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James are soon to embark on a nationwide tour (which rolls into Newcastle on May 17), having just released 14th studio album ‘Girl at the End of the World’. I spoke to bass guitarist Jim Glennie about the album, the tour and life at the heart of one of the U.K’s most enduring bands.

It’s been 34 years since Jim Glennie formed James, the band which took his name. After as many spats, break up’s and comebacks as you would expect of a band of such vintage, James are back and sounding as good as ever. The new album certainly has Jim in buoyant mood. ‘I think it’s a great record, I’m really proud of it, it sort of picks up where ‘La Petit Mort’ left off. It’s almost like what we learned from the previous album, we’ve used that as the start point with this record.’

There is certainly a feel good vibe about the album which sees the band reaffirm their dancefloor roots. Produced by Max Dingel, Jim tells me that Brian Eno was also involved. ‘We took him a couple of songs, one was the single ‘Nothing But Love’, we knew we’d written a great song but we thought ‘there is something missing’, so we asked Brian what he would suggest, and he put keyboards on it, sort of arpeggiated keyboards which have become a real key feature of it, even though it is a little bit alien to the rest of the song, but in total Eno style, it just works brilliantly.”

The band have had hit albums before of course, but perhaps are often seen as a ‘great singles band’ or a ‘great live act’ which has rather unfairly left albums such as ‘Laid’ or ‘Millionaires’ overlooked, even though they more than hold their own with any records from their era. It’s an assessment Jim agrees with: “I think that has happened, perhaps some of the records have slipped a little bit under the radar, but it feels a little bit different with this one, there seems to be a little bit of a new buzz about us, which is bonkers fourteen albums in.” And in terms of those previous releases which may not have hit commercial or critical heights, he is philosophical “It’s just part and parcel of the industry we are in, sometimes you feel you’ve released a great song or album and it doesn’t seem to engage for whatever reason, but it’s still there in the annals of music history, and at some point in the future, long after we’re all gone, some kid somewhere will bump into it, and think ‘wow this is wonderful’, so it’s there forever more”

James are somewhat notorious for not just ‘bumping into’ their older songs, but rather kicking them into the long grass, as Jim explains when I ask him about the setlist for the forthcoming tour. “Obviously we’ve got bloody millions of songs to choose from, so we tend to change things around every night. We’re not a band that will go out there and play songs we don’t want to play, and quite selfishly we go out and play the songs we want to do, and I guess that’s why we’re still here after all these years. We’ll happily do a tour without playing ‘Sit Down’ or ‘Laid’ but we have a pretty big portfolio to choose from. We are kind of (currently) debating the pool of songs that we are going to choose from for the tour, it’s often nice to surprise people with things from 15 or 20 years ago that they wouldn’t expect to hear.”

I ask about the tour and the relationships within the band, Jim has had a fractious relationship with lead singer Tim Booth over the years, and I wonder if the confines of a tour put an extra strain on that. “We’ve reached an age now where you can demand your own space a little bit, and you can go off on your own for a little while. It’s like a family, you fall out, you make up, it’s just gonna happen. We’ve matured now though, gone are the days of big rows and punch ups!”

The Newcastle gig is one that Jim is looking forward to in particular. “My wife is from Consett, so I’ve spent a lot of time up in the North East, I love it up there. When I was courting my wife, she was living on Westgate Rd (Newcastle) and I’d go up there every weekend, I really loved it and I think the people are amazing. We’ve had some great gigs up there, we’ve always had a really loyal fanbase, real heartfelt passion.”

It’s a relationship that looks set to continue as well as Jim tells me that the band are committed, contractually, to at least two further albums. “It’s never felt like a long career stretching out ahead of us and it still doesn’t. We take each album as a blessing. It feels like it’s in the lap of the gods but as long as we are enjoying it, long may it last.”

Here’s hoping it does.

James are back releasing their 14th album, Girl at the End of the World, a record that the band considers as their best ever. I had the privilege to interview Saul Davies, the violinist and guitarist for James. It was a relaxed and laid back conversation, at one point even the local plumber joined us, we talked about the band, the new album and their upcoming tour.

I was first introduced to James in 2014 when spontaneously attending the not so well known festival, Umbria Rocks. I saw the band perform in field filled with a grand total of around 150 people, my memory is of Tim exclaiming, “Wow, what a big field!” Despite the lack of numbers, James created a magical atmosphere providing more than just music. From this one experience, I bought all their albums and became aware of just how huge the band are. They’ve performed at every festival, Glastonbury, Woodstock 2, Coachella and have played with big names such as The Stone Roses, Radiohead and The Killers. They’re critically acclaimed and commercially successful having sold over 12 million albums worldwide.

James formed in 1982, emerging at the tail end of the 80s, they survived through the scenes of Madchester, Britpop and remain current today whilst others have faded into oblivion. I was intrigued as to how the band have kept going, when asking Saul what their secret is to, he gave the simple reply; “we just keep writing and keep making records.”

“If a band continues to make music and find itself creatively viable there is a chance people can enjoy what you’re doing. As soon as a band stops writing automatically you become like a little of a tribute band to yourself and I think that artistically it is not credible and difficult to maintain a credibility.”

James have had a long and illustrious career, I wanted to know if there was an album which Saul was particularly proud of, a question he found difficult to answer, having a mixture of responses;

“I think the last record we made prior to breaking in 2001, Pleased to Meet You is a great record. I’m very proud of La Petite Mort, I think it’s a lovely record. This record Girl at the End of the World I think is like a progression on La Petite Mort and kind of accompanies it. These last two records I do feel very strongly about.”

Saul had mentioned the band’s break in 2001, James had a hiatus from 2001 till 2007. It seemed for Saul during these years things “calmed down a little bit”, a time in which he married and had children. He stressed the fact that the break in 2001 was meant to be a permanent fixture with “absolutely no inclination to get back together again, it was something that wasn’t on the cards.”

At this moment in the interview Saul had a knock on the door from his plumber thus we had to quickly postpone our conversation.

Crisis averted, we returned to the interview and I asked what got the band back together in 2007;

“A desire to write more music again, we had some years apart…then we wondered what it would be like if we wrote something together and when we started writing it was apparent that we were writing some half decent material and one thing led to another…suddenly we were out on tour supporting an album that we’d made.”

We then went on to talk about the upcoming album Girl at the End of the World, I wanted to know what we were to expect from the album after hearing two pre-released singles, Nothing But Love and To My Surprise. These songs are filled with techno dance beats, which Saul described as “not that representative of the album.” His description of the album made it sound like it is filled with electronic, rock, club epic, “German sounding thing…big dance thing…mad keyboard flying thing,” so we were to expect a variety of things…

“I don’t think there is one particular theme that runs through it all…It’s difficult to categorise, there’s one song called Alvin which is in French for Christs sake, Tim decided to sing in French which is funny because his French accent is dreadful.”

James’ previous album La Petite Mort did extremely well with a hectic year of live shows, it seemed it would be a difficult one to follow. Saul however seemed confident in saying “Anybody who likes the last record looks like they’re probably really going to enjoy this one as well” and explained how many said Girl At the End of the World is actually better.

This May the band are endeavouring on what is said to be their biggest tour to date, playing to 60,000 fans across 15 shows. I asked what fans should expect from the two and a quarter hour set, “it has to be long because we’ve got a lot of songs.”

“Night by night it will change. We’re not a band who want to do the same set every night…we’ll play seven or eight new songs, we’ll play some old catalogue material…we’ll still play two or three songs from the last album, we love playing songs from that record.”

Many have named the sold out Manchester show as the sure highlight, I wondered if the band regarded Manchester as the best night being where they originated. I seemed to have hit a nerve as Saul insisted this wasn’t the case and each show was special in its own way;

“We must make our shows as special as we can everywhere we go for those people making the effort to even get to that show …I’m not paying lip service to this, it really is the case and I think we put a lot into our shows, they’re quite emotional…we’re doing something, we’re a band but we see ourselves as artists, it’s an enterprise, not just about business, it’s about making music.”

Saul then came down from his inspirational speech and went back to the subject of Manchester;

“Of course its special in Manchester because one way another that’s where the band is from and that’s where our heritage is so yeah it is special, we would be a different band if were from somewhere else, it has defined who we are.”

After talking for half an hour it was time to go…the questions were answered, the septic tank was fixed, the interview was over. Thanks Saul.

Girl at the End of the World is released 18th March alongside a major headline UK tour in May, the band will also be appearing in stores across the country in March for album signings.

The music world is a harsh climate. Its inhabitants, though a hardy breed, face the cold, bracing weather of public opinion and struggle to find sustenance and success in the saturated soil of modern rock. For bands who’ve been around for a while, all it takes is a change in the wind for them to grow tired and lifeless. James is a survivor. Formed in 1982, its members have put out album after album, and after a brief death when vocalist Tim Booth left in 2001, they rose again to fight for life in 2006, and have since gone on slam out three more albums.

Jim Glennie, the bassist and apparent namesake of the band, makes it clear that James had been his job for almost his whole life, and the albums they’ve made follow a path of progression. “You become different people – I’m not the 15-year-old boy I was anymore, I’m a fifty-year-old bloke with kids and grandchildren! Those albums reflect those massive changes, from this spindly sparseness on Stripmine to the more experimental period to the anthemic period where we had some success, then disappearing off to the States. I think that had a big influence on us.

“I never felt like we were gonna be in it for a long time – it wasn’t something that existed beyond the record we were working on. It never felt any more concrete than that. We’re still excited by what we do and we’re still finding new ways to present our music to people. Since we got back together in 2006, we felt like we were kind of under the radar, but after La Petite Mort [the band’s 13th full-length release] something shifted and a lot of people heard us for the first time. So, you kind of circumvent the industry, when you play a gig and there are loads of young people there – people get into you each time you do something, and that’s really exciting.”

This, in a way, is the real strength of James as a band. They have managed to hit their stride creatively in a career spanning 30 years and still boast a sizeable fan base to support them. Over time, their sound has morphed and won them supporters in many places. Brian Eno, the pioneer of ambience, is one such fan, and was involved in the production of a number of James’s albums mid-career such as Laid, Wah Wah and Millionaires. He is often credited with inflicting his ambient tendencies onto the band, and I wondered what influence current producer Max Dingel, an apparent Pro-Tools master and sonic perfectionist, had over the recent albums. “I think La Petite Mort was kind of a shift sonically for us and that was implemented by Max. We wanted to push things a little bit, and Max was the perfect person. He concentrates massively on the sounds – it’s about crafting the sounds and creating space for them. I think he’s given us the kind of grit and the power that we get live, but the difference is in the way he crafts the songs. Some of us weren’t so sure about the process, but I think the success of La Petite Mort has validated it. And also we love it, we kind of grew into it, so it seemed like a no-brainer to do another one with Max to kind of pick up where we left off.”

Their new album Girl at the End of the World, out on 18 March, promises to be as intricate as their previous release, La Petite Mort. Having been written entirely in Scotland, the solitude seems to be the only thing that carried through: “I don’t think Scotland specifically had an effect on the songwriting, it was more that we were locked away in the middle of nowhere in the Highlands in January, minus ten outside, and that could have been anywhere – Alaska, Newfoundland, Scandinavia, anywhere freezing would’ve had a similar effect on the album. It was something we needed to do, we locked ourselves away and spent all day writing, and that became the core of the album.”

In terms of tracks, ‘Girl at the End of the World’ promises a mix of straight-up pop songs and some structurally looser ones. “I love the big journey songs. I love the tension – the ones that don’t just go verse-chorus-verse-chorus, but the ones that go part-A-part-B-part-C-part-D, and I’m really looking forward to playing them live. ‘Girl at the End of the World’, it’s just a simple little pop song – I only join in on the chorus, but I love the directness of it.”

On the subject of live activities, Tim Booth’s serpentine swerving and seductive stage presence are renowned, and I ask whether the band has anything special in store for the upcoming UK tour. “We’re a bit shambolic when it comes to organising things. We tend to have a lot of ideas last minute that we try and implement and then cobble things together into a show. It’s going to be a lot of this new album obviously, we’re desperate to play it to people. I think we’re going to shift around some of the tunes we play and work on some back catalogue things, but we’ve got so bloody many to pick from!”

Although James has never quite dominated the musical landscape they reside in, as some bands do, they have maintained an impressively consistent trajectory on the path of British rock. They are career musicians – long-distance runners that make the music they love making, humbly and wholeheartedly. Girl at the End of the World hopes to be as big-hearted as the rest of their catalogue, and with refined production and a wealth of experience to draw from, it should build well on top of the success of La Petite Mort. They have survived for this long. Thankfully, it doesn’t look like they’ll be giving up the gun anytime soon.

Tim Booth on his fury at musical ageism, his love affair with Brian Eno and the spooky ways his lyrics come true.

Band at the end of the world James and Tim Booth (centre) look suitably delighted with their new album.

“People think ‘Surely James were biggest around Sit Down in the 90s?’ Well, we’re bigger now.”

If James singer Tim Booth’s claim seems unlikely at first, then their new album Girl At The End Of The World has just matched the No 2 peak of three of their past albums (90s discs Gold Mother, Seven and Millionaires.)

The self-confessed “awkward Mancunian band who never fitted anyone’s pigeonhole” are also set to play to 150,000 people on their marathon tour in May – more than any other tour in James history. They then open the main Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury on June 24.

“We aren’t fully appreciated, because the media goes with cool”

So it’s no wonder that Booth has plenty of anger at the fact that James have been in the margins ever since their debut album Stutter 30 years ago, back when Morrissey was pretty much their only mainstream fan.

“We still feel outsiders,” spits Booth. “There’s a large part of the cultural media that only looks at music made by people younger than 28. We don’t like that. We don’t like sexism or racism and we don’t like ageism either.

“We know that if a young band had made our new single Nothing But Love that it’d be a smash hit. But because of the way the media is set up, it’s virtually impossible for us to have hits now, unless a miracle happens.

“We aren’t fully appreciated and we aren’t seen for what we are, because the media goes with cool – bands who are less vulnerable and more obvious.”

And it’s true that James have always been unfashionable. Even when they had hits like Laid, She’s A Star and the all-conquering Sit Down they certainly didn’t belong to rave, grunge or Britpop.

But it’s that outsider spirit that drives the band on, determined to prove doubters wrong. “We’re bitter we aren’t appreciated sometimes,” admits the shaven-headed frontman. “But that bitterness drives us, makes us go ‘Well, we’ll just have to make even better fucking music.’ It’s an inspiration!

“And it’s working for us. We aren’t very cool, we don’t play the game, we sometimes won’t play our big hits for a year in concert. But James have made it through for 35 years. Our heritage says we have to take risks, and that’s why we’ve survived.”

“Brian Eno turned down millions to work with bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers and REM to work with us for a pittance”
If Booth’s words look angry in print, he says them with a smile. He may not be a typical bloke, but he can’t half swear for a Buddhist. Brought up in Bradford before he met his bandmates at Manchester Uni, he’s also a Leeds fan, which must be fun in an eight-piece Manc band.

And Booth is right about James taking risks. Fourteen albums in, and Girl At The End Of The World essentially sees James discover rave music. It starts with two minutes of pounding keyboards before Bitch’s self-mocking vocals kick in.

Like previous album La Petite Mort, the new record was written in the Scottish highlands. “It was three weeks of no internet and hardly any phone signal,” recalls Booth, 56. “It was isolated and lonely. It’s the band basically speaking in tongues, a completely made-up language that only we understand. The only respite was to take myself off to go hiking up a mountain in the sleet and snow.”

Booth talks excitedly about setting the band’s drum machine on a fast tempo in order to encourage its fast pace (“I’ve danced in James for years, but we don’t always give ourselves the best music to dance to”) and off the throbbing Attention began as a ballad before “some people in the band speeded it up to a mega-fast, comedy Pinky & Perky speed”.

But he later admits that Girl At The End Of The World was “the hardest record we’ve ever had to make”. He’s reluctant to expand further, explaining: “The turmoil is how bands like Oasis sell themselves. But we protect ourselves in James and close the wagon train.”

However, Booth may well be referring to guitarist Larry Gott, who is on sabbatical after not joining James’ tour in 2015. Is Gott still a member of James? “I think you’d have to ask him that,” says Booth tersely.

Booth is much happier talking about how Brian Eno helped them on the new album. Although produced by The Killers associate Max Dingel, Girl At The End Of The World’s recording saw Eno join James in the studio for the first time since 2001’s Pleased To Meet You.

“Brian says it quietly, but he does say that James are his favourite band,” grins Booth. “So many bands have come up to me going ‘How do you get to work with Brian Eno so much? We’ve been trying for years!’ And these are big bands like REM and Red Hot Chili Peppers who would make Brian millions, that he’s turned down to work with us for a pittance.”

Influential U2, Talking Heads and Coldplay producer Eno has “the best mind I’ve ever encountered,” according to Booth. “There’s no such thing as a problem to Brian, only exciting ideas that need to be looked at. He’s so positive and playful.

“Sometimes, sure, we’ll go on a dead end with Brian for hours, but then he’ll just go ‘Nope, didn’t work, let’s turn around and go this way.’ I feel so happy to see him every time and it’s still a love affair with Brian.”

Booth also admires Regina Spektor, saying he was unable to write a song for three months after he first saw the New Yorker in concert. “When I’m hit by music, I’m really hit by it,” he enthuses, adding he “wept and shook” the first time he saw Sufjan Stevens play, deadpanning: “He was even better the second time.”

But Booth admits he’s not completely immune to writing off ageing musicians himself. “When I saw The Rolling Stones, they were awful, a pantomime,” he sighs. “Most people get stuck and become parodies of themselves when they get old. It’s the same as before, but not as good. But it’s not about age, it’s about being alive. Leonard Cohen, Abdul Ibrahim, you still go ‘Holy cow!’ at them.”

So how do James avoid becoming a parody? “Because we make songs from the subconscious. It’s five songwriters moving all at once, and we don’t control it. We’re less predictable because none of us know where we’re going.”

It’s at this point where Loaded’s interview with Booth takes a turn for the sinister. We’ve spoken to plenty of singers who say their lyrics were trying to tell them something about their lives, but none have been able to demonstrate it quite so precisely as Booth.

He explains how Blue Pastures from James’ 1997 album Whiplash was about a man committing suicide in the Lake District by laying down in the snow and refusing to get up. Before the song was released, it’s exactly what a friend of Booth’s then-girlfriend did. The song was played at his funeral and his widow phoned Booth, asking how he knew her husband was going to kill himself.

“I don’t sit down to write songs about an event,” he states. “I’m fishing around and I believe the unconscious has access to the past and to the future. They’re all the same to the unconscious, so a lot of my songs tend to come true.”

Which, yes, does sound a bit like mystic bobbins. But it’s hard to deny Booth is onto something when he describes new song Attention. Booth lives in Topanga in the Californian desert with his wife Katie and their 11-year-old son Luka.

Attention was written when the family moved north in California to the affluent Berkeley suburb, but they moved back to Topanga eight months later, largely because their son was unable to settle in Berkeley.

“I’d written this song with a chorus mentioning a manzanita tree,” recalls Booth. “I thought to myself ‘What the fuck? No-one in England will know what a manzanita tree is. It’s a shitty chorus reference.’” Booth tried to write alternative lyrics “20 times”, but kept coming back to the same lines. They described a couple sitting around a manzanita tree watching shooting stars by a fire and “By this fire we are shaped”.

Shortly after Booth’s family moved back to Topanga, the father of twin classmates of Luka died suddenly.

“We know how we touch people’s lives, because they frequently tell us”

The children at the school requested they hold a Native American death ceremony in honour of the twins’ father… where families gathered around a manzanita tree by a fire, watching shooting stars. “You give offerings to the fire,” says Booth. “The twins slept by the fire with their mother, and it’s the most profound acknowledgement of death I’ve ever experienced.”

Told you Booth wasn’t a regular bloke. But he’s one it’s impossible not to warm to, and whether or not James play the hits on that May tour, 150,000 people will go home happy.

“We know what we’re capable of,” summaries Booth. “We know how good we can be live, though some shows fail and we fall.

“But we know how we touch people’s lives, because they frequently tell us. We do what we’re most passionate about and have people thank us for it all the time. That’s an amazing position to be in.”

Boasting a run of UK chart singles and an American college radio hit in ‘Laid’, James enjoyed phenomenal success in the 1990s, establishing themselves as a prominent fixture of the Manchester indie scene whilst avoiding the Britpop tag.

The band split in 2001 following the departure of singer Tim Booth but burst back into life six years later – and the seven-piece have been prolific ever since, with a number of tours and new studio albums.

Daniel Jeakins spoke to founding member and band namesake Jim ‘James’ Glennie ahead of the release of their latest record Girl At The End of the World to talk crowning career moments, a new three-album deal and their reformation.

Hi Jim. You’re in the process of promoting your latest record Girl At The End of the World. How’s it all going?

“Really well, thank you. We’ve got a really busy schedule lined up – we’re doing lots of in-store performances, BBC Breakfast and things like that. Personally I’ve been really pleased with the reaction we’ve got from the new material – we really enjoy the challenge of bringing new songs to our audience and not just playing the same old songs. We’ve always wanted to be an active band in that sense.”

Your last record, La Petite Mort, was labelled as being about the death of (singer) Tim Booth’s mother. Does this latest album have a similarly specific subject.

“Not really no, this album isn’t about anything in particular. Obviously there are certain songs you can point to which are about things Tim has experienced recently.”

You’ve been extremely prolific since you reformed – you’ve toured pretty much non-stop and this will be your fifth album since 2008. Obviously the hunger hasn’t died?

“We’ve always been a band that want to constantly update our sound. It might be hard to believe, but ever since the beginning it’s kind of felt like every album could potentially be the last one. We’ve never had any assurances that we’d be able to carry on – actually now is the first time we’ve really had that assurance.

“Our new label (BMG) have given us a three album deal, with this being the first one, so we’ve got plans to release more going forward.”

You’re the only member of James who has been a part of the band for its whole duration – what would you say are the highlights of your career?

“I could reel off things we’ve achieved and amazing things I’ve done, but it’s the small personal things that really stick in the memory. Growing up I was a huge fan of The Jam and I remember seeing their name written above the Apollo and thinking ‘I wonder if my band will ever get to play there’. Then years later we headlined the Apollo and our name was written in the exact same letters – sentimental stuff like that is what really sticks out to me.”

You’re known for playing very different sets every night and not sticking to the same selection of songs – why did you decide to vary your performances?

“I think it’s important to play a set that suits your setting. I remember we had a flight delayed when we were due to play Latitude so we ended up playing the day after in one of the tents at 11:30am. With that kind of set you have to respect that everyone’s a bit hungover, so we played a lot of quite intimate ones.

“If you’re on late afternoon when everyone starts drinking again you bring out the big anthems. Most bands like to rehearse a specific set list, which is a lot easier for our lighting and sound guys, but we like doing it that way. It does lead to a lot of arguments before the gig when it comes to choosing what songs we play though!”

Tim Booth believes the James’ younger fanbase is helping the band top the charts.

The rock group are on course to knock Grammy Award-winner Adele from the Number One top spot on the Official UK Album Chart with their 14th album ‘Girl At The End Of The World’ and frontman Tim Booth believes he has the younger generation of fans to thank for its recent success.

In an interview with NME magazine, he said: ”It [2014’s ‘La Petite Mort’] reached a lot of people, especially the videos. We were noticing a younger audience coming to our gigs, so I think the last one set up this one [‘Nothing But Love]. We know we’ve made a pretty magical record and we believe the record will stand up to the scrutiny so it feels great.

”There aren’t many people who can break through the glass ceiling of age and it looks like we’re gonna be one of them.”

But when it comes to knocking Adele off the top spot, Tim isn’t convinced the group will be able to up against a ”force” like the ‘Hello’ hitmaker.

He explained: ”We’re very happy with how things are going. We think the force of nature that is Adele will push us out of the way at the last moment. James is like a little cottage industry compared to a corporation and I can’t see us holding onto that Number One spot by the end of the week.

”We’re going to do our best obviously and we’ll be very happy with Number Two or Three or whatever we end up with. It’s just really nice that it’s surprised a lot of people.

”We improvise songs, we can’t write hits, we have not a clue how to do that and we aren’t interested in that, but every so often a big song just turns up. It’s like you’re fishing for trout and you suddenly catch a massive great pike by complete error. We knew we’d caught something quite big with ‘Nothing But Love’. We’ve got another one called ‘Dear John’ which is gonna make people be quite surprised too, because it doesn’t sound like a James song in some ways. I’m looking forward to that one coming out.”

TIM BOOTH, 56, is the lead singer of the band James whose biggest hit was Sit Down in 1991.

PATTI SMITH: Horses (Sony)

I heard this at boarding school after I was told that my dad had gone into hospital. I was devastated and couldn’t sleep. I hadn’t played it before and the song Birdland is about a boy losing his father. At that moment I connected to music in a way that I’d never done before.

WIRE: Pink Flag (EMI)

An overlooked punk classic. I interviewed them when I was 17 by pretending to be a journalist from the school magazine and watched them perform these songs. It’s one of the most inventive, crazy records ever.

PIXIES: Doolittle (4AD)

The Pixies were way ahead of their time and influenced the grunge movement. The arrangements are well crafted and singer Black Francis is the king of scream. They invited us to their Brixton show and it was one of the greatest gigs I’ve seen.

SUFJAN STEVENS: Carrie & Lowell (Asthmatic Kitty)

Magnificent. It’s very folky and partly about the death of his alcoholic, schizophrenic mother. It’s a great record to chill out and it’s so vulnerable. I saw him live last year and it’s so hard to hold an audience with stillness but he did it.

REGINA SPEKTOR: Soviet Kitsch (Sire)

She’s a classically trained pianist and can do musical things that I can’t dream of. The song Us is written from the point of view of statues of Soviet dictators and sounds like it has come from a musical. Her voice can make you weep but there’s lots of humour.

BRIAN ENO: Discreet Music (EMI)

I’ve lived with this record for 35 years. It never ceases to hold me. It’s one of Eno’s early ambient records and got torn apart by the press because everyone was into vocals at the time. I use it to relax.

original link – https://themouthmagazine.com/2016/03/19/tim-booth-james/

IT WOULD BE FAIR TO ASSUME THAT FOR THE NEW JAMES ALBUM FRONTMAN TIM BOOTH MIGHT HAVE CHOSEN TO WITHDRAW HIMSELF SLIGHTLY – 2014’S LA PETITE MORT HAD BEEN A RAW, VIVID AND SOMETIMES PAINFULLY EXPOSED TREATISE ON SEX, DEATH AND SPIRITUALITY.

tim featYet, on GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD (out this week) he continues unprotected ‘soul mining’, offering up another twelve nuggets from the coalface of the human condition. As ever, it’s deeply affecting – though this time it takes a few more listens for the songs to sink in and begin working that familiar James magic. It’s a much more experimental album, musically (though those with conservative tastes have no real cause to panic – you won’t be filing it alongside the cult classic, improvisational and Brian Eno-produced WAH WAH). In an often exhilarating move, on GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD James stride into what is, for them, sometimes unchartered territory. Keyboards are much higher in the mix and more central to the songwriting process. Though there are hits apparent here, this time round James have reconvened to produce one of their most dangerously ambitious records to date… In this new interview with The Mouth Magazine, conducted by telephone, Tim Booth speaks about GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD – and yet, as ever, we occasionally find ourselves wading into deeper waters throughout our conversation…

HELLO AGAIN TIM, HOW ARE YOU..?
Hi, hello again! Yeah, I’m good – but tired… We’ve been running around doing different weird things in London for a few days. We did the Chris Evans show on Radio Two this morning – but you have to get up at about five o’clock to do that… It’s not really what we signed up for when we joined a rock ‘n’ roll band.

I WONDERED IF YOU MIGHT HAVE GONE OUT ON THE TOWN WITH MR EVANS AFTER THE SHOW…
Aha… Ha ha. I don’t think he does that anymore. I think he goes straight to TOP GEAR these days… I’m back at the b&b, and I have to pack to leave. Oh, hmmm… There’s a cat in here… How’d that get in the house? Is that good luck or bad luck?

I HAVE ONE CURLED UP HERE NEXT TO ME ON MY DESK, LISTENING TO YOU… IT’S GOT TO BE GOOD LUCK, I THINK?
Yeah, you’re right. It’s good luck. I moved into this Airbnb thinking “This’ll be good, they’ll be good company for me”… But they’re really strange cats though, these ones. They’re psychotic cats…

THE LAST TIME WE SPOKE WAS ABOUT A YEAR AGO – YOU WERE JUST ABOUT TO ENTER FESTIVAL SEASON, I SEEM TO REMEMBER, TOWARDS THE END OF THE LA PETITE MORT CAMPAIGN… SO, LETS TALK ABOUT THE YEAR INBETWEEN. YOU’D WORKED INCREDIBLY HARD ON THAT ALBUM, AND EVERYTHING FOLLOWING IT, SO WAS THERE TIME OR THE INCLINATION TO TAKE STOCK, OR A BREAK… OR WERE YOU STRAIGHT INTO THE PROCESS FOR THE NEW ONE?
Oh, straight into the process. After LA PETITE MORT it felt like we had some momentum and we should keep it going. We went straight into the studio in Scotland, a kind of converted manor house. We made a DIY studio again, like we did for LA PETITE MORT, and worked our arses off, really, for three-and-a-half weeks. We had a great time making all these new songs that you can hear now. This was all in minus five or minus ten degrees, by the way!

THE CLOSENESS THAT THAT SORT OF ISOLATION BRINGS, AND THE RESIDENTIAL APPROACH WHEN YOU’RE WRITING AND RECORDING… WHAT DOES IT OFFER THE MUSIC?
An intensity, I think. When you’re writing songs with each other, really what you’re doing is you’re building a relationship, building a language – and so it’s more about listening than anything else. Like, I remember on about the fourth or the fifth day we had this amazing day. This thing, improvised between us, was so delicate and fragile that any wrong move would have messed it up. Everybody just hovered for about twenty minutes, high as kites in this careful listening process. We never actually made a song from that moment, but it wasn’t about that – it was about listening, it was about the communication and the connection. The next three or four songs ended up being really big songs, because we’d reached that level and developed that bond.

… A LEVEL OF TRUST…
Yeah. There were five of us writing, and we all knew we were there to catch each other. If someone does something risky or wild you don’t leave them out there alone – you go out there to them and see what you could do to make that work in a song. So, in James, there’s a lot of trust and there’s a lot of communication.

I GUESS IT’S A CASE OF LEAVING EGO OUT OF IT, TOO? LIKE YOU SAY, IN THIS BAND YOU’RE ALL THERE TO CATCH EACH OTHER – NOT TO CATCH EACH OTHER OUT…
Certainly that – but there is a fair heft of ego which turns up now and again. Trust me… But that often comes much later in the process – when people have got attached to songs. You get attached to the version that you’re hearing, and then somebody else takes the song in a completely different direction. So there can be resistance, but you have to keep letting go and keep letting go… It’s like loving a song, getting attached to it, but then letting go of it… All at the same time.

JAMES_ALBUM_BLUEAS A BAND WHICH HAS WORKED SO WELL TOGETHER FOR SUCH A LONG TIME, HOW DO YOU NAVIGATE THOSE MOMENTS? IS THERE A DEMOCRATIC PROCESS OR IS IT MUCH MORE ABOUT ONE-TO-ONE LOBBYING?
It happens in many ways. Sometimes we talk it through and it becomes a bigger discussion. But we’ve found that if two people have two different ideas, we’ll try them both. It’s often quicker to do that than to sit discussing it, because it’s so easy for people to get entrenched in what they think is right, or the right way… Sorry, I’m just putting some clothes on. I’m freezing in this house…

… YOU’RE NOT… NAKED… ARE YOU?!
No, no! I’m not naked! ‘Naked interview’, ha ha… But I certainly haven’t got enough clothes on for this weather…

FOUR OR FIVE LAYERS, THEN?
Yeah, definitely… I’m actually shivering with the cold. It must be my Californian blood.

A LOT OF JAMES’S MUSIC GROWS OUT OF IMPROVISATION, SO YOU CAN GIVE THINGS THE ROOM TO DEVELOP BUT ALSO HAVE THIS INTENSE EYE ON WHAT’S WORKING AND WHAT ISN’T…
Actually, we’re thinking of doing some improvised gigs – wholly improvised gigs – with timers. So we’d set a timer for six minutes and try and improvise a song to six minutes, and at the end of that improvisation we might set a timer for fifteen minutes and see what we can do to improvise one for fifteen, you know? That’s the writing process that we use, and it’d be interesting to see how it would come over in the live environment. That’s why Brian Eno came to work with us. That’s what made him want to record the improvised album WAH WAH alongside LAID. Eno had heard us improvise, and he believed that was what actually made us unique. I think he’s right, so I think we may try two or three gigs where we just improvise…

IT’S A BOLD IDEA…
Yeah. People will get their ticket and on it it’ll have to say ‘Purchase of this ticket may entail a really bad concert’ – because obviously we don’t know what’s going to happen. If you buy a ticket you’re buying a ticket to a lottery because we may be on that night – or we may not be that great that night…

… AND ‘GUARANTEED NO HITS’…
Yeah! Absolutely… ‘Guaranteed no hits’…

WHEN YOU’RE IMPROVISING, DO YOU FIND YOU HAVE TO ‘GET OUT OF THE WAY’ OF THE SONG, SOMETIMES, WHEN IT’S COMING?
Well, yeah. All James songs come out of improvisation – and that’s really the band’s only way of working. It’s absolutely our strength and it’s absolutely our limitation. So it’s…

… CAN I JUST INTERJECT AND ASK WHY YOU WOULD SAY THAT IT’S A LIMITATION?
Because we don’t know how to write towards something. If somebody said “Write a hit single, three and a half minutes long, which does x, y and z” – which is something a lot of people can do – we wouldn’t know where to begin, ha ha… What we do is we fish. We fish for songs. We write a whole load of songs and then if we’re lucky there’s a hit in there, in the pool. There might be a song in there that you know will somehow connect with many people, in a way the other songs might not. The thing is, you don’t necessarily love that song more than the other ones.

JAMES_ALBUM_BLUESO HOW DOES THAT APPLY TO THE NEW ALBUM?
Well, my favourite songs on GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD are probably ATTENTION and MOVE DOWN SOUTH – which are not hit singles. They’re more like journey songs, which are really strange and idiosyncratic – and songs that only a band like James would make… But the hits have a certain kind of clout to them. They’re bruisers. They can go into a radio station and fight it out with ten other songs by whoever. They might get on the ‘b’ list or the ‘a’ list or whatever, because they’re songs which show their muscle. They’ve got that something about them. We can’t plan to write those sort of songs. Whereas with singer-songwriters you get these people who seem to be able to consistently make those kind of songs – and make themselves very wealthy in the process. We write a lot and if we’re very very lucky one of those might turn up.

THAT’S INTERESTING. I REMEMBER TALKING TO JIM (GLENNIE) JUST BEFORE LA PETITE MORT CAME OUT AND HE TOLD ME THAT THE SONG CURSE CURSE ARRIVED VERY LATE IN THE DAY, NONE OF YOU REALLY KNEW WHAT IT WAS, AND SO IT WAS ALMOST DISCARDED. IT WASN’T – AND, EVENTUALLY, IT CAME OUT AS A SINGLE, PROBABLY ONE OF YOUR BEST… SO YOU’RE CLEARLY NOT A BAND WHO ARE OVERLY PRECIOUS… NOT THAT YOU DON’T TAKE GREAT CARE WITH EVERYTHING YOU DO… I THINK I MEAN THAT ALL OPTIONS ARE OPEN AT ALL TIMES…
Oh absolutely. COME HOME was an afterthought on GOLD MOTHER. It was just about the last jam we did – after we’d finished recording the album. we liked it so much we put it on there… CURSE CURSE came a bit late and, actually, I don’t think we quite got it right. I think there was more to get on that song – but it didn’t get the attention it probably warranted because it arrived so late. You have to go with the songs you’ve got, really. The songs that are ready in time… There’s that deadline, always.

SO IN THE CASE OF CURSE CURSE (AND ONE OR TWO OTHERS OVER THE YEARS, I EXPECT) IT’S IN LIVE PERFORMANCE AFTER THE ALBUM CAME OUT THAT YOU COULD STRETCH IT TO WHERE IT ‘NEEDED TO BE’?
Yes, absolutely. That process is where we find that the songs get much better. Some of the songs are far better, live, because we reshape them and push them about and, as you say, stretch them in the effort to find better ways to make them work… Better ways to get to what they are, I guess. That can be a bit frustrating sometimes because, live, you end up with a far better version than the one on the record – which is the one that everyone hears.

IT’S QUITE SOMETING TO EXPERIENCE THAT – THERE’S AN EXHILARATING SENSE OF DANGER ABOUT IT… IT MUST BE INCREDIBLE FOR YOU TO BE IN THE EYE OF THAT PARTICULAR STORM AT A GIG..?
Yeah. We leave quite a few songs ‘open ended’ when we play them live, and people can sense that anything could happen. That means it could go wrong as well as it could go right. People can feel that. We could be indulgent. We could mess up, if we don’t listen properly… But it brings you right into the moment, rather than playing the same thing every night – which is where, I think, it becomes a theatre performance and lacks vitality. And maybe truth? The way we do it, it becomes a living communication with the audience that are in front of you right now and it will never be repeated. That’s the real excitement of it, I think.

IF THERE’S THE POTENTIAL FOR THINGS TO GO WRONG, IF THING DO GO ‘TITS UP’…
… Ha ha ha…

… WHAT’S THE BAND’S RECOVERY MODE?
You don’t panic. If the song really goes wrong you find a way out – you summon improvisation or maybe you make a joke about it. The good thing with us now is that we’ve got to the place where when something goes wrong it’s actually an opportunity to connect, and to make the gig special in a certain kind of way. Essentially there’s nothing you can do if it collapses, so it gives you an opportunity to connect with the audience in a different way, I think… To admit that you tried something and it didn’t quite come off… To go vulnerable.

JAMES_ALBUM_BLUEIT’S INTERESTING THAT YOU WOULD USE THE WORD ‘VULNERABLE’… I DON’T THINK THAT’S NECESSARILY WHAT PEOPLE EXPECT FROM A BAND OF YOUR STATURE. NO-ONE EXPECTS A BAND OF YOUR STATURE TO PUT THEMSELVES OUT THERE SO NAKEDLY, AND YET THIS BAND CONTINUALLY DOES. HOW DIFFICULT IS IT FOR YOU TO CONTINUE DOING THAT YEAR AFTER YEAR? IS THERE A PERSONAL COST TO YOU? THAT’S WHAT I’M GETTING AT…
Oh, yes. My lyrics are always personal. I write from the unconscious. What happens is, I write and I think “What on Earth is this I’m writing?” – but I get a sense that that’s the right lyrics for the song, though I don’t know what its about. Usually, literally round about the time the album comes out, it becomes very clear to me what the lyrics are about. That can often be very very painful. Ha ha… Or very difficult or very self-revealing in a way that I had no idea when I wrote it. This particular album, GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD, people will get some of the songs and get some idea about what some of the lyrics are about but… trust me… every single lyric is deeply personal. And I’m actually paying for quite a lot of that, right now…

… RIGHT, OKAY… ‘COS I’D WONDERED – AS YOU EXPOSED YOURSELF SO MUCH ON LA PETITE MORT – WHETHER THIS ONE MIGHT ACTUALLY BE SOME SORT OF A REACTION TO THAT… LIKE AN ELASTIC BAND… WHETHER YOU’D NEEDED TO GO AWAY AND LICK YOUR WOUNDS…
No… No… It’s turned out to be the opposite, ha ha ha ha… In some ways LA PETITE MORT was quite cathartic in that it enabled me to express the grief I was feeling. Less for my Mum, because she died so beautifully and there was a real completion about her death, than to my friend Gabrielle. That was sudden and there wasn’t a sense of completion, and that took me years to grieve. So LA PETITE MORT did have a cathartic aspect to it… but this new record has blindsided me…

HOW SO?
I’m not going to give you too many details because some of the details are so personal, but a song like MOVE DOWN SOUTH… That line – “move down South” – came in the first improvisation, so we got that. Usually I trust the first lyrics I get if there’re some good ones there, and I liked that… I had a sense that I wanted to move up North, to San Francisco, and I couldn’t work out why this song was “move down South” when we were going to move up North… And we moved up north to San Francisco, in the summer – but by the time the song was mixed, my family had persuaded me to move back down South to Tapanga… Including my eleven year old son, when the mixes came through, going “Dad, even your bloody lyrics are telling you you’re meant to move back down to the South, but you’re not listening”… He completely got me ‘cos he knows, my whole family knows – it’s a running joke actually – that my lyrics come true after the event… There’s a song that I’ve been quite scared of – GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD itself. It was envisaging being in a car crash, a head-on collision, and going over the edge at Tapanga canyon – and hoping that at that moment you remember all the beautiful moments in your life. But I’ve been quite nervous about that song, genuinely, because most of the lyrics tend to come true. Literally come true.

OH, GOD… THAT’S PRETTY SCARY…
Well! When we mixed that song, about a week later I rang Jim and he’d just been driving round a hair-pin bend and there was a car overtaking four other cars, coming towards him at fifty miles an hour, head-on. Luckily the four cars, at the last second, had slowed down enough to allow the car back in. He missed it by a split-second and was left shaking at the side of the road. So with the lyrics coming true thing, we’re hoping that’s what GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD was about, that particular incident – which, thankfully, didn’t actually end up with a fatality.

I’VE ACTUALLY GOT GOOSEBUMPS. THAT’S BLOODY TERRIFYING.
Yeah! Well, also we called an album WHIPLASH and the second gig on the tour I gave myself whiplash, and I was disabled for two and a half years. So we’re aware that these things seem to act almost like spells. But there’s nothing you can do – you get a lyric and you get a lyric. There’s not much you can change. I do remember once writing a song about being stabbed, but I decided we weren’t going to put that one out…

JAMES_ALBUM_BLUETIM, I’M GOING TO TRY SOMETHING SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT HERE, FOR THE NEXT FEW MINUTES. OVER THE LAST WEEK I’VE BEEN CANVASSING QUESTIONS FOR YOU FROM JAMES FANS ON SOCIAL MEDIA…
Oh, that’s good… Okay…

… SO, HERE’S THE FIRST, THOUGH I THINK YOU MAY HAVE JUST ANSWERED IT OR TALKED A BIT ABOUT IT… “WHO IS THE GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD? AND, WHAT IS AT THE END OF THE WORLD?”
Mm-hmm, yes. The girl at the end of the world, from a boy’s point of view or from a gay lover’s point of view, is… Well, who are you going to think of at the last moment before you die, you know? Who is the girl at the end of the world? That’s different for every individual.

OK… “THE LYRIC “AVALANCHE VOLCANO” IN THE NEW SINGLE NOTHING BUT LOVE… WHAT DOES THAT PHRASE MEAN AND WHAT DOES THE SONG MEAN?”
People talk about love songs, the joy of love, to be in love… This is more, you know, “Oh shit… I’m in love with this person”… They may not be in love with you, it may be a totally inappropriate love… It’s “Oh-oh” kind of love. It’s a love that threatens your life, in a certain kind of way… or all the safety of your life…

… YOUR STATUS QUO…
Yeah, that’s right. So “avalanche volcano” is that it’s gone off like that. It’s not an easy going kind of love.

IT’S GREAT TO FEEL THAT SORT OF INTENSITY ONCE IN A WHILE THOUGH, ISN’T IT? OR EVEN JUST THE ONCE?
Erm, I think it’s what some people actually crave, the kind of love some people live for… But, yeah – absolutely. It makes you feel alive.

OK… “TURNING UP THE KEYBOARDS FOR THE LAST COUPLE OF ALBUMS HAS GIVEN JAMES A NEW LEASE OF CREATIVE LIFE. TIM, DO YOU AGREE?”
Yes I do. And I was probably the most responsible for that on LA PETITE MORT. I was, like, “Right. We’re not having this anymore Mark” and I just kept on bullying him to turn up. Because, what would happen is, we’d get to mixing a new record and we’d suddenly hear these amazing keyboard lines – but nobody had fed off them, nobody had bounced off them, or shaped the music around them because we’d never heard them while we were jamming or creating the songs. So I just said “This is what we’re doing. Mark’s getting turned up”, ha ha… So we turned him up, in the room, and people bounced off him and he took up space. He’d have a great line for certain songs, like CURSE CURSE, and then that means the whole song has to make the room for that keyboard line… I think by the time this record was coming through Mark had got enough confidence to go “Okay, this works, this is worthwhile”. So he’s continued with very little bullying since, ha ha…

OK… “LARRY (GOTT, GUITARIST) IS SITTING OUT THIS TOUR. WHERE IS HE, AND WHY IS THAT?”
You’d have to ask him.

OK…
I will just say that in James, many different things go on internally and we don’t use them publicly. We just don’t. Many bands – say Oasis, the Mondays – have used their internal frictions publicly. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s their choice. But in James we circle the wagons. That’s partly why I think we’ve survived so long.

OK… HERE’S THE LAST FAN QUESTION… “WITH ALL THE TWISTS AND TURNS OF A THIRTY YEAR CAREER- AND YOUR OFTEN REFERRED TO ABILITY TO ‘SNATCH DEFEAT FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY’ – HOW HAPPY ARE YOU WITH WHERE JAMES ARE IN 2016?”… MYSELF, TIM, I THINK THE LAST TWO YEARS HAVE BEEN A REALLY HIGH WATERMARK, BUT…
… Yeah, I think so too. Musically, I feel it’s been very much a high watermark. These two albums feel great, they’re up there with nearly anything else we’ve done… But sometimes we get a little pissed off that we don’t get as much recognition as we feel we should have done. That’s probably our own fault – we’ve been a difficult band. We made a lot of choices like that in the ’90s – for instance, not allowing the American record company to release SIT DOWN as a single when they came and begged us. We made what could be considered artistic choices, but some of them may also have been foolish choices.

SO YOU HAVE REGRETS?
Well, no. You can’t really regret. God knows if we’d actually have been able to handle any more success. Possibly not. I think you get what you can handle – or, rather, I think we’ve managed to get what we can handle. James was fairly dysfunctional in the late ’90s – as people. We had a lot of casualties, but I think it could have been a lot worse if we’d had more money or more success.

JAMES_ALBUM_BLUEIN THE HOSPITALITY AREA BACKSTAGE, LAST TIME WE MET, I’D NEVER SEEN SO MANY PUNNETS OF STRAWBERRIES IN ONE PLACE…
Ha ha ha… I don’t actually remember all the strawberries!

THERE WERE MILLIONS!
That sounds like an unusual day… Well, perhaps we’d had a fantastically benevolent strawberry farmer visit us bearing all of those punnets as gifts..?

… SO IT’S CLEARLY A HEALTHY MACHINE, IN GOOD SHAPE… BUT HOW EQUIPPED IS IT IN TERMS OF CREATIVITY AND, LET’S SAY, MIDDLE-AGED APPETITE, TO CONTINUE ON?
Most of us are quite healthy. We’ve gone through different phases. Different people have gone through many different phases – all of us have, really. I’ve always had to be healthy ‘cos I was born with an inherited liver disease and that’s kept me on the straight and narrow – which has probably saved my life, really, when I look at what’s gone on in this band.

DID IT GET ‘ROCK ‘N’ ROLL’…
Well James aren’t known for being a ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ band but when we did Lollapalooza with Snoop Dog and Korn and Tool and all those bands, we were known as the heaviest band on the tour, the wildest on the tour. We were the band that stole the golf buggy carts and crashed them, and we were the band that partied every day and that the other bands couldn’t keep up with. It’s funny.

THAT’S REALLY SURPRISING!
Well, again, we closed the wagons and didn’t make publicity on it. Well, we make publicity on it twenty years later, ha ha. That’s when we’ll talk about some of these things! At the time we don’t tell people these things. But that’s James – we have a private life and we look after ‘the family’, and that’s been important to our longevity… So, mainly we’re pretty healthy. I can’t think of anyone in too much trouble at the moment… But there’s always somebody tottering around quite close to the edge, ha ha…

… HA HA… THERE HAS TO BE…
Yeah, there has to be. It’s almost like we take it in turns. We take it in turns to be the band dickhead. And at various points in time everyone’s been the band dickhead, ha ha…

… HA HA… WELL, TO ROUND UP…
… Who’s the band dickhead? Probably me!

… HA HA… IS THE FUTURE FOR JAMES OPEN-ENDED OR ARE THERE DEFINITE PLANS? ARE THERE THINGS YOU STILL NEED TO SAY, AND IS JAMES THE VEHICLE YOU’RE HAPPY TO USE TO CONTINUE SAYING THEM?
So long as it stays so fresh and exciting – which it is – then yeah. It depends also on finances. We’re an expensive band and if we don’t have a record company behind us it becomes tricky. I wouldn’t like to record an album to follow this one unless we can bring really great people on board to make it sound as good as this one. Part of leaving after the PLEASED TO MEET YOU album was that I didn’t think we could ever top it.

WHY’S THAT?
I felt like we’d reached a creative peak, but we were so damaged as a band that I thought “We’re not going to top this so let’s go out on a high”… So it’s actually always hard to know. We might decide the same on this one – like, ha ha, “How can we follow this one? Maybe we should stop”. God knows, we just don’t know. The other big thing is, how long can we keep on physically improving our concerts? At the moment there’s a real sense that we’re still getting better as a band, as a live band. That’s so contradictory to what people expect from ageing, isn’t it? There must come a point that you can’t match, that you can’t beat. And I don’t want to go past that. I really don’t. I want us to go out with people knowing that we were at our peak – and the peak for James was not the ’90s…

I THINK THE LAST TWO ALBUMS – LA PETITE MORT AND GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD – MORE THAN PROVE THAT, TIM. THANKS VERY MUCH FOR YOUR TIME AND GOOD LUCK WITH WHATEVER COMES NEXT…
Thank you, my pleasure. The same to you, too… The thing is, you can’t look into the tea-leaves, as much as we might try… Actually, I do look into the tea-leaves…

À quelques jours seulement de la sortie de “Girl at the End of the World”, leur quatorzième album, James nous a accordé les instants nécessaires pour nous rassurer sur l’avenir du groupe et évoquer le bon vieux temps : le leur comme le nôtre. C’est que “Seven” m’a aidé à réviser le baccalauréat au début des années 90, puis “Laid”, “Whiplash” et surtout “Millionaires” m’ont ensuite accompagné jusqu’à la fin de mes études. Sans relâche : albums, singles déclinés jusqu’à trois parties distinctes (qui firent les heures glorieuses du marché du disque et des charts dans les 90’s), album solo de Tim Booth & Angelo Badalamenti, tout y est passé. L’histoire aurait pu s’arrêter en 2001, l’année du split après l’album “Pleased to Meet You”. Mais le retour inespéré en 2008 avec “Hey Ma” allait relancer la machine et réveiller la magie.

“Girl at the End of the World” est le quatorzième album de James en plus de trente ans de carrière. Est-ce plus difficile après autant de temps d’écrire aujourd’hui une collection de nouvelles chansons, ou bien est-ce au contraire plus facile avec l’expérience ?

Écrire des chansons a toujours été quelque chose de facile au sein de James. Il nous suffit de nous réunir et elles apparaissent tout seules. C’est la suite qui devient plus compliquée pour nous ; je veux parler des arrangements, de l’enregistrement et du mixage. Ces étapes-là ne sont jamais faciles pour le groupe et elles nous posent d’ailleurs parfois de sacrés problèmes.

Il y a sur ce nouvel album la chanson “Attention” dont la construction est plutôt complexe, qui me semble plus expérimentale que sur aucun autre album, depuis “Wah Wah”. C’est comme si trois chansons se retrouvaient compactées en une seule.

Tu sais, avec James, le processus d’écriture est assez bizarre. Nous improvisons tout, et ces improvisations peuvent durer jusqu’à une heure sans s’arrêter. Quand vient ensuite le moment d’assembler les différentes parties entre elles pour en faire un morceau, on se rend compte que les sections qu’on a décidé de garder sont très différentes les unes des autres, et que tu es à des kilomètres de la structure traditionnelle couplet/refrain. “Attention” fait partie de ce type de chanson, que nous appelons d’ailleurs entre nous les “journey songs” (en français, “les chansons qui viennent de loin” -ndlr).

En écoutant l’album, j’ai trouvé que chaque chanson proposait sa propre ambiance, son propre style, revendiquait presque son indépendance.

En fait, pour ce disque, les sessions d’écritures ont été plutôt condensées. D’une manière générale, nous nous autorisons la plus grande variété et le plus de variations possibles au sein même des chansons de James. Mais je pense que le caractère propre des chansons se développe de lui-même lorsque l’on travaille sur chacune d’entre elles séparément. D’une certaine manière, tu t’évertues à leur chercher une personnalité et au final, elle s’impose d’elle-même. C’est ce qui explique sans doute ce que tu as perçu en écoutant le disque.

Le nouveau disque va bénéficier d’une sortie cassette ! C’est un format qui revient très doucement, encore à la marge. Comment cette idée a-t-elle germé ?

Ha ha ! La bonne vieille cassette. Personnellement, je trouve qu’elles ont quelque chose d’attachant. Lorsqu’on nous a demandé si nous voulions voir le format cassette apparaître dans les différentes versions et bundles que nous allions proposer pour ce nouveau disque, nous avons répondu “oui”. Maintenant, je ne sais pas vraiment combien de gens vont réellement les écouter, j’ai peur qu’ils les gardent comme objet à collectionner…

Pourquoi est-ce que James n’a pas joué en France depuis le milieu des années 90, alors que vous continuiez de vous produire en Europe ? Est-ce par un manque d’auditeurs, ou des ventes de disques décevantes chez nous ?

Pour tout te dire, je n’en connais pas vraiment la raison. Nous avions de vrais problèmes avec notre ancienne maison de disques en France à une certaine époque, mais c’était il y a bien longtemps. Ceci dit tu as raison, quand j’y pense, la France est tellement proche de chez nous que de ne jamais y jouer me semble complètement ridicule aujourd’hui.

Je me souviens d’une époque où vous offriez jusqu’à trois inédits sur chacun de vos singles. Cette période est malheureusement révolue, puisqu’aujourd’hui le marché considère qu’un single est juste un fichier MP3 avec une pochette dédiée.

Tu as raison, et crois-moi, nous mettions tout notre coeur à la réalisation de ces faces B, qui devenaient des morceaux un peu cachés, préservés de l’énorme attention que demande un album. Comme toi, l’époque où nous incluions des b-sides sur chacun de nos singles me manque.

« C’est difficile de me souvenir si loin en arrière, mais sincèrement, je n’aurais jamais imaginé être encore là après tout ce temps. »

À propos de singles, quels sont ceux prévus pour “Girl at the End of the World” ?

Le premier extrait qui a été envoyé aux stations de radio fut “To My Surprise” en novembre de l’année dernière, et celui qui passe en ce moment est “Nothing But Love”. Pour ce qui est de la suite, je n’en sais encore rien pour l’instant.

Est-ce que tu te souviens de ce qu’étaient tes attentes avec le groupe au tout début de James ? Est-ce que tu imaginais qu’un jour il y aurait un quatorzième album ?

Wow! C’est difficile de me souvenir si loin en arrière, mais sincèrement, je n’aurais jamais imaginé être encore là après tout ce temps. Tout ce que je peux te dire, c’est qu’avec ce nouvel album j’ai le sentiment que nous nous sommes stimulés autant que possible. J’espère bien qu’il y en aura d’autres à venir : je suis prêt pour nos quinzième et seizième albums.