Category Archives: Interview
Oxygen Interview (French)
Le Pays Interview (French)
MTV San Francisco Interview
Tim : This is the first time we’ve ever played in America and we had a really strange day yesterday. We thought San Francisco would be kind of loads of sunny beautiful place.
Reporter : It is, most of the time
Tim : Our flight got to San Francisco and it couldn’t land because of the storms so we were taken to Sacramento and it ended up being a sixteen hour flight so we were all kind of jetlagged and then we also had trouble getting visas for half our people, our crew couldn’t come and it’s been like complete chaos but wonderful chaos. And the performance today, it was good chaos. It wasn’t like a real James performance but it was good fun. And that’s kind of our first performance in America, it bodes well, I think.
Born of Frustration, the single, I don’t really know what it’s about. I wrote the lyrics very unconsciously. It’s something to do with being born of frustration. Something to do with seeing all these possibilities but not being able to reach out to them, not being able to meet all your desires, being stuck inside a human body and I think that’s about it really. It’s about as much as I can say about it. That sounds pretentious enough as it is.
Jim : We started about nine or ten years ago. First single came out in 83 on Factory Records. Myself, Tim and Larry have been together for pretty much all of that, eight years. Met Tim at a disco in Manchester. He was dancing and we were pretty impressed with his dancing so we kind of called him over and had a chat with him and asked him to come down to the rehearsal room and try and write some lyrics for us because we weren’t very good at that sort of thing in those days. And that was it really, we were off really. It was very much done for fun in the early days. We did take it very seriously in the early days, we didn’t concentrate on pushing it out into the world and selling ourselves, it was very much more, you know, concentrating on the music and writing the songs and we had problems getting concerts. The greatest buzz for James in those days and probably now was playing live. We had real problems getting any live work. We thought we needed a single out so we released a single and it got loads of attention in England, it got Single Of The Week and suddenly we were thrown into the spotlight. And we decided to retreat a little because it seemed a bit quick for us. It took a while playing live in England, I mean for us it was basically there was a knock at the door and the guy from the record company and he said “Hey, I think you guys are brilliant”
Key 103 Special
Pete Mitchell : With me, Tim and Jim, welcome to the show
Tim : He’s put on his proper radio voice now
Jim : He was swearing before.
Tim : I tell you, if you talk to this guy, he’s got a high-pitched voice. The moment he gets in front of a radio mic.
PM : (In high voice) Hi there, it’s Pete Mitchell. No you’ve done nothing but complain about the table and the room you’re recording in
Tim : We’re used to better nowadays you know
PM : Well, I know. Exactly, you’re preempting my first question. Things have gone very well since we last spoke. I remember asking you about success last time and I think you both said it doesn’t feel like success. It must do now with the success you’ve had since we last spoke – Sit Down.
Tim : Every so often, you catch yourself and you think “Cor, blooming heck, how did we get here?” and it’s kind of like when you’re doing a video shoot in the Los Angeles desert and you look around and you see a huge crew and all the trucks and you think they’re all here to make a four-minute video for one of our songs and you think “Oh my God, what’s happened to us?”
PM : So obviously the past twelve months have been amazing, the best year of your career. Do you think you’ve coped with it well?
Jim : I think we’re doing alright. We’re still together as a band and still relatively sane.
Tim : That time you cracked up, took all your clothes off and ran down Manchester streets naked. I thought you’d lost it then.
PM : Do you think a lot hangs on this new album, Seven?
Tim : Yes
PM : In a nutshell
Tim : Well obviously, we haven’t released an LP for like two years.
PM : Well you have and you haven’t. Gold Mother came back out.
Tim : It kind of returned
PM : Gold Mother 2. The sequel
Tim : She had another baby. So yes, I think people are waiting to see what we’ve done next. And the press have already decided what we’ve done next. I don’t think, it doesn’t feel like it hinges as in it’s going to be bad. It feels like it is good to get something out for people to hear. We know what we’ve done. But it hasn’t necessarily been the best year of our careers. What it’s been is the busiest.
PM : And the most successful
Tim : Externally successful, yeah sure. But we never judged it in that way. We aren’t able to rehearse as much as we used to and we love rehearsing. And we don’t like being shipped around the world talking about records when we haven’t even been and played in the country we’re talking about, so we’re starting to refuse quite a few things nowadays.
Jim : We always thought our strength was in our songwriting. Getting in and having a good batch of songs behind us. And now we’re finding it harder to find time to actually get in and rehearse and write songs. At the moment, we’re feeling a little bit naked.
PM : So when do you find the time to write new material then? In between tours?
Jim : We’re just grabbing days. We insist on having a few days. Because as far as the record company is concerned, it’s like “you want to write some songs now, but you won’t be recording the album for absolutely ages yet. What do you want to go and write now for?”. They allot you a certain gap, a three week period or something, where you go and write the album.
PM : Just like that
Jim : Yeah. For us it’s not like packing biscuits. You can’t just put the hours in and you end up with the songs at the end of it. Well, you can, but they might be a bit dodgy. We write over a long period of time, we’re constantly writing songs when we’re on tour, in the soundchecks, we’re jamming them in the studio. That feeds us. That keeps us going. It keeps us sane because at the end of the day, there’s business and there’s creativity and I think, for us, we need more creativity than business normally wants you to put in
PM : I think it’s a lot of fun packing biscuits.
Jim : Well it has its points
PM : Custard creams, hob nobs
Jim : Jaffa cakes
PM : Let’s talk about the album then. Seven. Ring The Bells, which is a song I heard about three years ago live, am I right? Of course, I am
Tim : Of course you are. Probably about two and a bit
PM : I remember hearing it for the first time at Blackpool. Am I right on that one? Yes, I’m right again
Jim : We’ve got terrible memories
Tim : Yes, it’s an old song. First released at Blackpool. It’s the only one we have a great video idea for. And we aren’t going to get to make it as we wanted it. We had this idea of going to Mexico and during….
Jim : Another holiday
Tim : Another holiday. During one of their religious festivals, one of their kind of Christian religious festivals where Christ is covered in blood.
PM : Oh dear
Tim : And it’s really paga and heavy and filming it there and the bells, ring the bells would be one of these old Mexican churches, whitewashed churches and it’d be some nutter coming in off the desert.
PM : Clint Eastwood perhaps?
Tim : We’re into deserts. No, no, you’ve got it all wrong. Harry Dean Stanton. Like he’s had too much sun in the desert and he’s raging and he’s either got some kind of divine inspiration. He’s seen God in his forty days in the desert or he’s completely off his head and you can’t tell which. Like “Ring The Bells, wake the town. I’ve got something to tell you.” This kind of and you can’t tell whether he’s a complete nutter or divinely inspired.
Jim : But, fortunately, we’re not going, are we?
Tim : Fortunately, we’re doing it in Scunthorpe instead. On a beach.
(plays Ring The Bells)
PM : Ring The Bells from the album Seven. My guests today James.
Tim : Collectively, you should know us better by now, Pete
Jim : I think our names are James 1, James 2
PM : Shall we do that again?
Tim : I think that’s good. You can use these interruptions can’t you? You just don’t want to be interrupted.
PM : I just can’t be bothered editing the thing. That’s what it is. You’ve been described in most of the music papers as the next stadium band. Stadium rock. Is it going that way? Do you want it to go that way?
Tim : The next stadium band
PM : In the same breath as U2 and Simple Minds
Tim : In the same breath
PM : I think so
Tim : You mean kind of U2SimpleMindsJames
Jim : U2SimpleMindsJames
Tim : It’s a mouthful
PM : Do you see things going that way now? To big stadiums?
TB : More in the same breath as The Cure, New Order, REM, James
Jim : Pixies
Tim : James
PM : That was in the same breath
Tim : Or Metallica
PM ; When we say stadiums we mean America, cracking America and making it big there. Is that on the cards now?
Tim : Depends on whose cards. If you go to Avril, the tarot reader in the Corn Exchange.
PM : What’s she said about your future then?
Tim : She said America, yes, by the end of the year, but it’s not, you know, really on the cards. It depends on whose cards you’re reading. We aren’t going out there like some sort of Christopher Columbus divine mission you know. We’ve been out there a few times and we enjoy it.
PM : It’s the right time to go at the moment though as there’s a British invasion at the moment. Jesus Jones and EMF.
Tim : I think that was last year. I think it’s the right time simply because the charts have loosened up a lot rather like in this country. And so Metallica can get to number one and Nirvana can get to number one . And REM are no longer left of field. And in a world where REM are mainstream, we have chance definitely.
PM : Let’s talk about the the single’s success now. Sound. What can you tell us about that song. Another song from, of course, your album Seven. Says Tim looking at Jim. Jim? Tim?
Jim : Don’t know
Tim : It was jammed in the studio. It was, we were kind of, we had this weird studio set up with candles and strobes and we worked in candlelight for about two months and became moles with like no vision at all. We kept tripping up over leads and unplugging things. You’d do a whole take and find someone had unplugged something because they couldn’t see, but
Jim : Someone had fallen asleep
Tim : Yeah, someone had fallen asleep
Jim : The sound engineer
Tim : The trumpet break would come
Jim : Great sound on trumpet, Andy. (Makes snoring noise)
Tim : And Sound, we kind of had half of it set and the rest of it was left open to improvise on and so all the bits where I’m shouting down the megaphone “Do something out of character” or “Somebody break away for God’s sake”, that’s me shouting at everyone to improvise, to shoot off in another direction. I thought it was getting boring so I started yelling at people and you know we left it all in and we really enjoyed it. We love that songs and we felt when we did it it was quite a far out song, a kind of LP song and the record company suggested it as a single and we were like “Oh, yeah, great, fine”
Jim : Off their heads
Tim : We thought it would be a really good antidote to Sit Down.
(plays Sound)
Tim : The song Don’t Wait That Long was written about 2 1/2 years ago. Again it was a jam and we thought we’d written this wonderful song and we kept playing it to people and nobody was interested in it at all. Everyone thought it was crap and we tried messing around with different rhythms and messing around with it and we kind of realised that there was something wrong with it and it took about 2 1/2 years to work out what it was. We’re slow workers on some songs. We just kept it in our back pocket and we kept bringing it our every six months and tried it again.
PM : You played it here at that session you did here, don’t you remember?
Tim : Did we?
PM : Yeah, we’ll have to unearth that and pirate it
Jim : A different version
PM : Definitely
Tim : We just kept trying because we knew the seed of it was wonderful and we couldn’t find some piece of the jigsaw was missing and we found it in the summer and it was just basically slowing down the beat and making it more moody.
(plays Don’t Wait That Long)
PM : You’re listening to IQ on Piccadilly Key 103. My guests today are Tim and Jim from James reviewing the new album Seven. Live A Love Of Life – another interesting song from the album. Can you remember writing it? Was it recent or was it an old one again?
Tim : We’re not the Happy Mondays, you know. We do remember these things. Live A Love Of Life. Again, it was, it’s always, through improvisation. The lyrics are just about incomprehensible to anybody really.
PM : It’s obviously very difficult picking out the songs and talking about them. What about the album as a whole then?
Tim : It doesn’t work like that. I mean you produce the music what’s right at the time, that reflects where you’re at at the time. And I think it’s better to see LPs almost as states of mind rather than meaning.
PM : So how do you view songs like Sit Down and Come Home now? Your anthems.
Jim : We’re very proud of them, but
PM : Obviously sick of playing them
Tim : I think more, it wasn’t sick of playing them. Not Come Home. You get sick of the feeling that you have to play Sit Down. Like there’s nights when we don’t play Come Home so we don’t feel trapped but we did feel last year now and again that we shouldn’t have to play Sit Down. It’s more like, when the new LP comes out, I don’t think we’ll have to play Sit Down. We’ll play it when we want to and then we’ll get back to enjoying it again. But you do feel resentful when you’re put in a position where you actually feel forced to. We nearly didn’t play it once in London and people started booing and shouting.
PM : So that was the encore then
Tim : It was like we had a big row about it actually and that was bad at the time. It was a mess.
PM : Let’s play a track from the album now – Live A Love Of Life
Tim : With Live A Love Of Life, it’s partly a continuation of the song God Only Knows. It’s another piece of rejection of my Christian conditioning. I had to go to church every day of the week for about four years of my life and I kind of resented that. It seems to be coming out now for some reason or other that I can’t understand. It’s also when I sing “I don’t believe Jesus was a human being”, it’s more to do with like when you read those bible stories, he’s not presented as a human being with human desires, human passions, human problems and I don’t believe those gospels are reflective of that person as they lived. There’s also references to the, we wrote it at the time of the Gulf War, and it’s the idea that in the Christian cosmology God sent his son to earth to die. It seems a really weird thing for a father to do to his child and rather similar to the way countries send their children off to war to die for their country which I’ve never been able to understand. And that’s what the song is about. The other thing I’ve decided too to sing in different countries or on different days “I don’t believe Buddha was a human being” or “I don’t believe Mohammed was a human being” so when we go to India, it’ll be Buddha and when we go to Japan, it’ll be Confuscious.
PM : Remember what country you’re in though. Watch the jetlag.
Tim : Yeah, see if we can stir up things.
(plays Live A Love Of Life)
PM : You’re listening to an IQ special. James, my guests today. Do you mind coughing Jim?
Jim : No
Tim : You belched earlier mate. And you’ll edit that out
PM : Leave Jim’s cough in and get my belch out. The final song from the album Seven. A song called Heavens.
Tim : Heavens, yeah, a song about . The verses are about somebody sitting with their hands, with their head in their hands thinking, full of self-pity, thinking of despondency
PM : Like myself
Tim : Like yourself
PM : On a Monday
Tim : And then the chorus is like “Get up off your arse, are you waiting for the heavens to descend”. You know. Move it. It’s meant to be a kind of self-jolting song.
PM : Before you go, just briefly tell us what you’ve got lined up for this year. Are you spending a lot of time in America, trying to crack America?
Tim : No, no. We’re going there a few times, not there much. We’re more in Europe and that side of things this year and Britain. The good thing in Britain, after the two G-Mex concerts we did in Manchester a year ago, we didn’t know how to play in Manchester again and it was like how do you top that. We were quite scared of playing Manchester again. We tried to organise lots of strange things, sort of six nights at the Ritz., but we couldn’t book it because of bingo night
PM : That’s a shame. Fifty fifty
Jim : Grab a granny
Tim : Goth night. And then we tried getting a tent in Salford but the council, we couldn’t get permission. We tried Barton Aerodrome so Manchester, we haven’t neglected playing here. It’s just that we couldn’t find the right venue to go one further than G-Mex.
PM : What about up on the roof again?
Jim : Oh lovely
Tim : What we’ve done now, I think it’s July 4th
Jim : Yes
PM : Alton Towers
Tim : We’ve booked Alton Towers and we’re going to have a big day out there.
PM : A festival? Is it a one-day festival?
Tim : It’ll only be three bands. But if you pay a little extra, you can get a free day out in Alton Towers. And it’s really well organised. It’s not going to be like an outdoor festival with awful toilets. It’s going to be quite well organised and quite smart.
PM : That’s July 4th then?
Jim : All the shops are going to be open so there’s going to be food
PM : James merchandise in every shop
Tim : Hey up, you’re ruining this. And we’ve got, oh we don’t know who the support bands are yet
PM : Any ideas, any little hints? They’ve not signed on the dotted line yet?
Tim : MFI, it’s like MFI. You know?
PM : Alright, yeah
Tim : But we’re not sure yet so that’ll be nice. We want it to be a good occasion and we felt it was the only way we could go a bit beyond G-Mex.
PM : What about further singles from the album? Possibles?
Tim : Probably Ring The Bells.
PM : Will that be it then – finished for singles after that?
Tim : There might be one more but we’d make it an EP. Well, we’re trying to make it an EP.
PM : With a couple of new songs on as well
Tim : Yep, I mean we’re fighting off the record company. They want quite a lot more
Jim : Six, seven
PM : The old Michael Jackson syndrome. Ten singles off the album.
Tim : The only thing I can say is if we don’t, if the single after Ring The Bells or even Ring The Bells, you’ve got the LP, don’t buy it. You know. And the one after that, if it’s not an EP with new songs on then don’t buy it because we won’t be into it.
PM : Let’s hope Phonogram aren’t listening to this interview then.
Tim : I mean we never understand the singles thing. I guess we knew Born of Frustration, Born of Frustration comes out a few weeks before the LP. The fans, some of them are going to buy it but a lot of them they won’t buy it and that’s as it is really and we’re quite happy with that.
PM : It’s been a pleasure talking to you once again and it’s nice to see the success that you’re having. And don’t forget the gold disc. OK Tim and Jim from James, thanks again for joining us
Tim : You’ll have to pay for it
PM : How much
Rock Over London Interview
Int : After the session I had chance to chat with Tim and Jim and Larry and first of all congratulate them on the success of the new album Seven
Tim : Yeah, it’ll be number one next week I think
Int : Yeah
Tim : Depending on who we sleep with next week
Int : Tell me about the producer you roped into this particular project
Jim : We’d gone through a list of trying to find a producer. Checking out people whose work we respected and who’d worked with bands we liked, done albums we liked.
Tim : Then we chose the one whose albums we didn’t like
Jim : For some strange reason, we chose to go with someone who’d done nothing we liked. All the people we wanted to work with were either busy or when we met them, it didn’t quite happen. And then somebody at the record company suggested Youth and we looked at the things he’d done and thought “No way, forget it, he’s like a bloody dance producer, not right for James” And this A+R man was like “Nah, nah, I tell ya, lads. Meet him, meet him”
Tim : Weak Cockney impression that is, by the way
Jim : Yeah, sorry about that.
Tim : Youth by the way isn’t a generic term for an age group. It’s an individual.
Int : Yes
Tim : We must explain this otherwise people at home will think “They wanted youth to produce their album, that’s a kind of weird concept. How they gonna manage that? Invite everybody in?”
Int : One at a time
Jim : So we met this chap basically, an ageing hippy called Youth and he came in with his open neck cheese-cloth shirt and sandals and his long straddly hair and beads. And a few other things as well that I won’t mention.
Tim : You can only be this rude to someone you love
Jim : And we hit it off for some strange reason. Probably because we’re a bunch of old hippies and all. And the things he was criticising on the stuff we’d done was right, same as ours and the things he was pointing out that were good were the same as ours and you can’t ignore that, regardless of the fact he’d done a few dodgy records
Tim : And had no taste in clothes. It was the size of his crystals that did it for me.
Jim : Enormous crystals. So we decided to go for it basically and moved into this studio in London called Olympic in a really good wooden room and Youth had already been there. I don’t know how long he’d been there, weeks probably, he’s got an encampment on the go there. And he’d filled the whole room and the production room with three-foot altar candles and there was no electric light used on the session. Rugs and drapes on the walls. Enormous flower displays, incense, oil wheels, lamps, you remember those dodgy oil lamps from the seventies, where the blob used to go up and down, he got one of them in and all. And a strobe for the fast songs. We all burst out laughing. He’s off his head, he’s off his head.
Tim : And he convinced us we’d fallen into a time grip and were back in the 1960s and it worked. You can hear it on the LP.
Int : It must be a cliche now. But the last year, the last eighteen months, have been pretty amazing for the band really. I mean it seems like it’s all gone right.
Tim : After having gone wrong for eight years. Yeah, in terms of success, it’s been busy. That’s probably the best way to put it. It’s been really good. We’ve enjoyed it and the bank manager enjoys it too. We kind of had seven lean years where we were very happy with our music and nobody else seemed to be. Except live, we always had a good live audience for about four to five years and that’s how we built up our reputation in England. And then yeah, the last couple of years we’ve suddenly had a major breakthrough. Suddenly, it’s like overkill. And from not playing our songs on the radio at all for the first seven or eight years, now you can’t walk down the street without hearing the damn things.
Int : Doesn’t that make you a bit cynical when it’s like “Oh you like us now then” this sort…
Tim : No, no, everything has its time and we never had the business side together like we have now. We had the musical side together, we feel, for quite a long time, but we didn’t find a record company that shared our vision. And so it just needed all those components to fall into place. So I don’t really feel cynical. It’s just like we like to remind people of our pedigree.
Jim : The extreme of the changearound, the turnaround, we’ve found quite funny. From being nothing to suddenly every time you put on the radio or every time you’ve got on the TV.
Tim : Not that James again
Jim : Oh no
Music View Interviews
Originally a three-piece, Manchester’s James revealed their first EP seven years ago. And they’re now a seven-piece with a new album called Seven, strangely enough. Over the years their music has changed mainly due to varied instrumentation and styles but they have always been a pop band. Musicview asked vocalist Tim Booth and bassist Jim Glennie how their music has progressed since their previous album Gold Mother.
Tim : “Each one has been odd. We’ve experimented in this area and enjoyed it. This is what we found here and then we move on and records tend to react against the last one. So there’s a constant movement forward away from, and that seems to dictate our direction, but it doesn’t feel at all like now we’ve found our station.”
Jim : “That’s the last thing we want really. We want to move on and keep changing”
Tim : “Gold Mother, we felt had too much variety of sound and style. It was almost too disparate and it was like lots of real variety but it was almost too much. There’s wasn’t such a sense of whole as there is on this record where you feel it comes from the same tribe.”
Once a three-piece Manchester’s James have released five albums since their inception in 1985. With a new album Seven, the band is now a fully-fledged seven-piece and singer Tim Booth and bassist Jim Glennie related how the band dynamic has changed when talking to Musicview.
Tim : “It’s good because we’re much more flexible. We have trumpet and fiddle and the fiddle player plays guitar and drums. So, and the keyboard player plays about six instruments, so we can choose what sound we want. We aren’t stuck and that’s really nice.”
Jim : “There’s more colour in the sound now. When you want to hit people hard, you know, seven people whacking away, you’ve got seven people there, you’ve got the options.”
Holier Than Thou – Select
You are Tim Booth. After ten years of luckless striving and personal chaos you are suddenly huge. Have you kept your soul intact, or just become another mock-spiritual corporate rock tosser? Has James kept its integrity, or is it a load of pious pseudo-intellectual shite? Speak…(story by David Cavanagh)
“I think,” says Tim Booth with characteristic softness, “I would like some more champagne.” His vegetarian pancake’s looking a little on the dry side, admittedly. And that mineral water’s not going to help the flow. A decent bottle of Brut could be just the ticket for this lunchtime chin-wag. Three hours of having his photo taken has left Tim a little on the parched side – and constant wearing of shades makes him blink into the daylight like Mole at the start of The Wind In The Willows – and in an hour or so he’s got to do some interviews at Radio 1. He’s all the rage, is Tim Booth. Everybody wants him.
The restaurant was a good idea. Whoever did the booking successfully located an establishment so bereft of custom that the Tim Booth table remains the only one occupied all afternoon. And, give or take the odd Elton John ballad mewling its way over the tannoy, it’s a milieu of satisfactory, masticatory peace and quiet for Booth to think in.
Tim Booth talks a lot, very skilfully. Very softly, too, which is why even when he’s dithering over the menu he makes it sound like some sort of spiritual edict is but seconds away. He talks fluidly, pausing rarely and only hesitating when he wonders if he’s giving too much away. While you’re talking he has an endearing habit of nodding and saying “sure, sure” to each point you make. He appears incredibly attentive. Serene. On the scale of rock star intellect he’s easily in the top two per cent, as those fun loving types at MENSA would say. If 1992 is going to finally jettison this man into the league of Bono and Jim Kerr – and it’s an area he often seems to be racking his soul over – the IQ of stadium rock is going to take a serious leap as a result.
Beside him sits Jim Glennie, the bass player. Tim wanted him there. He keeps making sure the tape recorder is positioned so that it can pick up Jim’s voice as well as his own. From time to time Tim will turn to Jim for acknowledgement, clarification or – once or twice – actual permission to go on. On the afternoon you join us, ‘Seven’, James’ new album is about to come out. The main course has just arrived, the champagne glasses have clinked “cheers” and the tape recorder has just clicked on. Tim has already established that the Select interview is far from effusive, and the words “stadium rock” have just been mentioned for the first time. The dreaded words. It’s clear that lots of people now think James have got something terminal here. They’re now at the stage where the music press traditionally abandons bands – tchah, poor old James, they’re a stadium band now! – and leaves them to their globally-obsessed masterplan.
James, I hope we’re all agreed, are worth a hell of a lot more respect than that.
Have you accepted that you’re going to become truly massive this year, Tim?
We think so. But you can never tell. We stopped taking things for granted a long time ago. You know, Larry (Gott, guitarist) gets to LA and what’s the first thing that happens? He gets mugged at gunpoint. What if he’d been shot? What if he’d been killed? I don’t think the band would have gone on. I mean, there was a gun stuck in his ribs! His first time ever in America…
Is he going to go back?
I think he will. I think he’ll get over it. He’s very aware that he has to get back there as soon as possible. But he was freaked out by the whole thing.
Why choose ‘Seven’ as the album title? Because there’s seven of you?
Mmm. As a title it just seemed to fit. This album reflects the number of people in the band at this time. There won’t be seven always. It’s not that focused. A number of coincidences started occurring around the number seven when we chose the title about a year ago. ‘Sit Down’ went in at number seven. We did Top Of The Pops and were given dressing room number seven. On the same TOTP was a band who sang a song about lucky seven (‘Wear Your Love Like Heaven’ by Definition Of Sound’). Later on we found seven is the number of God in the Kabbala religion of numerology.
On a scale of one to ten, how happy are you with James at the moment?
Eight, I’d say (he looks at Jim, who nods slowly). Nine with the album, but then it’s different with that because it’s not something we can do much about now.
Now that the words “stadium rock” have been used about you – however flippantly – are you taking that as a criticism?
No Well…I don’t like the word.
Do you like Simple Minds?
Well (smiles)… we don’t feel they’ve progressed.
Is there a stigma to the word “stadium”?
Yeah! That’s why we don’t like it. Very few bands, to my mind, could play in a stadium and still communicate to individuals.
How many stadium-size gigs have you actually played?
I should think about six or seven.
Have you started writing in looser metaphors, writing for bigger audiences?
No. No, you can’t think about things like that. That’s where bands fall down. They start to think they’re writing for the people. And we’re writing for ourselves. And if you’re lucky the song you’re writing for yourself – if it’s got enough truth in it – will contact a large amount of people anyway.
How do you reach an individual in a huge audience?
I look at people. I sing to them. I look at individuals. And I can go to the back of a hall, I’m not just talking about the front rows. We played a gig in Paris last spring, doing 13 or 14 new songs that we didn’t know very well. We did ‘Born Of Frustration’ and there was this guy right at the back. And I sang the beginning to him and he was looking at me and he was really getting into it. And he started making his way through the crowd, dancing, moving his arms around, and he came right through the crowd, and as he got to the front we reached the chorus. And I bent down and sang it right into his face…I mean, the guy nearly came. And I was completely gone too, on his reaction. It was just like, whooaaahhhh!!! Because I love that song, and that was a really beautiful moment.
Is there nothing on ‘Seven’ that was written with a huge audience in mind?
No. If anything, we were trying to make certain songs smaller. ‘Sound’ – we actually made that smaller. It was more epic, it was more stadium. We don’t have much control over our songs. Recently, we’ve gone in to write new songs – and we’ve all been getting into Metallica and Nirvana and the Pixies – and it was like, Let’s get some really hard and heavy and harsh songs, y’know? And you try for a while and nothing happens. And then suddenly you go into a weird jam that’s in a completely different musical direction to the one you wanted. We’re coming out with all these folky songs, thinking, Aaah shit we’re going folk again. We have no control over these things. All the songs are totally accidental.
So you’re not one of these bands where the guitarist comes in with a chord progression?
No, never. Never. Nobody has ever brought a song into James. They start from nothing.
Well, ‘Live A Love Of Life’ sounds like it started as some kind of U2 riff.
Where?
Are you kidding? It’s blatant. It sounds like The Edge.
Well…(looking genuinely puzzled). I don’t think Larry has any U2 albums. I certainly don’t. I didn’t even hear any until ‘The Joshua Tree’. I’ve still never heard a Simple Minds album. So, no, that was not intentional.
What about ‘Sit Down’- have you ever wished you’d never written it?
No, no. Never.
(Jim says quietly that he has. Last tour, the whole question of what to do about ‘Sit Down’ had James beginning the set with it, ending the set with it, bunging it in the middle and generally trying to keep it fresh. Jim envisages a situation where James could leave it out altogether –“and if people couldn’t handle that, they needn’t come”.)
How many songs on ‘Seven’ are about your break-up with Martine (James’ manager and Tim’s longtime partner)?
Probably just ‘Don’t Wait That Long’. That’s the really personal one. That was written about two and a half years ago. The split was just beginning then. And we knew we’d written a beautiful song, and we kept playing it to people but nobody thought it was that good. We knew there was a missing piece, and it took two and a half years to find that missing piece. It was a rhythm change; we slowed it right down.
So that dates from ‘Gold Mother’ time, then. Was that a time of great misery for the band, before the success of ‘Sit Down’?
No, listen, you’re completely mistaking us. We weren’t miserable when we weren’t succeeding. Alright, lyrically, ‘Gold Mother’ and ‘Seven’ are the most depressed words I’ve ever written, but that’s to do with my personal life. We weren’t unhappy as a band when we weren’t succeeding. We were making music that we loved. The band has never been a problem. And, in fact, we wrote ‘Sit Down’ in our worst period of poverty. We’d look at each other and think, Well, we can’t give up now – we’ve got all these great new songs to play.
So the ‘James struggle’ thing is a bit of a myth?
Well, James was not it for us. You talk about our struggle, but we had problems in our personal lives (he looks at Jim) that were far bigger struggles for both of us. To see us simply as members of a band would be a real misconception of our states of mind at that time. I think people might have misunderstood what kept us going, actually. People kind of think James should have split earlier – how did they get through it, and so on. But we didn’t have many embarrassments live – we didn’t turn up and find there were no people. So all the time, to us, it felt like we were making progress. There was always as much a sense of movement in our lives as there was in our music. We were always more than an indie band.
Do you see ‘indie’ as a way of thinking?
Yes, and not necessarily a positive one. A very English second division way of thinking. A fear of success way of thinking. There are a few bands that can break through that. But it assumes…(smiles) it assumes not reaching for the stars.
Which you are?
Metaphorically, certainly.
There are some wildly opposing uses of the word ‘God’ on the album. On ‘Ring the Bells’ you’re singing “I no longer feel that God is watching over me”, whereas on ‘Seven’ you’re telling us “God is to love me”.
Sometimes I use the word to ruffle up preconceptions. Other times, it’s in a vague, more nebulous sense. I’m not a member of any religion or belief system at all. The thing is, I have a choice. I can either believe the world is random chaos and there’s no meaning and no values. Or I can believe there’s some purpose, some intelligence. And that, I would say, is God. Not a person. Not an entity. Just a vague understanding of an intelligence. And I flip from one belief to the other. I don’t think I could live in this world if I thought it was just complete chaos. I’ve experienced that state a few times, and it’s not something I can take for very long. It’s terrifying.
When was the last time?
About a year ago.
What happened?
I can’t tell you. (Long pause) The last three years have been the worst period of my life. But they’ve also been…(his voice gets very distant) an awakening of a kind, I suppose.
The very last words on the album are “love can change everything”. Do you believe that?
(After a long pause) No, I don’t. Not unless it’s balanced by wisdom. I’ve always felt that, going right back to The Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love’. No, sorry. You need something else as well.
So why didn’t you qualify that lyric?
I don’t know. I didn’t think of it like that. Maybe if love is all you have, you probably think that’s all you need. Maybe that’s fair enough.
When you write about love, do you feel you should constantly do twists on it, as in Michael Stipe’s famous “simple prop to occupy my time” on ‘The One I Love’?
No, but what you do feel is intense irritation at all the other uses of the word ‘love’, because I don’t think that love exists as it’s presented in most people’s songs. It’s usually a wonderful thing and everybody wants it and it’s gonna last forever and all that bullshit. Well, I don’t find that real. That is not my reality. If I’m going to write about love I’ve got to make it personal. And it’ll reflect huge amounts of pain as well as the wonder and the joy.
Do you see Martine all the time, then?
All the time, yeah. And she’s brilliant about letting me see my son. But with her…I guess I see her in a business sense. It’s just something we’ve worked out. It’s unusual, I know, but it’s just happened.
You mentioned personal problems back there. If they were bigger than the band, presumably you couldn’t exorcise them through your music?
Well, the background to early James, if you’re really interested – at around ‘Stutter’ and ‘Stripmine’ time – we were meditating. Me and him and Martine and Jenny. Hours every day. Ten hours at weekends. And that was for three years. No one knew about that, we didn’t tell anyone about it. People thought something like that was going on, which is why we got that Buddhist tag, which was untrue. But meditation was our private life for a long time. And you could find lyrics from that time, if you wanted, that reflected that.
(Tim has alluded in the past to James switching to meditation as some atonement for their debauched years as a “drugs band”. Tim and Jim both admit their immersion in meditation had a lot to do with the serious mental illness – through massive daily ingestion of hash via the lethally potent ‘hot knives’ method – of an early James guitarist called Paul.)
After that period where there were a lot of drugs going round, I looked for ways to reach those states of consciousness without drugs. And that became my search. Partly because I couldn’t handle drugs – I had serious liver problems – and partly to get the one member of the band into these other possibilities so he’d stop taking drugs. Trying to get him back.
Is Paul dead now?
No, he’s not dead.
(Jim immediately interrupts. “His character disappeared. He woke up one morning and there was nothing there. He’s kind of OK now. He’s sort of built something out of it now, but…it’s really difficult, you know? He was my best friend since I was 13.”).
So this search for altered states goes on?
I’ve always been drawn to the area where madness meets drug abuse meets mysticism. If you look at all the books I like and all the films I’m really into, that’s your common ground. When we started meditating, that was the intention: let’s do this properly. I’ve always been fascinated to find that schizophrenia and madness and divine wisdom are all states of mind tuned to the same frequencies of brain waves. And at various times in the past these states have either been respected – as in witches and witch doctors – or despised and locked away. Or, in our society, they become artists. They become the cultural myth-makers. They are people that have to be dealt with, you know? Because they are picking up on stuff that the majority of people don’t believe exists.
So where do you stand on drugs now?
Drugs have been in every single culture that has ever existed, but very often used much more wisely than they are now. Say a certain tribe would have a mushroom ritual three times a year or so…or solstices, or initiations…because you can’t do that every day. But this society’s so greed-based and consumer-based that not enough respect has been shown to these areas. So it’s well out of control now, which is why I can’t take a stance either justifying or negating drugs now. You have to show these things respect.
What’ll you do if James ever ends?
I should think we’ll want a long break from each other. Because it’s been pretty intense. But I think that after that we’ll become pretty good friends. All that talk of splitting up in 1989 was highly exaggerated, incidentally. That was only ever articulated once and quickly rejected. We have something to complete here. We all feel that.
You asked me earlier about how I felt about James on a scale of one to ten, and I said eight. I think I’d always have said eight. We love our music. But there is work still to be done.
Finally, on ‘Sound’, you yell out “do something out of character”. Was that a very James moment?
Yeah. I think so. We’re happy with it. That’s the kind of thing I’m happy with. And it’s going to be great onstage. We’re going to really intimidate each other. Start staring each other in the eyes, seeing who can handle it. Just move in on each other. Try to push things, psychologically. States of mind again, you see.
Isn’t there ever a risk to the sanity with all this?
Ah…(laughs) I don’t know the meaning of that word.
Q Article And Interview
FOR JAMES, THEIR FIRST DAY IN AMERICA did not offer the big, big welcome that greets so many would-be British invaders of the land of the free. Within three hours of stepping off the plane at Los Angeles where they were due to make a video, guitarist Larry Gott was mugged. At gunpoint.
Tney had just booked into the Chateau Marmont Hotel (where John Belushi died and The Doors and Led Zeppelin disported) where they hild a self-catering apartment. Being a “buttie addict”, Larry had stepped down Sunset Boulevard in search of a grocery. Successful, he was turning back into the hotel side entrance, when suddenly his nape hairs prickled with a sense of imminent threat. “It came to me too late. I turned around and there was a guy coming up the steps towards me. I was about to react when another guy turned the corner, with a gun out. Then I knew that this was fucking serious; it was for real. Give us your jacket, they said. Give us your wallet. I said, You got it – it’s in me fucking coat. Then they casually walked down the steps, turned around and said, If you contact the police, we’ll come back for you.
“In the hotel reception I said, It’s your fucking country, it’s your fucking town; what do you do in this situation? Phone the police. They came: an old guy with half-glasses and a shorter guy with a crew-cut and a gap in his front teeth through which he constantly spat out streams of phlegm. They were more interested in finding out exactly where rather than what had happened; if this gate had been 15 yards further down Sunset Boulevard, it would have been somebody else’s patch. All this time, their radio was blaring out: two streets away a woman had been garrotted from behind by two guys who fitted my description; there was somebody held up at knifepoint, somebody else at gunpoint. It was constant.
“The younger cop asked me about his gun. He pulled out his gun: Like this one? I said it was also a black automatic but much smaller. As I motioned to the barrel to point out that theirs had a silver stripe, he pulled back and said, Touch that and you’re fucking dead…”
WITHIN HOURS, LARRY WAS BACK ON the plane to Blighty, with road manager Richard taking his place in the Mojave Desert-set video for the single Born Of Frustration. The mild violence James have a habit of attracting is not the least of the paradoxes that attend this band who are reputed to be hardcore brown-rice fiends and meditation addicts. So wholesome, indeed, is their image that for some years they have felt the need to undermine it by confessing to the odd brush with pharmaceuticals, and, more particularly, to send it up at every opportunity.
Probe a little deeper, however, and the 31-year-old singer will vouchsafe the sort of intense and bookish confession that has maintained for seven years his personal cult following among those rock fans who like their frontmen pale and interesting.
“Every artist I’d ever liked had often used drugs to get to a certain state of mind,” he declares, in his soft Mancunianised accent, “and I’d always been fascinated by the schizophrenic state of mind of the witch doctors and the artists and the persons taking drugs, and where those states of minds linked with the holy man. I read R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self when I was 16 and thought it was brilliant, then The Outsider by Camus, and the other Outsider, by Colin Wilson – a paper chase of books pursuing this theme.”
From the mid-’80s, James have been a deep and elusively meaningful band beloved of indie sorts and, since the Manchester dance explosion, of the better-read raver. But in their earliest incarnation, in post-punk, Joy Division and Fall-dominated Manchester, James were not James but a distinctly low-brow, punk racket called Venereal And The Diseases. Bassist Jim Glennie is the sole survivor. “A friend bullied me into it!” says the hitherto directionless lad, recalling his induction into a rock’n’roll band. This friend, guitarist Paul Gilbertson, is James’s lost founder member. “He’d bought a stolen guitar for a tenner, and said our group didn’t need a drummer because of drum machines, but that we’d always need a bassist – so get a bass guitar! For some reason, my mother bought me one. I was going to see groups like The Fall and Teardrop Explodes and ended up in a weird crowd, smoking draw.”
Armed- or burdened – with their aforementioned moniker, Paul and Jim’s group played their first gig: “I got the buzz, and listening back to our songs, if you can call them that, on a tape recorder, this crackly cacophony, I thought, Yeah!” The band evolved through a succession of personnel and name changes – Volume Distortion and Model Team International: “Paul had a girlfriend who worked in a modelling agen- cy called Model Team International, so we got T – shirts ready-made with the name on, until they threatened to serve us with a writ. So we called our- selves Model Team so the shirts would still be just about wearable!”
Which is where Tim Booth came in -not, at first, as singer, but as the band’s pre-Bez idiot dancer. A reject of the public school sys- tem, Tim was of a church-going family who nonetheless was elbowed unceremoniously from Shrewsbury for being a bad influence.
“I was thrown out of the back door, told to leave – and if I didn’t, they’d formally expel me. So I went.” The memory still pricks. “Then, three years ago, I was driving by Shrewsbury and I started shaking. Fucking hell, I thought, still some unresolved emotions here. So I went back for an old boys’ thing – and you’re not meant to go back if you’ve been thrown out – but I never really understood why and wanted to find out. The housemaster who threw me out got quite drunk and kind of apologised. ‘I was new,’ he said, ‘and I didn’t know how to deal with you.’ I wasn’t one of those rebellious kids who smoked on the fire-escape or got drunk; I was just different, awkward, and they didn’t know what was going on in my head. I hated school and they knew it. There’d be one guy in the house who’d get all the shit, and he’d usually be small and Jewish. His life would be made miserable; I was OK but I had to hide my emotions all the way through. At the end, I think they thought I would go wild, so they kicked me out before I did. They did it an hour after my last , A’ Level exam. Why bother? It was symbolic and quite unpleasant.”
Convinced that acting was a life survival skill, Tim went to study drama at Manchester University, where he was a contemporary of Ben Elton. One evening at the University disco, his free-style dancing was noted by members of Model Team who were there enjoying the subsidised bar. “Paul came up and asked if I’d like to join their band,” Tim recalls. “I’d drunk quite a bit and woke up the following morning with this phone number written on my hand with the instruction: 6 o’clock scout hut. I went along and there they were rehearsing – naive, two-chord stuff, but it had something. I like Iggy Pop for his state of mind but Patti Smith was everything to me. I went to two rehearsals then we had a gig supporting Orange Juice. I shook a tambourine nervously and sang backing vocals.
“After one rehearsal when I still didn’t really know them, Paul said, Let’s go into town. When, Paul was in the toilet, Gavan (Whelan, the original drummer) said, Now, you mustn’t be too upset if Paul gets into a fight. Fights seem to happen around Paul. But he doesn’t start them. Sure enough, we left the club and Paul wanted a piss, so he started pissing against a car, and this bloke came out and started fighting him. It wasn’t even his car! There were these two guys rolling around in the gutter and me thinking, Bloody hell, what have I got myself into?”
One member, Danny Ram, “ended up in Strangeways for GBH,” they claim. “The first press we ever got!” As for Paul Gilbertson, “he changed,” as Jim delicately summarises how the guitarist’s enthusiasm became diverted towards less constructive leisure pursuits. “He’d throw himself into everything,” Tim recalls. “He had a real naive enthusiasm – and no fear. That was his weakness.” Gradually, Paul’s self-immersion into other pleasures distanced him from the band he founded and Larry Gott, a former guitar teacher, was recruited to cover his increasingly erratic playing. Finally, they confronted Paul with the stark choice of getting his act together or leaving the band. “We knew he was on a self-destructive path six months earlier, and we thought, Let’s try to reach these states naturally, through medita- tion,” Tim remembers.
“We were looking for a safe haven for us -and for him. It nearly worked. But we lost him.”
BY NOW, THEY HAD SETTLED ON THE NAME James, like fellow Mancunians The Smiths, a starkly anti-descriptive handle in reaction to the likes of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. Keen to cap- ture on vinyl the nervous, eclectic guitar-rock with which Manchester club audiences were rapidly falling in love, they recorded two critically adored singles on Anthony H. (then plain Tony) Wilson’s Factory label – Jimone and, after a mystique-building gap of several months, James II.
“We only wanted a singles deal and told him why: inefficiency, and this idea that they didn’t have to promote a record because Joy Division had got massive without any promotion -apart from the fact that the singer had killed himself,” Jim wryly notes. “Bands on Factory would disap- pear because they weren’t getting promoted. But he got us what we needed: attention.” Supporting The Smiths on tour, James were assisted by the endorsement of Morrissey as his favourite band. “We were flattered, but didn’t think we needed the boost to help our career,” remembers Jim. ” At the time, we were concerned to battle the negative side -that people would think we were like The Smiths. ..”
Tim grimly recalls how, after first avoiding the rock press and the necessity to construct for themselves “an image,” James bowed to the inevitable. “For one photo session, we put on these wacky coloured jumpers and funny hats – a piss-take of the cool image. But people took it seriously! As a musician, you naively think your music is wonderful and it will reach people. Then you suddenly realise that people want you to sell a personality – and it doesn’t even have to be your own!”
In search of both “alternative” kudos and big-league promouon, James signed to the New York-based indie-within-a-major, Sire, whose stable included Talking Heads and Madonna, and whose boss is Seymour Stein: ” A shy man,” Jim recalls. “He stood out because everyone else on Sire was like a second-hand car salesman. A quiet man -and we fell for it!”
Though they recorded two acclaimed albums, Stutter and Strip-mine, the cash-registers failed to ring. Despite maintaining their live following, by ’88 James’s career appeared to have stalled; meanwhile, it seemed that they would be washed away by another wave from Manchester, on the crest of which surfed The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays.
That they came to ride the same wave themselves owes something to the musical change that followed the departure of drummer Gavan Whelan. “We kicked him out,” Tim confesses. “He wanted the music to go one way and we wanted it to go another. He got frustrated because he couldn’t communicate his ideas to us and for over a year at every rehearsal we got bogged down in argument until we said, This isn’t working. After Gavan left, we had to write songs with a drum-machine, and that influenced a new direction in our music. Larry would find a preset, and, for the first time, a drum pattern would remain constant throughout our songs because we didn’t know how to change it.” James had already been on the lookout for additional musicians: “We’d done the four-piece,” summarises Tim. “Let’s see what other colours might be added to our palette. But we didn’t expect to end up as a seven-piece.” Drummer Dave Baynton-Power replaced Gavan, and James added trumpeter Andy Diagram (ex-Diagram Brothers and Pale Fountains), vtolinist Saul Davies and keyboardist Mark Hunter.
In ’89, James toured with Happy Mondays in support. It was the year of “Madchester” and the new crossover of indie rock and E-generation dance. The realisation that they were being swept into the new scene came at shows in Blackpool, where weekending Mancunian ravers would wig out to the new seven-piece, dance-friendly James. Even as they had let their Sire deal lapse, James inadvertently tapped into the scene’s craze for clothes with their eye-catching T -shirts. A fan designed the first of these items (“We had to keep finding him to give him more money because it did quite well”) and the band’s manager, Martine McDonagh (also the mother of Tim’s child, Ben), designed the others. Kids who had never heard the band wore the clothes, and today James’s turnover and profit is “far greater” from the T -shirts than the records.
JAMES RE-ENTERED THE RECORD FRAY WITH a self-financed live album, One Man Clapping: “We got a bank manager, Colin Cook of the Royal Bank of Scotland, to see us play a concert in Manchester with 3,000 people there,” Tim chuckles. “He gave us this huge loan, the biggest he could authorise. We had no collateral but for the great gig.” Out on their own label, One Man Records, it was distributed by Rough Trade and went to Number 1 in the indie charts – for one week. With an advance from Rough Trade, James recorded their next studio album, Gold Mother. “We gave Rough Trade the singles Sit Down and Come Home, and they said, This is great, we love it, but you have to understand, boys, that these will never reach a big audience,” sighs Tim. “They must have backed so many bands they loved who didn’t get anywhere that they must have lost faith in their own judgement of what would sell.
Next stop Phonogram, with a completed album up for grabs if the vibes were right. Not only did Phonogram accept the whole of the Gold Mother album as it was but, when asked how much they thought it might sell, instead of the expected 50-60,000 copies, the company replied, “about 300- 400,000 – a bigger number than we’d had in our wildest dreams.” And, kickstarted by the band’s anthemic single, Sit Down, this estimate proved to be “quite accurate”.
On the eve of the release of their new album, Seven (which has already been snubbed by some critics as “stadium rock”), James are learning to live with the mixed reception that is the flipside of pop stardom.
“I went to a bar for a drink,” Tim unwholesomely confesses, “and these four lads were going. This guy thinks James are a load of fucking nancies. This guy props himself up on the bar and says, Yeah, James are fucking poofs. So I say, Yeah, we are; we love sticking our penises up each other’s arses. We do it all the time. Really into it. Didn’t you know we were gay? Whatever he said, I just went with it, and he was fine after that. And at the Reading Festival, I was watching a band, and this guy in his mid-thirties who looked like a geography teacher came up: I’ve always wanted to talk to you, he said, very nicely. Five years ago, I thought you were so important, the best band. But now look at you – you’re awful! You’re crap! What happened? Well, I said, we sold our souls to the Devil. The Devil! We decided to make music that would make us lots and lots of money, and that’s what Gold Mother and Come Home are. I knew it! he said, and walked away. Fucking hell, I thought, you can’t argue with something like that. ..”
Seventh Heaven – Exit Magazine
Their name is James. Not Jesus James, just James. But you don’t know them. Actually, this band’s namesake is Jim Glennie, its bassist and founding member, but that won’t help you much since you don’t know Glennie either. It’s funny that James still isn’t a household name, but their American label, Mercury, isn’t laughing. How come a Brit-nominee (U.K. Grammy) that’s gone platinum is such a well-kept secret here? Surely they should have hit the mainstream after their single and album charted in the college top ten last summer.
You didn’t miss them in the onslaught of English Ecstasy bands because James didn’t ride to #1 via the Manchester gravy train, even though they hail from that berg. James predates that fad by light years. According to band historian/guitarist Larry Gott, “James began in the dark mists of time”. Such heady musician talk puts the early 80’s somewhere in the Mesozoic Era, but in people years, thats nearly a decade.
Back in 1983 their first EP with Factory Records prompted alternative arbiter Morrissey to proclaim James “the best band in the world.” Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, the Smiths covered their single ‘What’s the World.’ Five records, four new members, three labels, and two top ten hits later, sales and concert attendance bear out that prophecy. Gott reminds us, “It’s been five or six years since that quote. We’re all different people now.” Nevertheless, Mercury invokes Morrissey’s quote in case you can’t decide for yourself.
Apparently the meatless man still fancies them. Morrissey requested a spot on the bill alongside James for Amnesty International’s recent 30th birthday concert. “He did a song and the main lyric was ‘We hate our friends when they become successful. I think it was an affectionate little dig at us,” relates Gott.
You may have overlooked a reassembly of their 1989 LP “Goldmother” hiding behind a stripped-down neo-60’s daisy cover. This eponymous version omits two songs while adding “Lose Control” and the infectuous “Sit Down”, their charmed single which soared up the charts a second time, two years after its original indie release. That’s a neat trick every artist would like to pull off.
Excuse me, but isn’t it concert convention to get the crowd on their feet? A dose of james can cure such close-mindedness. Their live, full-length concert video, “James: Come Home,” recorded at the G-Mex in Manchester, will get you on your feet in your own living room. James’ stage improvisation is both a band and crowd favorite, and the charismatic Booth’s way with words and wails have made him a media darling. They’ve got youth dancing to irony again without the suicidal undertone of Depeche Mode or the self-indulgent apathy of the Smiths. Their misery is closer to the theraputic reflection of U2, without the profundity. Hard to get too serious with boyish Booth bopping in a franzy, his hair tousling, and his oversize shirt flapping.
When they tour the U.S. for the first time this year, expect to see a large, tight band which has spent the last year playing sold-out houses supporting huge acts like The Cure and headlining open-air festivals. Modeled on the strength of the E-Street Band (no kidding), James boasts virtuoso musicians each talented enough to front his own band. But it wasn’t always so.
Booth admits “we were terrible” at the start. The original members- Booth, Glennie, Gott, and departed drummer Covin Whelan- were more interested in new sounds than in perfection. Though that’s probably what attracted Factory records, the danger for a cerebral is to not connect with the audience. ” It was a criticism we had thrown at us a lot… that we were somehow insular and aloof,” recalls Gott, “and we didn’t realize because we we’re concentrating so hard.”
James worked dutifully to correct the flaw, gaining a reputation as a great live act. Then when they had great stage energy, their material just didn’t translate to enough people, or so the conventional label wisdom went. Booth reflects, “In the early days, our songs were like sketches that people had to interpret.” After years for searching for new band members, James found their ideal compliments within a four-month period. Perhaps fate selected Mark Hunter (keyboard), Andy Diagram (trumpet), Saul Davies (guitar, violin) and Dave Bayton-Power (drums), in time for James’ triumphant success with “Goldmother/James.”
“Aside from me, Tim and Jim, we’d only been together a couple of months,” recalls Gott. “We had songs we’d written and we tried to communicate to [the new members] what we wanted.” Now the whole band participated in a selection process on the material the cardinal three generate in jams. “We could jam and it sounds like shit and the next minute we write “Sit Down”- that took ten minutes! You can’t stop the song because it’s so good.”
Recent successes had a daunting effect on the group, though they overcame the pressure. “We’ve tried to write a song like “Come Home” and we can’t do it. It’s not like putting all the same ingredients in a pot and coming up with the same thing,” confesses Gott.
But what came out of the pot is very good. “Seven”, their current release, reflects the group’s maturity, in the studio and as well as in the message. Gott characterizes “Seven” as “James’ coming together.” Whereas “Goldmother/James” ranged from sincere to cynical about loneliness and desire, most of the songs on “Seven” imply the same deception, rejection, and shame, but suggest facing one’s fears can supply the strength to overcome them. Perhaps “Ring the Bells” will catch on, as it begs a tamer audience response.
James’ songs are soothing unless you really listen to them. Says Gott: “In the past, we’ve juxtaposed sweet lyrics with quite disturbing music. Juxtaposition is one of our fun areas. We write music that inspires Tim, and he finds things that aren’t quite so obvious.”
The hypnotic rhythms, ethereal subjects, and Booth’s precious vocals may remind one of Simple Minds or U2. He eerily whispers, “Strip away all of your protection… do everything you fear/in this there is power…”
“It’s hard to comment on Tim’s lyrics because they come from him. He’s saying something you wouldn’t neccessarily voice in public.” Can’t we get a hint as to the object of desire in “Next Lover”? “I’m sorry, you’ll have to ask Tim. If you think its an icon like Madonna, its not like that.”
Gott talks about his favorite cut, “Heaven”. Recorded as a straight ahead song during the session, the band included some weird overdubs that got shelved. The song was passable until producer Tim Palmer (Mission UK) got his hands on it. “Tim went through the cupboard, if you like and sorted out all these bits that really worked, and threw out the main song. He pulled out all the nice, slidey violins and trumpet, and blended them all.”
The beautiful result confronts a fatalist: “I’m waiting for the king of the world to come and rescue me”, with a challenge: “Are you waiting for the heavens to descend?”
As if to repent Booth’s doubts the album closes with a gentle “Blow Me Away”, a thank-you to the Creator, if you will. Life is cruel but God takes care of you in Heaven, he seems to say.
If “Seven”‘s songs seem to await that illusive, kinder, gentler thing that we’ve been hearing about, Gott counters, “It’s more of a sneaking suspicion that that’s not going to arrive.”
What’s sure to arrive is the band’s U.S. success. Will their inevitable success spoil James? ” In some people’s eyes,” concedes Gott, “because we’re not their special find, their little treasure. Once you’ve become accepted in a broader sense, a lot of people think you’ve lost that special quality. I hope it doesn’t spoil us. It will probably be the end of James.”
MTV Interview
It’s taken James nine years, four record companies and the rerelease last year of Sit Down to achieve success but now nominated for Best British Band category at next month’s Brit Awards along with Dire Straits and Queen. The backlash has begun.
Tim : I think in England there’s a particular thing with a band having success which is hard for a lot of people to take especially when you see it come up from something small. You’ve been their property, their private band, the band that they always loved and nobody else knew about. When you become public property, something else happens. It’s quite scary for us too because we’ve always liked bands that never made it.
Singer Tim Booth, in particular, has been accused of being pompous and taking himself too seriously. He allegedly threatened to commit suicide if he didn’t find the meaning of life.
Tim : I’d got everything I wanted and I found I still wasn’t enjoying it. I wasn’t enjoying life. You kind of think that’s a bit ridiculous and just try and like enjoy it really. I was giving myself too bad a time as well really, I was taking it too seriously. I was taking the responsibility of the band too much on my shoulders . It’s part of my upbringing as well, it’s just that if you do this thing really well, it’s serious and well it’s the whole of the upbringing, it’s the whole thing with religion. Well I don’t trust any religion now without a sense of humour so that kind of knocks them all out really.
Whether you think James have a sense of humour or not, one thing nobody disagrees over is what James are like when they play live. Their fanatical following and the intensity of Tim Booth’s performance means the band’s concerts can resemble religious celebrations.
Tim : There’s a certain range of feelings and emotions that a mass of people can get at a concert that I think they should almost be getting from religions that they don’t and I don’t see anything wrong in that as long as there’s a sense of humour there as well and people aren’t taking us too seriously in that way.
Even if the band do come from Manchester and the James rise came at a time when Manchester bands were constantly in the media spotlight, the only thing James have in common with the Happy Mondays is the town they live in.
Tim : We felt we were before all that anyway. Well, obviously for a start, we’ve been going eight or nine years and we feel as much connected to Joy Division and The Smiths than we did to the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses and so we didn’t want to get caught up in that wave because we felt once it had passed there would be a backlash and we didn’t want part of it. We were offered press that was linked with it and we’d turn it down.
But there are some things James have not managed to avoid. Sit Down, the single that turned James into stadium stars, became their unofficial anthem is probably one track they’ll have to play live for the rest of their lives.
Tim : We tried not playing it, we tried doing acoustic versions, we’d open all the sets with it and then we kind of realised to an audience coming along, it was fresh, it was something they hadn’t experienced before and it was us that had experienced it a few nights running and we ended up feeling like killjoys at a party, so we kind of accepted in the end that the song had gone public.
