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Tim Booth of James tells us what makes him shake his body.

1 CORNERSHOP – Brimful of Asha (Wiija single) – Tjinder and co’s dancefloor smash

“I first heard this in America a while ago and really loved it. I thought it was really hip and ahead of its time. I love it because it seems so innocent and guileless. It’s brilliant how they’ve managed to resurrect the word ‘bosom’ and forced it into the national consciousness through so much radio play. I’m not sure how badly they want or need fame and success. I just hope they don’t make the same mistakes we made.”

2 NICK CAVE – Are You The One I’ve Been Waiting For? (from the Mute album “The Boatman’s Call”) – The Lord Of Gloom at his depressing best.

“I’ve been a fan of his for years. This song is a rather self-indulgent choice. It’s for the times you’re pining for your loved ones and you feel all mopey and sad without them. I first saw him live when he played with The Birthday Party who were supporting Bauhaus. He came on wearing a dog collar tearing pages out of a Bible. It made Bauhaus seem pretty pathetic in comparison.”

3 JAN GARBAREK – Officiarden (ECM) – ambient choral music for those monastic moments

“It’s these monks performing choral music with a lone saxophonist in the middle of the whole thing which sounds really peaceful and haunting. I like it because it’s extremely soothing and therapeutic. It works best when you’re having a Radox bath. It’s a wonderfully still and tranquil contrast to the rest of my life. I usually listen to it on tour when things get too hectic”

4 HILDER VON BINGHAM – Canticles of Ecstasy (Hyperion) – F**ked if we know, Ask Tim

“It’s 13th Century Christian music. I listen to this when my memories are frazzled. It’s an extremely calming influence. Best listened to when you’ve got the lights off and you’ve got nowhere else to go except your own bedroom. It’s the ultimate sound of loneliness. It’s an extremely good reminder of why you miss your loved one when she lives in America.”

5 THIS MORTAL COIL – Song To The Siren (from the 4AD album “It’ll End In Tears”) – Ethereal classic and 4AD in a nutshell

“It’s from their atrocious debut album, it’s the only decent song on it. It reminds me of a Tim Buckley song called ‘I Need To Cry.’ Liz Fraser’s (from the Cocteau Twins) voice is one of the best voices of the Eighties. And that’s what separates this song from the rest of the album. It reminds me of a lot of the stuff I did with Angelo Badalamenti, because it’s dreamy, sensual and dangerous. Apparently David Lynch wanted it for ‘Blue Velvet’ but he couldn’t afford it. If it had been used on ‘Blue Velvet’, it would have been the perfect soundtrack.”

6 ESTHER AND ABI OFARIM – Cinderella Rockafella (Philips Single) – Glam rock stomper from the age of the dinosaurs

“I just remember seeing them as a child in the Sixties. They were this old hippy couple who became this one-hit wonder. It’s a really stupid song, the sort of song you can have a laugh about. It reminds me of my relationships because of the absurdity of it and because you can turn songs like this into your own special little song. And it’s also a self-indulgent reminder of my youth and I’ve included it for purely nostalgic reasons.”

7 FLEETWOOD MAC – Rumours (Warner Brothers album) – Classic transatlantic MOR from the Seventies

“I didn’t like it at the time because I was a punk and it didn’t really tie in with that scene. It was the same with Blondie. They weren’t really heavy enough. But it works if you go back and rediscover it. It’s an incredible album because the pain involved is evoked so subtly and it’s translated so wittily, creatively and eloquently.”

8 NEIL YOUNG – After The Goldrush (Reprise album track) – Classic whiney-voiced ballad from the King Grumpy

“I’ve been a fan for 15 years and it still thrills even now. It just comes across as being so naïve with all those cackhanded solos. The lyrics are very focused and concentrated, although at times it seems like he’s had one joint too many. It requires a lot of effort to truly appreciate him, but once you’re in, then it’s definitely love. This is Neil Young at his authentic best. Touring with him was amazing. I defy anyone to not enjoy his acoustic shows.”

9 RADIOHEAD – OK Computer (Parlophone album) – Groundbreaking, mindblowing opus from Prince Grumpy and chums

“I like the randomness and awkwardness of it. It seems to have been made without any commercial concerns at all. You can’t understand the words, but that’s part of the appeal. They toured with us early on and I found them a little too tortured, too intense, but there’s more of a balance here. I like the campness of ‘Karma Police’ with that line ‘They think I’ve lost it completely.'”

10 JAMES – The Best Of (Mercury album) – Britain’s Number One album!

“New James compilation album. The most underrated band of all time from Manchester. Available for all occassions, including weddings and barmitzvahs. Priced £13.99 from all good record shops.”

The Manchester hideaway of James’ singer is a calming place, heavily influenced by natural E, pentacles, crucifixes and Native American animal spirits. But then, it’s easy to scoff

Although the other members of James are scattered throughout the world, Tim Booth still likes to retain a flat in Manchester. He divides his time between Brighton where his son lives, and New York, home town of fiancee, Kate, which doesn’t leave a lot of time for the city that so heartily embraced his band circa Sit Down.

A pleasant walking distance from the city’s ‘Curry Mile’ (more curry houses per square mile than anywhere else in the Western world) Tim lives in the kind of artsy community common to Douglas Copeland novels.

“This house is like a way-station for creative people,” says Tim nonchalantly. “Actors and directors and producers come and go every month or two. One of the tenants is about to become a director on Coronation Street.”

But despite the Parisian Left Bank atmosphere indoors, the surrounding area is not without its problems. It’s quite a rough area, warns Tim, with more than its share of burglaries. Only last week Tim’s car was broken into.

“I feel quite vulnerable letting you into my room,” Tum admits. “But I also feel quite open, because I make my house a place of calm, as my life is so intense. I try to make a room a place of magic and fill it with antidotes to life in a rock band.”

1 SNAKESKIN

“This is the skin from a corn snake owned by Saul Davies (James violinist). It’s non-venomous and actually very sweet. Snakes shedding, their skin is a great image – the Native Americans saw it as a symbol of transformation. In Morocco, a snake-charmer once put a poisonous snake around my neck and then dropped it. Everyone else fled in terror, but I just sat their calmly, and thought it smelt like chicken. Later on, after the snake had been removed, a bead of sweat dropped where the snake had been and I jumped and screamed “AARRGH!” If I’d reacted like that earlier, I’m sure I would’ve been bitten.”

2 TIBETAN OIL AND DRUM

“These were given to me by a Tibetan shaman. He was trained from the age of 3 to 27 as a healer, which is a hell of a burden to put on any three year old. His element is lightning and thunder, so he uses shock as part of his healing. Whether you believe this or not, part of his training was conducting lightning. The oil takes seven years to make, and he gave it me to rub on my back. I use the drum for ceremony purposes. I wouldn’t play it onstage, because it’s too precious.”

3 CROSS

“I’ve got a couple of crosses – they’re just gifts from different people. I’m not into Christianity on any level, though. If you look at the history of the Catholic Church, they may have well have been the Mafia. The way they killed each other to get power, the way they raped their sisters – it’s fucking atrocious. I think the story of Christ is an amazing story, and if he were alive today, I’d be the first knocking on his door, but I don’t think the Church has anything to do with Christ. They’ve hijacked an astonishing man, as most religions do.”

4 PENTACLE ENGAGEMENT RING

“How much of this can I tell you without sounding like a complete wanker? This ring is a pentacle, and it represents the relationship between the Sun and Venus, which is a symbol of love. I initially decided I was only going to buy it if there was some kind of sign, and the next song on the radio was ‘Take Five’. A week later I showed the ring to one of my fiancee’s best friends and she went white as a sheet. Two days before she’d had a dream that Kate and I were making love and a guy with top hat and tails was saying ‘Their love-making is so profound, they’re making the star break out of the circle’. She then drank ten cups of tea in the dream and at the bottom of the last cup was this symbol.”

5 NATURAL ECSTASY

“It’s not chemical. It’s made out of kava nuts. It’s a legal high that works as an amazing aphrodisiac – it came top of a Cosmopolitan review. I have tried Ecstasy but it didn’t do anything for me, and the person I was with had a terrible comedown the next day. I want to reach those states in life, and there’s many ways to do it – through breaths, through loving sex, through dancing. You can find those ways and they don’t damage you physically.”

6 BUDDHA STATUE

“I love the work of the potter who made this – his work comes alive, especially when you’re in an altered state. I got in touch with him two weeks after he’d decided to stop being a potter, and he’d smashed all his work up. He’d become a school teacher, and I went round to see him to try and talk him out of it. I like the Buddha because it has a touch of the extra-terrestrial about it.”

7 COLOURED ROCK

“This is an amethyst geode, and it was given to me as an engagement present by a wonderful clairvoyant who’s helped me for a number of years. Amethyst is actually for developing clairvoyant powers as well as having calming properties. You just have it around and treat it like a great flower – feed it and clean it when you can.”

8 CARD WITH A PICTURE OF A TURKEY

“This is a Native American animal card. They’re more gentle than tarot cards because they’re less specific. To a Native American, every animal carries an energy, and the animal can give you that gift of energy. So a fox is about invisibility, because they have to stay hidden, and an eagle is about truth because they have great vision. A turkey is about giving things away – Native Americans would often give all their possessions to people in the belief that things would come back to them.”

9 DAMIEN HIRST POSTCARD

“That was a gift from Brian Eno, I love Damien Hirst – I’d describe him as a three-dimensional philosopher rather than as an artist. Most of his ideas are about life and death and sex, and finds a 3D way of bringing these issues home. Socrates said that philosophy was about preparing you for death, and Hirst has the same kind of concerns.”

10 LEEDS VS MANCHESTER UNITED TICKETS

“I usually shy away from talking about football. I don’t like the partisan shit and I especially hate the violence between Leeds and Man United. It all dates back to the War of the Roses – we laugh at the Turks and Kurds hating each other over things that happened hundred of years agom but we don’t realise that exactly the same thing happens here. I’m a Leeds fan, but I’ve been to see United a few times, because my son is a United fan. They used to play ‘Sit Down’ before games, which was weird.”

11 BACK MACHINE

“You attach this machine to a door and hang upside down, like a bat. I’d been hunting for one for ages because I ruptured a disc while dancing. I tracked one down and I rang up and left a message on the phone. A friend of mine from San Diego rang me back and said that he was the person who made them! I’ve been hanging from door-frames ever since. It aligns the spine and alleviates the pain.”

12 TOP HAT

“Jesus, this gets worse. I bought this in LA for Halloween. It’s a seriously pagan festival in America, much more intense than here. I got a really weird fishnet stocking mask to put over my head, and together with the top hat, it put me into a dark and dangerous place. We went to a great gay area where there were lots of transsexuals and amazing parades, and everybody was embracing their dark sensuality. It was great fun.”

13 EDWARD BOND SCRIPT FOR SAVED

“This is the play I’m going to appear in for a four week run in Bolton. I carry it with me every day and I hope that by some process of osmosis I’ll learn the lines – it doesn’t work, unfortunately. Plays are the scariest things of all things to do, as you can’t do a reshoot if you fuck up. This is the first time I’ve acted in 13 years, I acted in plays when I was a student in Manchester, and I even played a small role in a play directed by Ben Elton. But I wasn’t very good in those days – I had no sense of confidence.”

Although not previously a lover of Gibson’s finest, Saul Davies cadged a Les Paul Goldtop from Larry Gott when he left the band, and life hasn’t been quite the same since. “That guitar became more relevant to what we were doing,” he explains. “We were a bit twangy when we first started, but we’ve got a bit more hunkier. When I see myself on telly, I think ‘Wow! Look at that guitar!’ I can’t take my eyes off it.”

For acoustic duties, Davies employs a couple of Godins and a Lowden; his other main electric is a G&L ASAT. “It sounds gorgeous,” he purrs. “It’s got more body than a normal Fender sound, somehow….”

The G&L and the Les Paul are put through a Fender Prosonic head, a Marshall cab and a considerable array of FX pedals. “I use all sorts: a Pearl Flanger, a Tube Screamer – both She’s A Star and Runaground have got Big Muff all over them,” he enlarges. “I also play violinm which I often put through my MXR Blue Box octave divider. I have to limit myself onstage to just a few pedals though – because I jump around so much, I have to know that whichever ones I jump on, it’ll basically sound alright.”

Adrian Oxaal has remained faithful to his Fender Jazzmaster for over ten years. “It’s the guitar I learnt to play on,” he coos. “I got it initially because I liked the shape, but now I still use it for nearly everything I do” Other instruments that Adrian calls upon include a cello, a Takamine acoustic and a Mosrite (‘for feedback and microphonic noises’). “Larry Gott used to play a lot of slide, so when I joined I bought a Blade Strat-style guitar and hiked the action up to cover those parts,” he adds. As for amps, Oxaal proudly boasts his Fender Blues DeVille can melt cheese at 50 yards. “It’s a great lead amp, cutting but not tinny. It’s really good for rock riffs where you don’t want clean or fuzzy, but something in the middle.”

Even when jamming, Oxaal likes to set out his full FX pedal armoury, including a wah-wah, a Big Muff fuzz, a delay and a flanger. “It’s a great combination for getting the right texture for a riff,” he beams, “and when you sweep the wah-wah in and out, you get all sorts of psychedelic progressive rock shite!”

With a Best Of compilation zooming upthe charts and a brand new album simmering on the stove, James guitarists Saul Davies and Adrian Oxaal are in ebuillent mood, “Our songwriting’s a fairly confused process,” they warn. “It does seem to reap results, though…..”

“Let’s drive the car into the hotel bar and do the interview in there!” James guitarist Saul Davies might be weary from preparing live renditions of James classics Sit Down and Laid for Jo Whiley’s Radio 1 lunchtime programme at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios all morning, but his eyes positively sparkle at the prospect of ram-raiding the band’s Swiss Cottage hotel to create the perfect ambience for a TGM chat. “Didn’t Keith Moon do that in a Rolls Royce?” ponders his six-string colleague, Adrian Oxaal. “Yeah,” affirms Davies, “He drove it straight into the hotel lobby.” “Mmmm” remembers Oxaal, “then he got out and ordered a drink, as if nothing strange had happened…” Davies shakes his head. “That’s cool,” he mutters, struck with admiration for the legendary Who skinsman.

Fortunately for TGM’s police record, the duo decide that a more law-abidingly pedestrian means of gaining access to their swish digs is the best option – and once safely ensconsed in the hotel’s bar, talk turns to their chart-topping singles album The Best Of. Liberally sprinkled with hits from all their previous studio albums – from indie-dance classics Sit Down and Come Home from the breakthrough 1990 album Gold Mother through the galactic slide-heavy refrains of She’s A Star from last year’s Whiplash, The Best Of showcases a band that have been afraid to paddle their own sonic canoe wherever they damn well please.

Given the loyalty of their fans and the consistent sniping of the music critics – ‘folkie vegan Buddhists who caught baggy before they developed messianic stadium rock tendencies’ is about as many of the inaccuracies hurled at James that you could cram into one sentence – Davies was expecting widely diverse opinions about the compilation album. “It shows how stupid we are, though,” he laughs. “Because everyone thinks that now we’ve put out a Best Of, this is the end of the band – but we just wanted to do a singles album. Noone forced us to do it.”

Two new songs were included on the Best Of. One of them – Destiny Calling – sees James rocking with tongue firmly in cheek as they catalogue the comic realities of life in the pop world; the other track Runaground is a deliciously melancholic beast with a tear-inducing signature riff that spirals to a psychedelic conclusion.

“We’ve got 28 songs written for the next album,” reveals Davies.

“Rest assured, though, that you’ll only hear the best ones of those,” chips in Oxaal.

Davies : “Runaground is a fuckin’ serious piece of music. It’s more representative of the stuff that we’re doing at the moment. For me, the sonic melange I’m creating on that track and the lead guitar playing at the end is the best I’ve ever done. It’s simple and a bit unsure of itself, beacuse I didn’t know what I was doing when I played it. It sounds like a cross between New Order and Neil Young.”

“I quite like what I did on Destiny Calling,” counters Oxaal, “particularly the main riff and the lead solo. We tried doing it a different way to the way we did the original version in the studio and I came up with something really good. It’s nice when that happens – when you don’t have to struggle for inspiration.”

Collectively James have written galaxies of songs – yet the duo themselves still find it quite hard to fathom out their own songwriting process. “From my perspective,” proffers Oxaal, “it either comes out of nowhere or it rises from us having a jam together.”

Davies nods. “Our songwriting is a fairly confused process from anyone on the outside, and even to ourselves a lot of the time,” he admits. “It does seem to reep results, though….”

“One thing I’ve noticed recently is that early James songs were based on two-chord progressions. Then it moved to three-chord progressions – Come Home, Sit Down, How Was It For You? Since Laid, there have been more four-chord progressions and these progressions tend to follow fairly obvious intervals.” “E, A and B basically” chuckles Oxaal. “Yeah,” Davies elaborates, “but because there’s a lot of us and we have a fairly instinctive and musical approach, it sounds quite complex.”

This simple-but-deep musical approach is lost on many, including vocalist Tim Booth. “He hasn’t got a clue!” proclaims Davies. “During a song we’ll often play inversions of the basic chords and he’ll think we’re playing totally different chords and so he comes up with different vocal melodies. During a rehearsal he’ll say things like ‘Go back to the bit where you changed chords,’ and we’ll just laugh and go ‘We didn’t change them, you tit!'”

Oxaal only joined James a couple of years ago during the recording of Whiplash when the commitment of original guitarist Larry Gott was coming under question. Before his elevation to the major league, Oxaal played with indie hopefuls Sharkboy; he nabbed himself the James job because he and Davies (who himself joined James prior to Gold Mother in 1990) were childhood friends and had played together as teenagers in a pubescent combo called King Cobra and the River Men (‘I can’t remember any of the songs we wrote, thankfully,’ Oxaal laughs.) In those days, mind, Davies played drums. He credits Oxaal with teaching him to play guitar. “We used to go busking together in our hometown Hull. The thing was, I could only play the things Adrian taught me how to play – I couldn’t play anything else.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “It took me years to make that connection. It did!”

Both Saul and Adrian still hold Larry Gott in very high esteem. “I was always in complete awe of Larry – I hated picking up a guitar in front of him,” opines Davies. “He was a very special guitar player with a great ear for sonic activity.”

“How he managed to create the guitar part at the beginning of Sound will always be a mystery to me,” enthuses Oxaal. “It was something very unique to him.”

“I don’t know how he did that either,” admits Davies. “I think it was a combination of his guitar, his fingers and where he positioned his e-bow…..”

At this point in the proceedings the scene in the hotel bar is swelled by Michael Kulas, the Canadian backing vocalist who joined James a year or so ago (just to add to the confusion, Michael also plays guitar on some of the new tracks). How do the three split the post-Gott guitar roles? It turns out that although both Davies and Oxaal have strong improvisational skills, only Oxaal is capable of remembering what he comes up with. “I’m great at coming up with stuff when we’re jamming, but I always end up having to ask these two what it was I actually did,” Davies smiles ruefully.

Kulas, who wrote the intro riff to Runaground, describes his own guitar style as “very modal. I like running riffs of open strings in a twangy style. I also try and adapt to these two, because they have their own very different slant on guitar playing.”

Davies: “Basically, Adrian’s riff man…”

Kulas: “He feels it through the bottom of his freakin’ toes man. He’s got guitar coming through him.”

“I’m kind of ‘Byrds sonic boy,’ continues Davies. “And Mike’s ‘atmospheric sonic boy’. Mike’s very intellectual about his playing. Adrian’s a complete idiot, til you put a guitar in his hands….” “Not true!” objects Kulas, but Davies is already launched on his punchline. “Me though – I’m a complete idiot regardless of whether I’ve got a guitar in my hands or not.”

Name : Saul Davies of James

Band : The Jimi Hendrix Experience

Venue : Isle of Wight Festival, 1970

“I had hippy parents who took me to the Isle of Wight when I was five, and bloody good it was too! I remember waking up in the middle of the night, my parents screaming at me “Shut up, it’s Hendrix” I think we were probably a long way away from him. I think everyone was. I don’t think they had PAs in those days, did they?

We went in a Land Rover, and I remember getting my finger stuck in the window. A little stopper had come out and I stuck my finger in the hole. Some hippies had to give us some cold chips, which my mother rubbed all over me to get my finger out of this hole. And I got my parents busted. They were passing pills to someone. The police saw this happen and went up to them and asked ‘Did you pass pills to that person?’ They were denying it and I said ‘He did’ and they got carted off!

What happened to me? I’m not telling you. But it was 1970 and we lived in a virtual commune at the time. There were lots of surrogate mothers and fathers around. Anyway, they didn’t get into serious shit. Not sure what it was they had, but it obviously wasn’t too offensive or appalling.

I hadn’t seen so many people in one place before, and not since. It was just overwhelming. I can remember bits of Hendrix, the bloke with the flute – Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull – and bits of The Who. It was an amazing line-up and great fun as a kid to be at something like that, getting covered in mud and doing all the things that I’ll be doing at festivals this summer.

I found out years later that our manager, Peter Rudge, was actually on stage standing behind Hendrix’s amps. He was up there as a young, svelte thing holding onto the back of Hendrix’s amps and stopping them falling over. He’d taken The Who there; he was their tour manager or something. He was almost a hero in his own right, even in those days.

I can remember what I was wearing, and I remember that it all became floor cloths afterwards. My salmon pink flares with satin stars that my mother had sewn into them. Bitch! She was determined to make hippies out of us! I think it worked for a bit, but by the time we got to 1973, we were all disillusioned.

We play a lot of festivals now, and it’s really easy to just become the ligger backstage, closeted in your little, relatively warm, safe, not-so-muddy environment. But we do enjoy playing the big festivals because we can get out there and do the simple things that punters do – just watch bands and not get hassled.”

It’s been a turbulent 16 years for JAMES, but somehow they’ve survived, and now they’re releasing a greatest hits album. VOX asks ‘How was it for you?’ and hears tales of shamanic dancing, altered states and tour bus madness.

ONLY IN pop music is longevity imbued with such heroic glamour. When talking about bands who’ve managed to stick around for more than three hit singles and a patchy debut album, people use the word “survivors”, as if these musicians had endured major surgery or nuclear war, rather than the rigours of the tour bus and the television studio. You don’t hear people referring to long-standing bank managers or builders as “survivors”. Pop, if it hasn’t yet eaten itself, is renowned for eating its own.

James, 16 years into a career of remarkable transformations, from hippy dreamers to indie idealists to baggy superstars to stadium heroes to experimental weirdos to near oblivion, are certainly survivors, although, as they’ll tell you, it was touch and go for a while. It seems they’ve always known the score – right back in 1985 they released the song ‘Hymn From A Village’, where Tim Booth attacked pop music and its “songsmith crooks” for unforgiving vapidity – “Oh go and read a book/It’s so much more worthwhile” he spat, righteous with the knowledge that James were outsiders in the musical world. Thirteen years later, heralding a new ‘Best Of’ compilation, James are back with ‘Destiny Calling’, a single which takes a mellower look at the lot of a band, all with a self-referential nod and an arch smile.

“So we may be gorgeous/So we may be famous/Come back when we’re getting old…”

It seems James, having seen every inch of the rock machine, are feeling almost affectionate towards the old beast these days.

“I’m not naive enough to be disillusioned with pop music,” smiles Tim Booth. I understand the machine, and it’s very predictable. I can also accept and enjoy it as well. There’s a lot of luxuries in this job that I love, and the song isn’t condemning them, it’s right in the middle of it all, laughing.”

“She likes the black one/He likes the posh one/The cute ones are usually gay…”

The audience at James’ acoustic showcase in Whitfield Street studios, off Tottenham Court Road, are laughing too, at the dissection of the pop world. James’ entrenchment in early-80’s indiedom, living in poverty in Manchester, funding their band by offering themselves for drug experiments, is long past. Early albums ‘Stutter’ and ‘Strip Mine’, a string of Hieronymous Bosch metaphors, medieval imagery and sparse folk instrumentation, sound like they sprang from a tarot pack. Saul Davis, James’ present guitarist, who was recruited just prior to their breakthrough album, ‘Gold Mother’ in 1990, recalls their image in Manchester at the time.

“I though they were the weirdest bunch of fuckers I’d ever met in my life. James felt raw at that point, it was a strange little thing, very self-contained; a little family. It wasn’t obvious what the rules were, it felt different to anything I’d ever been in before, quite clean, quite pure. I bought “Strip Mine” and hated it – it sounded so light and skippy, urgh. I went home and told my flatmates that a band called James had asked me to join them, and they’d seen them at Glastonbury in 1985 and thought they were the best band in the world. Things started to sound better through those ears.”

He wasn’t the only one to have a change of heart. With the huge success of ‘Sit Down’, flowery James T-shirts became ubiquitous anywhere there was indie disco. They bought the design for 50 quid from local Manchester eccentric Edward Barton, and the merchandise soon became as much an icon of the ‘Madchester’ baggy era as Joe Boggs flares and pudding bowl hair cuts. Baggy was never their bandwagon, though – they might have come from Manchester and been friends of Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets, but they didn’t belong to the hedonistic, ecstasy-driven maelstrom that was rising up from the city’s clubs. Compared with the hooligan beats of the Mondays and the dance-tinged grooves of The Stone Roses, James were dependent on a more traditional folk-rock idiom for their songs.

Ironically, it was this tendency that was to undermine their victory. After seven years awaiting success, it seemed a very short honeymoon period before the country – at least, the press – decided they’d had enough of James, and ‘Seven’, the follow up to ‘Gold Mother’, was dubbed ‘stadium rock’ with the righteous horror people usually reserve for crimes against horses. Instead of triumphantly capitalising on their years of indie creed, they were kicked in the teeth and marked down as underground traitors who’d sold out their weird folk edge for global gain. Compare the angular rhythms and jerky passions of ‘Gold Mother’s ‘Come Home’ and ‘How Was It For You?’ with the dour grandeur of ‘Seven’s ‘Ring the Bells’ and ‘Sound’ and the difference is marked. “I heard you calling through the drumbeat,” sang Tim on ‘Hymn From A Village’, pleading for a “strong primal” music that would reach past rock’n’roll production and into people’s hearts. With these new songs, it seemed unlikely that even a crowd of 30,000 people would be able to make themselves heard through the epic sound. Unsurprisingly, that’s not how Tim sees it.

“What happened was we became famous during the making of that record”, says Tim. “We were going to produce it ourselves, but we couldn’t because we kept getting pulled out of the studio to do press. So we got Youth in, because he played us PM Dawn which he’d just done, and it was a fantastic-sounding record. The idea wasn’t to go rock at all, it was just the most exciting music. But journalists decided to see the songs a certain way – and do you know where that came from? One chorus – the “lalalalalas” on ‘Born of Frustration’.”

So it wasn’t an attempt to expand the sound in keeping with your expanding market?

“That’s a joke. We’d been playing those songs live for a year, and the band were becoming more confident. On ‘Seven’, everyone found their place – it’s one of my favourite records.”

All the same, the cool reception of ‘Seven’ was to have far-reaching effects on their career.

“There’s not a country in the world that’s as judgmental as this country. Me, Jimmy (Glennie, bassist) and Larry (Gott, guitarist) had a lot of ups and downs with the press and knew we were due that backlash, but the new guys – the ones who’d just had good press – they were freaked. Tabloid culture is the primary culture here and when we get interviews by European or American journalists, they say how do you deal with the crap. What happens is, you get quite paranoid and think, shit, they don’t like us any more, even though we’d just played to 35,000 people at Alton Towers. It’s ridiculous – and totally wrong. We had so many offers to tour America and we took them and didn’t come back for about four years.”

SO WHILE the Britpop explosion took hold and America became the new Evil Empire, James were AWOL in the States, out of sight, and as out of mind as you can be when you’re selling 600,000 copies of your fifth studio album ‘Laid’ across the USA.

“Our biggest problem was that we got off on America so much, and that was seen as a betrayal. In America, you can get what you want any time of the day, and we were blown away by that. Our mistake was that we didn’t come back for a few years, which was negligent of us,” shrugs Tim, as if they’d forgotten to cancel the milk. “The next thing you know, you’re accused of being anthemic, the indie police come around and you’re shot for crimes against indie.”

This might be said with Booth’s serpentine smile, but it can’t mask the sharp hint of bitterness. There’s a persistent sense of a band who feel that this far down the line they shouldn’t have anything to prove, but can’t help proving it anyway, who might loftily dismiss the machinations of press and industry, but still want their credibility back, still need the recognition for what they feel to be their massive influence on recent British music. Tim mentions James’ unlikely fans, the bands that owe them a creative debt. There’s a mention of how Tricky used to come and watch them every night from the side of state at Lollapalooza, how he’s expressed an interest in touring with them. A reference to a book about Oasis where Noel, then a roadie for The Inspiral Carpets, cites seeing James soundcheck as the reason he formed a band. The story about Neil Young asking them to support him in the US and their rapturous reception from his notoriously partisan audience. The way Brian Eno approached them to work on ‘Laid’ and the experimental dance set ‘Wah-Wah’ and not vice versa. The memory of Radiohead supporting them around the time of ‘Creep’ and how Tim “never saw them making such a great record, but it’s wonderful. I’m really happy for them to now have that success.”

There’s little perception of James being and influential band in Britain. They’ve left behind no clear legacy, unlike neon vapour-trails of The Stone Roses or Happy Mondays. They don’t appear in the lists of the greatest albums ever. But ask Tim if he sees the band as being influential and he nods with utter conviction.

“I know it. Major Britpop bands have shown us their signed James T-shirts.”

Why James have survived when most of their contemporaries have faltered is a mystery. Their early hero Ian Curtis is dead. The Smiths, who took the young band under their wing, long gone. All those baggy bands they were lumped in with have either mutated or been forgotten, Shaun Ryder becoming the Mr Creosote of pop excess, and the jury still being out on Ian Brown, while the Inspiral Carpets – who apparently lifted ‘This Is How It Feels’ from a James song with Tim’s approval – remain a footnote. But, as Saul says, last year survival was a subject tactfully avoided. After 1994’s Woodstock, they were near to splitting up, their exhaustion from touring providing the fertile ground for nascent personal emnities, while Larry, third original member along with Tim and Jim, left to be with his family.

“When we look back at it, we realise we were so close to breaking the whole thing open. We’d sold 600,000 copies of ‘Laid’, we were so close to really selling, but we couldn’t carry on. It’s like your wave doesn’t make it to the beach and you have to wait for your tide to go back out and come back in again.”

With new musicians Adrian Octal (guitars) and Mark Hunter (keyboards), they recorded last year’s ‘Whiplash’, and uneasy mix of their free-form, Eno-inspired experiments and – in singles ‘She’s A Star’ and ‘Waltzing Along’ – the wide rock panoramas of ‘Seven’. This time, they feel their return will be uncompromised by such disruptions.

There’s a belief that James never fell prey to all the excesses that eat bands from the inside out.

“I could tell you some stories,” says Tim, waggling his eyebrows, “but I won’t.” With Saul’s encouragement, they tell the tale of Lollapalooza where, due to serious injury, Tim was in a neck brace, while the band were just in trouble.

“It was the most horrible tour ever,” shudders Saul. “If any bands read this and they’re asked to do Lollapalooza, say no, because it will destroy them. It destroyed us.”

“We had two buses, a party bus and a peace bus for me,” says Tim. “I was fucked, I had a helper with me the whole time because I couldn’t walk properly. But I actually had a good time. I learnt how to use a computer and got through it. The party bus… [he pauses portentously] went into Happy Mondays cartoon mode and disappeared for a couple of months. It went out of control.”

“It’s difficult to know how to phrase it, ‘cos you get into trouble,” sighs Saul. “It’s not the enclosed space or the fact that it is all men on the bus. It was to do with wanting to get to the heart of it… wanting to fuck America up the arse and wanting to fuck each other up the arse, wanting to push each other into a situation where it was undeniable we had gone into madness. It was like Hunter S Thompson – let’s crack open the ether and see what happens,” he says, with melodramatic relish.

Tim grins. “We were playing like demons.”

Quite literally, according to the rock jocks who came to see Korn and were greeted with the sight of six fey Englishmen in dresses and mirrorball shirts. As Saul says: “A 40-minute set at Lollapalooza isn’t the best time to think: ‘Hmm, lets do some improvised jazz.” James had taken a bite out of America and suddenly, America was biting back.

“The third day in,” says Booth, “25,000 people started shouting ‘faggots’, so on the fifth day we got dressed up real faggy and we were ready for them. I used to work on lines to put them down and Saul would stand there in his little dress and go: ‘I want you to suck my cock’ a number of times and they just shut up. What I did, which I’d never do in England, was walk off stage and go sing to this huge guy who was heckling us and he was so embarrassed ‘cos all the people were watching him. After 20 seconds, he said: ‘Will you give me a hug?’ And I thought, ‘Wow, this is interesting.”

IT SAYS a lot about Tim Booth that he wouldn’t wander offstage in England, but in a land where people carry guns, he’s quite happy to make advances towards potentially dangerous thugs. He’s a curious mixture of charm and steely professionalism, with a pragmatic spirituality that’s far away from platitudinous new-age bleating. There are reminders, too, that this man was once a student of drama at Manchester University. At the video shoot for ‘Destiny Calling’, in a bizarre studio complex in London’s Mile End, Tim is required to remove all his clothes for a shot. VOX offers its sympathy – it’s cold enough for another remake of The Thing and anything other than head-to-toe fleece is and invitation to hypothermia. Tim, however, takes the comment as meaning ‘How embarrassing for you to be naked’, and is quick to assert that he has no problem with it at all. You can just imagine his student productions. He might come across as pretentious, were it not for his way of saying “that sounds really pretentious” after particularly elevated statements.

“Tim needs protecting, he gets a lot of flak,” says Saul. “He confuses people by being honest. No one’s ever really got the point of him.”

And that would be?

Saul pauses. “He’s and alien, a fucking alien. He’s on the fringes of life. He just doesn’t conform to any of the rules. That to me is rock’n’roll.” He laughs and shrugs. “OK, he drinks chamomile tea…”

Jim Glennie gleefully tells a different story.

“Everyone thinks Tim goes to bed at midnight and drinks weird herbal stuff, but he’s in league with the devil like the rest of us. He’s the bad boy of rock’n’roll. He’s the worst, honestly.”

Given the fact Tim is a pop star, Jim’s story is much easier to believe. There’s an obvious difficulty in reconciling his 16 years in a rock’n’roll band – a famously filthy profession – with the idea that Tim is an ethereal, otherworldly being. After all, this is the man who sang “don’t need a shrink but and exorcist” on ‘Born of Frustration’. Did the idea of self-destruction ever appeal to him?

“That’s what ‘Johnny Yen’ [from ‘Stutter’] is about. When I was younger, I swallowed the tortured artist myth hook, line and sinker. What I decided early on was that I wasn’t going to do it. I wanted to go to that level of pain, that level of madness and survive it, and do it consciously – not with drugs.”

Basically, Tim Booth gave God and ultimatum.

When I was 21 I gave myself a year to find out if God existed,” he says. “I decided that if I didn’t get any proof, I’d throw myself into the tortured artist role and burn myself out. I wanted proof and I found it in that year. Once you reach that point, there’s a point to living, so I was no longer going to become the suicidal dickhead.”

He’s cagey about the nature of this life-changing experience.

“You can’t explain meeting God. It’s not religious, but I believe in spirit. As much as I can say, I discovered it through meditation. It’s about going into altered states. I do that a lot through dancing and movement and love-making. Other people touch that stuff on drugs. But there’s a price to pay with that one and you can’t stay in those roles, you just stagger around like a drunkard till next time.”

Aware perhaps of the pervasive image of himself as the serious, high-minded singer slapping the wrists of his over-exuberant band, he adopts a more reasonable tone.

“But that’s just my way – because the band hates being presented as this sober, meditative thing. It isn’t. And I drink now and then, I even take drugs now and then. I don’t write it out of my experience. I don’t have any moral judgement on these things.”

The extremes Tim is drawn to are beyond the blaze-of-glory excesses that you would expect. At the acoustic show, Tim expresses his delight at letters he’s received from asylums saying how James are the patients’ favorite band, or from “a cassock of monks” from a progressive monastery, saying how much they enjoy the band’s music. The next day he talks about his work with “shamans and lunatics”, the classes he teaches in going into trance states through dance.

“You can have a lot of fun doing it. The teacher I work with has shown me that. I’ve worked with a lot of male Shamans and it’s all about pain endurance. This woman says that’s very much a macho idea of shamanism; her idea is it can involve great pleasure. We dance for days and get into amazing states, then she frees different areas of your psyche to get in touch with spirits. I think people get it through dancing anyway, they just don’t label it – it makes it less pretentious.”

There are those who see rock’n’roll as a continuation of shamanism. Does Booth find it easy to fit James in with that side of his life? Isn’t it hard to sustain some kind of spirituality in the world of a touring band?

“It’s become and overused word, especially in rock’n’roll, usually it’s an excuse to take drugs and justify it in cultural terms. Having said that, there is definitely a continuation. At a rave, with people dancing – that’s a shamanic thing to do. They’re using Ecstasy to help them, but they don’t need to.”

Did Booth ever succumb to those temptations?

“There’s a vortex in rock’n’roll which is very dangerous. Basically, if you achieve success, you can have anything you want. You can have unlimited drugs, unlimited alcohol, unlimited sex, and unless you learn discipline, you just become a big appetite. People think that’s heaven, but you have to be disciplined enough to be free. I only went into excess for about 2 years. Then I checked out of it.”

James, though, still show no sign of checking out. “Tell us when our time is up/Show us how to die well/Show us how to let it all go…” sings Tim on ‘Destiny Calling’. What would it take to split them up now?

“Either becoming uninspired, or a sense of, oh look, we’ve done it now. Which would take massive success. It’s almost like we’re sitting here waiting for the finishing post, and until we find it, it’s hard to know where to stop.”

Former peers of The Smiths, prime movers of the Madchester scene and rivals to Simple Minds/U2’s stadium crown, JAMES have been there, done that. Glyn Brown meets the band once described as ‘Manchester’s best kept secret.’

~”James’ music exists in past/future territory, somewhere between eccentric, romantic, tender, crazy and ecstatic. Their best songs rank among the very best of British pop music: it rings true” – Brian Eno, 1997~

JAMES: what happened there, then?

You could call them – they’ll stop reading at this – pop’s big-league nearly men, the ones who blew our minds on several occasions, through several eras, whether they were dressed in tatteed sweater and moccasins, or straitjackets, or billowing silk shirts.

Again and again they’ve sidestepped the top bracket with some very fancy footwork but, boy, did they get close. One or two slightly different moves, and the band who were once third men to U2 and Simple Minds wouldn’t be sitting in the crowded lobby of a north London Hotel utterly unnoticed. Not that they seem to mind this relative anonymity.

Tim Booth, one-time troubled eccentric and God freak with a history of psychic unrest, and multi-instrumentalist Saul Davies – representing a seven-strong assortment of contenders – are far from the disconsolate has-beens popular opinion might cast them as. With a ‘Best of’ retrospective (1988: The Year Of The Hits) and a new LP in the works, they are back for another shot at pop’s crown.

And after 15 years in the business of rock’n’roll, this turns out to be an opportune moment for them to look back on their tumultuous history – at what was, might have been and might still be in store for them…

So, here we are, in 1982, which is when bassist Jim Glennie, drummer Gavan Whelan and guitarist Paul Gilbertson spotted Tim dancing at Manchester University, where he was studying drama, and picked him to be Bez before Bez was out of nappies. These days, Tim teaches a system of therapeutic shamanistic dance. Back then, he was just whacko. And James were called Model Team International, because Paul was going out with a model and that was the name of her agency and logo on their free T-shirts. When the agency boss threatened to sue, Tim suggested something to honour his inspiration, James Joyce.

Their first release, on Factory Records in October, 1983, was the ‘JimOne’ EP, its guitar-pop frippery claimed as a successor to Orange Juice or The Fire Engines at their best, thought many thought it embodied the very weakest elements of indie. One track, “What’s The World,” was quickly covered by Morrissey, an early and ardent admirer. “To be honest,” says Tim now, “I think Morrissey fell in love with me. I may be wrong. I mean, he wasn’t out then. We used to go driving round Manchester Together. I didn’t really realise his feelings ’til quite a bit later.”

If The Smiths were influenced by James, “then we were influenced by The Fall and Joy Division – by their bloody-mindedness, their awkwardness, their refusal to play media games.”

Media games were no problem for Morrissey. James may have had a certain mystique, but, by now, long-time fans The Smiths were up and past them, touring the States, and James, although they’d co-toured here, turned down that support slot, as well as several music paper front covers. “We want to introduce the band by music, not by words,” they pompously disclaimed.

Nevertheless, when the second EP, ‘James II,’ appeared in 1985, the boys were minor-league legends in their home town. It wasn’t long before they were approached by a major label – the Warners off-shoot, Sire – to record their first full LP, ‘Stutter.’ Produced by Lenny Kaye, right-hand man to another Booth icon, Patti Smith, ‘Stutter’ appeared in 1986. A Luddite counter-blow to the futuristic technological indulgence surrounding them, it owed much of its success to new member Larry Gott’s nimble guitar picking, and mixed traditional folk with more powerful rock – the Iggy Pop tribute, “Johnny Yen,” introduced themes of exhibitionism, despair and violence, though arguably the sound that backed those ideas wasn’t always powerful enough to carry them. And James were still dressing like idiots or Smarties, in tartan scarves and primary colours.

1988’s ‘Strip Mine’ continued the melodic course, with off-kilter folk influences, a few simple singalong choruses that would lay a path for the future and Tim’s vocals a cross between Ian McCulloch and Operatic yodelling worthy of Heidi. Perhaps the most interesting track is “Riders,” in which Tim, slipping from Morrissey to Cave, howls of “sipping the juice that causes the pain all great singers need.” Here began a tumble toward dark and devastatingly depressive lyrics. “All my early songs were either paranoia about the business and how it destroys the soul, or about suicide, the myth of the tortured artist.” Some time later, Tim will tell me how wary he is of the words he writes, because they so often pre-figure future events.

Sire were not kind. Head man Seymour Stein, a “collector of artefacts,” was devilish. “It’s not romantic,” says Tim, “it’s exploitation. Stein didn’t really like our music – we were simply something to be collected.” “Sit Down” was written during this time, but never played to Sire. Eventually, James escaped on a legal loophole found by the band’s astute then-manager, Martine McDonagh.

A self-financed live LP, 1989’s ‘One Man Clapping,’ prompted a deal with Rough Trade. This, too, was not entirely fortunate. Rough Trade were not only on the point of bankruptcy, they also failed to see commercial prospects in James. “Geoff Travis said, ‘Look, this is minority music, it won’t sell to more than 20,000 people,'” remembers Tim. “So I asked him to let us go, and he did.”

James regrouped, adding enough members to bring them up to a seven-piece (Gavan Whelan left; Saul, Andy Diagram, Mark Hunter and Dave Baynton-Power joined), and took the record Travis had heard in embryonic stage to Phonogram/Fontana. The album was ‘Gold Mother.’ It sold 350,000 in the UK alone.

‘Gold Mother’ was a triumph – brainy, with a full, sometimes distorted, guitar sound, sparky brass and danceable rhythms, though Tim’s lyrics, if you cared to listen, were black as pitch. By the time it came out, in 1990, “Sit Down” had reached Number Two in the charts. The Madchester scene was revving up to full swing and James, along with Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses, were its champions. Every venue they played sold out. And Tim was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, his miserablism turned to full-scale depression.

There were a number of reasons. One was the band’s seemingly impregnable image as freakish vegan monks. Which, at one point, they had been. In the early Eighties, there had been a bit of lunacy and dope-smoking. Booth had suffered a serious liver complaint. “I nearly died,” he says. “I stopped breathing in hospital.”

As a result, Booth and Jim Glennie screened what they ate, joined a semi-religious cult and spent three-and-a-half years shunning the debilitating practice of sex (Tim is still bitter that his guru of the time slept with half the “disciples”).

But the band were hardly celibate now. In an effort to confirm that, newer T-shirts said COME, and there was talk of promoting the single, “How Was It For You?”, by stencilling its name down the side of condoms. Still, the holier-than-thou schtick had been compounded in 1989 when Tim shaved his head after seeing a documentary on Auschwitz, and remained such a problem that the band thought of changing their name.

Gradually, however, ‘Gold Mother’ turned Tim into a different sort of messiah, a leader for the lost, lonely and confused. His furious lyrics yelped about devious politicking (“Government Walls”), and, since he’d been victim of a sternly religious upbringing, about Christianity and TV evangelists. The pungent vitriol of “God Only Knows,” which stands alongside Flannery O’Connor’s novel, “Wise Blood,” in terms of religious disillusion, saw the band receive sacks of hate mail. An obsessive drive saw him take up most of a 1991 “Melody Maker” interview by talking about 40 “hidden” gospels – gospels according to Mary Magdalene, gospels showing Jesus to be a vegetarian nutcase who gave his disciples enemas – that he’d found in the Vatican library.

Crass as it may sound, what may have prompted this leap off the deep end was a split from his long-time partner and manager, Martine, who had just given birth to their son, Ben, and to whom ‘Gold Mother’ was dedicated. Live reviews showed Booth wild-eyed and manic, often in tears before a show, and he tells a story of climbing speakers mid-gig to walk along a 40ft-high balcony rail (“I didn’t give a shit, I was totally fucked up”), only getting down when he saw his minder crawling along on all fours behind him – “The guy was risking his neck for me. I thought, ‘Fuck, get off this.'”

There’s more than an element, of course, of glorious self-indulgence in it all; there was bound to be a fall. 1992’s ‘Seven’ was where the James sound really changed. The opening track, “Born of Frustration,” was accused of being cribbed from Simple Minds’ “Don’t You Forget About Me,” and the two bands’ sounds were not dissimilar – grungy, hypnotic, ululating and epic in proportion. Tim disagreed with the comparisons.

“I try really hard not to be Bono – we have to de-epic our sound now,” he said, though there was little sign of an attempt. And no reason for one: ‘Seven’ was windswept and often inspired. But the press were doubtful, petulantly slamming it as “bombastic stadium rock” – James by now were big enough to fill Alton Towers, where they played to 32,000.

And then they went West. Looking back, Saul tells me, “It was a mistake to leave this country. We could’ve nailed it here, and it felt like we had, but we hadn’t. We weren’t quite big enough or strong enough to avoid backlash – and it came.”

They spent three yeares in America, during which time they toured an acoustic set with Neil Young, and Tim was quoted as saying he yearned to “get out beyond the treadmill into hyperspace.” Egotistical as this may sound, Booth was, in fact, beginning to sort himself out. He’d dabbled with analysis, though the therapist cut short treatment, saying, “I’m sure I could cure you, but I don’t know what that would do to your songs.” So he turned to less conventional methods and, though still capable of insisting “art” could only come through pain, had embarked on lessons in shamanistic dance, which helped release his demons.

Work had begun on another album, 1993’s ‘Laid.’ An impressed Peter Gabriel offered his Real World studios; the producer was Brian Eno. ‘Laid had a subtle, stripped-down sound, loose with slide guitar – but the working atmosphere with the cultured Mr. Eno wasn’t always as relaxed.

Says Saul: “Eno used to get annoyed because I play a lot of instruments and, when we were improvising, I’d flit between different things.

“I remember him once getting me against a wall during a jam – he goes, ‘Listen to this fucking guitar you’re playing, you little c***. It’s brilliant – and then it stops. Why does it stop?’ He had me by the collar, up against the wall. I thought he was gonna hit me. I wanted to beat him up.”

But you went back and played guitar the way he wanted? “Oh, yeah.”

‘Laid’ broke James in the States, where it sold 600,000 copies. The follow-up, ‘Wah Wah’ (1994), a series of ambient jams from the ‘Laid’ sessions, was less successful. Intended as a reinvention, its release was delayed for over six months – by which time U2’s Eno-produced and similar-sounding ‘Zooropa’ had appeared, stealing James’ thunder. Aware that, at home, Madchester was history and feelings had changed, the band remained in America. Contemporar reports featured six men on a debauched bender, snorting drugs in the tour van, watching porn and waving around willies upon which young groupies had inked their names, while Booth, closeted away, sounded tired and defensive: “I think,” he said, head in hands, in 1994, “we’ve failed to present a coherent myth.”

What followed was 1995’s ‘Black Thursday,’ so-called because on that day Larry Gott and manager Martine walked out. It was discovered that James owed 250,000 pounds in back tax, and the band very nearly imploded. A long break from each other led to Tim’s solo LP, 1996’s ‘Booth and the Bad Angel,’ with 50-year-old Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti.

Meanwhile, Jim, Saul and Dave were back in the studio. They corralled the band, and the outcome was last year’s ‘Whiplash.’ Headstrong and poptastic, it was regarded by many as James’ best album to date, entering the UK Top 10 and delivering one of their all-time best-selling singles in the Beatles-esque “She’s A Star.”

But how quickly they do forget. Despite all this, and only 12 months later, people ask, surprised, if James are “still going.” They seem to be doing more than that. ‘1988: The Year Of The Hits’ is a holding device, though it features two powerful new singles, one of which, “Destiny Calling,” again features those reliable Beatles-patented descending chords so popular with Oasis. Its sentiments regarding the music biz are cynical and, though Saul doesn’t agree with them, he understands the bitter chorus of “We’re freaks.”

“Every band’s a freakshow. People look at you through the glass – ‘Don’t feed the animals.’ I was reading ‘American Psycho’ the other day, the bit where he kills a child at the zoo, and he sees a sign on the glass: don’t throw coins at the penguins, because they might die, they’ll choke on them. And he says, inevitably, ‘I throw a quarter into the pen.'”

This is as may be, but Saul – and Tim, and the rest, if it comes to that – know full well they’re not penguins. They’re in a business more or less like any other, with exactly the same swings and round-abouts. Which is why there’s a fresh LP just about half- written on a DAT somewhere. And a tour lined up for April.

And why, according to Saul, “This is gonna be our year. I don’t expect we’ll be massive, but I’m hopeful we’ll gain some respect. I know we had success in the past and let it go. It’s our fault, we walked away from it. Now, though, well, we don’t have a choice.”

Do James have a thing to say to us, right here, right now, in 1998? They say they do.

Time to get back in the ring.

What song describes you best?

“‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’, because I’m in love with someone very special and the sentiment fits”

What is heaven?

“A little house on a beach in California, with no fog, and people I love”

What is hell?

“Listening to my demons that talk to me in the dark, and being led by them.”

What’s your earliest memory?

“Setting fire to the Christmas tree, aged two. The tree was in my parents lounge, which I wasn’t allowed to go into because I was so young. I got in there and found some matches and burned everything. It was a highly-charged symbolic act.”

What’s your greatest fear?

“That God is an arsehole”

Who is your all-time hero?

“Anyone who lives their life with an understanding and appreciation for things beyond the material and who search for joy.”

What’s the worst trouble you’ve been in?

“Having a poisonous snake placed around my neck and dropped by its trainer”

Who was the first love of your life?

“A girl named Diana, aged 12, on an Italian island. I stalked her for days and finally got one kiss, just before she got on a ferry and went back to Milan.”

What’s your greatest talent?

“Searching for truth”

Upon whom would you most like to exact revenge, how and why?

“I wouldn’t exact revenge because I know from experience that it all comes back to you likea razor-edged boomerang.”

What’s your most treasured possession?

“My flat by the sea”

What have you most regretted doing while drunk?

“Twice, I got to the point of kissing a girl I really fancied, and threw up.”

What can you cook?

“Lots of things very well”

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

“First, ‘Love Is All You Need’, and second, a very wise woman once told me: ‘If you leave a back door open in your relationship, it might not just be you who uses it. That relationship will always have a hole in it.'”

Can you read music?

“No”

If you were invisible for a day, what would you do?

“Give flowers to people and make cats fly, just to remind people there’s magic in the world. And I’d probably also steal £1m from some massive corporation that wouldn’t miss it.”

What are your final three wishes?

“To have infinite wishes. To shift the whole energy of this planet so people have far more happiness. And to live with complete faith and trust in life.