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Paul Flynn talks to Tim Booth about a new stage in his career .

The short trip from Bolton to Manchester in the modest Saab (rear windscreen missing, tapes everywhere) of erstwhile James frontman Tim Booth is enough to persuade you that the man himself is of a slightly more actorly disposition than he is of a true, blue-collar, rock’n’roll one. Not to dismiss his self-evident services to muslc with the pop group that are currently, to quote music biz parlance, ‘doing a Beautiful South’ with their formidable Greatest Hits package, just that it’s odd to sit in the passenger seat of a pop star’s motor having a cerebral discussion on the nature of argument. Here, though, is a man that began his musical life with the scholarly invitation to “go and read a book, it’s so much more worthwhile”.

Argument, then: Tim doesn’t have them. The character that he is to play in his first professional theatrical engagement, Len in The Octagon’s revival of Edward Bond’s maladjusted ’60s gang drama Saved, can’t stop. To his desired end of character consumption he’s begun to have them and only this morning argued with a flatmate over breakfast in the cockney accent that he’s getting to grips with. Impressively, when he files off into his newly learnt tongue he doesn’t take the usual shortcut of punctuating every sentence with ‘Innit.’ “I want him to take over me,” he says. Meet the real Methodman.

Tim Booth’s acting history is erratic but committed. His contemporaries as a drama student at Manchester University number impressive alumni: Bhaji On The Beach brains Mera Sayal, playwright Charlotte Keatley and, most famously (fill in the occupation at your own leisure) Ben Elton. He acted under Elton’s direction, then “James came along and I was happy to do it.” He’s been offered parts before, including Tommy on Broadway (“I went to see it and turned it down.” Wise man) and is a discerning spectator, describing both Theatre de Complicite and Sam Shepherd as “inspired.” More relevantly, away from the glare of publicity, he teaches Five Rhythms Movement work at the Metropolitan University’s drama campus in Didsbury and is a watchful student himself. In anticipation of a move into acting -“If I just did James I’d go crazy. This is a risk, but that’s how I live my life” – he spent three months last year at Acting For Life in Los Angeles studying under Jean Bour.

The Octagon connection came about after artistic director, also Saved director, Lawrence Till approached a mutual friend with an eye on Tim for providing a score for the show. They met and Tim was promptly offered the role of Len. For Till, only a week and a half into rehearsal, Booth has a clear reverence. When asked if there was any sense of’ aye-aye, there’s a pop star in the room’ with the other actors he’s quick to deflect the suggestion. “Not here. Not with Lawrence. Which is really reassuring. He is really reassuring. So detailed, so calm, so clear. And extremely good fun. He has a magical way of keeping the focus away from tensions outside of the script.”

Saved is at Bolton Octagon from 14 May to 6 June.

JAMES have been here before – on the verge of world-slaying success and then – doh! – their credibility-lovin’ frontman goes and spoils it all. So, can they make it a second time around with their new ‘Best Of…’ riding high? Read on…

Silently, without a stir to harm the karmic solemnity, we enter the meditation chamber. We step over a prone drummer, slumpled against the wall, deep in spiritual communion with his inner child. Beyond him lie a bassist and his girlfriend locked motionless in an ancient configuration that the druids called ‘spoons’. Further into the darkness we can make out the figure of a guitarist balanced torturously across two plastic chairs as if, through the enlightening quality of extreme discomfort, he may levitate at any moment.

In ten minutes’ time they will be called upon to offer up three songs in sacrifice to the Dali Jools Holland as part of his eternal televised quest to bore Britain into some kind of jazz-based righteousness. But first, they must be fully prepared in body, mind and spirit.

Yes, after getting heartily ripped to the tits on champagne and jazz fags the night before, James are having a kip. Bless.

But they are not complete. In his own separate dressing room deep in the bowels of BBC Television Centre, Tim Booth readies himself in isolation, far from the soul-polluting forces of cigarette smoke and decent conversation. Perhaps he’s reciting a mantra for one of the group, wire-framed guitarist Saul Davies, who cannot rest. He paces the corridors, seeking more booze, driven and twisted by the terrible secret that haunts his every waking moment. For Saul, unbeknownst to his slumbering band mates, has today revealed James as evil, manipulative fakers of Milli Vanilli proportions.

“When I wrote ‘Destiny Calling’,” he admits furtively, “I just stuck a capo on the guitar and played ‘She’s a Star’ twice as fast. When Tim started coming up with his ideas for the lyrics having a go at the music business I started pissing myself. He doesn’t know this, but that song is actually a very clinical piece of marketing. It’s recycling.”

He sighs and swigs, eyes skyward.

“If Linda were still with us, she’s be proud.”

EXPOSED! EX-BAGGIES in hit swap cash con! So James’ cocky, self-defacing satire anthem aimed at the cynicism of production line pop is actually less original than ‘Theme From Cleopatra’! Triple bluff! Game, set and match to the elf-faced cocktail god!

But then, nothing is what is seems in Jamestown. NME arrived at BBC HQ ready to toast the valadiction of some of Britain’s most dogged survivors and underrated triumphalists. A band who sniffed the big shorts of stadium USA, cracked under the pressure of terminal uncool, almost bickered themselves out of existence and then clawed their way back to Number One thanks to a startlingly fresh comeback album (last years ‘Whiplash’) and enough ‘Greatest Hits’ to stun a rabid buffalo. A band who have just completed a sold-out Big Sheds tour to the rapturous acclaim of mobile phone salesmen across the nation. A band only a few feet short of being on top of the world again. And climbing.

Instead we find ourselves chairing an internal debate that makes the Northern Ireland peace talks look like the Jo Whiley TV show. Just when James should be at their most ambitious, assured and elated we find them riven with insecurity and indecision, awash with the same frictions that forced them to spend the four years after the 1993 ‘Laid’ tour as far from each other’s armpits as possible. And it’s all Perry Farrell’s fault.

“Lollapalooza fucked us bad,” Saul recalls of last year’s US festi-jaunt. “The lid came off the things we’d been keeping the lid on for an easy life. Fundamentally, it’s avery difficult band to keep together. A lot of our problems come down to Tim. He’s a fucking alien. He can be such an arse sometimes when there’s no need and only an alien would do that. But he’s not always at fault and when he applies himself he’s got a good voice.”

Jim Glennie, sly-smiling bassist and one-man eyebrow crop, touches his arm.

“Steady on…”

“We’re seen as these yogic flyers,” Saul continues, “but I’m not, Jim’s not, Tim is. And Tim is James, publicly. I can’t stand it sometimes. The way he represents us is so one-dimensional.”

It’s a fame thing, a dream thing, an ambition thing, a fear thing and – in one particular case – a large dose of New Age hippy bullocks thing. And it has built barriers, driven stakes and opened chasms withing James in the past few months. And so, adopting our most slimy Tony Blair smile, we split the People’s Republic Of James into its various camps and hit the peace-keeping trail. First stop, Camp Michael…

I WENT TO THIS GROOP Dogdrill party,” Saul grins, plunging his filter coffee, “and they had bucking bronco women with their arses in the air. You get on them and you like you’re fucking this thing. I lasted for what seemed like an eternity, but I was told later that it was a second. So par for the course, really. Then they had an ice torse and they were pouring vodka into it so you had to wrap your gums around this ice cock. It was great!”

Camp Michael gathers around a hotel breakfast table in Swiss Cottage and proceeds to celebrate itself. The generals-in-chief are Saul and Jim, but they speak largely for the rest of the ground troops (brooding keyboardist Mark Hunter, affable drummer David Baynton-Power, balloon haired guitarist Adrian Oxaal and fresh-faced new boy guitarist Michael Kulas). These are men of extravagance and excess, men who are proud of their peccadilloes “but only the unmentionable ones”. They plot to bag as many free World Cup tickets as possible, shudder with the previous night’s hangovers and consider George Michael as the patron saint of their wild-living cause.

“It just reflects people’s narrow-mindedness, ” says Jim. “If it goes against society’s judgements and society’s rules then you go to a public toilet and get a buzz out of doing something like that. It’s seedy and scummy but that’s sex! It’s fucking great! It’s a reflection of society, not him.”

The polarities in James, however, reach far deeper than their stances on public Jodrells. For the first time since the early-’90s they’re faced with their fundamental crisis point again. The point where Madam Unit Shifter lifts her skirts to reveal a world of unlimited fame and possibility, of magastardom beyond their admittedly pretty wild dreams. And, frankly, it scares James shitless.

Last time, after the Simple Mindish bluster of ’92’s ‘Seven’ blasted them to within howling distance of the mega-league and ‘Laid’ became a bona fide stonk-on hit Stateside, they almost purposely bullocksed it up for themselves. They headlined Reading with an acoustic version of ‘Sit Down’ and a handful of songs they’d written the week before. They argued and fractured, the opposing ambitions in the group brought to the fore by thir fear of failure and success, the risk of losing credibility if they made the big push or sliding back into car mechanics if they didn’t.

A five-year stint in the wilderness later and Fame rears its ugly yet strangely alluring head once more. A Number One ‘Best Of…’ compilation. A fan-base moshing like your mam on trucker speed to all their fave stude classisc. The distant call of Wembley. An abyss, but the bunjee rope looks firm. Fancy a plunge James?

“I was trying to have a conversation with some of the band about how we’re gonna approach the next album,” Saul muses, “but they couldn’t take the idea that we just go for it, that we could really do something on this album that we haven’t been in the position to do since ‘Seven’. Instead of fourth on the festivals next year, we could be headlining, won’t have to share a dressing room with Space. We could probably make a record with 12 singles on it. Personally, I think it’s time to hammer it home.”

“We’ve always shied away from situations like this,” Jim continues, “turned inward and done something weird. We’ve done that sidestep too many times. Doing the bleedin’ obvious for us is so different. It’s like, ‘Do ‘Sit Down’ last? Can’t we do two really quiet ones after it?’ ‘WHY? Give them what they want! They’re gonna go out the door buzzing like bastards! That’s unusual for us.”

“It’s gonna cause conflict on the next tour,” says Saul with trepidation. “A lot of people are gonna drag mates along to Wembley going, ‘They were AMAZING last time!’ and they’re gonna hear a new album that may be quite weird.”

And here we reach the crux. To shit cash or not to shit cash? To get caught soggy and satisfied with your metaphorical pants down in public, giggling like an extremely rich hedonistic rock pig, or to live a worthy and limited career and gain belated respect when you inevitably pass away having achieved arse all. James, you see, are caught in the wide and hazy gap between George Michael and the lovely Lady Linda.

Jim drops his head and considers this ridiculous and ill-conceived concept for a second.

“Basically, yeah,” he decides eventually. “You’re spot on.”

“THAT WAS REALLY SAD actually,” Tim Booth whispers in his delicate half-lisp, crouched praying mantis-like on his chair. “It really caught my breath. She’s one of the people, like Diana, who tried to use the position they were in to actually do something, and that has to be commended. I was really upset. That sweet woman was here.”

In Camp McCartney, all is serene. Tim Booth carries his own atmosphere of calm around him, talks like a hypnotist in full swing and has the solid gaze of someone who has brushed past The Other Side (he died for a few seconds from a liver disease aged 22) and come out smelling of tofu. You are the closest to a Linda McCartney figure we have left, aren’t you?

For nearly a minute he laughs. Then pauses. Weighs up the correct response for a clear conscience.

“Arsehole.”

Oh, come on, pal. You champion vegetarianism, don’t do drink or drugs, dabble in arts beyong your immediate shere (to wit: his forthcoming appearance in controversial slapstick child abuse caper Saved in Bolton) and, publicly, at least, you come across as a bit of a characterless hippy-dippy space cadet.

“I commend your bravery,” Tim glistens. “Hmm… Hmm… I don’t care to answer that. I don’t need to defend myself. I don’t fit and I don’t intend to fit. To me it isn’t just about success, it’s about how you carry it and how you live it. In most people’s cases it’s a cancer not a cure, it’s a nightmare not a dream. Most people cannot deal with it. That’s the challenge. Can you carry that energy? There’s a vortex to it. It’s litterally a twister and you have to respect it and have discipline. You have to be disiplined enough to be free.”

And he’s off, spiralling unprompted into internal discussions of Glenn Hoddle’s faith healer, his teachings of ‘ecstatic dance’ in Manchester, his former lives as Roman gladiators and humble beasts of the field blah blah oooohhmmm. It’s a little like being stopped by an Oxford Street monk who doesn’t want to sell you his guru’s book for 50p and wouldn’t much like you in his cult, to be honest. But, in describing his torturous inductions into Shamanism, he does eventually attain a mild state of pertinence.

“You have to really face your dark side,” he hisses, “your disowned self. You have to go onstage in front of a hundred people and act our your darkest secrets. It’s a good way of blasting anything you’re ashamed of. People can no longer kill you with those statements. ‘You’re a fake, you’re full of shit’. Yeah? Well I remember sitting on a stage in San Fransisco with a bag full of shit, bringing it out and covering it on my body going, ‘I’m full of shit’. How can you hurt me more than that?”

And thus NME’s sarky piss-taking slides from his back like water from the immortal mongoose of enlightenment. The twat. Still, such techniques can’t help relations within James, can they? Doesn’t your method of attacking your inner demons face on increase the tension?

“I like to plunge in and confront and that isn’t always the right thing to do,” Tim admits. “We’ve had some tense fucking times and it’s been the worst we’ve ever had in the past couple months. Survival is the key. I have quite a wild fury and my spiritual path is not about being a nice Christian person who turns the other cheek. Uh-oh, no fucking way. I’m not into revenge because revenge is no good for me.”

Saul says you’re an alien. Do you ever feel like that?

“Yes.”

Why?

“Because I’m an alien.”

Oh. Right.

“I think the others blame me partly for holding them back before,” he continues, “and that invented a lot of anger. Saul has a really conscious awareness of marketing and I have a real fear of losing integrity. Those are two polarities. For now, I’m in the minority. They aren’t incompatible. Part of the excitement is the contradiction.”

Trouble is, Tim is the contradiction in James. As his band mates are slavering to capitalise on the glory of being the New Beautiful South, to race into the first class cabin of life and drown themselves in top booze, to live out their days as credibility-free but extremely rich and happy rock sluts for ever, Tim steps back, respects “the vortex”, measures his strength and worthiness to tackle it and then pisses off to Lancashire for two months to be an actor.

Meanwhile, the back-stepping has already begun. James’ new single ‘Runaground’ – the second of the two songs specially written for the ‘Best Of…’ LP – is a slow-burning alienation epic that is simultaneously their boldest and least commercial single since ‘Hymn From A Village’. And it was almost the new ‘Candle in the Wind’.

“I wrote most of that lyric on the day that Diana died,” Tim confides. “I thought of it that way, but God knows how the others would have reacted to that! But really it’s about the fact that I used to have relationships and leave a door open.”

And it is with an exit clearly signposted that we leave James hanging in the balance of their own contradictions once more. We may next see them through a flash of firework smoke from the far side of Shea Stadium or through the flames of an overcooked cheesburger across a fast food counter in Barnsley. But rest assured, we will see them again.

“We’ll carry on,” Jim states from the nerve centre of Camp Michael. “As long as people keep listening to it we’ll keep doing it. One day we’ll get up and it won’t be there any more. I don’t know what won’t be there, but we’ll just go ‘It’s gone, hasn’t it? Yeah it has. See ya’. It’s therapy being in this band, it really is.”

“Yeah,” Saul interrupts, “but a really dodgy type of therapy. You get charged loads to do it and it doesn’t really work but you think it’s doing you good. And everyone still tells you you’re a prick.”

Thus saying, Saul has not the slightest inclination to prick himself with hundreds of pins in front of an audience of baying Buddhists. Vive la difference…

The early James had three rules: not to have any lessons (“because you end up learning to play like everyone else”); to ditch any song that sounded like anyone else, and to be unpredictable on stage at all times. Tim elaborates: “That meant changing the set list or improvising new songs, or singing a song in German. We used to make up songs a lot on stage in those days”

This whole approach arose from one gig when the band arrived at a venue to find themselves billed by a helpful promoter as “James (Not a poet)”. Tim decided to unleash some wilful confusion by going on and reciting a poem as a joke. He strode up to the microphone , but the lights failed to come on, so he stood there in total darkness, savoring an ominous silence from the expectant audience. When he finally read the poem, the applause was thunderous, “It was really powerful because of the tension,” he explains. “The band came on and we played the best gig of our lives.”

From then onwards they decided to always take risks.

“There’s a theory about pop music,” says Tim. “That it’s 90% predictable, 10% unpredictable – and the 10% is the crucial part. If it’s too predictable, the audience goes into automatic pilot. When you do something where you and the audience don’t know what’s going to happen, everyone is in a higher state of concentration. Most bands play three songs and the gig’s just a variation on those three songs.”

So how can bands avoid getting stuck in a rut?

“Strip down!” Tim urges. “Do a poem! Sing a song on your own, then go really big! Do a dance song. Fuck people’s heads…..”

After 15 remarkable years, numerous line-up changes and countless highs and lows, James are back. Pat Reid sits down to meet the survivors.

Tim Booth, singer with James, has got amazing eyes. Penetrating yet sympathetic, suggestive of both sharp intelligence and playful humour, they sum up the band far better than those best-selling “Ja” t-shirts you saw everywhere in the late 80s. With a new Best Of album to promote, Tim, along with guitarist/violinist Saul Davies, is on the interview treadmill in a London hotel. The pair’s personalities are contrasting, but oddly complementary. Tim is gentle, Saul is aggressive. Tim’s agenda is mystic and spiritual; shade-wearing Saul talks about “beer and tarts”. What they both have in common is a passion for James.

The band formed in Manchester in the late 80s, releasing weird indie-folk records and supporting The Smiths on tour. After years of struggle, they broke through in 1991 with the anthemic Sit Down single and the successful Gold Mother album. In 92 a critical backlash unfairly dismissed the fine Seven album as “pomp rock”, but the following year the Brian Eno-produced Laid made inroads for the band in America. After experimenting with electronic music, James returned last year with the strong Whiplash album, yielding the hits She’s A Star and Tomorrow.

Now, with the ‘Best Of’ album setting the seal on their past efforts, it seems an appropriate time to ask: how did all this get started? Tim’s EYES SPARKLE AS he thinks back to 1982: “Three 17 year-old scallies from Manchester saw me dancing in a nightclub while they were stealing my beer. When I went and confronted them they asked me to join.” The main thing Tim remembers from the band’s earliest performances is fear. James were petrified of playing live. And not only that, their own audience was distinctly heavy. “They had a fanbase of the 40 most aggressive people in Manchester,” Tim grins. “It was scary.”

The first few James gigs were supporting Orange Juice, then came the real test -Manchester’s Cyprus Tavern, by all accounts a bit of a hellhole. “About 40 people just sat there with their arms folded,” Tim recounts. “Giving me a real fucking stare. They were mates of Danny, the previous singer, who’d ended up in Strangeways for GBH, and they didn’t like some middle class student taking over his position…”

For Saul, the call to take up with James followed an eerily sirnilar pattern. “It was totally by mistake,” he insists. “I was in a club in Manchester on player’s night with these arses playing 12 minute guitar solos. Larry, the original guitar player in James, came up to me and said ‘Get up there, have a go’:’ It was another one of those portentous accidental encounters which so enliven musical history… “I don’t know why he did that,” Saul says, still bemused. “I’d never met him before and I didn’t know James at all.” In the event, Saul got up on stage and rattled off a one-note violin solo. A suitably entertained Larry invited him along to a rehearsal the next day. As the band improvised and Saul joined in, he had the distinct feeling that he was being auditioned: “I wasn’t taking it seriously,” he insists. “I thought they were pretty crap really.”

However, a week later when Saul was on stage with the band while an admiring Morrissey swooned in the wings, his impressions underwent a rapid re-evaluation. Not much of a fan of the music of the time, he had a crash course in the late ’80s Manchester scene. “James had taken the Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays on tour. When I joined, our support band was Inspiral Carpets. Suddenly I had a quick history lesson in what James was and what its place was.”

At this time, the band had been a cult attraction for five years, but had been unable to translate their popularity into commercial success. By 1989 they were so skint that they were reduced to testing drugs at a local hospital to pay for rehearsals. “We all went on the Enterprise Allowance scheme,” Saul says. “They gave you 40 quid a week to set up your own business, 17 quid more than if I was on the dole. But within a year we played at Free Trade Hall in Manchester, which holds about 1800, and it was sold out. It started to bubble up in Manchester, until by 1992 it became massive, and then we played Alton Towers to 35,000.”

CERTAINLY, WHEN SAUL JOINED in February 1989, James were about to enter a golden period. Hit singles and critical acclaim were their lot. That is, until the press turned against them. Today, Tim no longer reads their reviews. “1 know how the machine works too well,” he explains wearily. “and I just get tired of it. I decided four years ago not to read any more reviews of James. When Seven started getting very bad reviews it affected the new people a lot because all they’d had was real positivity. We became terrified of making anything that sounded ‘pompous’ -on some journalist’s definition of what that meant -so I found it a very negative influence on the band. You go back to Seven now, it’s a great record.”

It is indeed. But then, despite the detractors, James always have been touched with greatness. This is, after all, a band who won their first hardcore audience by resolutely upstaging an outfit as legendary as The Smiths on the Meat Is Murder tour.

“We’ve been an amazing live band,” Saul argues. “Which is why I hate it when we get slagged. Our Reading performance got slagged and we were brilliant. We were up against Cast and Suede and we were the only band that got everybody going. That’s what we do 30,000 people having a fucking good time.”

JAMES MAY HAVE CARVED a reputation as a near-definitive live band, but last year, Tim confesses, he lost the urge to perform. However, recording an acoustic set for joint release with the “Best Of’ compilation helped relight his fire. “We didn’t know what we were doing,” he recounts happily. “It was very improvised. I told stories in between songs, just like the old days.” James songs do tend to accumulate a certain anecdotal weight over the years.

Like the woman who ran a mental hospital telling Tim that Out To Get You (from Laid) was the inmates’ favourite song. Or the refugees from a weird cult in the states who had a soft spot for Seven… “These kids had been born into a religious cult,” Tim confides, “they broke out when they were about 14. Born Of Frustration was their breakout song. They felt it gave them the strength to do it.” Wow. Obviously Tim’s devotion to spiritual matters really works for some listeners. It’s this desire to truly touch people that makes James so cherishable. “Obviously Sit Down did it on a mass scale,” Tim continues. “We went into hospitals and sang that song to a kid in a coma. A lot of people who’d had bereavements wrote to us and told us that it was their favourite song.” Saul’s thoughts on the band’s most famous song are characteristically sharp: “Sit Down obviously is part of popular culture,” he says.

WHICH BRINGS US TO the 18-track “Best Of’ offering which should restore the band’s place in the hearts of the populace. If Crowded House hadn’t already used it, ‘you know more James songs than you think you do’ would be an appropriate tag. “There’s 14 top 40 hits on it,” Saul says “and two new songs which I think will be successful. The second single, Runaground, will probably be our biggest since Sit Down. Everyone who hears it goes ‘Fuck, it’s gorgeous’.” Of course, in the reference books, James sit resplendent in fine company, sandwiched between The Jam and blues hero Elmore James. So do they ever sneak into WH Smiths and proudly survey their page in the Guinness Book Of Hit Singles?

“No, I’ve never done that,” Saw replies. “But the other day we were looking up to see who’d sold the most records. Up to 1989 The Beatles had sold 1.2 billion records. Then we read that Paul McCartney has 39 gold discs and I thought, Wait a minute – I’ve got nine!” He cracks a cheeky grin: “That’s not bad.” Tim prides himself on the band’s consistency over the years: “Even when the albums have failed as wholes,” he says, “you can see the integrity.”

What have been his highlights so far? “When we did the live video at G-Mex 1 remember thinking it was actually perfect. It summed up everything I wanted us to sum up. Laid was an amazing thing, just to work with Brian (Eno). And to tour with Neil Young in America. To have Neil Young’s respect at the same time as Brian Eno… We felt that was our kind of peer.” Tim tells a touching tale from the Laid sessions. While recording Sometimes, Eno had never heard the completed chorus. When Tim reached that part of the song the producer was clearly moved… “We get to the chorus and I sing ‘Sometimes when I look deep in your eyes I can see your soul’. I was looking at him when I sang it and he nearly fell over. He slumped into a chair and sat there with his eyes closed. At the end he said, ‘That was one of the musical highlights of my life’:’ Now that’s a compliment.

So, if Tim could go back and meet himself 16 years ago as the ride was just beginning, what advice would he give himself? “Relax,” Tim says simply. “Enjoy it.” By his own admission, the singer has often felt “too responsible” to simply have a good time in the band. Additionally, James have always been perceived as rather moral – and not at all hedonistic – figures. Tim argues that this is more a reflection of his lyrics thanan accurate view of his fellow James-ers. “They would much prefer to be seen as a hedonist band. James are like The Happy Mondays a lot of the time, and I’ve toured with The Happy Mondays, I’m not exaggerating.”

So how come we don’t know about it?

“We don’t tell the press,” Tim says, twinkling again.