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Virgin Music interviews Tim Booth from James about ‘The Morning After’, ‘The Night Before’, ecstatic dance and why Simon Cowell has a lot to answer for.

Bob Fear: We’re here in the Fish Factory and you’re holed up here to record part 2 of the new album. How’s it been going?

Tim Booth: It’s going great actually, quite surprisingly. We gave ourselves five days to mainly improvise song arrangements and lyrics. We came crawling off a tour so we were pretty exhausted. But it’s gone great – I think we’re almost too exhausted to argue with each other, which is a definite plus and it’s helped with the process. We’re surprising ourselves, coming up with some really unusual takes on songs. One sounds a bit like Blondie, as we all went disco in the middle of the song, which is pretty unusual for James.

BF: You’re famous for your improvisations, working with producers like Brian Eno and trying things out. Is this process the same as that – finding mad, new sounds and going with them?

TB: Yeah, this is fairly similar to how we did “Laid’ with Brian. We did about four albums with Brian so each one was very different though. It’s quite acoustic, we want it to be quite low key. We are not wanting to make songs peak in the obvious places, which we are rather good at. So it is like trying to resist the chocolate cake, holding us back from peaks and troughs. It’s just looking for different ways to emphasize things, elongating parts we wouldn’t normally elongate and shortening bits you would normally lengthen, playing with our own expectations of ourselves. We’re doing it in a really calm way. This can be the most fraught part of James because everyone has a lot of ideas of how the song should go and can get very passionate about it – to the point of coming to blows. This time that isn’t happening, which is quite a relief.

BF: So it is a democracy in the James camp?

TB: Yes, that might be fair to say. Democracy is a bit too idealistic a word in this situation, but people are working together really well. People have certain jobs to do and they know what they are and everyone seems to be accepting their own roles.

BF: That massively contrasts the first mini-album, where there was a virtual recording process?

TB: The first mini-album was called ‘The Night Before’ – this one is called ‘The Morning After’. ‘The Night Before’, we wanted mainly uplifting songs. We improvised a load of tracks, stuck them on the internet. Any member of the band could download the song, do what they wanted, mess around with it, put it back on the internet. Then another band member could take it and run with it. We did it across continents and across cyberspace, essentially. Then there was this guy Lee ‘Muddy’ Baker who was our producer on ‘Hey Ma’. He’s a lovely man and a great mediator. He took all that and kind of made it into a presentable shape at the end of it. It was done in quite an Eno-esque, challenging way in order to bring something else put of us that we hadn’t had before.

BF: So the first time you heard each other’s contributions when Lee put them all together, or were you more involved in the production side of it?

TB: I would hear different stages from different people. Mark might have a version going and Larry might have a version going. You would just hope Lee would get the best out of both worlds, which he did, because he is very good at balancing. I was always optimistic about the process. Some people were quite freaked out within our band and management. The band has a lot of talent within it, it always has, really unrecognized talent. Mark, our keyboard player, is a very modest fellow. He is immensely gifted and he shone on ‘The Night Before’. That method of working in cyberspace really allowed him to come to the fore. Each member of the band could have his own band. We seem to be settling into a good place right now.

BF: The album is out now, I was just listening to it on the way over, naturally I love it. ‘Crazy’ is one of the standout tracks, what’s the story there?

TB: I had an undiagnosed liver disease all through my teens, it was inherited. I was bright yellow but nobody diagnosed it. So I just got on with it, even though I was a quite sickly child. It had interesting states of mind that went with it, a lot of insomnia, sometimes hallucinations. Definitely delusions, probably of grandeur, but more often than not mood swings and panic attacks. Also thinking you could hear people’s voices. I had that for ten years or so. So I assumed I was mad and I would one day be certified. When I got to 30 and wasn’t certified crazy I had a party. When it got diagnosed around 21 it got easier, as I knew what food to avoid, what drugs to avoid, what alcohol to avoid and it just became much easier after that.

BF: And now you live a much healthier lifestyle?

TB: Yeah, that’s what really led me into alternative health and that kind of world, it was purely necessity. I nearly died in hospital, I stopped breathing. The doctors said they had no cure for this and I didn’t believe that. I went out and got acupuncture and many more extreme holistic health systems than I would care to admit to. Some worked and some didn’t. It refueled an interest in meditation and that world.

BF: Is that where the ecstatic dancing comes from as well?

TB: Kind of. When I was sick dancing was the thing. I could express my rage and sadness and whatever I wanted through my dance. I always danced in a very strange way, even before I labeled it ecstatic dance. I had knives drawn on me twice by people who didn’t like the way I dance. This was before rave and people danced in a very conservative way and I didn’t. I used to throw myself around – that’s how I got in the band. They asked me to dance for them because they thought that would look interesting onstage.

BF: Do you still go to that space onstage now?

TB: Absolutely. That’s the real pleasure of it, if you can get there. When I was late in my twenties I found a system of Shamanic dance where you can go into altered states quite easily and come out of them. I learnt that, and learnt to teach that and it made life easier. I was staggering around in the dark before, it was very hit and miss and I’d often damage myself in the process.

BF: How was playing the Royal Albert Hall recently?

TB: It was amazing. It was phenomenal, but don’t tell anyone – we didn’t. We played the Albery Hall with The Smiths in about 1984 and I remember we couldn’t reach beyond the first 20 rows, or project to the back of the hall. It was out of our league at the time. It has only taken us about 25 years to get back there. The building totally adds to the whole experience, it’s like being in a coliseum. It was a great gig.

BF: And you’re looking forward to a summer of festival action?

TB: Yeah, summer festivals. We’ve got a secret thing happening as well that is going to be unusual, but I can’t tell you about it yet. And we’ve got a US tour, which I’ve been pushing for two years and finally we’ve got it. Then a Christmas tour as well.

BF: I wanted to ask, predictably, about your take on the current British political scene. Your songs have lots of political references, what is your take now?

TB: I was in America for the whole of the Barack Obama election and that was thrilling cinema, captivating. You can see in England they are trying to captivate the same excitement. Of course they can’t, it wasn’t going to be such a landmark election. We don’t have democracy in this country, it’s a complete sham. Unless you have proportional representation, it’s outrageous. America don’t have democracy either, they have lobbying, which is bribery by any other name. All the politicians are controlled by how much they are paid by the armaments industry, the medical industry, the oil companies. They are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by those companies so they do what they are told. Where the hell is a real democracy I don’t know – it certainly isn’t in America and it isn’t in England. I’ve been living away from England for the last few years. It is a country of opinion and the newspapers just stoke up people’s discontent the whole time. I’ve been in cabs recently and asked ‘what newspaper do you read?’ I’ve written down The Daily Mail and when they answer The Daily Mail I hold what I’ve written up. They moan the whole time – moan. The Daily Mail works on the basis that the past was somehow better than the present, which generally I don’t think is true at all. I wish England would stop moaning. I think it really comes from losing the empire, essentially, this time when we were the top dog, now we’re back to being a small island in Europe. It’s a bit hard for those egos who were brought up with visions of the empire to adjust. Anyway, I rambled!

BF: Does any of this inform you in the studio, or does it just bore you?

TB: I did enjoy the debate last night, but it’s such theatre. It’s all a movie, life’s a movie. With Rupert Murdoch’s control of the media and Simon Cowell’s control of creativity, it’s all a show and all a sham. They have the control. That enrages me sometimes, that whole X Factor thing where everything you do is about becoming famous. If your record sells a lot of copies it’s a good record – it’s the capitalization of art. Even Damien Hurst goes on about how much money he makes; that isn’t my idea of art. Not that he doesn’t have moments of artistic inspiration, but it just is breeding this idea that art is valued in money. It isn’t – art is one letter away from the word ‘hart’. For me the best art comes from the heart, not from the head. It moves people and that’s why you do it, it has to come out. We are dinosaurs in that sense, in this particular culture we are in at the moment. We are quite happy to be dinosaurs, we have a good audience of people that appreciate what we do and we’re happy with that.

BF: I very much appreciate it myself, your music is inspirational.

TB: We feel very much out of touch with the mainstream and out of touch with the cool NME London press. We know that we have nothing to do with that and don’t fit in that world. We just do our thing. We do our thing with belief and heart and integrity. And we have faith. I watched Leonard Cohen for 20 years when he was in the wilderness, nobody could give him the time of day and every critic slagged him off. Now those same critics say he’s the great god of lyrics. Brian Eno had the same thing when he invented ambient music. He told me he left for America because he was so fed up with the critics telling him ambient music was like watching paint dry. So he left for America where he met Talking Heads, and the rest is history. We just do our thing. Time may come back to us, the culture may cross our path again, we might suddenly become interesting to the culture. Or we may just be writing for the people who discover us. And that’s all we can do.

James new mini-album ‘The Night Before’ is out now, while volume two ‘The Morning After’ will be released on Monday 2nd August.

The band play the following UK dates this Christmas:

Thursday 9th December London – Hammersmith Apollo
Friday 10th December London – Brixton Academy
Sunday 12th December Birmingham Academy
Tuesday 14th December Leeds Academy
Wednesday 15th December Leicester – De Montfort Hall
Friday 17th December Glasgow – SECC
Saturday 18th December Manchester Evening News Arena

James frontman TIM BOOTH struggled with a debilitating liver condition and metal illness throughout his early life – and spent years fearing he would lose his mind.

The She’s a Star singer was born with an “inherited liver disease” which turned his skin yellow and led to mental health problems while he was growing up.

Booth admits doctors failed to diagnose the psychological side of his condition, and he struggled with the symptoms for many years.

He has now opened up about his problems, even writing a song about his battle with mental health, called Crazy, for the band’s new album The Night Before.

Booth explains, “I was born with an inherited liver disease which meant I looked bright yellow all through my teens. Nobody diagnosed it as an illness. It had a whole mental set (of symptoms) which went with it so for a 10-year period I just assumed I was going insane. I feared they were going to cart me off, lock me up and throw away the key. By the time I got to 30 and had not been carted off, I thought, ‘Nobody is going to catch me out.’ But it was difficult to grow up with something like that. I think it helped me develop a lot of mental toughness.”

James’ Mirrorball Tour kicked off in Edinburgh last week and The Blue Walrus sent off one of our new roaming reporters off to meet the band and talk about their new mini album, The Night Before, and have a small glimpse in to their incredible career. Here’s what Ben had to say…

I have loved James since I first rummaged through my older sister’s scratched CD collection ten years ago and realised that there was a lot more to the band than ‘Sit Down’. When Tim (aka The Blue Warus) asked if I wanted to interview the band it is fair to say that I pretty much wet my pants.

But it was important that I remained cool when entering the swanky Edinburgh hotel to interview the band so I took an old friend with me for moral support, I also gave him simple tasks to warrant his presence; he was to record the interview on his iPhone and take photos with a disposable camera because the SLR had stopped working – he failed miserably at both;

Not only did I keep on having to ask the interviewees to huddle up closer to the iphone but it stopped working 35minutes in, so the juicy story about setting fireworks off from a Beverley Hills hotel window and setting a hillside alight is now lost forever, oh, and my esteemed colleague didn’t take one single photo until the after the show when I heard the tinny sound of a disposable camera click and a bright light flash on Tim Booth’s face… smooth.

So, as you can imagine, James may not thought we were the most professional outfit, just as well it turned out they were some of the most down to earth & friendly people I’ve met…

It was clear their was genuine excitement from the band about the new mini album, Jim (the Jim behind the name James) beamed “it has been an opportunity for us to move the music on from the Hey Ma album and develop our sound” The Night Before has retained what we love about James albums – powerful, emotive and well written lyrics, great production, the classic seven piece James sound but more synths and electronics than Hey Ma and less brass.

The Night Before is James’ 11th studio album. The band has so far spanned three decades, seeing a record deal with Factory in the 80s, commercial success with ‘Sit Down’, ‘Laid’ & ‘She’s a Star’ in the 90s and disbandment and reformation in the 00s.

James began in a Manchester bar, where Jim (bass) would hang out with his pals in order to pinch pints from unsuspecting middle class students… enter Tim Booth, an intelligent middle class student with a talent for wild dancing who was about to get his pint stolen and an invite to dance for a embryo of a band that would soon become James.

28 years and 11 studio albums later, the band have grown together, the sharp differing edges of seven band members have blunted and the young angry lads have become experienced musicians, grateful of their careers and respectful of each others different approaches to life.

I asked Jim Glennie if they would have preferred to have had more widespread commercial success in the past three decades, his reaction was “I think we think we deserve it but I’ve gone past worrying or bothering about that – what always used to drive us is the feeling that we were bigger than we were. It was years of virtually no success in which we had to stand up and say come on we’re better than this.” James had commercial success in the 90s but it was never at the level of some the bands that originally supported James, such as Nirvana, Radiohead and Coldplay. Despite this Jim considers himself “one of the luckiest bastards on earth…so to sit here and complain would be ridiculous”.

James currently have a deal with Mercury, which is they say is far from the relaxed type of deals they were used to in the past – “now we have to pay for recording ourselves. In the past we would be able to be as gratuitous, stupid and silly as we liked and know that somebody else was paying. But when it’s your own money, you have to get the job done in the minimum amount of time and work really hard.”

With a repertoire of crowd pleasing hits, James are conscious of not acting as a “jukebox” at live gigs and playing the songs that the crowd are desperate to sing along to. “If we keep writing and playing new songs it means that we can’t cruise through a gig in third gear, which is the wonderful thing because the focus and concentration has to kick in.”

The Edinburgh gig was an opportunity for James to test some of the new songs from the album as well as “challenging people a bit and throwing the odd curve ball in there.” That is exactly what James did, putting a host of new songs and some old ones that only the dedicated fans knew. The Edinburgh crowd was as suspected, hungry for hits but Booth used his effortless and distinctive soaring voice to get the crowd behind him and soon everyone was singing along to the chorus of new song, Ten Below – “When’s the holidays? Holidays? Holidays?”

‘Crazy’ is a dark tale of ongoing paranoia and suffering from hallucinations that Tim Booth recently lived through when he was hospitalised with liver disease. As with the best James songs, there is a dichotomy of sad and painful lyrics juxtaposed with the sound of 6 other band members driving an energetic musical feel that keeps the song upbeat.

I brought up this dichotomy to the band and Larry told a story of driving to a gig with two girls in the back seat who were listening to Government Walls from the Goldmother album, as they sung their hearts out jumping with joy Tim was sat in the front seat with a blank expression on his face as the lyrics played “In Ireland they may shoot to kill without warning”

‘Porcupine’ begins with a great polyphony between Larry on lead guitar and Jim on bass, it is typical of the band’s 80s roots but also has a contemporary awareness that is relevant and fashionable now. The lyric ‘porcupine’ is derived from James’ approach to the development of songs – which is basically Tim, Larry & Jim meeting up and jamming. “we work on melodies and tunes with Tim singing phonetics only, sometimes one random word that works phonetically will bolt down the lyrics for a whole song – there was no getting rid of porcupine so we developed a lyric around love affairs and attrition developed that somehow involved porcupine…I’m a skunk you’re a porcupine”

They may well be some of the luckiest bastards on earth, they have tasted commercial success but more importantly James have stayed dedicated to their music and able to provide incredible live music to their fans for over 28 years, always being slightly eccentric, exciting and different. Loving James is knowing that most people won’t agree with you and that means that live gigs remain intimate and every unrehearsed cock up on stage makes the band seem more human.

After the gig, we saw Tim Booth and he asked what our favourite song was, I replied “Dr Hellier”, he seemed pensive, it is after all probably a very dark take on his recovery from illness. Out of nowhere a flash of light from a disposable camera lit Booth’s face, my esteemed assistant struck again and before we knew it the band were already on the tour bus.

I’d love to show you the photo, but the assistant hasn’t had it developed yet… (we might add that later -ed)

James have got two dates left of this tour so get yourselves down to:
Friday 16 April – London Royal Albert Hall
Saturday 17 April – Liverpool University

MENTION James and many people only know the big hit Sit Down, an anthem of the student disco that was hijacked nightly by heavily imbibed young men.

But with a career that includes ten studio albums, 20 UK Top 40 singles and 12 million albums sales, James, who formed in 1982 when 16-year-old bass player Jim Glennie found singer Tim Booth dancing wildly at a club, have clearly achieved a lot more besides.

Indeed, James have always been a thinking man’s band, something that wasn’t lost on Tony Wilson, the music mogul behind some of Manchester’s most successful bands, who offered them a deal with the legendary Factory label.

“It has been weird, the media’s attitude over the years,” singer Booth says when asked why they never got the credit – or the credibility – they deserved. “I think it’s partly because we never went in for public car crashes. Even when we had our differences, we tried to keep them private, so there was never a story there.

“Also,” he continues, “with a lot of cool bands, part of their being cool is this attitude of not giving a f***, whereas James have never been about that. We’ve always really cared about what we do, about making it as good as we possibly can.”

Before they drop new mini-album The Night Before on 19 April, the band step out on a UK tour that kicks off at the Corn Exchange, a venue they have played several storming gigs at down the years.

“We are getting to re-visit some venues for the first time in ages,” enthuses James guitarist Larry Gott, adding that the tour will serve as a warm-up for a summer spent playing some of the world’s biggest music festivals, including Isle of Wight and Latitude.

James have always been a force to be reckoned with on the live stage, and their comeback gigs a few years back went a long way to silencing those who had them marked as indie’s great underachievers.

The seven-piece have played some storming gigs in the Capital over the years, too, their show at the Corn Exchange in 2007 being among the most memorable.

Just 15 minutes before going on stage that night, the band were told that Tony Wilson had lost his battle with cancer, and dedicated the song Bubbles, with its defiant chorus of ‘I’m Alive’, to his memory.

“We’ll never play that song again so well,” said Booth in the aftermath. “Tony was Manchester. There’s no one to replace him. It’s the end of a chapter.”

interview by Mark Evans

Almost 30 years from formation and now 3 years re-formed, JAMES are back on tour. Delighting their ‘loony following’ with early e.p tracks, sating the classics thirsty ‘Sit Downers’ and promoting their new mini-album release ‘The Night Before’.

Day 4 of the ‘Mirrorball tour’ and straight from sound check Music-News.com spoke with Jim Glennie , the bands longest serving member and bassist, finding out about how the tours going , forthcoming plans, the Greek resurrection and about losing an important route into the business for new music.

MN: How was sound check Jim?

Jim: We’ve just finished in Preston. There’s a bunch of seats as well as standing so quite a mixed crowd tonight in that respect. We’ve played here before, it’s a nice place, should be good I’m looking forward to it.

MN: So, three of four nights into the tour now Jim. How’s it going so far?

Jim – Yeah, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Sheffield so far. It’s going well, there’s a mixture of songs in there. We’re doing the new record, most of which we haven’t played apart from one song Porcupine, so that’s totally scary. It’s (the new stuff) working really well. You reach the point of the set, people don’t know the songs , the records not out yet, you’re asking something from people, we’ve streamed the songs but even so you reach the point where you’re asking people to stop going bananas and listen. So that demands something from us and the audience. It’s always challenging putting in songs that people don’t really know yet , but we like the fact we have to make them 100% because they’re fighting against songs that people have known and loved for years. We like that challenge, it keeps you on your toes.

MN: You’ve put some of the old stuff in there as well, from the early ep’s?

Jim: Really old stuff, we have indeed yeah. So we’re not just going out playing the same songs. We had a silly list of songs to run through when we were in rehearsals, trying things we’ve not done for thousands of years. A bunch of them kind of fell into place really, simple and easy. We thought this isn’t gonna be as difficult as we thought, let’s have some fun. Let’s stick ’em in there. It’s always a surprise getting great reactions from fans who’ve not heard something for ten or fifteen years.

MN: How is it having the seven of you back on tour together from the Laid period?

Jim: Exactly yeah the Laid seven as it’s come to be known. Good yeah, it is, everyone’s getting on well, there’s a lot of variety in what we can do musically, Andy playing Trumpet, Saul on Violin, there’s a lot of different tones and colours we can get into songs which we’re having lots of fun with that. Changing songs around a little bit that people didn’t perhaps play on originally. There’s a lot of flexibility with this line up.

MN: I’ve read there have been some interesting openings to the gigs, which have reduced fans to tears apparently, Tim and Larry being dropped from a balcony for one. Have you worked one out for tonight?

Jim: I hope in a good way. We’ve done something every show basically. Not always with the same song, where and how you do it depends on the shape of the venue so we might not be able to it every night, we need to get Tim and Larry onto to the stage sharpish you know, we can’t isolate in them a middle of bloody nowhere for ten or fifteen minutes. They’re working tonight’s out now to be honest so I won’t spoil the surprise for you because I don’t know.

MN: With the venues for this tour you’ve gone back haven’t you, to a lot of places you haven’t been to for a long time?

Jim: Yeah , I think I’m allowed to say we’re doing a big tour in December , places like the M.E.N the S.E.C.C ,so on this tour we thought we’d keep it to smaller places , academy sized , and play some places we hadn’t played in for a long while. If you’re not careful you end up in the same places all the time, so we thought lets break that up. Playing to 2000 people in a venue where everybody’s that close to you like that, it’s a different type of performance that we don’t want to leave behind.

MN: So that’s helped with the set you’ve gone for on this tour

Jim: Exactly, that’s it, you’re dead right. When you feel you’ve got a very keen enthusiastic loony James following in front of you can take more liberties, be a bit odder, throw a curve-ball in there, you know if you’re playing the M.E.N and you’re not careful someone in row 834 might drift off slightly if you get too eclectic on them. With the places on this tour everyone is in front of you, there’s a real directness about that and it’s been great so far, the crowds have been pretty mad and probably tonight will be too.

MN: You have some festivals in summer too?

Jim – We’re playing the Isle of Wight which we did a couple of years ago and was good fun, it’s a lovely festival to do. Beautiful Days in Cornwall (Devon), Solfest in Cumbria, Latitude quite a few yeah. A bunch abroad , some in Greece which’ll be nice , bit of sunshine .

MN: They got into you late over there didn’t they?

Jim: We got really big in Greece, it’s really odd, we did one gig in 2001 at a small festival, that triggered something off, then we split up and a following developed with us actually doing nothing to encourage it and when we came back we stepped into being some kind of big superstars over there, we were suddenly massive, the album went to number five, the people there are great, the sun shines, the food’s lovely, it’s wonderful it really really is. We can play to big arenas there now, we’re playing the Tae Kwon Do Arena in Athens would you believe, Patra, then later in the summer we’re doing Rhodes and Crete where were playing a castle so god knows what that’ll be like. It’s one of those places, Portugal too, for some reason they’ve really took off and really connected with us

It’s the joys of the internet (that allowed the fan base to develop whilst not together) where stuff can happen without you physically having to go there like you did in the old days. People anywhere in the world can get you’re music and I think that’s great, it’s absolutely wonderful for us. The people in Greece presumed they’d probably never get the chance to see because just as they were getting into we split up. When we did come back it was kind of like this big resurrection in a way.

MN: You have the new stuff coming out after tour then. Tell us about that and how it was recorded.

Jim: It was a weird how do you do, we did an ftp site which is basically a website where the songs were put down in skeletal form, simple an basic, everyone downloaded them at home where we’ve all got the equivalent of a home studio so we all did parts, messed about with arrangements and collected it all and decided on what was going to be used. A chunk of song writing initially was done with myself, Tim and Larry in a room with a drum machine. Once that was done it was all from a distance pretty much. For lots of reasons really ,one being everybody living in various parts of the world which makes it not that easy and secondly that part of working through songs can get quite difficult and laborious , seven people all with ideas and wanting to do different things it can take ages.

MN: Anything different with the next one?

Jim: We’ve got another mini-album coming out in the beginning of August, we finish this tour and go straight to the studio to record that, and we’re doing that all together, a completely different approach. It’s going to be very old school, setting up in big room in a studio with 5 days to record. It’s like one extreme to the other. Another seven or eight songs, the idea initially was that there were two types of songs that we’d written. The more traditional uppy ones we do which is the first record , then there’s a batch of stuff which is quite low-key and gentle which normally we don’t get to use. It’s difficult to find a way to get them released, we might usually just put one on the end of the record. So we thought lets do two, an uppy one and one that’s a bit more chilled with a very different character. That’s what the second record is supposed to sound like at the end of it all, whether it does or not I haven’t a clue, cos we’re usually not very good at keeping together with concepts. That’s the plan.

MN: How’s the media attention going, radio play etc?

Jim: I think because there’s two albums coming out that’s attracted a bit off attention which is great. Crazy is the focus, track that’s getting played, We’ve got breakfast TV soon so we’ve got to get up at the crack of dawn to be in the studio at half past six in the morning, radio sessions with Lauren Laverne on 6 music and Dermot O’Leary on Radio 2, feature in the Independent , it’s going well.

MN: You’re a fan of 6music?

Jim: I love 6music, Marc Riley’s a big friend of mine from the early days when he was in The Fall, I love his show, it’s like John Peel in a way. It’s the route that bands can use to start a career and (on the possibility on losing the station) I think taking that out of the system is awful. You need those avenues to get into the business. Boiling everything down to statistics and only playing successful music. How do you get music successful? Every successful artist started as a nobody, you need those steps. I think the BBC has a moral obligation do that, bringing new music out to people should be part of their remit and binning it because statistics aren’t as high as if they played top 40 tunes is awful.

MN: Are there any new bands that you’ve picked up on recently yourself?

Jim: There’s a band from Manchester called Frazer King, they’re brilliant, I absolutely love them I tried to get them supporting us on this tour but it didn’t come off in the end. I love their weird, odd mixture of influences, they’re good fun.

MN: You’re a big Football lover. Are you going to be busy during the World Cup?

Jim: Yeah, we’re doing Soccer AM soon actually, which’ll be a bit of a laugh. Tim’s a Leeds a fan I’m City. Looks like we’ll be busy through the World Cup, but we’ll do our best to catch bits and pieces where we can really, we usually prioritise football, as it should be.

The Night Before, the first of 2 mini-albums, is released on April 19th

Two members of James came for a ‘Sit Down’ with Helen and Max this weekend.

Tim Booth and Jim Glennie from the legendary indie act were on Soccer AM just hours after lighting up the Royal Albert Hall for the first time in their career – which has spanned an incredible four decades!

“We played the Royal Albert Hall last night and it was fantastic – we haven’t slept, it was that good,” laughed front man Tim. “We played there once before, supporting The Smiths in 1984 and it has taken us 26 years to get back there as headliners!

The ‘Sit Down’, ‘Laid’ and ‘She’s a Star’ singers are set to release a new mini album called ‘The Night Before’, which will be followed up later this year by another mini album entitled ‘The Morning After.’

Unusual

For the first of their releases the band adopted an unusual and unconventional recording technique.

“The mini album is about six or seven songs long, so it is a bit bigger than an EP, and a bit less than an album,” explained Tim.

“We did two different recording techniques, the first album which is coming out on 19 April we put up on the internet, jammed some songs on there and each band member downloaded them, smashed them up, put their thing on there and then put them back onto the internet.

“It went on like this, getting passed around and that’s how we made the first album.

“It was funny because our keyboard player who is normally the most shy person in a recording studio was the one who came to the front.”

Jim was also pleased with the outcome.

“It was a bit of an experiment but we are really pleased with the results,” said the bass player.

“But we are just about to do the second mini album and we are going back into the studio, where we will do it in the traditional way.”

Various fans

James have enjoyed some big success over their long career and have picked up fans all over the world. While many indie fans have grown up with the band in the UK, leading to slightly older faces at their shows, in other countries the make-up of their audience is quite different.

“It really varies in different countries,” explained Tim.

“In Greece we only took off in the last ten years so it is all 20-30 year olds, in America it is different again.

“So in each country it is different. In England we’re known for ‘Sit Down’, in Portugal it is ‘Getting Away With It’ and somewhere else it is ‘Sometimes.'”

The boys both love their football as well with Tim a Leeds supporter and Jim a Manchester City follower.

Being in such a popular band certainly has its perks – as Tim explains.

“Allan Leighton (the former Deputy Chairman of Leeds) was a big James fan and he appointed Peter Risdale.

“He had a private plane he used to fly up to games and I used to hitch a lift now and again. It probably sunk the club actually!”