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Rockers JAMES have created alternative versions of new songs on their set lists for upcoming shows just in case the tunes about the death of frontman TIM BOOTH’s mother and best friend prove too much for the star onstage.

The Laid singer felt compelled to write new tracks All I’m Saying and Moving On after the double tragedy and he tells WENN he’s never sure how he’ll cope with the emotions the songs stir up until he’s actually singing them.

And after he burst into tears during a recent gig in Leeds, his bandmates have come up with alternative versions of the songs to allow the frontman to “gather” himself at gigs.

He says, “Grief comes in waves and there are times when you’re suddenly like a blubbering fool. We play it as a band where it’s open-ended; they’re ready for when I’m not able to sing a song like All I’m Saying, and they can go round it a few times while I gather myself. That happens now and again.”

Booth reveals the song was written after his late friend visited him in a dream weeks after her death, adding, “It was so vivid. It was like she was there.

“I didn’t make it to her when she died; I flew to New York but it was too late – and that just devastated me. I didn’t get to clear something with her… That woke me up in a certain way.

“I don’t want to waste time now. Once you lose friends or loved ones to death, you go, ‘S**t! Don’t f**k around. Don’t wait to kiss a person you love, don’t wait to tell them you love them’.”

The singer admits his mother’s passing in 2012 was a much more “beautiful” affair: “She was 90 and she died in my arms and she was surrounded by loved ones and she wanted to go. It was really quite beautiful.

“I got to sing to her for days and then cuddle up to her and sleep with her the night before she died. It was amazing. Yes, there were tears, but it felt like a birth.”

Both songs appear on the group’s new album La Petit Mort.

James! James Blake? Nein, James!

Es gibt sie tatsächlich noch: Bands, die äußerst bekannt sind, sogar mit Radiohead auf Tour waren, mit Brian Eno zusammengearbeitet haben – und von denen man in Deutschland trotzdem noch nie etwas gehört hat. James sind so eine Band. In England gibt es kaum jemanden, der sie nicht kennt, und auch international haben sie sich einen Namen gemacht, nur Deutschland ist irgendwie nie mit ihnen warm geworden. Dabei gibt es viele Gründe, warum sich das ändern sollte, beispielsweise das aktuelle Album La Petite Mort. Außerdem haben James in den Jahren ihrer Existenz praktisch die gesamte Entwicklung der britischen Popkultur seit den 1980er-Jahren begleitet und direkt miterlebt. Wir haben uns mit Tim Booth und Jim Glennie von James getroffen und mit ihnen eine Zeitreise durch ihre eigene Bandgeschichte gemacht.

Ihr seid unterm Strich nun schon seit 30 Jahren aktiv – trotzdem hattet ihr nie den Durchbruch in Deutschland. Erzählt doch mal … Wer seid ihr?

Tim: Wir sind Manchesters am Besten gehütetes Geheimnis (lacht). Wir haben 1982 angefangen. Wir waren erst so 15, 16 Jahre alt. 16, als ich dich getroffen habe, Jim.

Jim: Ich weiß gar nicht mehr, dann wäre ich ja 18 gewesen… Also muss das…

Tim: Alte Menschen die sich über ihr Alter unterhalten… So alt sind wir!

Jim: Oh ja!

Tim: Wir waren mit New Order auf Tour. Und The Smiths haben uns dann die beste Band der Welt genannt, und uns auch mit auf Tour genommen.

Jim: Das war sechs Wochen lang, die Meat is Murder Tour, in England. Dann haben wir zwei Alben bei Factory Records heraus gebracht, und das hat die Sache dann ins Rollen gebracht. Also, immer noch in einem eher kleinen Rahmen, im Independent-Level. Wir hatten plötzlich die Single der Woche in Musikzeitschriften, eine Session auf Radio One – es kam einfach Schwung in die Sache.

Tim: Aber wir waren anfangs einfach noch nicht bereit. […] Wir haben The Smiths gesehen, auf ihrem dritten Gig, und wir wussten: Die sind bereit. Wir haben sieben Jahre dafür gebraucht. Wir haben fünf, sechs Tage die Woche fünf Stunden lang geprobt, immer wieder improvisiert. Wir haben nicht in erster Linie versucht, Songs zu machen, sondern Spaß gehabt.

Jim: Wenn wir einen schlechten Tag hatten, haben wir auch einfach mal die Instrumente getauscht (lacht). […] Wir wollten definieren, was wir sind, was wir nicht sind. Es ging nicht darum, einen Plan auszuarbeiten, was als nächstes kommen sollte, oder wie man sich mit der Musikindustrie vernetzen könnte. Es ging nur um uns selbst. Aber wir wollten auch Konzerte spielen, denn so konnten wir das ganze Chaos in eine anhörbare Form gießen, nur um dann wieder in unsere eigene Welt abzutauchen.

Tim: Konzerte waren besonders wichtig, denn unsere Musik wurde nicht im Radio gespielt. Erst seit R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion. Seit diesem Song haben die Radiosender festgestellt, dass sie Independent mögen. […] Und dann, plötzlich, standen wir im Mittelpunkt und unsere Konzerte waren ausverkauft. Als das dann passierte, war das wie eine riesige Welle. Es hat einfach plötzlich funktioniert. Irgendwie lächerlich. Wir dachten uns nur: „Okay, jetzt geht’s los“. Nachdem wir dann in den 90ern mit Brian Eno zusammengearbeitet hatten, meinten die Leute plötzlich, wir wären fertig. Aber dann kam der Britpop. Und die Britpop-Bands meinten, dass wir ihr größter Einfluss gewesen seien. Von Blur bis Oasis. Noel Gallagher hat einmal gesagt, dass er Oasis direkt nach einem James-Konzert gegründet hat. Und daher ist dann alles nochmal von vorne los gegangen. Wir hatten dann jede Menge Erfolge, eigentlich überall bis auf Deutschland (lacht).

Was meint ihr, ist der Grund dafür?

Tim: Wir haben nicht die geringste Ahnung! Wir haben in Deutschland gespielt, Radiohead hatte uns damals supportet. Das war eigentlich die letzte richtige Tour hier. Dann hat Neil Young uns eingeladen, mit ihm hier zu spielen. Und das waren dann die letzten Konzerte. Das muss so 1995, 1996 gewesen sein. […] Wir waren der Plattenfirma hier glaube ich ein wenig zu kompliziert. Die haben uns nicht wirklich verstanden. Damals haben wir viel gesoffen und gestritten, aber das immer für uns behalten. Wir waren nicht wie Oasis, wo das an die Öffentlichkeit ging. Ich glaube, daher haben wir die Plattenfirma ein paar Mal etwas verstört.

Was ist da denn genau passiert? Habt ihr die Verhauen oder wie?

Tim: Naja, es ging schon fast in die Richtung (lacht).

Jim: Wir haben uns einfach oft untereinander gestritten. Wir haben uns betrunken, und dann gab es halt extreme Streitereien, fast Kämpfe. Wir haben einfach die Sau raus gelassen.

Tim: Und in den 90ern, als wir wirklich gute Musik mit Brian Eno gemacht haben, ging es uns einfach nicht gut. Es ging um unsere Gesundheit, Sucht, um unsere Beziehungen… Da [2001, Anm. d. Red.] bin ich dann ausgestiegen. Es war einfach zu viel. Obwohl wir da eines unserer besten Alben gemacht hatten. Ich konnte das einfach nicht mehr machen. Wir haben dann sechs Jahre lang nichts gemacht, und wir dachten wir seien komplett fertig. Aber jeder hat sich erholt, Leute haben Familien gegründet, sich entspannt, und dann waren wir wieder zusammen – bevor die anderen Bands wieder zusammen gekommen sind! Wir haben festgestellt, dass wir wieder besser miteinander kommunizieren können, dass wir wieder in einem viel besseren Zustand waren. Wir waren dankbar, haben zurückgeblickt und waren stolz auf das, was wir gemacht hatten. Seit wir wieder zusammen gekommen sind, macht es eigentlich am meisten Spaß. Es war nie besser!

Jim: Es war nicht so, dass es früher nicht auch mal gut war. Aber da war immer so viel Schmerz dabei. Das war eigentlich lächerlich, denn wir waren ja erfolgreich. Wir waren die glücklichsten Bastarde der Welt! Wir haben etwas gemacht, was wir geliebt haben, das ist ja auf jeden Fall etwas Gutes. Und wir haben das mit Füßen getreten, in dem wir uns wie Kinder aufgeführt haben.

Lasst uns über euer neues Album reden: Was macht euch wirklich stolz darauf?

Tim: Ganz generell geht es darauf ja um Tod und Wiedergeburt. Während wir an dem Album gearbeitet haben, sind zwei Menschen, dir mir wirklich nahe standen, gestorben. Deshalb sind wir da nicht daran vorbei gekommen. In zwei Songs geht es genau darum, in anderen um den Tod einer Beziehung (Gone Baby Gone), oder um einen Mann, der sich so fühlt, als sei er tot (Frozen Britain). Besonders in England ist der Tod etwas, über das man einfach nicht spricht. Daher ist La Petite Mort, was die Texte angeht, ein recht ungewöhnliches Album. […] Das ist kein depressives Album, es ist eher ein sehr positives. Wir haben nach Bildern gesucht, die eine eigene kulturelle Einstellung zu Tod transportieren. Und wir haben es La Petite Mort genannt, nicht La Grande Mort (lacht). Das bezieht sich ja auch auf Sexualität, auf etwas lebendiges. Was den Sound angeht haben wir uns mit Max Dingel zusammen getan, der auch schon mit The Killers und anderen Las Vegas-Bands, die wir großartig finden, gearbeitet hat. Er hat uns diesen Arschtritt-Sound verpasst. Max und Jim, der oft für die Riffs zuständig ist, haben dann an einem schmutzigeren, sexy Sound gearbeitet. Mark Hunter, unser Keyboarder, ist der schüchternste Mensch der Welt: Wir hören nie eine Note von dem, was er spielt, bis er es aufnimmt, weil er sonst immer so leise ist. Auf diesem Album, in jeder Probe, haben wir ihn immer lauter werden lassen.

Jim: Er ist ein Genie! Aber man hört einfach nicht, was er da tut! Normalerweise ist das ja so, dass man in einer Band immer so lächerlich laut wie möglich sein will, weil man sich dann selbst wunderbar in den Mittelpunkt stellen kann. Aber bei Mark ist das einfach das komplette Gegenteil! Manchmal ist er dann kurz laut, und dann wird er wieder leise. Das ist wirklich unglaublich. Dabei ist er wirklich großartig!

Tim: Und auf diesem Album haben wir ihn mehr in den Vordergrund gestellt. Wir haben die Songs mehr um ihn herum gebaut, also gibt es viel mehr Keyboard als sonst. Wenn man nicht weiß, wer oder was James ist, dann muss man das Video zu Moving On anschauen. Das ist ein Song über das Sterben. Und wir haben dazu das beste Video gemacht, das wir je hatten. Vielleicht, weil wir nicht darin vorkommen (lacht). Das Video zeigt, was unser Album ist. Ich glaube es ist unser bestes bisher. Die Leute sprechen wirklich gut darauf an. Vielleicht will Deutschland ja dieses Mal auch mit feiern! Denn viele andere Länder haben Spaß damit und wir würden gerne öfter her kommen!

Habt ihr eine klassische Hernagehensweise, wenn ihr an einem Album arbeitet? Ihr habt da ja früher mal mit Brian Eno zusammengearbeitet…

Jim: Als wir mit Eno gearbeitet haben, haben wir eigentlich zum ersten Mal jemandem wirklich vertraut. Früher haben wir unsere Alben immer für unsere Babies gehalten und wollten niemanden sonst an sie heran lassen. Aber mit Brian Eno ist ein Traum wahr geworden. Wir haben da viel mitgenommen. Er hat uns wirklich hart rangenommen: Wir haben einmal sechs Stunden am Sound einer einzigen Snare-Drum gesessen. Wir haben nicht geschlafen. Das war wirklich anstrengend. […] Einmal hat er Karten gebastelt und Worte darauf geschrieben. Die hat er uns dann immer einzeln gezeigt, während wir gespielt haben, und genau das mussten wir dann machen. Auf einer stand zu Beispiel „Wackeln“ oder „Andere die Tonart“. Das sollte man dann alleine machen?

Tim: Oder „Geh und setz Tee auf“!

Jim: Ja, genau!

Tim: Es ging darum, unsere eigenen Muster abzulegen. Menschen bleiben immer an Mustern und Angewohnheiten hängen. Obwohl wir gut im Improvisieren waren, war das bei uns auch so. Und er hat das gesehen und wollte es ändern. Kennst du das Buch „The Diceman“? Das solltest du lesen! Es geht um einen Mann, der sein Leben durch einen Würfel bestimmt. Er hat immer sechs Optionen, und zwei davon sind wirklich gefährlich. Und dann würfelt er. So ungefähr war das.

Tim, du hattest eine kleine Rolle in Batman Begins. Wie fühlt es sind an, in einer Band zu sein, von deren Frontmann man im Internet eine Actionfigur kaufen kann?

Jim: Ach was, das gibt’s (lacht)? Das wusste ich ja gar nicht! Finde ich super, das werde ich sofort machen (lacht)!

Tim: Er kann dann Nadeln hinein stecken… (lacht).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’ve got a busy summer of festivals ahead…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Has Manuel Pellegrini helped with that winning mentality?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are they sacrificing their careers for a pay cheque then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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