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Granada Reports interview with James at Castlefield Bowl barge show on March 25th 1998

Now they’ve been churning out the hits for fifteen years, they once got 10,000 people to sit down in the middle of a gig, and Morrissey, no other, called them “the best band in the world”. They are James.

And today, they returned to Manchester, the city where they started off, to launch an album of Greatest Hits. Trevor Ward was, of course, on the guest list.

TW : Now if you and me were pop stars, we could probably think of more exotic ways of celebrating fifteen years at the top and the release of our Greatest Hits album than spending a wet Wednesday afternoon on the banks of a Manchester canal.

Tim : I think this today should be a celebration of survival. And you know we wouldn’t have survived without the response we’ve had from the people in Manchester. We were supported in Manchester for seven years by our gigs here to people when we weren’t making any money anywhere else, noone else was listening to us and everyone else was telling us to give up.

First time I came here was, I actually organised a school trip to come and see Iggy Pop play at the Apollo and I got punched out by a bouncer and that was my first liaison with Manchester and it went downhill from there really.

The highlights have been mainly concerts, G-Mex, amazing concerts when we broke through with Sit Down and 10,000 people sat down.

Someone like the Stone Roses or the Mondays and Oasis and The Smiths, they somehow rode a really big wave. I don’t know how to explain this without sounding pretentious. And we never did that. We kind of would do stuff and then pull back. Do stuff and pull back. We paced ourselves in a way that was more for the long-haul, I think. They were more like explosive stars that would last a few years and burn out. You can’t keep that level going. It’s too much pressure, too much intensity and when you’re talking about young people, and there’s all the sex and drugs and rock n roll at your doorstep all the time, most of them can’t keep their heads together.

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James have recovered after a serious incident of whiplash for frontman Tim Booth that almost left him paralysed, and to prove it they’re back with a new single Destiny Calling and a Greatest Hits album as well.

Saul : When bands release a Greatest Hits or Best Of or whatever, it can quite easily be perceived as a weak cowing down to the business in many ways. But for me, it’s quite an aggressive thing for us to do. It’s a very deliberate statement of intent about the future of James. It says “Here are our 16 Top 40 records” This is about stating our case. This is a great band.

Tim : Well, Sit Down was actually written years before it was released. We wrote it and we wrote it in about twenty minutes and then fell about laughing, we couldn’t play it anymore because we were laughing so much. The first time we knew it was really special was Liverpool Royal Court. We took the song down quiet and the audience started singing the song back to us and so we took it down quieter and then we stopped and they sang to us for about five minutes and I mean we were in tears. We were very shocked.

Saul : The power of ten thousand, twelve thousand shouting this back at you was quite something.

I saw a really good interview the other day, I think on this show with Richard Ashcroft of the Verve and he said that when he split the band up in 95, he reformed the band two years later because he knew they had something to say. What he was really saying was regardless of what’s happening around you, you are doing this for a very good, the only valid reason, the only really strong reason, that you feel that you’ve got something to say.

Tim : And then we went and did Lollapolooza which was a disaster in America. Not in terms of what it’s done for us. It was just so hard to get through. We’d go on and deal with heckling every night which we quite enjoyed. We found novel ways of dealing with it. We were playing with other bands such as Korn, who had songs like, can you beep stuff, songs like Kill Your Father, F**k Your Mother. After about 2 or 3 weeks I was walking off stage, I’d walk off stage to go and sing in the audience and I found that if I went up to the hecklers they couldn’t handle 10,000 people watching them, and the first time I did it, there was this huge guy, screaming abuse and I’d go up and sing to him and after 30 seconds he said “Will you give me a hug?”

Saul : We actually said beforehand to Mercury about the video that we’re not doing it if you put us in a great big freezing shed on the outskirts of London and we got in these big cars and we ended up in, let me see, this great big freezing shed on the outskirts of London. We started the video and the whole day went by like a flash.

Tim : I was really open to our ideas and said. I was naked. Did you suggest we be naked?

Saul : Yes

Tim : I think you did. Like and he said “Let’s all go naked”