting part of the whole album project was way back in mid- February when the band had their first day with Brian Eno. As an A+R man you tend to feel almost parental about a band – you know, getting them into a good studio with a good producer is a bit like getting a kid into a nice school and dropping them off at the gates. It was exciting, both as A+R man and fan to have them there with Brian Eno.

Have you always been a fan of the band ?

“No – to be honest. I was always aware of them, but I wouldn’t really say I was a fan. I’d always thought of their material as a bit wimpy until I heard some of the stuff that they were doing for ‘Gold Mother’ and I was knocked out by it. I expected it to be watered down in comparison to what I had seen live and it wasn’t. I started to fall in love with their stuff the more I got acquainted with it. I think the live versions of the songs from the back catalogue are better than the recorded versions. This is due to a combination of musical proficiency and the immediate impact of a live performance. The thing I like about James is that with them a song is never finished. I dare say that’s probably partly due to them getting bored if they play the same thing all the time.”

What would you say was your favourite James song ?

“It’s difficult to say what my favourite James song is. I like ‘Don’t Wait That Long’ and .’Out To Get You’ – that covers the ballady-type ones, and ‘Lose Control’, particularly the stripped-down live acoustic version with just Tim and Larry. I also like the rockier ones: ‘How Was It For You ?’, ‘Come Home’, ‘Born Of Frustration’ and ‘Live A Love Of Life’. My favourite on “Laid” is ‘Five-O’, especially the lyric “If it lasts forever / Hope I’m the first to die”. I’m a major fan of Tim’s lyrics – I love it when people put little twists in their lyrics and Tim is very good at that.”

What is the best James performance you’ve seen ?

“It must be the one at Edinburgh during the autumn 1991 tour. The start of the gig was fantastic – the stage was just black and then Dave came on and started the drum beat to “Sit Down”, and then the others just ambled on and laid into it. The excitement they created was amazing and they managed to sustain it right through the whole show. That’s another thing about James – whereas most bands build a gig up to a big finale, James start with their big finale and carry it through.”

How influential do you think James are?

“James are in a very weird position really. There are some people who love to hate them. I think that’s because they’re one of this country’s finest talents and if there is one thing that this country is good at it is ignoring its own talent. I think that James are more influential than they’re given credit for. There aren’t too many British pop/rock bands that make five albums like James have. There are people who bear grudges and it’s just a case of James coming through that, which I believe they will do. It’s the British disease again – there’s nothing that British people hate more than success – you can almost hear the knives coming out the minute anyone gets close to success. I suppose that it is healthy to have a bit of cynicism to keep your feet on the ground but in pop music it tends to have a negative effect. The inky-press British media can often be the worst, they really do ‘build-’em-up-then-knock-’em- down’.”

“British pop music is going through a critical phase at the moment. We’re producing good records but we’re not really producing any stars. It’s almost a case of “Where is the next Mick Jagger going to come from?”. Anyone who does anything is slagged off, and we also champion things that aren’t really that good. I’ve been to some gigs that have been poorly attended and pretty bad all round and then I read a review of the same gig in the music press and they’re practically implying that Jesus was resurrected there.

“The music industry here is very cliquey -you can get a good review if your manager drinks with a certain journalist in a certain pub and promises guest list and so on. Take a band like Suede. love them or loathe them, there were elements of a backlash against them before they even had their first album out. It’s never been like that before – if you look at all great artists and bands – The Smiths, Bowie, Prince …the list is endless – they’ve all had the benefit of a few albums to establish themselves, but that doesn’t seem to be happening any more. There’s also this peculiar indie vs major ethos around the bullshit of “Selling Out”, you know, it doesn’t hold with any other fields. If you translated it to literature you’d be saying “That book is crap because it’s published by Penguin and this one is good because it’s on Fred Bloggs Press or whatever.”

What music do you listen to?

“Recently I’ve been listening to Underworld’s new album, and the new Paul Weller album, “Wild Wood” is excellent. I’ve also been listening to Orbital, Rage Against The Machine and that Julianna Hatfield album. I’ve got the new Nirvana album too, but I’m not really sure about that yet.”

Has there been a band supporting James that have really opened your eyes?

“Not really, no. Although Nirvana did a good job at the Transmusicales Festival in Rennes in 1991, and Andy Diagram’s band Spaceheads were good too. But to be honest I haven’t seen many of James’ support bands.”

Have you had any embarrassing or funny moments with James ? “Yes – loads. The trouble is they’re far too numerous to mention and they lose their funniness in translation. You probably had to be there to appreciate them. I suppose the weirdest time was when the band were recording “Seven” with Youth, purely because of his bizarre recording techniques.”

How would you best describe James in three words?

“That’s a hard one … I’d say indecisive, inconsistent and wonderful.”

Who do you think works hardest for James?

“Everyone does. No one person deserves that single accolade in my opinion. It’s more of a collective really.”

What would you have as your epitaph?

“I suppose it would be something like ‘It’s Only Pop Music For Chrissakes”‘

What do you believe in?

“Health, wealth and happiness -and I’ve yet to achieve all three.”