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It’s 3:45 on a Saturday afternoon at 99X. It’s fairly quiet as the disk jockey simply known as Jill cues up the next disc. All serenity is quickly dispersed as three members of the British band James arrive at the studio. Herded in by bustling management and followed by a small entourage, this faction of James looks tired. Hungry and tired. “Could someone possibly fetch some coffee?” asks Saul Davies, who is shrouded in dark glasses.

“Some food would be nice,” adds Jim Glennie. Vocalist Tim Booth seems to shake off his sluggishness and sits in one of the three chairs next to the soundboard. His two band mates follow.

Their exhaustion is easily justified. James has its nose to the grindstone at the moment promoting their new album Whiplash. A few small, warm-up gigs in Britain were followed by a series of club dates in Washington and New York. After the guys chat with Jill and choose a diverse set of music to play on the air, they’ll make their way to the Roxy where they’ll perform the last of these intimate shows. And then it’s back to New York in the morning where they’ll get ready for an appearance on Letterman.

“It’s a good, quick show,” Booth says of Letterman’s program. “With some of the shows in England you’re sitting around for eight hours. It’s tedious. But on Letterman, you’re in there, you play live, and you get out. We didn’t get offended by the fact he didn’t talk to us. He stuck his head around the door and said, ‘Hi.’ The only grind I had with him the last time we played was that he wouldn’t let me wear a dress. He was worried he was going to lost his Bible Belt following.”

Glennie, Booth and Davies shuffle through the discs Jill has retrieved for them and simultaneously attempt to eat lunch. This potpourri of music includes artists such as Beck and Smokey Robinson & the Miracles. “Where’s the Dolly Parton?” jokes Davies. The band seems much more interested in playing other people’s music than listening to their own this afternoon. This, however, doesn’t reflect the rest of the world.

Whiplash, which was released worldwide at the end of February, shot to No. 5 on the British charts just after it came out. Its sales are doing comparatively better than their 1993 smash Laid. When asked which album is the strongest musically, Booth shakes his head. “That’s impossible,” he says. “Laid was quiet, mellow and delicate. Whiplash is more in your face, aggressive, playful and uplifting.”

The new album contains 11 tracks that vary from radio-friendly pop to hypnotic grooves to dance-floor rave-ups. Produced by Stephen Hague, Whiplash also included some input from Brian Eno, who was involved with Laid and the improvisational double-album Wah Wah. The band says they’ve learned a lot from Eno, but his role in Whiplash was fairly minor. “It’s great working with Eno,” says Davies, “but I think we ought to stop overplaying this thing because that also says in a way that we’re slaves to what he does. And it’s not that way at all. Four years ago, when we made Laid and Wah Wah, it was an immense learning experience for us in terms of how we can make music. A lot of patterns and cliches were questioned by Eno. So we took a lot on board [Whiplash]. A lot of the weirdness on this album that you would associate with somebody like Eno is us. He’s a genius. We’re not, but we’re naive, and we’ve got a lot of energy. And I feel Whiplash is like a first album for James in some ways.”

Glennie agrees. “I think Brian didn’t really need to be there,” he says. “I think he worked through a lot of the conceptual stuff when we were doing Laid and Wah Wah. But this time around it’s like how we implemented that. There was no need for him to sit there babysitting us. And how we applied that kind of space and freedom we found was our angle on it and our input.”

Promoting this music obviously requires a world tour. It officially starts off in England, and James is scheduled to make it back to North America next month. Although touring can be tough, James tends to leave an impression on audiences in more ways that one. In fact, Booth says when they were playing in New York in support of Laid the crowd in the balcony was dancing so hard the floor fell through. “It nearly took the head of our record company with it,” he says. “He was literally about 10 yards away from it when it came down.”

After finishing their live interview with Jill, Glennie, Booth and Davies hop into a rented Lincoln Town Car headed for the Roxy. Although their bellies are now full, their hunger to record more music is extremely apparent. “Yeah, touring is great, but you want to get stuff out to people,” Glennie says. “You want to move on. We want to get on with a new album as soon as possible. Maybe next year.”

Bands should ask themselves three big questions once in a while. For starters: do we still matter? Secondly: what’s the point? And crucially: what difference do we make?

Most acts will admit that they’re just along for the jolly. Music provides them with a laugh, a few shags, a nice earner. But for a tiny amount of groups, there’s a crusade worth fighting. They want *betterment* of some kind. That’s what James fought over in the past, and you want to see if they still wear the scars with pride.

So when you meet the core of the band, still cackling over their “pervy” NME photo shoot (drummer Dave Baynton-Power, guitarist Adrian Oxaal and keyboard player Mark Hunter are apparently still, erm, tied up), that’s the important poser. How do James justify themselves these days? Singer Tim Booth suddenly turns stern. For the past few minutes he’s been charming and carefree. He’s been walking the line between flippant and serious conversation, but this question bothers him, and the good humour falls away completely.

“We don’t have to *justify* James,” he snorts. Jim Glennie, bassist and only original member remaining after Tim, rises to the question. “But hypothetically, if we have to justify ourselves…” “No!” Tim insists. “But we *don’t*!” So why are you in a band? What’s the point? “World peace,” says Jim with a straight face. “And global unity.” What are you bringing to the party after 14 years?

“Great music,” Tim decides. “To me, it’s about heartfelt music- ‘cos most people blow out bands after two LPs and we’ve managed to keep it going for a few more than that. It’s looking for depth and looking for real connections and real communication.”

“We still enjoy it,” Jim enthuses. “And we keep changing and moving on and challenging ourselves…and finding another area that we get bangin’ songs out of. We haven’t played for two-and-a-half years. It’s scary, and on-the-edge again. For us, it’s still vital.”

Tim, Jim and guitarist/fiddle player Saul Davies are loading up on poppadoms in a balti house on London’s Brick Lane. The background music consists of old faves (Deep Purple’s “Sweet Child In Time”, *The Godfather* theme and Jim Reeves’ “But You Love Me Daddy”)- all played in a Bollywood style, with masses of strings and wailing voices. This is surreal enough to usher us into the warped story of James, ’83-’97.

In the beginning, they were scatty, sacred fools, livening up Manchester. Each member appeared to be playing a different song to the other. Fold melodies were stretched beyond recognition, gone wild and raggedy. Their early releases on Factory Records typified the adventurous style of the label and the city’s post-punk esprit.

James became fellow travellers with The Smiths; railing against meat-eaters and the phoney glamour of the video age. They made the cover of the NME before most people had heard of them. Tim, like Morrissey, claimed to be celibate and aspired to a kind of gender liberation- away from set distinctions of masculine and feminine. He also danced oddly and wore cardigans.

“Yeah, we looked like a right bunch of losers in those days,” Jim remembers, with mock embarrassment as we mention the facial hair, waistcoats and Victorian pill-box hats of those formative times. “Granted, you *are* right. We couldn’t afford a stylist.” James echoed U2 in their aim to escape the conditioning and compromise of adult life. The Irish band called their debut LP “Boy,” and James wanted theirs to be titled “Lost Innocence,” before settling for “Stutter” instead.

In short, James were a classic indie band of the age. They survived crappy business deals to triumph during the Madchester boom of ’89; ranked alongside former support acts the The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, their flower-power T-shirt a top accessory. The James anthem, “Sit Down,” was cherished by rock fands and E-heads, a call for friendship a Smiley-suffused nation. It was ace.

But James fell out with Brit fashion again sometime after 1990’s “Gold Mother” LP and a mad finale to the year at Manchester’s G-Mex. The music became grander afterwards, losing some of the twitchy, village ambience of old. Oh well: America thought this was just great. Their sixth album, “Laid,” sold 600,000 copies there.

James’ last gig thus far was at Woodstock ’94, before a potential audience of 300,000 people. Typically, they played obscure indie tracks and songs from the then unreleased free-jam album “Wah Wah.” Still, the crowd went suitably bonkers, and marvellous prospects seemed to be opening for them once more. Nobody figured that Black Thursday was looming instead…

“We didn’t know that was Larry’s last gig with us,” Saul muses, remembering how original guitarist Larry Gott decided that touring and family life were incompatible. “He said, ‘I don’t want to be in this band any more.’ Then our accountant said, ‘I don’t know if any of you can *afford* to be in this band any more.’ Everything collapsed around us.”

Martine McDonagh, the band’s long-standing manager and mother of Tim’s son, Ben, had also left the camp, and Tim was ready to make his album, “Booth And The Bad Angel” with Angelo Badalamenti. He was also suffering from an injury that forced him to wear a neck brace onstage – something American concert-goers had loved. However, poor Tim had to spend 8,000 pounds on various treatments afterwards.

The band was practically done for, until Jim, Saul and Dave made off to the latter’s home studio near Wrexham on a rescue mission that developed into the new “Whiplash” LP. Later, Brian Eno and Stephen Hague duked it out as producers, and jTim passed by, leaving vocals on a multi-track tape to be mangled and uncoiled by the other musicians. Booth was free to work with Badalamenti, happy with his new-found freedom.

Everybody seems pleased with how it came out- free from the indecision and deadening democracy that stalled the experimental “Wah Wah” for ages. By the time *that* artefact was released, U2 and Eno had steamed through with the like-sounding “Zooropa,” which made James seem silly and after the fact. Not so this time; Tim reckons the new LP sounds “triumphant.” Heartstrings are soundly plucked on this record as Tim sings of long roads and good causes on current single, “She’s A Star,” rubbishes the cynics on “Greenpeace” and mocking capitalism on “Go To The Bank.” Booth’s voice is never better than when he’s aggrieved or beseeching- offering up a vision of something that’s going to give the old karmic wheel an extra spin. Some of the techno experiments of “Wah Wah” have even filtered through, offsetting the charge that the band are liberal tub-thumpers, a Simple Minds for the ’90s.

So maybe James have accidentally managed to catch the *Zeitgist* once more; now that emotional, cause-carrying rock is again acceptable in this post-“War Child” era. Now that every record company has signed up a band in the Radiohead/Longpigs vein, it’s only a matter of time before acts are claiming that there’s *always* been a “Joshua Tree” element to their music. In short, is anyone ready for a New Sincerity revival? “Sincerity is such a shitty word, isn’t it?” Jim figures. “It implies a lack of humour- that you’re po-faced. But I also think sincerity means that you’re putting yourself on the line and you’re giving your all. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It’s easy to undermine what you do- by slightly taking the piss to avoid being criticised. But I think that’s a cop out, musically.”

So what’s the mood of the band like now?

“It feels like we’re victorious, almost. After “Laid,” we thought, ‘Let’s have a really up album.’ There were a lot of miserable songs we didn’t put on the record because we wanted to tour it. So many of the new songs are in-your-face, with a f— you attitude.”

The closing words on the record are “into the deep.” It’s from a song called “Blue Pastures” that imagines some care-beaten individual crawling off into the snow to lay down and die. Bizarrely, a week after recording the lyrics, Tim discovered a friend’s mentor had actually chosen this method of suicide; taking a favourite walk into the Lake District at night and expiring slowly from the cold.

“That’s what songs do sometimes,” he supposes. “That was a brave thing to do. It’s not mucky and it’s you taking responsibility for your own life, because you take a long time to go that way. He’d tried it before and he woke up in the morning and the snow had thawed. That’s how they knew he’d done it on purpose the second time.”

James don’t sound ready to expire just yet. The mission is incomplete, the missionaries haven’t lost enthusiasm for the job. Which is where we came in, really. Given that Tim refuses to justify his band, we have to answer the questions ourselves.

Do James still matter? Yes, kind of. And what’s the point? Well, they make fine music, and float important ideas around. They restate the value of the alternative and make the outsider feel less alone. The new regime even has time for a right old laugh. And a final query: have they changed *anything* at all out there? Sure, James have made a bit of a difference. You’d miss then if they hadn’t existed. It’s time, once more, to fetch them in from the cold.

It looked like the beginning of the end for U.K. band James a few years ago – and the timing couldn’t have been better.

Founding member and bassist Jim Glennie and multi-instrumentalist Saul Davies, in town recently to promote James’s new album Whiplash (out today), describe the events of the sextet’s partial dismemberment and triumphant re-assembly with charming, self-deprecating humor.

After providing a shining pop respite in the maelstrom of American grunge with their 1993 gold-plus album Laid and its brief, captivating title single, James capped off months of successful touring with a slot at muddy Woodstock II in 1994.

“We had this momentum going after Woodstock,” Glennie relates.

“And stupidly, suicidally, we decided to start writing this album not long afterwards.”

During that week, James founding member and guitarist Larry Gottleft the group (later replaced by Adrian Oxaal) and enigmatic frontman, singer Tim Booth decided to go off and record Booth And The Bad Angel with composer Angelo Badalamenti, a project Booth had been waiting to do for over a year.

“So from having this band shooting along, all of a sudden it was, crash, bang,” Glennie says.

“And there’s always been weird political division in James because Tim, Larry and I were the only ones actually signed to the record company.

“The new boys came in not long after that, but weren’t signed, but the new boys have been in the band for eight years now. So Tim and Larry leaving shattered this little nucleus.”

Not completely sure they were doing the right thing, Glennie, Davies, keyboardist Mark Hunter and drummer Dave Baynton-Power started “messing around,” writing songs in Baynton-Power’s small, grey home studio in north Wales.

“For the first time, we worked collectively as a band,” Glennie says. “And when Tim came back, he saw that he doesn’t have to be the driving force of James anymore. Not only has it made his life easier, but there’s a shared responsibility and we discovered we can do it very well.

“Looking back on it, it seemed like disaster,” he adds. “But it finally made us a band.”

Of course, the band’s fans would say they’ve been one since their early folk-pop days in the thriving Manchester scene of the early ’80s. Booth’s imaginative singing – and dancing – and James’s move from a quartet to septet, and from simple to more experimental pop in the late ’80s saw them become a more theatrical unit on the live circuit.

For his part, Saul Davies is pleased and amazed that Whiplash’s first single, the lush pop anthem “She’s A Star,” entered the British charts at Number 9, and that James’ three unannounced club shows in London last month received raves from both audiences and critics. Chalk it up to great timing.

“One of the great things about the timing of Laid, why it went over well in the States, was that it provided an alternative to grunge,” Davies says.

“The whole thing of Britpop and especially Oasis in America is that everyone is waiting to see what they’re going to do next,” he says. “But in the intervening time, people will look for other things.”

“If we’d put out an album when (Oasis’ multi-platinum) What’s The Story Morning Glory? came out, it would have been buried, critics would have said, ‘Who are James to release an album when Oasis is out?’

“So I think our job is to provide an alternative to Britpop.”

James Waited Seven Years For Fame Then Ran And Hid After A Few Years At The Top. They’re Back Now, Telling Tom Lappin All

POPULAR music has an uncanny habit of throwing up parallels. 1997 sees the return of a one-time cult band who inspired a quasi-religious degree of fanaticism, flirted with being stadium dinosaurs, shied away from the mainstream, reinvented themselves with the help of Brian Eno, have come up with a new album that has disparate nods to drum ‘n’ bass, techno and the new dance minimalism, and are not U2.

James never quite attained the megalithic status and corresponding ludicrousness of Dublin’s ageing swingers, instead clinging to a resilient intelligence and credibility, mainly through knowing when to take a break from industry insanity. Such is their freshness, it’s surprising to realise that James are pretty much contemporaries of U2, having been extant for around 15 years.

They spent all of the Eighties in cooler-than-thou obscurity, touring with The Smiths (who paid the rare compliment of covering a James song), releasing a couple of brilliantly inventive left-field albums, criminally under-promoted by their then record company, garnering a small but devoted following, but generally seeming the band least likely to. Then came ‘Sit Down’. A long-time staple of the James live set, its re-release as a single suddenly found it installed as something of a student classic. Smartass university ironists took to sitting down to the track in union discos.

The albums Gold Mother and Seven provided anthems from a similar blueprint, and suddenly James found themselves playing to crowds of 10,000 and upwards, all of whom knew the words to ‘Sit Down’.

“Suddenly everyone wanted a piece of us,” the group’s idiosyncratic frontman Tim Booth recalls.

“We were everywhere. But that seven years in obscurity prepared us musically. We totally established our identity, knew what we wanted, which was to keep exploring and keep being creative. We had that well embedded in the band, by the time success came along, and that was never going to change.”

Seven, and the band’s time-served potency in concert, offered them the chance to leap into the big league of early Nineties stadium rock. It was a possibility they flirted with only briefly before realising how restricting that path would prove. In 1992, they made a decision to withdraw from the fray in Britain and rethink. “We haven’t played here for four-and-a-half years,” says Booth. “That was kind of career suicide on one level, but we needed to do that on our creative journey, for better or worse. We backed away from the idea of playing stadiums because we didn’t really want to. We didn’t know how to handle it at the time. We could probably do it now, but at the time we were more into respect.”

They also had an almost paranoid attitude to their overnight fame.

After years of support slots in tiny clubs, being ignored by their record company and the media alike, they had developed a deep-rooted distrust of the industry that carried over to their sudden high-profile status. After having to support your musical career by volunteering for medical experiments (Booth was rejected for being too frail but the rest of the band were regular guinea-pigs) it is difficult to adjust to a life of schmoozing.

“It was hard to accept success,” says Booth. “If you are a loser for a long time in your life it’s very hard to accept that suddenly things might be going right for you. If we create our own realities, an idea which I loosely subscribe to, you begin to think that you are underdogs and it’s quite hard when people start showering you with love and affection and acclaim to actually perceive it. You get quite churlish. I got like that with ‘Sit Down’ when it became public property. Part of me didn’t want to let go.”

Their 1993 album Laid (and its ‘companion volume’ of experimental noise-scapes Wah Wah) was a conscious reaction against the epic territory of Seven. A substantial contribution from Brian Eno took James into more fluid areas soundwise. It increased their profile in America. The new record Whiplash credits Eno with ‘interference’ and he contributes some bizarre backing vocals but the album is a punchier, more upfront affair than its predecessor, helped by producer Stephen Hague, best known for the shiny pop sound he brought to the Pet Shop Boys and New Order.

“Our records tend to react against each other,” says Booth. “Laid was hard to tour because it was so low-key and delicate, whereas this time we wanted a record that we could really take out live and blow people away with, really uplifting and aggressive tracks.”

Lyrically, Whiplash is often concerned with the pervasive effect of the media, of images of violence and death. It’s something Booth has been writing about since the early James song ‘Johnny Yen’ but this time the focus seems sharper. “The song ‘Lost A Friend’ was partially inspired by seeing the film Seven and the film Heat and seeing the violence in there, the way Seven was making death into an art form.

I thought why is the mainstay of our entertainment watching people being killed? What does that say about us? It’s not a moral judgement, it’s just thinking this is weird. How did we get to this point?”

The single ‘She’s A Star’ could also be interpreted as being about fame, about fighting the restrictions of celebrity, although that’s not quite what Booth intended. “‘She’s A Star’ is a reference to celestial things rather than fame. My ex-girlfriend’s middle name is Zurina, which in India means star. I was influenced by that and some other women I met. One of them had a big star on her bedroom door. It crept into my consciousness. It’s about a woman coming into her own power, a stellar view of life with a different energy to the male world. That’s what I was thinking of. As it turned out the video ended up being directed much more around the idea of someone being a film star. We wanted it to look like a preview for a Fellini movie and be this film within a film. At the last minute they left out that extra layer which I was a bit pissed off with because it added irony to it. Otherwise it’s just us in posh suits, me getting snogged by a model, which I wasn’t that happy with, honestly.”

You believe him, if only because Booth has never been a signed-up member of the posey rock star fraternity. From James’s early days as cardigan-wearing, folk-playing vegetarians, the group have never been even close to having a cool image (on the cover of Laid they wore their mothers’ old flowery frocks). Booth, who studied drama and dance, has the sort of spiritual fascinations that the laddish rock press loves to ridicule, but that he feels are important to maintain an escape route from the cynicism of the rock treadmill.

“My endeavour is to go deeper and deeper and become more honest. I do lots of different things with my life to keep myself open and vulnerable. I have a fear of getting old, of getting rigid and closed. I do a lot of different arts as well as singing. I do acting, work with shamen, I do yoga, a lot of trance dancing, and teach it as well. That’s what my life needs. Otherwise we just fall into rigid patterns. That to me is what living a creative life means. Other bands might use a lot of drugs to get to that state but after a certain number of years you can’t keep doing that or if you do you end up wrecking yourself. I want it to be a conscious spiritual growth.”

At which point he listens to himself and laughs. Booth’s creativity in other areas led to last year’s collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti, the composer best known for his Twin Peaks music. It gave him the chance to express all the over-the-top romanticism his more prosaic bandmates won’t allow him to smuggle onto James albums. “It was something I had to do,” he says.

“I felt too chained to James and the responsibility was getting too much. It’s done us all a lot of good. As a band James had to work without me for long periods and that’s made us much stronger as a result of that. While with Angelo, I could be as poetic and romantic and lush as I wanted to because the music allowed me to. It’s context really. It’s like if you go in the NME and start telling them about meditating for eight hours, you’re a fool because it’s the wrong context. Choose your context and you’re OK.”

Eight hours? On the forthcoming tour Booth is taking a Tai Chi and yoga personal trainer with him to keep him focused. Former guitarist Larry Gott has taken the more radical step of leaving the band to become a carpenter. After a Houston show a couple of years ago he and Booth ended up having a punch-up backstage. The madness of touring eventually became too much.

The rest of them are learning to cope. “We’re getting very good at knowing what we need to stay sane now,” says Booth. “But it’s strange to think our last gig was at Woodstock two years ago, in front of 300,000 people.”

Buddhist vegatarians-turned-sado-masochistic chicken fiends JAMES return with a gunslinging vengeance to stake their place alongside the Noelrock hierarchy. Armed with a pervy new LP “Whiplash” and tales of six-foot transvestites, who’s gonna stand in their way?

There’s no knock , just a slow creek of a swinging door and the head honcho enters. His cowboy boots tap carefully across the stone floor treading dust and Spice Girl feature underfoot. He shakes a couple of drops of rain from his poncho and tips his wide-brimmed hat further over his eyes. “Hi,” he says in a soft, lilting voice. Controlled. Potent. “I’m Tim”

Behind him, the posse gather. They dress casually and grin grins of the wicked. They scatter around the photographer’s studio, prodding light stand, fumbling at packing cases, giggling, seeking mischief. Behind the genteel facade, these are hard men, unflinching in the face of adversity, never backing down from a challenge. For over a decade they have struggled with the pitfalls of meditation, beaten off the cruel lure of vegetarianism, taken on the American heartland and won. These are savage times and they have tales to tell.

“We had a fight with (Def Leppard’s) Joe Elliott”, says the one who, with the addition of a curled moustache, would be the spitting image of Speedy Gonzales. “He just started having a go at Jim, but Jim offered him outside and he shat himself. Then there was the time we set fire to a house in LA..”

The head honcho touches his fingertips together and sighs.

“I don’t think we should talk about that”, he intones, a slight grin playing across his lips.

Speedy is silenced as the head honcho turns his gaze back to his inquisitor.

“They’ve been putting up with my idiosyncrasies for long enough”, he says. “Now I’ve got to start putting up with theirs.”

He has been away for three years, this veteran of musical sharpshooting. Other business to attend to, a rest from being top dog and a target for fresh faced young cowboys. Now he’s back and the town has run riot without him, overrun by upstarts with bigger guns. He’s Sheriff Fratman no longer, but from the spark in his eye you can tell he hasn’t done with fighting yet.

So where to feed? Where to charge their bellies before the dictaphone fight at the UK corral begins in earnest?

Tim Booth taps his lip methodically. Options pondered.

“Shall we go Mexican?”

In 1989, the whole world sat down. As the baggy phenomenon reached it’s pill popping peak, a five year-old band called James (previously only known to about 13 indie types as black-clad Smiths wannabes) decided to re-release an epic anthem of lurve called “Sit Down” in the wake of the chart success of “Come Home” Not a bad decision as it turned out. Within months it had scaled the UK and US charts and became alongside “Wrote For Luck” and “She Bangs The Drums”, a tune for the uniting of a hedonistic generation and encouraged every sentiment being in the known universe to buy one of their T-shirts. Baggy had transcended The Cult of James was underway.

And at its head table sat a man called Tim. A man who advocated Buddhist meditation, vegetarianism and dancing as if your arms were on fire. A visionary, a mystic and a man who was born to be a pop star. And, most important of all, a man with a voice that was able to shake mountainsides, skin prairie dogs at 100 paces and reach such gargantuan heights that even the most grunge-obsessed of American butt-heads sniggered into their Maiden T-shirts and agreed that it kicked hippy ass.

Then, as their contemporaries descended into obscurity, smack desolation or a very long snooze. James spent four years building the myth, sneaking a foot into the U2 superleague. There were three ultra-successful albums (“Gold Mother”, “Seven” and “Laid), outdoor megagigs, a Top 20 hit every time they farted near a microphone and photo shoots in dresses to cement the raggle-taggle Dexys-style image.

And all the time, as they were slowly filed away on a million dusty indie compilations at home (a symbol of nostalgia rather than an ongoing concern, forever Number 16 with a bullet) the globe continued to fall at their feet and snog their sandals.

“In different countries you’re remembered for your biggest song.” Tim Booth hisses, free from his poncho and clad now in a neatly tailored suit. “In America, it was ‘Born of Frustration’ and ‘Laid’. In England it’s ‘Sit Down’. And in Portugal it’s ‘Sometimes’. So every country has its own perception of your peak, but it’s a narrow one.”

“People say to us ‘Oh you’re in that band that did that Sit Down song, aren’t you?'” says Speedy-alike guitarist Saul Davies. “And we go ‘No, we’re actually part of the fabric of British pop.'”

So did you never become out-and-out rock star arseholes?

“Sadly, we haven’t got the rock star bit right yet,” says Saul. “We’ve got the arsehole bit.”

But the best laid plans of mice and mystics oft fall arse over tit in the end. The first blip on James rise to the megabowls struck in 1994 and it was called, almost an ironic summary of their career to date, “Wah Wah.” A warped mish-mash collaboration with Brian Eno that intentionally steered clear of their traditional widescreen dust-bowl territory. It was intended as a rebirth of cool, a leap back into the underground, just to prove they could. They couldn’t.

“In one way it was too extreme,” muses Saul, “we jumped right in and pushed it. For us, it was a learning process, finding a different way to approach the songs.”

Tim presses his fingertips together and grimaces. “I think it was passed over because we didn’t promote it. It was only released for a week.”

“We should either have not released it or really gone for it,” reflects Saul.

“It was supposed to start this underground thing,” bassist Jim Glennie interjects, “where you’d get a typical James audience plus all sorts. We thought it was a great idea.”

A great idea, sadly, that U2 had slayed the world with years earlier. The rut that James had ploughed for themselves, it seems, was deep. And worst of all, the mammoth two-year US tour they had just embarked on was to expose wickedness at the heart of the band that had been hidden from public view for too long.

You see, like all decent cults, the Cult of James hid demons behind its spiritual facade.

“My girlfriend was sticking things up my bum last night,” Saul yelps, spitting chicken chunks across the table. “She tried to get a bottle up there.”

Nearby diners in the high-class Mexican restaurant gag on their forks and eye their coats. They thought their eating space had been invaded by a nice pop group intent on discussing the advantages of the karmic cycle. Quietly. Then, within minutes, the corner had erupted with raucous laughter, the smashing of bottles and shaggy tales of sado-masochistic excess. Oh well, they’ll just have to ban their children from listening to the band’s records.

“I’ve got one of those tight rubber masks, a zip-up thing,” grins James, Manc laddism leaping to the fore. “It really freaks out my girlfriend. She says it’s not like me, obviously. It’s great” I lie there with my hand around her throat going “GRRRR”

Tim takes his fingers from his lips, drops his disapproving glare and smiles along.

“Jimmy is the gimp” he pronounces, unapologetically.

James, Vegan buddhists to a man. Think “football” is a particularly difficult yoga position. Partial to a quick tomato juice and mung bean soup before tucking up for an early night with their copy of The David Icke Tantric Workout Book, right?

So, so wrong. They are, in fact, rollocking ROCK savages who like nothing more than drinking the steaming blood of babies to fulfil their cruel lusts, then beating up their parents. Possibly. Certainly, of the assembled throng of devout carnivores, only Tim has the gall to ask for some broccoli sauce with which to baste his tender chicken meat. His bandmates meanwhile are regaling your correspondent with sordid tales of debauchery, deviant sex and knuckle-filled sandwiches.

“Last night we got one of the record company guys down on the floor and we were snogging ‘im!” screeches Saul. “He were lovin’ it!”

“I was sat on his face,” continues James enthusiastically, “and Saul was shagging him up the arse, shouting, what were you shouting?”

Saul almost leaps onto the table “We’ve been shagged up the arse by this record company for too long,” he yells. “NOW IT’S OUR TURN!!”

Crikey, and we thought you were such lovely, clean-living young chaps.

“The press would always focus on me and think that the whole band was like that,” says Tim, “but we’ve always had our contradictions. There’s been loads of things like this going on for years, but we usually keep it rather quiet.”

“The press never get hold of this sort of stuff – like getting thrown out of the Brit Awards or threatening other people’s lives when they threaten ours. It’s a whole side to us that never got publicised. It’s not violence so much as protecting yourself.”

“James has always been perceived in pretty much one way: the weird hippies playing folk music,” Saul explains. “And even though we haven’t had anything to do with that for years, people still think that’s what we are. People still think James are Buddhists. And it’s so far from the truth that it’s actually becoming really really funny.”

“No matter how bad we are,” laughs James, “people don’t just believe it.”

But what of Tim? Are there no devils of depravity lurking in his spotless soul? Has he, for instance, ever been arrested?

“I was nearly arrested once,” he sniggers. “It was a nudist beach in Greece and they don’t like nudist beaches in Greece. These young people had colonised it. The police came one morning with truncheons and started arresting people. I said I had a room in the village and pretended I wasn’t on the beach and they said ‘We’ll take you to your room and if you don’t have a room, we’ll put you in jail for a few days and then deport you’ We were waiting by this car when this bus stopped about 50 yards down the hill, so me and my friend Alex just ran for it and got away. It was really stupid.”

Yet despite such anti-establishment frolics, once the mask that is Tim’s pseudo-spiritualism is ripped from the James phantom, the scars of laddism are plain to see. Tim’s favourite film, for example, is The Fisher King, while James all-time favourite is Roco Does Prague. If they could become invisible for a day, Tim would start a fight in the House of Commons, James would “fiddle with women.”

Saul, meanwhile, spent his spare time during the recording of the new LP “Whiplash” trawling through the seediest of Soho’s transvestite bars and porno shops until six in the morning.

“He used to turn up in a shiny PVC jacket and a disco harness with chains and a big ring in the middle,” says James. “And a pair of shades.”

Hence while press and public alike considered James to be the band of Mary Whitehouse’s wet dreams, such behaviour was turning the American tour into an all-cylinders-burning rollercoaster ride into oblivion. The kind of tour indeed, that even the toughest was unable to survive.

“The only person that really cracked was our bodyguard,” Tim laughs, “our insecurity man. I think what really broke him was ending up in a room with a six-foot tall black transsexual on acid.”

“Eric,” says James helpfully.

“It was about a week later that he had to leave,” continues Tim. “After that, we needed a year out.”

It wasn’t only the security men who felt the strain, however. The tour left the band exhausted and sick of the sight, smell and (presumably) taste of each other. Like a million tour bus hostages before them, there came a point where the road simply ran out. And then the guitarist left.

“We had a really bad day that we have called Black Thursday,” Saul explains, dropping his fork. “We were sat in this studio in Wales when the shit really hit the fan. Larry (Gott, guitarist) said he was leaving the band, which meant that everything as it had been was over immediately, it was all gonna collapse.”

“And then the accountant discovered a five-year tax bill,” recalls Tim.

“To get from Black Thursday to the point where we’re really happy making records is a fucking miracle, to be honest,” says Saul.

It was a long haul back to the land of the happy people, and many bullets had to be bitten. Unsure of how to approach the British market after a five-year gap between tours, they withdrew entirely, took a year out from each other and recuperated.

Tim relaxed by “dancing, acting and making the d’Angelo record” whilst the rest of the band chased after their scattered marbles. Then, when they reconvened, they discovered that not only did they look better, but they also smelt less offensive and – hey! – maybe they didn’t taste too bad after all. Except Saul. Obviously.

But with almost every James T-shirt in Britain having been transformed into a washing-up cloth, aren’t you daunted by having to clean up the town once again?

“It’s a big unknown,” Tim says, fingers firmly pressed to lips once more, “we’ve had a great rest and we feel totally ready now. You’ve got to find your own pace, otherwise you get totally burnt out like all the other bands. That’s why we’ve lasted longer than anyone else. So we really didn’t have much choice, we had to have that time off.”

“It’s Oasis, Radiohead and James in terms of sales in America, but we can’t consider the market. We knew what we had to do for us and we did it. Now we’re back and it’ll be great for us, but God knows if there’ll be an audience.”

“It’s like: ‘We’re ready now!'” James shouts at the embarrassed diners collecting their coats, “Hello, come back!'”

“Erm, are you finished with these?” The waiter has never been so nervous in his life. He eyes the bottle in Saul’s sweaty palm and decides to inch out of the room backwards. And what’s this? Some flowers from the singer.

Tim Booth shakes his head, stares at the bowl of decorative flowers that he’s in the process of handing to the waiter to clear away and laughs. He places them carefully back in the centre of the table, blushes at the riotous laughter from his bandmates and leaps back on his train of thought. Anything to get him away, really.

“In making this album we found a new way of working with each other,” he smirks. “We knew we would have to do that if James was going to survive after Larry left. It was going to have to become more of a band if we were going to continue. It took six months to work that out.”

“The intention was to try and bring the two things together, the tunes and the more abrasive sound. We always had that side of improvisation, but we never showed it to people very much.”

“It’s actually dead exciting for the first time in years,” continues Saul, invigorated. “We’re desperate to get out and play. It’s like: ‘I want this! I want to get out there and play guitar in front of loads of people and be a twat.”

Enter James new album Whiplash; an awesome attempt to chase Noelrock varmints right out of town with the traditional weapons of classic songwriting, wind-swept atmospherics and a few stray missiles of industrial/trip-hop/rock mayhem.

There’s more than enough lung-bursting pop singles here to have the faint-hearted wringing out their T-shirts and stitching them back into shape. as well as the kind of askew glance to the technological future that should see the much-courted underground fall and snog their zip-up leather perv boots. It’s agonised but optimistic, sumptuous yet , unsettling. Quite ace.

BUT THE enemy is strong and it has the the backing of the formidable Weller Cavalry, resuscitated Beatles tunes and, hell, the very karmic gods themselves. So how do the old guard rate the new contenders?

“It’s much too safe for my tastes.” says Saul, diplomatically, “If you listen to a lot of the groups from the ’60s, there’s an energy there. They really kicked ass! But with this current crop of bands it falls somewhere in between being fantastic and not quite getting there, For me, Oasis get the closest and that’s why the whole world loves them.”

“I 1ove the whole rock’n’roll nonsense of it all,” yelps James, sensing kindred spirits. “You give a couple of blokes from Manchester huge success and mi11ions of pounds, and this is what happens! I think it’s wonderful! It’s hilarious!”

“But they’re shamelessly ripping off our musical heritage! Surely this goes against the Creed Of James?

“As a musician I am totally frustrated by that,” Tim agrees. “I don’t understand it. We’re too proud to ever do that. But sometimes you hear it and it works. The Happy Mondays rehashed stuff and it worked, which was wonderful. .But we look to express ourselves, and that means expressing ourselves, not some guy 30 years ago.

“I know some of these musicians and they do, literally, deconstruct songs. They learn how to play a song, then they learn how to mess around with it to make one of their own songs. It’s what art forgers have been doing for years, and occasionally it’s brilliant.”

So maybe the returning heroes can set up ranch next to the new rock invasion. Maybe the West has been won and it got us to a state of universal harmony after all. No need for a civil war, let’s all just gang up against Joe Elliott instead, perchance?

But for all their sordid tales and bloodied reminiscences, James have one last test to pass if they are to match up to the Big Bad Boys of rock. So tell us, what is the biggest lie you have ever told?

A pause.

“I didn’t sleep with her,” ventures Tim.

“It wasn’t me, your honour,” grins James.

Saul ponders a past of sleepless nights, fumbled encounters and rubber jockstraps. “I’m the singer,” he smirks, wickedly.

With that, ponchos are donned, cowboy boots dusted and they’re off into the sunset in a jet-black charger, licensed to carry five rock cowboys, chewing tobacco at the driver’s discretion.

Whiplash away…

Ihren größten Hits hatte die sechsköpfige Band aus Manchester mit Songs wie “Sit Down” und “Come Home” Anfang der 90er zur Zeit der englischen Indie/Dance- Rave-O-Lution.

?: Drei Jahre lang habt ihr keine Konzerte mehr gegeben und auch was Plattenveröffentlichungen anbelangt, war es in den letzten Jahren still um James. Was war los?

Tim Booth: Es war einfach mal an der Zeit, eine Pause zu machen. James gibt es nun schon seit 13 Jahren, und nie hatten wir wirklich Zeit für andere Dinge als die Musik. Es ging immer nur darum, ein neues Album aufzunehmen und damit dann auf Tour zu gehen, und irgendwann wirst du einfach müde von dieser Routine. Das ist ja zum Beispiel auch der Grund, warum eine Band wie R.E.M. nicht mehr nach jeder Plattenveröffentlichung eine Tournee unternimmt. In der Zwischenzeit haben wir alle eigene Sachen verfolgt. Manche sind umgezogen, dann ist Larry Gott, eines der Gründungsmitglieder von James, aus der Band ausgestiegen, was ein schwerer Schock für uns war, und ich habe mit Angelo Badalamenti zusammengearbeitet. Wir haben uns einfach neu orientiert.

?: War die übrige Band denn neidisch wegen deiner Zusammenarbeit mit Angelo Badalamenti?

Tim Booth: Da mußt du sie schon selber fragen.

Jim Glennie: Vielleicht hätte so etwas wie Neid aufkommen können, weil Angelo Badalamenti wirklich ein großartiger Komponist ist, den wir alle sehr schätzen. Aber als es darum ging, die Platte, die Tim mit Badalamenti aufgenommen hat, live vorzustellen, hat er uns gebeten, mitzumachen. Dafür waren wir ihm sehr dankbar, und es war ein phantastisches Erlebnis.

?: Hattet ihr bei der neuen Platte Angst, daß die Leute nicht länger an James interessiert sein könnten?

Tim Booth: Wir waren jetzt eine Weile von der Bildfläche verschwunden, und die Geschmäcker der Menschen ändern sich. Insofern gibt es natürlich schon die Möglichkeit, daß sich niemand mehr für uns interessiert. Aber ich glaube auch, daß es durch Oasis in den letzen Jahren zu einem Comeback der auf Gitarren basierten Musik gekommen ist. Nimm zum Beispiel Bands wie Suede oder die Manic Street Preachers, die waren im letzen Jahr so erfolgreich wie nie zuvor. Außerdem sind die Reaktionen auf unsere neuen Songs soweit sehr gut. Uns wird mehr Respekt gezollt als ich gedacht hätte. Es läuft also alles sehr positiv.

?: Was war denn der Höhepunkt eurer Karriere?

Tim Booth: In England war das mit Sicherheit unser Open-Air-Konzert in Alton Towers, zu dem über 30.000 Leute kamen. Für eine Indie-Gruppe war das damals ohne Vorbild. An dem Abend haben wir allein 22.000 T-Shirts verkauft, und die waren schon am späten Nachmittag weg. Bemerkenswerterweise gingen mit unserem 93er Album “Laid” die Plattenverkäufe in England ja zurück, während unsere Karriere in den USA erst richtig losging. Mittlerweile hat sich “Laid” dort 750.000 mal verkauft und 1994 sind wir ja auch bei dem Woodstock-Festival aufgetreten.

?: Muß man für den Erfolg in Amerika Kompromisse eingehen?

Tim Booth: Die Unterschiede zwischen dem Musikbusiness in Amerika und England sind schon riesig groß. In den USA mußt du halt eine Menge Hände schütteln von Leuten, die du gar nicht kennst, nur damit dein Song im Radio gespielt wird. Und als wir das letzte Mal in der David Letterman-Show aufgetreten sind, wollten wir – wie auf dem Cover von “Laid” – eigentlich Frauenkleider tragen, aber das wurde uns verboten mit dem Hinweis, die Zuschauer im “Bible Belt” würden das nicht tolerieren. Das ist albern, aber du mußt halt wissen, bis zu welchem Punkt du das Spiel mitspielen willst, um Erfolg zu haben.

?: In gewisser Weise klingen einige der Songs auf eurem neuen Album “Whiplash” so, wie man es vom neuen U2 -Album erwartet hätte.

Tim Booth: Ich habe das U2-Album noch nicht gehört, aber sicher spielst du auf die Drum `n’ Bass- und Elektro-Elemente in Songs wie “Greenpeace” an. Ganz neu ist diese Entwicklung für uns allerdings nicht. Viele der Sachen hatten wir schon auf unserem experimentelleren Album “Wah Wah”, das ja von Brian Eno produziert wurde, ausprobiert. Überhaupt haben wir Brian Eno diesbezüglich viel zu verdanken. Er stand uns auch bei “Whiplash” wieder zur Seite. Es war uns aber auch wichtig, daß die Songs, unabhängig von der Instrumentierung, immer noch James-Songs blieben. Wir wollten nicht einfach auf irgendeinen Wagen aufspringen.

?: Ihr habt schon seit Ewigkeiten keine Konzerte mehr in Deutschland gegeben. Kann man erwarten, daß ihr mit dem neuen Album hier auf Tour gehen werdet?

Tim Booth: Das Problem mit Deutschland ist, das sich hier außer einer überschaubaren Fangemeinde nicht allzuviele Leute für unsere Musik interessieren. Und wenn wir in Amerika mit den gleichen Anstrengungen hundertmal mehr Platten verkaufen können, gehen wir natürlich lieber dorthin. Aber wir haben schon vor, dieses Jahr auch wieder einige Konzerte in Deutschland zu spielen.