Details
This video was filmed in the water tank at Pinewood Studios in London where the James Bond movies were filmed.
Sometimes
Category Archives: Era: Laid / Wah Wah
Sometimes (Lester Piggott)
Summary
Producer Brian Eno describes Sometimes as one of the highlights of his musical career and is a fan favourite. This single from the album Laid reached 18 in the UK Singles Charts.
Track List
7″ JIM13- Sometimes (Lester Piggott) / America
CAS JIMMC 13- Sometimes (Lester Piggott) / America
12″ JIMX 13 – Sometimes (Lester Piggott) / America / Building A Charge
CD JIMCD 13- Sometimes (Lester Piggott) / America / Building A Charge
Details
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| Release Name: | Sometimes (Lester Piggott) |
| Artist Name: | |
| Release Date: | 30th August 1993 |
| Format: | Studio Single |
| Catalogue: | 7" JIM13; 12" JIMX 13; CD JIMCD 13; CAS JIMMC 13 |
Billed as James comeback single and a return to James folk-rock roots, Sometimes was producer Brian Eno’s choice as the first single describing the band’s first performance of the song in the studio as one of the highlights of his musical career.
The single was backed with two new tracks. America had been in the James set since the summer of 1992 and the version featured on the single was recorded live using solar power by Greenpeace in September 1992. Building A Charge features an overtly sexual lyric set against a simple musical backing.
Sometimes was seen as something of a renaissance of James by the music press as the general consensus was that James had stepped back from the stadium rock they had been accused of in favour of a more intimate involving sound. Radio 1 had the world exclusive first play of the single a month before the release and soon A-listed it.
The band was out of the country on the US WOMAD tour when the single was released, but had recorded the song for ITV’s The Beat show. When the single charted at number 18 in the first week, the band performed the song by satellite from Pittsburgh for Top of the Pops.
The single’s video was filmed in the water tank at London’s Pinewood studios, scene of many of the sea scenes in James Bond films. James spent the whole day in the water, the band playing their instruments and Tim dancing, singing and acting out the lyrics of the song.
Artwork for the single was provided by Larry’s wife Jane.
Reviews
Melody Maker
He sounds like Loz Hardy. Or is it Liam O’Maonlai? Either way, it rubs me up the wrong way. But despite myself, something here touches me.
Maybe it’s the one chord chiming away metronomically, never changing, like rain on glass. More likely it’s the hilarious attempt at Byronic naked-in-the-rain sensualism (“There’s a boy leaning against a wall of rain, aerial held high / Calling ‘Come on thunder, come on thunder!'”)
I’d be lying if I said it was crap
NME
James usually dreary drone is given a leg up by Brian Eno at the controls who does for this band what he did for U2. Eno has obviously heard something miraculous crying to get out of James past releases and on Sometimes he has managed to pry it loose from its prison. This is a great song with a strong sense of dreamy and ambient grooves flowing through it. It shoots images like bullets from a gun and they hit their target every time. A big surprise.
Press Release
James: Sometimes Single Press Release November 1993
James return with their first single of 1993, ‘Sometimes’ released through Phonogram Records in August 31st.
Taken from their eagerly awaited, Brian Eno-produced LP ‘Laid’, the seven inch and cassette versions of ‘Sometimes’ are backed by a new song, not on the LP, called ‘America’. This track was produced by Bob Margouleff for Greenpeace Records and was recorded live in Los Angeles using solar power. The twelve inch and CD versions carry ‘Sometimes’, ‘America’ and another new track not on the LP entitled ‘Building A Charge’, also produced by Brian Eno.
James who recently appeared at WOMAD on Saturday 28th August, head out to the US to join Peter Gabriel and the rest of the WOMAD bill for a nationwide tour.
The band return at the end of September for the release of the LP and a major live tour in December.
James hit the road for the first time in over two years when they headline a national tour in December.
December 1993
- 1st Glasgow Barrowlands
- 2nd York Barbican Centre
- 4th Manchester G-Mex
- 5th Wolverhampton Civic Hall
- 7th Derby Assembly Rooms
- 8th Gloucester Leisure Centre
- 9th Brixton Academy
- 11th Portsmouth Guildhall
- 12th Norwich UEA
- 13th Newport Centre
Tickets are priced at £11 at all venues except for London and Manchester where tickets will be £12.
- America :1993
- Building A Charge :1993
- Sometimes (Lester Piggott) :1993
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- Sometimes 7″/12″/CD Front Cover
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- Sometimes 7″ Back Cover
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- Sometimes 7″ A Side
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- Sometimes 7″ B Side
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- Sometimes 12″ Back Cover
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- Sometimes 12″ A Side
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- Sometimes 12″ B Side
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- Sometimes 12″ Limited Print
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- Sometimes Cassette Single
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- Sometimes CD Single Back Cover
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- Sometimes CD Single
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- US Promo: Sometimes (Front)
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- US Promo: Sometimes (Back)
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- Promo: Sometimes
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- Promo: Sometimes Cassette
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- Sometimes NME Review
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- Sometimes Melody Maker Review
Eno’s Wah Wah Notes
Improvisations are almost always the seeds for James songs. Before we started our formal recording sessions for what became the Laid album, I spent some days working with the band in their rehearsal room in Manchester, seeing extraordinary pieces of music appearing out of nowhere. It occurred to me that this raw material was, in its own chaotic and perilous way, as much a part of their work as the songs that would finally grow out of it.
The music was always on the edge of breakdown, held together by taut threads, semi-formed, evolving, full of beautiful, unrepeatable collisions and exotic collusions. I suggested that, instead of just working on one record (the ‘song’ record, for which we’d already agreed a very tight schedule) we find two studios next to each other and develop two albums concurrently – one of structured songs, and the other of these improvisations. It seemed pretty ambitious at the time, but we decided to aim for it. Generally, we improvised late at night and in very dim light. We worked on huge reels of tape, so that we could play for over an hour without reel changes.
Strange new worlds took shape out of bewildering deserts of confusion, consolidated, lived gloriously for a few minutes and then crumbled away. We never tried making anything twice: once it had gone, we went somewhere else.
Ben Fenner, who was engineering, attentively and unobtrusively coped with unpredictable instrument and level changes in near-total darkness, leaving us to wander around our new landscapes.
I asked Markus Dravs, who’d worked as my assistant at my place, to come down and occupy one of the studios. I wanted him to look at the improvisations and see what he could make of them while we carried on with the ‘song’ record. We’d select a promising section from an improvisation and he’d investigate it. Using bits of processing equipment and treatment techniques evolved in my studio, he’d evolve new sound landscapes located somewhere at the outer edges of aural culture.
We were initially too busy in the studio to bother him much, which left him free to work with the material in much the same spirit as it was originally performed – by improvising at the console.
As the days passed and there became less group work to do on the ‘song’ record, people spent more time in the wild studio, emerging from the jungle of interconnected equipment in the early hours. We worked very long days, but there was always enough going on to prevent any loss of momentum. Things happened very quickly.
My mixes from the jams were all done in a single afternoon: I was trying to get a little of each jam onto DAT because there was so much new work flying around that it was hard to remember it all. I made fifty-five mixes that day and never mixed anything twice.
I wasn’t expecting that we would use these mixes in the end, but it turned out that this fast, impulsive way of working was right in the spirit of the performances, and the results often make a cinematic, impressionistic counterpoint to the elaborate post-industrial drama of Markus’ mixes. They set each other off well: the combination feels like being at the edge of somewhere – where industry merges with landscape, metal with space, corrupted machinery with unsettled weather patterns, data-noise with insect chatter.