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Festival Bios and Extracts | Tour Programme | The following page includes an assortment of James bios from festival programmes.
| Aug 1979 | tour-programme booklet article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Mug Shots! | Gallery | Browse the gallery of James mugs that have been sold at shows over the years.
| Aug 1979 | gallery article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
T-Shirt Gallery | Gallery | Browse the gallery of James shirts that have been sold at shows over the years.
| Aug 1979 | gallery article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
From Venereal And The Diseases To James – What’s In A Name? | Feature, One Of The Three Feature | Before James became known as James in 1982, they had a number of what can only be described as “interesting” names. Venereal and The DiseasesQuite what the obsession with the sexually transmitted ailment was is not clear, but this was the name under which Paul and Jim played their first gig together at Eccles British Legion. The name lasted one gig. Volume DistortionKeeping the initials VD and with Gavan now on board, this name change was probably more to do with the quest for gigs and the problems the old name might cause. Or maybe it was Paul’s insistence on regular changes to the name. Model Team InternationalPaul’s girlfriend worked for a model agency in Manchester called Model Team International and they had t-shirts which the band took and named the band after. A swift change ensued when the manager of the agency threatened legal action. At this point, Tim had joined the band as dancer / backing vocalist. Model TeamA shortening of the name to appease the model agency boss. Didn’t last long as the band felt the name didn’t have the same ring to it .. and they couldn’t get free t-shirts anymore. Tribal OutlookOnly in use for a short period of time as Paul decided the band needed a single simple name and quite frankly, it’s not a very good name is it?. JamesThere are various stories about the James name:
The official biography suggests that the reason was somewhere between explanations 1 and 4. | Aug 1982 | feature oott-special-feature article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
1982 Demo (Hymn From A Village / Stutter) | Audio Archive | Audio
| Nov 1982 | audio-archive article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Manchester Hacienda – 17th November 1982 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistStutter / Discipline (incomplete)Support(supporting) Big CountryMore Information & ReviewsJames’ first time at the legendary Hacienda club in Manchester supporting Big Country. Larry was in attendance at the show and recorded it for the band with Announcement and Folklore from the gig appearing on The Gathering Sound boxset. Stutter from the show was also filmed and released on A Factory Outing video. The show was immortalised on the wall of the new Hacienda apartments built on the site of the club with a PRS plaque in 2011 commemorating James’ contribution to the Manchester music scene. Video
| Nov 1982 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ones To Watch – Sounds Magazine | Article, News |
Hot new Manchester combo called James, possibly very likely on the verge of signing to home town favourites, the godly Factory. | Jan 1983 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The James Gang – Sounds | Article, Interview |
| Oct 1983 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
“The Name Of The Game Is” – NME | Article, Interview |
James seem simple, four men, single Jimone on Factory Records. They make nothing of it – James have no phoney philosophical policies, no heroic hyperbole, no dull boasts or grand exaggeration. Their attitude is more one of the days of ATV and Swell Maps than the flashy NY remixes and glossy art design of Quando Quango or New Order. Fittingly, their record is low-key, harsh, humble, naturally bitter and almost wilfully rushed and messy with little or no production. With the homely folk-feel of fellow Mancunians, those sensitive Smiths, James could easily make their fortunes as the obvious meeting between The Fall and very early Bunnymen. But then, they’re not that simple. In fact, James are a highly peculiar thing; despite the splendid incongruity, they regard the relationship with Factory as one of mere convenience. “We just want to play gigs, and you can’t get gigs without a single. It’s a means to that end. Factory liked our tape, gave us gigs at the Hacienda and supporting New Order and then asked us to do an album. Then they wanted a mini-album, then an EP, then a 12″ – anything but a plain 45. They offered us help with production, artwork, all of which we declined. They’ve been remarkably patient. They didn’t even know whaat the single was until the day we recorded it! If anything it’s us that’s been difficult, and they never asked us to sign anything, which is all we wanted from anyone.” Jimone then, is just three songs from James – “No A-side, it’s insulting to tell people which song is better.” All have different productions and all were recorded live in the studio rather than “piece by piece on headphones” (they sneer well). The result from the snappy, slap-dash funk of ‘Fire So Close’ to the terse rumbling of ‘What’s The World’ and ‘Folklore’s unusual charm, is tentative; taut, almost disastrous, ultimately admirable, erratic and brilliant, with a concentrated anger and strange, rambling beauty that begins to prepare you for the fierce challenge of ‘Stutter’, a live highlight and their first moment of Greatness. Although they’re clearly prepared to be bold and determined to be different, the James boys are softly-spoken, shyly nervous, modest and wisely-aware of their own possibilities. Too bashful to talk to my tape, reluctant to have their pictures taken or to lend me demos or offer up influences, they even resist my attempt to discover devious intentions behind their choice of sleeve (a scrappy green and red felt-pen design of an elongated ‘Jimone’). The idea was to do one drawing each, and then choose. (Laughter breaks loose) Jimmy was the only one who finished! But it’s only a sleeve, even if it is Factory (who, perhaps justifiably, hate it). We want to be judged by our music. As long as it keeps the record clean, it’s fine.” With their past, their plans and motives, James remain strangely straightforward. “We just want to play live. We may stay with Factory, we may learn about production and change. We may learn to worry about sleeves. So far though we’ve done one single on Factory. We’re happy with that.” So, for now, Fac 78 is by James. The name was “simple, unassuming, didn’t give any clues…” And James are Jimmy Glennie (bass), Tim Booth (vocals), Paul Gilbertson (guitar), Gavan Whelan (drums). But you can believe it’s a great deal stranger than that. James. That’s it. | Oct 1983 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
BBC Radio 1 John Peel – 17th October 1983 | Audio Archive, Session |
SetlistVulture / If Things Were Perfect / Discipline / Hymn From A VillageDetails
SongsShare: | Oct 1983 | audio-archive session article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Spools Paradise (Just Hip) | Audio Archive, Compilation Appearance Album | A 1983 Compilation (non James) Album featuring James.
SummaryAn early version of Just Hip recorded with Nick Garside in 1983 that appeared on a Record Mirror cassette and is previously otherwise unreleased Track ListJust Hip DetailsReleaseAboutSongsGallery
An early version of Just Hip recorded with Nick Garside in 1983 that appeared on a Record Mirror cassette and is previously otherwise unreleased Audio
Share: | Nov 1983 | audio-archive album-compilation-appearance article compilation-appearance non-james-release discography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Piccadilly Radio – Last Radio Programme Interview | Article, Interview | Interviewer : Before the break you heard, well it was going to be the A-side of the new James single until the boys asked me to flip it over. I did in fact play If Things Were Perfect which is the b-side from Hymn From A Village and I’m delighted that James have popped in on this unearthly hour and well, as I’m sure they’ll explain they’ve got a busy time ahead of them. So welcome Gavan Whelan, Tim Booth, Larry Gott and Jimmy Glennie. Jimmy, this is a boring question but you didn’t contribute to the name, did you? Jim : Erm, not really. It was the old guitarist who thought it up. We’ve also got another James over here actually because Larry’s first name is James as well Interviewer : Ah, one of those complicated set ups where one has to change their names. If you were all Scotsmen, you could all call yourself Jimmy anyway Tuesday in fact, your tour supporting The Smiths starts. Is that correct? Jim : Yes Interviewer : So how many dates is that. Twenty odd dates? Tim : Twenty-six dates Interviewer : Oh, you must be looking forward to it, you’re going to be playing to a lot of people. Tim : Yeah Interviewer : More than one word answers fellas or we’re going to throw you straight into the studio. Now this track, we played before, If Things Were Perfect, you did in fact record it live at Strawberry, is that right? No overdubs, nothing? Tim : All the songs are recorded live but I was singing in a separate room. We did do overdubs for backing vocals because the studio couldn’t handle it. Interviewer : So is that the way you record all your stuff? Tim : We like to record like that but it’s very hard to find studios that will cater for it because they’re so into doing like great drum sounds and individual instruments. They don’t like the idea of someone coming in and doing it live. Interviewer : How did the gig go? I mean I saw you last week with A Certain General at the Hacienda? Did you enjoy that gig? Gavan : Not really. No Interviewer : Why? Gavan : Just the atmosphere. It was very cold. Interviewer : Very cold. You’ve played the Hacienda before, didn’t you? I think I saw you Gavan : I think we’ve played about six times Jim : A few times Interviewer : I mean that’s something we could talk about in the future. I know you’re busy for a few months with The Smiths. It’d be nice to put a Last Radio Programme James gig on and possibly record it. If you know the way you guys go about things live, it might be a good thing for the radio. That’s something we can discuss later. This is in fact the second time you’ve supported The Smiths. You did some Irish dates with them. Gavan : Yes. That was good. Interviewer : Did that go well? Gavan : Very well Interviewer : How do you find The Smiths audience? I suppose it can’t be a bad time to support The Smiths with the album at number one. I presume the whole tour has sold out now. Has it? Gavan : Yeah Tim : Yeah Jim : In Ireland it was great, but the audiences are really different over there. People go along to enjoy themselves so they do Interviewer : Are you prepared for this tour in as much as audiences are going to vary from town to town? And sometimes you’ll go down well when you’ll appear not to go down well. Jim : We’re used to that. Interviewer : There again, I suppose Manchester is notorious for that. You think you’ve had a bad night and in fact people love you. Tim : Yeah, we never seem to play well in Manchester actually. Interviewer : You don’t? Tim : No Interviewer : How far, I mean I presume you’ve played London and places? Tim : Yeah, we’ve played all round the country. Interviewer : So at the moment you appear to be quite a fashionable band in as much as you’re The Smiths favourite band and everything. So you’ll have quite a lot to live up to. I mean when we had The Smiths in here, we had Johnny and Mike Joyce in September, October, November time, I can’t remember when, when Hatful of Hollow was coming out, and all they did, instead of promoting themselves, was promote James. So it’s quite nice to know that Manchester’s favourite boys are big fans of yours. Tim : Yeah, we pay them a lot of money for that actually. Interviewer : You don’t manage them, do you? Tim : No, but Morrissey’s our PR man Interviewer : Is he? I’ve not really studied the NME poll but weren’t you mentioned in Morrissey’s favourite bands in that? Tim : Yeah Interviewer : Excellent Tim : I mean they keep doing this, it’s really nice of them, we can’t understand it either. Interviewer : Are you embarrassed by it? Tim : No, it’s alright. If we were just like The Smiths friends, then we’d be put a little bit in the deep end but we reckon people will see something and it will be OK. We’ve got the music. Interviewer : So what happens after The Smiths tour? Is that too far forward planning? Gavan : We’ve got three gigs coming up in Paris, they’re maybes. Interviewer : Have you played Europe at all yet? Gavan : No, we should have gone over last year sometime to Brussels but that never came off. Interviewer : Well, I’m sure you’re well prepared for the tour. | Mar 1985 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
An Everyday Story Of Pop Folk – NME | Article, Interview |
Factory-farmed, JAMES tuck into a bean fest with carrot-crunchin’ DON WATSON. “We take a lot from TV, particularly children’s. We used the Rainbow theme tune too. Beatrix Potter is a big influence.” EVERY DAY they deliver themselves to the door of the pop abattoir. Fresh-faced, pink-cheeked and plump, they line up at one end, patient and compliant. And they conveyer belt grinds away. . . From the other end emerge neat little packages– pork pie singles, neatly cut and nicely glossed. What’s so disturbing about our current breed is not only the unnatural strength of their herd instinct, but also their apparent zest for their own carve-up. If they don’t yet come ready-sliced, they’re sure marked “cut on the dotted line”–and in their own eye-liner, too. Retarded pigs, woolly-brained sheep and prize turkeys the lot of them. Under such circumstances, it’s scarcely suprising that some of us have more sympathy for the wolves– they may be hard at the core but their company is more fun. But every now and then, from the ranks of the herbivores, there falls an unlikely offspring. Such are James, strange and ungainly, awkward and charming– a black sheep at last. HERE THEY come in their cardboard box van. Here they come, trundling around the country in a truck designed for the get ahead greengrocer of the 1950’s. Here they come, the reputed Taoist vegans, another Manchester quartet supporting The Smiths on their nationwide tour. Here come the old pop perpetrators. Playing music! Eating beansprouts! Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce James– saviours of nothing at all, suppliers of intriguing music. Vocalist Tim wears what appears to be a white football jersey onstage and possesses possibly the most appalling pair of shoes I’ve ever seen (the kind that look like large brown omelettes). He talks softly and convincingly but warns the listener that by tomorrow he’ll have changed his mind. He has a sense of humour (which, with those shoes, is just as well). Drummer Gavan has a beard, wears shorts onstage, and maintains he once liked Led Zeppelin (he also has a sense of humour). As recently reported, he has been known to indulge in jam sessions with house bands in Greek restaurants. “But they threw me off after two numbers,” he moans, “and charged me full price for the meal.” Bassist Jim is thin with short straight hair and is, for inexplicable reasons, a generic Mancunian. He started James when his friend at school bought a nicked guitar. Guitarist Larry has a beard and wears glasses. He appears onstage in yellow trousers. James are, as everyone associated with Factory has told me, strange. Our first encounter takes place after this first support slot on The Smiths tour. In their van, they’re tucking in to a celebratory post-gig mixture of baked beans, bean- sprouts, and brown rice. They have to be back early to their bed and breakfast abode– this ain’t rock and roll. “Vegans yes, Buddhists no,” they maintain concerning certain rumours currently circulating. “God knows where they got that one from.” They continue to conduct a eminently knowledgeable conversation about the yin and yang of food. Passing their home photos to the bemused photographer, they discuss how it nice it would be to stick a snap-shot of a friend on the front cover of NME as representative of a James piece. They seem to be serious, although with James it’s often hard to tell. LIKE I say, James are strange and indeed it’s their strangeness that’s their strength. As evidence, may I refer you back to their two excellent Factory singles– ‘Jim One’ and ‘James Two’. Released in October ’83, at a time when the country was rank with Postcard plagiarists, ‘Jim One’ didn’t sound too much like_ anything, but it was touched by a almost frantic energy that charged with the thrill of a “Falling and Laughing”, a “Radio Drill Time”, or a “Get Up an Use Me”. ‘Folklore’, the most individual of the three songs on ‘JIm One’, took the same folk tinges that were being touched by the then nascent Smiths, and expanded them to full nasal extremes. Lyrically they played with self- examination, humour and contridiction, spinning a delightful web of nonsense. There was something special about ‘Jim One”. From here to silence. The Smiths rose, James ducked. Illness, and their insistence on individual methods kept James schtum. Their low profile was broken only for the odd New Order support slot– their ruptures were met with raptures but still no more was forthcoming. The conveyer belt was not for James. As undoubtedly the brightest prospect for ’85, James were to be the cover of the New Year NME. They refused– “We want to introduce the band by music, not words,” was their argument. James are not interesting in shouting, Look at Me! Now at last, there’s the second single, the classic ‘James II’, pairing the offbeat anthemic ‘Hymn From a Viilage’ with the spindly romanticism of ‘If Things Were Perfect’. And with a support slot of The Smiths grand-scale British tour, it seems that James are, however reluctantly, set to attract attention. THE SMITHS have sown their seed, but not yet spawned their imitators. Some cloth-eared observers, seeing Morrisey as a man who might not be averse to flattery, have misread James’ sincerity. “It doesn’t really annoy us,” says Tim, “it doesn’t really touch us, because we’ve been going so long, and anyone who really took the trouble to find out about us would know that we’ve been playing those songs and that music before, it’s just through force of circumstances, and through the popularity of The Smiths that we find ourselves in fashion. “We’d worry about it if we didn’t have strong songs, but we do.” There are features in common of course, a certain folk influence a vulnerability in the singing. Not that it’s a race, but in many ways James are ahead of The Smiths; live they reach far further into areas of form experimentation only touched on by The Smiths in ‘Barbarism Begin At Home’. Morrisey is certainly not taking the easy option by inviting his favourite band on tour with him. “They were offered money to take people on this tour,” Tim points out, “but instead they’re paying us and losing money.” “WHATS THIS then, a school party?” asks the hunched caretaker in West Country drawl as photographer Ridgers leads us through the graveyard gate towards the mausoleum for the photo-session. Um no, we just wanted to have a look around. “Weeeell, you be supposed to get permission, there’s some strange_ things been happening around here.” “Strange unnatural_ things,” we chorus once out of ear-shot. Strange James may be, but unnatural never. Their vegan lifestyle, their attitude toward music is all directed to the concept of natural music– that may sound like a soundtrack to meusli munching, but there’s a touch more to it than that. “If you drink a lot or whatever,” says Tim, “you’re always swinging from one extreme to another. A lot of our approach is concentrated around the idea of maintaining a balance.” “Then you have the strength to pursue your own interests, rather than being pulled by other influences,” says Jim. “You have a strong centre which you can then work from,” Tim continues. “People have this idea that balance has something to do with conservatism. They seem to think that it’s the core of this society, which is rubbish, this society is a very unbalanced one. To be balanced in this society is to be radical and extreme, whereas to be ill in this society is to be normal.” Of course I have my copy of _Under The Volcano_ peering from my pocket and can’t quite agree with this as a rule. Try as I might I can’t picture Jane Fonda as more extreme than Charles Bukowski, Malcolm Lowry or Antonin Artaud. My mind also runs to favourite sick men like Nick Cave and Blixa Bargeld, sometimes victims of their own excesses to be sure, but far from normal. Black sheep James have it seems, been tempted themselves to run with the wolves. “Something like the early Birthday Party was really appealing to me,” says Tim, “and it was appealing because it was self-destructive, it appealed to the adolescent in me. You look at the world, see how awful it is, realise you can’t change anything and you just turn your anger inwards, you just want to burn up. It seems like a romantic, mythical way to go, but inside it it’s really shit.” Tim recently had a dream. “I met Nick Cave, and he was showing me a video of The Birthday Party doing a fantastic version of ‘Dead Joe’ and I was going God! How did you do_ it? Then I looked at him and his face was just covered in huge craters, turning green and falling away in lumps, and I said, Ah, I see how you did it! It seems that if you really want to create that type of poison then you’re going to get poisoned by it in the process.” Instead James have swung to the opposite extreme– and their resultant individuality is testament that it is, as they claim, an extreme. Particularly live, James are a certain sound pushed towards its limit. “It is a matter of the balance between order and chaos,” says Tim, “always seeing how far you can go without the results sounding actually unpleasant. Always teetering on the brink of pure chaos, but always keeping that thread.” IN THE age of gloss-finished, soul-less single, ‘Jim One’ and ‘James Two’ are appealingly messy. They sound urgent, direct, and rough around the edges. “That’s because they’re recorded live,” explains Gavan, “also because quite frequently, we don’t know where the songs are going to start and stop. “Particularly live the songs are rarely in a finished form, they’re just collections of threads of ideas that that can always vary. The idea, theoretically, is that when a song stops being changed by the new inputs and new ideas then it’s recorded and then ideally we never play it again.” “Unfortunately it doesn’t always work like that,” counters Tim, “With ‘If Things Were Perfect’, for example, we’d been playing that for three years, then on the day we came to record it, it just changed.” So what if you had the money to afford a big expensive studio and expensive production? “I think we’d record rehearsals instead,” replies Jim, “or maybe work in a classical studio with the methods we use now. The trouble with working with rock studios is that they’re just not used to doing live recordings.” “We have got tamer,” says Tim, “we’ve had to. At one time the majority of our material was made up onstage, and either we’d be great or we’d make absolute arseholes of ourselves.” “Once on a New Order support slot, Jim and the other guitarists we had at the time just went on with acoustic guitars and jammed. We used to swap instruments a lot more too; one time Gavan just walked offstage and left us to get on with it, leaving me to play drums. We used to do that a lot, just disrupt each other deliberately, just to make it more exciting, now we just leave songs open ended.” It occured to me that ‘If Things Were Perfect’ showed the noble influence of the _Camberwick Green_ theme tune. “Yes,” replies Tim straightfaced,”that’s where we lifted it from, consciously– we take a lot from TV, particularly children’s. We used the _Rainbow_ theme tune too. Beatrix Potter is a big influence.” Sounds inconsolably twee. “Not at all, have you read the _Tale Of Samuel Whiskers_? That’s about a cat that crawls up a chimney and gets captured by a big rat in a waistcoat who puts it in a roly-poly pudding. All the mother cat can hear downstairs is this roly-poly-roly-poly sound. She doesn’t know they’ve got her kitten and they’re turning it into a pie. “I used to have nightmares about being put in a sandwich after that one.” JAMES ARE happier in the turnip field opposite than in the mausoleum. Once the photo-session’s over they can even dig up dinner. Are you a bunch of hippies? “Hmmm, radical Neils, that’s the current stereotype for vegetarians, isn’t it?” As with The Smiths, there’s a strong undertow of folk in James’ themes. “My dad’s a folk singer,” says Gavan, “so that might have something to do with it– 24-verse Scottish ballads and all that which takes some doing. “I think there is a bit more to it than that, though, it’s a lot to do with modal tunes, which seem to be in all of us. What we used to do at the beginning was to try and strip our influences down– if we jammed a song and it sounded a bit too much like Joy Division, New Order, Birthday Party, Pop Group or whoever, we’d just stop playing it. When we stripped them all down we were left with folkish, modal tunes. There’s something about them which seems to be characteristic of British people.” HERE THEY come, trundling around the country in their top-speed-20 van. Why, you sometimes wonder, do they do it? Jim: “When you play a song at the point when you write it, and it’s just so good. In a way you know that you’ll never play it that well again, there’s a tremendous buzz from that.” Tim: “When everyone changes together at the same time and you’ve never played the song before, so you shouldn’t know, but just because you’ve been playing together for so long you anticipate it.” Larry: “It goes on to another level and everyone realises and starts grinning at one another.” Tim: ” You’re trying not to stop because all you really want to do is burst out laughing. So we play for about 20 minutes and then fall about in hysterics.” “Then you’ve got to condense 20 minutes of ideas into one song,” says Gavan. “Most of our best songs actually are based on mistakes,” says Tim. “When you make mistakes that’s when you’re acting from yourself, rather than what you’ve learned or heard before– chord changes that go wrong, drum beats that fall apart.” “When it collapses,” Gavan adds, “somehow something comes out of the other end.” Meanwhile the conveyer belt grinds on. . . Tim: ” ‘If Things Were Perfect’– it’s partly about the way people will say, Hey! We’re having a great time! Come and join us! But you really know they’re not, they just need people to reinforce the idea that they’re having a great time, you can see that they’ve got frozen smiles.” Somehow I get the impression that James will keep going their own sweet way. | Mar 1985 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Saturday Night Live Interview – Radio 1 | Article, Interview | Muriel Gray : Now Tim, can I ask you first of all – is this going to be a real bug bear, the fact that Morrissey from The Smiths has been describing you as a brilliant band. How are you going to live that one down? Tim : We hope that people will take the trouble of coming to listen to us and they’ll hear and see for themselves. Muriel : Because obviously you’re just about to go on tour with The Smiths. A nationwide tour that’s just about to start. Tim : We’re in the middle of it now Muriel : In the middle of it now? So where are the next dates you’re going to be playing then? Tim : Margate and Ipswich and then we’re moving up north a bit, more to Manchester and Nottingham and places like that. Muriel : Now is it hard doing a tour like that with someone who’s obviously so popular. You are from Manchester, you’re perhaps living in the shadow of all these other famous Factory bands. How do you see yourself going on from here? Tim : What other Factory bands? Muriel : Well, one or two little names. New Order and so on Tim : We see it building. We just want people to see us and hear us and not believe what they read about us and make up their own opinions from live concerts and live performances. Muriel : Because there’s been some quite amazing things written about you hasn’t there? Like you’re Buddhist vegans. Is this true? Tim : No, it’s not true, not true at all. Not for one of us. Muriel : Why do you think people write these things about you? Just trying to make a little more publicity? Tim : I don’t know. We don’t say too much so I think people tend to fill in the gaps for us and make up things and let their minds run away with themselves. Muriel : This is quite a new eighties thing isn’t it? The quiet sensitive young men with guitars. Is this an image you’re falling into a bit? Tim : Don’t know how to answer that question Muriel : Because you are in fact a quiet sensitive young man. Tim : I don’t think so, not necessarily. And it’s not an image we’re falling into. I mean, if we are quiet sensitive young men, we probably wouldn’t know it anyway Muriel : Well, we’re very pleased to have some quiet sensitive young men on this programme, I can tell you. So what’s the next number you’re going to play. Tim : It’s called Johnny Yen and it’s about very unquiet insensitive young men who used to frequent rock n roll a lot. | Mar 1985 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
BBC Radio 1 Muriel Grey – 9th March 1985 | Audio Archive, Session | AudioSetlistHup-Springs / If Things Were Perfect / Johnny YenDetails
SongsShare: | Mar 1985 | audio-archive session article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
London ICA – 19th March 1985 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistSo Many Ways / Skullduggery / What's The World / Not There / Might As Well Be Friends / Summer Song / Johnny Yen / Just Hip / Island Swing / Discipline / Chain Mail / If Things Were Perfect / ScarecrowSupportn/aMore Information & ReviewsThe encore of this gig was recorded for the Old Grey Whistle Test. Sounds review by Bill BlackThe last Big Noise to burst forth from an ICA Rock Week was The Jesus And Mary Chain and this they did literally when scowls from the stage gave way to scuffles in the foyer. This might explained the “police presence” outside the prim bunker-like venue on the first night of “I Want Independents” week. But really, they needn’t have bothered. See, James are nice boys, raised on Mama Morrissey’s milk of tragicomic humanism (I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when singer Tim wailed “An earwig crawled into my ear / Made a meal of the wax and hair) and gloriously devoid of trappings. So the amps stayed miraculously upright, drummer Gavan stayed (for the most part) behind his Ringo-style kit – leaving the music to dwell amongst us with good deal of swank and even more swell. To explain : James have completely redefined the traditional rock dynamic by replacing the ingenious devices of tension and release with … well, one long crescendo. So a song like “Prison” goes from bulky bass chords and hamstrung high-life guitar propped up by Tim’s nursery rhyme vocal melodies to a polyrhythmic explosion charged by octopus-armed Gavan and animated by Tim’s preacher man paroxysms. The tease and dare is reinstated by James unique, not to say camp, delivery. And here lay my reservations for the evening. Music suffers from being bathed in contentment: what’s needed now is a more restless approach from this over-rehearsed quartet. But such nagging pales beside the simple fact that these grinning Mancunians have revamped the tones of guitar rock without replacing them with a worthless rattle of meaningless murk. The next Big Noise. Video | Mar 1985 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
BBC Radio 1 Janice Long – 25th April 1985 | Audio Archive, Session | AudioSetlistChain Mail / Folklore / Summer Song / DisciplineDetails
SongsShare: | Apr 1985 | audio-archive session article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Mayhem At Riverside – Sounds News | Article, News |
James offer “an evening of tunes and other entertainment with help from some of their friends” on the 12th. | May 1985 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
US Smiths Tour – Melody Maker News | Article, News |
But to dispel rumours that they’ll be selling out over there and settling in Laurel Canyon to write their albm, they’ve set a couple of gigs for their return. They’ll be drawling at London’s Bloomsbury Theatre on July 17 and hitting the mega-festival circuit at the WOMAD Festival on Mersea Island on July 21. | May 1985 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
News Article – Sounds | Article, News | James have dates at South Devon Hood Festival (7 July), Newcastle Riverside Centre (18) and Bristol Ashton Court Festival (3 August). These are in addition to their reported festival appearances at London Bloomsbury (17 July), WOMAD (21) and Manchester Platts Fields (2 August) To coincide with this activity, the first two James singles have been remixed by Factory Records and are released this week as a 12 inch single | Jun 1985 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Discreet Campaigns Vol 1 (What’s The World live) | Audio Archive, Compilation Appearance Album | A 1985 Compilation (non James) Album featuring James.
SummaryA live version of What’s The World included on a compilation cassette Track ListWhat’s The World (live) DetailsReleaseAboutSongsGallery
A live version of What’s The World included on a compilation cassette This may be available to purchase on Discogs Audio
Share: | Jul 1985 | audio-archive album-compilation-appearance article compilation-appearance non-james-release discography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
City Life Interview | Article, Interview |
| Jul 1985 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Melody Maker News – Summer Tour Dates | Article, News |
James play another IVY event at Basildon Gloucester Park on Sunday 4 August. And other new bookings for the band are Sheffield Leadmill (July 30), Bristol Ashton Court Festival (August 3) and Brighton Zap Club (8).
| Jul 1985 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Salad Days – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
For a start, most bands who’d been feted by the music press and courted so assiduously by record companies would have jumped at the opportunity of selling their soul (music) by signing on the dotted line for a massive advance, and having their faces plastered across the nation’s news stands. Not James. Having dipped their toes into the murky waters and have decided to wait until they come up with a scheme to sterilise the cesspool before they plunge in. After the release of their first single Jimone (pronounced Jim 1) during the back end of 1983, James laid low for a year, partly by design and partly enforced by singer and lyricist Tim Booth’s bout of hepatitis. In the last six months, the release of the musically more sophisticated James II (no prizes for the pronounciation) and the coveted slot as support on the recent Smiths tour has seen James move up from likely contenders to dead certs for the title of the “next big thing” James pop is proving to be a breath of fresh air in what has become a stale self-congratulatory idiom. Gavan Whelan’s drumming provides a precise backbone for bassist Jim Glennie and guitarist Larry Gott’s whirling musical dervlish. When did we last have a potential chart act whose intelligent lyrics force you to put down what you’re doing and actually listen to the radio? Comparisons with The Smiths abound, not least because Morrissey has taken it as a personal crusade to champion the James cause to all who would listen, and everyone else, too. The Smiths have based a career on perming Johnny Marr’s two tunes with Morrissey’s two theme – misery and sexual abstinence. Although most Smiths songs stand out individually, collectively they’re at risk of sinking into a whining sludge. By contrast, James, with only five songs released so far, have traversed a breadth of emotion within a remarkably varied musical format. They have recently been re-released as a twelve inch under the title Village Fire. This combines the strangely hypnotic anti-sexist themes of Folklore, the drivingly anthemic rush of What’s The World (a genuine pop classic), the staccato-like angst of Fire So Close, the reflective romanticism of If Things Were Perfect and the powerful musical synthesis of the celebratory Hymn From A Village. James have cultivated a reputation for being a bunch of eccentrics. False rumours abound that they’re a collection of crazy Buddhists, no doubt fuelled by the fact that they used to go around with their heads shaved calling each other “Buddha” or “Gandhi”. They’re also the proud owners of a van which looks like a relic from a time long past. They trundle up and down the country at a snail’s pace cooking their vegetarian food in this home-from-home. Every James interview seems to take place over a wholesome meal – we were meant to meet at The Hare Krishna Restaurant. What I still haven’t discovered is how a band who eat so much manage to stay so thin. How did the name of James come about? “Our ex-guitarist came up with it,” replies Jim. “He may have named us after James from Orange Juice, he fell in love with him.” “Also, there was a surfeit of Jameses in the band then,” adds Gavan. “Anyway, my name would be too Heavy-Metal sounding” Tim : “I don’t like the name much” What would you prefer “Timothy”? Shane MacGowan of The Pogues observed that he would have preferred Jim to James. Do James get portrayed as being too serious? “No, we’re not,” responds Tim, “we’re seen as wacky vegans, garden gnomes, Buddhist gurus or even Tiny Tims” Jim : “People ask us banal questions like ‘Is Morrissey celibate?'” Larry : “Or ‘Was Ian Curtis buried or cremated?'” Tim, when you used to have your head shaved in the past, you said it was because you were disgusted. With what? Larry : “Dandruff” “That was my standard reaction in those days,” says Tim. “It was disgust with everything, myself included. It wasn’t a very positive outlook and it had to change.” It was about this time that the Buddhist rumours were bandied. Gavan : “We weren’t surprised, though they were false.” “None of us adhere to any religions,” adds Tim. “They’re based on faith and belief, not personal experience.” “Some Buddhist ideas are quite good. For example, the idea that this is all an illusion and that you label things, and then stop actually seeing them because you’ve given them a name. So you don’t actually see what a tree is, you just call it ‘tree’ and that takes care of that.” What have been the major influences on you? Tim : “Everyone is a hotch-potch of influences, it would be difficult to pull out any specific ones. Our childhood and parents are bound to have the greatest effect upon us. I used to go to church a lot and that’s coming out in our songs now – those God-awful Christian hymns! If we see something that’s too overtly like something else, we don’t use it.” Gavan : “Individually we all have our influences but collectively they don’t come through.” Gavan cites various jazz musicians while Tim talks of Doris Lessing. Interestingly, no mention is made of contemporary pop music. Do you ally yourself with any other bands? “We hardly listen to pop music anymore,” replies Larry. “I think we share attitudes more than music with other groups.” “We had a group outing to see Dollar Brand” adds Jim. You’ve quoted him saying “I’m not a musician, I’m being played” before. What exactly did you mean? Tim : “In our day-to-day life, thought results in a time delay before it’s translated into action. But when we’re playing and it’s going really well, we don’t really think about it, it just happens spontaneously. The music almost becomes out of our control.” Gavan : “Usually when we rehearse a song for the first time, you get that feeling where the hair stands up on the back of your neck. We hit the highest peaks during our practices.” You came out of Manchester at the time Joy Division were in their prime. They must have had an effect on you. Jim : “A lot of their music was very minimalistic, simple and depressing and that did influence us. Although we’ve got away from the depression, we’ve always been pretty basic.” | Aug 1985 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Record Mirror – “We Want To Be As Big As Coca Cola” | Article, Interview |
An Indian restaurant in Whalley Range can throw up some strange characters. Eastern sounds float lazily around in the atmosphere, an old guitar sage sits in one corner while a bearded drummer taps constantly on the table whilst searching vainly for his vegetable dahl. James are in the heart of their home city. And yes, it is raining. The desperate race has already begun to discover that most lucrative of objects – The Band of 86. In short, the collection of musical souls who will breathe fresh life back into a snoozy music industry, liven up the deadliest of dull charts – and make someone, somewhere very rich indeed. While some noses turn sheep-like towards the preposterous preening of Sweet-On-Sennapods soundalikes Sigue Sigue Sputnik, and others to any number of pretenders to the U2 throne, there’s one band that have none of the trendiness of the former, nor the guitar swirling pomposity of the latter. James are a Mancunian foursome. They’ve been around, in some form or other for six years, but play with the enthusiasm and joy of a bunch of novices. James have a rather stupid name, but two timelessly charming singles on Factory Records to their credit. They once supported The Smiths around the concert halls of Britain and – after much deliberation – have just been signed by the man who discovered Madonna. James, erstwhile indie favourites and no doubt with neatly spruced belly buttons to the fore are making their play for big label success. Tim Booth, Gavan Whelan, Jimmy Glennie and Larry Gott are the four individuals who make up James. They laugh a lot, write rather good tunes and perform them with a sparse but energetic sound and much twitching and twirling from Timothy. Their forthcoming single “Chain Mail” is the first since signing to Sire / blanco y negro for a rather nice, if undisclosed sum. Out at the turn of the month, it’s the first chance for most people to hear them. “We want to be as big as Coca Cola,” says Tim. “But we won’t rot your teeth.” It all began six years ago. The cultural centre of the music scene had switched from London to the North. The safety pin was no longer the holy relic it was purported to be. Instead the cult of the dirty mac was in full fringe-flopping flow. In Liverpool, Ian MacCulloch, Julian Cope and Pete Wylie were the monickers to bandy round, while Manchester’s greatest musical export since Freddie Garrity went by the name of Joy Division. Coming up the rear was one Mark E Smith and his cheery Fall crew. And in the Whelan household’s front room, Gavan and Jimmy Glennie, just recently introduced by a mutual schoolfriend, were practising songs by these two most influential of local bands. Some two years later, Gavan and Jim were joined by Tim, first as a dancer (and if you’ve seen them live, the wonders of his epiletic skank will already have been revealed to you), then as singer of the still unnamed band. At this time, the vocalist was one Danny Ram, whose departure was followed by even greater things in the world of entertainment. Jim : “On the Val Doonican show” Tim : “He did the rocking chair. He pulled the string” With a sense of humour like that in tow, Tim, Jim and Gavan set about thinking up a name that would sum up their musical aspirations. Or not, as it turned out. Tim : “James really didn’t mean anything but it was quite an original name back them. There were no Smiths… No other bands with just a name for their title” Gavan : “There were lots of bands with long names at the time” Jim : “It was things like Echo and the Bunnymen, the Teardrop Explodes, that sort of alternative thing. Only it wasn’t alternative anymore” Tim : “And with the name James, people didn’t know what to expect, a hairdresser, a poet or whatever” Gavan : “So they got both” Larry : “That’s right, we’re hairdressing poets” Eighteen months ago, the line-up was completed when “old guitar sage” Larry left a life of teaching other people around Manchester how to find fame through six strings and some nimble fret work and took to a life of performing himself. James first appearance on vinyl was three years ago with ‘Jimone’, a collection of three songs that long ago sold out of the initial few thousand pressings. Together with James II (‘Hymn From A Village’ and ‘If Things Were Perfect’) they appeared on a 12 inch EP late last year, again on Factory. Jim : “All we’ve done is made two singles with Factory. We’ve never signed anything and have never considered ourselves on Factory. I don’t know if they did. They were really good. They let us do whatever we wanted and it worked really well at the time” Tim : “I think we always had our eye on moving, taking things on a step and just moving onto bigger things. Our experience with Factory in this country with the singles has been that they were quite …. inefficient in a way. And we didn’t want to trust an album worldwide to them.” Gavan : “They haven’t got the capital behind them. They’ve got £5,000 or something for a single, but as soon as it’s released, then that’s the money gone. There’s no money to back it up until it starts selling.” Jim : “We got to a stage where we thought we’d got good enough music to reach a lot of people, so we decided to sign up with a major label. There just doesn’t seem to be any alternative to us anymore.” Ten years after the punk explosion was supposed to end the dominance of the major labels, it’s rather sad that bands still feel the need of the heavy backing of a major corporation to gain the success they yearn for, but such is the situation. After months of rumours about large cheques exchanging hands in return for James’ collective signature, they finally signed for Sire together with blanco y negro in November last year. So why was it necessary? Larry : “To get an LP out basically” Tim : “And to do it professionally. We’ve spent a long time on songs and you want them to sound the best you can” Jim : “We signed with Seymour Stein. He’s the guy who signed Madonna and Talking Heads. So we want to be the next Madonna. They have this huge promotion scheme for us. They’re going to make us shave our beards and Larry’s going to have to wear compact lenses . We’re really into it, because we’re in to being puppets” If James were at all hesitant about relinquishing their indie status and “selling their souls to the devils”, they hide it very well. With their diminutive minders Martine and Jenny keeping a sharp eye on their business interests, just how much control are they going to have over the way they are to be sold to the wider record buying public? Tim, Jim, Gavan, Larry : “None!” Tim: “We said, do what you want with us. we want fame.” Jim: “Give us your money. We will only sign for lots of money.” Tim: “Thirty quid. We come cheap. Jim was a bit hesitant. We had to beat him every night to persuade him.” Jim; “I was convinced we were worth 35, but. ..” Behind the frivolity, though, is a group of people who appear to know exactly what they’re doing and are under no illusions as to the situation they are getting into. Tim: “The thing is, we looked at different companies and the thing about Seymour Stein is that he seems to be quite a music fan whereas with everyone else we saw, there were nice individuals but they were ‘business men’. “There are businessmen behind Seymour Stein, but it was nice to see the person in control of it all was a music fan.” “We’ve got a fair amount of control. We haven’t got total control, which is what we thought we’d get, but we’ve got quite a lot. We thought we’d hang out for total control – for eight months – but we never got it. “We all thought our music was so. ..” Jim: “Brilliant. ” Tim; “That they’d eventually say, do what you want, boys.” Jim: “Geniuses, geniuses!” Tim: “And unfortunately they weren’t like that. Some of them were incredible. They’d say, ‘Oh, this is great’, then suggest a single for release and say, ‘But you have to chop the last minute off the end’ or ‘You have to stick this or that in’.” Gavan: uOr ‘You’ve not got enough choruses’ or ‘Can anyone play a synthesiser?’.” Tim: “One guy thought we had a few wild songs. but some good commercial songs too, so he thought we could make an album of commercial songs, then press a few of the wild ones and give them away to our fans.” With the contract they have signed, though, James are confident that they’ll be consulted on everyttling to do with them. “They can’t do anything without asking the band first, ” points out manager Martine. Jim: “Then we say no and they just go ahead and do it anyway!” So far, James’s media image has come across as anything from “Buddhist vegans” to surly musos to wacky chaps who appear to be wearing custard pies on their feet”. Being neither Buddhists nor vegans, and there certainly don’t appear to be any custard pies hiding under the table today, there’s just the surliness and furrowed brows to find out about. Unfortunately, James positively beam with good humour. (Well, Tim and Jim do, Larry kind of smirks enigmatically, while Gavan’s style leans more towards the wry curl of the lip than cheery grins, but it amounts to the same thing.) Gavan: “Smiling. That’s something a lot of people have picked up on as well. We smile a lot on stage apparently. Dead wacky that” Jim: “Smile ‘smugly’ at each other.” Larry : “The fact that we’re from Manchester and Manchester bands don’t smile seems to confuse some people. The new Manchester misery guts school – James don’t just fit in.” Tim : “That’s another thing. Not many “serious” bands smile. Bands which seem to have serious music they’ve worked hard on , you make a joke and it somehow seems to undermine it. There aren’t many bands that are passionate who also make jokes – even in records. There are some that sneak them in and hide them, and some like the Fall, you can’t tell whether it’s humour or grotesqueness. Instead, you’re meant to walk around being angst ridden and full of fury and depresssion” Jim: “We are, aren’t we?” James are under no illusion that as the new Duran Duran, they would stand as much chance as Michael Heseltine keeping his hair in place. The new Wham! even. And as for the new Aha – well my dear, they wouldn’t stand an earthly! No, their aspirations lie more in the area of Tom Waits or, more to the pop Talking Heads- artists who have achieved a fair amount of commercial success; but at no expense to their ‘credibility’ (ahem) or musical brilliance. Larry: “What’s ‘big’ or successful anyway, Is it sales of records or is it how much in the public eye you are! There are some people who are not in the public eye and they sell a consistent number of records. That’s a good situation to be in.” James’s music is never likely to be a favourite on the Steve Wright show nor are they perhaps the stuff the musical breaks on Pebble Mill are made of. Their songs range from the quirky to the downright tuneful and pleasant. If the commercial success they deserve does come, it’s likely to be through building a following live and subsequent album sales rather than snappy three minute songs -although don’t discount that possibility too quickly. Tim: “I think we might sneak in like the Police did. Their stuff was very good at the beginning. Maybe more commercially accessible than ours, but they went through and established themselves very quickly after hard work. ” Jim: “We have got more commerciaily accessible songs. ” Tim: “All we do is put them out the best we can in the way that we like them. I hope we’d never put out anything just sell large numbers.” Jim: “Though if we’ve got mortgages going -!” And so, with contracts signed, the first single waiting in the wings and maybe the odd new woolly jumper to add that touch of showbiz glamour, just how successful wouid James like to be? Gavan: “I’ve thought about this one, and unless we change – change our music I couldn’t see our music going down well at Madison Square Garden.” Tim: “We think our songs can be very popular though. Big as Madonna! Larry, when he’s got less clothes or looks amazingly like Madonna, so we could handle that one. Or big as Jesus” .Jim: “Big as cheeses!” Tim: “Yeah. Just like John Lennon said. ‘We’re now as big as cheesy wotsits’.” That, indeed, would be fame. | Jan 1986 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
BBC Radio 1 John Peel – 20th January 1986 | Audio Archive, Session |
SetlistScarecrow / Really Hard / Skullduggery / Are You Ready?Details
SongsShare: | Jan 1986 | audio-archive session article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Four Imaginary Boys – NME | Article, Interview |
“I’d like to put a disclaimer in at this point: Mat Snow is using very long word and drawing us into an academic discussion of our music when we consider it to be fun and quite simple.” I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. “But I wanted that disclaimer. And that was no insult to you.” None taken I’m sure. “You’re using a lot of words, varied words, quite well-chosen words, but a lot of which you associate with theories and academics. ‘Hermetic’ things like that. When you talk to someone like that, you tend to start talking like that too; so if you quote us, it might make us sound … This isn’t the way we normally talk about things. So your piece will reflect, to a large degree, you – even down to the words we are using.” Should you imagine that what you are about to read is a minefield of misinformation, plonking authorial projection and sheer misrepresentation of James, a pop group from Manchester, then think again. A plethora of polysyllables and a thimbleful of theory does not mean no fun, it means James are scuttling around in the margins of pop, in an area so left-field as to present no easy comparisons or ready made definitions. So until someone can coin accessibly short and simple words to describe what James are up to, then volumes of verbiage will just have to do. It is quite possible however that there are no stories about James that are not true. Here I am tucking into a plateful of vegetarian chilli as the lecithin is passed round the table to be sprinkled on one’s food as an aid to the absorption of cholesterol and harmful saturated fats. Also breaking bread in the parlour of Liverpool’s Amazon studios are Larry Gott, whose guitar is as mercurial as his demeanour is of guru quietude; bearded drummer Gavan Whelan, the band’s token drinker (“I’m the bad one, really, I haven’t come to terms with anything.”); bassist Jim Glennie, the soul of amiability; managers Martine and Jennifer, the diametric opposites of every cigar-chomping, turkey-talking shark of your nightmares; producer Lenny Kaye, six-foot-four of hair, New York bonhommie and jovial recollection of his illustrious track record with ‘Nuggets’, Patti Smith and Suzanne Vega; engineer Gil Norton, who wants to see his name in print; and an empty place for Monty. Monty comes in. He is James singer Tim Booth, pale, quiet, seemingly lost in thought. Soft, unlined and somewhat angelic, his face is half-concealed behind a pair of spectacles so owlish and bulletproof as to scream for attention; likewise those Cornish-pastie shoes, the fashion sensation of the indie scene last Spring and still just as mindboggling. Tim is an odd fish. From his careful deliberation when asked to talk about what he does for a living, you might expect a stoolbound stummer of the early 70s school, another Nick Drake perhaps. But when he’s singing, he shimmers in the grip of an electric spirit, as if he’s a medium or conduit for some kind of unearthly ectoplasm, a third whimsy, a third ecstasy and a third warning. And yet it’s the mystique which might grow around such apparent schizophrenia that Tim is so keen to avoid – hence his disclaimer. Much though it might profit James to come across as some sort of professional enigma, they always steer my flights of fancy firmly back down to earth, down to the basics of simplicity, health and fun. The boss of their former record label Factory (James have now signed to WEA subsidiary Sire), Tony Wilson, drew a telling comparison; the Dutch national football team. In the early 70s, Neeskens, Cruyff, Rep and the other eight purveyors of ‘total football’ believed that they were merely doing a job and never talked about it in any other way – but it was beautiful to behold. The next generation of Dutch footballers felt thus inspired to go out and self-consciously recreate that beauty on the park. Result : their football was a shambles. But what we saw in the 1974 World Cup is of the same order as what we hear when James hit their stride. Harmony, Empathy, Alchemy ….. So let’s lob a few high balls into the box, Brian, and see if we can get a result…. “We’re just as mystified as the audience….” What I’d wondered, is the meaning of those sidelong glances, inward smiles and sotto voce chat that makes a James gig so clubbable, so intimate and yet so ultimately exclusive of their audience? “Each night of a performance one of us will choose a set list,” explains Tim. “And often one of us will choose a setlist that they know we really can’t play, an absolute minefield. The joke is, we don’t know where the changes are, so we have to look at each other to sat, Are you ready now for a change? “Like in a performance, you’re just projecting out to the audience, and sometimes you find we haven’t got together, so I think, look at the others to try and bring it back in. Cos if we haven’t got it right amongst ourselves, we can’t push it out to anybody. If I feel the energy’s getting too dispersed outwards, we’ll try and retreat as a group to get this bit right so we can take it out again. It’s like juggling from one person to another. We have to be very alert to each other, very aware of what each other is playing.” Gavan : “Because we’ve been in relationship with each other for quite a while, there’s more than just a connection between us when we’re playing. There’s a stronger link; through the songs we keep confirming that. A look is much more than that, much more expressive than that.” Tim : “Sometimes says we must argue a lot, and you can see that in a lot of songs, and then you see more harmony coming in. It’s going towards harmony all the time. “It’s like a personality, isn’t it? You can have a person who doesn’t express a lot of what they’ve got or doesn’t know a lot of what really lies inside them. The more you let out, then you’ve got to integrate it and make some sense of it otherwise you’re going to get into a bit of a mess. It’s the same thing with us. It’s like, getting bigger and bigger, but trying to integrate things within a song. “Does that make sense?” The flipside to the excellent new 45 ‘Chain Mail’, titled ‘Hup-Springs’, epitomises the beauty born of cock-up and the dashing trail of the untameable in hot pursuit of the unplannable. “‘Hup-Springs’ was a three-year old song and we all got really bored and pissed off with it. So we said, Come on, let’s really push this one and see what happens. In the middle of the take Gavan dropped a drumstick, but everyone went with it! You can’t plan things like that. And when we listened to it, it was wild. You can’t better that – it had it’s own life. “And that’s how a lot of the songs are formed.” “Ha ha ha ha ha ha”. All I’d suggested was that James songs suggest a hermetic personality, imprisoned and armoured and in two minds – half wishing to get involved in the world of worlds and other people, half wishing to remain secure behind closed doors: perhaps, indeed, like a baby at the threshold of birth, torn between the womb and the harsh bright light of the world. Ahem. I earn a round of applause as well as a laugh. But they agree the word tentative is not too wide of the mark. “Originally there were four of us, and we knew there was something missing, something we were looking for, It could have been another person in the band, so we tried lots of people, but we haven’t found anybody who had a really likewise attitude. Then, to a degree, Lenny Kaye was that piece for the making of the single (James Lenny Kaye-produced debut LP ‘Lost Innocence’ is out in May). We didn’t know what producers did….” Tim changes tack. “We wanted a record company we could trust our records with – we’d made all these records we cared about like, to go back to your image, a mother whose got all these kids but she doesn’t want to let them out on to the streets, cos she sees what the world does to kids. But now we’ve decided everyone’s going to get tainted anyway, so you’ve got to give up and accept the fact that there’s no perfection. What happens is what happens. If we become bland and boring because of the process, then that happens.” “I used to go to church every week and my Dad had a particular way of singing that people would think was out of tune and everyone used to turn around and listen to him, and the family would be really embarrassed. But when you know he listen to what he was doing, he was always in harmony but in a really strange way. Quite bizarre.” I’ve heard tell of Tim’s closeness to his family and a possibly secluded childhood. Indeed, he seems far older than his 25 years, a serene young man seemingly untouched by his days as a post-punk raver when studying drama at Manchester University, during which period he was to some of his friends “the little woolly lamb”. Gavan and Jim grew up in the same terraced street in Manchester’s Moss Side. Only one side of it remains now, the rest of the terraces torn down during their childhood to make way for tower blocks. Singing nursery rhymes whilst playing amongst the building sites is a memory; seeing The Beatles on TV is another. Inscrutable as ever, Larry’s roots lie in the anonymous Manchester suburb of Denton. “If you think of a kid seeing the power of television, seeing the effect the Beatles caused. I bet that sticks in there,” speculates Tim. “But later on you might think of all these brilliant reasons why you want to be on stage – you were going to be a great actor or change the world – but the reason is it got attention. Everybody’s so insecure they think there’s some value in being special in a public way. The reality is you see how people get corrupted by it, really ill from it, with a vain and empty lifestyle. “I’d acted twice in school plays and it sounded like a soft option at University and quite good fun. And I wanted to investigate acting because I thought people acted with each other all the time, and I thought this would penetrate to the heart of it. But I found it really boring, didn’t like it all. I could never remember lines! “Purging demons? Hmmm, yes, in those days it was true. Acting used to put me through a lot that I hated, It used to put me on the edge, scare the hell out of me. “Now I find I do better performances when I think it’s all a big joke, and I think we all share that. People say we’re playful and I think that’s when we’ve got it in perspective – it’s fun and that’s the way it should be. You’ve got all this stimulus coming at you and you’ve got to integrate it or else it’ll just drive you mad.” Ever investigated Exegesis, EST, encounter therapy or the like? “I’ve looked into a lot of those things. I find that a lot of them are very superficial and might work for a couple of weeks and then the holes start to fill back in again. And all of them are based on ego in the first place. Really, if you want something that’s going to last, it’s got to penetrate deeper than that.” God? “Those words are loaded – God! But there has to be some intelligence otherwise everything falls apart. Nature is such an integrated system that there has to be an intelligence behind it; it just couldn’t happen otherwise. “When you go into the country on your own, you can become very harmonious, very peaceful. And yet when you come back to the city and the pollution and traffic noise and the speediness and the electric bombardment and the drink and the canned food and the cigarettes, you are different and then it’s easy to believe in disorder with chaos and no meaning. “When I lived in Hulme, I got sick, I reflected the environment I live in. It all will end up being the case that you’re thinking of. The mind is a very dodgy implement to understand the world with and personally I wouldn’t trust it on any level. Intuition is much more penetrating than intellect because intuition seizes the whole all over. Whereas intellect will look at a cup as its outline and tell you its colour, but not see what’s in the cup..” Which neatly runs up against the buffers of a zen-like truth about not just James but all writing about music, something almost by definition beyond words. Like that cup, I can see James in outline and tell you what colour James are. But as to what’s inside? That’s for you to sup it and see. | Apr 1986 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NME So Many Ways News | Article, News |
The quartet return to live action with a hometown gig at Manchester PSV Club July 15 before a WOMAD Festival slot on the 19th. Next month they’ve lined up a short tour at Barrow-In-Furness August 14, Edinburgh Hoochie Coochie Club 15, Aberdeen Venue 16, Dundee Dance Factory 17. More dates will coincide with the album’s release. | Jun 1986 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Gentle Touch – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
James are a new thing. Maybe one of the last new things that’ll emerge from pop’s depleted range of possibilities, maybe the herald for a whole new order. It’s difficult to say. This is an interesting stage we’re suffering right now. In James’ words, we’re all “dying to begin again”- but the accent, as of yet, is on death, decline, drift, disintegration. James could be a penultimate, teasing glory, or the promise of renewal. It’s difficult. James are at an interesting stage too, making tentative, hopeful steps into a larger arena. Everything that makes them different and special is precisely what will create difficulties for them. But it’s going to be an adventure. James are very relaxed about it all. If they have a fault it’s perhaps that their affability and modesty can make you forget that they are “important” – if that word has any meaning left in the diminishing realm of rock 1986. They like to represent what they do as simple and natural and uncomplicated, a reticence that makes it hard to talk when you’re convinced, as I am, that their music is a sophisticated response to complex times. Sometimes I get the impression they’d like to promote the new LP, “Stutter”, without elaborating at all on contexts and intentions. “Stutter” was produced by Lenny Kaye, he of “Nuggers” and Patti Smith fame. You’d think a group as English and indie as James would be shy of linking up with someone with such heavy associations with a certain tradition of American underground rock ‘n’ roll. Or was this a conscious alignment, a coming clean about being a rock band? With James, nothing is ever deliberate, it just happens. Guitarist Larry Gott: “His name just kept cropping up. When we eventually signed to Sire, the label’s boss, Seymour Stein, knew him, you see.” Singer Tim Booth continues: “Lenny was a mixture of chance and choice. We talked to him and saw that he was really sussed. With him we were prepared to compromise, whereas with someone else, we might have closed ranks.” Compromise? I can’t see much evidence of commercial bland-out/gross-out. “Perhaps compromise is the wrong word,” suggests Jim Glennie, bassist. “It was more a question of letting Lenny’s input come into the music”. What is clear is that Kaye has given James a scope and force and brightness of sound appropriate to a major label group. James now have as much in common with early Echo or U2 as with the more flimsy, brittle sounding shambling bands. I think it’s important to stress that James are a rock group. Important precisely because they have so little truck with what we’ve come to associate with rock – the stale sleaze, the megalomania, the rowdyism, the swaggering sexuality. James are opening up possibilities for a new kind of rock, one that retains the accelerating and urgency, but relinquishes the aura of violence and overbearing masculinity. James aren’t alone – throughout the indie scene, both British and American, people are coming to the same conclusions, drawing from similar sources, developing elements like The Velvets, Byrds, Television, folk, into a rock that’s not just post-rockism, but post-r&b. It’s funny how all these hip white kids in Britain have appropriated the music and imagery of an earlier American bohemianism, only to use it as a kind of dissidence against present day Americanisation. The jangly/fuzz sound is combined with a defiant Englishness, a dissent from all that’s taken as Americanised in this country – video, wine bars, yuppiedom, soul boy culture, consumerism. A dissent from pop itself, in fact. Strange and exciting, isn’t it, that purity has become hipper than wildness, that innocence has come to seem a more desirable, cooler, state of being than worldliness? Are James aware they’re part of a wider change? They say they don’t listen to other music much, too much like a busman’s holiday. Have they got any ideas why this change is occurring? Tim muses: “It’s a different period… we’ve had that wildness stuff, and it doesn’t last long because the nature of it is such that you’re pretty ill, you can’t maintain the intensity and you burn out very quickly. So you move on to something else, hopefully something a bit more positive, and long term.” Larry continues: “It sounds like you’re putting this purity thing into a category almost like the punk explosion, or the rock explosion before that. I don’t think it will explode because of its very nature. Only things like outrage explode.” “And dissipate just as quick,” adds Gavan Whelan (drums). “We’re more like something that seeps into your bloodstream.” I’m interested that Tim speaks of moving on to something positive because, in most of the songs, you seem appalled by things, disgusted. “I hope there’s more than that. I hope there’s something positive at the end. Like ‘Black Hole’ speeds up at the end and that’s the way you get out. Plus there’s humour too – y’know, ‘Beam me up Scotty’! There is a lot to be appalled at, but not all life’s like that.” Perhaps what’s positive is just the transfiguration of sorrow in music, the sheer exultation in sound and energy. James are perhaps the best, most innovative and dynamic of jangly – nowpop groups, rivalled only by those Arizona mystics, The Meat Puppets. And it’s positive just to be able to write about bad things incisely, yet with wit and compassion. Tim’s lyrics traverse a number of interlocking themes – how machismo brutalises (both victim and self), the restlessness of desire that will never find peace in materialism or promiscuity, non-communication – and return again and again to the yearning for a home, for tranquillity, for “nature”, and “truth”. There are two really central concerns – pollution (of the environment, the body, of language) and illusion (social masks, self-deception). Tim will joke about “getting high on negativity”, but it seems to me that he does work himself up into a kind of ecstasy of denunciation on songs like “Just Hip” and “Your Loving Son”. And, because they’re exhilarating, charged pieces of music, we too get swept up in it. Both songs climax by spiralling up to the heavens and James’ music seems to strive to rise above it all, leave behind worldly concerns and base things. But I almost feel sorry for all those people whose lives are being dismissed as “disguises” and “built on lies”. The new single, “Really Hard”, implores “wake up from this dreaming state”, and it’s almost as though Tim sees all of everyday culture as a mirage, as ersatz-satisfaction. So, what are we left with, once all the veils are stripped away? Clear vision? What, I ask, are the real things? A long, embarrassed, smirky, silence ensues before Tim speaks: “Well, there’s love… and there’s waking up. Like, things are often not very real – lots of patterns in the way people behave, are dependent on the way they were treated as a child, on the environment they were brought up in, the school they went to, the psychological games their mothers and fathers played with each other, certain key events. All that can make people into a kind of machine, repeating. And when you find yourself repeating these patterns you try to wake up from that. When you start to wake up, it’s very exciting.” What do people wake up to? One thing that marks James out is the explicit way they address the way pop is a form of conditioning, how rock’s dead history of gesture can constrict our vocabulary of desire and self. “What’s The World” and “Hymn From a Village” were brilliant essays on pop’s redundancy and the search “for some words I can call my own”. The new LP contains “Johnny Yen”, an hilarious rejection of the self-immolation of the rock outsider/tortured young artist. “When you start to make songs, all the songs you’ve ever heard come in, and you have to be very alert to the clichés. It’s another facet to waking yourself up. “Clichés are dead songs, there’s no energy, no lift to them, cos you can predict what’s coming, from the first note in. Like “Hymn From a Village” stems from when we started to make a song and it seemed very robotic, like a cliché, and that led to the lyrics ‘this song’s made-up, made second-rate’. It was a sleepwalking song. So it’s the same with life – if you wake up, you become more alive, instead of just going through the same tired habits and responses to what confronts you.” It seems to me that what James are attempting is a noble project. They’re trying to inject into pop ideas and practices that are foreign or actively hostile to what pop has always been about. Pop and rock have hitherto been very much take take take, me me me, want, want, want – whereas James are trying to introduce reflection, selflessness, a quiet life, concentration, into its scheme. It makes me wonder that Sire think they can sell them. There’s too much that’s jarring and alive about James for the radio – the disruptive intelligence of their song constructions, the fact that you can tell people are there from their playing, will all make it difficult for people to use James as background listening. Are James too up-pop to ever be successful? “Lots of people come up, like you, and say, I like it, but it’ll never be popular. But lots of people come up and say that! The truth is we just don’t know. We want to find out.” Jim: “You’ve just got to show people that possibilities exist.” Tim: “We used to think the music would sell on its own merits, but now we see we have to sell it, sell it on Jim’s face, Gav’s beard, my shoes and Larry’s glasses.” I hope it works. | Jun 1986 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Debris Fanzine Interview | Article, Interview |
| Jun 1986 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
News Article – Sounds | Article, News | James play Manchester PSV Club on 15 July, a warm-up for their appearance in the WOMAD Festival the following Saturday (19). They’re also set up for a string of four shows in August – at Barrow Bluebird Club (14), Edinburgh Hoochie Coochie (15), Aberdeen Venue (16) and Dundee Dance Factory (17). The Mancunian four-piece have their new single So Many Ways / Withdrawn issued by Sire next Monday, with the bonus track Just Hipper on the 12″, but it seems likely that their August gigs will coincide with the release of their debut album Stutter. | Jun 1986 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Radio Manchester – Interview | Article, Interview | Int : That was Really Hard, your choice to play as a track from the new album. Why Really Hard, Tim? Tim : I sung the vocals on my birthday. Because it was my favourite song at the time Int : Yes Tim : I think that’s one of the most complete songs on the LP Int : Many things have been said to typify James. One – vegetarianism. Tim : Gavan’s drumskins are all made out of the finest leeks. We’ve really taken a stand on this Gavan : Very expensive Tim : And we come on dressed in vegetables as well, because we don’t believe in wearing animals against our skin. Int : Yes, I thought that artichoke was rather fetching actually. Buddhism. Does that still come into it (Band do lots of Buddhist chanting and meditating sounds) Int : Ok, I think we’ve answered that one. Message then Jim : Hello Mum Int : Yes. From Jim of James. I saw you playing at the Anti-Reagan Rally Tim : It just happened we were busking in Albert Square and then this march came round the corner Jim : Oh, fucking hell Tim : And we were standing there playing and thought well what are we going to do now. Maybe we can get some money out of it so we carried on playing for a few songs Jim : Passing the hat around Tim : But they soon told us to shut up Int : Playing something like Albert Square. I mean that’s quite something in itself. Slightly different to your average venue. Tim : It’s a weird game. Playing Albert Square. I prefer Monopoly. Int : Is there a big difference with an audience without alcohol Tim : A soberier audience? Usually the sober audiences just stand there and gawp and look really embarrassed and don’t know what to do with their hands. Jim : Oh God, I’m really paranoid. Everyone’s looking at me, but I’m not drunk. Oh God. Tim : And they don’t know how to handle it. Whereas a drunk audience. Jim : Just fall over Tim : Just forget it and take no notice of us and jump on each other and things like that. It’s easier to fool a drunken audience. Int : Pop interviewer question number 227 – what are your influences? Tim : What are our influences? Int : Mancunian Doors? How do you take to that label? Jim : There’s one Tim : That’s really corny. The Doors were always out of their heads. And we’re never. Gavan : Jim was. I don’t know about the rest of them Jim : Speak for yourself Gavan : Not as bad as he was Tim : None of us need alcohol or drugs to fuel them. One of the ideas is that we don’t need it live. Int : This energy, where do you get it from? Why do people resort to alcohol? Just to replace or imitate that sort of energy that you manage to get live? Jim : Lightweights. Gavan : I don’t think the drugs replace energy unless you’re using specific drugs such as speed or something. It gets rid of the inhibitions so you can do what you want. But I think drink, it saps your energy. Tim : At the beginning when you go on stage, everyone’s really frightened and so if you have a few drinks, you can hide from that fear and a lot of bands do that. They never get past the stage where you actually stand up there and tell if you’re brave or strong enough and are as good as you can be. Gavan : So that’s what you did with the artichoke was it? Int : Finally, the deal with WEA. Jim : Sire Int : Sorry, what is it and why are you doing it as opposed to staying with Factory? Tim : We never signed with Factory. We just did 2 singles with them. That’s all the agreement, that was done on a day-to-day basis. But we liked them a lot, we got on well with them, but we just got to the point where we felt our records were just not being distributed. We were doing a tour with The Smiths and in each city we would go into the record shops and none of them would have a copy of our records even though the record had just come out and we were doing a tour to support it. And we just felt we needed better support really. Int : And you’re going to get it? Tim : I don’t know. No, we hope so. Int : So a very serious band then Tim : Very serious. | Jun 1986 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James : A Bunch Of Clever Yobbos – Smash Hits | Article, Interview |
“We were a bunch of yobbos when we first met,” says Tim Booth, the singer. Gavan Whelan (the drummer) and Jim Glennie (on bass) were in this nightclub where I was dancing, and I caught them trying to steal my drink! There were too many of them so I backed down quickly. But they asked me to dance in the group (Tim is a bit of a “whirling dervish” when it comes to moving the old feet about). And pretty soon I started singing. Larry Gott, the guitarist, joined about three years ago and we’ve been together ever since.” James have a new single out called “So Many Ways”, and will soon be releasing an album called “Stutter”. They hope that both will do well because at the moment they all get paid the grand sum of £33 a week each i.e. not exactly a fortunette. They didn’t bother publicising their last single “just as an experiment” says Tim. Sounds like a bit of a silly idea to Bitz. So what happened? “It failed.” Hmm, thought it might. Amongst other things, James are friends of Morrissey and The Smiths, who they supported on tour last year. Like The Smiths, they are also vegetarians, and can be v. serious. Pheeyeeew!!! So what is Tim’s greatest ambition? Cripey o’stripey! James aren’t just a bunch of yobbos after all – they’re a bunch of seriously-thinking yobbos! | Jul 1986 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tour And So Many Ways News – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
| Jul 1986 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jimmy Jimmy (Unknown Interview) | Article, Interview |
| Jul 1986 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Growing Up In The Big Pond – Record Mirror | Article, Interview |
James are making quiet additions to their Book Of Brilliant Things. The current chapters have been probed ad nauseam – normality, music, Manchester, brown rice, garish jumpers and hipness. But hark, what is this? Edging closer to inclusion are two unlikely contenders -London and a major record label. Jim: “People in London are really scared and poranoid. They won’t even look at you. Everyone seems so busy and blinkered, living in their own little world.” Larry: “But there are little pockets you can start walking through and feel quite nice about. Bayswater’s getting a bit like that because we’ve stayed there so often.” James are also coping admirably with being small fish in the very big pond that is WEA Records. Jim: “We went to a major because we thought the music could sell to a lot of people. We’ve never felt swamped, in fact we’re quite enjoying it. “We always knew there’d be hassles and we have had hassles but nothing radical. Irs never been, ‘Oh God, the end of the world!'” Larry: ‘We had very naive ideas.” Jim: “Very idealistic. We thought we could take the world by storm.” Larry: “All we knew was that the record industry didn’t work on the principle that if you release a record and if the public buy it, you have a hit. “If we’d tried to suss out the industry and built a plan of action, we’d have fallen flat on our faces. Our ideas of it 18 months ago have been completely blown to pieces. On the other hand, someone like Tony James can do it because he saw it all 10 years ago. He could go away, devise a masterplan and sell it to the people.” Isn’t he the one who’s fallen flat on his face? Larry: “I think it’s the industry that has.” Jim: ‘What happened was probably all he intended anyway. They must have known deep down that they’ve got a cheap, cruddy image that everyone was going to be pissed off with in a few months.” Either that or they’re more stupid than they look. Larry: “As for the advertising on their LP, I’m sure people are just going to tape it and press the pause button during the adverts. That’s if anyone actually wants to listen to a Sigue Sigue Sputnik album.” And are James going to be hitless hipsters for the forseeable future? Larry: HI always thought we’d have a hit some time.” Jim: .And we haven’t given up or this one yet.. (This one being the very splendid ‘So Many Ways’.) “These days, though, you have to get on the playlist and we’re not. I always used to think DJs played records they liked:’ As for the dreaded image business any record company pressure to enhance the oddity factor? Boxes of kaftans appearing surreptitiously on doorsteps, perhaps? Larry: “Is our image that dreaded? No, no, I didn’t mean it like that. “No it was basically a case of, ‘Here’s James, let’s see what they can come up with’.” Jim: “And our image is dead easy We just have to be ourselves.” ‘So Many Ways’ is just one of many delights unveiled on James’ first LP ‘Stutter’. The essential Jamesian elements are here in force -wild, uncontrollable melodies; rabid, unru voice; unbelievably tongue-in-cheek lyrics and, occasionally, a modicum of order. Timothy Booth’s voice has a perplexing charm. It’s so, um …Larry”‘Weird is the word that springs to mind. Although, on Chain Mail’, he was really taking the mickey out of himself a bit with the highvoice.” As for James’ poetic licence. ..’I love my black hole’, ‘I need a wash’ and other similar gems sung with such sombre conviction, they must be joking. None of this pilfering from Roget’s Thesaurus like other bands, though. Larry: ‘We used to have really ba speakers for rehearsing. You could jt about pick up the melody, punctuating and that was about it. The words were totally blurred. ‘Really Hard’ started , as ‘Riddly Ya’. Tim was just improvising with syllables and vowel sounds until one of us mentioned ‘That song, ‘Really Hard'” Enter Gavan and talk,of antiquated pop stars – Larry’s birthday being imminent. Larry: “Yes, nearly 21.. Ho ho. Too old to be sprightly young pop things, eh? Though such chart doyen as Morten Harket and Neil Tennant are surely giving hope to the elderly. Larry: “Pet Shop Pensioners, more like..” Jim: ‘We’re not old, are we, Gav? Gavan: .No, we’re fresh-faced young men.” Jim: “Seventeen, in fact, so we car be pop stars.” Larry: ‘Well, you’re going to be a right heart throb anyway, Jim”. (An acquaintance took a copy of James’ last appearance in these hallowed pages to Styal, a women’s prison.) the women were going, ‘Ooh, who’s he?’. Jenny’ (James minder): “All these women who’ve been denied their conjugal rights for 15 years. If we ever play there, we’ll have to build a barbed wire fence around you.” Is there something we don’t know? Why did a certain hotel refuse to hand over the undies Gavan left behind? What is going on? | Jul 1986 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Interview – Sounds | Article, Interview |
Sounds: August 1986 – In fear of earwigs crawling through their heads, these strange James boys tell Jonh Wilde about the bizarre phobias creeping through their pop music. Photo debris by Ian T. Tilton Eighteen months ago, James were just born and didn’t give interviews because “people hadn’t heard the music and we wanted them to decide what it was like before they took another person’s opinion”. These days, four singles and one LP forward, they’ll talk until their tongues start rattling about in their heads and their faces turn purple. These days, they concentrate madly and try to make the chat as consuming as their extremely strange records. Today they tell me they’re being pensive because I’m being pensive, but it’s not always like this. “We thought about suicide all the time, we didn’t see any other point in living, we at least wanted to go out with a bang. It seemed very romantic, and we came pretty close.” Then came Factory, plucking them from the dusty corners, and their ambitions swerved away from hara-kiri and toward “making an album as good as ‘Horses’ or ‘Prayers On Fire’”. They settled, temporarily, for a brace of enticingly scruffy singles, little fussed over but beautifully insecure. James were likely to remain a snug but slovenly concern. The bee crept into the bonnet and started to hum with some true spite earlier this year. ‘Chain Mail’, part of their Sire ‘Sit Down’ EP, tipped the wink to crystalline melodies and purged words. James were scraping all the crusty bits from their Y-fronts and starting anew. And last month came ‘So Many Ways’, some of the holiest pop of this year, James truly gasping at us, at last. Now their debut LP ‘Stutter’ gets word-drunk and the fetching, bespectacled Tim Booth is telling me that his song about earwigs crawling through your head, ‘Skullduggery’, comes from his kindergarten memory of “being told that earwigs crawl through your ear if you lie down on grass. I only realised it was a fib the middle of last week”. There are many such rum moments to be found on ‘Stutter’, at its best a copulation between Syd Barrett’s ‘Baby Lemonade’, the Velvets’ ‘The Murder Mystery’ and some of The Laughing Clowns. Oh, bugger it, James don’t sound much like anyone anymore, snubbing a nose at foolhardy Smiths analogies, saving up their spittle for the mirth and madness that spills from their vinyl pores. “What are we like now?” muses the bearded Gavan, after just admitting he’s the most likely member of James to plot a murder. “Frightening, uplifting, scared at the world and its surroundings, not so much complaining as reflecting”. “People have picked up on that madness, but then go on to treat it like Half Man Half Biscuit or something; otherwise, some really neurotic noise. It might be schizoid but we see it as something joyous… accepting all the mad energies.” With Tim looking on dubiously, Gavan tells me, “It’s like there’s a fifth thing going on, like a fifth member directing everything.” Whatever goes, they’ve hurdled far since those old death wishes, now emerging as Manchester’s best sandblasted racket. With ‘Stutter’ beside them and their future no longer behind them, they shape up as a prime slice of high fiction. “You can almost imagine this character, James, wandering around outside there,” Tim suggests. “He’s probably dark and light and funny as hell…” Probably one of those tourists of the emotions, pecking here and there, a contrary sod, miles and miles of celibate lust. James are dragging some welcome jive-ass jabber back into view, their scribbles packed with doubletalk. Their potential, so to speak, is far behind them. Four plain James, losing the gravel pit for the sweat pit, singing “trying to impress is the nature of our work”. These four grinning skulls write about lads called Johnny Yen who run down the street with their clothes on fire. They sensitively note that “to be loving when the lights are out takes much courage” in the sobbing ‘Really Hard’. All in all, they tell me that “without getting too involved, the meanings come out all displaced, but the characters in the songs somehow emerge as real, maybe slightly surreal”. So ‘Stutter’ reels with much erratic brilliance, a grainy soundtrack to fickle moods and shifting perspectives. Their hurried jangle is inhabited by characters halfway between a lovelorn swoon and a nervous fit. The greatest plus is that their music no longer has any centre, it merely flurries from some strange, unknown corner. James are looking at me, almost scolding. “People get so psychological about us,” Tim tells me. “People don’t really know where to put us. Those that call us ‘hippy’ get contradicted and confused when they see all these other sides.” “What we do,” Gavan intercepts, “is push and shove and look at things with a different perspective. Like being a kid, when you go out to the park and look at nature differently, it fascinates you. As you grow older, you look at a tree and it’s just a tree.” You must be barmy. “James don’t take those things for granted, that’s all.” | Aug 1986 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The List Gig Guide (Edinburgh/Glasgow) | Article, News |
| Aug 1986 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
City Life Interview | Article, Interview |
Local indie pop band James return to the fray on record and live – they appear at The Green Room on August 9 and 10, CRAIG FERGUSON (words) and IAN TILTON (photo) meet the foursome. One moment you’re there, ‘flavour of the month’ taking the slaps on the back, and the next moment you’ve disappeared; a vanishing act, voluntary or otherwise. This, of course, is the very nature of the crazy world of popular music, God bless it. Ups and Downs, Booms and Slumps – it’s very much a cut-price cut-throat market. Suffice to say, nothing’s guaranteed, certainly not success, nor it seems mere activity. Take James, one of the better bands to emerge from Manchester over the past five years. Having built up a reputation as a superb live band, and with two fine singles on Factory to their credit, James were bound for a major label. They signed to Sire (American-based and part of the WEA empire) providing them with the debut LP Stutter back in the summer of ’86. For my money, it was a disappointing record While it featured familiar songs of considerable quality, it neither committed the live James sound to vinyl, nor established a parallel studio sound worthy of those songs. But this all seems by the by – the group have been firmly stuck in a frustrating lull since the L.P. As Gavan puts it. “Last summer? You’re going back a bit there mate!” A year is a long time – they must have been doing something. “We played in Europe, worked on lots of new songs and went into the studio, eventually” The tone of Tim’s voice says it all; they could have done so much more. It becomes immediately obvious where the blame lies. James are not happy with the treatment they’ve received from their record company and they make no bones about it. “It was a mistake not going on tour after the LP came out,” says Tim. It certainly doesn’t make good business sense to publicise the product before it’s available rather than after. Add to that the lack of funds for advertising in the press, and their more recent awkward stance with regard to the new LP and you can see that this particular band-label relationship isn’t all that it should be. It almost reached the divorce court before Sire relented and gave the band the money they needed for recording. Tim goes as far to say: “In the last year we’ve had a hell of a lot of business problems – it’s an area none of us want to be bothered with, but we’ve had it forced on us.” At the risk of labouring the point, the past year has not been a very happy one for James – “the only thing that has kept up going is the music.” At the mention of music, the room becomes charged with extreme enthusiasm. They’ve just had a month’s break and their thirst for a return to playing is overwhelming: “You start rehearsing again and sooner or later this thing starts, circling in the middle of the room, and the song starts playing you.” When Gavan says this, it sounds weird but you know what he means. They all nod in agreement and the passionate feeling is unanimous. Live, James rarely fail to excite, but as everyone knows, getting that excitement onto vinyl is another matter. The first L.P. didn’t work in that respect -“it wasn’t put together very well,” says Jim – and we agree that live sound and recorded sound have to be regarded as two separate ‘mediums’. Larry: “Hugh Jones who produced the new L.P really slagged us off about Stutter: He said we’d lost so much between the last Factory single and the L.P.” Gavin: “The sound quality mainly. And I think we were a little more professional about it, working to the principle that ‘less is more’ – there’s more space and thought.” I take that to mean that they’ve held back at times where usually they’d give it the full James treatment. Gavan doesn’t hold back “It’s a classic! I wouldn’t have bought the first L.P. -I’d have taped it off a mate -I’d definitely buy this one though.” Given that so much was expected of the first L.P., are they not a little apprehensive about this one? “We’ve had quite a cynical approach towards it, but it’s a much better record,” say! Tim positively. Sire predictably don’t think James are commercial enough – do they feel any pressure to sound more commercial? “It’s inward pressure as much as anything because we want a bigger audience. We want success -you can only be an impoverished artist for two or three years and no longer; earning a reascnable living is as important as gaining acceptance in the sphere that you’re working in.” There’s no doubt that the new L.P – untitled as yet but out hopefully in September (Sire permitting) -represents a crossroads on the James road of progress. If it sells they’re laughing, if not, it’s bye bye to Sire. ‘Ya Ho’, the single out in September, may be a good indicator. Whatever happens, the band describe their new work as “wild in variation” with some “truly brilliant moments”. After years on the scene, James are still looked upon as an oddity – something they are positively pleased about. It’s not the personuel who are odd but possibly their approach -they shy away from convention, be it the song or the method. The identity they were given a couple of years ago – folk-singing vegans -is less true than it ever was, just the usual case of picking out extremes. Unfortunately, people have a habit of reading, believing and remembering. “The Bodines thought we all lived together in a big house in the country!” Jim laughs. Happily, James are set to re-emerge from the darkness of a long, quiet year. They’re dying to do what they do best -what’s so odd about that? | Jul 1987 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Record Mirror News | Article, News |
James break a silence of almost a year with a new single and live dates at Fury Murry’s Glasgow (August 16), The Venue (17) and two nights at the Green Room, Manchester (9 and 10) | Jul 1987 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fountains Of Youth – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
Singer Timothy Booth is describing what life should be like. “When you think of a dog or a young child, the way they look around when they come into a room. Or a dog going on a walk, smelling something completely new to it. The next day, it’s a whole different thing and the dog has a look of pure joy as it looks around, experiencing all the sensations as they are. Or a child looking at a plant, wanting to touch it or eat it. It’s also living in the present. I’m not making an argument that this is how we should behave all the time because we’d never get out of one room. You’d look over at one corner, turn your back, look over again and it would be a new corner. “One reason I think people are ill and unhappy in society is because most people are well out of touch with the childlike quality and we all need some of that. Some people look to drugs to get it. You can get it after a lot of sex, when you get that rush of vitality. You get it from concentration. We get it from performing our music. It happens whenever your concentration becomes heightened. “I’ve had months when life has been really mundane and then something happens and you get that special buzz and want to hold on to it. You wonder why the rest of life isn’t like that, at that level of intensity, at that level of living.” Are James particularly special? “Oh yeah!” Showing up all these contradictory components, incompatible things, a kind of intimate association of opposites. Are James like litmus paper? “Litmus paper?” No, not litmus paper, the other thing. “Oh, the acid test. Yeah, we’re like the acid test.” It is almost 18 months since James took a tumble with us on the nuptial couch, since “Stutter” found 11 new ways of taunting itself with its own doodles and fear of heights. Now this starving man is back. Drummer Gavan Whelan has been working in a hotel and bassist James Glennie has been flogging second-hand cars. Very James. Very commonplace, very matter-of-fact, very left-handed. The splurge of lopsided obsessions that made up the brilliantly shoddy “Stutter” ultimately failed to persuade a sunken nation like ours to throw its ballet skirts to the wind and bare its thighs and backsides. Indeed, “Stutter”, even considering the way it rushed over the style, failed to provoke so much as a neatly-dressed ankle. Me and James are mystified by this. In fact, if it happens this time around, we’re going to whip some asses sharpish. “When we finished that first LP,” Larry recalls, “it was the culmination of so many years worth of work focussed in a six-week period, incredibly intense. At the end of it, we thought we’d created a monster and a masterpiece. It came out and we just didn’t touch people with it. You just lose your perspective when things like that happen.” If slivers of “Stutter” might have proved too far gone for British pop-pickers used to having their meanings written in scarlet tartan, there could be no excuse for overlooking “So Many Ways”, the group’s “Eight Miles High”, three rippling minutes that defied you to keep your knees or your head together. As a single, it was beautifully dressed and powdered and all you killjoys out there in the real world turned your backs. Together with the rest of “Stutter”, it seemed that this group had abandoned their uncertain, prudent beginnings for something daft and dark, something that was just three gulps short of a minor masterpiece. James were showing that they needed to be lived with to be understood, that they were too complex and enraptured to settle for a quick roll on the grass-verge behind the youth club. They were obsessional and terribly droll in a way that most pop music is too pious to be. They made you itch in ways that had little to do with your winter woollies or your last hernia, bringing you to a point where you never knew whether to scream or cackle. To most people, though, they were still like oddball deviants caught in the revolving-doors and none of this mattered a hoot. “Pop is deviant itself”, Tim Booth reminds me. “If David Lynch can have a hit film with ‘Blue Velvet’…well, we’re much less deviant than he is. I think Lynch is too dark. James is full of dark but also full of light.” Too many wicked curves? “We like to offset music and lyrics to some degree,” says Larry. “Loads of contradictions because there’s loads of contradictions between four people. A song like ‘Fairground’ is built completely on a contradiction. We were in this terrible black hole of a rehearsal-studio having a huge argument, me and Gavan on one side, Tim and Jim on the other, both sides playing something entirely different, stuck in these separate camps, no unity whatsoever. These two disjointed things were playing along at the same time and we accidentally recorded it. When we listened back, it was brilliant, like galloping horses at a fairground. Where you’ve got this circular motion contradicted by this up and down motion. They go in opposite ways but somehow blend.” Are you consciously trying to please? Is this why you are making such a din? “We try to do that, we think, jut by concentrating on exactly what we are doing. Not that we all know our individual parts blindfold. It’s that anticipation of what’s coming next. If that gets picked up by an audience, then there’s a certain thrill of going into unchartered territory that heightens their concentration and their awareness of what’s going on.” You’ve got to lose yourself. You have to expect your ration of convulsions, palpitations, fainting fits, anxiety attacks and brain fever. “You’ve got to be right there, right then,” Jim nods, “The kind of losing yourself in a way that you’re not really there to some degree. It’s the build up to things. The best thing about having a present is the moment before you open it. That’s the thrill, knowing you are going to open it.” There was a hungry look in your eyes when you said that. “He didn’t get any presents for his birthday and he won’t forget it,” says Larry. “Some group we’re in! I didn’t get one bleeding present either.” “Ya Ho”, a new James single, presents them to the nation, visibly stimulated in new ways, a song about rescuing people on beaches, about whirlpools, fear of failure and rubbing movements. Dry James, pea-shooting James. This is far from the glazed gusts of “So Many Ways” or the campfire dragnet of “Why So Close”; calm James. Persist with it though. After the bits that go plink and fizz, there’s a marvy (marvellous) bit three-quarters of the way through that manifests itself in ways that are almost indecently flirtatious. Like other new James peaks, particularly the possible follow-up single “What For”, it brings us scarlet mouths, dagger-like peaks, waving arms and a golden clitoris that, believe me, is a pleasure to tango with. Already “Ya Ho” is meeting some rum reactions, adopted as a terrace anthem in parts of Leeds after a recent James show there, replacing the cry of “Come back Duncan, come back” that has wafted through those cobbled streets for the last 10 years, an obscure reference to Duncan “Golf Ball” Mackenzie, Leeds United’s former post-Revie golden boy. I suspect that this is coy James sticking their tongues out at us as only they know how. “Actually, it’s a cry of despair”, James Glennie informs me. “It’s ungainly James, experienced and dying to tell a story. It reminds us of the time we left Factory, when Tony Wilson compared us to the Dutch football team of 1974, the Cruyff era, when it didn’t seem like it was trying, because it was all so natural. Of course, when they started thinking about it, when the next World Cup came around, they were complete crap.” People still think of you as fey, frightened outsiders. Cissies. Apologetic rather than apoplectic. When are we going to convince people that you have real, six-foot ulcers hidden under those coats. “A lot of it came about from us being on Factory to start with,” Jim explains, “which affected how people viewed us. There was also the rare, secluded image of James because we didn’t do interviews and didn’t do a lot of live work. We were seen to be withdrawing from the public eye and people thought it was our decision. It built up a kind of mystique but it made us special in a way.” These days, James seem more lucid, looking none the worse for wear after their prolonged hallucinatory, delirious phase. The phantoms of the troubled “Stutter” appear to be fully exorcised. All those earwigs crawling through lug-‘oles, small twisted figures disappearing into black smelly tunnels, people spontaneously combusting… the obsessions of that first torrid collection of waking nightmares seems purged now, replaced with another copulative beat and another set of clinging compulsions, more inclined to fondle you this time round. Endearing? “Well, we feel are obsessions are what obsess other people,” reasons Gavan. “This time, we seem to be telling people more about our obsessions instead of just hiding within them. Maybe there’s more sense of distance in that way now. In previous songs, our lyrics have been clear but our meanings haven’t. Our meanings have tended to be perverse. Musically too, we’ve tended to shy away from stating the obvious, not going to the root of things. Now, the lyrics have gone to the root the same way as we’ve kept to the root of the song as musicians. It’s taking it one step further.” Making for a better James? “Locating our perversities and making them work for us. Before, we’d get to be so obsessive trying to predict what was going to happen that we’d make what we didn’t want to happen…” Brain tissue everywhere. Lovely stuff. You ask the four James rouges what all this nervous shifting really amounts to and you get some words back to poison your brain with. “Insular? Personal? Tricky? Argumentative. Asking for trouble. Obsessional, of course. Brittle. Awkward. Out of context. Different. Playful. Tony Currie. Socks that don’t match the shoes, very James. A call to arms. Clear. Dense. Overturning one thing and finding another thing beneath it. Not meticulous. Perfectionists. Making things better. Intrigued. Broke. The desirability of men and women foxtrotting together while naked. Acrobatic. No longer so nightmarish. Embezzlement.” | Sep 1987 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Just Say Yes – Sire Biography | Article, Biography | from the Sire Records “Just Say Yes” sampler You’ll want to call them Jim after getting familiar with their engaging brand of music, but resist the temptation. The name of the group is James; four Manchester-sired men with a lot of music between them. Five years to be exact, which is how long they’ve been nurturing a mutually creative relationship, playing the local circuit and recording their highly-praised, high-stakes brand of modern pop. James, in fact, has been the good word on the British music scene ever since they released their first singles on the powerhouse Factory Records label not so very long ago. Snapped up by Sire’s tireless talent scouts, James took to the road, opening for the likes of New Order and The Smiths and all the while honing their already razor-edged songwriting skills. Aural adventurers stateside got their first taste of James on the staggering Stutter, a fresh slice of unadultered innovation, featuring the captivating single “Chain Mail”. Both are produced by Lenny (Suzanne Vega) Kaye. You can call them Jim or you can call them James. Just remember, music this good deserves respect. “Ya Ho” from the Sire album IF THINGS WERE PERFECT … Available on LP and Cassette (1/4-25657) | Sep 1987 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
BBC Radio 1 John Peel – 9th September 1987 | Audio Archive, Session |
SetlistStowaway / Whoops / What For / Ya HoDetails
SongsShare: | Sep 1987 | audio-archive session article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
BBC Radio Manchester – 28th September 1987 | Audio Archive, Session | AudioSetlistMedieval / Doubts / Meltdown JingleDetails
SongsShare: | Sep 1987 | audio-archive session article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Meltdown Interview | Article, Interview | Phil Korbel : It’s James and Phil Jim : Phil and James PK : The band have now crawled out of the studio. Torn themselves away from the John Peel session, their own John Peel session that they were listening to in the gramophone library and come to talk to me. And now they’re complaining they’re not being paid. OK, now recently you’ve been described as being a band in the wilderness. We’ve heard nothing from you on vinyl for ages. What’s wrong? Jim : Ermmm PK : The corporate voice of James Tim : We’re still in the wilderness. We’ve got an LP and other stuff coming out in about February. It was meant to come out now, it’s not going to. It’s being remixed. Maybe. Just in case someone’s listening. It’s coming out in February and we’ve just had a year of business problems. PK : Business problems? Tim : They’re over now PK : And a change of management I gather Tim : Yeah, we didn’t have a manager for a long time. Jim : So that was quite a change really because we’ve got one Tim : Well, we got one and then we sacked him so now we’ve got another one PK : A real one Tim : A real one Jim : We didn’t sack him Tim : We took him back to the shop as he was still under guarantee. PK : Are we at liberty to divulge your new manager’s identity? Jim : Mr X, come on down Tim : Eliot Rashman who also manages what they called All : Simply blue, red head PK : Are we now going to have the same Simply Red treatment on James Tim : Oh yes Jim : You haven’t heard the new album Tim : You haven’t heard the backing female singers and the orchestra PK : You’re not joking are you? Jim : No, not at all Tim : We had a Tibetan, a Tibetan orchestra for the backing tapes and stuff like that. We’re going to tour with them as well in February. PK : The Tibetan backing orchestra? Tim : Yeah, gongs and horns and all sorts of things PK : Ah yeah, a real small scale tour Tim : And skulls of dead llamas PK : You spent ages in a Welsh cottage recording this album and you’re still not happy with it. One, why did you go away to record the album? Gavan : I don’t think Wales is really going away. It’s only like half a day away isn’t it really? PK : Come on, come on. Be serious now Gavan : Where do you want us to record it? There’s nowhere in Manchester really. Jim : Well, now we’re megastars we thought we’d move up and hire somewhere like the Bahamas or Wales. Guess which we picked. PK : Yeah, well, quite. Tim : Whatever PK : Now you’ve got this reputation of being good, clean-living young men. You know, Buddhist, teetotal, the strongest drug you’ll take is a cup of tea. Is this still true or have you fallen away? Tim : No, we don’t drink tea. Jim : Very high in tannin, very high in tannin. Makes your teeth go brown PK : I see, right, OK. So you’re still good clean-living boys All : We never were. No, no. Tim : It’s all a myth Jim : We’re sponsored by Guinness now PK : I see, so it’s going to be the Guinness tour now? I like the idea of that. Now, we’ve heard the rendition, the only kind of recorded output of James that we’ve had recently are the jingles that three of the band did that Tim hasn’t heard. Tim, the singist, for reasons best known to himself didn’t want to come in Tim : You’ll find out why when you hear the bloody jingle. PK : Well he hasn’t actually heard this one Jim : He’s a lightweight PK : Just listen to this Jim : You’re sacked (plays piano-heavy Meltdown jingle with Jim’s deep “scary” voice) Gavan : That’s it lads, I’m leaving Jim : Nothing to do with me PK : As you can see, now the denials come out Tim : They only agreed to do it because you said it would remain anonymous. PK : Oh rubbish Tim : Sounds like a mad vicar Jim : Meltdown. That’ll do PK : That’ll do Jim : Nearest to a compliment we’re going to get this evening Tim : We’re going into adverts because we reckon there’s some money in it and we haven’t seen any anywhere else so we’re going into adverts PK : Adverts for Jameson Whiskey first? Tim : Yes, Jameson Whiskey Jim : You talked us into that one PK : Right, let’s talk about the new album. You’re dissatisfied with it, but the little of it I’ve heard so far appears to indicate a new direction, a beefier sound maybe. Tim : Beefier? Come on, we’re healthy PK : Sorry sorry Tim : More Marmite. PK : More soya like Jim : No, no, we want a new image Tim : Yeah, beefier, that’s fine Gavan : It’s not beefier enough, that’s the problem Tim : More beefy Gavan : I’ve been ordered to come closer to the mic. It is not beefier enough. PK : Thank you. That’s very kind of you Gavan. Gavan the drummer acting like a drummer. Jim : Ooh cutting PK : Tim, the rest of you, Tim, Jim, Gavan. The new album, if people were going to take the last album as a starting point, in which ways is this album different? Tim : It’s the second one. It’s the one after the last album. I think that’s the first thing that’s really important to get across. Jim : The second one’s a lot better Tim : It’s much different from the first one as well PK : In what ways? Tim : It’s got different songs on it PK : Yeah, right, I see, fine Jim : It is much better though Tim : My Mum says she thought that second track was really good. PK : The second track, now is your Mum. Jim : There’s only you on it Tim : That’s why she likes it (Jim and Tim have pretend argument) PK : Now you’ve got this image of being very very serious people. Excuse me Jim : You won’t laugh when he hits you Tim : Perv PK : Now this lot did actually say that they were going to behave when they came in, but it seems as if the occasion has overcome them and we might not get anything more sensible out of them. Are we going to? Tim : Yes, you will PK : Are you sure? Gavan : The album is a bit more thought out. That’s why it’s different Jim : Well said, round of applause PK : Now the other thing, we’ve got some sense out of them, thank you. Next Tim : It’s going to be much wilder. The songs are more complete. It’s like on the first LP some of the songs sound like they weren’t quite sketched out fully and the new one, we’ve taken them more to extremes, so a potential rock song becomes a rock song and a potential classical song becomes totally classical with the London Philharmonic joining in. And we’ve just taken things more to the extremes PK : More extreme, so does that account for the fact that last time you played Manchester you had two sets, you had an acoustic set and then, for want of a better word, a rock set? A full band set anyhow Gavan : No. We just felt because it had been quite a long time since we last did a gig in Manchester that we just wanted to make it a bit special. Tim : And Gavan our drummer is a frustrated pianist so it gave him the opportunity to let his fingers out for a walk. PK : So it was just a bit of fun Tim : Yeah PK : Also, it has been suggested that you are now ruing the day you left Factory. You are regretting the day you left Factory. Gavan : I think we left Factory a bit early PK : Before you were ready. Jim : Yeah, we should have gone after dinner PK : There I was thinking we were having a serious conversation Jim : It’s true, it’s true PK : Too early, are you ready now? Tim : Are we ready? Gavan : There’s no choice Jim : We’ve got to be. There’s no point in going backwards. But I think we did leave a bit early Tim : What do you mean by ready? I mean, what happened was we went on a major record company and they couldn’t see any of our music being potentially commercial so they didn’t put anything behind it. It’s really when they decide that we’re commercially potential, whatever that means. And so God knows whether in their eyes we are or not yet. I doubt it. PK : Shall we cross fingers. Well anyhow, now a track from that album, the pre-remix version of a track called Charlie Dance and after that we go back to James live. Thank you very much gentlemen. (plays Charlie Dance) PK : A track from their forthcoming album, Charlie Dance. And before we go back to Tim and Gavan who will be doing a live song for us in a second, Jim is going to give a little competition for a pair of tickets to their concert at the International 2 on Thursday. Question please, Jim Jim : Thanks very much Philip. And the question is : Is Ed Bonicki innocent? Answer, yes or no Tim : Who? PK : Daley Thompson Jim : Oh no PK : Thompson Daley. Jim : If Thompson’s Daley, is Ed Bonicki innocent? PK : Answers not on postcard, ring us now on 061-xxx-xxxx to go and see James at the International 2. Now we go over with a flick of switch to Tim and Gavan. | Sep 1987 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Les Inrockputibles – Folklore | Article, Interview | FOLKLORE 1983 : alors que la vague gothique donnait une nouvel uniforme éphémère au rock anglais, James osaient sortir un premier titre « Folklore », quitte à passer pour les idiots du village. Toujours aussi emmerdeurs et déroutants, ils se font rares et précieux depuis : une discographie intrigante et des concerts déroutants les ont hissés sur un piédestal solide et définitif, voisin de celui des Smiths. La liqueur du rock. Vous semblez tous les quatre particulièrement liés les uns aux autres; Après un bon concert, oui( rires );Nous avons joué un très mauvais concert il y a quelques jours, c’était la misère qui nous liait toute la soirée. Nous sommes très différents les uns des autres, nous discutons beaucoup, nous avons connu beaucoup de choses ensemble en cinq ans. Chacun d’entre nous est passé par des périodes étranges, c’était très délicat à négocier. Vous ne souhaitez pas parler de ces périodes ? Pendant quelques années, trois d’entre nous avions pour habitude de méditer énormément, et quand je dis énormément, c’est vraiment énormément. Nous le faisions hors du groupe, parfois pendant des périodes de plusieurs jours, des heures d’affilée. D’autres se sont intéressés aux arts martiaux, ce genre de choses. J’allais justement dire que lorsque je vous ai vus la première fois sur scène, vous m’avez fait penser à une espèce de secte; Non, ce n’est pas ça. Nous avons pratiqué la méditation pendant quelques années mais nous avons arrêté il y a un peu plus d’un an maintenant, parce que le groupe avec lequel nous le faisions s’est dissous. C’était intense, beaucoup trop, un travail trop dur, trop éprouvant. C’était trop organisé et rigide, maintenant nous ne faisons que ce que nous voulons faire, nous choisissons. Nous restions assis à méditer, deux heures par jours, parfois dix heures le week-end ou même des journées entières de dix-huit heures. C’était très exigeant. J’en suis assez fier, mais cela peut aussi vous rendre très arrogant;ou même vous détruire, car vous restez là, assis pendant des heures, alors qu’on a qu’une envie, c’est de sortir courir; Maintenant que vous avez arrêté, cela ne vous manque pas trop ? J’ai recommencé récemment, mais je le fais lorsque je le veux alors qu’avant, la discipline de ce groupe était trop dure. C’était trop extrême. En tournée, cela pouvait donner des situations étranges, les uns méditaient pendant que les autres buvaient leur café, deux camps séparés. Mais lorsqu’on est un groupe, il faut faire des sacrifices, on ne peut pas vivre que pour soi-même, il faut trouver un langage commun. Venez-vous de familles très religieuses ? Le groupe vient du milieu prolétaire de Manchester sauf moi ( Tim, le chanteur), je suis le snobinard de la bande ( rires);Je viens de la classe moyenne du Yorkshire. Mon père était assez religieux, c’était une espèce de chrétien distrait, un chevalier-gentleman;Mais rien de positif, alors qu’avec la méditation on agissait, c’était du concret. Comment vivez-vous à Manchester ? Etes-vous impliqués dans la scène musicale ? Nous sommes à part. Mais je ne crois pas qu’ils existe véritablement une scène musicale à Manchester, la plupart des groupes sont à part. On fait son propre truc, on ne fait rien en commun, on ne partage pas. Il n’y a aucun sentiment de communauté à Manchester, ce n’est pas comme si tous les musiciens créatifs jouaient dans leur secteur avec un but commun. Ce sont juste beaucoup de gens qui habitent là, qui forment des groupes parce qu’ils s’ennuient. Certains d’entre eux deviennent plus connus et peuvent en vivre, c’est tout. Les groupes sont très différent les uns des autres, il existe de très bons groupes de jazz, et les Smiths, New Order, The Fall et Black;Simply Red;les deux extrêmes;Ten CC ( rires ); Morrissey, des Smiths, nous a dit qu’il a été très déçu par les groupes qu’il avait aidé, que James était le seul avec lequel il avait gardé de bonnes relations, malgré quelques problèmes; (rires);L’un des problèmes a été que j’ai essayé de l’entraîner à méditer (rires);Je ne crois pas que ça pourrait bien marcher avec lui;L’autre problème a été qu’ils voulaient nous emmener sur une tournée américaine et nous avons annulé une semaine avant le départ, ce qui l’a déçu énormément car il nous avait beaucoup aidés, ils ont eu l’impression qu’on les laissait tomber. Mais à part ça, on s’entend toujours bien, il est venu nous voir lors de notre dernier concert à Londres. Quel effet vous a fait la dissolution du groupe ? Pas grand chose. Nous ne leur avons jamais ressemblé, musicalement, même si les gens nous mettaient dans le même sac. Il y a quelques points communs, ils sont végétariens, nous aussi;Mais c’est étrange car nous existions deux-trois ans avant eux et les gens ont dit qu’on leur ressemblait, ce qui était agaçant. Mais le contraire n’aurait pas été plus juste, ils n’ont rien pris chez nous, ils étaient vraiment indépendants. Il y avait aussi des similitudes quant à nos styles de vie, car nous ne menions pas la vie de la scène rock habituelle. A cause de ça, nous devions, dans nos interviews, ne pas trop dévoiler notre façon de vivre, pour qu’on ne nous rapproche pas trop d’eux. Je crois que je n’ai parlé de la méditation qu’une fois auparavant. Les gens ne nous auraient pas compris. Vous aussi êtes végétariens; Trois d’entre nous le sont. Nous le sommes devenus car cela faisait partie de la discipline méditative. Mais c’était plus que ça : pas d’alcools, pas de drogues. Vous avez d ‘ailleurs joué pour des concerts anti-alcool; Ce n’était pas vraiment ça, ce n’était pas vraiment anti-alcool. C’était une espèce de programme d’éducation qui insistait sur les dangers de l’alcoolisme sur des choses pratiques, ce n’était pas pour condamnes l’alcool. C’était juste pour renseigner à propos d’une drogue, car c’est une drogue à part entière. Mais bien sûr , ça a été perçu comme une campagne puritaine (rires);On a été étiqueté. C’était une amie qui organisait tout ça, on devait l’aider. Nous ne sommes pas contre la viande ou contre l’alcool, nous sommes pro-végétariens et pour la prévention de l ‘alcoolisme. Il ne s ‘agit pas d’être contre quelque chose, nous sommes positifs. Maintenant tout le monde boit de l’alcool dans le groupe, mais pas de manière extrême;Cela va sonner très péjoratif sur l’Ecosse : en tournée, nous sommes passés par certaines villes, comme Aberdeen, où le problème de l’alcoolisme est absolument terrible, aussi épouvantable que l’héroïne, sauf que c’est légal. Il est important de simplement souligner ces choses-là. En ce qui concerne le végétarisme, ce n’est pas un problème pour nous : chacun d’entre nous pourrait très bien re goûter à la viande un jour ou l’autre. C’est la presse qui en a fait une grosse affaire. Notre musique semble attirer la frange mode, avant-gardiste de la presse, qui aime Nick Cave et ce genre de choses, une musique plus radicale. Ce qu’ils ne peuvent pas supporter, c ‘est que nous n’ayons pas l’apparence « rock ». Ils n’aiment pas ça, mais alors pas du tout !!! Ca ne correspond pas à leur image. Nous avons eu des critiques où ils admettaient aimer, mais presque à contre-cœur, ils disaient « ils ont l’air de cons, ils ne se bourrent pas, ils ne mangent pas de viande, mais ils jouent de la bonne musique ». Voilà les réactions que nous avions, celles de gens à l’esprit étroit, bloqués dans leur propre image. Au début, on les faisait marcher, on était des emmerdeurs;Nous avons joué avec New Order, tout était sérieux et lugubre, nous ressentions le besoin de jouer des chansons folles et stupides, il fallait le faire, tellement l’environnement était misérable et gris. Il fallait se comporter de manière stupide. Nous le faisons moins maintenant, mais nous avons toujours tendance à réagir, nous avons beaucoup de chansons agaçantes, méchantes, agressives. D’autres soirs, lorsque le public semble sage et calme, le public des Smiths, on lui jouera des morceaux durs et rapides. On a tendance à choisir le contraire de ce qu’ils aimeraient entendre. Mais finalement, il aime toujours ça. Connaissez-vous votre public ? Il y a de tout. Il y a encore cette frange liée à Factory, le reste est un croisement de tout ce qui peut exister. Les gens qui ont le plus de difficultés pour venir à nos concerts sont ceux habillés de cuir noir, car ils n’aiment pas notre image. Certaines de nos chansons parlent de ça, du besoin des gens de porter un uniforme. Car c’est un problème, ils pourraient aussi bien être soldats;manque de sécurité, de confiance sans doute. Vous avez sorti vos deux premiers 45t sur Factory. Comment êtes-vous arrivés sur le label ? Ils sont venus nous voir à un concert et ont trouvé ça bien. « Voulez-vous faire un album avec nous ? » nous ont-ils demandés. « Non !!! » Et un peu plus tard »Voulez-vous faire un maxi avec nous ? » « Non !!! »(rires);et nous avons dit que nous voulions faire un single. Ils nous ont spécifié sur feuille tous les titres qu’ils voulaient que nous enregistrions, mais nous ne voulions pas enregistrer d’entrée nos meilleurs morceaux, nous avons donc choisi librement nos chansons les plus faibles. Ils ont d’abord été très embêtés, mais les morceaux sonnaient très bien en studio finalement;Ensuite, ils sont revenus à la charge avec leur album et leur maxi;et on a enregistré notre deuxième 45t !(rires);Nous ne voulions pas que nos chansons soient gâchées. Nous les chérissons, car nous y mettons beaucoup de nous-mêmes, trop, nous sommes trop sérieux quand il s’agit des chansons. Nous étions comme des mères possessives, nous ne voulions pas les laisser partir de chez nous, comme des mères qui veulent toujours prendre toutes les décision pour leurs enfants, ne pas les laisser grandir eux-mêmes. Etes-vous toujours aussi sérieux avec vos rejetons maintenant ? Ca va mieux, il le fallait. Les concerts, c’était la même chose. Ca ne pouvait pas être un simple concert, il fallait que ce soit à chaque fois une expérience unique. Nous pouvions rester des semaines à nous préparer mentalement pour un concert, c’était infernal. Je perdais toute notion de proportion des choses;Nous pensions être tellement spéciaux qu’il fallait faire de chaque concert un événement historique unique, nous improvisions beaucoup, maintenant encore. Beaucoup estiment que vous êtes le groupe le plus « out of time », hors des courants, des modes, intemporels;On est incapable de discerner la moindre influence; Au début, si nous pouvions, dans nos morceaux, sentir une quelconque influence, ou si quelqu’un du groupe sonnait comme quelqu’un d’autre, nous jetions immédiatement le morceau, même s’il était bon. Encore une fois, nous sommes maintenant devenus moins rigides, parce que tout le monde finalement est influencé. Et nous avons dû dans le passé jeter trop de bons morceaux sur lesquels personne, à part nous, n’aurait trouvé la moindre influence directe;Mais nous, nous pensions « oh oui, ça sonne trop comme la quatrième mesure de tel morceau, sur un album live obscure de 1969 » (rires);En plus, depuis que je suis dans le groupe, nous n’avons pas fait une seule reprise, même pas en répétition. On n’y a même jamais pensé. De toute façon, nous avons tous les quatre des goûts musicaux totalement différents. Comme nous écrivons les chansons ensemble, personne n’a de contrôle sur le son final. C’est pour ça que nos chansons sont bizarres ; à cause des ingrédients que chacun de nous apporte au résultat final; Est-ce que l’on serait étonné si vous nous disiez le genre de musique que vous écoutiez dans le passé; Non, pas vraiment; Gavan, le batteur, adore Led Zeppelin, est-ce que vous êtes étonnés ?(rires);et il adore le jazz;Je ne sais pas trop pour Jimmy, il écoutait The Jam et The Fall quand nous avons commencé le groupe, il y a des années;J’aime Jimi Hendrix, Captain Beefheart, Television; C’est étonnant de vous voir réunir des influences aussi diverses, vous qui avez tant d’unité, une personnalité si forte; Merci. Comment voulez-vous répondre à ça (rires);nous nous respectons beaucoup entre nous, et nous puisons une grande partie de notre influence chez les autres membres du groupe. Il n’y a aucun groupe de nos jours chez qui nous pouvons trouver l’inspiration;juste quelques trucs;Nick Cave & The Birthday Party;nous étions tous très fan, à part Jimmy, c’était un sacré groupe (souffle admiratif);De façon individuelle, nous avons aimé quelques morceaux, des choses de Stump, par exemple, mais rien ne nous a tous marqués depuis Birthday Party. Nous écoutons surtout des choses de l’époque où les musiciens aimaient la musique et n’étaient pas là pour vendre. Tous ces groupes que nous avons cité ont commencé parce qu’ils adoraient la musique, par pour gagner des millions de dollars;Cet appât du gain domine toute l’industrie du disque;Je me souviens quand j’étais plus jeune, j’étais très amoureux de Patti Smith;c’est ma grande influence. Ses concerts étaient tellement; uniques;elle poussait les choses le plus loin possible, improvisait;J’ai peur pour son nouvel album. Pour moi, ce qu’elle a fait de mieux est le pirate sorti juste avant « Horses »;Tellement choquant;les musiciens jammaient pendant qu’elle hurlait sa poésie. Quand Lenny ( Kaye, ex-guitariste du Patti Smith Group, ndlr) est venu produire notre premier album, il nous a donné d’excellents pirates;Par exemple la première répétition de Lenny Kaye et Patti Smith, juste deux, en train de reprendre des trucs de Brecht, « Mack the Knife »; Comment s’est passé l’enregistrement avec Lenny Kaye ? Votre premier album avait, à l’époque, beaucoup surpris; C’est vrai que ce n’était pas du tout un album commercial; Nous étions très naïfs à propos de notre force de vente; Nous pensions « c’est de la pop, les gens aimeront ça » (rires); Nous avons été surpris; Nous n’avons eu aucun problèmes avec Lenny, mais nous lui en avons donné beaucoup. Nous étions très possessifs avec nos enfants, nos chansons, et nous ne voulions pas lui laisser faire quoi que ce soit;le pauvre; Nous avons bloqué ses initiatives. Mais nous l’adorons, nous nous téléphonons souvent, nous sommes restés très proches, nous nous revoyons à chaque fois qu’il vient en Grande-Bretagne ; Il est super, un homme adorable, très drôle, une des personnes le plus attachantes que nous ayons rencontré dans ce business; Pourquoi ne pas l’avoir choisi pour le second album, alors ? Non; Nous ne pouvions pas (silence); Il était temps de passer à autre chose de différent. Mais la fabrication du deuxième album ne s’est pas très bien passé. Nous avons dû tout remixer, ou presque; Hugh Jones, que vous avez choisi pour cet album, n’est pas, à priori, un producteur très subtile, surtout pour un groupe comme vous; Le problème était de savoir avec qui aller ! Nous ne savions pas qui choisir quand Hugh est venu nous voir à la fin du concert, et il a su nous impressionner. Il nous a vraiment beaucoup critiqué, nous a insulté; personne ne l’avait fait avant; nous avons alors décidé qu’il était notre homme (rires); « Ok, montre nous ce que tu sais faire, grosse tête » (rires); Il nous a montré, et ça n’a pas marché; il a vraiment bien enregistré les chansons, mais ne nous a pas du tout convaincu au mixage. Il avait entendu nos premiers singles sur Factory, et ça l’excitait beaucoup; il pensait que nous n’avions pas réussi, sur le premier album, à recapturer le feeling de nos premiers singles, et il a beaucoup travaillé pour essayer de retrouver ce son;c’est dommage qu’il ait échoué au mixage; Ce nouvel album sera-t-il une suite naturelle à « Stutter » ? Oui, une progression très naturelle;mais il y aura pas mal de surprises. Je pense qu’il sera plus accessible, avec quelques singles dessus. .. Il ne faut cependant pas croire que nous ayons dû faire des concessions; nous avons compris pourquoi « Stutter » prenait tant de temps à séduire; L’ordre des chansons par exemple, peut faire une différence énorme. Les deux premiers morceaux sur « Stutter » étaient les plus mal produits de l’album. Il en résultait que la mauvaise impression durait ensuite pendant tout le disque; Tu ne peux pas te rendre compte à quel point ce genre de chose peut affecter les ventes; Nous n’avons pour l’instant qu’un titre provisoire pour le nouveau; il devrait s’appeler « If things were perfect »;de vieux souvenirs ! Quant à savoir s’il sera une suite vraiment logique à « Stutter », je crois que ce serait vraiment difficile de donner un prolongement naturel à quelque chose d’aussi bizarre, non ? C.WHATSHISNAME & JD BEAUVALLET (Les Inrockuptibles- n°10-February/March 88 | Feb 1988 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Who? – A Talk With James – Sire promo 12″ | Article, Interview | Jim : I’m Jimmy. I play bass guitar Gavan : Hello, I’m Gavan. I’m the drummer Larry : Hello, I’m Larry and I play the guitar Tim : Tim, I sing and write the lyrics Gavan : The recording went fantastic, really well and I think we’ve probably made the best LP for four years that I’ve ever heard. It’s called Strip Mine. We recorded it about a year ago with Hugh Jones down in Wales. Tim : We usually jam together as a band and try and work out basic tunes and a kind of general structure for the song. I’ll take a cassette home and then late at night into early morning, I’ll write the lyrics starting with whatever comes into my head. A lot of them I don’t have a clue what I’m going to write about, I just let the song be written the way it wants to be. Everyone in the band has completely different influences, often contrasting. Larry : I used to when I was 13 or 14 or something like that, I used to listen to Jimi Hendrix a lot. Before that I listened to a lot of Motown when I was younger around about 12. Then I really got into heavy rock music like that English group called The Groundhogs and other blues rock guitar players. And like everybody, I think as I grew older, my tastes widened and my spectrum of musical influence just got bigger and bigger and bigger. Tim : We don’t like each other’s taste in music some of the time. Gavan : Quite often Tim : Quite often. What do you call an influence because we never try and emulate anyone. Full stop. And if we hear certain influences which we feel are too overt we just drop the song or we change it. Gavan : There’s a lot of music in America that I like, especially ethnic’s the wrong word but each different area has it’s own music, it has it’s own idiom and we’re quite open to that, travelling round, we get inspired by that. Jim : I suppose it’s just the music we listen to, isn’t it? Tim : There aren’t any fillers on the LP. We made sure everything that went on we really worked on. We really got the most out of. What For is about somebody trying to uplift themselves. In Manchester, there’s this big town centre and every evening before the sun goes down these birds, these starlings, start circling overhead, flying in almost hieroglyphic formations, a really spectacular site, really beautiful, especially in the middle of a dirty smelly city to see these beautiful formations and it’s really uplifting. And the song is kind of about this guy who’s really down, he’s trying not to think about his worries and newspapers and everything he reads, he looks up and sees this beautiful sight and thinks “What For, tell me, tell me what for” | Mar 1988 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
What For – ITV The Other Side Of Midnight – March 1988 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsJames performing What For on The Other Side Of Midnight in March 1988 | Mar 1988 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sounds – Flying Teacups And Other Broken Crockery | Article, Interview |
The questions rattle around my head as the car lurches into second gear. But James personal manager Martine and personable singer Tim Booth are oblivious to my thoughts and Tim favours an indepth discussion on UFOs and the CIA cover-up conspiracy. As the 21:15 flight Manchester to Ibiza economy flight retracts its undercarriage, Tim glances out of the window. “Look, there’s one now!” The car journey ends at the International II, where free admission is acquired through a combination of bribery – a 12-inch copy of the new James single “What For” – and sympathy (a knee injury necessitates Tim’s use of a Dickens and Jones walking stick.) Inside the garish grotto, Pere Ubu are yet to appear. Tim and Martine, now joined by James fresh-faced bassist Jim Glennie, are soon immersed in conversation with The Man From Del Monte’s maniacal singer Mike, and Edward Barton – both whom have recently supported James. Edward, who prefers tweed to Mike’s Biggles chic, is a little upset that a recent Sounds interview questioned his sanity&ldots;. “He called me mad. I’m not mad.” The suggestion that mad might refer to eccentric is given short shrift. “No, mad doesn’t mean eccentric,” he insists vehemently. “Eccentric is an upturned tea cup; mad is a tea cup teetering on the edge of a table.” Edward is equally concerned that James might be misrepresented. “Be careful,” he warns Tim, “they’ll label you and forget you.” “They won’t call me mad,” says Tim gently to the agitated tweed wearer. “No, they’ll call you a veggie loony, put you in a box&ldots; then forget you!” In keeping with the veggie loony image, my arrival next morning at Tim and Martine’s flat – opposite an undistinguished door which leads into Factory Records – is greeted with a choice: decaffinated coffee and soya milk or medicinal Japanese tea. No sugar. The pious celibate Buddhist stereotype is given further credence by Tim’s meticulous, almost obsessive shaving ritual. However, his addiction to Cheers (the soapy social documentary of life in a New York bar) shatters the illusion. The choice of background music hardly enhances an aura of piety. Still, the Pogues “If I Should Fall From Grace With God” meets Jim’s approval, and that of Larry Gott, lead guitarist. Drummer Gavan Whelan will be late. Of all the band members, his attitude most closely approximates the devil-may-care rock-n-roll rebel. Despite associations with orange juice, James are not without their drinking songs. “We’ve got some songs like that,” says Tim before slipping into song. “Wish I’d invested gold / Down go share prices / New York to Tokyo” Larry: “We’ve done the drunken song live at Leeds Astoria” “Christ!” Tim comes down to earth religiously. “Went well,” says Jim “Did it?” asks Tim incredulously “There were a load of football fans in that night,” continues Larry. “We were on a stage that was about two foot high and they were spilling beer, throwing pots on stage and throwing tables in the air. And we played the drunken song and we all started falling about the stage with the drunken audience.” Tim: “There were people on the stage from the first song and they wouldn’t go. The management thought : James, vegetarian band, lay off some bouncers. And it was a riot &ldots;.” “People would come up and say, Autograph, give us an autograph, halfway through songs. And one guy came up and said, Sing a song for the working class then &ldots; sing a song for the working class! And he’s getting really irritated and his mate’s going, Yeah sing a song for the working class.” “So at the end of the song I said, That song’s for you, it’s the best we can do. And he went kinda, Woarrr that was for us!” Despite the carnage at Leeds, last October’s gig at London’s Astoria was spiritual and ten times better for you than a dose of Nicky Cruz or a series of Songs of Praise. In white robes and adorned with a skull cap, Tim pervaded the auditorium with an aura of understanding and courted those that leapt onstage. This threaded with James sound – a crisp, traditional folk merged with various international styles and warped into a lush chart-compatible brew – had James leading the audience as the pied Piper led Hamelin’s sewer population. “It varies, you see,” explains Tim. “Sometimes we stir it up because we’ve got a lot of aggressive songs which we’ll only play if we’re in that mood, where we go on from the beginning thinking f**k you.” “We did that at WOMAD once.” Jim: “It was a really sunny day, everybody was really laid back with the African music, the cheap falafels&ldots;..” Tim: “So we started with all our unpleasant epics. They were the opening songs and people just couldn’t get a toehold.” My misconceptions are now in splinters, an appropriate point from which to survey the past, present and future of James. The upward spiral was swift: “What’s The World” and “If Things Were Perfect / Hymn From A Village” being released first as singles then together on a five-track EP by Factory, between october 1984 and July 1985. A transfer to Sire (WEA’s American sister label) followed, bringing the ‘Chainmail EP’ and ‘So Many Ways’ 45s before the debut album, ‘Stutter’, in the Summer of ’86. ‘Stutter’ was a transition period for James, caught between the commercial demands of the record company and their own desire for complete control. The result was a mish mash, a record with charm and erraticism, coated in a cheap lustre – a record to tape rather than buy. Then, nothing. Record companies operate on credit not acclaim and the band, as the record, were left on the shelf to gather dust. Tim: -The record company didn’t want us to record so they didn’t give us any money. We tried to release something after the LP but they wouldn’t have it so we could do nothing. Then you try and tour and they say, Well, you haven’t had anything out for a while, wait. “Then Martine resigned as our manager and you can’t get anything out of a record company without a manager. With a new manager (whose career spanned just four months) James got to work on a new album. ‘Strip Mine’ was finished in March 1987. Release was delayed until October and then halted altogether with the arrival of new manager, Eliot Rashman (of Simply Red fame). Rashman felt that the album needed remixing and, after five months, got James (who also had misgivings about the production) and Sire to comply. Sire’s decision to finance the remix coincided with the resignation of The Housemartins and The Smiths from the intelligent end of the pop market. An ideal opportunity for James to scoop the awards in ’88? Tim: “I think that’s what they {the record company) think. Everyone wanted us to get a record out when The Smiths had broken up. We went the opposite way on that kind of idea.” Their new single, ‘What For’, supports this claim, not that James have ever had to fear the Smiths copyists claims so wrongly attributed to them in the past (The Smiths actually covered them, recording the first James single on the cassette release of ‘I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish’). With the subterfuge of The Housemartins’ ‘Happy Hour’, the tempo of The Cult’s ‘She Sells Sanctuary’, a lushness you’d expect of a band sharing the same label as Madonna and an advertising budget big enough to ensure blanket press coverage (surely a sign of Sire’s newfound confidence), it might seem surprising that the record has failed to gain the Radio 1 A-list grading so essential for chart success. It was practically constructed for Top Of The Pops. Larry: “It was originally a Eurovision Song Contest Entry actually, a song for Europe.” Tim: “I used to take the piss out of it and sing a real Eurovision chorus to it” Larry: It went ‘Bonjour. .:” “‘Bouncy bouncy bonjour!'” the band return unanimously. Larry: “It changed a lot cos it was quite poppy and breezy and didn’t have a serious side to it, and then musically it got more serious.” By its live airing in October, it had grown teeth, Tim singing “I will dive into Sellafield seas. Sick fish, myself and some strange debris”, but on vinyl the nuclear power plant reference disappeared. Tim assures me that the absence of the leaky location was not due to record company censorship. I took it out because I didn’t want it to be that specific, so I sing ‘Foaming seas’, which refers to sea pollution more generally, not just nuclear . If you’re going to censor it you’d have to take out “will not think of torture or the rape of nature” which like ‘Misty Blue last year, is not A-list compatible. THE LUSH quality and satirical lyricism of ‘What For’ is maintained throughout ‘Strip Mine’. ‘Vulture’ is the musical equivalent of the imagery of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil mixed with the blatant vulgarity of The Hitcher’s severed fingers in the pomme frittes. “Yeah, I enjoyed that,” says Tim with relish. .’When you spy a fresh face / Remember the rich taste / You want a part in the cost of it all/ So you open your flicknife /And cut off a thick slice / Envy makes the flier fall'” Then, before you can breathe in, Tim summons up Monty python’s exploding man. “It was written before that,” says Tim defensively. “It must be about five years old, it was on the first Peel Session, but a different version. It’s all about greed and gluttony.” If “Vulture’ provides enough colour for a good schlock movie, ‘Riders’ is the hospital horror incarnate -a nightmare at St Elsewhere. “It was a dream,” says Tim quietly, a fairly exact description of a dream I had four years ago that turned my life around. “Until then I’d been on a very self-destructive route and this dream showed me what I was doing and made me decide that I really didn’t ‘want that poison in’. “I’d been in hospital very shortly before (with a chronic liver complaint) and I probably took from the experience. The woman in the song, the nurse, was Nurse Rachett from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and her assistant was Jed Clampett from The Beverley Hillbillies. If ‘Riders’ took Tim off the motorway to self-destruction, it hardly diffused the potency of his songwriting Each song has a purpose and prod. at the subconscious as it teases the eardrums. The most overt message is in ‘Charlie Dance’, which epitomises a country where a budget aimed to cripple the poor, is taken up by the media as a perfect package for the working class -.the mentality of Harry Enfield’s .Loadsamoney on the front page of a national newspaper. “‘Charlie Dance’ is about a believer in official lines who accepts what the government says. It was written after Chernobyl so it was like ‘The cows don’t moo anymore/But “m sure they’re not dead/They don’t chew anymore but ‘.m sure they’re not dead'”. “The one person in this country who drives me up the wall is Lord Marshall, head of the Nuclear Electro Generating Board. After Chernobyl he was saying there’s no danger from our machines. Anybody who’s ever owned a machine knows they break down. And he denies it and denies it. He should live on the site or swim on the sea if he thinks it’s that safe”. This is the serious side of James, the side that finds the term Ministry Of Defence hypocritical. Tim relates it to a Ben Elton sketch (the two were at college together): .A near mid air disaster. What do they mean near miss? More like near bloody hit. “The Ministry Of Defence should be called the Ministry Of War.” It’s a high horse that all but Gavan are prepared to mount. What does Gavan want? “Loads of money” SO WHAT have we got? Take the talking bit from Dr Dolittle (“I feel that it is very important in principle that one should avoid eating one’s friends”), yesterday’s tabloid headlines, Luxembourg’s Eurovision entries (circa 1985-1988), rhythms from Didsbury to the Congo Basin, the humour of Palin and Gilliam (and a dash of Cleese), add a pinch of Cheers and cook for 45 minutes on Sellafield radiation, mark four. James James I, James T Kirk or James Anderton? | Apr 1988 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Just Say Yo – Sire Biography | Article, Biography | Not every band would have the nerve to open up their album with a cheery little ditty about someone being attacked by an earwig. Imagine how that goes over back in the corporate offices – “Psss – did you hear that new group we signed? Man, they’re weird”. No, not weird, James. Not as in Dean (though Morrissey is a big fan). As in four men with some very unusual, sometimes caustic, sometimes surreal and totally individual songs to parlay to a world that needs a little something different to shake things up a bit. Which the band did on their first album, STUTTER, a dollop of post-punk, post-modern strangeness thrown on top of an often uncomprehending music world. However, one doesn’t have to be an Einstein to recognise that this bunch from Manchester, where some of England’s most creative bands (The Fall, Joy Division, New Order, The Smiths) have taken root, is ready to join its predecessors ranks. On the other side of the Atlantic, James’ unique folk-punk-pop intellectual cut-up-cabaret synthesis (whew!) caught the ear of rock critic, Patti Smith guitarist and Suzanne Vega producer Lenny Kaye. Kaye, who produced the group’s debut album STUTTER, knows a special sound when he hears one. As will you, after hearing “What For”, the special inclusion here from the singular James. | Apr 1988 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Naked And The Dead – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
The recipient of this thoughtful self-imposed dictate is a cloudy-haired type with the charisma of Irene Handl (yes, that much) and, despite himself, the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie. Tim is certainly a Venusian. He has that flavour, and blinking yellow skin (caused by liver trouble) too. But we shall skip past this tastelessness. “According to quantum physics, it’s more than possible, in fact it’s probable, we have other lives, probably hundreds of them.” He pauses for me and Jim to stop blushing. “In parallel universes, we’re all on the boarder off insanity. We could discover other existences if only we went over.” He gives me a pen because I ask for one, and tells me to read a lot of Robert Anton Wilson (“the weirdest books I ever…”) and about equal amounts of Milan Kundera. And you can see, I took the medicine. Yum. James used to be like a goat (? – eh, Ed) with a broken femur, an awkward oddity, but happy as Mary Popping, or Larry. They made this one record, “Hymn From A Village”, and this brought them the fame of a minute. They toured with The Smiths, who loved them. They had rousing reviews for their first LP, “Stutter”. But oh dear me, so funny, all vegetarians, weren’t they, or didn’t drink, or don’t take drugs, is it? The gents of the press could get no handle on it, and nor could the record company. James have taken two years to resurface with the brilliant tightrope album “Strip Mine”. They’re taking more care of business now. James are like a fully-formed, million-dollar robo-goat, nearly free of scape. I’m very afraid they want me to think them normal. Me, who could hardly go in the house because there was a magpie near it. Tim: “So how many have you seen today?” Two, then one, but that makes it really three. “No, it has to be all at the same time. You cheated. Still, all you have to do is blow them a kiss or take your hat off to them, and that way. “Martine and I were sitting in a park. A magpie landed about a hundred yards away, and we both went, ‘Uh oh’. Well, it turned and looked at us as if it heard what we said. Then it took off, staring at us, and flew towards us, about two feet off the ground. It landed and hopped around us, pecking at my shoelaces, then round the back of me and pecked at my bum. It stayed for ten minutes. An utterly beautiful-looking bird. Its eyes closed like camera shutters, kind of chunk chunk.” Jim, Alias James, Alias The one that got the band undemocratically named after him, has a weeny baby girl – hence potential genius – called Gemma. He says, “I’ve been told 13’s a bad year.” What happens then? Jim bites his lip. “Don’t know.” Then there’s the nature of rarefied genius, which brushes scapulae with James too much. When Jim was 11, he had this best friend, and at 18 they started the band. “Paul had a real fire. He was our motivation”. Paul’s not in James now, for one or two reasons that cause heartache. “I’ve never seen anyone change like he did. Oh God! He was the most outward-going, full of life person… But he died. Not really, and I don’t know if it was drugs. I really don’t know. But the Paul I knew was no longer. And I miss him, I really do. I miss him. And I still see the guy in the street, but it’s not him.” Because Jim’s choked and the wall could get damaged, Tim ice-skates across the frozen pool. “At one time Paul was quite catatonic. He didn’t talk, he used to stand in the room at rehearsals and not play his instrument. At one gig he turned his guitar upside-down and played it left-handed, or tried to. It was our big break, our first gig with The Smiths, 1,500 people. We’d played to maybe two or three hundred before. Our first big gig, and he decided he wanted to play the whole concert with his guitar upside-down. He shaved his head the same day, and went on stage but didn’t play. He just stood there, the whole gig, trying. Making these noises.” Paul was a pie-in-the-sky, sweet dream baby. They repeat his words now, like dazed pupils. “He said our set list must change every night. That we must take a lot of risks. Originality – if you hear any other’s influence in your song, dump it. No advertising. Everything shared. Everything.” Jim laughs like it might be hurting him too. “And we were gonna be huge. With no advertising, no interviews, no publicity.” Other people make it hard for those dilly dreamers. “Uh-huh. Sometimes, I could say things to people which would kill ‘em, would core ‘em.” “Glamour. Hooh. Glamour, eh?” “Glamour, Tim.” Silence. “It’s not a particularly pleasant word.” It’s just that you used to say, “seduction has to be wrong”, but this new LP, with its talk of skin and bone, glows differently. Tim: “Glamour in music today is a money thing. It’s revolting – there’s bugger-all in it. To me, Patti Smith is glamorous, but it didn’t cost her a lot of money, it wasn’t linked with wealth. She was a romantic poet, the artist, trying to push life to an extreme, to extract some drop of meaning out of it.” Tim was at boarding-school (this was then) when his mum rang and said, “Your dad’s in hospital. He may not make it through the night. I’ll ring you tomorrow. You mustn’t come home, by the way.” What a Ma. So he crept about in the dark dorm, found some headphones and listened to anything that happened to be there. Into his hot, sad shell, Patti Smith sang, “His father died and left him alone on a New England farm.” Tim is a Rupert Brooke himself, a house on fire, a misplaced Joan of Art. Tim says obstinately, “Everyone has their own meaning for every damn word you use. So how on earth do you have any communication?” Levitate us, Tim. “Martine keeps telling me that words are only seven per cent of the human being’s communication. The rest is through gestures, smell, tone of voice, smile, eyes. Statistics show this.” Statistics, inter-ballistics. “I talk it out, I should it out, I put myself in a position where I’m gonna have a fight. Violence is something that – oh God – I do not morally condemn. Sometimes it is very necessary. Having been a pacifist, I’m now getting into boxing. I enjoy seeing Tyson knock people out, the blood, the mats on the canvas to cover where it’s splattered. I’m surprised at my own reactions. I know you cannot grab an idea of how the world should be and impose it. I just let myself feel my animal side, sexually as well as in violence. I blocked what I couldn’t control before”. And love will save the world? No reply. What, love won’t save it? “Save the world. That’s a slogan.” Tim suddenly finds a lot about his shoe interesting. “Save it from who, save it from what, save it for what? You know, maybe this is how it’s bloody well meant to be.” Eh? The man with a thousand possibilities and twice as many probable lives has gone me in a trick bag. “Maybe we’ll never attain the knowledge everybody’s lookin’ for. We just ain’t got the capacity up here (Jim taps noddle). Not even just for an understanding of what the bleedin’ hell’s goin’ on.” Jim, Gavan, Larry, Tim. Going round in frivolous, important circles. Assault and battery. Mad hattery. Celebration. | Apr 1988 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Rejoice – NME Questions | Article, News |
Can you tell me what Mancunian popsters JAMES are currently up to? Also can you supply me with the address of their fan club? Hupsprung Nick, Sutton Coldfleld, W. Midlands The news is that James are about to fling themselves into non-stop activity in the hope of reaching the front pages of TheSun. A single, ‘Ya Ho’ is promised for mid-September, while an album, ‘Strip Mine’ will be released by Sire just a couple of weeks later. Tourwise, I haven’t got full details yet but the Jimmies should be in Dublin and Belfast on October 8 and 9 respectively, while confirmed dates include Manchester Ritzy (11), Newcastle Riverside (12), Aberdeen Venue (14), Glasgow QMU (15), Dundee Fat Sam’s (16), Liverpool Poly (20), Sheffield University (21), Nottingham Trent Poly (22), Birmingham Irish Centre (25), Bristol Bier Keller (26) and London Astoria (27). But there are plenty of dates to be added. James don’t appear to own a fan club but messages to the band can be relayed via Karl Badger, Sire Records, WEA The Electric Lighting Station, 46 Kensington Court, London W8 5DP | Aug 1988 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Strip-Mine US Press Biography | Article, Press Release | JAMES A band of four square men. Manchester-based. Their music reflects their relationship with each other over a seven year period. Two singles released on Factory Records, which, when combined, reached No. 1 on the Independent chart. The last six years spent sharpening their songs, with the occasional tour as support to New Order and The Smiths. Signed worldwide by Seymour Stein’s Sire label, with Blanco Y Negro in collaboration in the UK, for a modest advance on 11.11.84, in return for their independence in the material world. The single “Chain Mail” was released in February 1986. The LP Stutter is released in August 1986. Both produced by Lenny (Suzanne Vega) Kaye. A second album, Strip Mine, released 8.9.88. Produced by Hugh Jones. Features the cuts “What For”, “Medieval”, “Not There” and “Return”. Looking forward to meeting your aquaintance. | Aug 1988 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Dates – Sounds News | Article, News | JAMES, the Mancunian quartet whose debut album is in danger of going rusty in the can, play Warrington Legends October 9, Manchester Ritz 11, Newcastle Riverside 1 2, Aberdeen Venue 14, Glasgow Queen Margaret Union 1 5, Stirling University 16, Liverpool Polytechnic 20, Sheffield University 21, Nottingham Trent Polytechnic 22, Birmingham Irish Centre 25, Bristol Bierkeller 26, London Astoria 27. | Sep 1988 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James New Single – NME News | Article, News |
JAMES, the Mancunian foursome return with a new single and a tour. The 45 ‘Ya Ho’ is released by Blanco Y Negro/Sire on Monday and the band then head out on tour taking in Warrington Legends (October 5), Manchester Ritz (11), Newcastle Riverside (12), Aberdeen Venue (14), Glasgow OMU (15), Stirling University (16), Liverpool Poly (20), Sheffield University (21), Nottingham Trent Poly (22), Birmingham Irish Centre (25), Bristol Bierkeller (26) and London Astoria (27). | Sep 1988 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ya Ho – The Other Side Of Midnight – September 1988 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsJames performing Ya Ho on The Other Side Of Midnight in September 1988 | Sep 1988 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Home James – Record Mirror | Article, Interview |
Take four slightly weird individuals, get them to write some ‘extraordinary’, ‘climatic’ songs, and you have James. Phew, says Johnny Dee. There is no way you can tie a label around James. Maybe because of this, past interviews have centred around myth-making. The last time they appeared in rm they wore ‘ultra-bright’ knitwear in the photos, said they were inspired by the ‘Trumpton’ theme tune and there was talk of Buddhism and veganism. All of this was, of course, tongue in cheek – it just went a bit far. Tim (tongue placed firmly in cheek): “Jesus lads, I can’t go on like this, it has to end!” Gavan: “I think you’re hypersensitive.” Tim: “I’m hypersensitive? God, what about you?” Gavan: “If things were easy we wouldn’t be where we are.” Jim: “There’d be a lot less pain and friction.” Gavan: “Yeah, but that’s art isn’t it?” Tim: “In the West maybe, but in the East it doesn’t have to be pain and strife.” Gavan: “You’re joking, you’re joking!” The argument continues. Rock ‘n’ roll mythology comes in for cross examination next: Tim: “Rick Astley has got a mythology.” Gavan: “But he’s a f***ing twat.” Tim: “He uses jet set Campari mythology.” Gavan: “He doesn’t.” Tim: “He does.” Gavan: “He doesn’t, he doesn’t!” Tim: “His videos are like adverts for Tunisian holidays!” James are about to release an album called ‘Strip Mine’, 10, extraordinary songs that travel lyrically from Tim’s head, past his nipples, naughty bits and down to his toes. Tim: “I’m a human being – I’ve got all these parts on me, I carry them around and inspect them every now again and write about them.” Live, James are the nearest you can get to spontaneous combustion. Often one member of the band will start a completely new, unheard song and the rest will join in. Other times, things just click, unbelievably, into place. Larry: “Sometimes it becomes so easy. Everything sounds fantastic when it meshes together.” Tim: “Live, sometimes it’s just ‘ah’, it’s just ‘there’.” It all sounds very sexual. Tim: “It is, it is!” Jim: “Our songs are very climactic.” Gavan: “It’s synthesised sex.” Tim: “It’s really hard after three songs to keep it going.” Jim: “You keep thinking, ‘we’re gonna lose it, we’re gonna lose it’… And then you’ve lost it.” Tim: “It’s really awful if you come off stage and you’ve ‘come’ and everybody else goes ‘bloody awful gig’.” James are totally enthusiastic about their music. They get excited even talking about it. What do they think other people get from James? Gavan: “A buzz they can’t get elsewhere.” Tim: “In the past we’ve been a bit shy selling ourselves. Now, we can say ‘it’s brilliant’.” But is there a place for James in the giddy pop world? Gavan: “Yeah. Number one – that’s our place.” Ladies, gentlemen, and disillusioned vegans – I give you James – a weird recipe of fun and naughty bits. Take some home with you. | Sep 1988 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Strip-Search – NME Interview | Article, Interview |
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James: Ya-Ho Les Inrockuptibles Review (French) | Article, Era: Strip-Mine, Review | Le voir pour le croire. L’allure de garçons mystiques enrôlés par la foi, qui s’apprêtent à revêtir leur robe de bure pour tourner en rond avec leur méditation dans les couloirs rassurés d’un monastère. L’allure seulement, car sous leur apparence désuète, les quatre de James sont peut-être les doux illuminés les plus en marge de toute la scène anglaise, insensibles aux courants, ignorants des poses et aveugles des modes, je doute même qu’ils connaissent l ‘existence du terme. Ce n’est pas que le temps se soit arrêté pour eux, il n’existe pas. Il y a 50 ans, ils auraient porté les mêmes pompes, dans 50 ans ils se rachèteront les mêmes, si elles sont usées. Rien d’étonnant : ils sont de Manchester, la ville où rien n’est surprenant. Bientôt, il n’y aura pas que chez eux qu’on admirera leur importance, leur pop intemporelle taillée au burin et leur sensibilité exacerbée, habitée par l’épilepsie et la loufoquerie : « Yaho », une ronde sautillante aux accents tyroliens pour attendre un deuxième album en début d’année, déjà un must. Translation by Google Translate(!)Seeing is believing. The pace of mystical boys enrolled in faith, who are preparing to take their frock to go round in circles with their meditation in the corridors of a monastery reassured. The only speed, because under their antiquated appearance, the four of James may be mild in most illuminated margin of all the English stage, insensitive to currents poses ignorant and blind modes, I doubt they even aware of the existence of the word. This is not that time has stopped for them it does not exist. It was 50 years ago they would have worn the same pumps, in 50 years they will buy the same, if worn. No wonder they are in Manchester, the city where nothing is surprising. Soon, there will not be home that we admire their importance, timeless pop cut and chisel their heightened sensitivity, inhabited by epilepsy and craziness “Yaho” a chugging round the Tyrolean accents to wait a second album earlier this year, already a must.
| Sep 1988 | article era-strip-mine review era | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Rockin’ In the UK – Interview With Tim And Gavan – October 1988 | Article, Interview, Video Archive |
DetailsInterview with Tim and Gavan from the Rockin’ In The UK programme in October 1988 | Oct 1988 | article interview video-archive | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
City Life Interview | Article, Interview |
City Life Interview October 1998 Martyr And The Vendettas! James’ last performance at the Ritz has been mythologised as Manchester’s best gig of 1988. With a new album under their belt and another Ritz gig in the pipeline (October 11), James should be ecstatic, yet Mike West found Tim Booth poor, pensive but in the pink. The interview is postponed. The singer has slashed himself with a shard of broken glass. Was this a suicide attempt or an accident in the kitchen? “I was washing up the stem glasses and… I guess I lost control,” says Tim Booth, arriving two hours later with five out of ten fingers bandaged. James, the pop group, Manchester’s most visionary project since G-mex, suffer for their art. They suffered for a well publicised abuse of drugs. They suffered for an over-public use of meditation. They suffered for vegetarianism and two successful independent singles. Finally, they suffered at the hands of big business, WEA Records. If you worship martyrs, Van Gogh, Jesus Christ and Jim Morrison, you will probably worship James. “In 1984, my liver packed in. The band were ill, disorientated, using drugs, happy to burn out. I was a materialist, left-wing. I knew nothing about health and magic.” Tim, James’ esoteric lyricist and unlikely idol to legions of beer-boys from Leeds, has perfect bone structure and a carrot juice complexion. He is explaining how he came to write the nursery rhyme narratives that Yorkshire delinquents have taken to their hearts. “I read Arthurian legends, Beowolf and Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories at too young an age.” The delicately featured boy grew up frightened, perverted, and obsessed by these fantasies of monsters rising from the sea. “Then I read this book on interpreting dreams.” Uniformed nurses administer him poisons. Alien parasites attack his jaw. Tim’s dreams have more adventure and less sex than Sigourney Weaver’s films. Aided by Jungian analysis, his dreams became metaphors. And reality became symbolic. And meditation became an obsession. And sex became infrequent. Four years ago, Tim’s heath and James’ habits were turned around. Narcotic depressives became suspected Buddhists. “That’s when we began to see beyond the surface of things.” Stripmine, the current and long-delayed follow up to Stutter, documents this catharsis with depth, honesty and wonderful songs. “They are simple stories with an underlying resonance of meaning that not even I understand. I used to believe that my lyrics wrote themselves.” The stories have a happy end: the suffering artist’s liver complaint is cured with acupuncture and a regulated diet. But does the suffering end? Of course not. While Tim discovered alternative medicine, other states of being, escapes from the material world, James found no escape from the materialists. Shortly after the success of ‘Hymn From A Village’, their second single on Factory Records, James were snatched from Tony Wilson’s collection of precious curiosities by a connoisseur with greater pretentions and more capital, Seymour Stein of Sire Records. They say Seymour hoards artifacts and artists like a squirrel hoards nuts. He buries them in expensive holes – his New York apartment or his record company – leaves them there to own and forget. Stripmine was recorded two years ago, kept from the public by accountants and A&R departments, quibbling over production, presentation or budget. James were shelved, an ornament adding to Stein’s prestige but taking from the livelihoods of Tim, Larry, Gavan and Jim. “We had no record, so we had no gigs, so we had no money. We could not subsist.” Sire, WEA, choose to ignore that bands are made of people not porcelain. James made their compromises. Once, they were obstinately human, their dress sense uncoordinated, their image as incoherent as four strangers waiting for a bus. Then, under the persuasion of Simply Red’s manager, megalomaniac Eliot Rashman, the four men began to experiment with clothes, make-up and method acting. They learned the basic skills taught to fourteen year old school girls and rock stars. “That was only for photographs… off camera, we fall apart.” Tim is defensive. The clutter of conflicting styles that is James’ music has also been cleared out, like their wardrobe, reorganised. The result is Rock music, a professional compromise between performer, producer and promoter. But now the group are preparing legal letters severing their relations with Sire. They will emerge from the conflict as four friends, whose worst injuries have been self inflicted. “Although we’re very close, the pressure has caused fights…” admits Tim. And later that afternoon, in the small park opposite the Buddhists’ Eighth Day vegetarian café, a strong man with a weak chin is seen shouting at the man with a carrot juice complexion. A Christian rally sings psalms nearby, but Gavan Whelan’s expletives cut through. “Fuck Hugh Jones,” says the drummer and ardent meat eater, “John Paul Jones (Led Zepellin’s bassist) should be our producer.” Tim Booth turns from carrot to beetroot. “I hate Rock,” he says. “So why do you fucking play it?” asks Gavan. First year Polytechnic students bow their heads with embarrassment as they walk by. Tim Booth believes all things are fated, preordained by magical powers, numerology and good cooking. “But in this culture, it doesn’t necessarily follow that talent gets rewarded.” James have their talent. They have yet to get their reward. | Oct 1988 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Interview – Uptown | Article, Interview |
The last thing you’d expect to influence a Manchester band is the starlings in Piccadilly Square. Usually it’s the rain, or the industry or even the lager louts – but then James are no ordinary Manchester band. Into their melodic songs on their new album ‘Strip-mining’, they weave poetry and lyrics that linger rather than escaping into the nearest guitar twang ‘In the sky above the square starlings spiral dancing on all’. (What for?). Explains vocalist and word fashioner Tim Booth… “It was the idea of this guy being really down, looking up and seeing the starlings swirling round and going ‘wow, that’s amazing’. It’s the best sight in Manchester – they can’t build anything to rival that in beauty.” James have been around the Manchester scene for a number of years, and three years ago signed to Madonna’s label Sire. Their future looked rosy and still does, but to coincide with the release of the album, the band have parted company with the label, after waiting two years for its release, while Sire withheld backing as they thought the music was too ‘English’ and wouldn’t sell. Guitarist Jim says: “We’re happy now. We wanted to get off the label two years ago because they wouldn’t let us do what we’re good at – playing live and recording. We’re not going a step backwards by any stretch of the imagination. This album will take us to the next step.” Trouble is, that James have got a reputation as a frantic live band – one of the best to see in the country, yet their album is very song based and tuneful – not what sells records in the age of pop pirates. Yet they wouldn’t budge… “No-one seems to realise that you just make the best album you can.” Quite. It’s like asking Picasso to paint a bunch (???) of flowers… Tim “and then turning round to him and saying ‘well, those flowers would have been better painted blue instead of yellow. If you want them painted blue, then go paint your own! Recording an LP is a completely different medium and you’ve got to treat it differently. The music’s a bit more calm.” Jim: “I like to think that we’re still doing the extremes, we’re just doing them better.” Tim: “The aim is to have bigger extremes of franticness, but contrasted with the complete opposite with some really calm and beautiful things. When we start off with songs, they’re usually quite simple and then we play them a lot live and they just grow. All these songs are like little fledglings and then on tour, they’ll have to lean to fly…” Jim: “We’ll put them out of the nest and see if they like it…” And no doubt they’ll soar like the starlings in Piccadilly Square… James play The Ritz on October 11. Their album Strip-mining is now on release (Blanco Y Negro). | Oct 1988 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Melody Maker Tour News | Article, News |
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Itinerary: 1988 October Tour | Tour Itinerary | This is the band itinerary from the October 1988 tour. | Oct 1988 | tour-itinerary article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
BBC Radio 1 Andy Kershaw – 20th October 1988 | Audio Archive, Session | AudioSetlistMedieval / Sit Down / Stripminingrecorded 6th October 1988 for broadcast on 20th October 1988 show Details
SongsShare: | Oct 1988 | audio-archive session article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Dropped By Record Label – Record Mirror News | Article, News |
The album, recorded over a year ago, was repeatedly delayed for remixing and various other reasons. | Nov 1988 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Gavan Leaves James – Sounds News | Article, News |
The Manchester band, who expect to name a new sticksman within the next couple of weeks, are also in the process of launching their own label after leaving Sire Records. The band have a live LP, recorded at Bath Moles Club last November, ready for release but are currently negotiating the rights to some of the songs with Sire. | Jan 1989 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
One Man Clapping – Press Release | Article, Press Release | James Live Album For you, the doldrums are over. On March 20th, One Man Clapping Records, through Rough Trade, release One Man Clapping, JAMES first vinyl output since September 88 and an ill-fated liaison with Sire Records The new album shows the band at their very best – totally live – recorded at a series of 3 special concerts at Bath Moles Club in October 1988. One Man Clapping features the “classic” James line-up of Tim Booth (vocals), Gavan Whelan (drums), Jim Glennie (bass) and Larry Gott (guitar). Following Gavan’s departure, JAMES take to the road with new members David Baignton Power, known for his session work with It’s Immaterial and other leading North West bands, on drums and Saul Davies on violin, guitar and percussion. The tour dates are : March 14th : Newcastle University March 15th : Sheffield University March 16th : Hull University March 18th : Manchester Free Trade Hall March 21st : Birmingham Powerhouse March 22nd : London Dominion | Feb 1989 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Back In The Sticks – Sounds News | Article, News |
He’s Dave Baignton-Power, and the band have taken the opportunity to add a new member, guitarist, violinist and percussionist Saul Davies. After the dates, the new line-up will record a single called ‘Sit Down’, due for release in May, probably on their own label. And they’ll start work on a new album soon after. Their live album, ‘One Hand Clapping’ is out this week on Rough Trade and reviewed on Page 40. | Mar 1989 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Best New Article (French) | Article, News | James, le groupe de Manchester invité du festival Inrockuptibles de l’automne dernier et qui s’est fait jeter de chez Sire, sort son nouvel album « One Man Clapping » enregistré live en octobre dernier à Bath en Angleterre. Depuis, le groupe a changé de batteur avec l’arrivée de David Baynton Power et le recrutement d’un violoniste en la personne de Saul Davies. Le disque sort sur leur propre label One Man Record distribué par Rough Trade outre-Manche. Best – March 1989 | Mar 1989 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Out Of Order – ITV Documentary | Article, Interview, Video Archive |
DetailsPatti Caldwell : Welcome to Out of Order the programme that bites. Tonight we see the flipside of the glamorous pop industry. How one promising British band disappeared when they signed on the same British label as Madonna. Looking for fame and fortune and climbing the charts, tonight Out of Order looks at what it’s like to be young, talented and signed up to a huge American music corporation and then left on the shelf with little chance of escape. Reporter : Madonna is number one in the album charts. This is the story of the British band hoping to copy her success with the WEA/Sire record corporation. They too joined the stable of Seymour Stein, the man who signed Madonna. In 1985, rock critics had tipped James as the next big British rock act and Seymour Stein snapped them up into an exclusive contract. But unlike Madonna, they were never to earn more than £30 a week. A number one band in the independent charts, front page of the NME and described by Sounds Magazine as “pop gods and saviours of rock n roll., they now belonged exclusively to the world of Sire and WEA, part of the massive Warner Communications. Only when they were signed did they realise that it wasn’t a passport to fame and fortune. Jim : Things were going really well for us. We were being courted by the record companies. We signed to Sire on a high. We were going and then things stopped basically. Tim : We would ring people in WEA a year after we’d signed and we’d say “This is so and so from James” and they’d say James Who? and it was like they didn’t even know you were part of WEA and Sire Reporter : From rock n roll to medical guinea pigs, testing drugs at the local hospital for £10 a day so that they could continue to work full-time. James shared their manager with top WEA act Simply Red. They’ve sold millions. Now Elliot Rashman has put at risk his vital relationship with WEA and Sire by talking to Out of Order. He believes that by now James should be a top international act, but he says they were left in a dark corner of the musical industry, what’s known as the mummification process. Elliot Rashman : Most of the major record labels in the US use the independent music scene in the UK as a Sainsburys and they come over here with their metaphorical shopping trolley and fill it full of independent acts and the cost for a major American conglomerate is minimal so they come over here and every year they sign bands and bands and bands and they tell them it’s all going to be wonderful and they’re the next big thing and that’s as much as they do. All they have to do is sign them, they don’t have to work them. Now their view is business is business. Reporter : Into the shopping trolley and locked into a sixty page contract, James were owned by Sire “throughout the universe” and in the hands of that company. In this letter to WEA, manager Elliot Rashman accuses the company of failing to give proper promotion. The problem he says stems from Sire’s policy of “sign them and see what happens but don’t spend any money in the meantime” All this from a man whose only other band, Simply Red, were making millions for WEA. Sire were committed to releasing two albums. Today hype and promotion are the lifeblood of pop hits. Elliot Rashman is scathing over the release of the second James LP. ER : It ended up on the shelf. It ended up being released because again from a contractual point of view, all they have to do is release it and they’ve obliged, they’ve fulfilled their side of the contract. Reporter : Is it possible to have hits by just releasing…. ER : No, it’d be dead within a week. PC : Well, the only advice Elliot Rashman could give James was to break up and to escape the contact. James, the high hopes of 85 watched the obituraries roll in. Reporter : Across the Atlantic, Rolling Stone magazine wrote a glowing feature on flamboyant Stein, boasting that he’s a collector, he likes to collect furniture. James felt like they were in the attic and Sire wouldn’t let them out of the contract. Larry : If they turned round and let a band go and they then go on and have success elsewhere, then they’re left with egg on their face and probably no job. They’ll be branded as “He’s the guy who let James go. He’s the guy who let the Beatles go.” It’s not a very good reference for the next job. So they keep you. Reporter : So the band waited. Their last album recorded in February 1987 wasn’t released by Sire until Autumn 88. With no new material, there seemed little point in playing live. We tracked down Seymour Stein to London to see if he would talk to us and he refused. He said he was too busy at the moment with the promotion, the parties and the razzmatazz of the new Madonna album. Three years on from signing, James are at last free, risking everything, they’ve borrowed £12,000 to put out a live album. Tim : Seymour heard that we were making this programme and threatened to stop us releasing our LP even though we’re not on the label. So obviously there’s a threat there. Reporter : Stein eventually relented but there’s a final twist. ER : It means their new album, which is a live album, coming out on their own independent label, they have to pay the record company because they’re using songs, albeit performed live, from the previous two albums. They don’t even let you go. It’s a bit like hacking your arm off and still feeling the sensation for a couple of years. Reporter : Saturday night and the touts are out. Freed from their contract, James are back. PC : We called WEA Records no less than seventeen times to ask for an interview with Seymour Stein because we wanted to hear what he had to say. We traced him through his New York office to Madrid where we delivered a list of questions. Why did his company not let James go when, as it appeared, they were not promoting them? Well, we’re still waiting for an answer on that one. But one question it appears has been answered. This week, four years on, James new album went to number one in the independent charts. | Mar 1989 | article interview video-archive | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
One Man Clapping Release – NME News | Article, News |
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One Man Clapping And Tour News – Melody Maker | Article, News |
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Itinerary: 1989 Spring Tour | Tour Itinerary | This is the band itinerary from 1989 James Spring Tour. | Mar 1989 | tour-itinerary article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Tour – Record Mirror News | Article, News | JAMES (above), whose ‘One Man Clapping’ live album (on Rough Trade) has put their vinyl nightmare with Sire behind them, have set up a tour, starting in mid-June. With new keyboard player Mark Hunter now in the line-up, they play Liverpool Royal Court June 16, Nottingham Trent Polytechnic 17, Bristol Bierkeller 19, Leicester University 20, | Apr 1989 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ici Et Independent News | Article, News |
James, le groupe de Manchester invite au festival lnrockuptibles de l’automne dernier et qui s’est fait jeter de chez Sire, sort son nouvel album « One Man Clapping , enregistre live en Depuis, le groupe a change de batteur avec l’arrivee de Dave Blaignton Power et le recrutement d’un violiniste en la personne de Saul Davis. Le disque sort sur leur propre label One Man Clapping Records distribue par Rough Trade outre-Manche | Apr 1989 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Tour Preview – Sounds | Article, News |
WHATEVER YOU think of their first single since the big split with Sire Records, ‘Sit Down’ (and the Sounds office is pretty split here), there can be no doubting the uplifting inspiration of a James gig. Though departed drummer Gavan Whelan’s devil-may-care attitude will be sorely missed (not to mention his excellent rhythmic capabilities), the new expanded six-piece- with violin and keyboards – has only served to highlight James’ potential as a giant rock band, whose attention to issues Green and adherence to the Byrne/Gabriel ethic of multi-cultural absorption has given them a magical, almost angelic edge over some of rock’s more morose competitors. Expect songs from all points on the Factory-Sire-Rough Trade career, and don’t be surprised if singer Tim Booth suddenly comes swimming over your right shoulder. Don’t ‘Sit Down’, get up! | Jun 1989 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Transmission Interview – ITV | Article, Interview, Video Archive |
DetailsJames are back again with a new single called Sit Down with a new album towards the end of the year. They recently signed to Rough Trade after encountering various problems with their last record company. Tim : I mean they weren’t very interested in us. We didn’t feel. We felt they had us and they didn’t do anything with our songs. They were a bit confused by the music we made. I think they found it a bit too individualistic. They told us it was too English for them. It was obviously not working and we were surprised when they said they wanted to carry on working with us after the second LP but they did want to carry on so we had to sneak off because we were really fed up. Question : I was going to ask you if it had shaken your confidence, but obviously not. Tim : I mean it was awful. We made this LP two years before it got released and we didn’t release anything in a two-year period and we had a big momentum going before that. So we lost it all just being not able to do anything. Remixes, the whole lot happened. Jim: It was a really difficult period Tim: We lost confidence a little bit in that sense. Jim: You know we always believed the music would win through in the end. We would come out the other side and it would be OK, but the main thing was getting off Sire. Tim: When we came off Sire and the drummer left, the nucleus of three of us, me, Larry and Jim, we write the songs. we thought about changing the name and starting again just for ourselves. But we kind of decided against it. (part of Sit Down video) Jim: It’s nice. Occassionally, you’re kind of walking down the street, been to Tesco, in shopping mode and they encroach on that a little bit. Encroach is the wrong word as it sounds not particularly pleasant but they’ll say “hello” and you’ll go “woah” because the two worlds are very different. You can go into one and come out again, and noone recognises you and everything’s fine and it’s funny where they overlap. It’s obviously not a big problem – yet – as it’s not happening all the time and people aren’t hassling you when you go into the shop all the time. Tim: Only really in Manchester Question: What about when one of your records gets played in a club? Do you get embarrassed by that? Tim: No, it’s dead exciting. You see a dancefloor being filled in Manchester when they play one of your records. You feel you don’t want people to see you there but you kind of want to watch. Like that’s what you want. It’s how you feel it’s should be Jim: You get a bit self-conscious Tim: Yes, Jim went to see a band last week and they did a cover version of one of our songs and everyone was looking round at him. Jim: It’s really nice. It’s dead flattering. I was really glad I was there but you feel that, even if they’re not, you feel that the whole place is looking at you. (another section of Sit Down video) Tim : I mean we’ve all changed over a long period of time. We’ve been through a lot of different phases. When we first started, our lifestyles were chaotic as in the rock and roll terms. We kind of lost a guitarist to that lifestyle, he ended up very ill and in prison. And so we’ve been through that kind of phase. We had a puritanical clean up where we saw we could have gone the same way and we didn’t want to do that. And then now, we’re just more relaxed, just enjoying what we do, we love our music. I mean the thing about James is that is so special to me is that it’s not just about one person or centred around two or three. Even now, we’re a six-piece with three new members, they’re all great musicians in their own right. Each one of them could front a band and have it based around them, but we’ve got six people working together of that level of combustibility. And it’s really exciting. And you don’t normally get that. That will sound arrogant, but that’s how I see it, because, obviously, I’m the singer and I wouldn’t be working if I didn’t really respect and love the music we’re creating. We wouldn’t keep going that long if we didn’t love it. Question : Have there been any regrets? Tim: Regrets? We’ve had a few. Oh yes, we shouldn’t have gone on Sire. We shouldn’t have signed on the dotted line. The little signature. That was a mistake Jim : You don’t know. We could have ended up with someone else ten times worse and all split up and committed suicide or something. Tim : You can’t really regret. If we’d have stayed with Factory and recorded with them, something else might have gone wrong. We might have been hit by a bus because we weren’t down in London signing for Sire. Jim : You don’t know do you? Tim : You never know | Jun 1989 | article interview video-archive | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sit Down – Press Release | Article, Press Release | James Single News June 1989: James kick off a long-term recording relationship with Rough Trade Records with the single Sit Down released on June 19th. Sit Down looks set to build on the success of the indie chart-topping One Man Clapping live album; the b-side Sky Is Falling shows the band have lost none of their out-spoken concern for environmental issues. The full track listing for the twelve inch version is as follows :
Keyboardist Mark Hunter is welcomed aboard the line-up for a national tour – dates as follows : June
July
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Are You Sitting Comfortably – Sounds News | Article, News |
It’s called Sit Down which should be familiar to most James gig goers and is out on Rough Trade. The single is their first studio recording since their Strip-Mine album. | Jun 1989 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
June Tour Announcement – Record Mirror | Article, News |
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Three Chairs For James – NME | Article, Interview |
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James: Les Inrockuptibles Sit Down (1989) Review (French) | Review | Les yeux dévorants, les textes sur le bout des lèvres, les gamins du premier rang fixaient Tim Booth d’une manière dont peu de chanteurs peuvent se vanter de l’être. C’était au Marquee, le single était à peine sorti que, déjà, ce parterre de gosses sidérés le connaissaient par cœur, dévoués au charisme trouble du chanteur. « Sit Down », le single idéal, celui qui aurait dû monter dans le chart anglais comme le « Song For Whoever » de Beautiful South, s’il n’y avait pas une inexplicable poisse sur les merveilles de James. Un single qui donne un efois de plus l’envie de se battre pour ce groupe si normal mais tellement différent. Google Translation(!)Devouring eyes, the texts on the lip of the front row kids staring Tim Booth in a way that few singers can boast of being. It was at the Marquee , the single just came out that already this audience of stunned kids knew by heart , devoted to the disorder charisma of the singer . ” Sit Down”, the ideal single one who should ride in the chart English as the ” Song For Whoever ” Beautiful South , if there was not some inexplicable bad luck on the wonders of James . A single that gives efois more desire to fight for what so normal but so different group. | Jun 1989 | review article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
GLR Interview | Article, Interview | Interviewer : I’m joined now by Tim and Larry from the band James. I’m absolutely delighted to meet these two because I thought coming from a Mancunian band who I expected to wear really long overcoats and be really serious that this was going to be murder, but these guys are quite jolly. Tim. Tim : Jolly. Must be something we ate I think. Interviewer : I think so.You’re not very used to doing this kind of thing are you because you’re not very, even though you’ve had a lot of records, you’ve had a reputation for being indie and here you are poised, or I thought you were until you were talking to me a minute ago, poised to have a hit single. Was Sit Down a conscious effort to do something different that would get you in the charts? Tim : No, all our songs are created through improvisation and about one song a year we make that’s kind of like Sit Down which has the potential for being a commercial success and all we do is earmark those as singles, because obviously there are certain things that are more likely to be played on the radio than others and a lot of our music is much harder than Sit Down, so we don’t release them as singles as they wouldn’t stand a chance. Interviewer : With the thoughtful image that you’ve got and your fans like about you, do you think that they would resent your success if you did get in the charts? Tim : There might be some people who would like to hold on if they think it’s very precious to them, but, you know, all we can do is concentrate on the music. As long as you keep the music pure then that’s all that matters, they’ll be OK with it, they’ll get by. Interviewer : People always write about you and The Smiths and Simply Red as being part of some sort of Manchester scene. Do you think that really existed, Larry? Larry : No, I don’t think it did. I don’t think it was like the Merseybeat scene and all those scenes like the New York scene of 1976-77 and things like that where everybody rehearsed in the same place, knew each other and went to everybody’s gigs. You know, it just so happened that all those bands came out of Manchester round about the same time. I think there’s more of a scene now with bands like The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets, they appear to be more closer-knit. Tim : We see quite a lot of them as well. Larry : Places that they rehearse and record Interviewer : How important is it now if you’re a Manchester band or a Liverpool band to come to London. Will the record companies come up North to find you? Tim : I think there’s quite a lot of people coming up to Manchester at the moment because it’s meant to be a hot city at the moment. Interviewer : Hey. I’m hot and I’m cool. Tim : So at the moment, this year Manchester’s in. Next year, it probably won’t be again. But you are a bit cut off. It’s very hard, the business centre is in London and you do feel quite cut off a lot of the time. Also apparently if a band in a city sells a lot of records, when it comes to get charted, it gets what’s called regionalised which they don’t take consideration of the fact if you sell a lot in your own city. Whereas if you’re a London band and you sell a lot of records in London, you aren’t regionalised. So the charts are slightly stacked there. So you know, you do feel quite separate a lot of the time. Interviewer : I’ve got a clipping from Sounds, it must be the current issue of Sounds, that says about you, Tim, it says “He’s nothing but an effite Buddhist vegan in a Morroccan skullcap who neither drinks Nescafe nor says the word Bottom in polite conversation” Tim : No, it doesn’t say that, it says that’s my image. The image I’ve been landed with. Interviewer : But it is your image, isn’t it? Tim : I don’t know, I think that’s slightly journalistic licence. That one. Basically I shaved my head about two or three months ago. Interviewer : But most of it’s grown back. Tim : Yeah, it’s all grown back now and so I wore a Morroccan hat, a, to keep my head warm and b because I wasn’t sure I was happy with having a bald head. And people make a lot of assumptions when you have a bald head. Interviewer : You’re right Tim : You’re either a skinhead or a Hare Krishna you know Interviewer : Or very very old. I wonder if you had any special feelings at 12.34 and 5 seconds today, during Doris Collins psychic moment.Were you aware of all that? Tim : Yes I could feel something, I could feel some spirits trying to contact us, willing us on. I think it was my Great Grandfather. I could see him standing there. Talking about the war. Interviewer : Was this a wind up or? Tim : Yes Interviewer : That’s what you never know of course. Is he a bit of a wind-up merchant, Larry? Larry : That’s where the image comes from. All those images we’ve been landed with are all wind-ups of journalists who’ve taken it seriously. Or they’ve just printed it verbatim. It just comes out. As you read it, it reads flat and you don’t see the tongue in cheekness. Interviewer : I love the way Tim : Bottom Interviewer : There you are. Larry : In public. On radio Interviewer : I love the way Smash Hits occasionally shove in a complete fib in the hope that other journalists pick it up. One example was that Bruce Springsteen’s real name is Roger. They sat back and waited for other newspapers and it works. It always works for them. So I gather you’re going to do us an extemporised tune here. Tim : Yeah, we’ve got two if you want them. Interviewer : Let’s try the one and see Tim : We’ve not rehearsed this. Interviewer : Larry’s going to play the guitar and Tim’s going to sing. What’s it called? Tim : Promised Land, but it has a reference to our glorious leader. Interviewer : Really, there’s been a couple of songs called Promised Land. Tim : It’s terrible, isn’t it? I’m really embarrassed. And it’s also kind of a political song. We hardly ever write political songs and this is the only one we can do acoustic. Interviewer : Larry and Tim from James acoustic in the studios of GLR. (play Promised Land) Interviewer : Are you going to be doing any real live James gigs in London in the future? Tim : We’ve just done two nights in the Marquee last week. In November, we’re going to come back and probably play the Town and Country. We’re recording a new LP in the summer with our new six-piece band. Got a violinist, a guitarist. Interviewer : So Sit Down is a track from that, is it? Tim : Sit Down, yeah. I think we’re going to redo it and make it a big harder because we play it harder and faster live now. But it’ll be something like that. Interviewer : Well thanks very much for joining us this afternoon. I gather you’ve got another live song for us. Tim : Live we are a rock band, but this is acoustic. It was written about six years ago when they brought nuclear weapons into the country. I’m afraid it’s another topical one. | Jul 1989 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Stand Up – Sounds Interview | Article, Interview |
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Halifax Piece Hall – 20th August 1989 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistHang On / How Much Suffering / Undertaker / Johnny Yen / What ForSupportn/aMore Information & ReviewsNone. Video | Aug 1989 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Holy CND Benefit – NME News | Article, News |
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Bradford Futurama Festival – 1st October 1989 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistHang On / Scarecrow / How Much Suffering / Undertaker / What's The World / Riders / Johnny Yen / Sit Down / Crescendo / God Only Knows / Hymn From A Village / What For / Come Home / Promised Land / SandmanSupportn/a - FestivalMore Information & ReviewsJames headlined the festival, with Cud / Man From Delmonte / Bradford / Farm / Hollowmen / And All Because The Lady Loves / Zoot & The Roots / Bridewell Taxis / New Fast Automatic Dafodils / Pale Saints / Treebound Story / Frank Sidebottom Dave Simpson, Melody MakerThankfully James are incredible, pointing the way for modern, tuned-in pop. Rock music of the highest order – and make no mistake, this is rock music of the highest – order can capture the moods and the aspirations of its generation, and James do all of that tonight. As they end “Sit Down” (the entire audience doing precisely the opposite and dancing wildly) to absolutely deafening roars, it’s all I can do to stop the tears rolling down my face. Video
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City Life Feature | Article, News | Are you sitting comfortably? Then the new look freshly beefed James will begin – at The Apollo on December 4th. The Apollo? James? Beefed? Joff Lillywhite checks the changes to the city’s most spontaneous combo. From the Mancunian fourpiece, so familiar to gig goers around the city centre comes the all-new James, a seven-piece line-up with extra percussion, brass and strings. The usual trademarks of the band, particularly Tim Booth’s distinctive vocals, remain constant. To top off the innovative guitar work of Larry Gott, James have incorporated a rather unusual, but pleasant combination of violin and trumpet, the result being “general orchestral madness” as Tim describes it. James spent two months this summer in the studio recording for their next Nick Garside produced album Gold Mother which is out in February. Their new single Come Home, which comes from their LP and took only one hour to write and record, has just been released and like the last Sit Down is on the indie label Rough Trade. James ended up on this label after a spell on Factory, followed by a horrific deal at Sire, part of the giant Warner Bros empire. But the difference between Rough Trade and Sire is basically one of feedback. Tim thinks Rough Trade are more into and are interested in James music, whereas Sire were really only concerned with a concept of James that they had thought up. With so much trouble with record companies, it would not be surprising to find James sick of studio work. But, as Saul explains, “We are creative and very spontaneous in the studio, take Come Home, for example : just one hour from the first note written to the completion of the song.” They are however, currently on tour around Britain and they play the Apollo on December 4th, much to Tim’s regret. He did say that he would never play there, but now there is no venue in Manchester that is the right size. Next year, according to Tim, there will be a shared gig at G-Mex with Happy Mondays. Does playing all-seated venues have any effect on the band’s performance though? Tim believes that non-seated venues are better for atmosphere but that playing seated venues like the Apollo means that the audience are more prepared to listen and notice what the band are playing. Listening and understanding is all very well, but what about listening and misinterpreting? Does Tim ever worry that his lyrics might be misunderstood? Take the song Riders for example – what exactly does that mean? He explains….. “Well, Riders is very specific, a very personal song. You see early James was very Happy Mondays-ish, very chemically induced and the situation was really getting out of hand, like one member of the band got really sick. Anyway, one day I was reading this book about dream analysis and thought I’d try and analyse the dream I had that night and the dream was Riders. The ‘sister in uniform’ was Nurse Ratchett from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and the listeners were people like Jim Morrison and Nick Cave, people from the ‘rock n roll hall of fame’. Anyway, that was the dream I had and it marked the beginning of our reformation, it took about a year for us to get our act together.” Heavy stuff maybe, but when mixed with the band’s music, Tim’s lyrics blend in resulting in a sound so unique that it can only be called James. | Nov 1989 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Come Home Chart Error – NME | Article, News |
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Come Home Tour Preview – Melody Maker | Article, News |
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Itinerary: 1989 Winter Tour | Tour Itinerary | This is the band itinerary from 1989 James Winter Tour. | Nov 1989 | tour-itinerary article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Snub TV Interview with Tim Booth | Article, Interview, Video Archive |
DetailsSnub asked frontman Tim Booth if he’d resolved his misgivings about impending adulation. Tim : Well, it’s such a joke isn’t it? The whole thing is such a joke, it’s a surrealist’s nightmare. You know, people going hysterical. I take some of it seriously, I take some of it not so seriously. I have an ego, I’m flattered by a lot of it, I’m turned on by a lot of it., but also a part of my brain goes “This is ridiculous”. They don’t know you. I’m trying to go with it more because I believe, I think we blocked it last time when our wave came and as a result the wave and we watched it. And that wasn’t very clever because we ended up wondering what would have happened if. And we don’t want to wonder that anymore. I think we should have changed our name this year and made it a complete new start because it feels very different, seven people and lots of new songs. Government Walls is about the way they’re tightening up the secret service act, about the Peter Wright case. The way in this country they’re just trying, you know if anyone leaks anything, they say “That’s a secret service” and they can put you in prison for it. And they can stop the papers from telling you what the information actually is. But the information that they’re suppressing really tells you who runs this country and how this country is run. So Bring Down The Government Walls is just about trying to prevent this secrecy that’s going on, which you have to suspect, all this stuff about, well I can’t even say it, can I? (plays Government Walls) I think bands tend to insult an audience’s intelligence and ability to concentrate. Like they say in America, isn’t it that each record has an average play of 1 1/2 plays because the concentration span is so low. But that isn’t with our records and I don’t believe that it necessarily has to be so. If the record is dull, people aren’t going to listen to it. But if there’s a lot in there, people have to listen to it. People should be stretched and we should be stretched. It shouldn’t be just going through the motions. | Dec 1989 | article interview video-archive | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Interview Best Magazine (French) | Article, Interview | L’important pour nous, c’est d’ apporter un peu de ce qu’on peut pour que ce groupe avance ! Révélés par les Smiths qui reprirent une de leur chanson, les James eurent quelques difficultés pour concrétiser cette hype établie autour d’eux : « En fait, nous n’étions ni punk ni quoi que ce soit ; on ne savait pas très bien jouer et contrairement à d’autres ça nous a beaucoup nuit. » Ainsi, après deux albums qui ne connurent qu’un très moyen écho, la bande à Booth vit enfin le jour grâce à deux singles météorites satellisés en plein pendant la furie Manchester et qui leur permirent de laisser venir. « On ne s’est pas posé trop de questions, on a enregistré notre album comme on l’entendait, et ce n’est qu’après le mixage qu’on est allé voir les maisons de disques avec un produit fini. D’ailleurs, Phonogram (heureuse élue) a du renoncer à ressortir « Sit Down » parce que nous voulions sortir un autre single et on leur a dit que ça faisait partie des conditions du contrat. Mais ça n’empêche pas la maison de disque de nous faire des propositions. Souvent, lorsqu’on les écoute, on se dit non, c’est pas possible de faire ceci ou cela, et puis finalement, parfois, c’est pas si idiot que ça. En tout cas, pour l’instant, ils font du bon boulot. » Ce fut donc « Come Home » qui suivit son prédécesseur sur les plus hautes marches des charts anglais assurant à ses auteurs une reconnaissance nationale et méritée. Depuis, le groupe a joué un peu partout dont plusieurs fois à Paris, notamment au désormais fameuses soirées Hacienda de la Locomotive. Il était donc hors de question, au lendemain du concert Inrockuptible, que je n’interroge point Tim Booth sur ses camarades de promotion ainsi que sur cette aura qui semble entourer Manchester ces temps-ci, tout en prenant bien soin de ne pas oublier que lui et son groupe sont là depuis bien plus longtemps. « On n’est pas vraiment concerné parce qu’on est plus grand que tout ça. En Angleterre, on joue dans des salles de 10.000 personnes, donc c’est tranquille à ce niveau ; par contre, ce qui est ennuyeux, c’était quand nous n’avions pas encore ce succès, car on s’intéressait à nous parce que nous étions de Manchester et nous craignions qu’une fois la mode passée, les portes se referment sur nous. Quant aux groupes de Manchester, les Happy Mondays ont été notre partie il y a deux ans, et ça s’est bien passé ; les Stones Roses ont quelques bonnes chansons dont « Fool’s Gold » qui est excellente, mais il y a quand même une tendance à copier à Manchester ; tant que ça reste dans un esprit ouvert comme les Happy Mondays ou certains morceaux des Stones Roses, là ça commence à ne plus vouloir dire grand-chose, c’est comme un écho d’un écho. Quand on prépare des morceaux, la démarche est très simple : on se réunit à trois (la base du groupe est constituée du chanteur, du bassiste et du guitariste) et on travaille les morceaux en appelant les autres musiciens au fur et à mesure. C’est vrai que notre façon d’écrire des morceaux est très démodée et traditionnelle, mais la mode ne m’a jamais vraiment intéressé. Cela étant, je crois que la vague de Dance Music qui a envahi l’Angleterre nous a quand même influencé. Une chanson comme « Come Home » est bien une chanson de son époque tout en étant personnelle ; quoi qu’il en soit, je ne la renie en rien. Tu sais, c’est très dur de savoir vraiment d’où viennent tes influences. Notre trompettiste, par exemple, lui, vient du jazz, ce qui ne l’empêche pas de laisser ses influences de côté lorsqu’il joue dans James. Du moins consciemment il ne va pas nous refaire tel ou tel solo à la manière d’un autre. L’important, pour nous, c’et d’apporter chacun un peu de ce qu’on peut à ce groupe pour q’il avance. Bientôt, nous allons retourner en studio pour faire un nouvel album qui sera exclusivement composé de nouvelles chansons. Car même si certains souhaitent nous voir enregistrer certaines de nos vieilles chansons qui ne l’ont pas été et que nous jouons sur scène, nous voulons garder une marge de surprise pour les fans qui viennent à nos concerts et qui croient connaître tous nos morceaux. Pour la production, on est actuellement en discussion avec Gil Norton (Pixies), mais rien n’est fait, si ce n’est que ça se passera probablement dans les semaines qui vont venir. » François Gerald ( Best – December 1989) | Dec 1989 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Interview Ritual Fanzine (French) | Article, Interview | « Si Smiths est un joli nom de famille, alors James est le prénom idéal » écrivait Michka Assayas en novembre 1986 dans Libération. Il essayait sans doute d’expliquer par là que James représentait la deuxième génération mancunienne de pop mélancolique sur fond de guitares cristallines. Quatre ans plus tard, le quatuor a grandi et évolué. Tim Booth, chanteur et leader de James s’explique. (Tim Booth) Cela fait six-sept ans que l’on existe sous le nom de James. On est basé à Manchester. On a sorti quelques disques sur Factory. On s’est fait bloquer par Sire, la compagnie de disques américaine pendant quelques temps. On est maintenant sur notre propre label. On est sept dans le groupe : un violoniste qui joue également de la batterie et de la guitare, un trompettiste multi-instrumentiste, un clavier, une guitare, une basse, une batterie. On est un grand orchestre maintenant. 1989 aura été une année de grands changements pour nous. On est complètement différent. Chaque fois que je vous vois en concert, vous êtes deux de plus dans le groupe. Oui, on s’agrandit, on se multiplie. Ca tombe bien, avant on était un peu limité. N’est-ce pas plutôt pour essayer de combler un vide quelque part ? Non, dans le groupe, tous sont excellents musiciens. On a cherché pendant longtemps des gens qui avaient la bonne attitude musicale. On les a trouvé cette année, on ne pouvait pas les refuser. Avec The Band Of Holy Joy, vous avez fait en octobre 89 un concert pour le CND (Campagne pour le Désarmement Nucléaire). C’était juste un concert de soutien pour lancer une vidéo de groupes indépendants anglais. Tout l’argent va servir à financer un e campagne pour le CND. Il y a tout le temps des benefits dans ce pays. Les groupes y participent pour différentes causes et l’importance du groupe ne devrait pas jouer&ldots; même si le but est de gagner le plus d’argent possible. Bradford a été sauvé de l’anonymat par une déclaration de Morrissey qui disait qu’il était le groupe le plus intéressant d’Angleterre. Ceci posé, peut-on dire que les Smiths vous ont « découverts »(James ayant fait la première partie de la tournée Meat Is Murder en 1985) ? (Ton sec et télégraphique, histoire de faire bien comprendre que l’on pourrait parler d’autre chose) Non pas du tout ! Ils aimaient notre musique. Ils nous ont emmené en tournée avec eux. Ils reprenaient nos chansons sur scène. On s’entendait bien avec eux&ldots;J’ai aimé pas mal de trucs qu’ils ont fait. J’ai pas aimé d’autres trucs. Je suis pote avec Morrissey, je l’aime bien&ldots;Je n’ai jamais été fan des Smiths. Toute la musique intéressante vient de Manchester en ce moment. Vrai ou faux ? Vrai ou faux ? C’est un jeu ? Je gagne quelque chose si je réponds bien ? Non, tous les groupes auxquels tu penses jouent à Manchester depuis des années. Ils ne recevaient aucune attention de la part de la presse. Et puis, depuis un an, la presse et les médias se sont dits « eh, regarde ce qui se passe à Manchester ». Ils pensent donc que tous ces groupes sont nouveaux. La presse musicale en Angleterre est-elle si importante ? Je suis très cynique à propos de l’argent, des maisons de disques qui achètent les charts, du pouvoir de l’image sur les journalistes&ldots;Ils semblent être tous obsédés par l’imagerie, la mythologie rock’n’roll. Je trouve cela enfantin&ldots;Quand on a commencé avec James, on ne prenait pas les interviews au sérieux. On mettait des fringues ridicules pour les photos parce que l’on pensait que ça n’avait rien à voir avec la musique. On a refusé longtemps de donner des interviews ou alors, on racontait des conneries qui étaient prises au sérieux. Tout cela nous a valu une image très négative. Il nous a fallu beaucoup de temps pour redresser la barre. Maintenant, on sait que les choses sont importantes pour des gens, maos pas toujours pour nous. On joue plus le jeu qu’avant, c’est tout. Avez-vous eu des choix difficiles à faire avec le groupe ? Oui. Avec Sire, on a eu un combat. Un combat d’affaire. Ils voulaient qu’on devienne un grand groupe de rock alors que nous, on voulait juste continuer à faire notre musique. Ca a été un combat qu’on n’a pas gagné d’ailleurs vu qu’aucun disque n’est sorti pendant deux ans. Ca nous a tué créativement&ldots; On a perdu beaucoup à l’époque. Votre album live s’intitule « One Man Clapping », est-ce une blague ? Oui, c’est juste une blague. Dans tous les albums live, les groupes rock veulent toujours qu’on entende bien qu’il y a un public énorme. C’est une partie importante de leur disque. Dans notre live, le public applaudit d’un bout à l’autre et, à la fin du dernier titre, ça monte en intensité et il n’y a plus qu’un seul mec qui applaudit. C’est le sens de l’humour de James&ldots; ce n’est pas très drôle. James, vous prenez au sérieux ? Oui, nous prenons notre musique au sérieux mais nous ne nous prenons pas au sérieux . Tu sais, tu fais un concert et après, il y a des gens qui veulent t’embrasser et qui ne partiront pas avant de t’avoir embrassé. Il y a des gens qui font 300 kms pour nous voir, qui nous suivent dans toute l’Angleterre. Alors, tu ne peux pas prendre cela au sérieux ou alors tu devient maboul. Il y a des gens que je connais personnellement et qui sont devenus des mythes du fait de la presse musicale&ldots; je sais que c’est très dur à assumer. Au début, c’est drôle, on joue avec ça, je préfèrerais que les choses soient plus honnêtes , qu’il n’y ait pas de mensonges, qu’on ne doive pas être des personnages exotiques ou glamoureux pour vendre des disques&ldots; Je pense que nous faisons une musique formidable et que nous produisons sur scène l’un des bruits les plus excitants qui soit. Je voudrais que les gens viennent nous voir, s’amusent bien, passent du bon temps et que les rapports en restent là. Mais je crois que je ne suis pas réaliste. Richard Bellia (Ritual [belgian fanzine]) | Dec 1989 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Manchester Apollo – 4th December 1989 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistScarecrow / Violent Rain / Hymn From A Village / Whoops / Promised Land / Top Of The World / Walking The Ghost / Johnny Yen / God Only Knows / Sit Down / Stutter (incomplete setlist)SupportThe Band Of Holy JoyMore Information & ReviewsNone. Video | Dec 1989 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NME News On Phonogram Signing | Article, News |
James and The Charlatans look set to sign new record deals in the latest round of A+R activity surrounding Manchester. James are reportedly in negotiations with Phonogram although they’ve yet to put pen to paper. Rumours of a Phonogram deal have been in the air for some time, and although official sources are tight-lipped, it’s believed that they are close to signing. James were previously with a major, having moved to Sire from their early days with Factory. But after an apparently unhappy time with the US-based label moved to Rough Trade, having a couple of minor hits last year with Sit Down and Come Home. | Mar 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
How Was It For You? Press Biography | Article, Biography | James release their first Fontana single – ‘How Was It For You?’ – on April 30th. The b-side of the 45 features ‘Whoops’ recorded live at Manchester Apollo at the end of last year, while the twelve inch contains two more live tracks – the legendary ‘Hymn From A Village’ and ‘How’ – plus ‘Lazy’. The CD line-up reads ‘How Was It For You?’, ‘Undertaker’ and ‘Hymn From A Village’. None of these extra tracks will be available on the group’s new LP, which is set for release at the beginning of June. James began their recording career in 1983 with Factory Records, producing two acclaimed singles ‘What’s The World’ (later to be covered by The Smiths) and ‘Hymn From A Village’ plus the ‘Village Fire EP’. Signing to Sire Records in 1985, the group put out two albums ‘Stutter’ and ‘Strip Mine’. during an awkward three year relationship with the label. Leaving Sire, James pursued an independent path, releasing a live album – ‘One Man Clapping’ – through Rough Trade in February 1989. Following the departure of original drummer Gavan Whelan the nucleus of James – vocalist Tim Booth, bass player Jim Glennie and guitarist Larry Gott – toughened up their sound with the addition of Dave Baynton-Power on drums. Enjoying two indie hits with ‘Sit Down’ and ‘Come Home’ and a sell-out tour, the group expanded their line-up to a seven piece with multi-instrumentalist Saul Davies, keyboard player Mark Hunter and Andy Diagram on trumpet, joining James ranks. The group started 1990 taking several coaches from Manchester over to Paris to play the Hacienda’s Temperance Club night out. James set off on their World Cup tour in June, which includes festival dates at Womad and Glastonbury. The group are still waiting to firm up details for a major Manchester summer show. Dated 9th April 1990 | Apr 1990 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
How Was It For You? Press Release | Article, Press Release | James are one of the original wave of new Manchester bands, they appeared at the same time as The Smiths, and were accorded the ‘Morrissey’s favourite band’ label. Previously the band have released three albums, and built up a sizeable live following, enabling them to sell out large venues across the country. Their first single for Fontana will be ‘How Was It For You?’ produced by the band and Nick Garside and mixed by Tim Palmer. Each format of the single will feature a previously unavailable James track, and will be very much in demand from their very loyal fan base. James play an extensive UK tour right through June and three shows in May, Cambridge, Brighton and the WOMAD Festival. The band are guaranteed extensive music press coverage around the release of the single and are recording a John Peel session to transmit in May. The band’s last single on Rough Trade was a Mark Goodier hit-lister on Radio One and they are no strangers to daytime radio. PREVIOUSLY UNAVAILABLE TRACKS 7″ ‘WHOOPS’ (live) Recorded in Manchester 12″ ‘HYMN FROM A VILLAGE (live)’ Recorded in Manchester, ‘LAZY’ – New Track not on forthcoming LP CD ‘HYMN FROM A VILLAGE’ (live), ‘UNDERTAKER – New Track not on forthcoming LP RELEASE DATE : 30th APRIL, 1990 JIM 5 How Was It For You? / Whoops (Live) JIM 512 How Was It For You? / Hymn From A Village (Live) / Lazy JIMCD 5 How Was It For You? / Hymn From A Village (Live) / Undertaker | Apr 1990 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Leave Home (Late) – NME News | Article, News |
JAMES have been forced to put their forthcoming tour back six weeks because of delays in recording their first single and LP since signing to Phonogram. But their agents have carefully booked the rescheduled shows with days off so everyone can watch England’s World Cup games. The new dates are Cambridge Corn Exchange (May 13), Brighton Top Rank (14), Morecambe WOMAD Festival (19), Glasgow Barrowlands (June 5),Lancaster University (6), Hull City Hall (8), Exeter University (9), Bristol Studio (10), Middlesbrough Town Hall (12), Leeds University (13), Sheffield University (14), Liverpool Royal Court (15), Norwich UEA (17), Nottingham Rock City (18), London Kilburn National Ballroom (19),Birmingham Hummingbird (20) and Glastonbury Festival (23). All tickets are still valid for the rearranged shows. The dates in Belfast and Dublin are likely to be slotted in at the end of May. Vinylwise, James should have a single out later this month with an LP to follow in June. | Apr 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Go Hoops – Sounds News | Article, News |
JAMES release their first Fontana single “How Was It For You”, on April 30. It’s backed with “Whoops”, recorded live at Manchester Apollo at the end of last year, while the 12-inch contains two more live tracks, “Hymn From A Village”and “How”, plus “Lazy”. The CD single contains “How Was It For You”, “Undertaker” and “Hymn From A Village”. None of the extra tracks will be available on the group’s new LP which is set for release at the beginning of June. At that time James will be about to start their World Cup Tour which includes festival dates at Womad and Glastonbury. They are still waiting to finalise details of a major Manchester show in the summer. Meanwhile, they have added a tour date at Aberdeen Metro Hotel on June 4. | Apr 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
How Was It For You? NME News Piece | Article, News |
JAMES release their first Fontana single ‘How Was It For You’ on Monday-a taster for the band’s next album due to hit the shops in June. The revived Manchester band’s latest effort will also feature a batch of live tracks on the flip the 12″ version containing a live version of their classic ‘Hymn From A Village’ plus ‘Whoops’ and’How’. The live tracks were recorded at Manchester Apollo at the end of last year. | Apr 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
How Was It For You Single Release – Press Release | Era: Gold Mother, Press Release | Press release for James’ single How Was It For You.
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James: How Was It For You Press Biography | Biography | Official Press Band Biography – Dated 9th April 1990James release their first Fontana single – ‘How Was It For You?’ – on April 30th. The b-side of the 45 features ‘Whoops’ recorded live at Manchester Apollo at the end of last year, while the twelve inch contains two more live tracks – the legendary ‘Hymn From A Village’ and ‘How’ – plus ‘Lazy’. The CD line-up reads ‘How Was It For You?’, ‘Undertaker’ and ‘Hymn From A Village’. None of these extra tracks will be available on the group’s new LP, which is set for release at the beginning of June. James began their recording career in 1983 with Factory Records, producing two acclaimed singles ‘What’s The World’ (later to be covered by The Smiths) and ‘Hymn From A Village’ plus the ‘Village Fire EP’. Signing to Sire Records in 1985, the group put out two albums ‘Stutter’ and ‘Strip-mine’ during an awkward three year relationship with the label. Leaving Sire, James pursued an independent path, releasing a live album – ‘One Man Clapping’ – through Rough Trade in February 1989. Following the departure of original drummer Gavan Whelan the nucleus of James – vocalist Tim Booth, bass player Jim Glennie and guitarist Larry Gott – toughened up their sound with the addition of Dave Baynton-Power on drums. Enjoying two indie hits with ‘Sit Down’ and ‘Come Home’ and a sell-out tour, the group expanded their line-up to a seven piece with multi-instrumentalist Saul Davies, keyboard player Mark Hunter and Andy Diagram on trumpet, joining James ranks. The group started 1990 taking several coaches from Manchester over to Paris to play the Hacienda’s Temperance Club night out. James set off on their World Cup tour in June, which includes festival dates at WOMAD and Glastonbury. The group are still waiting to firm up details for a major Manchester summer show. | Apr 1990 | biography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
BBC Radio 1 John Peel – 10th April 1990 | Audio Archive, Session |
SetlistSunday Morning / Come Home / How Was It For You?Details
SongsShare: | Apr 1990 | audio-archive session article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Gold Mother News – NME | Article, News |
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How’s That? – Record Mirror | Article, Interview |
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Solid Gold James – Melody Maker News | Article, News |
JAMES release their new LP, “Gold Mother”, through Fontana on June 4. The 10-track LP features the group’s Top 40 single “How Was It For You?” plus their indie hit, “Come Home”. The album, produced by the group and Nick Garside, includes a guest appearance from Inspiral Carpets who contribute backing vocals to the title track. Track listing is: “Come Home”, “Government Walls”, “God Only knows”, “How Much Suffering”, “Crescendo”, “How It Was For You?”, “Hang On”, “Walking The Ghost”, “Gold Mother” and “Top of the World”. The group have added an extra date to their June World Cup tour at St Andrews Fife University on June 4. | May 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
20th Century Schizoid Band – NME Interview | Article, Interview | Loud, dumb, obnoxious, red-neck Americans. Dontcha just love ’em? There are seven of the Big Mac dickheads in a Soho restaurant, terrorising the lettuce-reared, trendy wimp clientele. The yanks are shoving mountains of pasta into each others’ Grand Canyon gobs, splattering the table cloth with Sandinista blood sauce and chanting “Nicaragua! Grenada! Vietnam!” at the tops of their nuclear deterrent voices. At a nearby table, one reputedly ideologically sound, sweet young English vegetarian and his two Manchester mates sit laughing at the Stars ‘n’ Stripes gorillas, winding them up, “What movie are you from? Animal House?” says the curly haired one. But the Americans prefer to pick on the girl opposite who’s getting ‘confrontational’ “Come on darling, frighten me with more than your face” they tell her. “Plastic surgery would be worth it, sweetheart” So her boyfriend picks up a bottle and starts to wade in. At this point, Tim Booth, Larry Gott and Jim Glennie, who were thinking of leaving, decide it’s their moral duty to order a pudding and stick around for the fun. None of this is quite the sort of behaviour that people would normally associate with James. But then people do have some funny ideas about them. In their seven year history as Manchester’s precious enigma boys, assumptions have grown around James like fungus on a dead fish. Despite the dashing pop energy of last year’s brilliant two singles, ‘Come Home’ and ‘Sit . Down’,they are still broadly conceived of as follows : the Smiths inheritors who slipped through the net; rustic English oddballs, too arrogant to write a decent pop song; village poet laureate mystics with a boring Green-leftie moral certitude streak; bookish wimps, not at all the types to join in with a bunch of meathead US shitizens singing “America The Beautiful” The latter however is exactly what James were doing the night before I met them. In the intervening 22 hours Tim Booth took in a movie, danced like a nutcase at the Wag Club, slept for four hours and then got woken up by workmen singing “Ooooh Black Betty, bam-a-lam” outside his hotel window. Then in the hotel lobby he met a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps who pinned him down to recount his life story , and when I met him that afternoon he was standing by a large fish tank in a photo studio, herding fish into frame for photographer Cummins. Tirn Booth is nobody’s caricature. He is intense, open and funny, and after a weird , sleep-deprived day and night, has the manic stare of an amazed child. “James are going to be a big fish in a big pond,” he tells me with reference to the band’s recent return to major label Fontana / Phonogram, so I take Tim, Jim and Larry down the pun for a bit of a grilling. Funny ideas about James One : James are a bunch of bleeding-heart, knee-jerk liberals. Tim : “Well, for a start, you’d have to be referring to the lyrics to make a statement like that because how do knee-jerk liberals play? I’ve never seen David Steel play a guitar and I wouldn’t really know how he’d handle it. As for the lyrics, anyone who actually bothers to look at them will see that they’re a lot darker than that. Do you think that, or is it a provocative statement?” It could be. Tim : “Well it’s a good thing I’m not a bottle-on-the-head jerk left wing angry young man isn’t it?” Booth’s mad eyes are staring rather intensely at me, so I agree. OK. Funny idea number two : James are a folk rock band. Tim : “Anyone who has seen us live would have that idea changed. There might be certain songs in the set which have that element in them especially the acoustic ones, but that’s at most ten percent. And no one says we’re a heavy rock band, but there’s an equal measure of heavy rock songs in the set.” Three : You, Tim Booth, would rather read a good book than shag Madonna. Tim : “I think we’d better leave you with your popular misconceptions. I think you should get some help. I don’t think Madonna is actually… I think she’s quite sexy, I guess. I think I’d rather have safe sex than read a good book. I’d rather have safe sex with Madonna than read a good book. Now, if you’d said Jodie Foster…..” Four : You, Tim Booth, are a surrealist poet who nicked all his ideas from Arthur Rimbaud. Tim : “No, Anton Artaud please. I can’t read French anyway… I find poetry boring.” Five : None of you have sufficiently similar musical tastes to want to play the same song at the same time. Larry : “Probably not too far off the truth there.” Tim : “That’s a nice one. They’re getting a bit soft now.” Six : James moment has come and gone Tim : “Well we can’t say anything about that, can we? We’re just going to have to show you. We’ll show whoever decides that. We’re going to make them all eat fish.” Aside from the fact that they’re suckers for a dumb fish joke, what becomes quickly apparent from locking antlers with Tim, Larry and Jim is that they’re in confident combative mood. There are good reasons for this. A year back when the new breed of Manchester bands were getting geared up for Top of the Pops, James were still recovering from an unproductive period with Sire. Three awkward years on the major label had left them without even the money to sue the name crowding Halo James (“He deserves a good kicking”). As they expanded to a seven-piece they were for a while planning to change their name, feeling that they were by no means the same band who put out Hymn From A Village in Factory in 83. Tim Booth was, however, outvoted. They kept the name and by the end of the year, they’d had two glorious singles out on Rough Trade, kept their dedicated fans happy with a live LP, One Man Clapping, and had their summer. recorded, imminently released album ‘Gold Mother’ picked up by a major label. The new James songs, of which the single ‘How Was It For You’ is the first unleashed, are fiercer, poppier and funkier than before, without losing any of the humpbacked dementia. They would seem to be going through the same sort of renaissance that The Fall went through with ‘Extricate’ Tim “We’ve all been stripping things down and trying to make the songs more simple and more direct in what we’re trying to say” Do you think you’ve been musically arrogant in the past? Expected too much? Tim: “Not from…. There were definitely people who were reading us on our level, and a lot in Manchester. We always got that feedback there…. If you ever see us play in Manchester, they’ll tear you apart if they ever found out who you were. You’ll see. It’s a really different kettle of fish there. Oh dear, nearly said ball game.” “But some people have been able to respond to us on the level that we take ourselves, which is very seriously. I mean, we don’t take ourselves… I mean yeah, we were difficult, we were arrogant, we were very protective of our babies, our songs. We thought they were masterpieces and we wouldn’t let anyone else touch them. That ended up with us hiring producers who we didn’t let do their jobs. Now we’re more relaxed about it.” Lying somewhere in Bristol is an entire student thesis written entirely about James. This would make for curious reading because as a songwriter, it has to be said that Booth is a bit of a schizo. On the one hand, there’s the fraught wordplay of the likes of Stutter or Whoops. In the other cranial hemisphere there’s the liberal protest songs, ecologically concerned, like Sky Is Falling, anti-Thatcher, like Promised Land, or bleeding heart for the disadvantaged like Sit Down. So far from the new album, it emerges that How Was It For You? is about using drink and drugs to evade sexual guilt, How Much Suffering is about English emotional restraint and Gold Mother is about mother courage in child birth. Just occassionally it seems that Halo James would be an appropriate name for Booth’s own band. Is he angling for a sainthood or what? Fortunately, God Only Knows from the new album suggests otherwise. Tim : “It’s about people speaking in the name of God, or thinking you can speak in the name of God, which is a highly dubious claim. Because a long time ago, I used to speak in the name of God.” What do you mean? Tim : “I had that kind of self-righteos zeal that only people who think they’re favoured by God can have. It was a long time ago, but I’m still very attracted to people who try and live their life by a thought-out code, and then find their life has another idea about it and it goes its own way. The more you say Thou Shall Not to anything in your life, the harder it becomes to resist. It’s like you build it up. So someone like Jimmy Swaggart I find very interesting. You know, the public posture contrasted with the private personality.” “It’s like all the heavy left wing people, when they get to about 60, they all become fascists. It’s like they can’t hold back any longer. And all the atheists you know suddenly become born again pillocks.” Does that mean the more you try and be a reasonable bloke who just happens to sing in a band, the bigger wanker you become? Hypothetically speaking, of course. Tim : “No, it means that if I started telling people I was a regular guy in a band, which I don’t, but if I pretended I was, then I’d be a very irregular guy…. It doesn’t mean I’d be a wanker. An irregular wanker, perhaps, which I am. Not a man of habit.” Back in 83, with Tim Booth fresh out of Manchester University drama studies, James put out Hymn From A Village, the song which was to line them up as the next big post punk jangle. A sprightly piece of off-kilter guitar pop, it’s mostly remarkable for a lyric which snaps at the inadequacy of pop-song language. So maybe the moralising streak in Booth, the bit that keeps coming up with – songs about wicked governments, evil preachers and irresponsible sex, is fired by plain old guilt. Do you feel guilty about doing something as frivolous as singing in a pop group? Tim : “In terms of how you define pop, I don’t consider myselfto be in a pop group. You know, we make music and I don’t feel at all guilty about that because we make brilliant music and give a lot to people and get a lot for ourselves. I mean, unless I become Mother Theresa or a lawyer or something, there’s no moral high ground in most people’s jobs, to absolve you of guilt. You know, unless you’re Bob Geldof. So I really don’t feel like that at all, and I don’t think any of us do.” “I hardly ever express just one viewpoint in a song. Usually, there’s lots of different attitudes in them. I don’t understand how people can have clear cut attitudes to basically anything, except this government. I don’t understand how people can have clear cut attitudes about morality, about sex, about drugs. You know ‘DRUGS ARE GOOD’, ‘DRUGS ARE BAD’. Who can say? I don’t take liberal viewpoints.” “I don’t believe there’s any morality. I don’t believe in morality. If I have to take a decision on something the decision will be practical, not moral. Liberalism is a lot to do with guilt and morality. If you’re going to make me fight out of that corner, you bastard.” Neither wet liberal apologist, nor in-tuned poet nutcase, Booth is maybe too much of a slippery character to fit in with the conspicious pop personalities. Last time around, while the Morrisseys and Mark Smiths ran off with the miserable bugger prizes and the Housemartins stole the right-on plaudits, James were left muddling along in the margins. Too leftfield, too flighty as musicians, too cool for their own good. This time round though, there’s a focused, hard-headed determination in the James camp that comes across both in Booth’s righteous indignation at my James jibes and in the kick-ass edge (honest) to the new songs. The fired-up Tim Booth who sits at the back of a North London pub spouting lyrics in defence of his songs and telling me I’m as rude as the Americans in the restaurant, hardly matches up with the serene, angelic portraits painted of Tim in the past. Has “the little woolly lamb” who skipped out of Manchester University changed much over the years? Tim : “Yeah, I’m born again now. I mean how do you answer a question like that? Y’know, I’m much more handsome than I ever was and more modest. No, but we’ve been through a lot of crap. A lot of strange experiences. We’ve got a lot out of James. It’s been our focal point, and the more people who wrote us off, the more it’s been, well, they’re going to have to eat humble pie.” “There was one day when we talked about packing the whole thing in, for about an hour, but after that it was ‘We will fight them on the beaches!’ Because the music turns us on so much. It’s like we’d be having all these business problems, but the rehearsals would be brilliant. You get a song, and you lose yourself in a song and you feel fantastic. There’s no way we were going to give that up. And we knew that when we play live, we could take people to the same place.” Last October, when the James tour came to the London T&C Club 2, they took the young dedicated and hot as f–k crowd way out to rapture and back. Frantic, climatic and ebuillent, wiht Booth losing himself totally in spasms of electric eel dancing, it was far from any creaky-jointed nearly-men display. On that kind of form, when they play at Glastonbury at the end of their June World Cup tour, then James have every chance of stealing the Happy Monday’s thunder. James are, of course, thoroughly affronted by any suggestion that the rise of Mancunian dance society has left them a bit out in the cold. Tim : “You don’t know how we relate to that and what we do in our private lives. Yeah, that’s how it’s perceived, but the reality, that’s a different matter. If it’s seen like that then OK, but we don’t want to part of the scene, because that isn’t going to last and there’s going to be a backlash. It’ll be fine for the Mondays and The Roses and the bands that get through, the good bands. But that’s it. And that was 1989.” There is however, nothing blinkered about James current course. There were remix discussions going on last year with A Guy Called Gerald. Graham 808 State Massey danced-up their Come Home single although it was never given an official release. James are just smart enough to scowl at the bandwagon jumping implications of a rumoured Andy Weatherall remix of Sit Down (“It’ll make us the most un-hip band in Manchester”) and wily enough to promise that the dance mix of the already eight minute long rambling groove jam Gold Mother complete with backing vocals by Inspiral Carpets will only come out as a b-side. It is time for the funny ideas about Booth and his band to binned for good. Whatever weight of history they have in tow, James in the 90s are not going to sink beneath the raves. They’re sleaker and groovier than ever before and Tim Booth is a match for anyone who wants to try and box him in. Well, for a lettuce-reared, caring, sensitive, sweet young Englishman he is anyway. Do you think, Tim, you might one day write a song about, say knobbing Jodie Foster on the back of a motorbike? Tim : “Actually, that’s the next single Knobbing! Isn’t that a crude word? I’m a bit more romantic than that. So ‘no’ is the answer to that, I mean, who would be driving for a start? And you know, crash helmets and so on, I’d never be able to keep an erection going while driving a motorbike. My technique would suffer….” Cool as Hadd–k for sure! | May 1990 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
GLR Interview | Article, Interview | Interviewer : Now on a major label, Phonogram’s Fontana, James having a hit single with How Was It For You? and the band are downstairs in our basement studio. Tim Booth on vocals, sometimes known as Maharishi Booth. Bit of a guru on the quiet Tim : Not round my parts mate. You come down here and tell me that to my face. Interviewer : I love reading about your dream though. Which featured, Tim : (groans) Interview : Well, you told the story once, it comes back to you Tim : Yeah, the guy can’t write. He got it completely wrong as we did the interview on a train so he couldn’t hear his tape back afterwards. It’s embarrassing Interview : But was Jed Clampett and Jim Morrisson in it? Nurse Crachett Tim : I’m afraid so, but it had a punchline to it. It had a point to it and it didn’t read like that. It’s an old dream too as well, you know. My dreams are much more clinical nowadays since I’ve been having the treatment. Interviewer : Did you have one last night? Tim : That’s a very personal question isn’t it? Interviewer : I suppose it is Tim : How Was It For You? Interviewer : Dreams are very personal things. Tim : I can’t remember. I can’t remember. I’d better censor it. I think you’d get cut off on air. Interviewer : Listen, have you had to change at all, going to a major record label? Has there been any compromise along the way? Tim : No, because we actually recorded the LP beforehand so part of the deal with Phonogram was that they had to sign for completed masters of the LP. So we’ve just handed them the tape and they said “Yep” and so we actually haven’t had any problem like that. They’ve given us some input, some ideas that they’ve suggested, and we either say “yay” or “nay”. But they kind of seem to respect us at the moment. Interviewer : How long that will last is anyone’s guess. Alright, a song Tim please…. | May 1990 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
What Every Lentil Wants To Know – Smash Hits | Article, Interview | James are a crazy seven-piece from Manchester who everyone used to think were vegan buddhists but weren’t really cos they’re all like really normal guys and they want to talk about the music, right, and not meditation and chunky cardigans etc. With their single How Was It For You? gliding into the Top Forty, Smash Hits slipped into its sandals and spoke to Tim Booth, singer 28, about like the James concept, man. 1. Tim Booth was born in picturesque Bradford but has lived in not so picturesque Manchester for ten years 2. He once worked in a Yorkshire brewery. “That was quite weird, quite aggressive. I don’t have a Yorkshire accent and I had to put one on. Friends of mine who’d worked there before had been beaten up because they didn’t have the right accent.” 3. James came together in 1983 and they thought their name was “very original” then. “But now it’s ten a penny, it’s disgusting.” spits Tim. 4. Touring was once a problem. “Tour promoters thought ‘James’ might be a poet, so I used to go on at concerts and pretend I was a poet, and that the audience had been conned into thinking they were seeing a band. I had to write a poem in the day and narrate it to the audience,” mutters Tim. 5. They’re always being accused of being intellectual. “I think that’s a dead end,” argues Tim. “Intellectuals tend to be people who’ve got overdeveloped brains and underdeveloped hearts.” 6. Seeing James t-shirts has saved them from bankruptcy. Lester in Beats International wore one on Top of the Pops. “We’re going to give us music and open up a retail outlet,” jests Tim. Ho, ho! 7. In the past they’ve meditated a great deal. “When you’re leading the kind of lifestyle that we lead in the band, you just need something to balance you out and you just gonna be off your head all the time.” 8. Tim thinks happiness is not a permanent state of mind. “If it is them there’s something wrong with your hormones.” | May 1990 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Select Magazine Interview | Article, Interview | Their forthcoming album for Fontana, Gold Mother, is not merely James best studio recording so far, but the most accomplished example of what used to be called indie-rock that 1990 has seen. And as Jim Glennie says Beats International have already taken a James T-shirt to number one. All they need now is to match it with a record. The omens are unmistakeable. The smart money says that, at long last, James are about to happen. “This time we’re prepared to take the breaks,” Jim Glennie says. “And we weren’t in the past. That’s the difference.” “We’ve created a situation where we could have been successful, we could have gone for it and done everything, but we didn’t, we held back. And we lost our chance.” Today, you could get a donkey Bloggsed up in flares and Kickers and it would probably be hailed as the next wonder from the land of the Orange Buses. Despite selling upwards of 2,000 concert tickets in most cities – more in Manchester – and despite shifting two grand’s worth of their distinctive t-shirts this week, James were virtually blacklisted by last year’s Madchester media circus. With their back catalogue of sophisticated oblique pop, James clearly didn’t fit into the popular conception of a cartoon world filled with bowl-headed, so-called scallies berserk on horse tranquilisers and bent on mischief. James were a Manchester band, not a Madchester band. And Madchester was about the Mondays, The Stone Roses, 808 State, Oldham’s Inspiral Carpets and a slew of promotion play-off candidates like The New Fast Automatic Daffodils. Maybe James (est 1983) had been around a bit too long and outstayed their welcome, failing to match previous glowing references from the press with attendant hits. Or perhaps it was the Morrissey seal of approval, priceless when he bestowed it upon James in 1985 but now the equivalent of the black spot, that dropped them into the perceived no man’s land between the bright young things and the old Manchester of New Order, The Fall and The Smiths. Either way, James fell victim to a conspiracy of silence. This rankles with guitar talent and conviction man Larry Gott. “James is not the band Manchester forgot,” he says testily. “Once we were the media’s darlings but because we didn’t do what was expected of us (touring America with The Smiths for example) we were forgotten about. It didn’t mean anything to us. Our audiences and record sales kept growing.” Tim Booth is also at pains to put Manchester matters into perspective. “You have to divide what’s really going on in Manchester – the bands who know and respect each other – and what’s written in the press. The journalist conception of the Manchester scene is totally different to the reality of how the bands relate to one another which is, on the whole, very good.” “And we are part of that. That’s why we’ve taken the Mondays and the Carpets and the Daffodils on tour; that’s why we were taken on tour by The Smiths, The Fall and New Order. It’s nothing like what’s written about by journalists from the South.” James conspicious failure to do the business was partly due to their ill-starred three year deal with Sire Records, signed in 1985, which was so grim it nearly finished the band off. Even today, they groan at the mention of the company that promised so much – not least the chance to share a label with band favourites Talking Heads and The Ramones – and delivered nothing but misery. Stutter and Strip Mine, their two albums for Sire, were both fine spiky offerings but each received a negligible push from a label which was more concerned with its American operations. The records duly evaporated. The band’s attitude did not help. “We were idealistic,” says a rueful Jim. “We thought the music would win through, regardless of whether or not we did any interviews or didn’t release anything for years or whatever. It was just naivety.” These were dispiriting times for the then four-piece James, even when the contract expired, as Larry explains with the black humour of hindsight. “We nearly called it a day there and then, when Gavan (Whelan, James original drummer) said, Well that’s it. And we knew that whatever the next person said would decide whether it went one way or another.” Glennie, Booth and Gott opted to soldier on, eventually recruiting new drummer Dave Baynton-Power. They returned to indie-land and Rough Trade for the singles Sit Down and Come Home and an acclaimed live album One Man Clapping. The album’s lengthy stint in the indie charts proved that there were still plenty of James fans out there, after all. For most of 88 and 89 James paid the rent not as musicians, but, bizarrely, from the proceeds of the range of James t-shirts designed by a fan in London. The shirts have ‘Ja’ on the front, ‘m’ on one arm and ‘e’ on the back and ‘s’ on the other arm. ‘Poor as Fuck’ might have been more appropriate. “It was ridiculous” recalls Booth. “While we were producing Gold Mother last year, none of us even had cassette machines that worked properly to listen to the masters. Our record players were useless too. We’d been on £30 a week for about seven years and we had no money for the necessary technology.” This is unlikely to be the state of affairs from now on. It’s early days, but the new seven-piece James are enjoying a productive relationship with Fontana. The fiery How Was It For You?, first fruit of the new deal, shifted 15,000 copies in the North West alone in its first week of release and the label is doing all it can to ensure the record’s chart success. Tim Palmer, who worked on the re-release of the House Of Love’s Shine On, had remixed How Was It For You? for single consumption, with James blessing, and Fontana are releasing the track in a variety of formats, with bewildering permutations of exclusive extra tracks. James, though not entirely happy with this chart chicanery, have spent enough time of the metaphorical arses to realise that some compromises are worth making. “It’s a fix really,” Glennie concedes. “But at the moment, we need that push. Hopefully, when we’re in a situation when we don’t need it anymore we can stop bloody doing it.” Of course, there are remixes and there are remixes. And it’s something of a surprise that James, stalwarts of the pre-Acid house, no disco-dancing, indie-kid brigade are taking the plung with a dancefloor remix of their next release. Paul Oakenfold and Andy Weatherall (the men who made Happy Mondays dance) are possibles to rework Come Home as is Inspirals and Erasure remixer Flood. And somewhere in the James tape cupboard is a remix by Graham Massey of 808 State, which, reckons Jim. is, “more bassy but too muffled to release.” The band had it done last summer – “When it wasn’t sofashionable,” quips Booth. “Yeah, dance mixes are a departure from what we were doing two years ago, But since then the Mondays and Fools Gold and countless others have proved that there are no longer two camps of dance and rock, that it doesn’t matter which area you work in as long as the song itself is good.” Inspired by the distant sight of Strangeways Prison’s wrecked rotunda, Jim and Larry toy with the idea of a “Strangeways Rooftops Dance Mix” of Come Home with the former indie hit’s spiralling hook replaced by incesssant police sirens and an opening sample of a rioter shouting “Good morning, Manchester!” All agree it would be mega-classic. They want to call it Come Down, but realise that then the song wouldn’t make sense. This month’s Gold Mother is a measured, tempting collection with confidence to spare. The fractured wit and melodic inventiveness of Stutter and Strip Mine are still there but the context is new, with recruits Mark Hunter (keyboards), Andy Diagram (trumpet) and Saul Davies (everything but specifically violin) bringing extra colour to what are some of James finest songs. How Was It For You? and Come Home are already well known as wild things with hearts of ice and Top Of The World finds a pitch of poignancy that James have never reached before. The textures are many and varied, the sentiments intriguing and more readily intelligible if not exactly commercialised. Weak links are few: this is how James always should have sounded. Booth’s lyric-writing, noted for its tendency to sharp contrasts of specifics and abstracts, has also moved into focus. God Only Knows is hilarious, skewering religious head-the-balls of the Swaggart and Bakker school with some cruelly apposite sampling from Satellite God-slot programmes and the priceless lines ‘If God is in his image, Almighty must be small”. Booth does not bother to disguise his contempt for today’s cheap goons who pass for religious authority. “If God made man in his image then it doesn’t reflect too well on God, does it?” he grins. “Man is a total screw-up and if there is a spirit or meaning of life then man clearly has no idea what it is. He is much better keeping his mouth shut rather than saying, Follow me as your intermediary.” Maybe the title track gives the most telling clue to James present concerns. Gold Mother deals with the birth of Tim’s son Ben in graphic technicolour, but it’s no lame bout of new-man drivel. The song is positively peculiar, an angular bass-driven chant with backing vocals by everyone’s favourite obstetricians the Inspiral Carpets. “Have you ever seen a woman giving birth?” asks Tim. Only on the telly. “It’s not the same on the telly” Back at the James offices, the aforementioned Ben is having a messy late lunch and the band are poring over a limited edition of How Was It For You? in a particularly desirable metallic sleeve. It comes with a free James logo stencil, which Jim reckons will kill off their T-shirt sales in one fell blow. Talk turns to which of Larry’s guitars will look best on the inevitable Top of the Pops slot, and to the Gold Mother tour, which begins this week, coinciding with the World Cup. Instead of a support band, James will be screening the match of the evening with a DJ on at the same time, so you can dance or watch the game. Or both. “It’s not as if we’re a great football band or anything but people will want to see the game, which seems fair enough,” says the obliging Tim. | May 1990 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Tour Update – NME News | Article, News |
JAMES, currently enjoying their first Top 40 hit with ‘How Was It For You?’,have announced changes to their forthcoming tour, including the addition of two nights at Blackpool’s Empress Ballroom (August 3 & 4), scene of The Stone Roses shows last summer. Special guests are to be confirmed and tickets are priced £7 from the usual agents. They now start their tour at Aberdeen Ritzy (June 3), and not the previous date, with their re-arranged Irish shows taking place at Dublin McGonagles (27) and Belfast Queens University (28). Their new LP ‘Gold Mother’ is set for release at the beginning of June and they appear at WOMAD this weekend (May 18-20) Besides James, other acts appearing at this years WOMAD Festival in Morecambe Bay (May 18-20) include Gil Scott-Heron,Thomas Mapfumo And The Blacks Unlimited, Dick Gaughan, Arrow and Jah Wobble And The Invaders Of The Heart. | May 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Blackpool Rave – Sounds News | Article, News |
JAMES, currently enjoying their first Top 40 hit with “How Was It For You”, are to headline the Blackpool Empress Ballroom, the same venue The Stone Roses sold out last summer. James are playing two shows at the venue, on August 3 and 4. Tickets, priced £7, are available from the usual agents. Special guests and DJs will be confirmed nearer the time. James have also rearranged their Irish shows which now take place at Dublin McGonagles on June 27 and Belfast Queen’s University (28). The tour also now starts at Aberdeen Ritzy on June 3, not 4 as previously announced. The band’s new LP, “Gold Mother”, is set for release by Fontana at the beginning of June. | May 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Mutha Of A Major Label Debut – Sounds News | Article, News |
JAMES release their new album,’Gold Mother’, on Fontana on June 4. The eagerly awaited artefact contains ten tracks, including the band’s recent hit How Was It For You, plus Come Home, which they previously released as a single for their last label Rough Trade. The other songs on the album are: ‘Government Walls’, ‘God Only Knows’, ‘How Much Suffering’, ‘Crescendo’, ‘Hang On’,’Walking The Ghost’, ‘Gold Mother’ and ‘Top Of The World. And adding to the band’s reputation, which has been helped along by the craze for all things Madchester, there’s a guest appearance from men of the moment lnspiral Carpets, who popped on to record some backing vocals on the title track. The album was produced by the group along with Nick Garside. James have added a date to their June tour,at St Andrews Fife University on June 4. | May 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Itinerary: 1990 June World Cup Tour | Tour Itinerary | This is the band itinerary from 1990 James June World Cup Tour. | May 1990 | tour-itinerary article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Programme: Gold Mother Tour (1990) | Tour Programme | The 28-page programme from the 1990 Gold Mother tour featured band bios, interviews and pictures. This copy is signed by the band. Click on an image to browse the tour programme.
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Going For Gold – Sounds | Article, Interview |
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James Come Home Single – Melody Maker News | Article, News |
Out on Fontana on June 25, the single is taken from their “Gold Mother” LP which entered the national chart at 16. It’s backed by the previously unreleased “Fire Away” and a live version of “Stutter” recorded at Manchester Apollo last year. Weekend tickets for the band’s shows at Blackpool Empress Ballroom on August 3 and 4 are on sale for £12 from usual agents. The band have had to cancel shows in Dublin on June 27 and Belfast (28) due to recording commitments. | Jun 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Glastonbury Festival – 23rd June 1990 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistHang On / Hymn From A Village / Scarecrow / Government Walls / Bring A Gun / Johnny Yen / Promised Land / Walking The Ghost / Whoops / Come Home / How Was It For You? / What For / Sit DownSupportn/a - FestivalMore Information & ReviewsNone. Video | Jun 1990 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Les Irrockuptibles Interview (French) | Article, Interview |
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Tim Interview – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
Front Man with James, Tim Booth was THE sensation of this year’s Glastonbury Festival. James have a new single, ‘Come Home’ and a new album, ‘Gold Mother’, out now on Fontana WHERE DID YOU GO LAST NIGHT? To bed WHAT WAS THE LAST THING YOU THOUGHT OF BEFORE YOU WENT TO SLEEP? I’m too tired to sleep. WHAT DID YOU DREAM? That I was asleep dreaming I was awake. WHAT WILL YOU DO TODAY? Move home. WHAT IS YOUR GREATEST FEAR? Lingering pain. WHO ARE YOUR FAVOURITE SINGERS/MUSICIANS? Nick Cave, James. IF YOU COULD BE SOMEONE ELSE, ALIVE OR DEAD, WHO WOULD YOU BE? Who wants to be dead? God. WHAT ANNOYS YOU THE MOST? Guilt trips. WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER YOUR GREATEST STRENGTH? Optimistic determination. WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER YOUR GREATEST WEAKNESS? Guilt trips me up. WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE RECORDS? “Horses”; “Mercy Seat” WHAT WAS THE LAST ACT YOU SAW LIVE? World Party. WHAT DO YOU ALWAYS CARRY WITH YOU? A hanky. WHO WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO KILL IF YOU COULD? Thatcher; Waddington; Terra Blanche; Alistair Burnett; Paul Daniels (getting petty here). WHAT WOULD YOU FIND DOWN THE BACK OF YOUR SOFA? Keys, coins, my wallet (I hope) WHO WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO MEET? Doris Lessing; Patti Smith; Sam Sheppard; Robert Anton Wilcox. WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING AT THE MOMENT? “A Confederacy Of Dunces”. WHAT WAS THE LAST FILM YOU SAW? “Jesus of Montreal”. WHAT DO YOU NEVER MISS ON TV? “Cheers”. WHAT DID YOU LAST RECEIVE IN THE POST? Bills. WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE WORD? Fingers. WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO AN ALIEN? “Take me with you”. WHAT MAKES YOU LAUGH? Paid professionals: Connelly; Martin; Williams; Wright; Hegley; Redmond; Elton; Atkinson; “Cheers”; “Roseanne”. WHAT MAKES YOU CRY? Being human HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO DIE? Gently. WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE YOUR EPITAPH TO BE? “Nice try” | Jul 1990 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Mancs That Like To Say Yes – Select Magazine | Article, Interview |
Their T-shirt went to number one in Britain and now JAMES aim to follow it up with their debut LP for a major. So how far are they the band that Manchester forgot, or just a Madchester crazed media overlooked? May Day in Manchester. Thermometers are nudging the 80 degrees mark and everyone’s stupid with the heat. It’s too sweaty too wear flares, so the city’s youth have left their flapping dungarees at home in favour of surf jams and questionable Bermuda shorts. So much for the Rainy City – this is more like Torremolinos. On a postage-stamp of parkland near their city centre offices, the founder members of Manchester’s best kept secret lounge on dry grass. Today’s Today says that record smog levels make sunbathing a high-risk activity, akin to changing a lightbulb while standing in a bucket of water, but James couldn’t give a bugger. The charming and amiable trio of Jim Glennie, Larry Gott and singer/wordsmith Tim booth are keen to relax – a wise move considering that their workload is about to increase considerably. After nearly eight years of diligent gigging, an unhappy marriage with a major label followed by 18 months in limbo, a succession of managers and enough false starts to wear down the most patient of artists… all these trials are about to pay off. Their forthcoming debut album for Fontana, ‘Gold Mother’, is not merely James’ best studio recording so far, but the most accomplished example of what used to be called Indie-rock that 1990 has seen. And as bassist Glennie says, Beats International have already taken a James T-shirt to number one in Britain. All they need to do now is to match it with a record. The omens are unmistakable. The smart money says that, at long last, James are about to happen. ’’This time we’re prepared to take the breaks,” Jim Glennie says. “And we weren’t in the past. That’s the difference. We’ve created a situation where we could have been successful, we could have gone for it and done everything, but we didn’t, we held back. And we lost our chance.” Today you could get a donkey ‘Blogged up’ in flares and Kickers and it would probably be hailed as the next wonder from the land of the Orange Buses. Despite selling upwards of 2,000 concert tickets in most cities – more in Manchester – and despite shifting two grand’s worth of their distinctive T-shirts this week, James were virtually blacklisted by last year’s Madchester media circus. With their back catalogue of sophisticated oblique pop, James clearly didn’t fit into the conception of a cartoon world filled with bowl-headed, so called scallies berserk on horse tranquillisers and bent on mischief. James were a Manchester band, not a Madchester band. And Madchester was about the Monday’s, The Stone Roses, 808 State, Oldham’s Inspiral Carpets and a slew of promotion play-off candidates like The New Fast Automatic Daffodils. Maybe James (est 1983) had been around a bit too long and outstayed their welcome, failing to match previous glowing references from the press with attendant hits. Or perhaps it was the Morrissey seal of approval, priceless when he bestowed it on James in 11985 but now the equivalent of the Black Spot, that dropped them into the perceived no man’s land between the bright young things and the old Manchester of New Order, The Fall and The Smiths. Either way, James fell victim to a conspiracy of silence. This rankles with guitar talent and conviction man Larry Gott. “James is not the band that Manchester forgot,” he says testily. “Once we were the medias darlings, but because we didn’t do what they expected of us (touring America with The Smiths for instance) we were forgotten about. It didn’t mean anything to us. Our audiences and record sales kept growing.” Tim Booth is also at pains to put Manchester matters in perspective. “You have to divide what’s really going on in Manchester – the bands who know and respect each other – and what’s written in the press. The journalistic conception of the Manchester scene is totally different to the reality of how the bands relate to one another which is, on the whole, very good. And we are part of that. That’s why we’ve taken the Mondays and the Carpets and the Daffodils on tour; that’s why we were taken on tour by The Smiths, The Fall and New Order. It’s nothing like what’s written about by journalists from the South.” James’ conspicuous failure to do the business was partly due to their ill-starred three year deal with Sire Records, signed in 1985, which was so grim it nearly finished the band off. Even today they groan at the mention of the company that promised so much – not least to share a label with band favourites Talking Heads and The Ramones – and delivered nothing but misery. ‘Stutter’ and ‘Strip-mine’, their two albums for Sire, were both fine, spiky offerings, but each received a negligible push from the label which was more concerned with its American operations. The records duly evaporated. The bands’ attitude did not help. ‘We were idealistic”, says a rueful Jim. ”We thought the music would win through, regardless of whether or not we we did interviews, or didn’t release anything for years or whatever. It was just naivety.” These were dispiriting times for the then four-piece James, even when the contract expired, as Larry explains with the black humour of hindsight. ”We nearly called it a day there and then, when Gavin (Whelan, James’ original drummer) said, well that’s it. And we knew that whatever the next person said would decide whether it went one way or another.” Glennie, Booth and Gott opted to soldier on, eventually recruiting new drummer Dave Baynton-Power. They returned to indie-land and Rough Trade for the singles ‘Sit Down’ and ‘Come Home’ and an acclaimed live album, ‘One Man Clapping’. The album’s lengthy stint in the indie charts proved that there were still plenty of James fans out there after all. For most of ’88 and ’89 James paid the rent not as musicians but bizarrely with the proceeds of the range of James T-shirts designed by a fan in London. The T-shirts have a ‘Ja’ on the front, ‘m’ on one arm and ‘e’ on the back and ‘s’ on the other arm. ‘Poor As Fuck’ might have been more appropriate. ‘It was ridiculous,” recalls Booth. “While we were producing ‘Gold Mother’ last year none of us even had cassette machines that worked properly to listen to the masters. Our record players were useless too. We’d been on £30 a week for about seven years and we had no money for the necessary technology. This is unlikely to be the state of affairs from now on. It’s early days, but the new seven-piece James are enjoying a productive relationship with Fontana. The fiery ‘How Was It For You’, first fruit of the new deal shifted 15,000 copies in the North West alone during its first week of release and the label is doing it all it can to ensure the record’s chart success. Tim Palmer, who worked on the release of The House Of Love’s ‘Shine On’ has remixed ‘How Was It’ for single consumption with James’ blessings and Fontana are releasing the track in a variety of formats with bewildering permutations of exclusive extra tracks. James, though not entirely happy with this chart chicanery have spent enough time on their metaphorical arses to realise that some compromises are worth making. “It is a fix really,” Glennie concedes. “But at this moment we do need that push. Hopefully when we’re in a situation where we don’t need it anymore we can stop bloody doing it.” Of course there are remixes and there are remixes. And it’s something of a surprise that James, stalwarts of the pre-Acid House, no disco-dancing, indie-kid brigade, are taking the plunge with a dancefloor remix for their next release. Inspired by the distant sight of Strangeways Prison’s wrecked Rotunda, Jim and larry toy with the idea of a ‘Strangeways Rooftop Dance Mix’ of ‘Come Home’ with the former indie hit’s spiralling hook replaced by incessant police sirens and an opening sample of a rioter shouting, “Good Morning Manchester!” All agree it would be mega-classic. They want to call it ‘Come Down’ but realise that then the song wouldn’t make sense. This month’s Gold Mother is a measured, tempting collection with confidence to spare. The fractured wit and melodic inventiveness of ‘Stutter’ and ‘Strip-mine’ are still there but the context is new with recruits Mark Hunter (keyboards), Andy Diagram (trumpet) and Saul Davies (everything but specifically violin) bringing extra colour to what are some of James’ finest songs. ‘How Was It For You?’ and ‘Come Home’ are already well-known as wild things with heart and ice and ‘Top Of The World’ finds a pitch of poignancy that James have never reached before. The textures are many and varied, the sentiments intriguing and more readily intelligible if not exactly commercialised. Weak links are few: this is how James always should have sounded. Booth’s lyric writing, noted for its tendency to sharp contrasts of specifics and abstracts has also moved into focus. ‘God Only Knows’ is hilarious, skewering religious head-the-balls of the Swaggart and Bakker school with some cruelly apposite sampling from Satellite God-slot programmes and the priceless lines, “If God is in his image/Almighty must be small”. Booth does not bother to disguise his contempt for today’s cheap goons who pass for religious authority. “If God made man in his image then it doesn’t reflect too well on God does it?” he grins. “Man is a total screw-up and if there is a spirit or meaning of life then man clearly has no idea what it is. He is much better off keeping his mouth shut rather than saying, Follow me as your intermediary.” Back at the James offices, the aforementioned Ben is having a messy late lunch and the band are poring over a limited edition of ‘How Was It For You?’ in a particularly desirable metallic sleeve. It comes with a free James logo stencil which Jim reckons will kill off their T-shirt sales in one fell blow. Talk turns to which of Larry’s guitars will look best on the inevitable Top Of The Pops slot and to the Gold Mother tour which begins this week coinciding with the World Cup. Instead of a support band, James will be screening the match of the evening with a DJ on at the same time so you can dance or watch the game. Or both. “It’s not as if we’re a great football band or anything but people will want to see the game which seems fair enough,” says the obliging Tim. | Jul 1990 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Offered Bowie Support – NME News | Article, News |
JAMES (above) have reportedly been offered the support slot to DAVID BOWIE at his Maine Road gig in Manchester on August 7. The band, currently in the Top 40 with a remix of ‘Come Home’, are set to play the major show, although there was no official comment from the group as NME went to press. The James story follows rumours that the INSPIRAL CARPETS had been offered one of the Bowie support slots for his two dates at Milton Keynes Bowl. They turned the gig down because of their headlining appearance at the Reading Festival later in August. | Jul 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
That Was Zen, This Is Now – NME Interview | Article, Interview |
They used to dress up in muesli and eat sandals whilst meditating on their heads, but now they’re a gleaming multi-membered pop combo. Are James jessies or the finest live band in Britain? Stuart Maconie jumps on their tour bus and finds himself in teen pop heaven (!!!) “Two weeks ago they said ‘We’ve got the Railway Children coming down here today’ and ‘I thought ‘Bloody Hell! Jenny Agutter and all that lot from that film’. Then they said to me ‘James will be here afternoon’ so I thought ‘James who?’ Was that two sugars, did you say? PC68 is clearly the odd good apple that gets the whole force a bad name; a fine man whose notion of community policing extends to making coffee for journalists and keeping you up to date with the World Cup scores. His beat, happily, takes in that part of downtown Sheffield which includes the HMV shop and thus, it is he who is called upon to cast a firm but paternal eye over the drooling drug nympho teenies whenever rock phenomena such as Springsteen or Edsel Auctioneer are in town for a ‘signing’. Downstairs in the shop, a disparate crowd of young folk are gathering excitedly to have their CDs, shoes, faces and tea towels signed by their favourite group whose current glorious ascent is testimony to the powers of human spirit and the importance of good t-shirts. Eighteen months ago, James were matchwood on the cruel and rocky shores of pop success; indie art-rockers (so the theory went) who had been left behind in the headless chicken rush for new good times. When such things mattered, they had the King’s Ear, the Papal blessing – Morrissey liked them. But as the 80s ground to a halt and the spectre of disco entered many a polytechnic common room, so James became the sensitive Zen vegans who couldn’t dance properly and were not prepared to learn. Now, in the summer of 1990, there are few more exciting or original groups on the planet. On record, they have become brazen, bold and eclectic; live, they are a revelation, of which much, much later. For now, I have seen the future of multi-cultural, chart-friendly, stadium pop/folk metal and its first name is James. “The embarrassing thing about signing teenage girls t-shirts is that they always want you to sign them halfway up the back and you always end up in trouble with the bra strap. I wonder if that’s the idea….” Saul Davies, if my calculations are correct, will have to get used to this for there is much of it ahead. Saul is one of the four new personnel whose introduction into the James camp has coincided (though it’s no real coincidence) with the spectacular renaissance in the group’s fortunes. When he and Dave, Mark and Andy joined the band, James were firmly in neutral and beleagured by a welter of preconceptions that had James backed into a corner. James the academic, aloof dilettantes, the bloodless folkies, the mantra chanting recluses. Most of these were wrong but you could see how they had gained currency. From the outset, James had nurtured a peculiar style that invited comparisons with both folk, indiepop, The Birthday Party and other radicals, and even high life and tribal rhythms. They were touted as new and unusual white, Northern hopes; heirs apparent to the vacant Smiths throne. There was a flurry of front covers, and a series of interviews in which the odd reference to Buddhism, meditation and alternative healing was to provide pundits with a dream of an angle; James as brilliant rock weirdos. And what was to make them intriguing and individual in 85 would have turned into a mocking albatross by the end of the decade. Those silly buggers with the carrot juice and cardies who never made it. But such depressing thoughts seem inappropriate as we cruise through the Yorkshire streets sipping our Aqua Libres, idly pondering which CD to play or which video to peruse. Thanks to a logarithmically expanding fan base, a hit single and a burgeoning reputation as a live act of extraordinary power, the days of draughty Transits littered wiht old banana milk cartons are over. Availing myself of the sumptuous tour bus comforts, I introduce myself to James. The central core of Tim Booth, Jim Glennie and Larry Gott has been augmented by Saul, a personable multi-instrumentalist who is probably sick of being called impish; Mark, the tactiturn genius of the keyboards; Dave, the AWOL drummer; and trumpeter Andy, once a member of the The Diagram Brothers, a curious group who I practically venerated in the early 80s. For the entire two days I think of bringing the subject up only to think better of it. I hope this explains my odd behaviour. We’re on route to the venue having completed the successful in-store PA. These are invariably strange affairs, made stranger in this instance by James insistence on playing an acoustic set. So we are treated to Tim singing of global annihilation whilst wedged on the counter between tape cleaning kits and Kylie posters. The place is packed, though, and it does afford an interesting glimpse at the James fan of the 90s. And they’re young. Horribly young. Except for the old ones. Many wear hooded tops, flared trousers and have faces curtained with floppy fringes obviously in the throes of geographical adolescent crush. Others are more conventionally alternative and have albums by Echo and the Bunnymen back at the flat. Their enthusiasm is as infectious as it is justified as they queue patiently to have their merchandise autographed and pass the time of day with their heroes. Two hulking, neanderthal bodybuilders who’ve popped in for Tina Turner albums stand bemused in the midst of it. Many of the kids clutch copies of Gold Mother, latest and undoubtedly best James album. Fleshed out by the additional members, the sound is now free of the slightly edgy diffidence. The Jamesian quest for originality is still evident but so is the desire to make a full-blooded rock racket. It even garnered a bona fide hit in How Was It For You?, a straightforward, unreconstructed knees up of a rock tune that successfully completed a string of excellent ‘nearly’ singles: What For, Sit Down and Come Home, the latter now set for re-release. At the soundcheck, James go through the complicated daily routine of choosing tonight’s set. They try Crescendo and declare it to be a ‘bloody mess’. They perform an excellent God Only Knows and still seem unconvinced. They run through a lovely version of The Velvet Underground’s Sunday Morning (admittedly a song that could withstand an Erasure version) which I love and they dismiss as ‘shite’. Being an unconventional pop group, ie not having your nightly performance worked out down to the last witty ad lib, clearly has its trials and I leave them to it. Over the catering crew’s delightful strawberry meringues, word goes round that tonight’s gig is sold out. Saul throws up his hands in mock horror. “Oh no, we’ve sold out! I knew we shouldn’t have released How Was It For You?” There probably are poor benighted souls who think this way (indeed, some of them work on music papers) but fortunately there are thousands of others to whom James are a new band and come unfettered by associations. Unsurprisingly, all of James turn out to be extremely nice folk indeed. Tim and I realise we have a shared love of the Lake District fells and I am quietly impressed and dead jealous when he tells me of travelling Helvelyn’s Striding Edge in a blizzard. The bar is filling up with many of the same faces that were at the record shop earlier. They wear their freshly signed t-shirts as trophies, as proof that they are privy to the inner sanctum. James have always had a considerable live support but something indefinable and inexplicable has happened. The Manchester connection, though powerful, is not enough to account for this broadening of appeal, this new devotion. And within two hours, I know why. I have a confession to make. I’ve been a little lukewarm about James in the past. Hymn From A Village, Johnny Yen, Scarecrow, interesting stuff I agree, but…. Maybe it was just me being suspicious but I could never really get past the wilful awkwardness of some of their songs and their seeming substitution of bug-eyed dementia for genuine passion. In case you have harboured these thoughts yourself and have not had the pleasure of the new James, then let me, as Peter Purves would say, enlighten you. James have metamorphosed into an extraordinary rock group, a live event of breathtaking force. The individuality remains but with it comes grit, pluck, fire and brimstone. As the siren riff of Come Home plays over the slide show of James banners, the expectation is palpable. They begin and immediately you’re struck by the imposing weight of the sound and the sense of self-assurance. Hang On and Government Walls are the work of a band not afraid to make a big beautiful sound, an intoxicating tumult. Bring A Gun and Suffering are raucous and intense rock songs, with a physical presence most speed metal bands would envy. They take chances with impunity, dropping into the spectral atmospherics of Walking The Ghost or chancing their arm with an untitled new song building on relentless repetition and the interplay between an agitated violin and a bruised, blue-black trumpet. There then follows a kind of mini greatest hits segment that sends the assembled bonkers with glee. How Was It For You? leads into the frenetic, primitivist Johnny Yen complete with ad lib along the lines of “Aren’t you just sick of all those translucent Manchester bands” If concessions to modernity (Mondays drumbeat, splash of house piano) have been made in Come Home they’ve been made with an elan that you can’t fault. Sit Down; the new James anthem brings legions onto the stage, forcing Tim on to the speaker cabinets for fear of being crushed. In case anyone thought they were playing to the gallery for cheap applause, they finish with Stutter, a nightmare blast of psycho metal. The image retained is that of Andy’s wildly flailing searchlight illuminating corners of the hall, of Tim’s frantic dervlish dance, of Saul roaming the stage like a man possessed and of a pop group at the height of their powers. You could say I was impressed. I gave it a week. It could have been a trick of the light or something in the lager, I figured. The James World Cup tour finished up at the Birmingham Hummingbird and I proposed to be there. To get some more of this addictive stuff and to sit down with James and a tape recorder. The night in Sheffield had ended in champagne, autograph hunters, eight different types of soft cheese and a curious coach journey to Manchester where the video entertainment came courtesy of Stallone and First Blood, not perhaps an automatic first choice as most people’s idea of fave James viewing. James arrive in beautiful downtown Brum in good spirits, having had several good gigs in the interim, including one particularly special, emotional shindig at the Liverpool Royal Court. The World Cup tour proper ends tonight, the 20 gigs in 23 nights, although there is Glastonbury and some Irish gigs later. Are these extraordinary scenes of fervour and mass communion seen every night? Tim Booth laughs. “Not always. God knows what it is that starts them off. I suppose certain songs like What For and Sit Down are very warm and they invite an emotional response. But in other songs like Come Home, you don’t get the same singalong quality, it’s darker… ‘After 30 years I’ve become my fears…..’ But, yes, often the audience seem to get involved in an almost U2 kind of way.” You see, this has been bothering me. Though there’s nothing of the bombastic or messianistic about James, the last show I saw that had a similar feel to it was a Simple Minds concert. The same sense that for the crowd, and band, this was more than a collection of pop songs played loud but implied some celebration of import. Is Tim insulted by this comparison? “No because I know what you mean. We’ve always had it, even though in the past the audiences have been a bit thinner on the ground. In Manchester, it’s been a celebration for four years. There’ve been times when we’ve had to stop playing because the crowd was singing so loud it was putting us off! But in the past this never got reported.” “On stage, it’s a performance but it’s also a reflection of ourselves. Sometimes we don’t want to do the nice songs, we want to do the heavy ones with the nasty lyrics. Then the audience aren’t invited to join in, it’s more like ‘witness this’. We like those as well, though the sound people say ‘that was weird’. “This tour I’ve encouraged people to sing Sit Down. In London they wouldn’t. But I guess I shouldn’t really try, it’s a bit of a cliche. So sometimes it’s a celebration – uplifting and rewarding. Other times, we release demons.” Larry : “There used to be a real barrier between us and the audience. It was a criticism that was thrown at us a lot … that we were separate, somehow insular and aloof with all this improvising on stage and stuff. And we didn’t realise because we were concentrating so hard. In effect it was like a practice room with 600 people.” Jim continues this rueful reflection. “We were much more self conscious then. Much more vulnerable. Going on stage was terrifying because we were right on the line, taking real risks…. and sometimes it would go badly wrong. It would fall apart and we’d all freak out, all turn round and retreat, heads down and face the drummer. Try and get off quick.” How about the audiences themselves? Who comes to James gigs these days? Tim : “Well on this tour it’s been young girls. Loads of them. That’s certainly never happened before. I can’t remember when it started…..” Saul interrupts. “Basically it’s been since I joined the band, hasn’t it?” Larry : “I think partly because we never made it, our records have become very dear to people. It’s as if there have been a lot of people quietly rooting for James who are now coming out of the closets.” Jim : “It seems to go in pockets around the country. In Glasgow and Norwich, it’s older people. You can see the odd grey hair in the audience. But you go elsewhere and there’s these really young girls down the front.” I ask whether they are beginning to get tired of hearing that James areon the verge of stardom. Larry is quick to reply. “What, after seven years of it, you mean?” Tim takes up the thread. “No, it’s very different now. This is it. In the past our music was often quite skeletal and difficult. But now there are seven of us, working hard and the sound has become more accessible. Fleshed out and huge. Like Johnny Yen, which has always been a good song has now become an anthem. “There’s a real wave of support now. The biggest we’ve ever had,” continues Jim. “You definitely get the feeling something is happening.” Tim : “It’s a new band. I’ve wanted this for so long but we were never able to find sympathetic musicians. Now we have. I wanted to change the name to emphasize this. But I’m glad we didn’t now because it’s become a good name again after a period of being terribly out of fashion.” Larry : “I’m glad we kept the name too. For me, it’s like The Fall. They’ve gone through so many changes but they are still The Fall. The same spirit persists. And we’re still James. It’s just that now there are seven of us playing to the same principles that the four of us once had.” Jim : “For me, changing the name was about destroying the preconceptions that people had about us. It was going to be a way of saying ‘Look we’re back and we’re completely different. Forget all that bollocks you read in the past.'” And what preconceptions might those be, I ask innocently. Jim eyes me with a wry smile. “I don’t really like to repeat them because it only helps to perpetuate them. You know that in the past we’ve been associated with…….” Tim clamps a hand across Jim’s mouth and doesn’t remove it until he’s certain Glennie isn’t about too say anything too incriminating. “… some softer areas of music. Yes, we do have our quiet moments. But really, we play half a dozen heavy metal songs in the set and people still say we’re a folk band. How can anyone who plays a song like Stutter be described as a ‘folk band’? It’s as if people are desperate not to confuse the issue. ‘Look you’re vegetarians, we suspect that you’re Buddhists, you do the odd acoustic number. You’re a folk band!” Larry : “It’s like touring with The Smiths. We did that specifically to destroy the endless Smiths comparisons. We thought that by going out and playing with them every night, we’d hammer home the point that we were nothing like them. But it backfired. It just made the association stronger.” Tim elaborates on this theme. “At the time the things that Morrissey said were very flattering and we were very grateful but when we didn’t make it, it became this millstone around our necks that we had to put up with for five years.” James, undoubtedly, are a group reborn. They have not disowned their past but they have built something completely new from its foundations. At what point did this rebirth occur? Tim : “In some ways it was external events like coming off Sire and Gavin (ex-drummer) leaving. That was a stimulus. We’d wanted more people in the band for ages.” Jim : “We tried everybody. Ron Johnson. Blokes from the Halle Orchestra. Clint from the Inspiral Carpets. But it never seemed to quite work.” Then Tim makes a shock admission. “You see I’ve always been a big fan of Bruce Springsteen live. I’ve seen him a few times and I’ve always been blown away by the real depth of talent within his band. That’s something I’ve wanted for James but it never seemed to work until this year. It all fell together. “Andy’s really the most freelance of the four. He’s got his jazz band. Dave was suspicious because he’d been badly ripped of in the past. And in the beginning he had to join on trust because there was no money to pay him with. At the end of the first tour I think he was amazed when we paid him. Mark is extremely talented but so quiet that for a year we didn’t know whether he was enjoying himself or not. (He also has a sense of humour. In the tour programme, he lists his least attractive trait as being ‘loudmouth and pushy’) And Saul was spotted by Larry, doing his bit in a get-up-and-improvise club. And how did Saul feel, I wonder, about his discovery, a la the Human League girls? “Well, it came at a particularly good time for me as I was doing absolutely nothing. Indeed, I was up a particular creek without a certain implement. I’d never played on a stage in my life and within two weeks I was playing to 2000 people at the Free Trade Hall. I gradually learnt stagefright.” It would seem to me that only a person stupider than a very stupid thing could not be enchanted by the new James. But have there been any mealy mouthed cries of ‘sell out’? Tim : “Well, there have been the reviews. For the first time in our career, we were landed with a whole batch of pretty vicious reviews saying ‘what a good LP Stutter was’ which, of course, no one said at the time.” Larry : “It’s ironic really, this talk of ‘selling out’ because we never saw ourselves as being particularly oblique at the time. We always wanted to be popular as well as experimental. An esoteric pop group. We thought we were accessible when really we weren’t. Stutter has its difficult moments, though a lot of it was naivety. We didn’t realise that there was anything odd about songs with no choruses.” But, around the time of the Stripmining LP, things had reached a low ebb. Faced with public indifference and an uncooperative record company, there must have been a strong case for packing it all in. Larry pales visibly. “There was one point. Sire had pretty much refused to do anything with What For and our management then couldn’t seem to do anything. I remember the four of us being in a cafe and I think it was Gavan who said ‘well, that’s it then’ and I think it all swung on the next remark. But fortunately someone said something to the effect of ‘let’s show the bastards’. I knew I wasn’t prepared to be told that my career was over by some bloke in an office in America who knew nothing about James.” But did you ever feel, like many others did, that James had had their chance? Tim : “Not really. We knew our music was improving. We were always confident that we’d be one of the biggest groups in the world. So we waited with a kind of arrogant patience.” Cynics might suggest that your rocketing popularity has more to do with a general infatuation with all things Mancunian rather than your own qualities. Larry : “Are we seen as part of that scene? I’m not sure that we are. There may be some overlap but I don’t think that it counts for very much.” Tim : “When we toured with the Mondays well before this Manchester thing, we were beginning to get big audiences and a great vibe. You can’t win. Someone said ‘Oh you’re getting popular now because The Smiths had gone,’ but The Smiths have been gone for years now. So then it’s ‘well, The Stone Roses are doing well’. How can you argue with that? And are these the happpiest times ever for the James gang? Tim : “Musically, yes. My personal life is in a shambles. But everything to do with the band is very exciting and uplifting at the moment.” And does the imminent threat of fame appeal to you? “It used to frighten us; back in the days when everyone was saying it was bound to happen. But then it passed us by. We thought ‘we’ll never know’. Now we can’t wait. I’m getting used to all that strange business about feeling watched all the time. Being asked for autographs in nightclubs. And then there’s the sex……” Pardon? “The feeling of it being around all the time. The constant availability. It’s both very frightening and very exciting.” I bet. That night in Birmingham the James World Cup Tour 1990 came to an exhilirating end. I was converted for the second time in a week. The air crackled. The rafters rang. And by Sit Down the band gave up and simply let the crowd sing the chorus in proof that sometimes pop music can still be powerfully affecting without resort to schmaltz or overblown, fake sentiment. Backstage there is an intoxicating, gentle euphoria. For me, there is the joyous realisation that pop music doesn’t have to pick its spots and pull some potato-faced sneer in the mirror of its mum and dad’s house to be wildly, dangerously brilliant. Backstage, a hugely, tipsily pregnant woman gets Tim to sign the stomach wherein resides her unborn child. Is this making you feel sick, rock n rollers? Good. You’ll be getting a hell of a lot sicker before this party is over. | Jul 1990 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
City Life Interview | Article, Interview |
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Well Red Interview | Article, Interview |
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Uptown Interview with Jim | Article, Interview |
On a park bench blistered and worn by exposure to decades of Mancunian rainfall, Jim Glennie and I sit, talk and delve deep into the inner world of James. Before us sweeps the smokey, industrial labyrinth of North Manchester, a dismal maze of rooftops and chimney stacks providing an atmospheric backdrop to an interview which drifts naturally into moody nostalgia. “Maine Road holds a lot of memories for me,” Jim says (James are supporting Bowie at Maine Road on the 7th). “I used to go to the Claremont Road School so a big chunk of my childhood years were spent around those terraced streets of Rusholme. I used to see City a lot at Maine Road too. It will be really weird playing there, especially knowing that a large part of the audience won’t even know who we are. As we talk I suddenly notice the concrete slabs beneath use are cracked and broken and through the gaps, as though responsible for their very existence, peeps the occasional flower — individual, defiant and graceful but sadly overlooked by the passer-by. An image which seems curiously symbolic of James’s struggle to blossom in the stoney-faced and unaccommodating world of pop. A band who’ve been with us for a long time now and who have treated us to some of Manchester’s most innovative and ethereal music, it is surprising that James have only been rewarded with modest commercial success. “The last two singles did okay I suppose,” Jim says referring to the recent chart success of ‘How Was It For You’ and ‘Come Home’, “But it does seem that Radio One and Top of the Pops have an unusual attitude about us. A week before its release, ‘Come Home’ was D listed on the radio. It went straight into the charts at number 32 but for some reason, they took it off the list altogether. We’ve been really unlucky. Sometimes the whole mechanics of the pop and rock industry can be a real pain in the arse. But hoardes of acid scallies donning the James T-shirts on a Saturday afternoon in Manchester is sufficient proof (if any were needed) that James are the defiant flower of the current Manchester scene, not growing from it but through it, like the flower in the park peering through the shattered slabs of worn-down concrete. “Naturally the Manchester scene affect us,” Jim says, “But at the same time we are quite detached from it all. We are still waiting to see how people react to it. What I’ve liked so far about Manchester is that bands have always been very individualistic. But once the bubble bursts people are going to be much more critical.” ‘Gold Mother’, still hovering in the album charts, was James’s offering for the summer and perhaps their most haunting album to date. The pounding rhythmical surges of ‘Come Home’ is still guaranteed to pack the dance floor with scores of arm-flailing idolaters and the LP, the first fruits of the Phonogram deal, has already become part of the current teenage bedroom culture. Politics, loneliness, alienation, anger — ‘Gold Mother’ sweeps majestically through a twilight world of emotional turmoil and self-awareness. Who can resist singing along to such hard-hitting lines as, ‘I am in love insane with a sense of shame That I threw stones at the condemned and now I’m slated.” “Yes, I agree, it’s a moody album,” Jim says, “For the last year or so we were pissed off with the situation we were in and a lot of the songs on the album emerged from that period. But the album is more compact than the others. We picked up the songs that seemed to fit in with each other. It’s hopefully the sort of album you can listen to from start to finish. “It’s interesting,” Jim continues, “Because a lot the songs emerge subconsciously. Tim, Larry, Mark and I all get together in a big room and jam incessantly for twenty minutes or so. We record the session then listen to the bits we like. At this stage, however, the song is very much in its pupal stage. It then grows and changes until it reaches its final metamorphosis in the studio.” As we drift slowly back to the manager’s office in New Mount Street, the delicate image of the flower remains permanently imprinted in my head. The flower is the colourful and attractive part of the plant from which the fruit or seed is later developed. The seeds of James have already been sown and I am convinced that it is only a matter of time before the band finally bloom in a pop world soiled by apathy and blandness.
| Aug 1990 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Avanti Fanzine Interview | Article, Interview |
Dave Simpson traces the history of the band and talks to singer Tim Booth about broken dreams, shattered illusions and a new faith for the nineties. The story of James is a lesson to every aspiring young person that ever picked up a guitar, ever dreamt of pop success and the glory that goes with it, ever believed in the old adage that talent will win through in the end, that good will always triumph over evil. Which, after all, is most of us. The story of James is a love story, a tale of young men at odds with the world and in love with their art. It’s a tale that has fought off betrayals, disappointments and crippling disabilities, that’s seen hearts break, tears fall and spirits shatter. But James are still here. And this is their story. The band formed in the early eighties as a collection of schoolboy friends. Tim Booth, Larry Gott, Gavan Whelan and Jim Glennie became James, named after their guitarist and because “Gavan didn’t have the same ring to it!” Based in Manchester, it wasn’t long before they had progressed to playing the occassional gig at The Hacienda’s local bands night and it was there that the group came to the attention of New Order manager Rob Gretton, who saw something in the foursome’s idiosyncratic yet emotive music and the frenzied dancing of Tim Booth and asked if they might like to record a single for Factory. The “Jimone” EP duly followed at the back end of 1983 – containing the live standard “What’s The World”, the anti-nuclear “Fire So Close” and the sublime “Folklore”, the band’s attempt at questioning the basics of male/female stereotyping, which, looking back, could have been the touchstone for the “wimps” tag which was to haunt them in years to come. The band’s image was far removed from the overt masculinity of much of the rock music of its time – the blustery chest-thump of Simple Minds and the increasing stridency of U2 – and their fondness for casual clothing (principally cardigans) and vegetarian politics provided the press with an easy label. The term of “hippy folkie vegans” became synonymous with articles on the group. 1985 saw the classic “Hymn From A Village / If Things Were Perfect” coupling that was “James II”, a biting attack on worthless big-league pop and the single that rightly had the critics falling over themselves and A&R men dashing for their chequebooks. Things moved fast. Morrissey proclaimed them as his favourite band, a tour with The Smiths beckoned and the band were catapulted into playing to thousands on one of the wildest tours of the decade. “The Smiths tour – we were very very grateful to The Smiths for giving us that level of exposure. But it was a case of a double-edged sword, on the one hand we were playing to these huge audiences and all that, but on the other hand it meant we were to become associated with The Smiths, compared to them. Which we never really thought was appropriate at all, we were two different bands really. It almost became a stigma, y’know. ‘Oh James, Smiths type band.'” Following the success of the tour and their notable appearance at the 1985 WOMAD festival, James signed to Seymour Stein’s Sire Records, home of Madonna and Talking Heads. Things looked good. Whilst lacking the raw power of the Factory records, the first Sire single “Chain Mail” dented the national Top 50 and gained a snatch of daytime radio play. Things started to go astray however with the release of the band’s debut album, the ironically titled “Stutter”. The record contained some fine songs, particularly the dreamy “Really Hard” and “Johnny Yen”, which was to become a cornerstone of the band’s set for many years, but it was marred by a flat production job, courtesy of Lenny Kaye, former drummer with the Patti Smith Group. “We were inexperienced as a studio band, Lenny was inexperienced as a producer. We were lost, basically.” Tim Booth’s charming, charismatic vocals were rendered all but colourless. The album crept out to mixed reviews and without a substantial back-up. In chart terms, it flopped. The band soon realised the difference between being independent hopefuls and major label artists. “You can be number one in the indie charts and mean nothing in the mainstream charts. When you go to a major you lose the profile an independent hit gives, even though you may actually be selling more records. Looking back, I think we should have done an independent album.” Sire began to lose interest. They viewed James as still essentially being an “indie” group. They’d been signed as a “hip” band with a flurry of press activity and once they’d got them on the dotted line, the company had no idea what to do with them. A further problem was the fact that, as a huge American company, Sire didn’t have a UK office, which made it difficult for the group to deal with them. There was never any real working relationship between the two parties. Tim Booth recalls “With Sire, we didn’t accept any money, so they could really do with us what they wanted because they hadn’t put any investment into us. They could just leave us on a shelf for two years, they weren’t going to lose anything.” Which is precisely what happened. Between 1986 and 1988 there were no James records – no singles, no albums, no more than a handful of gigs. Many of the group’s fans assumed they’d split up, there were the usual trickle of rumours surrounding the band’s activities (some almost as far-fetched as those surrounding The Only Ones), and for all intents and purposes James were close to being all but a cherished memory. The band were shattered, broken. Their dreams languished on the rocks, their morale was all but crushed. It was never meant to be this way. 1988 at last saw a release in the form of a fine single “What For”. It was to become an anthem for the band, an inspiring and uplifting tale of a yearning hope, flying in the face of adversity. Its success was seen as vital to the continued progress of the group. Sire thought the record still “a little too indie for Radio 1”, failed to give it any kind of push, and, despite the band’s faithful following rushing out to buy a copy, it failed to make the Top 40. James were devastated. The drummer, Gavan, left. Tim Booth recalls “That year had been really hard, we’d nearly finished, just given up, we were on the brink of bankruptcy. With Gavan, we had to ask him to leave after a series of arguments. He seemed to have a different idea of what he wanted from the music, so we just felt it wasn’t worth continuing, because it was like every rehearsal was a fight.” James long awaited second LP appeared at the tailend of the year, two years after it was recorded and after remixing had attempted to give it a more radio-friendly sound. The company did nothing to promote it. “Strip Mine” was a great record that never got made, the resulting release a very good but rapidly dating and frustrating shadow of the group’s increasingly electrifying live form. Worse, their former champions in the press maintained the notion that the band and their music were somehow “wimpy and fragile”. Which was patently ludicrous. “We were in this awful press rut where we were a, you know, ‘File under Smiths, vegetarian, Buddhist, arran sweaters’ kind of group. That was a hell of a shit rut to get into, we didn’t feel it reflected any of the music that we were making. We don’t feel out music’s ‘indie’, there’s never been a Buddhist in the band, vegetarianism isn’t a policy, it just happens that most of the members of the band are that way by choice. The music’s not wimpy, it’s more &ldots; provocative and aggressive. I’d actually quite like to meet the journalists who write that we’re wimps, then we could show them just how wimpy we are. We still get dismissed like that, only recently one paper wanted to run an article on us and the projected headline was ‘Return of the Hippies!’ It’s just ridiculous.” Down to a three-piece, the band were at rock-bottom. But they didn’t give in. They still burned with a basic faith in the power of what they were doing, they found a new will, a new resolve. They found a legal loophole in their record contract and finally broke free. The phoenix began to rise. In 1989, having spent time recruiting a new drummer, James expanded to a seven-piece line up and began work on a more powerful, more danceable sound. “We’d wanted other musicians before, but we’d not been able to find any with the same attitudes as us regarding improvising and taking risks, but gradually they just seemed to appear, we sort of stumbled on them. So we became a seven-piece, almost by accident.” Finding a helping hand at Rough Trade, the band released a live album “One Man Clapping” to very favourable reviews. Their live shows had always far eclipsed their recorded work, so it was appropriate that the record featuring the original four-piece line up recorded over two hot nights in Bath should become their best long player to date. Featuring many previously unrecorded songs, including the bitter vitriolic ballad “Burned”, the album was a firm fixture at the top of the independent charts for weeks. Another classic single, “Sit Down”, possibly their best yet, was unleashed upon the public. But on the verge of a chart hit, the band’s jinx struck again. A technicality concerning the accompanying video resulted in a Musician’s Union ban on television showings for a crucial two weeks. The single entered at 77 and got no higher. But by now, the group’s ever-growing following was beginning to show itself in huge numbers. Especially in the North, there was barely a gig crowd to be seen without someone wearing the band’s characteristic t-shirts. At Bradford’s Futurama Festival in October, a quite remarkable performance by James literally stunned the crowd into a massive standing ovation. There were people with tears streaming down their faces. The devoted fans that had stuck with the group through everything were sharing in the joy of the moment, the realisation that at last James time was about to come. The next step was another single, “Come Home”. Wary of the band’s “wimp rock” reputation, Rough Trade dished out a few white labels of the record to club DJs, refusing to name the artists. Showcasing a forceful new dance sound, it was greeted ecstatically on dancefloors across the country. It was an excellent record. A hit single looked a safe bet. “Come Home” entered the Gallup chart at 85 following a “Hitlist” powerplay on Simon Mayo’s Radio 1 show and coinciding with Manchester’s Stone Roses and Happy Mondays assault on the nation’s consciousness. Incredibly, disaster struck again. A cock-up at record business mag Music Week meant that the bottom end of the Top 100 was printed exactly the same as the week before. This meant that James single was not listed as a new entry and hence at the crucial time lost the profile it would have otherwise received. The band were livid. It came as a further blow to a marketing campaign which had already seen pluggers without copies of the record, cancelled video shoots and delays in availability. It seemed like par for the course when, touring to promote the release, the band were struck down by flu. But the “Come Home” tour was, despite everything, a major success. Dates were almost all sold out as James were doing the same level of business as the Mondays and the Carpets, and whilst the tour opened in Sheffield with Tim Booth barely able to sing, by the final date in Leeds the band were in spectacular form. The tour ended with the stage packed with members of supporting act Band of Holy Joy and Holy Joy wordsmith Johnny Brown proclaiming that Tim Booth was “God” That tour saw James unveiling the clutch of songs that form the basis of the “Gold Mother” era. As well as boasting the best tunes they’ve ever come up with, they show that as a lyricist Tim Booth now ranks with the best. His lyrics have developed from an early charming ambiguity to a searing directness, by turns intimately personal and vibrantly political. None moreso than the epic “Promised Land” which shows the group unafraid to speak out and take the lead as pop rises to the challenges of the new decade. Tim : “I don’t like the word political, but yes, that’s the direction my lyrics have taken. In the early days though, we had songs like ‘Fire So Close’ which was about Cruise missiles, so it’s always been there. In those days, though, I was afraid to be as direct as I am now. I liked to keep it ambiguous, whereas now I just f**king write it, y’know. I was very angry when I wrote ‘Promised Land’, I was sitting on a train and it came out in half an hour. When a song comes out very smoothly you just have to use it, I couldn’t turn it down. A lot of them are like that, you just write it down, don’t censor yourself and then you find it usually makes more sense later. The ‘Promised Land’ thing was also about Hillsborough. We were recording ‘Sit Down’ in Sheffield at the time and she was in the hospital the next day. There’s these poor buggers trying to get better and Thatcher’s hanging over them trying to get a photo session done.” The last tour saw audiences increasingly reacting to the content of the songs. A crowd in Birmingham let out a rapturous cheer when Tim altered the lyrics of ‘What For’ to take in ‘I will swim through Sellafield seas’ in comment on recent spills. “When we played in Edinburgh which is very politicised at the moment due to the Poll Tax thing &ldots; when we played it, they were just cheering and cheering. I’ve never known anything like it, Larry was in tears. It was incredible.” “We’ve always known though that people were listening. We’ve always had that belief, sometimes that was all we had to keep us going, y’know. We’ve just gone on at our own pace. The last tour was sold out virtually everywhere, we’re just letting it grow naturally, building. I suppose we’re hoping for a similar growth to U2 or Springsteen. Because we can do it live, I think we can sustain it. I think Springsteen is a role model for us, some of his music’s very cliched but he can really cut it live. So can U2, I would imagine. I’ve not seen U2 but some of the sequences in that film, the live thing, they’re incredibly powerful.” Tim Booth radiates an aura these days. It’s not something you can easily put your finger on, but maybe things like faith, determination, hope, love and anger have something to do with it. He’s more authoritative, maybe happier. “I’ve been looking back at certain memories, and they’re just really awful memories, y’know, about not being happy and everything. I hope I won’t look back on my present as being like that. The funny thing was, it was all in me, it was my mentality that was making me unhappy.” Whatever the future holds, the lessons of the past have not been spared on James. “We were wary of signing again after what happened with Sire, but we’re far more aware now than we were then. We won’t make the mistakes we made then and we won’t get f**ked around like we were then. Record companies all come down to money in the end, even your smallest back bedroom indie label. They’re bankers, it’s just with a major label the sums they invest are far greater. The thing what made us look at signing again, was &ldots; we’ve been on the verge of bankruptcy for about a year. We have a huge amount of faith in our music, and we were thinking, y’know, we can’t go on writing songs this brilliant and not get anything from it. We’ve got to the point also where we’re a seven-piece band and to tour costs us thousands. It’s the only option open, really. But I think this time it will prove to be the right one.” 1990 has been (so far, at least) kind to James. They’ve broken the charts, (firstly with “How Was It For You?”, a trite, weak single as it happens) and the “Gold Mother” album has helped restore their reputation as the great white hopes for British pop. The band have moved towards the kind of corporate games that typify the approach of many major label artistes (multi-format releases, in-store p.a.’s etc) but it is hoped that, with the chart barriers broken, the group will once again rely of their music, and their music alone, to maintain their success. After all, it’s that what’s carried them this far. It would be a shame now, after all they’ve been through, James threw it all away and became just like all the rest. Bankers. | Aug 1990 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James’ Xmas Crackers – Sounds News | Article, News |
Three major shows including G-Mex JAMES, who are currently working on new material for a September single release, will round off a phenomenally successful year on the Madchester wave with three mega Christmas shows at Glasgow Barrowlands on December 4, London Brixton Academy 6 and everyone’s favourite venue, Manchester G-Mex, on December 8. Tickets are on sale now from box offices and usual agents, price £8.50 for London and £6.50 everywhere else. More news on the new single to follow soon. | Aug 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James December Tour – Melody Maker News | Article, News |
JAMES wind up what’s already become their most successful year to date with three Christmas shows in Glasgow, London and Manchester. The band, who proved the surprise hit at this year’s Glastonbury Festival and at their support slot to The Cure at Crystal Palace three weeks ago, are currently in the studio. They´re recording with producer Flood (Depeche Mode), and a single looks likely to be released in late September. After that they’re off to America on a press and promotion trip. They return for shows at Glasgow Barrowlands on December 4, Brixton Academy (6) and Manchester G-Mex (8). Their current LP “Gold Mother” is just about to go silver in the UK. | Sep 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
First Blackpool Then The World – Face Interview | Article, Interview |
First Blackpool, then the world You couldn’t move in Blackpool for those T-shirts. Advertising the LP “Gold Mother” or the single “Come Home”, James logos added a little style to the Golden Mile with its tourists in gaping tops and small shorts queuing up to see Elvis as approved by Graceland, screaming on Pleasure Beach rides and eating soggy chips and curry sauce in the hottest weekend on record. Singer Tim Booth is buzzing. He is becoming something of a guru with his audience, who are devoted scallies and indie fans. He is not an obvious pin-up; as he wanders around, the Pleasure Beach girls gasp, point, and whisper: “It isn’t, is it?”. The T-shirt Posse approach hesitantly and casually remark “Brilliant gig, mate”, to which Booth smiles, mutters “Thanks,” and shoves his hands deeper into his pockets. In a café along the seafront, Booth is talking about how proud James are of their fans. “They’ve been fanatical for about four years in Manchester. We haven’t played there this year. So loads of people came up to see us – we really wanted to book a campsite and include the price on the tickets, but they wouldn’t let us. We were nervous because these are the first gigs since Glastonbury. I just couldn’t believe it when everyone in the Ballroom got down on the floor for ‘Sit Down’. It blew me away. It was wild!” James are at their best live-their songs have a mesmeric, anthemic quality which touches on early Teardrop Explodes and the House Of Love. Strobe lights flicker from all angles, colourful images dance on the backdrop behind the seven-piece band. Fans at Blackpool – 10,000 of them over two nights – danced on stage with Booth, doused themselves with water and wore James T-shirts with Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, and “Cool as Fuck” visible beneath. The association with Manchester, their hometown, is inevitable, especially when the Inspiral Carpets do backing vocals on the title track of their LP “Gold Mother”, but Booth insists James aren’t linked with the ‘scene’, and is skeptical of pale imitators who think wearing hoods and flares is enough. “I don’t think imitation is a sign of respect at all. Most people miss the whole point, trying to copy the spirit of the band without being able to emulate the notes. It seems so superficial. But if there is a Manchester backlash, it won’t get us because we’re too big.” Booth’s voice, intense eye contact and easy smile make his boasting sound more like honestly then egotism. But his pride is understandable. From the days of “Stutter” (1986) to this summer’s magnificent “Gold Mother”. James have always shown that their music – catchy and poppy but full of twists – has guts. Guitarist Larry Gott sips his tea and sweeps his hair back. “The guts have just been in a different area to other bands, who rely on loud drums and guitars and distortion.” Their staying power is central to their success. After eight years of financial difficulties when they were saved by the sales f those T-shirts, James are considering world domination. Levi’s believe they are going to be as big as U2 (“Their words, not ours”) and are sponsoring them. Subtly, of course. “They can take photos before the gig, and they may do a brochure-a tasteful one-to be distributed to 2,000 shops,” Booth explains. “And we get wardrobes full of free jackets and shirts,” adds Gott, laughing and covering the conspicuous red tag on his shirt. The music press now seems to have forgotten the awkward, playful James who used to wear bright clothes and smile in press pictures because everyone else “was wearing black and looking dour and cool”. And the time when Booth’s slightly feminine looks added to the band’s ‘wimpish’ label. Now the praise comes more readily, although they are wary of hype: “If you believe the press when they say you’re fantastic, you’ve got to believe it when they say you’re terribe.” Booth shakes his curls and says they are learning lessons all the time. “I was tripped up the other week on Radio 1’s Newsbeat. The first question was ‘NME says you’re the best band in the world or a load of jessies. What do you think of that?’ I said if it was a choice, I’d say, ‘We are the best band in the world!’ And of course they just used that. I felt really embarrassed.” The waitress brings some sickly ice cream and confides in us. “You know, something really strange is going on today. Everyone’s wearing funny T-shirts. I think it’s all about this band called James. Do you know anything about them?” World domination is yet to come. (Amy Raphael) | Sep 1990 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Will James Last? – Vox Interview | Article, Interview |
WILL JAMES LAST? GASPO! IT LOOKED LINE ONE OF THE FIRST—AND SOME WOULD SAY THE BEST—OF THE NEW NEW MANCHESTER BANDS WOULD MISS THEIR PLACE ON THIS YEAR’S MIGHTY MANC BANDWAGON, BUT IN THE NICK OF TIME JAMES GOT THE SUCCESS THEY LUSTED FOR, JUST LIKE THEY ALWAYS KNEW THEY WOULD. DONTCHA JUST LURVE HAPPY ENDINGS? ASKS ANDREW COLLINS “It’s that time again, when I lose my friends/go walkabout/I’ve got the bends from pressure/this is a testing time when the choice is mine” (“Come Home”) You and I, we’re on first names terms with James. We’ve been that way for some time now. Six years, in actual fact. And we’ve been through a helluva lot together, you, me, and James. Premature adulation, the pain of being misunderstood, peer pressure, the frustration of being leap-frogged, the crushing demoralization of one man clapping, and now, it’s that testing time when we’ve got more friends-you, me, and James-than we know what to do with. For 1990 has been James’ Renaissance year. Look at the national chart successes of this summer’s “Come Home” single and “Gold Mother” album if you want statistics. Or ask anyone at Glastonbury which was the most ubiquitous T-shirt amongst the huddled masses, if you prefer less clinical proof that James have arrived. “I’ve always found normal life pretty damn weird anyway, so I don’t find this any weirder,” says James frontperson Tim Booth, whose ‘normal” life now involves being mobbed in the street by young people wearing his T-shirts and the occasional “weird sexual advance.” Tim has been at the helm of James from the beginning. He is not James, he is Tim; he is one seventh of The Band With No Surname. But occupying, as a singer inevitably does, the foreground, it is Time who has the clearest view of this lasting six-year friendship. To get to the very beginning of James, “ the first stirrings”, as Tim poetically puts it, we have to travel back to 1984, to a Manchester University disco, when an angst-ridden Tim is ‘expressing himself’ on the bitter-soaked dancefloor. “I was pissed off because my girlfriend had gone away and left me, and I’d had a few drinks and I was dancing wildly on a crowded floor, and people were having to make room for me. I came back to my table and this bearded fellow was stealing my drink. I confronted him, and two other fellows stood up to support him – so I immediately became charming! They were 16-year-old Manchester lads who’d seen me dancing and wanted me to dance in their band.” The next morning, Tim woke up with a phone number on his hand. He rang it, and that very night, found himself sitting in a scout hut round the back of then-guitarist Paul’s house “listening to this really naïve band play songs with two chord changes that went on forever.” This young band were also short a lyricist, so, assuming that Tim was dead clever, what with him being at university and all, they asked him if he’d write some words for them. (“I’d never done such a thing in my life, but I wanted to be in a band – so I allowed them to carry their ignorance with them.”) A couple of practices, a spot of backing vocals (the band had a female lead singer at this point) and some angst-ridden tambourine banging later, it was announced that they had a support slot with Orange Juice in Sheffield. “Come along,” they said, to their new-found Human League-style dancing boy. And he did. “I danced like a very frightened man, and that was it.” James weren’t called James at this tender stage, they were The Model Team International, named after the model agency that Paul’s sister worked for – hence, ready-made T-shirts were available for stage wear. The importance of good T-shirts would crop up again in James’ career… A year later, ‘that girl singer’ was ‘asked to leave’, and Tim was promoted. The name changed, too. Paul didn’t want them named ‘Paul’ for fear of looking big-headed; they shied away from being called ‘Tim” to avoid singer-as-bandleader connotations; ‘Gavan’ (the drummer) sounded too much like Heavy Metal band; so the honour of immortalization befell bassist Jim Glennie. James was born. The inevitable demos ensued, leading to a single with local Factory Records. “They wanted us to make an EP but we refused to do that as well and did a single. We deliberately chose our three weakest songs and recorded those – we thought we were bound to cock up the first time and we were not going to waste our best songs.” If “What’s The World’, Fire So Close’ and ‘Folklore’ were James’s worst songs, it was little wonder they got themselves noticed on the release of this first single. Slightly ragged, a tad ‘folk-tinged’, perhaps less overtly tuneful that the currently ‘happening’ Smiths, but tightly-sprung, highly-strung Pop oddities nonetheless. February ’85 saw the “good songs” follow-up, headed by the now-familiar ‘Hymn From A Village’. Next stop – ‘that NME cover story’. On March 16, the four members of James- Tim, Larry Gott, Jim and Gavan – found themselves peering from the cover of said well-known weekly, automatically hailed within as Great White Hopes, saviors of Brit Pop, new pioneers of rubbish-trousered ‘ordinary ‘ blokedom. This was fine – except that far from being the fruition of an unknown band’s hopes and dreams, this cover-stars honour was soured by the fact that it was actually timed in spite of itself; James were staring up from the shelf of WH Smiths by (their own) default. The idea was, originally, that James would herald the new year, by being the NME’s first cover of 1985 – but they turned it down, “because we felt it was damaging to the soul”. It wasn’t arrogance, then? “No, it was naiveté. Things were going so well for us, we thought they’d carry on forever. We felt that the music was It – and it isn’t. That isn’t the reality of the music business.” Things were indeed going well. Recently-elected guru for a new generation, Morissey, had name-checked James in print, and the boys were duly invited on the Smiths ‘Meat is Murder’ tour. James ‘awkward, self-consciousness, bedroom poetry style and Manc geography earned them many an early Smiths comparison. “We liked the Smiths. They were a great band, but they were working in a different area to us. We were well-protected by them, too – they looked after us,” Tim admits. However, true to form, they turned down the subsequent American leg of the Smiths’ tour. While your average young band might measure their own brilliance by totting up press offers and support dates, James viewed their own worth completely outside of the great media circus. Simply, they knew their music was brilliant. Courtship by major labels followed and James welcomed it-because Factory simply weren’t getting their singles into the shops of the towns they were playing in. (“We felt we were putting our backs into it and they weren’t. We get on really well with Factory now – it turns out that they weren’t the people to be frightened of. Sire were.”) Ah yes – Sire. Entirely down to the naïve belief that any company that signed up the Ramones and Talking Heads must respect their artistes, James exchanged ink with the legendary New York label. “We felt that the fat American who signed us was a real music fan and we went with him. It was a mistake.” A mistake that would eat a full three years out of James’ divine masterplan. The vote of confidence inherent in the actual signing was the last evidence that Sire were behind them that James would see. “They didn’t see us as a commercial band; they saw us as avant garde. Which in a way, we were.” “We were very difficult,” Tim admits. “very naïve. We fought with the producers. We’d demand a lot of them and we didn’t know what we were doing.” After much friction and studio-ache, a first album ‘Stutter’ sort of dribbled out of Sire’s Summer ’86 schedules. It was very much a first album, hung with haunted, jerky James ditties, often without the aid of a chorus, always injected with Moriss(ey) dancing maypole catchiness. But the huge void between James’ idiosyncratic vision and Sire’s chorus-hungry transatlantic obsolescence soon became apparent. This doomed mixed marriage is most lucidly illustrated by the chapter in the James story where they record their second album; ‘Strip Mine’ and Sire take a full two bloody years to release it. “’Strip Mine’ nearly killed us, because we had such debts. We couldn’t tour, there was no money coming in, and we were a complete mess.” The second new manager James called in to try and salvage their career actually gave in, saying that they couldn’t physically get in touch with Sire at all. (Sire’s UK office comprises “a glorified secretary,” Tim spits.) But there is a God. And this very failure to communicate became James’ escape. “There was a small print in our contract that said if Sire didn’t send a telex to say that they were going to renew, six months after the LP was released, they lose us automatically. They told us verbally on the phone that they were, but they forgot to send a telex! They were so inefficient.” And with one bound, James were free. Poor, demoralized, and instilled with a blanket dislike of Americans (“They’re up their own arses, they don’t understand new music!”), they somehow managed to stay together. How? “The music was still brilliant, and we knew it. We never lost confidence in the music. If you know that you’re one of the best in the world at what you do, are you going to give it up and do something that you’re not very good at?” “When we couldn’t tour, we’d play Manchester. We were playing Manchester four years ago to 1,500-2,000 people, and they would understand what we were doing! They would be going berserk!” James “walked the tightrope with bankruptcy” for 18 months after the break with Sire, and, as if to add injury to insult, Tim had a funny knee. After two cartilage operations they told him he’d never dance again, and minor depression set in. “So I got the whole of The Singing Detective out on video and watched it the day after I came out of the hospital. And I didn’t believe in painkillers so I was in f***ing agony and couldn’t sleep. There I was, on my back, watching a film about this man in hospital who’s in agony, shouting and swearing at people, and it really did me in. And really cheered me up because if something that odd can get recognition that I felt that there had to be some justice!” Which leaves us with a splendid allegory to play about with: James as bed-bound genius, racked with creative fervor, disturbing the other patients, refusing the painkillers etc etc. And – just like Philip Marlowe in The Singing Detective – James recorded a live LP in Bath to remedy all that time spent rotting in a confined space. It was called, ironically, ‘One Man Clapping’, and it captured the still-intact spirit of James-bristling, frustrated, chewing at the muzzle, and independent. Yes, they were independent again, the album being financed by comfortable old carthouse Rough Trade. This might have been the start of a beautiful friendship, but “ they didn’t see us as a commercial band, they saw us a bit like Pere Ubu, a band they felt obliged to help – original, but not going to sell large amounts of records. Sol we felt obliged to leave-because we saw ourselves selling lots of records!” The singles ‘Sit Down’ and ‘Come Home’ came out on the back of Rough Trade’s honourable sense of obligation, but, despite ‘89’s obsession with all things Manc, failed to be more than just indie hits. (‘Sit Down ‘ was dashed by a Musicians Union ban on the video, because Larry played a log with two sticks in a suspiciously drummer-like manner in it, and obviously put scores of real percussionists out of a job by doing so.) Despite being “jinxed” in matter of business, James songs were still coming thick, fast and brilliant. Gavan had left in December ’88, and this paved the way for a recruiting drive – one that resulted in the new, seven-man line-up that exists today. Saul, the fiddle player, “blew Larry away” with some sparkling improv at a local jazz club, keyboardist Mark “blew the whole band away” with some improvised accompaniment to ‘Sit Down’ in a studio in Bath; trumpeter Andy (literally) “blew them away” by busking through a track called ‘Crescendo’ – are you spotting a pattern here? So, newly complemented by top improvisation merchants, James set about rebuilding themselves on vinyl, in order to blow us all away too. The Rough Trade-financed ‘Gold Mother’ LP (comprising many a track actually written during improv sessions at the previous auditions) was so fine, so convincing, that Phonogram bought it up lock, stock and barrel. Its eventual release in July this year signaled James’ official Renaissance (the one that had been happening for about six years!) and even though it’s ‘taster’ single ‘How Was It For You?’ flopped due to Top of The Pops changing their format to include album charts and hence nixing James’ long-overdue debut by one chart placing, a UK tour that featured serious Jamesmania in the area confirmed what they already knew. “The people that follow us now are quite devotional,” understates Tim, who has witnessed an entire audience in Paris sitting down to ‘Sit Down’ and had a gig at the Liverpool Royal Court halted while the crowd sang this song for five full minutes. “The trouble with something like this is that you then try and recreate it. The next few nights I was holding the mic out to the crowd and they didn’t sing – and that’s where the cliché’s born!” When you spend that long realizing your own greatness, you do tend to avoid clichés. James’ rise from Moz-tipped tank tops to fully-fledged national institution has been anything but a fairy tale. “I find this inevitable,” smiles Tim, and you’re tempted to believe him. SINGLES Nov 84 What’s The World/Fire So Close/Folklore (Factory) Feb 85 Hymn From a Village/If Things Were Perfect (Factory) Jan 86 Chain Mail/Uprising/Hup-Springs (Sire) Jul 86 So Many Ways/Withdrawn/Just Hipper (Sire) Mar 88 What For/Island Swing/Not There (Sire) Sep 88 Ya Ho/Mosquito/Left Out Of Her Will/New Nature (Sire) Jun 89 Sit Down/Goin’ Away /Sound Investment/Sky Is Falling (Rough Trade) Nov 89 Come Home/Promised Land/Slow Right Down (Rough Trade) May 90 How Was It For You/Whoops/Hymn From A Village/Lazy (Fontana) Jun 90 Come Again/Dreaming Up Tomorrow/Far Away/ Gold Mother (Fontana) ALBUMS Jul 86 Stutter Sire Sep 88 Strip Mine Sire Feb 89 One Man Clapping (Live) One Man Jun 90 Gold Mother Phonogram The JAMES gang Tim Booth (28) Vocals Jim Glennie (26) Bass Larry Gott (30) Guitar Saul Davies (30) Violin, percussion, guitar Mark Hunter (22) Keyboards Andy Diagram (28) Trumpet, percussion Dave Baynton-Power (27) Drums
| Oct 1990 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Lyon Le Transbordeur – 21st October 1990 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistCome Home / Sit Down (setlist incomplete)Supportn/aMore Information & ReviewsVideo | Oct 1990 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Rockerilla Interview (Italian) | Article, Interview |
| Nov 1990 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Lose Control – Melody Maker News | Article, News |
JAMES release a new single through Fontana on November 26. And they have also this week announced a headline gig in the Life Serenaids series. The Single offers two previously unreleased tracks, “Lose Control” and a cover of Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning”. The 12-inch additionally features “Out To Get You”. James appear at the Terrence Higgins Trust’s Life Serenaids on November 29 and at Brixton Academy. The three-night event aims to highlight World AIDS Day on December 1. James Will be supported by That Petrol Emotion, Billy Bragg, New Fast Automatic Daffodils and Stereo MCs. Tickets are £10 in advance, excluding booking fee, from the Academy box office, usual ticket agents and a special charity hotline – 071 734 8932. The band follow on with a short series of British gigs in December, as already announced. Then they fly to Russia for shows in Moscow, Kiev, Arkhangelsk, Vilnyus and Svendlovsk. | Nov 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NME News on Lose Control | Article, News |
James release a brand new single through Fontana on November 26 titled Lose Control. The b-side is a version of the Velvet Underground’s Sunday Morning and the 12″ has an extra track, Out To Get You. The band are currently working on a new LP, due out next Spring, and have just announced that they will be playing Russia following a short UK tour in December. | Nov 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Aid Higgins Trust – NME News | Article, News |
JAMES will headline an AIDS benefit show at London’s Brixton Academy on November 29. The Manchester band(singer Tim Booth pictured right) are the latest addition to the three-day Serenaids Festival in support of the Terence Higgins Trust.They will be supported by That Petrol Emotion, Billy Bragg, The New Fast Automatic Daffodils and the Stereo MCs. Mica Paris has also been confirmed as special uest for another of the shows at the same venue on November 28. She’ll appear on the same billas Marc Almond,Everything But The Girl, Carmel, Jools Holland and Working Week. Tickets for all the shows cost £10 each and you can book on the credit card hotline by calling 071 734 8932. | Nov 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Higgins Trust – NME Preview | Article, News |
JAMES, THAT PETROL EMOTION, MARC ALMOND and THE ADVENTURES OF STEVIE V play London this week to draw attention to World Aids Day on Saturday. The gigs, under the banner ‘Serenaids’, and organised by the Terence Higgins Trust, start tonight (Wednesday) at the Brixton Academy with Almond, Mica Paris, Everything But The Girl, Carmel, Jools Holland and Working Week. They continue on Thursday with James, That Petrol Emotion, Billy Bragg, New FADs and Stereo MCs on the bill and concludes on Friday with The Adventures Of Stevie V, Bass-0-Matic, MC Kinky and Cabaret Voltaire. | Nov 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Are They Out Of Control? – Sounds News | Article, News |
JAMES (above) release a new single through Fontana on November 26, the follow up to ‘Come Home’. Called ‘Lose Control’, it sees the culmination of the band’s most succesful year since they formed in 1983. Their album ‘Gold Mother’ went silver, they played Glastonbury, supported David Bowie and saw their T-shirts become second only to the lnspirals’ ‘Cool As F**k’ as the essential fashion The band play a series of Christmas dates next month, culminating in two home town shows at Manchester G-Mex. They are currently working on the follow-up to ‘Gold Mother’, due for release next spring. | Nov 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dusseldorf Phillipshalle – 24th November 1990 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistJohnny Yen / How Was It For You? / Government Walls / Sit Down / Come Home / StutterSupportn/aMore Information & ReviewsVideo | Nov 1990 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Avanti Fanzine Feature | Article, Interview |
| Dec 1990 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Comm Home – NME News | Article, News |
JAMES venture behind the Iron Curtain (R.I.P.p.e.d.) this week for a seven-date tour of the Soviet Union, which will include gigs at a seaport in the Arctic Circle and an aircraft factory in Kiev. The band will be braving sub-zero temperatures (minus 20!), playing to average audiences of 2,000 per show.The first gig is tomorrow night (Thursday) at the Culture Palace Of Construction Trust in Vilnius, Lithuania. Manager Martine McDonagh told NME that the dates were not part of a promotional jaunt, as James’ records are not on sale in the Soviet Union. “It’s an opportunity for the band to do something a little bit different,” she said. “It’ll be a weird tour. Apart from their own instruments, they will have to use the equipment at the various venues. It’ll probably be pretty bog standard stuff-a real back-to-basics tour.” James are due to return to Britain two days before Christmas and will have a short break before starting work on their next album in the New Year. “Nobody’s heard of us in Russia so it’ll be really interesting for the band to see the reaction” Martine added. | Dec 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Script For A Jester’s Tear – Melody Maker Interview | Article, Interview |
“WHAT ARE JAMES CELEBRATING? OH, OUR RECOGNITION OF WHAT THE WORLD’S ABOUT. THAT’S WHAT IT IS, really. Seeing the dark side of life, knowing things can really be shit, but trying to say that there’s still hope. Trying to say just look how beatuiful THIS is! That’s James. That optimism. Not a blind, foolish optimism that merely says the world’s a wonderful place, la-di-da. That’s too easy. No, you have to recognise there’s beauty and there’s crap in here. You have to recognise the complexity.” –Tim Booth FEW groups know how to celebrate like James. Few truly recognise the art. It’s not a question of mere cheerfulness. Any fool can grin. True celebration involves a joy, a depth, a resonance, an intelligence. True celebration needs complexity and conviction. The very best fun is a genuinely serious business. James never used to be skilled celebrators. Not even two years back. There was a greyness to shake off. They tended towards the sombre. James have always been many things; perverse, giddy, singular, contrary, clever, tilted, troubled. But they weren’t always fun. Pop success eluded them. James looked doomed to perenial comfy, vaguely sullen cult status. But then James became a cause to celebrate. They blossomed spectacularly. Where once they scripted edgy, twitchy angst-dramas there came loping anthems. Two wicked, intoxicating singles, “Come Home” and “Sit Down”, exploded their morose milieu. Live shows grew into addictive, joyous theatre. From being the ultimate student band, James were reborn as uneven, insanely joyous entertainers. It was a miracle. Five months ago, they converted 50,000 souls to their busy mayhem at Glastonbury when Tim Booth rode their twisted rhythms from the stage and into the crowd. James were delirious that day, fervent, inspired demons. They came of age. And now, to complete the process, comes a potent new single, “Lose Control”, to strafe the charts. At long last, James’ exile is over. The secret’s out. Tim Booth’s unstable, maverick glee can go public. It’s surely time to celebrate. “LOSE Control” is a classic single, one of the year’s greats. Set to the ubiquitous Soul II Soul drum shuffle by Flood, producer of The Soup Dragons’ “I’m Free”, its curios, querulous outlook is unmistakeably James. “Where is the love/That everyone is talking of?” wonders Booth dolefully over the hypno-beat, before deciding, “We have found the love/To carry on”. It’s baggy, yeah, yet superbly aloof. James have always kept their distance. “It was a long, dark night when I wrote it,” grins Tim. “I tend to write through the night. The idea is pretty dark: ‘Don’t be deceived, no land in sight/We’re all adrift in this dark night’. It’s an insomniac, awake all night, plagued by doubt and fear. ‘The terror’s all within my head’. But it ends on a positve note, I stuck in a real corny American-type ending.” Why do that, Tim? Why contradict the song’s delicate, delicious meloncholy? “Recently, I’ve seen that if I write a load of depressing songs, I get depressed soon after,” he confesses. “I feel a responsibility to make things positive. But I don’t know why. It’s not a conscious effort. Life’s hard enough without bloody unhappy endings!” How about that line, “My body’s young, but my spirit’s old”? Do you feel that way? Were you badly down that night? “Yeah, but my spirit being old is okay. It’s a continuation. And when I sing, ‘Shake my body, release my soul”, that’s to do with dancing and trying to BREAK OUT of your limits! Your skin is your physical prison. So, punish your senses! Break out of your physical prison. . .” THE cleverly camp Tim Booth is charismatic in tiny ways. He knows all about eye contact, how to glance just_ so, how to be quietly flamboyant yet immaculately polite. He’s a real charmer. The band’s Jim and Larry plus myself, sitting round the table in a Manchester greasy spoon, all seem lumpenly oafish in comparison. We’re too laddish. On stage, Tim is yet more puckish, a dextrous Pierrot orchestrating James’ heady chaos and the audience’s love. It’s no surprise he used to be a drama student. Does he ever feel like an actor up there? “No, I was a terrible actor,” he grimaces. “I had no confidence at all. I’d spend my whole time on stage trying to remember my words. I always had a complete panic expression on my face. Even in James, we were pretty bad at first! It took us two years to overcome our stage fright. Two years to want to be up there.” It’s hard to believe now. Two weeks ago saw James take apart a theatre in Paris. Tim Booth played to cockeyed messiah to perfection. The French adored him. Their love for him was palpable. Does he feel powerful? “Yeah, I’m aware of a power. The power of music, of the whole event. I get so much adrenalin going. I might as well be taking drugs. We’ve walked on stage before and the audience bayed at us so much we’ve tilted backwards, like in a fierce headwind! So we try to use it. We have to. It’s fight or flight. . .” WHEN did James cast off their shackles? What made them embrace this dizzy, frenzied new lease on life? “We toured earlier this year,” recalls Tim, “and it got ever more celebratory. We learnt how to celebrate. Look at my lyrics very closely, and a lot of them are very hard, extremely depressed. But every gig we played, people were singing them as great big celebratory anthems. When I remember how I felt when I wrote them, what I was going through, it was totally weird! “But it’s alchemy really. We can transform depression into joy, and that’s beautiful. I love it. We’re playing two shows at G-mex in December, 10,000 people each, and they’ll be such a celebration! Completely over the top! I’m nervous, but I can’t wait.” So what is it that James celebrate? “I think it’s life,” decides Tim. “Vitality. Some kind of joy. It’s so hard to say it. The world’s a f***ing hard place, sure, but it can be a wonderful place, so enjoy it! Enjoy that painting! Enjoy that animal! James should be life-affirming.” Is it accurate that James are called “eccentric”? “I don’t like it,” Tim says, “it’s too light. I just think we’re open to chance, and realise chance means the subconscious. It arranges things so much easier than the conscious, which can only work according to what it’s heard before. The unconscious brain throws in random factors. It’s much fresher.” How do you trigger the unconscious? “Take loads of drugs!” A shake of the head. “No. Oops! I mean just be receptive to it. Mistakes can be great. They’re original. You can’t make mistakes on purpose. We wrote ‘Come Home’ by mistake! We were trying to play ‘Sit Down’. ‘Sit Down’ is the big bastard brother of ‘Come Home’, the big bastard brother who’s been to Strangeways!” James have always been contrary. They sabotage themselves. It’s part of their left-handed charm. Jim and Larry tell me eagerly how thet deliberately make sets hard, set themselves improvisatonal tasks, “for a challenge”. And Tim, not to be outdone, says “Lose Control” may be their sole dance single. What?! Are you serious? “Yeah! It’s a good single, but don’t forget there are seven people in James. There’s loads going on! We can’t mix everything with the bass and drums up front. . .” THE charming Tim Booth enthuses about his recent wargames debut, shooting paint bullets at bored executives. “I killed loads of people,” he grins, wide eyed, divulging plans to set up a band contest against Happy Mondays. Our minds boggle en masse at the prospect Of Bez wielding a paint gun. How personal to Tim Booth are James’ songs? “Songs I though were very external to me turn out at a very later date to be personal,” he says. “I wrote a song about Jimmy Swaggert, or thought I had, and it turned out to be about me. He was interesting to me. He had all these commands for how others should live, then he couldn’t live up to them himself. “That works in my life as well. I had very set ideas how I wanted to be. I haven’t lived up to them. So, maybe, the ideas weren’t right! Maybe I should just live my life, and not have too many concepts about it. I haven’t meditated for two years or so now. I get angry a lot more. More impatient. I’m turning into a right bad-tempered git!” Yet see James live, in 1990, and Tim Booth isn’t a bad-tempered git. He’s a cunning jester. He even seems to love it when the kids cheerfully bellow that line in “Come Home” where he glumly tells the world he’s become “the kind of man I always hated”. “I was in a pretty deep pit when I wrote that,” he recalls. “It was so personal. When I first heard it on Radio 1, I was shocked. I’d never heard such self-hate on the radio. But nobody ever figures it out! They all just sing along!” Do you resent that? Tim’s eyes twinkle. He’s a clever sod. “No, it’s fine! It’s the transmutation of something dark into something very light! Good! The song has a depth written into it. Maybe people will go back to it, in the future, and see the nastiness. I dunno. But I appreciate people getting joy from the songs! It’s better than feeling depressed.” JAMES’ fragile days are over now. They know their worth. They’re no longer spindly. This curious, lopsided, singular band have learned to dance without blushing, rock without apologising. They’ve followed their erratic, engaging vision for eight years, gathered disciples, never compromised. The hard work’s over now. Here comes the pay-off. “How do I summarise James?” asks Tim. ‘Where do I start? All I can do is talk in very general terms. About vitality, and energy, and an attempt to discover things about ourselves and our relationship with the audience. We’re here to discover.” Larry: “People always called us Manchester’s best kept secret. Then the secret got let out of the bag. When this Manchester thing happened, every band in every attic and garage was dragged out and thrown out on a stage for the press to look at!” Was it fun being a secret, all those years? “Well, secrets lead to gossip,” says Tim. “People gossip. When we can sell out a 10,000 people concert in two weeks, we know someone’s let the cat out of the bag! Someone’s told their friends! Now it’s time for James to be Manchester’s best-kept gossip” So what motivates you to keep inventing new twists for James? “We’re probably addicts,” grins Tim Booth. “If we tried to give up, we’d get withdrawal. It’s very compulsive. We don’t have a lot of choice in it. But this doesn’t feel like the time to stop. I think we’ll know when that time comes. “We have a psychotic need to express ourselves in this manner,” Tim concludes. “Someone asked me yesterday, what’s our drive? And I said personality disorders. I just need to hit myself on the head a few more times! Then I’ll be alright!” James have found the love. Their time is definitely NOW. I suggest you celebrate frantically. “Lose Control” is out next week on Fontana. James play December dates in Glasgow, London, And Manchester.
| Dec 1990 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Solid Gold Mothers – Melody Maker Review Of The Year | Article, News |
With the possible exception of John Major, JAMES were 1990’s most spectacular surprise success. They began the year as indie cult heroes with a spell of failure on a major behind them, and ended it as chart regulars with a massive, obsessive following and a reputation as one of the nation’s most thrilling live bands. For every old supporter who bemoaned the way James smoothed some of the rough edges from their early, quirky noise, there were 100 new converts. The first obvious sign of the band’s rapidly rising status came when their single “How Was It For You?” went Top 30 in May. It was a glorious, uplifting summer song, a celebration of post-coital euphoria entirely free from laddish sexual boasting. “Gold Mother”, the album released in June, confirmed that it was no fluke. James were just as convincing being coldly furious and determined (“Government Walls”) or achingly lonely and vulnerable (You Cant Tell How Much Happiness (sic) [On A Face That’s Always Smiling)”. A series of major live triumphs began around the same time. James were one of the biggest hits of the Glastonbury Festival despite an unpromising mid-afternoon time slot, and that was followed by two sold-out, delirious nights at Blackpool’s huge Empress Ballroom. Meanwhile, a remixed version of the surging, anthemic “Come Home” became James second hit single in July. The year ended with more major label live dates – an AIDS benefit at Brixton Academy, and two nights back on home ground at Manchester G-Mex-and another hit single. “Lose Control” sees James making a diversion into dance music without compromising their character. James’ big breakthrough was undoubtedly helped by the baggy movement, but they’re too unashamedly intelligent to be part of that tribe. They were unstoppable this year – and their momentum is still building. | Dec 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dead Cert – Manchester Evening News Interview | Article, Interview |
Ready to finish off 1990 with a flourish are James. One-time prisoners of Factory Records, before being transported seemingly for life to the badlands of American major label Sire, James have grown up and lost a few like-minded souls on the way. And they have emerged in the past 18 months as a dead certainty for international recognition. Monday sees the release of their third single for Fontana records. As their previous vinyl outings Come Home and How Was It For You? missed out on being big hits by a couple of hundred sales, is there any pressure for the band to have a top 20 smash with their new three-track EP? James lead vocalist Tim Booth is quick to scotch that one: “Not at all, really, in fact the record company wanted us to reissue Sit Down. But as our last single was a reissue, we felt it important to put something new out – only this time it’s an EP, although the A-side is called Lose Control. “We’ve also done a different kind of cover of The Velvet Underground’s Sunday Morning, and I’ve put a few references on it to New York and drug addiction in a narrative at the end of the single, pertaining to the fact that I’m wandering the streets of New York looking for my man to score some sweet Jane, but he’s not around because it’s Sunday Morning. I think it’s less Lou Reed and more James.” So how successful are James at the moment? “Well, it depends on what you call success? Our LP Gold Mother has gone silver. We were really pleased the way the album turned out, and we’ve already written most of the songs for our next album which we’ll be recording in January and will be produced by Gil Norton, who’s produced The Pixies stuff. Oh, and we are off for a tour of Russia just before Christmas, playing in Leningrad, Moscow and various other places in the frozen steppe lands. Why would the Russians be interested in James? I thought they were all into Elton John, Billy Joel and Cliff Richard? “Well, we’ll be a pleasant antidote to that kind of stuff. I’m looking forward to playing there, although we’ll be bringing cans of beans with us as there are some major food shortages there.” Were you disappointed that How Was It For You? and Come Home weren’t hit singles? “Yes, but only because we missed out on Top Of The Pops by a couple of places. We couldn’t get any daytime radio play for those particular singles, probably because of the sexual content in the lyrics, which was annoying as they weren’t sexual insofar as they were suggesting anything immoral. In fact, we missed out on having the video for How Was It For You shown on television as the video had me singing underwater. Probably afraid someone might copy me and drown.” James have, it would seem, arrived to save pop from over-hype and stagnation. When they supported David Bowie at Maine Road this year, it was widely known that Mr Bowie selects his own support acts. They supported The Cure at Wembley and stole the show at Glastonbury. On the famous long-sleeved t-shirt front, Beats International had a couple of members performing on Top Of The Pops wearing James t-shirts, and the band are now in a position to easily sellout 2,000 capacity venues all over the country. So has Tim Booth changed over the past few years from overly thoughtful indie rebel to sexy growling rock n roller? Tim laughs “Certainly not changed in that way. I think I’m mutating slowly.” | Dec 1990 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Come Home Live Video Interview | Article, Interview | Jim : My name’s Jim from James. It’s named after me actually because I’m the most talented and best looking in the band. So I started playing bass guitar and about two weeks after I got it, we did our first gig, we couldn’t do anything, after two weeks of playing guitar you can’t do anything, nothing. We practised in the scout hut and the scoutmaster used to play acoustic guitar and sit round singing “Gingangooly”. We used to get him to tune the guitars then carry them on the bus trying not to bang the machine heads and knock them out of tune. So I got him to tune the bass and we went and did this gig. The singer, I got this lad to sing and he decided he wasn’t going to do it, totally bottled out, so I volunteered to sing, so I got really pissed, totally ratarsed and got up and made some noises in the microphone. The British Legion in Eccles. Larry : I’d been in quite a few bands and I decided I was going to give up and I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I started to give guitar lessons. Paul, the original guitarist, and Jim were my first pupils and I began to realise they weren’t responding to it, playing chords in a certain way, they had their own distinctive style. They invited me down to a couple of practices and that’s where the trouble really started. I went down to the practice and I expected them to be doing things like influential covers and whatever and after about five minutes or something like that they’d play this noise and certain things you could start hearing music in it. It was very random, very abstract but there was something in it. Tim : We’ve got a tradition, that’s how we feel. We’re really proud of all our old records, right from the start, the awkward ones as much as now. And we just follow our path and we can’t alter that path to get rich or to get famous. Our path is our path. Jim : We think we’ve managed to keep some integrity as people and in the music through a lot of hard times and we have gone through a lot of hard times. And you know we think the music’s great. We think the music’s very special. Obviously there’s going to be a lot of challenges there and a lot of rubbish individually that we’ve got to come to terms with. I mean if you’ve got like tonight you’ve got 12,000 people telling you how amazing you are, it’s hard not to rub off and for you to go “Yeah, I am, aren’t I?” Larry : Sometimes I think we really deserve it when we do a fantastic concert and I know the audience are cheering, they’re not just cheering us, they’re cheering what’s been happening, what’s coming off the stage, what reaction it’s having. And that they’re being lifted, you’re being lifted and it really comes together. There’s different kinds of relationships within the three of us. Sometimes I’ve been closer to Tim, other times I’ve been closer to Jim. It changes a lot like that. Now there’s seven of us, the interaction is that much greater. There are some very solid friendships and there are some acquaintances. If there’s one thing we got criticised for around 1985-86 from people who saw us live, they loved what we were doing but we were very insular. The audience just stood and watched these people on stage and there was no interaction between us and the audience whatsoever. And it was a criticism that got through to us that we can’t stand in the audience and see how we are and we could tell from what they were saying that yes it was true. So in a way we had to learn to open up what we were doing on stage to the audience so that they could see what was going on. Tim : Adrenalin produces a fight or flight reaction. and we tend to fight. But you get this kind of “Woooaaahhh”, real buzz. The people who come and see our concerts, they have really high expectations. You know you’ve got to top the gig you did last time, it’s at that level. The lyrics are quite hard and they’re often self-critical or self-abusive. So I think the audience wouldn’t think I was a particularly nice person. I don’t try to make myself out to be a particularly nice person. I just try to write lyrics that reflect me. Some of them are not nice and some of them are. Some of them are funny and some of them are quite depressed. There’s a big variety in there. The early James, for years we used to hate it. And we used to keep out heads down and play and keep really quiet and I used to dance very aggressively. But now most of the concerts are really good but only a few of them are magical. For us. You can’t sleep. That’s the whole night gone and you’re not going to sleep. And you just feel very alive. And that’s wonderful. | Dec 1990 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Manchester Invaders Pack Winter Woolies – Manchester Evening News | Article, News |
Top Manchester band James are busy rushing round city centre shops equipping themselves with stocks of canned vegetables and warm winter woolies – they are the first of the new wave of the city’s pop stars to tour the Soviet Union starting on Thursday. Singer Tim Booth and the rest of the seven-piece band will brave temperatures of below 20 degrees to play to around 14,000 people in Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, Estonia and the Ukraine in venues that include an aircraft factory in Kiev and “The Cultural Palace of Construction” in Archangel, a port on the Arctic Circle’s White Sea. It will be a far cry from the massive G-Mex Centre in Manchester where they played to 18,000 fans over two nights on Friday and Saturday. The band’s record company Phonogram doesn’t have a distribution deal in the Soviet Union. Manager Martine McDonagh says “It’s not a promotional tour for selling records – the band want to do something different.” The band play at seven venues in five nation-states, including some trying to secede from the Soviet Union. But agent Nick Hobbs says : “The band won’t be in any trouble where they’re going. The biggest problem is that they are all vegetarians and in the Soviet Union, being a vegetarian is as useful as speaking Chinese” Martine assures me that the band are taking adequate supplies. She adds “Our records aren’t sold there, so it will be interesting to see what they make of the band. Apparently, everyone from grannies to little children turn up to watch.” | Dec 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Next Stadium Rock Band – James? – Manchester Evening News | Article, News |
Last weekend, James packed out the 9,000 capacity G-Mex venue. It was an amazing feat – they haven’t even had a Top 30 single. James have been around for years and have probably shifted more schmutter than vinyl – rumours are that they have grossed over £1/2 million in T-shirt sales this year alone. But the charts should beckon with the new single Lose Control. Singer Tim Booth’s charismatic personality, and the powerful rock music of the seven-piece outfit, have been knocking on the door so long that their bad luck has become a cliche on the city’s scene. If one Manchester band have the potential to become a stadium rock band on the scale of Simple Minds or U2 it’s James. The fact that they, like other guitar-based bands, haven’t had the success of the Mondays/Inspirals/Roses axis says more about fashion than music. Other brilliant artists without major chart recognition – Yargo, MC Buzz B and The Railway Children spring to mind – soldier on, confident that tastes will come round to their music. | Dec 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Guarana Be In My Gang? – NME | Article, Interview |
Take our hand and let us lead you through 72 hours on the road with James – herbal tea and guarana-driven wholemeal bread-heads back from the dead and on a hometown rampage in a Ned’s t-shirt (small). “It’s such a feeling yeeeah! It’s such a feeling Wooooah!” Blitzed out of their minds at two in the morning, a group of sleet-soaked lads in office suits stumble merrily through the gnawing cold of central Manchester, belching out the rising coda to How Was It For You? Three hours after witnessing the celebratory communion of James final G-Mex show, they have alco-smashed out of company-car consciousness into a state of heightened oblivion. The song that they’re bellowing is a viciously penned meditation on the psychology of abandoning yourself to drink and drugs, but I don’t think they can give a flying f__k about that. They’re having a fine time as it is. Probably better than if they’d been to see Gary Glitter’s Christmas Gang Show. That was the last warbling echo of three days on the road with James that had started on the most chilling note possible, and ended with a grin. The 48 hours that turned in 72 hours had been but 30 minutes old when the dread realisation dawned that it would be absolutely unthinkable to ask Tim Booth the top pop triv question “What did you have for breakfast this morning?” Armed with a battery of crushingly banal enquiries the journalist sloped into the backstage catering room of James gig at Brixton Academy, prepared to smugly trivialise into Milli-Vanillidom the Oedipally fixated, quiche eating, earnest pop misfits James, with their holier than thou Jesus sandals intelligence and intacto integrity. Un-funnily enough, that isn’t how it worked out. Fifteen minutes amidst the backstage atmosphere of veggie cooking, polite sobriety and intense preparation and the journalist is listening straight-faced to Tim Booth explaining that they have a masseuse backstage to help them relax before a concert. “Better than getting stoned,” suggests the snide journalist. “We don’t do drugs,” snaps Tim, convincingly. Then he’s off, enthusing about David Lynch’s re-invention of 50’s pop, speculating on the expected weirdness of the band’s pre-Christmas tour of Russia and dipping into a quick appraisal of Czech novelists. “I’m more into Kundera than Kafka,” says Tim, like someone who’s actually read the books. “Kafka’s not very good with sex, is he?” And finally, the hammer blow to mockery is delivered in the form of an innocent looking fax. The fax is a letter from the family of a young James fan who died tragically this summer. The kid had a ticket to see James in Manchester and the family’s request is that Tim dedicated a song to him at their G-Mex show. It would mean a lot to them. There is a gobsmacked silence backstage as Tim stares at the letter. “We’ve had a few like that,” he says. “I’d rather you didn’t mention it, actually.” Many hours later, when I suggest to Tim that it must be frightening for a mere pop group to become involved with such serious feelings, he agrees to having the letter mentioned. “I’m just worried because there’s a real fine line between something like that happening and exploiting it,” says Tim. “I don’t want to be like the politican after a disaster, turning up at the hospital to kiss the injured. But it has happened a few times and it’s really touching and things like that really move you.” You’re not scared by it then? “No. Because when I was 17 someone like Patti Smith was hugely important in my life. Hugely important. Like a complete lifeline in an environment that I felt was totally hostile. And there was suddenly something that I could totally relate to, and made me feel that I wasn’t crazy after all. And I feel that we supply that for some people, and in that respect, I don’t see us like a pop group at all.” “That’s what Sit Down’s about, and that’s why they particularly respond to that song. Y’know ‘I’m relieved to hear that you’ve been to some far out places/’Cause it’s hard to carry on when you feel all alone.’ It’s a song for the darkest hour.” “So it doesn’t frighten me. I’m really happy when people take us that seriously. Because I’ve taken things that seriously, and they’ve helped me that much, and stopped me going crazy, and made me feel that I could keep going.” Spending three days on the road with James at this stage of their existence is like watching the tightrope walker half way over towards applause and bow-taking. Ahead of them lies a prize that says “Most Important Band Since…” Beneath them on the sawdust lie the mangled windbag bodies of Rock Hams who overdid it – Bono, Kerr, Gary Glitter and friends. In the past 12 months, James have gone from being a seven-year running, cult Manc soap opera to prime-time networked public exposure. This year, resigned to a major label, they hit the Top 40 for the first time with How Was It For You? and Come Home. Their summer World Cup tour ended triumphantly with two glorious nights in Blackpool. Their Gold Mother album, the first time they’d come close to capturing their deep power on an LP, went silver. And their T-shirts were everywhere. Now, on a brief pre-Christmas tour of major league venues, including two sell out nights in the enorma-dome of G-Mex, they are being interviewed and videoed like never before and meeting the kind of over-the-top audience reaction that would’ve embarrassed Christ into retirement. At James Brixton show, despite the set lacking their usual fire (although Tim is as fascinatingly energised as ever) the entire audience follows the pre-set tradition of folding to the floor and dancing cross-legged on their bums for Sit Down. They look like worshippers at the feet of Maharishi Tim. When Sit Down’s euphoric, anthemic rallying cry for the alienated (with its Gary Glitter Rock n Roll Part One drum intro) is re-released next year, James will have to dance pretty clever to avoid becoming the type of band they’ve always hated. “I feel embarrassed when everyone sits down,” says Tim. “That’s probably the primary…. No it isn’t… You get mixed emotions. You’re really touched, a bit embarrassed, and you’re a bit frightened. Ultimately, it’s really moving, but I’m up there panicking, thinking ‘How long before it becomes a cliche?'” “We’re worried about this song. I’m frightened of Sit Down becoming the only song that people want to come and hear. But, James is so awkward that I swear that if it got out of hand we’d stop playing it.” “It’s getting that balance between showmanship and it being real. Like tonight, you could say I was performing, and in one way I was. but I felt totally convinced of what I was doing.” Are you ever worried that you’re turning into Gary Glitter? “F–k off! But on other nights I’ve gone on and felt really embarrassed and my body’s felt awkward. Everything I’ve done has felt like a performance. What I’m trying to do is make a distinction between hollow theatere and …. Well it might just be the distinction between bad theatricality and good, between striking postures and poses, which is what most rock is about, and a theatricality where I’m totally into what I’m doing, so I’m totally convinced… And it’s a weird state to be in.” These are indeed weird times for James as they attempt to cope with the transition into the big rock world without becoming caricatures. They do, however, have certain built-in advantages in that respect. Like an off-stage unobtrusiveness that borders on invisibility. The ‘after gig drink’ at Brixton Academy is about as wild as a Sunday afternoon spent reading the papers in a country pub. The next day’s flight up to Manchester passes completely without incident. And when they arrive at the airport, Tim, who is yet to sleep after the Brixton show (having eschewed the traditional frontman’s post-gig relaxant of eight cans of Red Stripe and a spliff) heads for bed. Then, in the afternoon, the arguments start. After soundchecking (intensely) in the imposing empty hulk of the G-Mex the band sit in the catering room, running through the day’s business. First up is a lengthy and unresolved discussion over who should produce the next single. I vote for Lee Perry, but noone seems to go for this. Then the daily grudge match over the set list (which they change every night) begins. Starring Tim, guitarist Larry, bassist Jim and James manager (and Mum to the Booth family baby) Martine, it goes like this. “Are these just songs we can rearrange in any order then?” “I’m doing that because I’m a difficult bastard” “I’m not happy. There’s too many slow ones.” “I’m going to do that one if I have to do a f–kin’ vocal solo.” “What about the lighting people?” “You’re interfering” “Alright then. Write the f–kin’ thing out yourself.” At the front of G-Mex, £40,000 worth of James T-shirts are being set out on the merchandising stalls. In the production office, the video crew for the next night are fighting for backstage passes. Does it ever bother you, I ask Jim, trumpeter Andy and garrulous violinist Saul, that Tim gets all the attention/. Jim : “No. Well, a teensie weensie bit. But it’s just one of those things. We know what we put into James but it’s just like you’ve got to remember that. Then there’s like a f–kin’ article in the paper and it’s like ‘Tim Booth and his backing band’ But you can’t get too pissed off about that.” Saul : “He’s very popular on the roar-o-meter” Do you ever worry he’s turning into Gary Glitter? Jim : “All the time, actually. Yeah, if he wears any more…. No, but do you think it’s a bit over-dramatic? I think sometimes we walk a fine line, especially when gigs aren’t going well. We act.” Saul : “We’ve become really big, like this big powerful sound. I’d like to hear it going a bit weirder.” So you argue a lot? Jim : “Yeah, all the time” Andy : “We do hate each other. Quite a lot.” On the first night at G-Mex, the Booth-chosen moody intro track of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game gives way to the screams and hooting claxons of the footy-sized and predominantly dead young James audience. In a set of escalating brilliance, the band carry off their mellower moments (like the haunting new single Lose Control) with ease. They adrenalin whip through the rush and rattle songs (Whoops, Bring A Gun, Johnny Yen) and supply anthems-a-plenty with What For, Come Home and Sit Down. Spasm dancing like a man with 40,000 volts up his bum, and even clambering into the crowd at one point, Booth is a consummately wired focus. James show no sign of having a problem with projecting themselves into the hall of Rock Hugeness. And it is something of a medium-sized miracle to witness a band who have made few – if any – accommodations to bagginess, putting over songs about God, sex, soul-suffering and madness to 9,000(ish) Manc raver teens. Especially since that band comprises (trivia fans) a worrying guilt-racked Correspondent(RIP)-reading singer (Tim), a Jack Nicholson fan, family-man guitarist (Larry), a sly, Viz-reading bassist (Jim), a dress-wearing trumpeter (Andy), a neurotic Nabokov-reading violinist (Saul), a non-talking keyboardist (Mark) and a right-on drummer (David) who plays Welsh dance music in his spare time. It’s all a bit ‘against all odds’. But there are moment at G-Mex, like when Tim sombrely introduces Stutter as ‘a song about losing your faculties; and a unseemly number of fans scream “Woooaah! Yesssss!”, when you have to wonder. You have to wonder whether James newly widened audience actually gives a nana about all that agonised stuff. After the first night in Manchester, The Most Intense Man In The World, now in the grip of post-gig adrenalin fever, eyes me even more intensely than usual. So I put it to him that some of the fans seem to be just waiting for the sing-a-long songs. And mighn’t he just as well be singing ‘We’re all going down the pub’ as ‘God only knows’? “Is this a wind-up or do you actually feel that?” says Tim, taking a deep breath. “A lot of my lyrics are quite dark and quite sad, but the audience take it and turn it into a celebration. And that’s lovely. So the more twisted we can make it, and it still be a celebration… That’s a wonderful contradiction.” “It’s harder to pull off slow sets in Britain now, because people are used to the adrenalin buzz with James. But we can play slow songs and hold an audience. Maybe you have a point, but I’m not interested in that. I’m not interested in becoming a figure of popular appeal if that means we get castrated in the process.” The Saturday afternoon following the first G-Mex show, Manchester is lashed by the sleet and snow of the nationwide cold snap, presumably summoned up by James new line in snowflake T-shirts. Two hours before the G-Mex doors open there are already 20 or so of the younger and bloody stupider of the woolly-hatted hordes getting ice-whipped outside the venue. Inside, James have reconvened to go through the day’s picky preparations all over again. There is an added tension in the air caused by the presence of the video crew, there to document the show. After a sleepless night spent wrestling with erotic thoughts in a hotel room which “smelled of sex”, Tim Booth is nevertheless up for a chat about, erm, sensory depravation tanks and mind expansion. There is a none too serious but noticeable difference between Tim and the rest of James. You talk to Larry about his family. Saul will joke around confessing to scenes of “disgusting greed” when the band were recently presented with a roomful of free Levi’s gear. With Tim, however, the tone is unavoidably analytical. Tortured, almost. Already on this tour, he has lost enough weight to mean that his free Levis no longer fit. Usually he loses about a stone on tour. The previous night, Tim had been led to ponder on how a weirdo (anxious, doubt-ridden variety) like him, copes with being in showbiz (sort of) “Erm…Phew! I think I’m probably fairly schizophrenic. So I can switch into another mode as well. There’s a whole load of politics that go with being in a band that we payed no heed to for the first seven years, and as a result didn’t get anywhere near publicity. Now we pay heed to a whole load of games…. interviews, photographs, shaking hands, kissing babies… eating babies. And only once or twice does my… I mean, I have done some things which are diplomatically highly incorrect.” You seem like this controlled person who’s fighting a constant battle to maintain that control. “Mmmm Lose control? The image of Lose Control is I think more important to me as an idea of breaking out of personality, breaking out of physical limits. Not so much going mad, just wanting to push reality to its limits, to see if there’s anything more. “I’m quite confrontational. I’m not a particularly easy person to be around. And to really want to push a song, like OK, where’s that going to?… And the same with myself. Push my body. Y’know, how much can I do? That’s really a big drive. “That’s the idea of losing control…. ‘Shake my body, release my soul’ Y’know, break out of this, Because I think a lot of the time, people are really trapped within their own personalities. Really bored with themselves. And I can get really trapped in myself and it’s like wanting to f–kin break out… and to scream. Some people have said I’m starting to repeat myself in songs, but I think I’m getting more to the point of what I want to say. I’m saying it more clearly.” Isn’t it all impossible? A bit mad? “No, I don’t think so. And listen, I think it’s very common. I think that’s why people drink. I think that’s why people take drugs. I mean everyone’s trying to do it all the time. But I don’t want to do it artificially. Or at least, not very often. Because it has too much of a damaging effect. You know…. be careful, it’s big medicine.” Sixty milligrams of Coenzyme Q 10 natural energy capsules have just slooshed down into Tim Booth’s stomach. Around him in a non-smoking zone dressing room littered with Guarana packets, health drinks and the odd beer, the rest of James are getting ready for the final show. Larry has been put into a state of nerves by the video crew who asked him how it felt to be adored by 9,000 people. “I didn’t know what to say,” he confesses. “I just sort of sat there looking embarrassed. I thought I’d get used to it all by my age.” Dave is pulling on his ‘F–king F–k’ sloganed T-shirt. Saul is worrying that the snow has kept the fans away. And Tim is standing in front of a mirror trying to work out what to wear. “Motherf–ker! F–k I’m angry tonight. Or at least I’m trying to get angry. Bollocks.” Tim sighs, frowning at the pile of shirts crumpled on the floor. “It’s just the idea that it’s going to be on video. I wouldn’t give a shit otherwise.” The doorway that opens onto the backstage area at G-Mex sends a sunburst of white TV camera lights out into the darkened arena where the swaying hollering James fans wait in near hysterical mood for the band to walk on stage. Eight years ago, James first photographs were taken outside the G-Mex building when it was still Manchester Central Station. Then they were still too self-effacing to even look at the camera. Tonight they jog on stage to face the crowd roar with a TV camera shoved up each of their noses. From Tim Booth’s entrance on top of the speaker stacks, through to the moment near the end where he dervlish-dances himself into near unconsciousness and has to crawl stage-side for oxygen, the final show is pure drama. A truly uplifting mesh of black thrills and ecstatic pop. Fainting teenagers are dragged out of the crowd throughout. When James drop the volume half way through Sit Down, the entire audience sings the chorus, unaccompanied, for a full five minutes. It is shamefully, inescapably moving. Tim Booth dedicates the encore to three fans who have died during the year and somehow, one James-ette dodges past the security men to scramble on stage and skip around madly during How Was It For You?. Bono would have made a show out of that. Booth, the canny bastard, just carries on dancing himself stupid. For two hours at G-Mex, James were the most important band since…. “You slag Morrissey off you do, you f–king bastards” A sweat-soaked James cub standing next to me at G-Mex has sussed out that I work for the NME and is spitting Moz fervour in my ear. So I ask her James Corps friend, who seems a little less likely to stab me, if she thinks Tim Booth is like Gary Glitter. “Naaah” she says “Gary Glitter wears platform boots. Tim Booth wears Jesus sandals.” Thank Christ for a sense of humour. “We were very naive back in 83” Tim had told me earlier. “We thought we’d be stadium level… I was dragged to a Bruce Springsteen concert, and I thought ‘Corny old American’ but it blew me away. Not really the music because it wasn’t very original, but it was more the heart of how much he was giving. I always wanted to be in a band that was like that.” Surely though, Tim, you can’t expect that the commitment and intensity of James is all that’s going to come across? Isn’t it OK to be a clown as well as a poet? “No, the jester thing I didn’t like. Being a jester sounds too weak. It would have to be more like a psychotic jester, nearly getting executed for saying all the wrong things at all the wrong times. Humour is very important, but becoming a wacky band, or donning loads of costumes… ‘know, it’s got to be hard. The songs have got to be hard.” So in that case it wouldn’t really be appropriate to ask you what you had for breakfast?” “Hash browns. Button mushrooms. Baked beans.” And for the one and only time in my three days with the nearly un-mockable James, Tim Booth actually laughs. | Dec 1990 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim’s End Of Year Poll – Melody Maker | Article, Interview | Best Single – Wicked Game (Chris Isaak) Best Album – The Good Son (Nick Cave) Most Despicable Record – Most of the rest Best Gig – The Pixies at the Manchester Apollo Best Film / TV Show – The Cook, The Thief… (I saw it this year) Most Memorable Experience – I can’t remember What Did You Spend Most Money On? – My desires Non-Event of 1990 – Political parties becoming greener Person Who Made The Most Impact : Robert Anton Wilson | Dec 1990 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
G-Mex Refunds – NME News Piece | Article, News |
More than 1,000 fans were unable to make it to the sell out concert on December 8 due to the Arctic weather sweeping the North, but the band have pledged to make it up to them by allowing them to swap unused tickets for gigs on their 1991 spring tour. Full details of the dates will be announced early next year, by which time the group hope to have completed the follow-up to their ‘Gold Mother’ LP. | Dec 1990 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Pitiful | Audio Archive, Unreleased Song | Pitiful was an unreleased song played at Newcastle Mayfair on 3rd December 1990. No other record of performance exists. The show was partially released as a bootleg vinyl in the early 1990s. Details
LyricsListenReleaseAvailable OnGigsGuitar Tabs Unavailable
Live – Newcastle Mayfair 3rd December 1990 (from bootleg vinyl)
Share: | Dec 1990 | audio-archive song-unreleased article discography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
1991 Melody Maker James Booklet | Booklet | A special James promotional booklet from Melody Maker in 1991. | Jan 1991 | booklet article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Vox Picture | Article, News |
| Jan 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
MTV 120 Minutes Interview With Tim At The Hacienda | Article, Interview, Video Archive |
DetailsInterview with Tim at the Hacienda on MTV 120 Minutes | Jan 1991 | article interview video-archive | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
London Wembley Arena – 18th January 1991 | Audio Archive, Live Performance |
SetlistCome Home / How Was It For You? / Johnny Yen / Sit Down / StutterSupport(supporting) Happy MondaysMore Information & ReviewsJames supported Happy Mondays as part of Great British Music Weekend. Mr S, SoundsThe backdrop is swathed in floating flowers and Mysteron hoops as James belt out “Come Home” and “How Was It For You?”, Tim Booth looking like the unlikeliest teen idol yet with his Ten Pole Tudor chic and odd fondness for showing off fingers of snot to the cameras. “We thought you’d only be into dance music,” says this disgusting but charming front-man, clearly amazed by the warm reception he’s getting. “Sit Down” is rapturously received and, as James climax with a flurry of scything violins and furious rocking axe-work accompanied by a mad strobe-light frenzy, you can’t help feeling that very soon they’re going to be massive. Audio | Jan 1991 | audio-archive live-performance article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James: Sit Down Press Release and Band Biography | Biography, Press Release | Official Press ReleaseDate: February 1991 Formed in 1983, James turbulent career finally came good in 1990. Their ‘Gold Mother’ LP went silver, their dates at Blackpool’s Empress Ballroom, Glastonbury, Maine Road (with Bowie), Crystal Palace (with The Cure) saw them build up a fanatically loyal live following, while James’s t-shirts became an essential fashion item for indie kids up and down the country. The band also had their first top forty hits with ‘How Was It For You?’ and ‘Come Home’. Originally signed to Factory Records seven years ago, they released two cult hits, ‘What’s The World’ (later covered by The Smiths) and ‘Hymn From A Village’ plus the ‘Village Fire’ EP. Signing to Sire in 1985, the group put out two albums ‘Stutter’ and ‘Strip-Mine’ during an awkward three-year relationship with the label. Leaving Sire, James pursued an independent path once more, releasing a live album ‘One Man Clapping’ through Rough Trade Records. Following the departure of original drummer Gavin Whelan, the nucleus of James – vocalist / lyricist Tim Booth, bass player Jim Glennie and guitarist Larry Gott – injected a new harder edge to their sound with the addition of Dave Baynton-Power on drums. Following two of the biggest indie hits of 89 – ‘Sit Down’ and ‘Come Home’, James had their freshly recorded ‘Gold Mother’ album released by Fontana. Expanding to a seven-piece with man of many instruments Saul Davies, keyboard player Mark Hunter and Andy Diagram on trumpet, the new look James bounced into the charts with ‘How Was It For You?’ and ‘Come Home’. The group ended the year with a new single ‘Lose Control’, two triumphant hometown Manchester shows and a short tour of Russia’s major cities. Coming bang up to date, James release a re-recorded version of their live classic ‘Sit Down’ on 18 March 1991. Out on Fontana, the seven-inch version of ‘Sit Down’ is produced by Gil Norton and mixed by Dave Bascombe. The b-side is backed by a nine minute version of ‘Sit Down’ recorded live at Manchester G-Mex last December. A full length live video, filmed at the December G-Mex gig is released on 15 April 1991, while an hour long TV version of the gig is to be transmitted by Granada on 27 March 1991. The group are currently recording their new album which is set for Autumn release – a massive UK tour is being booked to coincide with the release. | Feb 1991 | biography press-release article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Piccadilly Hotel Gig – Melody Maker News | Article, News |
| Feb 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Record Collector Feature | Article, News |
Like the other Manchester favourites covered this month, the Chameleons, it seemed that James would miss out on success But after recordings for three labels, including a nightmare ordeal with Sire, the band are currently residing at Fontana, which has finally given them the long-overdue taste of chart action that they were always promised. 1990 also saw James touring consistently to encouraging live reviews, which included headlining the Glastonbury Festival, a two-sell-out stint at Blackpool’s Empress Ballroom, and the recent end-of-year bashes in London and Manchester. Unlike several recent bands who’ve made the crossover from indie to national charts, however, James are anything but a flash in the pan. Centred around a nucleus of Tim Booth (vocals), James ‘Larry’ Gott (guitar) and James ‘Jim’ Glennie (bass), the band have been augmented by a variety of other musicians since their inception in the early Eighties, apparently sparked by Jim Glennie after a school mate bought a stolen guitar!. These early days of the band’s career, which included drummer Gavan Whelan, remain shrouded in mystery to all but a few. And the band always tended to distance themselves from the public eye, so much so that they shunned the chance of front cover prominence on NME’s 1985 new year issue, arguing that they wanted to introduce the band “by music, not by words”. In these formative years, James were rumoured to have led the archetypal wild rock’n’roll lifestyle, until a close friend became ill and ended up in prison. This had a profound effect on the group, who are reputed to have dramatically changed their ways. They became vegans, much to the delight of the press, who often tagged them as ‘loony Buddhists’, but James may have taken matters a little too far by organising teetotal gigs with veggie food on offer! Numerous low-key local gigs in and around Manchester attracted the city’s premier independent, Factory, and in 1983, James issued their debut EP, ” Jimone”. Engineered by Chris Nagel (who more recently twiddled the knobs on the Charlatans’ excellent debut single}, the record’s child-like cover endeared itself to many, with the gentle sound of “Folklore”, the absurd rhythms of “Fire So Close” and the classic “What’s The World”, which still remains in the current live James set. Much has been made of Mornssey’s fondness for James, and he too must have been entranced by their aura, since James found themselves supporting the Smiths (fresh from a ‘Top Of The Pops’ appearance for “This Charming Man”), at the legendary “Manchester Explodes” night at the Hacienda. Neatly coinciding with the release of “Jimone”, this event is surely destined to be the stuff of ‘folklore’. The Smiths paid James the ultimate compliment by releasing an excellent cover version of “What’s The World”. This can only be found on the extremely limited “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish” cassingle, (Rough Trade RTT 198C), which now commands a price in excess of £10. For their next single, the aptly titled “James II”, the band employed the excellent production skills of Nick Garside to produce a pop classic, and possibly my favourite single of all time. “Hymn From A Village” was a scathing attack on the pop world and has become a dancefloor favourite for all those who have worshipped its crafted beauty. The plaintive B-side, “If Things Were Perfect”, was equally memorable, and no doubt helped “James II” to enjoy a 31-week residency in the ‘NME’ independent chart, peaking at the top. This was sustained by a later 12″, entitled “Village Fire”, combining both singles, which is still available despite being difficult to obtain in some areas – although watch out for vastly inflated prices on this item. Fans had also been drawn by the allure of John Carroll’s wonderfully bizarre sleeve drawings, which complement the band’s songs perfectly. With further live dates with the Smiths (a band they are often compared to, but sound nothing like!), and rave reviews in the press (‘Sounds’ hailed them as “pop gods and saviours of rock and roll”), it seemed that James could do no wrong. Doubtless impressed by their high U.K. profile, they were snapped up by Seymour Stein’s huge American conglomerate, Sire. The band saw this as their path to fame and fortune, but it almost brought about their ultimate destruction. They found themselves locked into a contract where they were owned “throughout the universe” by Sire, and were never to earn more than £30 a week! Problems with lack of communication and funds dogged James throughout their years with Sire, and this sad plight was detailed on Granada TV’s “Out Of Order” consumer watchdog programme. As Jim Glennie phrased it on the show, “We signed to Sire on a high. ..but things stopped, basically”. Indeed, there was a suspiciously long gap before the first fruits of the Sire deal were unleashed on the public. The band’s then manager, Elliot Rashman (of Simply Red fame) later said the band had fallen foul of Sire’s “sign ’em and see what happens. .. but don’t spend any money in the meantime” musical policy. It also seems that the Soup Dragons suffered from Sire’s anti-midas touch – like James, they managed to escape their clutches and bounce back with a truly merited top ten success last year. By the time “Chain Mail” was issued, the press had moved on, and much of the momentum gained by their Factory singles seemed lost. With its high-pitched vocals, “Chain Mail” was a more polished affair but suffered from Lenny Kaye’s suffocating production that seemed to restrain the band’s free-flowing rhythms. Backed by the funky “Hup-Springs” on the 7″ with additional, almost Caribbean-like “Uprising” on the strangely titled “Sit Down” 12″ EP, the single saw James diversify, but is still a worthy investment. Incidentally, like many other singles, the 7″ and 12″ utilise completely different artwork, which has encouraged fans to seek out both formats. The 12″ of “Chain Mail” is becoming increasingly difficult to find, and is now valued at over £20. The next single, “So Many Ways”, was obviously a trailer for their debut album, which was to appear later that month, with possibly the finest James sleeve design adorning the 12″. The lead song was almost anthemic, but still contained a moody and reflective ‘dark’ element characteristic of James’ early work. The speedy delights of the forthcoming LP track “Withdrawn” surfaced on the flip, while the 12″ added the bizarre “Just Hipper”, a mish-mash of a song that sounded like an impromptu studio jam. A rarely seen video for the single featured Tim Booth showing his eccentric dancing ‘skills’ (so much a part of the early James live experience) to the best of his ability. Like “Chain Mail”, the 7″ for “So Many Ways” can be found for £10-£12, but again the 12″ is very rare, and probably the hardest to find. Although a price tag of £25 would be reasonable, it could well fetch far more if offered for auction. James’ debut album, “Stutter”, was an eleven-song collection of erratic and unorthodox rhythms and lyrics, and proved a confusing release that gave many reviewers a shock to the system. Described as ‘too English’ (whatever that means!), the deluge of musical influences, dominated by medieval and folk elements, created a sound that the listener had to become immersed in – and was definitely not one for casual background accompaniment. From the opening track, “Skullduggery”, (which Booth later dismissed as “too wacky”) to the closing cut “Black Hole” (surprisingly resurrected at Blackpool last year), “Stutter” can best be summed up as quirky. All tracks from “So Many Ways” were included (although a calmer “Just Hipper” was renamed), alongside the excellent “Scarecrow” and “Johnny Yen”, and “Why So Close, a moving acoustic rendition of “Fire So Close” from their first EP. After mediocre reviews from confused reviewers, the press turned about tail and praised the band’s WOMAD festival appearance that year. Then, nothing. James tried to release new material, but Sire wanted them to wait. They tried to tour, but were told not to, because they had nothing to promote. Next, their manager resigned, to add a further nail in the coffin that was seemingly being built for them. Eventually, the band got to work on their second album, “Strip Mine”, which was finished in March 1987. But its release was continually delayed and then halted completely with the arrival of a new manager, Elliot Rashman. He felt the LP needed completely remixing and the band agreed. It was some months before this could be financed, so in the meantime James recorded a John Peel session in August 1987 containing “Yaho”, “What For”, “Whoops” and the as yet unreleased classic “Stowaway”. With virtually no income, band members found themselves testing drugs for £10 per day at a local hospital so they could continue rehearsing full time. A glimmer of hope came with Sire’s agreement to fund the “Strip Mine” remix. This decision apparently coincided with the Smiths’ demise from the ‘intelligent pop’ end of the market (presumably how Sire saw it); James were seen as successors to some vacant throne. Almost two years after their last release, “What for” appeared as the band’s fifth single. Remixed by Steve Power, it was a striking uptempo pop song – far more commercial than any previous offerings. Indeed, the accompanying video was even aired on Saturday morning children’s’ TV, and the band performed the song live on Granada’s “Other Side Of Midnight” show, which has consistently supported up-and-coming Manchester bands. Backed by “Island Swing” on the 7″ and an extra track, “Not There” on the 12″ and limited library case cassingle, the single received favourable reviews, which the band celebrated with a handful of dates, including a home- town gig in May 1988, supported by none other than the Stone Roses (“We’ve never supported anyone” indeed!). “What For” is the most common Sire single, but all formats still command a high price, such is the current demand for James product. Completists should note the existence of a 12″ promo combining two versions of “What For” plus a short band interview, which can normally be secured for around £12. The next single, “Yaho”, was a strange affair. Since it bore an earlier catalogue number than “What For”, it would seem that it was held back only to reappear several months later. Drawn from “Strip Mine”, “Yaho” was backed on 12″ by three amazingly individualistic tracks of an almost hillbilly nature, of which “Mosquito” remains one of James’. finest moments. Both formats are difficult to find, especially the 12″. Nearly 18 months after completion, the remixed second LP “Strip Mine” reached the light of day, to scathing criticism from manager Rashman. He complained bitterly of the “bog standard promotion” for a group he rightly believed should have reached top international status by then. “Strip Mine” was sadly soon forgotten, ignoring the genius that clearly shone through on the pure pop of “Charlie Dance”, “What For” and “Are You Ready?”, perfectly contrasting darker songs like “Riders” and “Medieval”. The selective live dates to promote the album were supported by the latest Factory hopefuls Happy Mondays, then still relatively unknown, who owed more than a passing debt to James’ sound. Further disaster struck, when drummer Gavan Whelan left the band. And locked into a horrible contract, the rest of the group were trapped, and feeling at an all-time low. Amazingly, Sire wouldn’t release them, even though the label were showing little, if any, interest in the band. The chips were truly down, and the only advice offered to them was to split up and later reform, which would have meant ditching their name. Eventually, Sire relented and James were free. Risking everything, they borrowed £12,000 to put out an album by themselves which Sire, at first, tried to prevent. The live “One Man Clapping” magnificently captured the highly charged emotion experienced by both band and audience at many of their gigs. The best tracks were saved for last – the majestic “Burned” possibly took a swipe at Sire (who received royalties for the album), and the frenzied “Stutter”, a band favourite and the final song of many a concert. Spurred on by the LP’s top spot position in the indie charts, James took the opportunity to introduce the new band members through ensuing live dates. David Baynton-Power took over the vacant drum stool, while the sound was augmented by Mark Hunter (keyboards) and the multi-talented Saul Davies (violin, guitar, etc), who was spotted by Larry strutting his stuff at a local talent night. Friends the Inspiral Carpets, who were breaking in new crooner Tom Hingley, supported. And Tim celebrated the band’s ‘resurrection’ by shaving all his hair off for the London performance! Shortly afterwards, James signed with indie giants Rough Trade, who had lent a hand with the release of “One Man Clapping”, and what followed was one of 1989’s finest singles. “Sit Down”, with its distinctive Central Station Design sleeve, was a breezy summer pop song, possessing a charm that most acts could only dream of attaining. Accompanied by an Edward Barton-directed video, the single scored highly on the independent scene and John Peel’s end-of-year festive 50. The expanded line-up allowed for a steadier, more solid sound than their earlier, more erratic work. And since it hasn’t been included on album, the deleted “Sit Down” has spiralled in value, especially the 12″ and CD formats which boast a longer version. In addition, early copies of the 7″ and 12″ included a desirable promo postcard, which add some £5 to the value. As the music press went overboard over the so-called Manchester scene, James still remained the dark horses. Not even their brilliant next 45, “Come Home”, which recalled producer Nick Garside, had them striving for the hype tablets. First aired at John Keenan’s superb Futurama “Indie Pop And Scally Rock” festival, the song was an obvious successor to “Sit Down”. Taking in new member Andy Diagram (erstwhile Diagram Brother, who’d also served with over-looked Mancs the Pale Fountains) on trumpet for a sound which Tim described as “orchestral madness”, the single was a flowing piece with a definite dance feel prompting many a wild stage invasion ever since. The B-side, “Promised Land”, was a harsh stab at the realities of Thatcher’s Britain, while the 12″ and CD added a longer “Come Home”, plus a demo version of “Slow Right Down”. Snap up copies while they’re still easy to find, since all formats are now deleted. After such a problematic career, James were once more in the ascendency. Doubtless encouraged by the success of North West- based groups storming the charts, James signed to Fontana after much speculation in the press. Any collectors familiar with the House Of Love’s array of limited editions and sales gimmicks might have expected more of the same with the release of James’ first Fontana single, “How Was It For You?”. Indeed, the 7″, 12″ and CD were all necessary to obtain all the tracks – though a later, limited 12″ with free stencil contained the previously CD-only cut, “Undertaker”. Unfortunately, the lead track was disappointedly lukewarm, and those who had bought the Rough Trade 45s must have felt slightly short-changed. However, any disappointment was shortlived, as within a few weeks, James’ excellent fourth long player, “Gold Mother”, arrived on the scene to rave reviews. The band suddenly became music press darlings, gracing several magazine front covers – an incredible five years on from their first. Regarded as their finest LP, “Gold Mother” had a laid-back feel that suggested the group had finally gelled together technically, as a musical unit. Songs of sexual guilt, childbirth and religious bigotry resonated around teenage bedrooms the nation over, with sales promoted by several chaotic in-store record signing sessions. Sales of the band’s striking merchandise, such an integral part of many Manchester bands’ popularity, shot up. It was impossible to walk down any provincial high street last year without being greeted with the distinctive” JA M ES” and flowers that adorn their T-shirts. James’ ‘World Cup’ tour to promote the album was a great success, and included superb performances at Glastonbury Festival and the large capacity Blackpool Empress Ballroom, where touts were asking over £20 from those unlucky punters without a ticket! Fans attending the 1990 tour had the chance to pick up a souvenir programme containing an exclusive demo version of a new track “Weather Change”. This is still available from some mail-order outlets. but once stocks are gone, its value is bound to increase. In the wake of this live and album adulation, Fontana chose to issue an unimaginative remix of “Come Home” by Flood. But at least it gave James their first Top 40 hit, aided by the label’s policy of requiring fans to buy several formats to obtain all the tracks. The best of these was a limited 12″ featuring a live rendition of “Come Home”, “Gold Mother” (Warp Remix) and “Come Home” (Andy Weatherall Boys Own Remix); this last dance-oriented mix benefitted from sampled parts of “Skullduggery” from the first album, This mix was combined with an ‘Extended Flood Mix’ and circulated around the clubs as a two-track white label 12″ housed in a stickered sleeve, valued at around £7. After a short rest, James returned last November with a new single “Lose Control”, which was previewed live on Channel 4’s “The Word”. With its eerie trumpet and slide guitar, the song is their strongest single so far on Fontana. The back of the 7″ boasts a delightful cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning” , which was recorded for the Imaginary’s “Heaven And Hell: A Tribute To The Velvet Underground” various artists collection. As for other compilations, look out for the excellent Sarah Champion set “Manchester, North Of England” which featured an early version of “Sky Is Falling” , as well as the usual run-of-the-mill indie ‘greatest hits’ albums and videos, featuring the Rough Trade singles. The video for “Sit Down” surfaced on “Indie Top Video -Take Two” (PMI MVP 991200 3), while “Come Home” qualified for the follow-up, “‘Take Three” (MVP 991215 3). Also watch out for the Futurama 6 video (Jettisoundz JE 200), featuring three live cuts from the Futurama event, plus the earlier Factory Outing video, which also utilises live footage. In the meantime, how about an album from Strange Fruit, combining the band’s sessions for John Peel? From their humble beginnings on Factory, James’ path to fame and fortune has been a rocky one. But they’ve won through by dogged perseverance and a blinding faith and love for their own, unique music. With a re-recording of the classic “Sit Down” due next month and an album pencilled in for early summer, James look set to reach the dizzy heights that have eluded them for so long. | Feb 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sit Down Press Release And Biography | Article, Biography, Press Release | Formed in 1983, James turbulent career finally came good in 1990. Their ‘Gold Mother’ LP went silver, their dates at Blackpool’s Empress Ballroom, Glastonbury, Maine Road (with Bowie), Crystal Palace (with The Cure) saw them build up a fanatically loyal live following, while James’s t-shirts became an essential fashion item for indie kids up and down the country. The band also had their first top forty hits with ‘How Was It For You?’ and ‘Come Home’. Originally signed to Factory Records seven years ago, they released two cult hits, ‘What’s The World’ (later covered by The Smiths) and ‘Hymn From A Village’ plus the ‘Village Fire’ EP. Signing to Sire in 1985, the group put out two albums ‘Stutter’ and ‘Strip-Mine’ during an awkward three-year relationship with the label. Leaving Sire, James pursued an independent path once more, releasing a live album ‘One Man Clapping’ through Rough Trade Records. Following the departure of original drummer Gavin Whelan, the nucleus of James – vocalist / lyricist Tim Booth, bass player Jim Glennie and guitarist Larry Gott – injected a new harder edge to their sound with the addition of Dave Baynton-Power on drums. Following two of the biggest indie hits of 89 – ‘Sit Down’ and ‘Come Home’, James had their freshly recorded ‘Gold Mother’ album released by Fontana. Expanding to a seven-piece with man of many instruments Saul Davies, keyboard player Mark Hunter and Andy Diagram on trumpet, the new look James bounced into the charts with ‘How Was It For You?’ and ‘Come Home’. The group ended the year with a new single ‘Lose Control’, two triumphant hometown Manchester shows and a short tour of Russia’s major cities. Coming bang up to date, James release a re-recorded version of their live classic ‘Sit Down’ on 18 March 1991. Out on Fontana, the seven-inch version of ‘Sit Down’ is produced by Gil Norton and mixed by Dave Bascombe. The b-side is backed by a nine minute version of ‘Sit Down’ recorded live at Manchester G-Mex last December. A full length live video, filmed at the December G-Mex gig is released on 15 April 1991, while an hour long TV version of the gig is to be transmitted by Granada on 27 March 1991. The group are currently recording their new album which is set for Autumn release – a massive UK tour is being booked to coincide with the release. | Feb 1991 | article biography press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Record Mirror Sit Down News | Article, News |
James re-release their single ‘Sit Down’ on March 18. It was originally out a couple of years ago on Rough Trade and the b-side features an epic nine-minute long live version of the song recorded at Manchester’s G-Mex in September. The 12-inch and CD contain the extra track ‘Tonight’. A full length video filmed at G-Mex will be out on April 15. James are currently recording their new album which will be out in the autumn, when they are planning a large tour. And look out for next week’s revealing interview with the band. | Feb 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Paris Le Zenith – 16th February 1991 | Audio Archive, Live Performance |
SetlistGod Only Knows / Sit Down / Johnny Yen / Hymn From A Village / Whoops / Ring The Bells / Protect Me / How Was It For You / Come Home / StutterSupportn/aMore Information & ReviewsNo review. Audio | Feb 1991 | audio-archive live-performance article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Video Compilation – NME News | Article, News | JAMES release their debut video, “James Come Home”, this week through Polygram. Recorded live at Manchester G-Mex, it includes their current single,”Sit Down”. The full track listing is : “Come Home”, “What’s The World”, “Lose Control”, “Sunday Morning”, “Ring The Bells”, “Whoops”, “Government Walls”, “Walking The Ghost”, “Nextlover”, “God Only Knows”,”How Was It For You”, “Bring A Gun”, “Sit Down”, ‘What For” and “Stutter”. It costs £12.99 and runs for 72 minutes. | Mar 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Gold Mother Of All Bills – NME News | Article, News |
James, Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, Julian Cope, Dinosaur Jr, Flowered Up and Nirvana are rumoured to be the latest additions to this year’s Reading Festival in August. The bill continues to take shape following previous NME reports that Iggy Pop, Sonic Youth, Pop Will Eat Itself, Senseless Things and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin are likely to appear. Dinosaur Jr and Nirvana reportedly back up Iggy Pop, Sonic Youth and the Poppies on Friday, while James have been mooted to lead Saturday’s bill, supported by Carter and Cope among others. Flowered Up look like being included on Sunday’s set whose star attraction is said to be “a major solo artist.” | Mar 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Scythe A Star – Sounds | Article, News |
GOTCHA! EACH week at extortionate expense and with total credibility, Bizzerk! encourages star-struck rock heroes to assault one another with the now legendary spikey stick. This week YEEHAW, ya scrawny runt-looking baggied assholes, how’s the drug taking? Whaddaya mean ya don’t do any, ya spineless bastards? Don’t ya know that a man ain’t no man unless he’s done some horse- man? You stringy-haired veggie-f**kers. Whaddaya mean ya don’t eat cows? Over here we roast ’em whole, kill ’em, cut ’em up and stuff ’em with smiley assholes like you. Geez spare me from that no meal nonsense. Just look what it’s done to you. Look at your sodding single- what kinda an idea is that? ‘Sit Down’? Sit down!! Stand up and sit on my face instead you weight-laden, fat-ass bastards That’ll teach ya a lesson – that and a few hundred stampeding steers riding roughshod over your buttocks, you sensitive limey disco fags. And call that a remix? That’s got about as much chance of getting a diehard narcoholic onto the dancefloor as a wet handshake from George Bush. So piss off back to the Manchester outback you pig-ignorant, tousle-haired buckets of lamb spunk. You and The Stone Roses. | Mar 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Come Home Live News – NME | Article, News |
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Uppers And Downers – Record Mirror | Article, Interview |
When James played Blackpool last August, the father of a devout girl fan put the 20 strong entourage of band and road crew up in his hotel for free. After one of the finest and stickiest gigs of the year, bunches of daisy T shirts clung moistly to those fans who wilfully missed their last train to see the encore. Huddled together at the station, chilled by the sea’s breath, they froze their cockles off till dawn. Earlier that night, an ocean of devotion swelled the Empress ballroom, as each and every punter parked their sweaty bottoms on the floor during a magical version of ‘Sit Down’. Seven years into their career, the ritual is fast becoming an integral part of the colourful James experience. Today, in a Manchester studio, James end a six-hour photo session to promote the re-release of Sit Down. Originally out in June 1989, it failed to become more than just an indie hit. This was due to a Musicians’ Union ban on the video, which featured bassist Jim Glennie playing a log with two sticks, apparently putting lots of percussionists out of a job. A new video will be used this time ‘round using live footage. “Jim was the model upon which David Lynch based his Log Lady in ‘Twin Peaks’”, says violin maestro Saul Davies. “My log has something to say to you; it saw something that night.” With that, he slopes mysteriously off, following the others home to watch that very same soap, leaving front man Tim Booth and guitarist Larry Gott to explain them. Why a re-release of ‘Sit Down’? “It would have been nice to continue with new material, but we think that it’s fair to exploit our stuff if it didn’t get a fair hearing first time ‘round,” says Tim. “The mechanism to reach the public wasn’t ready at the time. It’s slower than James and we’re always creating. We have to wait for it to catch up.” Released last December, the meandering and wonderful ‘Lose Control’ surprisingly suffered a similar fate. Tim proffers an answer: “It was a really bad time to release it. It sold twice as many copies as ‘Come Home’ but didn’t get as high. If we’d released it in January or February it would have reached the top 30. Instead it got lost in the Christmas rush. “Singles come to us about twice a year. They descend like the Tooth Fairy. We don’t know how to contrive them – they either come or they don’t. Phonogram wanted to release ‘Sit Down’ at the time, but we wanted to get some new material out first so we chose ‘Lose Control’ which is a lovely song.” Explaining how James ditties ever find themselves on vinyl, Tim takes us through the ‘distillation process’. “We start with seeds of songs and choose which ones to develop. In the past, the real test was to throw them on stage. If they get up and walk around you use them. If they roll around drunkenly you put them away. We’re taking less risks in that way now, though, because we’re aware of the standards we set with other songs. Also we’ve got such an intricate light show that if you throw a new-born under unprepared lighting it’s doubly shown up.” Not that James are in the habit of showing themselves up in a live situation. Most recently they did themselves proud at The Great British Music Weekend. Was it fun? “Yes,” answers Tim. “We could have played on all three nights. The heavy metal night might have been difficult because my Spandex tights don’t fit anymore and Larry would have had to dig his V-shaped guitar out of the closet.” “Robert Smith had a good point when he said that the awards ceremony should have been linked with the weekend,” says Larry. “A lot of the people playing weren’t even nominated for awards and then you have this frothy dinner party much later on where they dish them out. The only thing connecting the two events was that Jonathan King was at both.” How did you find the Wacky One? “He was really nice,” says Tim. “He came into our dressing room expecting to get a bad time. We just took the piss out of him and he did the same to us. He’s just a professional bullshitter and provocateur. It’s hard to know how to react to people like that because they want you to react badly. He’s like a Julie Burchill or a Tony Wilson. I’m quite impressed with people who stir it and seem not to give a damn. “I saw it was a real dance night and said we should end with a heavy metal song. Jonathan turned round and said, “If you do I’ll give you a blow job.” Anyway, we finished with ‘Stutter’, which is quite a thrash metal song, and then legged it.” “We were quite impressed by The Cure. We approached Robert Smith about producing at one point. We’re impressed by longevity and keeping standards up for years. I worry about that a lot because my favourite bands always burn out after about two albums. None of them lasted as long as us. We’re frightened that we’re going to lose this level of intensity and creativity: that one day you’ll wake up and it will have gone, like a cloud, and suddenly you’re as bland as Cliff Richard, Phil Collins or Eric Clapton – hollow men. “Basically you push yourself all the time. You have to keep trying to renew yourself, seeing if you can go deeper with each song. You have to keep being an agitator with your own material, never accepting that it has reached its limit. It’s a hard process.” “Every band has at least one album inside them,” says Larry. “After that you’re thinking on your feet. You’ve got to keep looking over your shoulder.” Mention the band’s clean-living image and obsession for all things green and you’re greeted with a patient sigh. “There’s a press image of James which is becoming a bit of a bummer,” says Tim. “We’re being presented as Cliff Richard types; ecological, monastic, non drug -taking. Kind of the anti-matter of the Happy Mondays – and it’s not true.” “I was quoted as saying we don’t take drugs, but what I really said was we don’t take them before a gig. I don’t want to advocate drugs, but I didn’t actually say that and it bugs me. The whole drugs issue is far more complicated than saying whether or not we take them. I don’t come out black and white like that anymore.” Although not known as a ‘cause’ band who spend nights playing benefits for this or that movement, James did support the Serenaids concert at the Brixton Academy before Christmas, where all proceeds went to The Terence Higgins AIDS charity. It wasn’t a particularly good performance though. “The sound onstage was comical,” remembers Tim. “We actually started laughing. There was complete panic at first but then you just give up, stop worrying and enjoy yourself. It’s the philosophy of ‘Fuck it.’ When you’re trying to get to an appointment on time and everything conspires against you, you think ‘I’m not meant to be there’. You reach this point of release. You put yourself into fate’s hands; you accept things. I’m trying to cultivate that feeling into a permanent, enlightened state of mind; The State of Fuck It” Well I hope he didn’t use that language in front of the kiddy. Tim is the proud father of a 22 –month-old son. “Having a child hits you like a truck – changes your whole attitude. The nicest aspect is that there’s somebody you love and who loves you back in the most direct, physical, unquestionable way. I’ve never experienced that before. I love him totally, without argument, whereas if you love anyone you can always question it in dark hours.” Gold Mother to the bairn is Martine, James’ manager, designer of those T-shirts and backing vocalist on the new version of ‘Sit Down’. “She’s got a good eye for design,” says Tim. “She came up with an idea that was as good in sartorial terms as the music. She’s got some good watches out now.” A 10-minute live version of ‘Sit Down’ is on the new 12 inch. Recorded at Manchester’s G-Mex last year, it features a rousing crowd sing-along with much cheering and tooting of claxons. A video of the night will be out soon. “It captures a very good James concert. It’s the best thing we’ve ever done. We’re very proud of it. The BBC people who made it rang us up the next day and said it was the best thing they’d ever recorded. When we saw it we thought, ‘Where do we go from here?’ It’s exhausting. At the end of it, I’m on my hands and knees taking oxygen from a St John’s Ambulance woman. I’d never watched myself before and I thought, ‘Jesus, do I go through that every night?’ It really made me want to give up. I certainly want to look for a different way of performing. I don’t want it to be so frantic. If anyone wants to judge James then they should judge us on the video. If they don’t like that, then they don’t like James, and that’s fair enough.” | Mar 1991 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Revamped – Manchester Evening News | Article, News |
At last it looks as if James may achieve that long-awaited top 20 single and Top of the Pops appearance. Remixed, revamped and getting prime time Radio One airplay with their rereleased single Sit Down, James look to be getting in with the people that matter in the business. They’ve already got an album in the can and if it’s anything like as good as their last album Gold Mother it will make 1991 truly worthwhile. For fans of James, listen to Jon Ronson’s show in Saturday and Sunday 10pm until midnight – he normally plays at least five or six tracks (the little tinker). | Mar 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Home James? – Manchester Evening News | Article, News |
Mark from Moston was on the phone to me during my KFM show last Sunday. Besides casually suggesting that I play MC Buzz B’s “Never Change” single, he said, “Why are you not out on the streets celebrating?” I thought, what? Have the government abdicated, has my salary been doubled or the poll tax been abolished? “What do you mean, Mark?” “You should be celebrating because the James single has gone straight into the Top Ten of the national charts at number seven.” Later on that evening, a dyed-in-the-wool Guns n Roses heavy metal fan hanging round the studio tells me he’s worried he’s turning into a townie. “Why’s that?” I ask innocently. “Because I really like that single by James, although I prefer that one they had out a while ago, Come Home. Don’t tell any of my mates” he whispers conspiratorally. So celebrate in the streets if you like, but in the case of James, a top ten hit was inevitable. No band as good as them could carry on with such a huge cult following without hitting the big time. With the band’s strongest line-up in years and writing the best songs they’ve ever written, it’s all come at exactly the right time. Currently, their number seven single Sit Down, is being played to death on Radio One, where it’s tipped as a number one single by a number of DJs including Simon Bates and Steve Wright. | Mar 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Sit Down Again – Sounds News | Article, News |
JAMES release a re-recorded version of their live favourite ‘Sit Down’ through Fontana on March 18. The single, produced by Gil Norton, is backed by a nine-minute long live version of the song recorded last year at G-Mex in Manchester. 12-inch and CD versions contain an extra track, a previously unreleased James son called ‘Tonight’. The band are currently working on a new LP, set for autumn release. There will be a “massive” UK tour to coincide. | Mar 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sit Down – BBC1 Top Of The Pops – March 1991 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsFirst Top Of The Pops performance of Sit Down in March 1991 | Mar 1991 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sit Down – BBC1 Terry Wogan Show – March 1991 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsJames performing Sit Down live on the prime time BBC1 program The Terry Wogan Show. | Mar 1991 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sit Down Single Release – Melody Maker News | Article, News |
JAMES release a re-recorded version of the live favourite “Sit Down” on Fontana on March 18. Produced by Gil Norton and mixed by Dave Bascombe, it’s backed with a nine-minute version of the same track, recorded live at Manchester G·MEX last December. Due to its length, the B-side plays at 33rpm. 12-inch and CD versions contain an extra track, the previously unreleased James song ”Tonight’. James also release a full-length live video, filmed at the G·MEX gig, on April 15, while an hour-long TV version of the show is to be transmitted by Granada TV on March 27. The group are currently recording their new album which is scheduled for autumn release. An extensive UK tour is being set up to coincide. | Mar 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Album – Melody Maker News | Article, News |
JAMES re-release their “Gold Mother” album this week with a new track listing. The current single, “Sit Down”, and the last single “Lose Control”, are now added in place of “HangOn”and”Crescendo”. Anyone wishing to swap their original LP for the reissue can do so in any Our Price store before May 20. The band are currently in the studio, recording a new album, due to be released in September. | Apr 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Mega Tour For September – Sounds News | Article, News |
JAMES play a massive 28-date tour later this year to coindde with the release of the follow-up to their album ‘Gold Mother’, which the band are currently working on. The dates are at Carlisle Sands Centre on September 30 then Newcastle City Hall October 1, Sheffield City Hall 2, Birmingham Aston Villa Leisure Centre 4, Hanley Victoria Hall 5, Nottingham Royal Centre 8, Leicester De Montfort Hall 9, Hull City Hall 10, Bradford St George’s Hall 12, Wolverhampton Civic Hall 13, Bristol Studio 15, Exeter University 16, St Austell Cornwall Coliseum 17, Oxford Apollo 20, Folkestone Leas Cliff Hall 21, Portsmouth Gulldhall 22, London Brixton Academy 24 & 25, Brighton Event 28, Cambridge Com Exchange 29, Norwich UEA 30, Newport Centre November 1, Preston Guildhall 2, Middlesbrough Town Hall 3, Glasgow Barrowlands 5, Aberdeen Capitol 8, Edinburgh Playhouse 9, Liverpool Royal Court 11. Tickets are priced £8.50 for all dates except the two London dates which are £9.50- and they’re on sale now,so get on down to those box-offices and usual agents. | Apr 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This Band Is Where It’s Sat – NME | Article, Interview |
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More Settee Vicar – NME | Article, News |
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Sit Down – BBC1 Top Of The Pops (2nd appearance) – April 1991 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsSecond Top Of The Pops performance of Sit Down in April 1991 | Apr 1991 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Come Home James – Manchester Evening News | Article, News |
Fans of those Manchester homeboys James are looking forward to April 15. That’s the date when the full-length, live video of their December G-Mex gig hits the shops. While their single Sit Down goes up the chart, what are Tim Booth, Jim Glennie, Larry Got, Dave Bayton-Power, Sau Davis, Mark Hunter and Andy Diagram up to? Well — the word is they are currently recording their new album and bracing themselves for a massive UK tour to co-incide with the autumn release. since they formed in 1983 the band have gone from strength to strength | Apr 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sit Down + Interview – BBC1 Going Live – April 1991 | Interview, Session, Video Archive |
DetailsJames perform Sit Down on BBC children’s TV show Going Live and are interviewed | Apr 1991 | interview session video-archive article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Going Live Interview – BBC1 | Article, Interview | Sarah Greene : Thank you for coming in. We’re really thrilled to get you on Easter Saturday. We’re really thrilled to get you at all, because you’ve been tremendously busy of late. You’ve got a big video coming out on April 15th. Tell us about that. Tim : It’s a live video. Recorded at Manchester last Christmas and, yeah, it’s wonderful. It’s really good. SG : We look forward to seeing that. Look forward to that very much. Now you have brought in some prizes. Tim : Yeah, I’m wearing them SG : You’re actually wearing them. Tim : This jumper SG : Let’s have a look at it. Give us a twirl. Terrific. A beautifully designed acrylic, I mean pure wool jumper. Tim : Something like that. Cotton. SG : We’re going watch mad on the programme this morning, aren’t we Simon? Because there’s an exclusive James watch. Can we see that? And the lovely Simon Foster is in fact modelling a t-shirt of yours. We are giving away lots of t-shirts, well James are giving away lots of t-shirts of the current single. This is Come Home. And CDs. Tim : That’s the last one SG : Yes, but we’re giving away the current one. He’s such a fan, he’s got your previous one, but we’re not giving away those but we’ve got the current ones. He couldn’t change in time. Simon : This has got chicken on it SG : It’s got chicken stuff on it, so we won’t be giving it away Tim : I think it adds to it actually SG : Do you think so? We’ll throw that one in as well, but that’s up to Simon Foster. What’s the question? Tim : The question is an easy one. There are two members in the band James who have the name James. Which instruments do they play? SG : That’s quite complicated. OK, two members of the band James and which instruments do they play? Tim : Yes SG : Okay, thank you very much Tim : Thanks SG : Good luck with the video and best of luck with the tour towards the end of the year. | Apr 1991 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Rapido Interview with Tim Booth and Jim Glennie – BBC2 | Article, Interview, Video Archive |
DetailsRapido, dutifully reporting on some modern musical collection rising up uncertainly from the merry mists of Manchester and this week is going to be no different, lovely viewer. Well, it is but it is only in the sense that the Mancunian group James are actually very talented indeed. In fact, James have been going in various forms and line-ups since the early eighties. Back then, they had a mutual appreciation society going with The Smiths and recorded for Rough Trade. Now with an enlarged line up and singer Tim Booth very much at the helm, they’ve enjoyed major league chart success. Their style has won the hearts of Britain’s young and alive due to the fact it’s based on songs and substance rather than the usual mix of deranged cobal and meaningless lyrics we’ve come to expect from certain other sections of the Manchester community. James. Right here. Right now. On Rapido. Currently perched high in the charts with Sit Down, James aren’t exactly an overnight success with eight years of making records behind them. We asked singer Tim Booth and bassist Jim Glennie where they suddenly went right. Jim : I don’t think there’s been any conscious change by us. I think it’s always been a movement. James has been a direction that the songs have been changing, the music’s always been changing and the audience has been growing around that, selling more records. Yeah, there’s been a big jump in the last year. For a lot of people James are quite new in a lot of respects. It’s the first time they’ve come across us. But for us, it’s not been like from nothing to fame. Over the years, James have expanded to a seven-piece replacing the drummer and adding keyboards and trumpet. Their latest album Gold Mother, released last year, shows off their new range. Tim : Come Home is probably the most representative song in terms of the power on record that we’ve caught so far. I think Gold Mother is probably the rawest we’ve got, but we still feel we’ve got, that’s the area we can improve in a lot. A Manchester rather than a Madchester band, James don’t see themselves as belonging to the baggy dance tradition of the Happy Mondays or the Stone Roses. Tim : I mean we’ve had some really support from Manchester. We had some really difficult years and it was the support in Manchester that kept us going so we’ve got a great relationship with Manchester, with our audience there, and the concerts there are a complete celebration, absolutely wild, and that’s wonderful. That’s it, it’s more the people than the city. I mean, what’s a city? A place of pollution. Manchester was like left alone for years. All the music industry in Britain is in London so they didn’t take any notice of what was happening in Manchester. So The Stone Roses had been going five or six years, the Mondays six years, and suddenly people turned round and said there were some good bands there. They’d had time to develop themselves by that time. Despite protest songs like Sit Down and Government Walls, James don’t particularly want to be known as a political band. Tim : I felt Live Aid and the way Bob Geldof was a spokesperson for that, not taking particular sides, speaking for that, I felt that was the only way it could be done because otherwise you just end up in one camp or the other and it becomes us against them. Divisive. And as soon as you get into that, we’re better than you and our beliefs are better than yours, it’s a joke. | Apr 1991 | article interview video-archive | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Head Out On Massive UK Tour – NME News | Article, News |
JAMES head out on a massive UK Autumn tour. This week’s cover stars play Carlisle Sands Centre (September 30), Newcastle City Hall (October 1), Sheffield City Hall (2), Birmingham Aston Villa Leisure Centre (4), Hanley VictoriaHall (5), Nottingham Royal Centre (8), Leicester De Montfort Han (9), Hull City Hall (10), Bradford St Georges Hall (12), Wolverhampton Civic Hall (13), Bristol Studio (15), Exeter University (16), St Austell Colisseum (17), Oxford Apollo (19), Folkestone Leas Cliff Hall (21), Portsmouth Guildhall (22), Brixton Academy (24 and 25), Brighton Event (28), Cambridge Corn Exchange (29), Norwich UEA (30), Newport Centre (November 1), Preston Guildhall (2), Middlesbrough Town Hall (3), Glasgow Barrowlands (5), Aberdeen Capitol (8), Edinburgh Playhouse (9) and Liverpool Royal Court (11). | Apr 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Major Tour – Melody Maker News | Article, News |
JAMES, currently enjoying their first major hit with Sit Down, have lined up their biggest tour to date taking in 27 cities and including two nights at the Brixton Academy. The band are currently in the studio working on the follow-up to “Gold Mother”. It should be released in September. The tour kicks off at Newcastle City Hall on October 1 and continues at Sheffield City Hall (2), Birmingham Aston Villa Leisure Centre (4), Hanley Victoria Hall (5), Nottingham Royal Centre (8), Leicester De Montfort Hall (9), Hull City Hall (10), Bradford St George’s Hall (12), Wolverhampton Civic Hall (13), Bristol Studio (15), Exeter University (16), St Austell Cornwall Coliseum (17), Oxford Apollo (20), Folkestone Leas Cliff Hall (21), Portsmouth Guildhall (22), Brixton Academy (24 and 25), Brighton Event (28), Cambridge Com Exchange (29), Norwich UEA (30), Newport Centre (November 1), Preston Guildhall (2), Middlesbrough Town Hall (3), Glasgow Barrowlands (5), Aberdeen Capitol (8), Edinburgh Playhouse (9) and Liverpool Royal Court (11). Tickets are priced £8.50 in the provinces, £9.50 in London. | Apr 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James And Kylie Rereleases Stir Up Chart Row – Melody Maker | Article, News |
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We’ve Got A Result – Select | Article, Interview |
On a sunny Friday afternoon in June 1989 is a tiny barely-furnished room in Rough Trade’s London HQ, two members of James were interviewed by a journalist from Sounds. The main topic of conversation was the band’s imminent new single Sit Down. Tim Booth (vocalist) and Jim Glennie (bassist) were very excited about it – and rightly so, it was a terrific song – although it was noticeable that when “chart action” was mooted, the pair laughed darkly and intimated that they’d believe it when they saw it. Booth had recently shaved his head; he wore a Moroccan skull-cap and radiated a kind of tranquil benevolence. Glennie was chipper, relaxed. But both shuddered and groaned copiously as every step of James career was discussed. It was not, in truth, a great time to be a member of James. In fact, drummer Gavan Whelan had realised this and jumped ship shortly before, leaving a core of Booth, Glennie and Larry Gott (guitar). Their major label deal, with American rock n roll tycoon Seymour Stein’s Sire Records, had collapsed after years of neglect, mismanagement and intransigence. From being 1984’s Band Most Likely To and 1985’s Band Most Certain To, James now found their suitcases unceremoniously dumped on the street. They still packed out sizeable venues in their native Manchester, mind you, and they were virtually stars on the continent, but the further south they travelled from Manchester, the harder James found it to get arrested. Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses and Inspiral Carpets, all of whom had supported James in the not-too-distant past, were now coming along and doing a mighty thunder plunder, and James were being forgotten. Something had gone terribly wrong. Their immediate contingency plan was to set up their own label, One Man, and put out an excellent live album One Man Clapping through Rough Trade. Money was so tight, they had to secure a loan from the Royal Bank of Scotland to do it. A measure of how low their star had plummeted was when their bank manager insisted on seeing a Manchester gig – he didn’t believe them when they told him how popular they were. Two years have passed, Rough Trade’s in dire trouble. Sounds no longer exists. And Sit Down by James, re-recorded and released on Fontana, has made it to number 2 in the national charts. You couldn’t avoid James now if you wanted to. The James success story, about eight years out of schedule, is finally a dramatic reality. It has been eight years of struggle, inspirations, intensity, tragedy, depression, stagnation, anti-careerism and outrageous risk-taking. “For the first three years it was going to be a suicide dive,” claimed Tim Booth in 1988. “The band meant so much to us we were going to die for it.” Die for it? Die for what? When James first peeked out of Manchester in 1983, the overrriding impression was of a quartet of gentle, almost pathologically soft-spoken, possibly Buddhist, probably vegan nutters dicing with Olde Englande Maypole folk forms, splicing them with Smiths-like lyrical introspection and ending up with something thrillingly enigmatically unique. Everyone saw in Tim Booth a frontman of wild purpose and hypnotic self-confidence… but pigeon holes were as cruel then as they are now and Green issues were not hip. “We are not vegans,” fumed Booth. “There has never been a Buddhist or a vegan in the band.” But they did come over ascetic and pretty stern. Frivolity was not a key factor in James interviews. What had occurred – and what is never discussed these days in James articles – was a total lifestyle volte face in the band’s camp. When they started out, they had been a confirmed drugs band. “From Nick Cave to Van Gogh,” Tim Booth later noted, “most brilliant artists use some kind of artifical stimulant and, in creating their work, end up wrecking their lives. The intensity with which I love my work means that if I couldn’t create anything without fucking myself up, I don’t know that I wouldn’t go ahead and do it.” When the idea of James was originally discussed, around 1982, Tim Booth was not the singer. He was a dancer, a Bez. The vocalist was a guy called Danny Ram, and they had a guitarist called Paul, who was the best friend of bassist Jim Glennie. This Paul, Glennie later revealed in a 1988 interview, got freaked out on drugs, and, over the course of several James gigs, became a catatonic liability. When he eventually wound up in prison, the surviving members of James, it is widely believed, decided en bloc radically to change their ways of life. “Seeing a friend like that shot down like a plane,” recalled Booth much later, “we realised the reality of burning out. We knew so easily it could have been one of us. It was at that point that we decided we were going to make music so good it would make us high that we wouldn’t need drugs.” They were tagged as “Buddhist vegans”, a reputation that gathered pace as they banned alcohol from their gigs. “Because we’d been so deeply involved in drugs and drink,” explained Booth, “the reaction had to be equally as extreme. Just like any revolution….” The three songs on James first single on Factory in November 1984, “Jimone” (pronounced Jim One), showed a band using daringly soft folk structures, stark lyrical images and vocal dramatics to create something seductively new. A 1991 listen reaffirms its appeal – it must have sounded very odd in the marketplace. Musically, it was kind of eclectic Smiths b-side via Brecht/Weill; lyrically it was precocious enough to intrigue a generation of bedsit dwellers. But as the student franchise got tied up by The Smiths, James had to mop up the more eccentric branches of the wan intelligentsia with single number two, James II (usually known as Hymn From A Village). It was spring 1985 and Morrissey had declared James his favourite band. They toured with The Smiths, lapped up the plaudits, left Factory for famous US magnates Sire and drafted in Lenny Kaye, doyen of Tim Booth’s beloved Patti Smith Group and all-round cool guy, as producer of the debut album. James nightmare was about to begin. Stutter was released in July 1986 to uniformly favourable reviews. People were still finding out about James, still getting to grips with the oblique medieval sing-song melodies, the strange stories and the arrangements that often seemed to come from a perverse encyclopedia of 15th century English folk-jazz. But Stutter didn’t exactly do the truckload business Sire required, and the purse strings were promptly tightened. James would later claim, in a grim precursor of The Stone Roses vs Silvertone case, that they never earned more than £30 a week on Sire. In addition, they were advised by the label not to put out any new material for the time being. When the band wanted to tour, they were told they couldn’t because they had nothing to promote. One swift re-reading of Catch 22 later, their manager resigned. James began work on their second album, one of the most convuluted sagas in recent rock history. They finished making it in March 1987 and a release date was set for May. Sire were unhappy, so it was put back. Then it was put back again. Then again. “Each time it was put back,” recalled Tim Booth in 1988, “we kept thinking, It’s got to happen this time. Once it even got as close as two weeks to the day before the thing was pulled.” The album eventually blew out eight different release dates as producer Hugh Jones embarked on a panicky, coffee-drenched, somnambulant full scale remix. Booth later revealed that choosing the running order of songs alone took four days. By now the band were submitting themselves for drug tests at a tenner a day at a Manchester hospital just to pay for rehearsal time. The second James album, Strip-Mine, emerged in September 1988, 16 months overdue. It had been one hell of a gestation period. Reviews were muted, confused, largely unimpressed. Gavan Whelan, the drummer, walked out. “We nearly called it a day, there and then,” Larry Gott told Select in July 1990. “We knew that whatever the next person said would decide whether it went one way or another.” The One Man Clapping album kept the wolf temporarily from the door – check the bitterness of Burned, the anti-Sire song, and a highly successful UK tour saw James make three adroit line-up changes. Dave Baynton-Power came in on drums, Mark Hunter appeared on keyboards and a stunning utility player called Saul Davies took on the violin, as well as additional guitar and even drums. Since then Andy Diagram, an erstwhile Diagram Brother and Pale Fountain, has been added on trumpet, to fill out the sound to unprecedented levels. James sound, Tim Booth admits, is now “orchestral madness”. The lunacy has spread to the charts. What was once a rueful daydream is now hard fact. The 1990 James album Gold Mother breezed into the album charts on release, and, when reissued last month with two slight alterations in tracklisting, entered the charts at an astonishing number two. Throughout 1990 the patented James t-shirts have done a ridiculously good trade, bringing in £2,000 plus a week. And finally, finally, the media’s reluctance to find a place in all the Manchester madness for James has subsided, and now it’s as if they had an invite to the party all along. Sit Down, meanwhile, as anthemic as any single this year, has already booked its place on the next “That’s What I Call Music” collection. James have been utterly vindicated. The cliche has taken a well-merited kicking – James are no longer the best-kept secret in Manchester. | May 1991 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Hilversum Meter 2 – 13th May 1991 | Audio Archive, Session | AudioSetlistRing The Bells / Lose Control / Sit DownDetails
SongsShare: | May 1991 | audio-archive session article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Seinajoki Festival – 8th June 1991 | Audio Archive, Live Performance |
SetlistHeavens / Ring The Bells / Hymn From A Village / How Much Suffering / Sit Down / Johnny Yen / What's The World / Government WallsSupportn/a - FestivalMore Information & ReviewsNone. Audio | Jun 1991 | audio-archive live-performance article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
London Tufnell Park Dome – 12th June 1991 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistHeavens / Protect Me / Born of FrustrationSupportn/aMore Information & ReviewsA one-off set for Channel 4’s late night Friday Night At The Dome programme, showcasing three as then unreleased tracks from the Seven album. It was during the recording of this programme that Tim first expressed a wish to work with Angelo Badalamenti. Video | Jun 1991 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Lausanne Dolce Vita – 22nd June 1991 | Audio Archive, Live Performance |
SetlistJohnny Yen / Lose Control / Heavens / All My Sons / Whoops / How Much Suffering / Born Of Frustration / Protect Me / Sunday Morning / Ring The Bells / Come Home / Sit Down / How Was It For You? / God Only Knows / StutterSupportn/aMore Information & ReviewsSee attached press clipping. Audio | Jun 1991 | audio-archive live-performance article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Belfort Eurockeennes Festival – 23rd June 1991 | Audio Archive, Live Performance |
SetlistJohnny Yen / Lose Control / Heavens / All My Sons / Bring A Gun / Live A Love Of Life / Born of Frustration / Sound / Sunday Morning / Ring The Bells / Come Home / Sit Down / How Was It For You?Supportn/aMore Information & ReviewsNone. Audio | Jun 1991 | audio-archive live-performance article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sounds Tim and Miles Hunt Caption | Article, News |
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Granada What’s New – August 1991 | Session, Video Archive |
SetlistSound / Protect MeSupportN/A (Session)More Information & ReviewsTwo track live session on Granada TV | Aug 1991 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Secret One-Off Gig Is Off – Manchester Evening News | Article, News |
Whisper it if you dare – top Manchester band James have arranged a secret gig at the Hacienda tonight. Now say it loud from the rooftops – it’s been cancelled. The city’s pop grapevine has been buzzing with the news that the band, whose last single was a top five smash hit, were to play a hush-hush warm-up gig before they headline the massive Reading Festival this weekend in front of 35,000 fans. Hacienda DJ Dave Haslam, an old pal of the band’s singer Tim Booth, arranged the special one-off concert for around 1,500 in-the-know fans at the top nightclub, even though the band played to 20,000 fans at G-MEX earlier this year. But Tim has returned from a gig in Austria last week with a sore throat – and Dave is now busy spreading the word that the gig that no-one supposedly knew about is off. “It was hard enough publicising it through word-of-mouth,” says a disappointed Dave. “But it’s a bit difficult telling people it isn’t on when it wasn’t officially happening anyway. “Tim doesn’t want to give a half-baked show and wants to save his voice for Reading. He decided he couldn’t risk it.” | Aug 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Reading Festival Programme | Article, Biography | It’s the Great British Pop Awards 1991 and bizarre showbiz entrepreneur Jonathan King is prancing around telling the world that James are going to be huge this year. Not for the first time, he’s right. James are up there with the big boys … and about time too. Is that man King psychic? Only weeks later there’s Sit Down hanging around at Number 2 in the BBC charts for what seems like forever, unable to climb over Chesney’s flowing locks. For most of the millions watching TOTP, James were another new madcap Madchester outfit, but we know better. James have been marked out from the crowd since they began, way back in 1983. And although James Mk 2 is radically different from the earlier model – less fearful of writing simple songs, for one thing – their individuality shines through. James arrived too late for the big Factory boom of the early 1980s, although their first singles were released on the Manchester label, and too early for the second spearheaded by Happy Mondays. A brace of Factory outings included What’s The World, later covered by The Smiths, who then invited the band out on tour. Early shows were dominated by Tim Booth’s scary intensity, the gallows humour of the songs and a definite touch of weird greatness. James signed with Sire, home of Talking Heads and Richard Hell, in what is now widely regarded as one of the disastrous career moves of the 80s. They made a superb first album in Stutter, produced by Patti Smith cohort Lenny Kaye: Really Hard remains a gem of a song, Johnny Yen an oddball classic, but it was determinedly anti-commerical. The group and the company were reported to be at loggerheads and the world passed James by. The next album Strip Mine was delayed and delayed again. It’s a seriously strange record with a few hints of the more direct style they were later to adopt. And What For should have been a hit, guv. Live shows were sporadic, and one gig at the ICA, supporting the then hot tips The Woodentops, saw James floundering, no direction home, as they say. Finally out of the Sire mire, James took stock. They’d pushed the obscure intricacy they delighted in to its extreme and seemed destined to become nothing more than a minor cult. The 1989 live album One Man Clapping, recorded over three nights at Bath Moles, provided a farewell both to drummer Gavan Whelan and to James Mark 1. Fresh faces and a fresh style were the order of the day. In came the forceful drumming of Dave Baynton-Power, Andy Diagram, of northern indie strange guys The Diagram Brothers, multi-instrumentalist Saul Davies and keyboard player Mark Hunter. And suddenly James were hungry again. Sit Down and Come Home came out on white labels so that dance DJs wouldn’t be put off by old connotations, and proved huge indie successes. A big, punchy, wide-open sound was the order of the day, and Tim sounded more confident than ever. James t-shirts became the fashion item of the year, the future was in no doubt. A new album Gold Mother on a new label, Fontana, saw them link up with the Inspiral Carpets on the title track – at least as strange as anything they’ve done before, but played with a new maturity. And the long-awaited chart debut came with How Was It For You? But it was on stage that James really proved themselves. Wild, all systems go, older fans moving to the beat beside a huge horde of new ones – and it became a ritual to sit down to Sit Down. The intensity of the earlier shows was still there, but it was now channeled in to an explosive outburst. Now it was OK to love James – not just like them, but to go totally overboard, heart and soul. And yet it’s only four years since one music paper, replying to a “what happened to James?” letter, sniggered back that they couldn’t find anyone in the office who’d admit to liking them. Hah! Times do change, don’t they? Onwards and upwards, today Reading, next month a new album, then a UK tour sold out months in advance. That Jonathan King, he can’t half pick them (and go tell that to Carter too). | Aug 1991 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Hultsfred Festival – 10th August 1991 | Audio Archive, Live Performance |
SetlistJohnny Yen / What's The World / Government Walls / Lose Control (acoustic) / Come Home / Sit DownSupportn/a - FestivalMore Information & ReviewsAudioDele Fadele, NMETechnical difficulties of the generator-failure variety conspire against James on the first day, but normal transmission is resumed when they stand in for Status Quo with borrowed equipment the next. The irony is somewhat lost, as the transformation of these perfectly sane Mancunians from rustic modern folkies to stadium-hugging iconoclasts is now complete. At least Tim Booth knows how to use his new-found avant-Messiah position. By exaggerating his patented scarecrow dance, questioning and railing against God, and gently goading the audience with snappy asides, he somehow avoids the breast-beating and ego-fulfilment that comes with being a small figure on a large stage. “Hymn From A Village” benefits from the expanded line-up treatment, just as valid a critique of the pop process as it was in those far-off Factory days. “Lose Control” is stripped of its dance undercarriage and rendered acoustically to spine-tingling effect, while “Walking The Ghost” is a work of stark, plaintive brilliance. The new songs aired show just how much James are consolidating their stand with sturdy rhythms, just the right amount of light and shade and sometimes caustic, often probing lyrics. The one dealing with frustration is an instant classic, even more salient than when Tim sings “Do you really need that Ecstasy to disarm defences?” during “How Was It For You?” a frantic encore. | Aug 1991 | audio-archive live-performance article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
MTV 120 Minutes Interview With Tim And Jim At Reading Festival | Article, Interview, Video Archive |
DetailsInterview with Tim and Jim at Reading Festival in 1991. | Aug 1991 | article interview video-archive | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Reading Festival – 24th August 1991 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistWhat For / Scarecrow / Seven / Government Walls / Hymn From A Village / Ring The Bells / Walking The Ghost / Johnny Yen / Sound / Sit Down / Lose Control / Live A Love Of Life / Whoops / God Only Knows / Born of Frustration / How Was It For You? / Come HomeSupportn/a - FestivalMore Information & ReviewsVideo | Aug 1991 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: Stutter – Issue 1 | Fanzine | A Stutter was a James fanzine produced by Paul Hardman. | Sep 1991 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Q Magazine Feature | Article, News |
James career should have ground to a resounding halt in 1988. They had left the Sire label after two singly unsuccessful albums and accumulated debts of £50,000. Instead they ploughed on, building a fanatical following in their native Manchester. The line-up expanded as James’ twisted, almost folky approach was married to a twisted almost dancey beat. “A&R people used to seeing crowds of 30 would see 2000 in our audiences and wonder why we weren’t signed,” remembers singer Tim Booth, once a Bez-type dancer. “They thought there was something wrong with us.” After a live album, One Man Clapping, Fontana took the plunge. Three singles and the Gold Mother album charted in 1990, James audience extended beyond Greater Manchester and finally they looked poised for the big breakthrough in 1991. It came with Sit Down, a song from 1989, re-recorded and re-released. “The mechanism to reach the public wasn’t ready at the time,” says Booth. “It’s slower than James. We have to wait for it to catch up.” Sit Down charged towards the top 5 as if making up for 9 lost years and Fontana had the seemingly quirky idea of re-pressing Gold Mother (including Sit Down) and giving purchasers the opportunity to replace it for free. It entered the chart at Number 2 to all-round hosannas, not least because of the precedent-setting marketing ploy. James are headlining Saturday night at the Reading Festival, their own crowds are larger and possibly more fanatical than before (hence the live version of Sit Down where the song stops and the crowd take over for nigh on 15 minutes), and Tim Booth is confident: “We developed a theory that the longer it took, the bigger we’d be. It took us a long time getting here and now we won’t bloody leave.” | Sep 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Programme: Seven Autumn Tour (1991) | Tour Programme | The 28-page tour programme was from the autumn of 1991 in the run up to the release of Seven. As usual it featured band bios, interviews and pictures. Click on an image to browse the tour programme. | Oct 1991 | tour-programme booklet article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Single – Melody Maker News | Article, News |
JAMES are set to return with a new single at the beginning of next month and an LP in the new year. The single is called “Sound”and is set for a November 11 release by Phonogram. It’s backed by “Come Home”and a new song “All My Sons”. | Oct 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Putting The Booth In – Melody Maker | Article, News |
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Running With The Homeboys – Rage Magazine | Article, Interview | It’s as if The Beatles never happened. Deafening screams that could slice your head off flood London’s Brixton Academy. The smell of teen spirit fills the air, a huge throng in matching T-shirts bob and bay the words, “Sit down next to me” in unison. Half of this sweating, salivating mass were still in short trousers when James stumbled into the pop fray. For the older and wizened half, James’ elevation to God-like status was, quite simply, overdue. Remarkably un-phased by their crooked road to riches, Tim, Jim and Larry – the songwriting nucleus of the seven piece – are enjoying themselves to the hilt. “We’ve been indulging in the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll much more on this tour, because we’ve never done it,” croaks freshly shorn and throat-infected singer Tim Booth backstage. “It’s a bit strange, it’s like a new world we’re venturing into,” says Jim. “It seems such a contrast to what we’re actually trying to do.” “This tour, the crowd certainly have different expectations,” Larry continues. “It’s hard to judge because our crowd has changed so much over the years. I hope there’s still some original James fans there. They don’t make themselves as known as the newer fans, a lot of whom are younger and of the female persuasion.” Wham! Bam! It seems James have entered the teen sexdome. “I think there’s a lot of handsome people in this band,” Tim deflects. “I’m far too strange, too odd, to be a sex symbol though. Not with my dancing! What I do see is us generating a lot of energy and power onstage and some of that stems from confused sexuality. “Some nights,” he continues, “when we go onstage we have real control, it’s really from the belly. Then other nights we’re completely lost and no one really knows what’s going on. It’s completely chaotic.” Indeed, most James shows are an anomaly. Changing the set list every night, the only live staple now is the anthemic ‘Sit Down’, usually their parting gift. “The first four or five times we played it and everyone sat down we got such a buzz off it,” says Tim. “By the fifth or sixth time you worry that it’s a cliche but what you forget is that for that audience it’s the first time. I see it as the final chapter in a novel. But if you take it out of context you miss the whole point. There’s 15 or 16 songs before that which affect people in different ways, before they can join in on ‘Sit Down’. It’s a release. It’s a whole.” Originally their ‘comeback’ single for Rough Trade in ’89, it took nearly two years for ‘Sit Down’ to do the business. but, they claim, there was no game plan. “We should have had this incredible campaign where we could have taken over the world 12 months after ‘Sit Down’,” Larry muses. “It’s just like life, another day another door opens and if it looks promising you’ll go through it, if not you’ll check the next door out.” The belated follow-up ‘Sound’, out this week, eschews the sing-a-long commerciality of its predecessor. With no real chorus to speak of, aren’t they playing with fire? Jim: “Every time we throw our ideas into what we think is a single, it’s never the same as anyone else’s ideas. We’ve got no fucking idea. We love them all, that’s the problem. We just can’t get the distance to judge them properly.” Errors of judgement have severely hampered their progress in the past. In early ’85 they looked set to become the next big cheese on the indie scene after The Smiths, with Morrissey’s full endorsement to boot. It proved a mixed blessing. Despite a rapturous response as support on the former’s ‘Meat Is Murder’ tour, James were burdened with a very dour, serious image. Gawky to a fault in interviews, they came on like anathema to the rock press. “I think the serious thing really came from me, it didn’t really reflect the band,” says Tim. “In the early days we were called folky wacky vegetarians,” explains Jim, “and we had hard songs at that time. Some weird heavy hard shit knocking around and that small element of what we did was picked upon as a criticism. We spent ages trying to get away from that image.” “I think we’ve lightened up a lot,” claims Larry. “We were dour, we were precious, we were scared. We were entering into a big sea and you can drown very quickly. So we huddled together in our own tight little group, and we were very precious about what we had. We found it very hard to make snappy decisions. We had to let things grow a bit more organically and just see how it goes. And we still feel like that.” Big Mistake Number Two was signing to Sire. Courted by label head Seymour Stein (the man who signed Madonna), they reached a deadlock on their unfinished second album ‘Strip Mine’, delaying its release for over 18 months. the band remain phlosophical about the time. “It wasn’t like banging your head against the wall because we always had something – and that was rehearsing and writing songs,” recalls Larry. “Everyone perceived James through 1983-5 as stepping up rungs of ladders and then we just vanished. In everybody’s eyes we just seemed to disappear.” Tim: “We were never involved in the business side of things, we just did it and it was at that point we realised we had to get involved. We were getting such a kick off the music at the time. we wrote ‘Sit Down’ then and we were on a real high. It was dead exciting.” Jim is even more stoical. “All the animosity from the Sire thing has gone now. It was our cock-up as well. If you put your career, your life, your future, all your hopes, ambitions and dreams in somebody else’s hands, is it their fault if they fuck it up or your fault for giving it to them in the first place?” Eventually freed from that deal, James went back to square one: playing grass roots live shows, patenting their now famous T-shirt design and borrowing money off their bank manager for the live ‘One Man Clapping’ LP. Back on an indie label they transformed into a seven-piece and released ‘Sit Down’ and ‘Come Home’ or Rough Trade with luckless precision, just as the label hit its rough trade. ‘Sit Down’ entered the charts at 75 and dropped out again. Yet they remained undaunted. “We’ve always had this weird self knowledge that we would get there,” says Jim. “There was no doubt. We just kept going, kept cracking at it. We always loved what we were doing and every time we played it to people they loved it. And for some reason the industry didn’t quite seem to fit in. And we thought, well, fuck it. Every time we went to the rehearsal room new songs kept coming and we thought, what we gonna do, call it a day? We’ve given it our best shot and it didn’t work out. We never felt like that.” “There were just years of frustration which became our kind of driving force and we kept ploughing through it all. Obviously having no money and having set-back after set-back after set-back is serious hard work. I’ve never felt we’ve stagnated musically or even in the business. Each time we go on tour the venues are a bit bigger. We’re getting used to communicating to a bigger crowd.” What they do refute, however, is that they’re on the verge of joining the stadium elite alongside U2 and Simple Minds. “I think certain journalists are trying to put us in that bag in order to run us down,” says Tim. Jim: “I’m not arsed but there’s a side to what we do that I know is so big. Okay you can call that stadium but to me it works. It’s big and it sounds fucking great. But I know in that area we have to watch that we don’t get pushed too far over the top. Now we can create a massive sound do we push that or bring it back down again? Do we splinter it? I don’t know”. “I like the idea that people think you can work and project that far. The thing I don’t like about stadium bands is that they’re overblown, larger than life. It’s the amateur dramatics that fucking get on your tits. And obviously I don’t want to get into that sort of bollocks, charging around like a blue-arsed fly so that people at the back can see you. “The challenge for us has always been getting something that you can play to people that works in a way that doesn’t sound cliched, bombastic and crass.” As the future, the possibilities are many. There’s a big world to conquer. “It feels like we haven’t really started yet,” buzzes Tim. “It’s weird. we’ve only started playing Europe in the past two years really. We’ve never been to America, Japan, Australia. It’s only just starting – we’ll be touring for the next three or four years but it won’t be in Britain. It’s what we want to do, we want to take our songs to as many people as possible and see what happens when you hit a different culture. Variety is what we enjoy.” “We’re only just ready for it. We’d have been in big trouble if it had happened five years ago. Now we can see all the pressure and problems you have to endure. And you can see why people trashed their hotel rooms and everything else. It’s bloody difficult if you don’t have friends and people around you to bring you down. “I’ve got my own balance so I don’t go mad. It stems from years of discipline – self discipline and meditation – so I’m not worried about going off the rails. I still meditate but meditation’s not a strict regimen to me anymore. I’ve also got a brain machine for winding myself down, self hypnosis tapes…” The backstage James rider also takes in lashings of carrot juice, Guarana capsules and a martial arts expert “so we can feel empowered”. Typically, Tim is thinking of taking more of a backseat in the future. “I don’t like all the limelight coming down on me as a person. I’m seriously thinking of refusing to do interviews very soon because I’m embarrassed at all the attention. There’s too much focused on me.” Tim Booth the home boy is playing away. JAMES BY JIM: JIM: BASS “I’m good at thinking up simple little tunes on the bass guitar. That usually starts the general hubbub of the jam that kicks off into lots of different directions and gets pulled away by different people. I’m good at starting seeds.” TIM: VOCALS “We work together quite closely on songs, he feeds off me when we’re jamming. It’s a two way thing; he’s pushing and pulling where he wants to take things.” LARRY: GUITAR “Larry kinda fits in around that in a really supportive way. When he’s not there it’s virtually impossible. He works out what we’re doing and kinda pushes one side or the other. At the end the three of us can create a song that sounds whole.” DAVE: DRUMS “Dave’s the energy, he’s the power. We piddle around with a drum machine but at the end of the day it’s Woarrgh and it can move.” MARK: KEYBOARDS “He’s very supportive: personality-wise and in his keyboard playing. He never gets in the way. We always have to tell him to turn himself up! He’s so unobtrusive, he really is. You have to pull it out of him a bit. He’s come up with some great stuff: the hooks in ‘Come Home’ and the start of ‘Sit Down’.” SAUL: VIOLIN/GUITAR/DRUMS “The spark of the band. He brings a good kind of edge, a kind of conflict that I enjoy. He’s quite firey, being a bit of a Roy Castle in the band. He leaps around a lot, he adds a good energy. You give him a space with a violin and he’ll soar.” ANDY: TRUMPET “Strange one Andy. He’s very much the wandering minstrel in the band, a little bit separate, doing his own things. We give him a long leash. When you give him the space he’ll take it, he’s not pushy with things. Great fun to have around.” JAMES DISCOGRAPHY Jim Glennie takes us through the James’ albums and previews the next, due in early ’92. ‘STUTTER’ (July ’86) “I love ‘Stutter’ now. I went off it completely after we did it because it didn’t sound like I wanted it to. Now I’m really proud of it. I just think, Where the hell were our heads when we did this? Some of it’s really weird. It seems very different from what we do now.” ‘STRIP MINE’ (September ’88) “A mixture of feelings on ‘Strip Mine’. I like most of it. I think on ‘Stutter’ we just did what we did, on ‘Strip Mine’ we werer trying to do something different. Musically some of it works, some of it doesn’t but the songs are great. There’s an element of madness that we should have let go more. Tim loves it.” ‘ONE MAN CLAPPING’ (LIVE) (March ’89) “Our bargain basement album. I really like it, still. It brings back funny memories. ‘One Man Clapping’ was to fill a gap but there were a lot of odds and ends on it, old B-sides that we felt we’d never got right, never done justice to.” ‘GOLD MOTHER’ (June 1990) “It wasn’t quite how I imagined it when it came out. I’ve got enough distance from it now that I can enjoy it. I felt at the time we were looking to push it again, put some balls in. I think we went for it on that.” THE NEW ALBUM (Due early ’92) “Youth (Blue Pearl, Bananarama, PM Dawn) produced it. His views were identical to ours so we decided to go for it. He basically just set a vibe. We were in Olympic Studios and he filled it with three-foot altar candles, loads of them, an oil wheel, a strobe for the fast songs, a load of kilns, rugs, flower displays and incense. We pissed ourselves laughing all the way through, but it worked. It’s got an energy, a vitality and a life.” | Nov 1991 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sound Release News – NME | Article, News | James round off a triumphant 1991 in which they scored a number two hit with Sit Down and topped the bill at the Reading Festival with a new single. The track Sound will be the first taster of their new album, due out in Spring 92. The track was produced by Youth and mixed by Tim Palmer, and is backed by another new song All My Sons. 12-inch and CD formats also carry Youth’s dub mix of Come Home plus an extended mix of Sound. Sound is released on Fontana on November 18. Dave Haslam, prominent Manchester journalist / DJ has been commissioned to write James’s authorised biography, which will be published by Omnibus next year. | Nov 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Norwich Gig Cancellation News – NME | Article, News |
James were forced to pull out of a date at Norwich UEA last Wednesday after Tim Booth experienced voice problems. However, Thousand Yard Stare, currently supporting on the tour, volunteered to headline in place of James, and the show went ahead. | Nov 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sound – Press Release | Article, Press Release | James end a triumphant year with a brand new single ‘Sound’. Released by Fontana on November 18th this is a taster for their new album, which is set for release in the Spring of 92. ‘Sound’, a new Booth/Gott/Glennie song. was produced by Youth and mixed by Tim Palmer. The 7″ is backed by another new song, ‘All My Sons’. while the four track 12″ and CD contain extended versions of ‘Sound’ plus Youth’s Pressure Dub Mix of ‘Come Home”. James chequered eight year history finally came to fruition in 1991. They enjoyed a number two hit with ‘Sit Down’ in April, their live ‘Come Home’ video topped the video charts, their ‘Gold Mother’ LP has sold quarter of a million in the UK, while the band played their biggest show to date when they topped the Saturday night at the Reading Festival, going on to play a 36 date sellout UK tour. In Europe a series of summer festival appearances saw the band enjoying a long deserved continental success, while American alternative radio has embraced ‘Sit Down’. 7″ JIM 9 SOUND / ALL MY SONS 12″ JIM 912 SOUND (FULL VERSION) / (EDIT) / COME HOME (YOUTH’S DUB) / ALL MY SONS CASSETTE JIM 9 SOUND / ALL MY SONS CD JIMCD 9 SOUND (FULL VERSION) / (EDIT) / COME HOME (YOUTH’S DUB) / ALL MY SONS | Nov 1991 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Going Live Interview – BBC1 | Article, Interview | Phillip Schofield : Come and have a seat at the front. Always a pleasure to have you on the programme. That’s a great housecoat by the way – that’s a heck of a thing. Fabulous. I bet you can go straight back to bed afterwards. Welcome to you. I’ve got a couple of things for you here. First of all this has come from Christine Free who is in Swindon. My daughter Poppy is an avid James fan as you can see from the enclosed photo. There we are. There’s a nice picture there. Had her hair done. Extraordinary. So I thought if we gave that to you, maybe you could send her a picture or something. Tim : Yeah sure. Find out her hairdresser PS : If you’ve got time. The other one I’ve got here, we’ll get through the fan mail first of all if that’s alright, this is from Susan. Susan is in Greater Manchester and she’s done a whole load of pictures for you here. Masses of them. All sorts of stuff. Tim : Who’s that psychopath? PS : Let me show you the originals. Those are the originals there. Tim : Thank you. Jim : Who is it? Tim : It’s Andy PS : A bit skinny in that one actually. Tim : Oh, I’m like that under this coat. PS : Well you do apparently, I was reading all this stuff on you last night, and apparently is it true that you lose a stone when you’re touring? When you’re performing. Tim : Yeah. From the beginning of the tour to the end, kind of. Not in one concert PS : Does that mean you can pig out? You can have those as well. You can pig out in a major way before you go on tour because you know you’re going to lose it before the end? Tim : Yeah, but not straight before a concert because you end up belching in the middle of a song which isn’t very healthy. As you’ll find out I think. PS : Oh no, I shan’t be eating, I’ll be far too nervous to do any of that stuff Tim : No fizzy drinks PS : Is that right? Thanks for the advice. It’s going quite well actually, I’m quite pleased with it at the moment. Tim : You’ve got a good teacher PS : Yes I have. Got a very good teacher. Thank you. Let’s get on with that now. Going back to reading through all the newspaper stuff, live is very important, your live stuff is very important to you. I mean you were singing live vocals this morning on the programme. Is it important for you to get out and do it live. Tim : Yeah, yeah Jim : We’ve just finished a really big tour and that was great fun. It’s what we do best at the end of the day. PS : My brother says it’s one of the best concerts he’s ever seen actually, really enjoyed it and that’s high praise from him by the way. A lot of people would say, apart from your fanatical fans that you’ve got, that it was almost sort of an overnight success. You’ve actually been plugging away at it for quite a while, haven’t you? Eight years or so Tim : Yeah, me and him have been together about ten years and James have been going about nine. PS : Did you feel comfortable about slipping out of that cult status and into commercial popdom? Do you want that to happen? Tim : We needed the money so we didn’t turn it down. Because we’ve been going so long, we write all our songs through improvisation so we can’t change it so it doesn’t affect the way we make our music. We did, I think we’d had enough of being in that cult ghetto which gets tedious after a while and it’s nice to reach as many people as possible. We’re not prejudiced. We like to have young and old and families and their really young kids, it’s great. PS : It’s alright being cult but it doesn’t pay the mortgage. Jim : Biggest cult band in the world. | Nov 1991 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sound Single Release – Press Release | Era: Seven, Press Release | Press release for James’ single Sound.
| Nov 1991 | era-seven press-release era article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Belfast Ulster Hall – 14th November 1991 | Audio Archive, Live Performance |
SetlistBorn of Frustration / Bring A Gun / Lose Control / Don't Wait That Long / Live A Love of Life / Gold Mother / God Only Knows / Sit Down / Top Of The World / Sound / Come Home (incomplete set)SupportThousand Yard StareMore Information & ReviewsRecorded by BBC Radio 1 for broadcast as part of their In Session series, this show appears on the KTS bootleg disc “Live And Dangerous”. Audio | Nov 1991 | audio-archive live-performance article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sound – Channel 4 The Word – November 1991 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsJames performing Sound live on The Word in November 1991 | Nov 1991 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sound – BBC1 Top Of The Pops – 25th November 1991 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsSound performed on Top Of The Pops in November 1991. | Nov 1991 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Radio 1 Jakki Brambles – 26th November 1991 | Audio Archive, Session | AudioSetlistHeavens / Lose Control / Protect MeDetails
SongsShare: | Nov 1991 | audio-archive session article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Standing Room Only – Vox | Article, Interview |
It’s taken eight years for Manchester pop princes James to become a BIG DEAL. But before the stadia of the world are rocked, there’s that tricky Sheffield gig – Stephen Dalton reports, Ian Dickson photographs It’s not very rock’n’roll in Sheffield these days. Gone are your Def Leppards and Saxons, prophets of a dying sub-culture consigned to towns more grubby and provincial than this oddly faceless steel city. And no longer is Sheffield Techno Central; its central grid of science-fiction walkways and flyovers no longer ring with the distant metallic thud of Fon studios and Warp Records. Not tonight, at least, because James are playing — and James are androgynous ambassadors from the planet Pop. It makes perfect sense, of course, in this most inoffensive and neutral of Britain’s major cities. The classless crowd at the City Hall is as sexually and socially balanced as you will find under one roof these days, united by their simple uniform of primary colours and artfully basic band T-shirts. Students from the local Poly and youths from Sheffield’s grim Blade Runner housing projects are outnumbered by the band’s core constituency — high-street teenagers addicted to the clean and clever pop thrills these Mancunian minstrels provide in stronger doses than anyone else around. Because there is something about James that cuts to the bone, an emotional depth and left-field intensity that few of their peers and none of their descendants can equal. Eight years of crippling bad luck and false starts does that to a band, especially when their final reward is the sudden sun-drenched glory of massive mainstream popularity. It’s been a long and bumpy ride. After their sparse but immaculate early Factory singles and attractively angular debut album Stutter, released under the searing searchlight of Morrissey’s double-edged patronage in 1986, critical hysteria cooled. The band fell out with Seymour Stein’s Sire label over the shambolic and half-hearted release given their excellent second long-player Strip Mine in 1987, jumped through a legal loophole to record a self-financed live collection One Man Clapping for Rough Trade in 1988, before finding themselves in the absurd position of being able to pack huge venues without even having a record deal. But 2000 Sheffield teenagers don’t care about the intervening years of poverty, illness and misfortune when the band found themselves back on the dole and deeply in debt. It doesn’t affect these youngsters whether James are on Phonogram — which they now are, with an expansive album, Gold Mother, and several awesome hit singles behind them — or Plastic Dog Records of Skelmersdale. What matters to any pop fan is the gorgeous sensurround sound this new-look seven-piece belts out. James send a huge surging power through two chunky bungalows of speakers: violins, acoustic guitars, synthesizers, babies, personality disorders, sexual politics and whopping great singalong anthems the size of Norway. It’s not very rock’n’roll, but it’s brilliant. Of particular note: the rousing anti-religion battle-cry ‘God Only Knows’; a scathing attack on Sire and their industry ilk in the lurching lament ‘Burned’; former single and thundering pop juggernaut ‘How Was It For You?’• a sweet stroll through the Velvet Underground’s ‘Sunday Morning’ and a deliberately truncated ‘Sit Down’ purpose-designed to defuse the call- and-response crowd hysteria invariably generated by their biggest hit to date. Just occasionally, when impish choirboy Tim Booth trains the search-light of his maverick intelligence onto obvious targets like the Gulf War rather than his trademark psychological territory, James descend into verbose pomposity. More often, as on throbbing current single ‘Sound’, they change into the acceptable face of stadium rock — wired and weird, lean but huge. “The U2 you’re allowed to like” is the approving post-gig verdict of one friend and critic of the band. Which obeys a perverse sort of logic: both groups lash fierce idealism to the clatter and strum of rootless neo-primitive polyrhythms, both emerged from a musical wilderness and both have advocated monkish self-denial in varying degrees. Tim was a teetotal celibate vegan long before his mentor Morrissey made sobriety sexy, which might explain why the band’s backstage gathering at Sheffield is so low on alcohol but piled high with tasty vegetarian cuisine. As befits their sensitive New Man reputation, James sit around discussing poetry and art while their dressing room buzzes with wives, girlfriends and children. It’s a family affair, and 2000 light years from rock’n’roll as we know it. As is longtime band manager Martine McDonagh, politely answering questions as the two-and-a-half year old son Ben she shares with Tim Booth — the couple have separated but enjoy a healthy working relationship — excitedly bellows the titles of James songs at her. Does she think the band are in danger of becoming genuine stadium rockers? “In danger?!” laughs Martine, pound signs clearly visible behind shrewd eyes. ‘They are a big band, so the sound they make will always have to adapt to the venues they play. But every song they write is different from the last, so I think they’ll always retain some idiosyncratic character. ” Part of that idiosyncrasy is the oddly feminine aspect of James, the gentle and androgynous side of seven male performers which Martine wholeheartedly encourages. It is she — along with Booth and fellow founder members Jim Glennie and Larry Gott — who has final say over band policy. “They’re not afraid of their femininity, they’re not out here to be big macho men or prove something. They’re not worried about their sexuality and they’re prepared to go out and display all sides of their personalities. I feel that’s something to be praised. ” One side of their personalities James no longer display is the self-destructive dithering and crippling idealism of their early days: refusing interviews and photo sessions, turning down a prestigious support slot with The Smiths in America, waiting two years between releases. “There’s been bad luck and bad decision-making,” confesses Martine, “but I’m glad we made all the mistakes we made in the past, because if we hadn’t made them then we’d be making them now.” What finally sent the band careering towards careerism was the “Madchester” explosion of recent years — in spirit at least — when fellow Mancunians and former James support acts like Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses benefited greatly from saturation media coverage. “We very consciously avoided it but obviously realised we could use it to our advantage,” Martine admits. “We were very aware of musical waves at that point, having had our own one crash rather suddenly. We were aware the Madchester thing was a wave that would crash at some point, so we decided to develop alongside it but apart from it.” Encouraged to think big by recent successes at Europeån festivals, Martine confesses she has been sizing up the potential international profile of James for the last two years. “I think in the UK we’ve hit a point where it could go very stale if we’re not careful, we’re going to have to be very creative.” When she speaks of creating a buzz in selected territories and taking alternative hits to mainstream radio, Martine begs the question whether James are becoming just another packaged pop product. But she refuses to accept they have lost anything since their electrifying early incarnation besides “a bit of naivety. I don’t think they’ve lost their soul by any stretch of the imagination. You lose things, you gain things.” James— The Movie: the touching story of a band who lost everything, but found themselves along the way. It’s possible, but who would play Tim — still a waifish waistrel at 30 with his little-boy lisp and wide-eyed innocence — Booth? Even their sex-starved female press officer calls them “the kind of band you want to be your friends, and Tim’s the boy next doör.” Women, sighs the singer, only really want him for his mind. “In the early days I was celibate, then I was with Martine for three years, and now I’m a free man — so I’m kind of frustrated! Some nights we do really sexual concerts, but unfortunately I don’t think people quite relate to us in that way, and sometimes I would like them to! I think we get a lot more… it’s going to sound really corny, but respect and love. And lust can be a healthy thing now and again. ‘ Preconceptions fall away minutes after meeting Booth. Educated at the same public school as John Peel before moving to drama college, the precious and po-faced crank we might expect overflows with gentle charm and dry wit. Tim is that rare and immensely treasurable commodity, a genuinely intelligent, eternally questioning pop star, even if he doesn’t take kindly to Simple Minds comparisons. “We can communicate with large audiences but stadium rock is a dirty word in hip English journalism, which is indie and white and sarcastic. They aren’t going to like us if they know we can communicate in those kind of venues. When we did ‘Come Home’ everyone said we’d turned into a rave band; when we did ‘Government Walls’ and ‘Promised Land’ everyone said we were a political band; when we had a couple of songs on an acoustic guitar we were a folk band. They’re not listening — we’ve got fifty songs and maybe two or three you could say are in a stadium rock style. Two songs out of fifty — I mean, fuck off!” Reviewers slammed James’s patchy performance at Reading this year as flabby and bombastic, but Tim dismisses this as the inevitable backlash against bands who become too big for the music press. His mind is on bigger horizons: Australia, Japan, America. “There’s a kind of hollow stadium rock, where it promises a lot and nothing happens, and there are people who can play in large venues and still communicate in a very kind of personal way. To me it’s all part of this whole English thing about success: I don’t think people in this country know how to handle success beyond a certain level.” Tim protests that the set list he chose for Reading was deliberately difficult, overflowing with new material and not leaning too heavily on crowd-pleasers. He loves the celebratory atmosphere of recent James concerts — which reached a hysterical peak at Blackpool’s Winter Gardens last year when 3000 people sat down to ‘Sit Down’ — but is wary of becoming a Greatest Hits act. “We thought we could actually control ‘Sit Down’ but we can’t, it’s out of our hands now, we’ve come to that realisation since Reading. ‘Sit Down’ to me is like the end of a big book, the last chapter, and it has to be seen in context. I don’t like it overshadowing songs I love as much or more. ” Perhaps Tim Booth overestimates his audience? At one stage during the Sheffield gig he thanked everyone for concentrating so hard. “Tonight the audience got loads of new songs and they really concentrated, and we were fired by it. Tonight I got the sense we could have played any song we chose, and they were willing to really listen, and that’s beautiful. The Sun underestimates people’s intelligence: I don’t want us to be a fucking daily newspaper, I want us to be challenging and still be big.” Like The Doors, Talking Heads and The Smiths… the success rate at this game is pretty low — one band per decade — but James are ideal candidates to continue this lineage. All four bands are able to yoke the intensely cerebral wordsmithery of messianic, manic frontmen to savagely visceral energy and conjure up rock theatre on a visionary scale. When James tap into this soaring momentum, their anthemic majesty transcends everything on today’s pop landscape. Even when they wear waistcoats, a telltale symptom of stadium-itis, their passion and intelligence sparkles through. “It’s not very rock’n’roll, is it?” coughs Tim apologetically. No, and thank God for that. She must be smiling on James at last.
| Dec 1991 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Material World – NME | Article, Interview |
MATERIALS Jim : Crimpolene Tim : Honey, massage oil, skin WHAT ARE THE VIBES LIKE WITH YOU? OK, thank you WHAT DID YOU DO LAST NIGHT? Jim : Got up, brushed teeth, fed cat Tim : I can’t remember, I was unconscious WHAT BOOKS ARE YOU READING? Jim : Wide Ranger Tim : Quantum Psychology, Kundalini Yoga, Time’s Arrow WHAT’S IT LIKE BEING A POP STAR? Jim : Very good Tim : I’ve no idea. Ask one. FAVOURITE SNACK Jim : Dinner time Tim : Love bites FAVOURITE JOURNEY Jim : To the centre of the earth Tim : Coming home WHAT DO YOU ALWAYS CARRY? Jim : Shopping Tim : Gravity WHAT ARE YOU LIKE WHEN DRUNK? Jim : Axe murderer Tim : Benignly tearful WHAT WOULD YOUR SPECIALIST SUBJECT BE ON MASTERMIND? Jim : Green Green White Red Brown Tim : The 39 Steps FAVOURITE GAMES Jim : Mastermind Tim : Hunt The Mars Bar, Pick Up The Orange. Potential game show. FAVOURITE HEAVY METAL ACT Jim : Metallica, Stutter Tim : Uranium WHAT MAKES YOU LAUGH? Jim : Funny things WHAT RECORDS MAKE YOU CRY? Jim : Really bad ones Tim : Julee Cruise, Mary Margaret O’Hara, “Green Onions” WHAT RECORDS CAN MAKE YOU DANCE? Jim : Ones that travel down your legs and make your legs jerk. KEY FILMS IN YOUR LIFE Jim : Jacob’s Ladder, Blood Simple, Bambi Tim : Sky West And Crooked WHO DO YOU HATE? Jim : Baddies Tim : Goodies PUNCHLINE TO FAVOURITE JOKE Jim : “Never mind the porridge, who’s nicked the f**king video?” Tim : “The horror, the horror” IRRITATIONS Jim : Questions Tim : Negative patterns FAVE MANCUNIANS Jim : Brown paper packages tied up with string Tim : Bobby Charlton, Anthony Burgess, Morrissey, Ben FAVE GUITAR SOLO Jim : So low you can’t hear it Tim : Breakin’ In My Heart – Tom Verlaine NAME THREE GREAT SINGERS Jim : Pavarotti, Domingo and the other one Tim : Mary Margaret O’Hara, Patti Smith, Black Francis NAME THREE OVER-RATED PERFORMERS Jim : Jim, Tim and Larry Tim : Van Morrisson, Elvis Costello, Paul Daniels, Kate Bush and Prince (Ha Ha) WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE FOR CHRISTMAS? Jim : Lots of very expensive presents Tim : Real love. Self-sacrifice FAVE GADGETS Jim : Remote control model of Cutty Sark Tim : DAT-Organiser-Video-Walkman-thingy HOW DO YOU RELAX? Jim : Sleep Tim : A large hammer FAVE SPORTS Jim : Mountaineering, hand-gliding, scuba-diving, parachuting, potholing Tim : Hunt the Mars bar WHAT NEWSPAPERS DO YOU READ? None FAVOURITE LAKE Greg MOST ROCK N ROLL THING YOU’VE DONE THIS WEEK Jim : Threw my mother’s colour portable out of the window Tim : Rowed with the guitarist FAVOURITE JAMESES Jim : James songs, and gigs, and t-shirts Tim : Joyce, Swaggart, Kirk FAVE SMITHS SONGS Jim : “We want to be Smi-i-iths crisps, we want to be Smi-i-iths crisps” Tim : “Hammer and the Anvil” WORST SONG YOU’VE EVER RECORDED Jim : All of them Tim : None of them FAVE THING FROM THE BODY SHOP Jim : Dodgy, recyclable plastic bags Tim : Sexy massage oil WHEN DID YOU LAST BREAK THE LAW? Jim : It was him, honest Tim : Yesterday FAVOURITE TIPPLES Jim : Drinking Tim : Favourite what? FAVOURITE DESSERTS Jim : Sahara and Gobi probably Tim : Chocolate ice cream, cheese cake EARLIEST MEMORY Jim : 3.15am Tim: The beginning of life on Earth, pre Greenwich Mean Time FAVE PUNK GROUPS Jim : Pistols, Clash, Old James Tim : The Stooges WHAT ARE YOU BAD AT? Most things FAVE KARAOKE TUNES Jim : Never heard of them Tim : Kara Oke. Some strange Japanese singer who never turns up for his own gigs BEST ADVICE YOU’VE RECEIVED Jim : What you need to do is try a cover version, have a hit then try one of your own Tim : You’re on your own. There are no rules FAVE SMELLS Jim : Number One, Number Six and 11 Tim : Necks, hips, geranium, hair, bodies FAVE SEASIDE RESORTS Jim : Anywhere sunny Tim : Beirut WHEN WAS YOUR LAST OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE? Jim : Being born Tim : Now. Are thoughts out of the body? WHAT SCARES YOU? Jim : Bogeymen and people shouting “Boo” loudly Tim : Paranoia, no love life, help doctor FIRST RECORD BOUGHT Jim : Sit Down Tim : Paddy McGinty’s Goat FAVE SOUNDTRACKS Jim : My Mum’s Sound of Music Tim : Theme from Cuckoo Waltz WHO WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO SIT DOWN NEXT TO AND WHY? Jim : The pilot Tim : Robert Anton Wilson, Gordon Strachan, Jodie Foster, Ben, Martine, Kylie, Liz McColgan FAVE MONTH Jim : October Tim : August WHAT WOULD YOU FAX KENNY THOMAS? Jim : Who? Tim : A condom HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE REMEMBERED? Jim : Who? Tim : As the one that got away FAVE CLASSICAL MUSIC Jim : Ask Saul this one Tim : Nick Cave’s “The Ship Song” MOTTO Jim : “Life’s what you do when you can’t sleep” Tim : “Can you turn your guitar down Larry?” | Dec 1991 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sound And Glory – Melody Maker Review Of The Year | Article, News |
In commercial terms, 1991 was an unallayed triumph for James. The re-released Sit Down reached number two in April and the band’s long metamorphosis from eccentric semi-acoustic indie outsiders to major status, was confirmed when they headlined the Reading Festival in August. Yet, as the year progressed, the band’s critical stock fell as fast as their public popularity rose. Sit Down weas shamelessly anthemic, with its singalong chorus and its rallying call to misfits everywhere. “Those who find themselves ridiculous / Sit down next to me” sang Tim Booth, as if hoping to gather a stadium-sized congregation of assorted inadequates. And, while that top spot at Reading carried undeniable kudos, most reviewers felt the band had struggled and failed to follow the more effective rabble-rousing from Carter USM that immediately preceded their performance. In October, James set out on a 28-date UK tour, the biggest to date for a band whose popularity had long been built around live performances. Tickets for the shows were as scarce as reviews that didn’t mention Simple Minds. The success of the tour showed that most old fans stayed loyal; but the new material disappointed many who’d been charmed by the mixture of pop gloss and individual vision that characterised 1990’s Gold Mother LP. James appeared to have responded to their higher status by turning into a pomp-rock band; and these fears were confirmed by the ponderous excesses of Sound, the single released to a barrage of critical raspberries in November. Once again, however, the record-buying public begged to differ, and Sound immediately soared into the Top 10. James’ year ended with the announcement of plans for a new album Seven to be released next Spring- and, it seemed, with the stadia and lighter-waving citizens of America beckoning. | Dec 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
French Interview with Tim Booth of James for Gold Mother | Era: Gold Mother, Interview | Translated from French (by Goggle Translate, with as few edits as possible for meaning by OneOfTheThree.com) Interview with Tim Booth of James, who were there before The Smiths; and all Mancunian groups are indebted to themPosted on 12/06/1991 Later is better for JamesThe city of Manchester will never stop surprising us. After revealing the Fall, Buzzcocks, Joy Division / New Order, The Smiths and A Certain Ratio, the city invaded the British dance floor with the Stone Roses (a contractual dispute gagging since their first album), Happy Mondays, Charlatans, Inspiral Carpets and EMF to name only a few. The new musical scene only just started when James were already successful veterans. Eight years ago, we were not yet talking about The Smiths but about James whose fourth album, “Gold Mother”, appeared in England more than eight months ago, finally after long years of contract issues were put behind them. The sustained sale of great t-shirts kept them alive and the recent success of three titles, “How Was It For You”, “Come Home” and “Sit Down”, all taken from “Gold Mother”, finally allows them to taste the success which has to this point benefited all the other Mancunian groups which they had previously helped. And to hear the perfection and the freshness of all the titles of “Gold Mother”, it is difficult not to be under the spell of the strong personality of Tim Booth, the James writer and singer, when we interviewed him: Thierry Coljon: Today, you’ll release, on Fontana / Phonogram, a new version of [the album] “Gold Mother”, with the addition of “Sit Down”. Is not better to leave the version of Gold Mother that was released a year ago behind and include “Sit Down” with a new album? Tim Booth: It has always been thought that this record [Gold Mother] would sell. More than seventy-five thousand were sold in the UK last year, and then “Sit Down” later became a hit. Phonogram wanted it included right away in “Gold Mother”, we said no because it was not very fair for those who had just bought it. So we agreed only on the condition that people could exchange the old for the new. In Europe, it was more complicated because you had to negotiate with different firms but if some of your readers have “Gold Mother” without “Sit Down”, they can bring it back to England and exchange it. TC: Your relationships with record companies have not always been simple. You left Factory to record two albums, “Stutter” and “Stripe Mine”, on Sire who did nothing to promote them. You slammed the door on [Sire] in 1989 [and self-released] the “live” “One Man Clapping”, and then left Rough Trade, who released the singles “Sit Down” and “Come Home”. Why did you leave Rough Trade, which still gave you your first successes? TB: Sire had seen in us a light pop band from the north of England. That’s what they were looking for. It was fashionable at that time. They found our albums not commercial enough for their taste and did not do anything about it. We had to go elsewhere and find another contract with people more in harmony with our musical ambitions. At Rough Trade we found some lovely people who helped us a lot but they had a reduced idea of what James was. They did not think we could ever have a massive success there. Rough Trade loved our music but thought we were just a band for musicians and journalists, an alternative band when we were convinced to make music to please everyone. Rough Trade was not ready to do with us what they did with The Smiths because they did not believe in us. They did not want to see us big, unlike Phonogram who believed it right away. Now it is all fine. We have proved that we were able to sell today more than The Smiths in their day. TC: But how did you manage to preserve that energy and freshness for so long while seeing other Manchester bands come into your charts? TB: We always believed a lot in what we did. We knew we would have a day of success but weren’t sure when. This confidence allowed us to survive, but also the concerts that we never stopped giving, initially supporting other groups or at festivals. The surprising reaction of the public assured us that we were in the right. We also had a lot of fun working, repeating four, five days a week. We managed to live, some members of the group had kept a part-time job. In eight years, the band stopped for two or three months in the summer. It was obviously frustrating to see the others on the hit parade, but we were never convinced that they were successful because they were better groups. For three years, we have only spoken of Manchester. We knew we had to take advantage of this fashion and quickly get attached to it because one day nobody will want any more Manchester groups. But we always intended to be there afterward. We have already proven that it is possible to survive The Smiths and Morrissey. The most embarrassing is that some people think that we are inspired by the known Mancunian groups while actually we were there before them, but with time history will be clear. TC: You who have been here for a long time, how do you see Manchester’s scene, its history, its personality? TB: We only know the groups that have appeared in the last twelve or thirteen years. We have the impression that there have always been groups in Manchester seeking to be original. That may be what brings them together. Putting them in one bag is a mistake. We speak quickly of “musical scene”, three groups are enough for that. When we started with The Smiths, we were already talking about the Mancunian scene. I find that the groups in Manchester have in common their belief that they never needed to change their style to be successful. TC: You have been supported by bands like Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets, who appear on “Gold Mother”, in “How Was It For You”. You’ve said some pretty fierce things about the neo-psychedelic fashion influenced by the Sixties that most Manchester groups adopt? TB: It is precisely so that they do not get lost in an excessive desire to appear. Fortunately, their music is more important than their sweatshirts and haircuts. And I don’t always like everything that comes from Manchester… On stage, I change the lyrics of a song. What I write is less important than the interpretation of those who listen to it. TC: You like to write words that easily become mantras or slogans when you set your music, in the same way as U2. You do not hesitate to take a stand. “Government Walls” is a committed political song … TB: Slogans are unconscious. All is nonsense. That said, writing a pop song does not have to be an encouragement to cheap culture. I do not force myself, everything comes naturally from my head, I write as it comes to me. “Sit Down” is a celebration. I try to be positive but I do not believe in creating “happy” songs. “Government Walls” comes from a very specific English fact: MI5, the English secret service, was used by the political right to scare the Labour party. The book that revealed the whole thing is still forbidden here because it says things we should not know. “God Only Knows” speaks of rotten preachers. We immediately think of the Americans because there it is very obvious but it exists everywhere in a more subtle version perhaps. The song “Gold Mother” is perhaps the most beautiful song ever written about the woman, the mother … She talks about the birth of my son. It is a celebration of the courage of the woman. We never talk about the courage it takes a woman to bring a child into the world while we spend our time celebrating the courage of man when he goes to war or dies … James: “Gold Mother” (Fontana, Polygram distr.) Original Interview was at this link (now dead link): http://www.lesoir.be/archive/recup/mieux-vaut-tard-que-james-le-groupe-de-tim-booth-etait-_t-19910612-Z0428N.html | Dec 1991 | era-gold-mother interview era article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Rennes Transmusicalles – 7th December 1991 | Audio Archive, Live Performance |
SetlistTop Of The World / Come Home / God Only Knows / Born of Frustration / Live A Love of Life / Hang On / Hymn From A Village / Johnny Yen / Walking The Ghost / Gold Mother / Ring The Bells / Sit Down / How Was It For You / Sound / StutterSupportNirvanaMore Information & ReviewsAudioKeith Cameron, NMENirvana manage to blow everyone else off the map including headliners James, though no fault of theirs. If we must have bands playing arenas of this size – and to be honest, no band worthy of your respect ought to aspire to plying their trade in dismal barns – then I’d vote for James. If only because their music is now so seamlessly tailored for such occasions. The Simple Minds comparisons are valid if you remember the Minds circa “New Gold Dream”, as a song like “Sound” has the same sleek aerodynamic grandeur. One hopes the flab won’t set in, but perhaps it’s inevitable. Whatever, Tim Booth’s juggling with fire here, and the concessions to history – “Johnny Yen” and a patently ridiculous “Hymn From A Village” – squirm horribly in their new attire. For better or worse, richer or much richer, that particular James is long gone. | Dec 1991 | audio-archive live-performance article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Gang Get Gott – NME News | Article, News | James guitarist Larry Gott was victim of an armed mugging in Los Angeles last week, just three hours after arriving in the States from Manchester. Gott was held up at gunpoint outside the band’s hotel on Sunset Boulevard by two men who made off with his money and jacket. After giving a statement to police, Gott, distressed by the incident, took the first plane back to England – missing the group’s three-day US video shoot. Gott told NME: “The robbery coupled with my subsequent experience at the hands of the Los Angeles police left me with an overwhelming sense of fear, paranoia and suspicion of everyone I came into contact with.” The band went ahead with taping the video for the new single ‘Born of Frustration’ with their tour manager standing in for Gott. | Dec 1991 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Warrington Parr Hall (afternoon) – 20th December 1991 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistLose Control (acoustic) / Johnny Yen / Hang On / Sunday Morning / Protect Me (acoustic) / Born Of Frustration / Ring The Bells / Bring A Gun / Mother / Don't Wait That Long / Live A Love Of Life / Next Lover / Heavens / Protect Me / Seven / Fight / Sound / Come HomeSupportn/aMore Information & ReviewsA 2.30pm and a 7.30pm show that previewed the whole of the Seven album two months before release and was filmed for the Seven – Live Video/Concert VHS and DVD releases. Video
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Warrington Parr Hall (evening) – 20th December 1991 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistProtect Me (acoustic) / Sound / Heavens / Bring A Gun / Live A Love Of Life / Mother / Don't Wait That Long / Come Home / Seven (incomplete) / Born Of Frustration / Johnny Yen / Next Lover / Ring The Bells / Seven / How Was It For You / Protect Me / Gold MotherSupportn/aMore Information & ReviewsA 2.30pm and a 7.30pm show that previewed the whole of the Seven album two months before release and was filmed for the Seven – Live Video/Concert VHS and DVD releases. Video
| Dec 1991 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sit Down – BBC1 Top Of The Pops – 25th December 1991 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsJames performing on the Christmas Day edition of Top Of The Pops in 1991 | Dec 1991 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: A Sound Investment – Issue 1 | Fanzine | A Sound Investment was a James fanzine produced by California based Chris Zych and Lori Chin.
Download this fanzine as a PDF. A Sound Investment is © copyright 1992 Chin, Turner, Winchell, and Zych Ltd. | Jan 1992 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Born Again James – NME News | Article, News |
JAMES are set to chase their Top 20 hit ‘Sound’with a new 45 this month. ‘Born Of Frustration’ is backed with another previously unreleased track,’Be My Prayer’. CD and 12″ formats will carry a Mark ‘Diceman’ Hunter remix of ‘Sound’. Tim Booth and co are also gearing up for the release of a new LP,’ Seven’, which follows the reissue of their ‘Gold Mother’ album last year, and is accompanied by tours of America and Europe, likely to climax with their own major outdoor UK date this summer. | Jan 1992 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Magnificent Seven – NME | Article, Interview |
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MTV Interview | Article, Interview | It’s taken James nine years, four record companies and the rerelease last year of Sit Down to achieve success but now nominated for Best British Band category at next month’s Brit Awards along with Dire Straits and Queen. The backlash has begun. Tim : I think in England there’s a particular thing with a band having success which is hard for a lot of people to take especially when you see it come up from something small. You’ve been their property, their private band, the band that they always loved and nobody else knew about. When you become public property, something else happens. It’s quite scary for us too because we’ve always liked bands that never made it. Singer Tim Booth, in particular, has been accused of being pompous and taking himself too seriously. He allegedly threatened to commit suicide if he didn’t find the meaning of life. Tim : I’d got everything I wanted and I found I still wasn’t enjoying it. I wasn’t enjoying life. You kind of think that’s a bit ridiculous and just try and like enjoy it really. I was giving myself too bad a time as well really, I was taking it too seriously. I was taking the responsibility of the band too much on my shoulders . It’s part of my upbringing as well, it’s just that if you do this thing really well, it’s serious and well it’s the whole of the upbringing, it’s the whole thing with religion. Well I don’t trust any religion now without a sense of humour so that kind of knocks them all out really. Whether you think James have a sense of humour or not, one thing nobody disagrees over is what James are like when they play live. Their fanatical following and the intensity of Tim Booth’s performance means the band’s concerts can resemble religious celebrations. Tim : There’s a certain range of feelings and emotions that a mass of people can get at a concert that I think they should almost be getting from religions that they don’t and I don’t see anything wrong in that as long as there’s a sense of humour there as well and people aren’t taking us too seriously in that way. Even if the band do come from Manchester and the James rise came at a time when Manchester bands were constantly in the media spotlight, the only thing James have in common with the Happy Mondays is the town they live in. Tim : We felt we were before all that anyway. Well, obviously for a start, we’ve been going eight or nine years and we feel as much connected to Joy Division and The Smiths than we did to the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses and so we didn’t want to get caught up in that wave because we felt once it had passed there would be a backlash and we didn’t want part of it. We were offered press that was linked with it and we’d turn it down. But there are some things James have not managed to avoid. Sit Down, the single that turned James into stadium stars, became their unofficial anthem is probably one track they’ll have to play live for the rest of their lives. Tim : We tried not playing it, we tried doing acoustic versions, we’d open all the sets with it and then we kind of realised to an audience coming along, it was fresh, it was something they hadn’t experienced before and it was us that had experienced it a few nights running and we ended up feeling like killjoys at a party, so we kind of accepted in the end that the song had gone public. | Jan 1992 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
LA Gun Ordeal Shatters Star – Manchester Evening News | Article, News |
A first-time dream trip to the United States has turned into a nightmare for Manchester rock star Larry Gott of the hit band James. The 29 year old lead guitarist was robbed at gunpoint by two men less than an hour after arriving at Los Angeles International Airport. The armed robbery was followed, said Larry, by “an interview with two disinterested and at times threatening members of Los Angeles Police.” The experience forced a shaken Larry to return to Britain leaving the band in Los Angeles .. only a few hours after he had arrived. He is now back at his South Manchester home while the band return this weekend. James, led by frontman Tim Booth, are currently in America to make a video for their new single Born of Frustration. Their last single Sound made No 9 in the charts, following the top 3 success of their hit Sit Down. Last March, before their first hit record, they sold out two nights at Manchester’s G-Mex exhibition centre. The band’s spokesman Philip Hall says “They are rising stars in America right now. This is an important promotional tour.” Bespectacled Larry explained: “My decision to return home was based on my first experience of American culture.” “My experience at the hands of two disinterested and, at times, threatening members of LA police left me with an overwhelming sense of fear, paranoia and suspicion of everyone I came into contact with. I couldn’t imagine having anything to say to a journalist other than what had happened to me. They don’t need me to tell them their society breeds violence. They know that already.” Larry was at least able to joke about his experience. “I think the video will be better without me in a bullet-proof vest.” A roadie stood in for him in the filming session. | Jan 1992 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Born Of Frustration Press Release | Article, Press Release | James follow up their second Top Ten hit ‘Sound’ with a new single. ‘Born of Frustration’ is released by Fontana on January 20th. It is backed by ‘Be My Prayer’, which won’t be on the forthcoming album, with the CD and 12″ containing an extra track, the Mark “Diceman” Hunter mix of ‘Sound’. The group’s new album ‘Seven’ is set for release in February and will be followed by dates in America and Europe. James hope to headline their own major outdoor date in the UK during the summer. 7″ JIM10 Born Of Frustration / Be My Prayer 12″ JIM1012 Born Of Frustration / Be My Prayer / Sound (Diceman Mix) CASSETTE JIMC 10 Born Of Frustration / Be My Prayer CD JIMCD 10 Born Of Frustration / Be My Prayer / Sound (Diceman Mix) | Jan 1992 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Seventh Heaven – Exit Magazine | Article, Interview |
You didn’t miss them in the onslaught of English Ecstasy bands because James didn’t ride to #1 via the Manchester gravy train, even though they hail from that berg. James predates that fad by light years. According to band historian/guitarist Larry Gott, “James began in the dark mists of time”. Such heady musician talk puts the early 80’s somewhere in the Mesozoic Era, but in people years, thats nearly a decade. Back in 1983 their first EP with Factory Records prompted alternative arbiter Morrissey to proclaim James “the best band in the world.” Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, the Smiths covered their single ‘What’s the World.’ Five records, four new members, three labels, and two top ten hits later, sales and concert attendance bear out that prophecy. Gott reminds us, “It’s been five or six years since that quote. We’re all different people now.” Nevertheless, Mercury invokes Morrissey’s quote in case you can’t decide for yourself. Apparently the meatless man still fancies them. Morrissey requested a spot on the bill alongside James for Amnesty International’s recent 30th birthday concert. “He did a song and the main lyric was ‘We hate our friends when they become successful. I think it was an affectionate little dig at us,” relates Gott. You may have overlooked a reassembly of their 1989 LP “Goldmother” hiding behind a stripped-down neo-60’s daisy cover. This eponymous version omits two songs while adding “Lose Control” and the infectuous “Sit Down”, their charmed single which soared up the charts a second time, two years after its original indie release. That’s a neat trick every artist would like to pull off. Excuse me, but isn’t it concert convention to get the crowd on their feet? A dose of james can cure such close-mindedness. Their live, full-length concert video, “James: Come Home,” recorded at the G-Mex in Manchester, will get you on your feet in your own living room. James’ stage improvisation is both a band and crowd favorite, and the charismatic Booth’s way with words and wails have made him a media darling. They’ve got youth dancing to irony again without the suicidal undertone of Depeche Mode or the self-indulgent apathy of the Smiths. Their misery is closer to the theraputic reflection of U2, without the profundity. Hard to get too serious with boyish Booth bopping in a franzy, his hair tousling, and his oversize shirt flapping. When they tour the U.S. for the first time this year, expect to see a large, tight band which has spent the last year playing sold-out houses supporting huge acts like The Cure and headlining open-air festivals. Modeled on the strength of the E-Street Band (no kidding), James boasts virtuoso musicians each talented enough to front his own band. But it wasn’t always so. Booth admits “we were terrible” at the start. The original members- Booth, Glennie, Gott, and departed drummer Covin Whelan- were more interested in new sounds than in perfection. Though that’s probably what attracted Factory records, the danger for a cerebral is to not connect with the audience. ” It was a criticism we had thrown at us a lot… that we were somehow insular and aloof,” recalls Gott, “and we didn’t realize because we we’re concentrating so hard.” James worked dutifully to correct the flaw, gaining a reputation as a great live act. Then when they had great stage energy, their material just didn’t translate to enough people, or so the conventional label wisdom went. Booth reflects, “In the early days, our songs were like sketches that people had to interpret.” After years for searching for new band members, James found their ideal compliments within a four-month period. Perhaps fate selected Mark Hunter (keyboard), Andy Diagram (trumpet), Saul Davies (guitar, violin) and Dave Bayton-Power (drums), in time for James’ triumphant success with “Goldmother/James.” “Aside from me, Tim and Jim, we’d only been together a couple of months,” recalls Gott. “We had songs we’d written and we tried to communicate to [the new members] what we wanted.” Now the whole band participated in a selection process on the material the cardinal three generate in jams. “We could jam and it sounds like shit and the next minute we write “Sit Down”- that took ten minutes! You can’t stop the song because it’s so good.” Recent successes had a daunting effect on the group, though they overcame the pressure. “We’ve tried to write a song like “Come Home” and we can’t do it. It’s not like putting all the same ingredients in a pot and coming up with the same thing,” confesses Gott. But what came out of the pot is very good. “Seven”, their current release, reflects the group’s maturity, in the studio and as well as in the message. Gott characterizes “Seven” as “James’ coming together.” Whereas “Goldmother/James” ranged from sincere to cynical about loneliness and desire, most of the songs on “Seven” imply the same deception, rejection, and shame, but suggest facing one’s fears can supply the strength to overcome them. Perhaps “Ring the Bells” will catch on, as it begs a tamer audience response. James’ songs are soothing unless you really listen to them. Says Gott: “In the past, we’ve juxtaposed sweet lyrics with quite disturbing music. Juxtaposition is one of our fun areas. We write music that inspires Tim, and he finds things that aren’t quite so obvious.” The hypnotic rhythms, ethereal subjects, and Booth’s precious vocals may remind one of Simple Minds or U2. He eerily whispers, “Strip away all of your protection… do everything you fear/in this there is power…” “It’s hard to comment on Tim’s lyrics because they come from him. He’s saying something you wouldn’t neccessarily voice in public.” Can’t we get a hint as to the object of desire in “Next Lover”? “I’m sorry, you’ll have to ask Tim. If you think its an icon like Madonna, its not like that.” Gott talks about his favorite cut, “Heaven”. Recorded as a straight ahead song during the session, the band included some weird overdubs that got shelved. The song was passable until producer Tim Palmer (Mission UK) got his hands on it. “Tim went through the cupboard, if you like and sorted out all these bits that really worked, and threw out the main song. He pulled out all the nice, slidey violins and trumpet, and blended them all.” The beautiful result confronts a fatalist: “I’m waiting for the king of the world to come and rescue me”, with a challenge: “Are you waiting for the heavens to descend?” As if to repent Booth’s doubts the album closes with a gentle “Blow Me Away”, a thank-you to the Creator, if you will. Life is cruel but God takes care of you in Heaven, he seems to say. If “Seven”‘s songs seem to await that illusive, kinder, gentler thing that we’ve been hearing about, Gott counters, “It’s more of a sneaking suspicion that that’s not going to arrive.” What’s sure to arrive is the band’s U.S. success. Will their inevitable success spoil James? ” In some people’s eyes,” concedes Gott, “because we’re not their special find, their little treasure. Once you’ve become accepted in a broader sense, a lot of people think you’ve lost that special quality. I hope it doesn’t spoil us. It will probably be the end of James.” | Jan 1992 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Born Of Frustration – BBC1 Top Of The Pops – 30th January 1992 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsBorn Of Frustration performed live on Top Of The Pops in January 1992 | Jan 1992 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Today Article | Article, News |
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Feels Like Seven – NME | Article, News |
James, currently flying high in the singles charts with “Born of Frustration”, have announced details of their fifth LP. “Seven”, which follows the band’s platinum “Gold Mother” LP, features new mixes of hit singles “Sound” and “Born of Frustration” plus eight additional tracks. Full track listing is as follows: “Born of Frustration”, “Ring The Bells”, “Sound”, “Bring A Gun”, “Mother”, “Don’t Wait That Long”, “Live A Love Of Life”, “Heavens”, “Protect Me” and “Seven”. Cassette and CD formats of the LP, which is released through Fontana on February 17, feature one additional track, “Next Lover”. Meanwhile James are planning a giant open air one day festival which they will headline. The event is believed to be scheduled for July 4 at Alton Towers pleasure park in the Midlands. | Feb 1992 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Live 105 Biography | Article, Biography | 1991 was the year James truly came of age in the UK. James is comprised of vocalist/lyricist Tim Booth, bass player Jim Glennie, guitarist Larry Gott, keyboardist Mark Hunter, Andy Diagram on trumpet, Dave Baynton-Power on drums and man of many instruments Saul Davies. Originally signed to Factory Records in 1984, James released two cult indie hits in the UK, What’s The World (later to be covered by The Smiths) and Hymn From A Village plus the Village Fire EP. In 1985, the group put out two more UK albums, Stutter and Stripmine. In 1989, James released a live album One Man Clapping and in June 1990 released their Fontana debut, Gold Mother, which featured four hit singles. James has headlined major shows in the UK and played alongside the likes of David Bowie and The Cure. Their first self-titled Mercury release came out last year with the singles Sit Down and How Was It For You? (both heard first on Live 105) leading the way into the US charts. Seven, the new album from James, set to be released next month, is the record that will make the world open their eyes. Seven draws James into the forefront of that small group of important new acts who have the talent, personality and breadth of material to move into real international acclaim and appeal. Born of Frustration, their newest single, is already being played on Live 105. This summer James will be headlining a major US tour, playing more than seven dates. And today, you can witness their first as Live 105 proudly presents James to San Francisco. | Feb 1992 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Q Article And Interview | Article, Interview |
FOR JAMES, THEIR FIRST DAY IN AMERICA did not offer the big, big welcome that greets so many would-be British invaders of the land of the free. Within three hours of stepping off the plane at Los Angeles where they were due to make a video, guitarist Larry Gott was mugged. At gunpoint. Tney had just booked into the Chateau Marmont Hotel (where John Belushi died and The Doors and Led Zeppelin disported) where they hild a self-catering apartment. Being a “buttie addict”, Larry had stepped down Sunset Boulevard in search of a grocery. Successful, he was turning back into the hotel side entrance, when suddenly his nape hairs prickled with a sense of imminent threat. “It came to me too late. I turned around and there was a guy coming up the steps towards me. I was about to react when another guy turned the corner, with a gun out. Then I knew that this was fucking serious; it was for real. Give us your jacket, they said. Give us your wallet. I said, You got it – it’s in me fucking coat. Then they casually walked down the steps, turned around and said, If you contact the police, we’ll come back for you. “In the hotel reception I said, It’s your fucking country, it’s your fucking town; what do you do in this situation? Phone the police. They came: an old guy with half-glasses and a shorter guy with a crew-cut and a gap in his front teeth through which he constantly spat out streams of phlegm. They were more interested in finding out exactly where rather than what had happened; if this gate had been 15 yards further down Sunset Boulevard, it would have been somebody else’s patch. All this time, their radio was blaring out: two streets away a woman had been garrotted from behind by two guys who fitted my description; there was somebody held up at knifepoint, somebody else at gunpoint. It was constant. “The younger cop asked me about his gun. He pulled out his gun: Like this one? I said it was also a black automatic but much smaller. As I motioned to the barrel to point out that theirs had a silver stripe, he pulled back and said, Touch that and you’re fucking dead…” WITHIN HOURS, LARRY WAS BACK ON the plane to Blighty, with road manager Richard taking his place in the Mojave Desert-set video for the single Born Of Frustration. The mild violence James have a habit of attracting is not the least of the paradoxes that attend this band who are reputed to be hardcore brown-rice fiends and meditation addicts. So wholesome, indeed, is their image that for some years they have felt the need to undermine it by confessing to the odd brush with pharmaceuticals, and, more particularly, to send it up at every opportunity. Probe a little deeper, however, and the 31-year-old singer will vouchsafe the sort of intense and bookish confession that has maintained for seven years his personal cult following among those rock fans who like their frontmen pale and interesting. “Every artist I’d ever liked had often used drugs to get to a certain state of mind,” he declares, in his soft Mancunianised accent, “and I’d always been fascinated by the schizophrenic state of mind of the witch doctors and the artists and the persons taking drugs, and where those states of minds linked with the holy man. I read R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self when I was 16 and thought it was brilliant, then The Outsider by Camus, and the other Outsider, by Colin Wilson – a paper chase of books pursuing this theme.” From the mid-’80s, James have been a deep and elusively meaningful band beloved of indie sorts and, since the Manchester dance explosion, of the better-read raver. But in their earliest incarnation, in post-punk, Joy Division and Fall-dominated Manchester, James were not James but a distinctly low-brow, punk racket called Venereal And The Diseases. Bassist Jim Glennie is the sole survivor. “A friend bullied me into it!” says the hitherto directionless lad, recalling his induction into a rock’n’roll band. This friend, guitarist Paul Gilbertson, is James’s lost founder member. “He’d bought a stolen guitar for a tenner, and said our group didn’t need a drummer because of drum machines, but that we’d always need a bassist – so get a bass guitar! For some reason, my mother bought me one. I was going to see groups like The Fall and Teardrop Explodes and ended up in a weird crowd, smoking draw.” Armed- or burdened – with their aforementioned moniker, Paul and Jim’s group played their first gig: “I got the buzz, and listening back to our songs, if you can call them that, on a tape recorder, this crackly cacophony, I thought, Yeah!” The band evolved through a succession of personnel and name changes – Volume Distortion and Model Team International: “Paul had a girlfriend who worked in a modelling agen- cy called Model Team International, so we got T – shirts ready-made with the name on, until they threatened to serve us with a writ. So we called our- selves Model Team so the shirts would still be just about wearable!” Which is where Tim Booth came in -not, at first, as singer, but as the band’s pre-Bez idiot dancer. A reject of the public school sys- tem, Tim was of a church-going family who nonetheless was elbowed unceremoniously from Shrewsbury for being a bad influence. “I was thrown out of the back door, told to leave – and if I didn’t, they’d formally expel me. So I went.” The memory still pricks. “Then, three years ago, I was driving by Shrewsbury and I started shaking. Fucking hell, I thought, still some unresolved emotions here. So I went back for an old boys’ thing – and you’re not meant to go back if you’ve been thrown out – but I never really understood why and wanted to find out. The housemaster who threw me out got quite drunk and kind of apologised. ‘I was new,’ he said, ‘and I didn’t know how to deal with you.’ I wasn’t one of those rebellious kids who smoked on the fire-escape or got drunk; I was just different, awkward, and they didn’t know what was going on in my head. I hated school and they knew it. There’d be one guy in the house who’d get all the shit, and he’d usually be small and Jewish. His life would be made miserable; I was OK but I had to hide my emotions all the way through. At the end, I think they thought I would go wild, so they kicked me out before I did. They did it an hour after my last , A’ Level exam. Why bother? It was symbolic and quite unpleasant.” Convinced that acting was a life survival skill, Tim went to study drama at Manchester University, where he was a contemporary of Ben Elton. One evening at the University disco, his free-style dancing was noted by members of Model Team who were there enjoying the subsidised bar. “Paul came up and asked if I’d like to join their band,” Tim recalls. “I’d drunk quite a bit and woke up the following morning with this phone number written on my hand with the instruction: 6 o’clock scout hut. I went along and there they were rehearsing – naive, two-chord stuff, but it had something. I like Iggy Pop for his state of mind but Patti Smith was everything to me. I went to two rehearsals then we had a gig supporting Orange Juice. I shook a tambourine nervously and sang backing vocals. “After one rehearsal when I still didn’t really know them, Paul said, Let’s go into town. When, Paul was in the toilet, Gavan (Whelan, the original drummer) said, Now, you mustn’t be too upset if Paul gets into a fight. Fights seem to happen around Paul. But he doesn’t start them. Sure enough, we left the club and Paul wanted a piss, so he started pissing against a car, and this bloke came out and started fighting him. It wasn’t even his car! There were these two guys rolling around in the gutter and me thinking, Bloody hell, what have I got myself into?” One member, Danny Ram, “ended up in Strangeways for GBH,” they claim. “The first press we ever got!” As for Paul Gilbertson, “he changed,” as Jim delicately summarises how the guitarist’s enthusiasm became diverted towards less constructive leisure pursuits. “He’d throw himself into everything,” Tim recalls. “He had a real naive enthusiasm – and no fear. That was his weakness.” Gradually, Paul’s self-immersion into other pleasures distanced him from the band he founded and Larry Gott, a former guitar teacher, was recruited to cover his increasingly erratic playing. Finally, they confronted Paul with the stark choice of getting his act together or leaving the band. “We knew he was on a self-destructive path six months earlier, and we thought, Let’s try to reach these states naturally, through medita- tion,” Tim remembers. “We were looking for a safe haven for us -and for him. It nearly worked. But we lost him.” BY NOW, THEY HAD SETTLED ON THE NAME James, like fellow Mancunians The Smiths, a starkly anti-descriptive handle in reaction to the likes of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. Keen to cap- ture on vinyl the nervous, eclectic guitar-rock with which Manchester club audiences were rapidly falling in love, they recorded two critically adored singles on Anthony H. (then plain Tony) Wilson’s Factory label – Jimone and, after a mystique-building gap of several months, James II. “We only wanted a singles deal and told him why: inefficiency, and this idea that they didn’t have to promote a record because Joy Division had got massive without any promotion -apart from the fact that the singer had killed himself,” Jim wryly notes. “Bands on Factory would disap- pear because they weren’t getting promoted. But he got us what we needed: attention.” Supporting The Smiths on tour, James were assisted by the endorsement of Morrissey as his favourite band. “We were flattered, but didn’t think we needed the boost to help our career,” remembers Jim. ” At the time, we were concerned to battle the negative side -that people would think we were like The Smiths. ..” Tim grimly recalls how, after first avoiding the rock press and the necessity to construct for themselves “an image,” James bowed to the inevitable. “For one photo session, we put on these wacky coloured jumpers and funny hats – a piss-take of the cool image. But people took it seriously! As a musician, you naively think your music is wonderful and it will reach people. Then you suddenly realise that people want you to sell a personality – and it doesn’t even have to be your own!” In search of both “alternative” kudos and big-league promouon, James signed to the New York-based indie-within-a-major, Sire, whose stable included Talking Heads and Madonna, and whose boss is Seymour Stein: ” A shy man,” Jim recalls. “He stood out because everyone else on Sire was like a second-hand car salesman. A quiet man -and we fell for it!” Though they recorded two acclaimed albums, Stutter and Strip-mine, the cash-registers failed to ring. Despite maintaining their live following, by ’88 James’s career appeared to have stalled; meanwhile, it seemed that they would be washed away by another wave from Manchester, on the crest of which surfed The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. That they came to ride the same wave themselves owes something to the musical change that followed the departure of drummer Gavan Whelan. “We kicked him out,” Tim confesses. “He wanted the music to go one way and we wanted it to go another. He got frustrated because he couldn’t communicate his ideas to us and for over a year at every rehearsal we got bogged down in argument until we said, This isn’t working. After Gavan left, we had to write songs with a drum-machine, and that influenced a new direction in our music. Larry would find a preset, and, for the first time, a drum pattern would remain constant throughout our songs because we didn’t know how to change it.” James had already been on the lookout for additional musicians: “We’d done the four-piece,” summarises Tim. “Let’s see what other colours might be added to our palette. But we didn’t expect to end up as a seven-piece.” Drummer Dave Baynton-Power replaced Gavan, and James added trumpeter Andy Diagram (ex-Diagram Brothers and Pale Fountains), vtolinist Saul Davies and keyboardist Mark Hunter. In ’89, James toured with Happy Mondays in support. It was the year of “Madchester” and the new crossover of indie rock and E-generation dance. The realisation that they were being swept into the new scene came at shows in Blackpool, where weekending Mancunian ravers would wig out to the new seven-piece, dance-friendly James. Even as they had let their Sire deal lapse, James inadvertently tapped into the scene’s craze for clothes with their eye-catching T -shirts. A fan designed the first of these items (“We had to keep finding him to give him more money because it did quite well”) and the band’s manager, Martine McDonagh (also the mother of Tim’s child, Ben), designed the others. Kids who had never heard the band wore the clothes, and today James’s turnover and profit is “far greater” from the T -shirts than the records. JAMES RE-ENTERED THE RECORD FRAY WITH a self-financed live album, One Man Clapping: “We got a bank manager, Colin Cook of the Royal Bank of Scotland, to see us play a concert in Manchester with 3,000 people there,” Tim chuckles. “He gave us this huge loan, the biggest he could authorise. We had no collateral but for the great gig.” Out on their own label, One Man Records, it was distributed by Rough Trade and went to Number 1 in the indie charts – for one week. With an advance from Rough Trade, James recorded their next studio album, Gold Mother. “We gave Rough Trade the singles Sit Down and Come Home, and they said, This is great, we love it, but you have to understand, boys, that these will never reach a big audience,” sighs Tim. “They must have backed so many bands they loved who didn’t get anywhere that they must have lost faith in their own judgement of what would sell. Next stop Phonogram, with a completed album up for grabs if the vibes were right. Not only did Phonogram accept the whole of the Gold Mother album as it was but, when asked how much they thought it might sell, instead of the expected 50-60,000 copies, the company replied, “about 300- 400,000 – a bigger number than we’d had in our wildest dreams.” And, kickstarted by the band’s anthemic single, Sit Down, this estimate proved to be “quite accurate”. On the eve of the release of their new album, Seven (which has already been snubbed by some critics as “stadium rock”), James are learning to live with the mixed reception that is the flipside of pop stardom. “I went to a bar for a drink,” Tim unwholesomely confesses, “and these four lads were going. This guy thinks James are a load of fucking nancies. This guy props himself up on the bar and says, Yeah, James are fucking poofs. So I say, Yeah, we are; we love sticking our penises up each other’s arses. We do it all the time. Really into it. Didn’t you know we were gay? Whatever he said, I just went with it, and he was fine after that. And at the Reading Festival, I was watching a band, and this guy in his mid-thirties who looked like a geography teacher came up: I’ve always wanted to talk to you, he said, very nicely. Five years ago, I thought you were so important, the best band. But now look at you – you’re awful! You’re crap! What happened? Well, I said, we sold our souls to the Devil. The Devil! We decided to make music that would make us lots and lots of money, and that’s what Gold Mother and Come Home are. I knew it! he said, and walked away. Fucking hell, I thought, you can’t argue with something like that. ..” | Feb 1992 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Holier Than Thou – Select | Article, Interview |
You are Tim Booth. After ten years of luckless striving and personal chaos you are suddenly huge. Have you kept your soul intact, or just become another mock-spiritual corporate rock tosser? Has James kept its integrity, or is it a load of pious pseudo-intellectual shite? Speak…(story by David Cavanagh) “I think,” says Tim Booth with characteristic softness, “I would like some more champagne.” His vegetarian pancake’s looking a little on the dry side, admittedly. And that mineral water’s not going to help the flow. A decent bottle of Brut could be just the ticket for this lunchtime chin-wag. Three hours of having his photo taken has left Tim a little on the parched side – and constant wearing of shades makes him blink into the daylight like Mole at the start of The Wind In The Willows – and in an hour or so he’s got to do some interviews at Radio 1. He’s all the rage, is Tim Booth. Everybody wants him. The restaurant was a good idea. Whoever did the booking successfully located an establishment so bereft of custom that the Tim Booth table remains the only one occupied all afternoon. And, give or take the odd Elton John ballad mewling its way over the tannoy, it’s a milieu of satisfactory, masticatory peace and quiet for Booth to think in. Tim Booth talks a lot, very skilfully. Very softly, too, which is why even when he’s dithering over the menu he makes it sound like some sort of spiritual edict is but seconds away. He talks fluidly, pausing rarely and only hesitating when he wonders if he’s giving too much away. While you’re talking he has an endearing habit of nodding and saying “sure, sure” to each point you make. He appears incredibly attentive. Serene. On the scale of rock star intellect he’s easily in the top two per cent, as those fun loving types at MENSA would say. If 1992 is going to finally jettison this man into the league of Bono and Jim Kerr – and it’s an area he often seems to be racking his soul over – the IQ of stadium rock is going to take a serious leap as a result. Beside him sits Jim Glennie, the bass player. Tim wanted him there. He keeps making sure the tape recorder is positioned so that it can pick up Jim’s voice as well as his own. From time to time Tim will turn to Jim for acknowledgement, clarification or – once or twice – actual permission to go on. On the afternoon you join us, ‘Seven’, James’ new album is about to come out. The main course has just arrived, the champagne glasses have clinked “cheers” and the tape recorder has just clicked on. Tim has already established that the Select interview is far from effusive, and the words “stadium rock” have just been mentioned for the first time. The dreaded words. It’s clear that lots of people now think James have got something terminal here. They’re now at the stage where the music press traditionally abandons bands – tchah, poor old James, they’re a stadium band now! – and leaves them to their globally-obsessed masterplan. James, I hope we’re all agreed, are worth a hell of a lot more respect than that. Have you accepted that you’re going to become truly massive this year, Tim? We think so. But you can never tell. We stopped taking things for granted a long time ago. You know, Larry (Gott, guitarist) gets to LA and what’s the first thing that happens? He gets mugged at gunpoint. What if he’d been shot? What if he’d been killed? I don’t think the band would have gone on. I mean, there was a gun stuck in his ribs! His first time ever in America… Is he going to go back? I think he will. I think he’ll get over it. He’s very aware that he has to get back there as soon as possible. But he was freaked out by the whole thing. Why choose ‘Seven’ as the album title? Because there’s seven of you? Mmm. As a title it just seemed to fit. This album reflects the number of people in the band at this time. There won’t be seven always. It’s not that focused. A number of coincidences started occurring around the number seven when we chose the title about a year ago. ‘Sit Down’ went in at number seven. We did Top Of The Pops and were given dressing room number seven. On the same TOTP was a band who sang a song about lucky seven (‘Wear Your Love Like Heaven’ by Definition Of Sound’). Later on we found seven is the number of God in the Kabbala religion of numerology. On a scale of one to ten, how happy are you with James at the moment? Eight, I’d say (he looks at Jim, who nods slowly). Nine with the album, but then it’s different with that because it’s not something we can do much about now. Now that the words “stadium rock” have been used about you – however flippantly – are you taking that as a criticism? No Well…I don’t like the word. Do you like Simple Minds? Well (smiles)… we don’t feel they’ve progressed. Is there a stigma to the word “stadium”? Yeah! That’s why we don’t like it. Very few bands, to my mind, could play in a stadium and still communicate to individuals. How many stadium-size gigs have you actually played? I should think about six or seven. Have you started writing in looser metaphors, writing for bigger audiences? No. No, you can’t think about things like that. That’s where bands fall down. They start to think they’re writing for the people. And we’re writing for ourselves. And if you’re lucky the song you’re writing for yourself – if it’s got enough truth in it – will contact a large amount of people anyway. How do you reach an individual in a huge audience? I look at people. I sing to them. I look at individuals. And I can go to the back of a hall, I’m not just talking about the front rows. We played a gig in Paris last spring, doing 13 or 14 new songs that we didn’t know very well. We did ‘Born Of Frustration’ and there was this guy right at the back. And I sang the beginning to him and he was looking at me and he was really getting into it. And he started making his way through the crowd, dancing, moving his arms around, and he came right through the crowd, and as he got to the front we reached the chorus. And I bent down and sang it right into his face…I mean, the guy nearly came. And I was completely gone too, on his reaction. It was just like, whooaaahhhh!!! Because I love that song, and that was a really beautiful moment. Is there nothing on ‘Seven’ that was written with a huge audience in mind? No. If anything, we were trying to make certain songs smaller. ‘Sound’ – we actually made that smaller. It was more epic, it was more stadium. We don’t have much control over our songs. Recently, we’ve gone in to write new songs – and we’ve all been getting into Metallica and Nirvana and the Pixies – and it was like, Let’s get some really hard and heavy and harsh songs, y’know? And you try for a while and nothing happens. And then suddenly you go into a weird jam that’s in a completely different musical direction to the one you wanted. We’re coming out with all these folky songs, thinking, Aaah shit we’re going folk again. We have no control over these things. All the songs are totally accidental. So you’re not one of these bands where the guitarist comes in with a chord progression? No, never. Never. Nobody has ever brought a song into James. They start from nothing. Well, ‘Live A Love Of Life’ sounds like it started as some kind of U2 riff. Where? Are you kidding? It’s blatant. It sounds like The Edge. Well…(looking genuinely puzzled). I don’t think Larry has any U2 albums. I certainly don’t. I didn’t even hear any until ‘The Joshua Tree’. I’ve still never heard a Simple Minds album. So, no, that was not intentional. What about ‘Sit Down’- have you ever wished you’d never written it? No, no. Never. (Jim says quietly that he has. Last tour, the whole question of what to do about ‘Sit Down’ had James beginning the set with it, ending the set with it, bunging it in the middle and generally trying to keep it fresh. Jim envisages a situation where James could leave it out altogether –“and if people couldn’t handle that, they needn’t come”.) How many songs on ‘Seven’ are about your break-up with Martine (James’ manager and Tim’s longtime partner)? Probably just ‘Don’t Wait That Long’. That’s the really personal one. That was written about two and a half years ago. The split was just beginning then. And we knew we’d written a beautiful song, and we kept playing it to people but nobody thought it was that good. We knew there was a missing piece, and it took two and a half years to find that missing piece. It was a rhythm change; we slowed it right down. So that dates from ‘Gold Mother’ time, then. Was that a time of great misery for the band, before the success of ‘Sit Down’? No, listen, you’re completely mistaking us. We weren’t miserable when we weren’t succeeding. Alright, lyrically, ‘Gold Mother’ and ‘Seven’ are the most depressed words I’ve ever written, but that’s to do with my personal life. We weren’t unhappy as a band when we weren’t succeeding. We were making music that we loved. The band has never been a problem. And, in fact, we wrote ‘Sit Down’ in our worst period of poverty. We’d look at each other and think, Well, we can’t give up now – we’ve got all these great new songs to play. So the ‘James struggle’ thing is a bit of a myth? Well, James was not it for us. You talk about our struggle, but we had problems in our personal lives (he looks at Jim) that were far bigger struggles for both of us. To see us simply as members of a band would be a real misconception of our states of mind at that time. I think people might have misunderstood what kept us going, actually. People kind of think James should have split earlier – how did they get through it, and so on. But we didn’t have many embarrassments live – we didn’t turn up and find there were no people. So all the time, to us, it felt like we were making progress. There was always as much a sense of movement in our lives as there was in our music. We were always more than an indie band. Do you see ‘indie’ as a way of thinking? Yes, and not necessarily a positive one. A very English second division way of thinking. A fear of success way of thinking. There are a few bands that can break through that. But it assumes…(smiles) it assumes not reaching for the stars. Which you are? Metaphorically, certainly. There are some wildly opposing uses of the word ‘God’ on the album. On ‘Ring the Bells’ you’re singing “I no longer feel that God is watching over me”, whereas on ‘Seven’ you’re telling us “God is to love me”. Sometimes I use the word to ruffle up preconceptions. Other times, it’s in a vague, more nebulous sense. I’m not a member of any religion or belief system at all. The thing is, I have a choice. I can either believe the world is random chaos and there’s no meaning and no values. Or I can believe there’s some purpose, some intelligence. And that, I would say, is God. Not a person. Not an entity. Just a vague understanding of an intelligence. And I flip from one belief to the other. I don’t think I could live in this world if I thought it was just complete chaos. I’ve experienced that state a few times, and it’s not something I can take for very long. It’s terrifying. When was the last time? About a year ago. What happened? I can’t tell you. (Long pause) The last three years have been the worst period of my life. But they’ve also been…(his voice gets very distant) an awakening of a kind, I suppose. The very last words on the album are “love can change everything”. Do you believe that? (After a long pause) No, I don’t. Not unless it’s balanced by wisdom. I’ve always felt that, going right back to The Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love’. No, sorry. You need something else as well. So why didn’t you qualify that lyric? I don’t know. I didn’t think of it like that. Maybe if love is all you have, you probably think that’s all you need. Maybe that’s fair enough. When you write about love, do you feel you should constantly do twists on it, as in Michael Stipe’s famous “simple prop to occupy my time” on ‘The One I Love’? No, but what you do feel is intense irritation at all the other uses of the word ‘love’, because I don’t think that love exists as it’s presented in most people’s songs. It’s usually a wonderful thing and everybody wants it and it’s gonna last forever and all that bullshit. Well, I don’t find that real. That is not my reality. If I’m going to write about love I’ve got to make it personal. And it’ll reflect huge amounts of pain as well as the wonder and the joy. Do you see Martine all the time, then? All the time, yeah. And she’s brilliant about letting me see my son. But with her…I guess I see her in a business sense. It’s just something we’ve worked out. It’s unusual, I know, but it’s just happened. You mentioned personal problems back there. If they were bigger than the band, presumably you couldn’t exorcise them through your music? Well, the background to early James, if you’re really interested – at around ‘Stutter’ and ‘Stripmine’ time – we were meditating. Me and him and Martine and Jenny. Hours every day. Ten hours at weekends. And that was for three years. No one knew about that, we didn’t tell anyone about it. People thought something like that was going on, which is why we got that Buddhist tag, which was untrue. But meditation was our private life for a long time. And you could find lyrics from that time, if you wanted, that reflected that. (Tim has alluded in the past to James switching to meditation as some atonement for their debauched years as a “drugs band”. Tim and Jim both admit their immersion in meditation had a lot to do with the serious mental illness – through massive daily ingestion of hash via the lethally potent ‘hot knives’ method – of an early James guitarist called Paul.) After that period where there were a lot of drugs going round, I looked for ways to reach those states of consciousness without drugs. And that became my search. Partly because I couldn’t handle drugs – I had serious liver problems – and partly to get the one member of the band into these other possibilities so he’d stop taking drugs. Trying to get him back. Is Paul dead now? No, he’s not dead. (Jim immediately interrupts. “His character disappeared. He woke up one morning and there was nothing there. He’s kind of OK now. He’s sort of built something out of it now, but…it’s really difficult, you know? He was my best friend since I was 13.”). So this search for altered states goes on? I’ve always been drawn to the area where madness meets drug abuse meets mysticism. If you look at all the books I like and all the films I’m really into, that’s your common ground. When we started meditating, that was the intention: let’s do this properly. I’ve always been fascinated to find that schizophrenia and madness and divine wisdom are all states of mind tuned to the same frequencies of brain waves. And at various times in the past these states have either been respected – as in witches and witch doctors – or despised and locked away. Or, in our society, they become artists. They become the cultural myth-makers. They are people that have to be dealt with, you know? Because they are picking up on stuff that the majority of people don’t believe exists. So where do you stand on drugs now? Drugs have been in every single culture that has ever existed, but very often used much more wisely than they are now. Say a certain tribe would have a mushroom ritual three times a year or so…or solstices, or initiations…because you can’t do that every day. But this society’s so greed-based and consumer-based that not enough respect has been shown to these areas. So it’s well out of control now, which is why I can’t take a stance either justifying or negating drugs now. You have to show these things respect. What’ll you do if James ever ends? I should think we’ll want a long break from each other. Because it’s been pretty intense. But I think that after that we’ll become pretty good friends. All that talk of splitting up in 1989 was highly exaggerated, incidentally. That was only ever articulated once and quickly rejected. We have something to complete here. We all feel that. You asked me earlier about how I felt about James on a scale of one to ten, and I said eight. I think I’d always have said eight. We love our music. But there is work still to be done. Finally, on ‘Sound’, you yell out “do something out of character”. Was that a very James moment? Yeah. I think so. We’re happy with it. That’s the kind of thing I’m happy with. And it’s going to be great onstage. We’re going to really intimidate each other. Start staring each other in the eyes, seeing who can handle it. Just move in on each other. Try to push things, psychologically. States of mind again, you see. Isn’t there ever a risk to the sanity with all this? Ah…(laughs) I don’t know the meaning of that word. | Feb 1992 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James To The Tower – NME | Article, News |
James who made a low-key appearance at Manchester Polytechnic last Saturday as a dress rehearsal for their forthcoming dates in America, have announced details of a date at Alton Towers in July. As predicted exclusively in NME last week, Tim Booth and co headline the outdoor gig in the 500-acre theme park in Staffordshire on July 4. The band will be supported by two major acts, yet to be announced. Tickets for the concert and admission to the park for the day (including free access to all the rides) are available for £25 from Alton Towers box office on 0538-702200. | Feb 1992 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Seven UK Press Release And Biography | Article, Press Release | “‘Seven’ is a substantial document that marks James out as one of the few bands around who are capable of framing the anxiety and apprehension of eternal adolescence. It is the sound of a band moving into a new phase – one with longetivity stamped all over it.” Vox – February 1992 “James are ambitious, proud, moving, and unconvincingly self-important. ‘Seven’ is big, brash, unafraid, unashamed, but also miserable, paranoid and eccentric. Musically, ‘Seven’ is James at their most ambitious and diverse.’ Melody Maker – February 1992 “James were part of something, but now they’ve become one-offs. Intrigiung, difficult, unhinged at the fringes.” Q – February 1992 James fifth album ‘Seven’ is released by Fontana on 17 February. The follow-up to the platinum ‘Gold Mother’ LP, ‘Seven’ sees the band continue to span a wide range of moods and messages. There’s the stark anti-war ‘Mother’, the electric waltz of ‘Protect Me’, the sensuous hothouse ‘Next Lover’ and the caustic commentary on Manc nightclubbing ‘Bring A Gun’ and of course, both top twenty hits, ‘Born of Frustration’ and ‘Sound’. ‘Seven’ was produced by Youth, who as Tim Booth explains had his own way of working – “Youth decorated the studio before we got there. There were Moroccan and Indian hangings on the walls, exotic carpets, enormous flower displays. There were no electric lights, just altar candles, though he got a strobe going for the fast songs. We cracked up with laughter when we first went in. But the crazy thing was it worked. It broke that studio sterility. There was Youth in the candlelit control room, barefoot with beads like a hippie guru&ldots;. it was the working vibe.” James only UK show to promote the LP will be a huge open air gig at Alton Towers Leisure Park in Staffordshire on 4 July. Two major support acts will be announced shortly. Since Tim Booth (vocals), Jim Glennie (bass), Larry Gott (guitar) and Gavin Whelan (drums) formed James in Manchester in 1983, their career has followed a chequered course. Signed as awkward press darlings to Factory, they released two cult singles – ‘What’s The World’ (later to be covered by The Smiths) and ‘Hymn From A Village’. A major deal with Sire followed, resulting in two critically acclaimed albums ‘Stutter’ and ‘Strip Mine’. However, relations with the label were notoriously difficult and the group left in 1989 to reassess their future. Whelan left the band to be replaced by drummer Dave Baynton-Power, injecting a harder edge to their sound and the group pursued an independent path once more, releasing a live album ‘One Man Clapping’ on Rough Trade. Enjoying two of the biggest indie hits of 89 with ‘Sit Down’ and ‘Come Home’, James new found confidence saw them agree with Fontana. Now expanded to a seven piece with multi-instrumentalist Saul Davies, keyboard player Mark Hunter and trumpeter Andy Diagram, the new look James finally achieved major chart success with their ‘Gold Mother’ album. A string of top forty singles – ‘How Was It For You?’, ‘Come Home’ and ‘Lose Control’ – during 1990 set the way for their biggest hit to date when ‘Sit Down’ reached Number 2 in March 1991. A full-length live video, filmed at one of the band’s two sell-out Manchester G-Mex shows, came out in April, entering the video charts at number one. Now established as consistent hit makers, James had built up their following through a string of spectacular live shows, from two sellouts at Blackpool’s Empress Ballroom to shows at Glastonbury, Maine Road (with Bowie) and Crystal Palace (with The Cure). James t-shirts had become an essential fashion item and this was never plainer to see than when the group played their biggest show to date headlining the 1991 Reading Festival to a 40,000 capacity crowd. The group’s commitment to live work continued when James embarked on a gruelling 28-date sellout tour of the UK at the end of 1991. 1992 will see James take their highly charged live show around the world, the first date being an open air gig in Union Square, San Francisco in February. CATCH JAMES IN THE UK AT ALTON TOWERS IN JULY. | Feb 1992 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Seven UK – Press Release | Article, Press Release | 6 February 1992 James have their fifth album ‘Seven’ released by Fontana on February 17th. This is the follow up to their ‘Gold Mother’ album, which since its release in June 1990 has gone on to sell over 300,000 copies in the UK. ‘Seven’ contains different versions of the group’s recent hits ‘Sound’ and ‘Born of Frustration’ – plus nine new songs. The cassette and CD contain and extra track – ‘Next Lover’ James return to the States next month to play their first ever American gig when they do a one-off open air show in Union Square, San Francisco. The group are still set to headline a major outdoor show in the UK this summer. The full tracklisting for the album is as follows SIDE ONE Born of Frustration Ring The Bells Sound Bring A Gun Mother SIDE TWO Don’t Wait That Long Live A Love Of Life Heavens Protect Me Seven LP 510932-1 CASSETTE 510932-4 CD 510932-2 For more information please contact : Philip Hall, Hall or Nothing | Feb 1992 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Alton Towers – Press Release | Article, Press Release | James, currently in the Top Twenty with their single ‘Born of Frustration’ have announced details of their summer show. The band will headline a huge outdoor concert at Alton Towers, Alton, Staffordshire, on July 4th, supported by two major acts to be announced shortly. The gig will be the only one around the release of their fifth LP ‘Seven’, out through Phonogram on February 17th. The album is already being hotly tipped as a number one seller. Alton Towers is a theme park set in five hundred acres of open parkland, woods and gardens and contains over 125 rides and attractions, in fact, a fun day out for all the family. Tickets for the concert only are £17.50 (subject to a booking fee) and are available from the box office on xxxx xxxxxx, selected outlets across the country and by credit card from xxxx xxxxxx. Tickets for the concert and admission to Alton Towers all day including free access to rides and attractions are available at £25 (no booking fee), available only from Alton Towers. Booking office xxxx xxxxxx. By post, tickets are £17.50 plus 75p per ticket booking fee. Send to James Tickets, PO Box xx, Warrington, WAx xxx. Cheques payable to ‘James Alton Towers’. Enclose a SAE and allow 21 days for delivery. Dated 6/2/92 | Feb 1992 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James On A Rock And Roller Ride – Manchester Evening News | Article, News |
The Manchester hit band James will give 30,000 fans a rocking rollercoaster ride when they play at Alton Towers. The concert – on July 4 – will be the band’s only major appearance in Britain this year. Seven-piece James, fronted by Tim Booth, played a low-key warm-up gig at Manchester Poly on Saturday night. They have a new single, Born of Frustration, in the Top 20. And they expect to see their new LP Seven go straight to Number One when it is released next Monday. Record company Phonogram say it has already gone gold – sold 100,000 copies in advance. Promoter Simon Moran said: “The band chose Alton Towers site very carefully. They missed out on their hometown on their last tour and they wanted somewhere with easy access from Greater Manchester. They wanted to give their fans the thrill of a lifetime. So the combination of the concert and Alton Towers’ white knuckle rides was perfect.” Tickets go on sale tomorrow at £17.50. A £25 ticket will cover the concert and theme park rides. | Feb 1992 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Music View Interviews | Article, Interview | Originally a three-piece, Manchester’s James revealed their first EP seven years ago. And they’re now a seven-piece with a new album called Seven, strangely enough. Over the years their music has changed mainly due to varied instrumentation and styles but they have always been a pop band. Musicview asked vocalist Tim Booth and bassist Jim Glennie how their music has progressed since their previous album Gold Mother. Tim : “Each one has been odd. We’ve experimented in this area and enjoyed it. This is what we found here and then we move on and records tend to react against the last one. So there’s a constant movement forward away from, and that seems to dictate our direction, but it doesn’t feel at all like now we’ve found our station.” Jim : “That’s the last thing we want really. We want to move on and keep changing” Tim : “Gold Mother, we felt had too much variety of sound and style. It was almost too disparate and it was like lots of real variety but it was almost too much. There’s wasn’t such a sense of whole as there is on this record where you feel it comes from the same tribe.” Once a three-piece Manchester’s James have released five albums since their inception in 1985. With a new album Seven, the band is now a fully-fledged seven-piece and singer Tim Booth and bassist Jim Glennie related how the band dynamic has changed when talking to Musicview. Tim : “It’s good because we’re much more flexible. We have trumpet and fiddle and the fiddle player plays guitar and drums. So, and the keyboard player plays about six instruments, so we can choose what sound we want. We aren’t stuck and that’s really nice.” Jim : “There’s more colour in the sound now. When you want to hit people hard, you know, seven people whacking away, you’ve got seven people there, you’ve got the options.” | Feb 1992 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Rock Over London Interview | Article, Interview | Int : After the session I had chance to chat with Tim and Jim and Larry and first of all congratulate them on the success of the new album Seven Tim : Yeah, it’ll be number one next week I think Int : Yeah Tim : Depending on who we sleep with next week Int : Tell me about the producer you roped into this particular project Jim : We’d gone through a list of trying to find a producer. Checking out people whose work we respected and who’d worked with bands we liked, done albums we liked. Tim : Then we chose the one whose albums we didn’t like Jim : For some strange reason, we chose to go with someone who’d done nothing we liked. All the people we wanted to work with were either busy or when we met them, it didn’t quite happen. And then somebody at the record company suggested Youth and we looked at the things he’d done and thought “No way, forget it, he’s like a bloody dance producer, not right for James” And this A+R man was like “Nah, nah, I tell ya, lads. Meet him, meet him” Tim : Weak Cockney impression that is, by the way Jim : Yeah, sorry about that. Tim : Youth by the way isn’t a generic term for an age group. It’s an individual. Int : Yes Tim : We must explain this otherwise people at home will think “They wanted youth to produce their album, that’s a kind of weird concept. How they gonna manage that? Invite everybody in?” Int : One at a time Jim : So we met this chap basically, an ageing hippy called Youth and he came in with his open neck cheese-cloth shirt and sandals and his long straddly hair and beads. And a few other things as well that I won’t mention. Tim : You can only be this rude to someone you love Jim : And we hit it off for some strange reason. Probably because we’re a bunch of old hippies and all. And the things he was criticising on the stuff we’d done was right, same as ours and the things he was pointing out that were good were the same as ours and you can’t ignore that, regardless of the fact he’d done a few dodgy records Tim : And had no taste in clothes. It was the size of his crystals that did it for me. Jim : Enormous crystals. So we decided to go for it basically and moved into this studio in London called Olympic in a really good wooden room and Youth had already been there. I don’t know how long he’d been there, weeks probably, he’s got an encampment on the go there. And he’d filled the whole room and the production room with three-foot altar candles and there was no electric light used on the session. Rugs and drapes on the walls. Enormous flower displays, incense, oil wheels, lamps, you remember those dodgy oil lamps from the seventies, where the blob used to go up and down, he got one of them in and all. And a strobe for the fast songs. We all burst out laughing. He’s off his head, he’s off his head. Tim : And he convinced us we’d fallen into a time grip and were back in the 1960s and it worked. You can hear it on the LP. Int : It must be a cliche now. But the last year, the last eighteen months, have been pretty amazing for the band really. I mean it seems like it’s all gone right. Tim : After having gone wrong for eight years. Yeah, in terms of success, it’s been busy. That’s probably the best way to put it. It’s been really good. We’ve enjoyed it and the bank manager enjoys it too. We kind of had seven lean years where we were very happy with our music and nobody else seemed to be. Except live, we always had a good live audience for about four to five years and that’s how we built up our reputation in England. And then yeah, the last couple of years we’ve suddenly had a major breakthrough. Suddenly, it’s like overkill. And from not playing our songs on the radio at all for the first seven or eight years, now you can’t walk down the street without hearing the damn things. Int : Doesn’t that make you a bit cynical when it’s like “Oh you like us now then” this sort… Tim : No, no, everything has its time and we never had the business side together like we have now. We had the musical side together, we feel, for quite a long time, but we didn’t find a record company that shared our vision. And so it just needed all those components to fall into place. So I don’t really feel cynical. It’s just like we like to remind people of our pedigree. Jim : The extreme of the changearound, the turnaround, we’ve found quite funny. From being nothing to suddenly every time you put on the radio or every time you’ve got on the TV. Tim : Not that James again Jim : Oh no | Feb 1992 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Key 103 Special | Article, Interview | Pete Mitchell : With me, Tim and Jim, welcome to the show Tim : He’s put on his proper radio voice now Jim : He was swearing before. Tim : I tell you, if you talk to this guy, he’s got a high-pitched voice. The moment he gets in front of a radio mic. PM : (In high voice) Hi there, it’s Pete Mitchell. No you’ve done nothing but complain about the table and the room you’re recording in Tim : We’re used to better nowadays you know PM : Well, I know. Exactly, you’re preempting my first question. Things have gone very well since we last spoke. I remember asking you about success last time and I think you both said it doesn’t feel like success. It must do now with the success you’ve had since we last spoke – Sit Down. Tim : Every so often, you catch yourself and you think “Cor, blooming heck, how did we get here?” and it’s kind of like when you’re doing a video shoot in the Los Angeles desert and you look around and you see a huge crew and all the trucks and you think they’re all here to make a four-minute video for one of our songs and you think “Oh my God, what’s happened to us?” PM : So obviously the past twelve months have been amazing, the best year of your career. Do you think you’ve coped with it well? Jim : I think we’re doing alright. We’re still together as a band and still relatively sane. Tim : That time you cracked up, took all your clothes off and ran down Manchester streets naked. I thought you’d lost it then. PM : Do you think a lot hangs on this new album, Seven? Tim : Yes PM : In a nutshell Tim : Well obviously, we haven’t released an LP for like two years. PM : Well you have and you haven’t. Gold Mother came back out. Tim : It kind of returned PM : Gold Mother 2. The sequel Tim : She had another baby. So yes, I think people are waiting to see what we’ve done next. And the press have already decided what we’ve done next. I don’t think, it doesn’t feel like it hinges as in it’s going to be bad. It feels like it is good to get something out for people to hear. We know what we’ve done. But it hasn’t necessarily been the best year of our careers. What it’s been is the busiest. PM : And the most successful Tim : Externally successful, yeah sure. But we never judged it in that way. We aren’t able to rehearse as much as we used to and we love rehearsing. And we don’t like being shipped around the world talking about records when we haven’t even been and played in the country we’re talking about, so we’re starting to refuse quite a few things nowadays. Jim : We always thought our strength was in our songwriting. Getting in and having a good batch of songs behind us. And now we’re finding it harder to find time to actually get in and rehearse and write songs. At the moment, we’re feeling a little bit naked. PM : So when do you find the time to write new material then? In between tours? Jim : We’re just grabbing days. We insist on having a few days. Because as far as the record company is concerned, it’s like “you want to write some songs now, but you won’t be recording the album for absolutely ages yet. What do you want to go and write now for?”. They allot you a certain gap, a three week period or something, where you go and write the album. PM : Just like that Jim : Yeah. For us it’s not like packing biscuits. You can’t just put the hours in and you end up with the songs at the end of it. Well, you can, but they might be a bit dodgy. We write over a long period of time, we’re constantly writing songs when we’re on tour, in the soundchecks, we’re jamming them in the studio. That feeds us. That keeps us going. It keeps us sane because at the end of the day, there’s business and there’s creativity and I think, for us, we need more creativity than business normally wants you to put in PM : I think it’s a lot of fun packing biscuits. Jim : Well it has its points PM : Custard creams, hob nobs Jim : Jaffa cakes PM : Let’s talk about the album then. Seven. Ring The Bells, which is a song I heard about three years ago live, am I right? Of course, I am Tim : Of course you are. Probably about two and a bit PM : I remember hearing it for the first time at Blackpool. Am I right on that one? Yes, I’m right again Jim : We’ve got terrible memories Tim : Yes, it’s an old song. First released at Blackpool. It’s the only one we have a great video idea for. And we aren’t going to get to make it as we wanted it. We had this idea of going to Mexico and during…. Jim : Another holiday Tim : Another holiday. During one of their religious festivals, one of their kind of Christian religious festivals where Christ is covered in blood. PM : Oh dear Tim : And it’s really paga and heavy and filming it there and the bells, ring the bells would be one of these old Mexican churches, whitewashed churches and it’d be some nutter coming in off the desert. PM : Clint Eastwood perhaps? Tim : We’re into deserts. No, no, you’ve got it all wrong. Harry Dean Stanton. Like he’s had too much sun in the desert and he’s raging and he’s either got some kind of divine inspiration. He’s seen God in his forty days in the desert or he’s completely off his head and you can’t tell which. Like “Ring The Bells, wake the town. I’ve got something to tell you.” This kind of and you can’t tell whether he’s a complete nutter or divinely inspired. Jim : But, fortunately, we’re not going, are we? Tim : Fortunately, we’re doing it in Scunthorpe instead. On a beach. (plays Ring The Bells) PM : Ring The Bells from the album Seven. My guests today James. Tim : Collectively, you should know us better by now, Pete Jim : I think our names are James 1, James 2 PM : Shall we do that again? Tim : I think that’s good. You can use these interruptions can’t you? You just don’t want to be interrupted. PM : I just can’t be bothered editing the thing. That’s what it is. You’ve been described in most of the music papers as the next stadium band. Stadium rock. Is it going that way? Do you want it to go that way? Tim : The next stadium band PM : In the same breath as U2 and Simple Minds Tim : In the same breath PM : I think so Tim : You mean kind of U2SimpleMindsJames Jim : U2SimpleMindsJames Tim : It’s a mouthful PM : Do you see things going that way now? To big stadiums? TB : More in the same breath as The Cure, New Order, REM, James Jim : Pixies Tim : James PM : That was in the same breath Tim : Or Metallica PM ; When we say stadiums we mean America, cracking America and making it big there. Is that on the cards now? Tim : Depends on whose cards. If you go to Avril, the tarot reader in the Corn Exchange. PM : What’s she said about your future then? Tim : She said America, yes, by the end of the year, but it’s not, you know, really on the cards. It depends on whose cards you’re reading. We aren’t going out there like some sort of Christopher Columbus divine mission you know. We’ve been out there a few times and we enjoy it. PM : It’s the right time to go at the moment though as there’s a British invasion at the moment. Jesus Jones and EMF. Tim : I think that was last year. I think it’s the right time simply because the charts have loosened up a lot rather like in this country. And so Metallica can get to number one and Nirvana can get to number one . And REM are no longer left of field. And in a world where REM are mainstream, we have chance definitely. PM : Let’s talk about the the single’s success now. Sound. What can you tell us about that song. Another song from, of course, your album Seven. Says Tim looking at Jim. Jim? Tim? Jim : Don’t know Tim : It was jammed in the studio. It was, we were kind of, we had this weird studio set up with candles and strobes and we worked in candlelight for about two months and became moles with like no vision at all. We kept tripping up over leads and unplugging things. You’d do a whole take and find someone had unplugged something because they couldn’t see, but Jim : Someone had fallen asleep Tim : Yeah, someone had fallen asleep Jim : The sound engineer Tim : The trumpet break would come Jim : Great sound on trumpet, Andy. (Makes snoring noise) Tim : And Sound, we kind of had half of it set and the rest of it was left open to improvise on and so all the bits where I’m shouting down the megaphone “Do something out of character” or “Somebody break away for God’s sake”, that’s me shouting at everyone to improvise, to shoot off in another direction. I thought it was getting boring so I started yelling at people and you know we left it all in and we really enjoyed it. We love that songs and we felt when we did it it was quite a far out song, a kind of LP song and the record company suggested it as a single and we were like “Oh, yeah, great, fine” Jim : Off their heads Tim : We thought it would be a really good antidote to Sit Down. (plays Sound) Tim : The song Don’t Wait That Long was written about 2 1/2 years ago. Again it was a jam and we thought we’d written this wonderful song and we kept playing it to people and nobody was interested in it at all. Everyone thought it was crap and we tried messing around with different rhythms and messing around with it and we kind of realised that there was something wrong with it and it took about 2 1/2 years to work out what it was. We’re slow workers on some songs. We just kept it in our back pocket and we kept bringing it our every six months and tried it again. PM : You played it here at that session you did here, don’t you remember? Tim : Did we? PM : Yeah, we’ll have to unearth that and pirate it Jim : A different version PM : Definitely Tim : We just kept trying because we knew the seed of it was wonderful and we couldn’t find some piece of the jigsaw was missing and we found it in the summer and it was just basically slowing down the beat and making it more moody. (plays Don’t Wait That Long) PM : You’re listening to IQ on Piccadilly Key 103. My guests today are Tim and Jim from James reviewing the new album Seven. Live A Love Of Life – another interesting song from the album. Can you remember writing it? Was it recent or was it an old one again? Tim : We’re not the Happy Mondays, you know. We do remember these things. Live A Love Of Life. Again, it was, it’s always, through improvisation. The lyrics are just about incomprehensible to anybody really. PM : It’s obviously very difficult picking out the songs and talking about them. What about the album as a whole then? Tim : It doesn’t work like that. I mean you produce the music what’s right at the time, that reflects where you’re at at the time. And I think it’s better to see LPs almost as states of mind rather than meaning. PM : So how do you view songs like Sit Down and Come Home now? Your anthems. Jim : We’re very proud of them, but PM : Obviously sick of playing them Tim : I think more, it wasn’t sick of playing them. Not Come Home. You get sick of the feeling that you have to play Sit Down. Like there’s nights when we don’t play Come Home so we don’t feel trapped but we did feel last year now and again that we shouldn’t have to play Sit Down. It’s more like, when the new LP comes out, I don’t think we’ll have to play Sit Down. We’ll play it when we want to and then we’ll get back to enjoying it again. But you do feel resentful when you’re put in a position where you actually feel forced to. We nearly didn’t play it once in London and people started booing and shouting. PM : So that was the encore then Tim : It was like we had a big row about it actually and that was bad at the time. It was a mess. PM : Let’s play a track from the album now – Live A Love Of Life Tim : With Live A Love Of Life, it’s partly a continuation of the song God Only Knows. It’s another piece of rejection of my Christian conditioning. I had to go to church every day of the week for about four years of my life and I kind of resented that. It seems to be coming out now for some reason or other that I can’t understand. It’s also when I sing “I don’t believe Jesus was a human being”, it’s more to do with like when you read those bible stories, he’s not presented as a human being with human desires, human passions, human problems and I don’t believe those gospels are reflective of that person as they lived. There’s also references to the, we wrote it at the time of the Gulf War, and it’s the idea that in the Christian cosmology God sent his son to earth to die. It seems a really weird thing for a father to do to his child and rather similar to the way countries send their children off to war to die for their country which I’ve never been able to understand. And that’s what the song is about. The other thing I’ve decided too to sing in different countries or on different days “I don’t believe Buddha was a human being” or “I don’t believe Mohammed was a human being” so when we go to India, it’ll be Buddha and when we go to Japan, it’ll be Confuscious. PM : Remember what country you’re in though. Watch the jetlag. Tim : Yeah, see if we can stir up things. (plays Live A Love Of Life) PM : You’re listening to an IQ special. James, my guests today. Do you mind coughing Jim? Jim : No Tim : You belched earlier mate. And you’ll edit that out PM : Leave Jim’s cough in and get my belch out. The final song from the album Seven. A song called Heavens. Tim : Heavens, yeah, a song about . The verses are about somebody sitting with their hands, with their head in their hands thinking, full of self-pity, thinking of despondency PM : Like myself Tim : Like yourself PM : On a Monday Tim : And then the chorus is like “Get up off your arse, are you waiting for the heavens to descend”. You know. Move it. It’s meant to be a kind of self-jolting song. PM : Before you go, just briefly tell us what you’ve got lined up for this year. Are you spending a lot of time in America, trying to crack America? Tim : No, no. We’re going there a few times, not there much. We’re more in Europe and that side of things this year and Britain. The good thing in Britain, after the two G-Mex concerts we did in Manchester a year ago, we didn’t know how to play in Manchester again and it was like how do you top that. We were quite scared of playing Manchester again. We tried to organise lots of strange things, sort of six nights at the Ritz., but we couldn’t book it because of bingo night PM : That’s a shame. Fifty fifty Jim : Grab a granny Tim : Goth night. And then we tried getting a tent in Salford but the council, we couldn’t get permission. We tried Barton Aerodrome so Manchester, we haven’t neglected playing here. It’s just that we couldn’t find the right venue to go one further than G-Mex. PM : What about up on the roof again? Jim : Oh lovely Tim : What we’ve done now, I think it’s July 4th Jim : Yes PM : Alton Towers Tim : We’ve booked Alton Towers and we’re going to have a big day out there. PM : A festival? Is it a one-day festival? Tim : It’ll only be three bands. But if you pay a little extra, you can get a free day out in Alton Towers. And it’s really well organised. It’s not going to be like an outdoor festival with awful toilets. It’s going to be quite well organised and quite smart. PM : That’s July 4th then? Jim : All the shops are going to be open so there’s going to be food PM : James merchandise in every shop Tim : Hey up, you’re ruining this. And we’ve got, oh we don’t know who the support bands are yet PM : Any ideas, any little hints? They’ve not signed on the dotted line yet? Tim : MFI, it’s like MFI. You know? PM : Alright, yeah Tim : But we’re not sure yet so that’ll be nice. We want it to be a good occasion and we felt it was the only way we could go a bit beyond G-Mex. PM : What about further singles from the album? Possibles? Tim : Probably Ring The Bells. PM : Will that be it then – finished for singles after that? Tim : There might be one more but we’d make it an EP. Well, we’re trying to make it an EP. PM : With a couple of new songs on as well Tim : Yep, I mean we’re fighting off the record company. They want quite a lot more Jim : Six, seven PM : The old Michael Jackson syndrome. Ten singles off the album. Tim : The only thing I can say is if we don’t, if the single after Ring The Bells or even Ring The Bells, you’ve got the LP, don’t buy it. You know. And the one after that, if it’s not an EP with new songs on then don’t buy it because we won’t be into it. PM : Let’s hope Phonogram aren’t listening to this interview then. Tim : I mean we never understand the singles thing. I guess we knew Born of Frustration, Born of Frustration comes out a few weeks before the LP. The fans, some of them are going to buy it but a lot of them they won’t buy it and that’s as it is really and we’re quite happy with that. PM : It’s been a pleasure talking to you once again and it’s nice to see the success that you’re having. And don’t forget the gold disc. OK Tim and Jim from James, thanks again for joining us Tim : You’ll have to pay for it PM : How much | Feb 1992 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
MTV San Francisco Interview | Article, Interview | Tim : This is the first time we’ve ever played in America and we had a really strange day yesterday. We thought San Francisco would be kind of loads of sunny beautiful place. Reporter : It is, most of the time Tim : Our flight got to San Francisco and it couldn’t land because of the storms so we were taken to Sacramento and it ended up being a sixteen hour flight so we were all kind of jetlagged and then we also had trouble getting visas for half our people, our crew couldn’t come and it’s been like complete chaos but wonderful chaos. And the performance today, it was good chaos. It wasn’t like a real James performance but it was good fun. And that’s kind of our first performance in America, it bodes well, I think. Born of Frustration, the single, I don’t really know what it’s about. I wrote the lyrics very unconsciously. It’s something to do with being born of frustration. Something to do with seeing all these possibilities but not being able to reach out to them, not being able to meet all your desires, being stuck inside a human body and I think that’s about it really. It’s about as much as I can say about it. That sounds pretentious enough as it is. Jim : We started about nine or ten years ago. First single came out in 83 on Factory Records. Myself, Tim and Larry have been together for pretty much all of that, eight years. Met Tim at a disco in Manchester. He was dancing and we were pretty impressed with his dancing so we kind of called him over and had a chat with him and asked him to come down to the rehearsal room and try and write some lyrics for us because we weren’t very good at that sort of thing in those days. And that was it really, we were off really. It was very much done for fun in the early days. We did take it very seriously in the early days, we didn’t concentrate on pushing it out into the world and selling ourselves, it was very much more, you know, concentrating on the music and writing the songs and we had problems getting concerts. The greatest buzz for James in those days and probably now was playing live. We had real problems getting any live work. We thought we needed a single out so we released a single and it got loads of attention in England, it got Single Of The Week and suddenly we were thrown into the spotlight. And we decided to retreat a little because it seemed a bit quick for us. It took a while playing live in England, I mean for us it was basically there was a knock at the door and the guy from the record company and he said “Hey, I think you guys are brilliant” | Feb 1992 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Piccadilly Key 103 – 14th February 1992 | Audio Archive, Session |
SetlistProtect Me / HeavensDetails
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BBC Radio 1 Mark Goodier – 16th February 1992 | Audio Archive, Session |
SetlistLive A Love Of Life / Heavens / Seven / Protect MeDetails
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Seven Album USA Release – Press Release | Era: Seven, Press Release | Press release for James’ album Seven in the USA.
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Rock Over London – March 1992 | Audio Archive, Session | AudioSetlistLose Control / Protect Me / Promised LandDetails
SongsShare: | Mar 1992 | audio-archive session article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Le Pays Interview (French) | Article, Interview |
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L’Etudiant Article (French) | Article, News |
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Oxygen Interview (French) | Article, Interview |
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The Band That Wanted First-Name Terms – The Independent | Article, Interview |
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Vox Tim New York Picture | Article, News |
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Lime Lizard Interview | Article, Interview |
As far as the American public area concerned, James are just another British group with a funny name and a single. While Tim Booth and his henchmen mark their first trip to the States by filming Born of Frustration in the Californian desert, Randee Dawn straps on her seven shooter and discovers a place where the grass is actually greener. Meanwhile, back at the Bonaventure Hotel… And there they were: like something out of Lawrence of Arabia (or not), all seven of them, pale and dazzled, amidst the ochre sands of the Mojave Desert, horns a-blasting, singing about frustration and just who’s to blame. The camera sweeps broadly across the sharp coral structures that are all that remain of an underground lake. Strong winds blow piercing particles of sand into every crevice. It is all very reminiscent of November Spawned A Monster, actually, but if you told this to the seven out in the field, looks might kill. Yet another Morrissey reference might not be the best way to approach James these days, not even the new, reformulated James who have assembled five new multi-instrumental members around them like padding, or insulation. The press photo says it all: smack in the centre of the loose spiral of members sits Tim Booth, singer and mind, head cocked just a bit, insouciant and protected. This time, James want no room to slip up, this time, they are taking no chances Today’s topic: Silence of the Lambs. Today’s speaker: Tim Booth. “I was a Jody Foster fanatic long before John Hinkley. She’s amazing: at 12 she was a great hooker. She’s good in even crap films, like The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. So, having followed young Jody’s career all my life, it was good to see her really make it.” The same could be said about James fans. Most anyone who knows anything about James has known it for quite some time. James may hold the record for being the greatest also rans in musical history. For just under a decade they’ve been there, slogging it out among the best, and yet never quite getting inside the winner’s circle. It has, to coin a word that Tim Booth so hates, become a bit of a habit. But now there are new members in the former quartet, and there is also a new album to commemorate the new number, Seven. From Fontana, their record label, there is also much enthusiasm. “We’ve had a lot of business-speak,” says Tim, “you know, ‘James is going to break America,’ but it doesn’t really help anybody. We’ve never been in a very big hurry for success; we weren’t very ambitious. We just thought the music was great and eventually everyone would catch up on that.” It has taken just about everyone a long time to reach James’ level, buy to some extent they have also lowered their standards. Formerly this was a band who would never give an interview, have themselves photographed, or indulge in self promotional nonsense. “But if you don’t play that you’re shooting yourself in the foot,” says Tim, who clicks his tongue as he pauses, thinking, like an old man gnashing his dentures. “The reality of the 1980s was you have to do that, times have changed and the industry had become just that, an industry. The reality of James in the beginning was rehearsing, making a racket, really enjoying it. We didn’t make any money for the first seven years at all, but the music was so good, we felt it would work out in the end, they’ll invite us to the party eventually.” And on a level, they have, at least been let in the door. For the first time, says Tim, they don’t have to rely on good press at home to push themselves or their record. “This song’s going to be heard by everyone in England,” says Tim, “so I don’t care what they say about it.” And just in time, too – right on schedule, he adds, the revolt has experiencing a press backlash for our success. This may be a first from Tim Booth’s lips. Sure, James have always known they were too big and too fantastic for just anyone, but to actually say such a thing implies security. Because unless you’ve been in a cave, or lived in America since 1982, you probably have at least heard of James and their many misadventures. Stare more deeply into your memory’s photographs and you’ll recall James somewhere, either as an elegantly crazed opening act, or reading about their record label hopping in some paper, or maybe just by hearing Ya-Ho or Hymn From a Village, or more likely Sit Down. Familiar, they have become easy to overlook. And they have always been labelled – incorrectly: “We used to have two acoustic songs,” says Tim, “so we were a folk act. And then we wrote songs that had political overtones, small ‘p’, and suddenly James were a political band. Now we have two songs that are slightly anthemic and being like U2 is the latest criticism. But we refuse to stand still. It’s the spirit behind the music, not the genre. I love defying categorisation – it’s be a bad day when we kept getting the same review.” It was this refusal to sound or be like anyone else in music that ultimately may have been the cause for James being shunted to the side so often. Avoiding being pigeonholed is one thing – not allowing the masses to at least get a grip on what you’re doing is quite another. “We’ve always been frightened of rituals and clichés,” says Tim. “We improvise, and we change our set every night. I hate it when musicians get too good, and all they do is end up looking technical, and when you mention improvisation they’re either so afraid of hitting the wrong note or their idea of improvising is to play as many notes as they can at the same time.” This, Tim says, was part of the “James attitude” they had been searching for years for from musicians. The booting out of drummer Gavan Whelan gave the remaining three impetus to begin to take a different outlook on what James ought to be. That, according to Tim, was a widely expanded version of the old model. “We thought, we’ll look for a drummer, but let’s look around for what else is out there, too. We wanted good musicians, but who didn’t have to show it, musicians who were looking for the simplest way to play a song, rather than the flashiest way. So when one person takes a chord, everyone reacts. It’s a vulnerability, and an ability to be very awake, flexible, and able to take the lead when you need to.”
Thus assembled, James became the old: Tim. Larry Gott, and Jim Glennie, and the new: Saul Davies, Andy Diagram, David Baynton-Power and Mark Hunter, many of whom play more than one instrument, and most of whom switch roles depending on the song, the night and the mood. And why not? There are improv jazz bands, improv comedy, why not an improv pop group? “Live has always been our element,” says Tim. “Playing a great live show is making it all real, so it doesn’t look like you’re just going through the motions. It’s a direct communication, it’s something you feel is alive in that time on stage, when you know the band isn’t going to do the same moves to the same songs every night, they’re going to live their songs.” And so, as seven, they made Gold Mother. “I think the reason it didn’t work was it was too weird, with extreme types of songs,” says Tim. “Our own criticism was that it didn’t feel like a whole – people were wondering ‘Who the hell made this record.’ Maybe it should have been four records instead of one.” Regardless, Gold Mother was not the breakthrough they expected. Its re-release, in a new version with the stirring (or, better, the ‘settling’) Sit Down, however, was. All at once, James were acclaimed in the manner they had always expected they would be. Huge shows sold out, all the time. They were merchandised to death. Buttons. More t-shirts. “And now they won’t stop playing us on the radio,” says Tim. “We’ve gone to radio stations and asked them not to play our songs, but they wouldn’t listen.” Your life should be this tough. But having hit a high water-mark at home, Tim says the bigger shows were putting them out of touch with the audience, and they were losing their desire to improvise. “It inhibits you from taking risks,” says Tim “and it wasn’t a Zen enough attitude really, to take one place more seriously than another.” America had been on the agenda for some time, but better to struggle in one country than flounder in two, so James had prudently not struck out on the road abroad thus far. In fact, visiting the desert to film Born Of Frustration marks their first trip overseas. Apart from the expected culture shock, however, a language barrier appears to be developing. Hispanics all over the world might cringe when Tim pronounces the desert they are performing in as “Moh-Jayv” When James tour America for the first time, they will be a different band than anyone has ever seen in England. They will come without ten years of preconceptions, without ten years of history to founder under : No Morrissey tag, no “bearded, Buddhist vegans” here. To the patrons of clubs around the States, James will be just another British group with a funny name and a single. “It’s a challenge,” says Tim. “We like coming onstage and knowing we’ve got to take these people somewhere and they’re not going to take it all in on the first song, it’s going to be on the sixth or seventh. Seeing how different songs play in different cultures is always fascinating.”
What does seem to follow, no matter what culture, is the inability to grasp James’ agenda. Magazines are already labelling them folk-metal, or psychedelic, or just a bunch of “adorable blokes.” And this is the American press. One review of James referred to Gold Mother as “celebrating the beauty of childbirth.” This had not been Tim’s intent. “The whole thing is about the birth of my son, and it’s not a romantic view,” he says, “because giving birth is the most incredibly real, animal primal experience I’ve ever been through, and I didn’t do it, I just watched. When the song first came out people thought it was a sex song. And they thought that “purple headed alien” was a reference to my penis. I have a much better relationship with my penis than to call it an alien. Can you imagine: ‘Hey, would you like to touch my purple headed alien?’ It’s not going to do much for anybody, is it really?” But understood as seven adorable blokes or as musicians of more serious intent, James are coming. They’ll play clubs if they have to, but in a more perfect world, says Tim, they’d just rather be the support act. “Then we could play bigger places,” he confides. “lf we played for bands like the Pixies, or REM, or Talking Heads, that would be ideal. American bands feel more real, and Black Francis, he’s the weirdest of them all. He makes you think he’s completely crazy and say’s ‘My lyrics mean nothing, but I’m going to sing like I’m in primal agony.’ It’s that the depth of madness of American bands tends to be more real to us than the English, which I find a bit light.” The full tour will take place a few months hence, once the latest James offering is firmly in stores and completely overplayed on alternative radio, and only then, when James have been on the road for a month will the sense of utter cynicism and sarcasm set in about America. But for right now, the States are “alien and exotic” according to Tim. “It’s like places you’ve heard of in films, so you feel deja-vu all the time – ‘Oh, I’ve been here before – no, that was Mae West.’ The mythology that comes from movies is very weird.” Especially when you expect New York to be like Mean Streets and instead get mugged at gunpoint less than an hour after being in Los Angeles. “We’re not used to guns in England,” Tim says diplomatically. “We’ve only seen them in movies. This country’s obsessed with them. Yes, it is a right. And it is written in the constitution. But do you know what I found out today? The constitution was written on hemp. George Washington had his own stash. It’s a wild thing, that constitution you have’. It is suggested that he visit that constitution when the band plays Washington DC, where it is preserved under glass. Tim says he thinks he will. “I’ll put my nose right up on the glass and take a big smell I might get a dose of idealism.” | Mar 1992 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
New York Times Article | Article, News | The James band know who its constituents are : “Those who feel the breadth of sadness”, “those who find they’re touched by madness” and “those who find themselves ridiculous. Those are some of the categories itemised in “Sit Down” which became a major hit in England in 1991 and had fans singing along “Sit down next to me” on Tuesday night at the Ritz. (In decorous England, fans sit down, at the Ritz people stayed on their feet) Heartfelt, straightforward and more than a little plaintive, James speaks to sensitive teenagers (and post-teenagers) who’ll admit if alone with an album or at a concert with like-minded people that they’re not as cheerful and confident as others seem to be. James was formed in Manchester, England in the early 1980s and has gradually accreted a style that pulls together the confessional bluntness of mope-rock, the high-minded anthems and marches of U2 and the neo-pyschedelic grooves of English rave music. Crooning in a smooth tenor voice that echoes U2’s Bono and Morrissey of The Smiths (another Manchester band), Tim Booth sings about political disillusionment and private alienation. To battle frustration, the band urges positive action: “Stop talking about who’s to blame when all that counts is how to change.” It also suggests for the moment that listeners “leave yourself behind” temporarily for the pleasures of dancing and music. In “Lose Control” Mr Booth sings “We float on seas of disbelief while singing songs of pain relief” For the band, relief takes the form of tuneful riffs and multiveiled vamps. James might use folk-rock guitars, percolating keyboards or U2’s martial beat; compared with most current dance bands, there’s very little funk. Its seven members can turn a simple riff into a minimalistic web of overlapping lines, stretching pop songs for dancefloor use while spotlights swivel and flash. But Mr Booth’s singing and his sentiments hold the foreground of the songs. After a decade he seems surprisingly ingenuous and unguarded, eager to share his feelings and to reassure his listeners that while they may be unhappy, they’re not alone. Good-natured, propulsive and melodic, James never underestimates the importance of being earnest. | Mar 1992 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ring The Bells – Press Release | Article, Press Release | James have a new single – ‘Ring The Bells’ – released by Fontana on March 23rd. Taken from their current Top Ten album ‘Seven’, this is set to become the group’s seventh consecutive Top Forty hit. The single is backed on the twelve inch and CD by Andy Weatherall’s legendary mixes of ‘Come Home.’ The ‘Skunk Weed Skank Mix’ was previously only available as an underground twelve inch while the ‘Hugo Live Dub Challenge’ has never been available at all before. ‘Once A Friend’, the bonus track on the twelve inch is a new song recorded during the ‘Seven’ sessions, while ‘Fight’, the extra track on all formats is another new track specially recorded for this single. James are currently on a sellout club tour of America. Their only British date this year is their summer extravaganza at Alton Towers on 4th July. 7″ JIM 11 RING THE BELLS / FIGHT 12″ JIM 1112 RING THE BELLS / FIGHT / COME HOME (SKUNK MIX) / ONCE A FRIEND CASSETTE JIMC 11 RING THE BELLS / FIGHT CD JIMCD 11 RING THE BELLS / FIGHT / COME HOME (SKUNK MIX) / COME HOME (HUGO LIVE DUB) | Mar 1992 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Seven US Press Release and Biography | Article, Press Release | “We started during the era of Joy Division and the Buzzcocks,” says Jim Glennie of James. “It spilled over into the Smiths, New Order, and the beginnings of Simply Red. The Manchester scene came along, though we were there before it. It’s gone now, but we’re still around.” He laughs. “Guess it all means something, hey?” It looks that way, though Glennie could easily win first prize for understatement. It’s no surprise that James have broken through in Britain after nearly ten years of sweat and patience. Ten years of building an audience. Album by album. Song by song. Fan by fan. But it finally paid off in 1990. The band’s third studio outing ‘Gold Mother’, went platinum over there. It delivered four UK hits, spearheaded by the anthemic ‘Sit Down’ – which after rising high in the indie charts early on, unexpectedly shot to number 2 in the UK Top 40 nearly a full year later. James’ first full-length concert video simultaneously hit the top spot in the UK video chart. Due to their captivating live performances, sold out tours, the band was asked to headline major European festivals, including the prestigious Reading Festival in England. On this side of the Atlantic, Fontana released ‘James’ in mid-91, a retrospective collection designed to introduce the band to America. They began as a foursome in Manchester : Tim Booth, Jim Glennie, Larry Gott and original drummer Gavin Whelan. Today, James is seven members strong : Jim Glennie (bass), Tim Booth (vocals / lyrics), Larry Gott (guitar), Dave Baynton Power (drums), Andy Diagram (trumpet), Mark Hunter (keyboards) and Saul Davies (guitar / violin). Now there’s ‘Seven’, the fourth studio album – one that’s already pumped out a UK Top 10 single ‘Sound’. Produced by Youth (formerly of Killing Joke), the band and Steve ‘Barney’ Chase at the Manor in Oxfordshire and Olympic Studios in London, the new songs span a widescreen, technicolour range of different moods and messages. After the band signed with Manchester-based Factory Records in 1983, their debut EP ‘Village Fire’ and two subsequent singles ‘Hymn From A Village’ and ‘What’s The World’ (later covered by The Smiths), caught the attention of key British critics. Although James shift to Sire Records in 1985 resulted in two extraordinary albums ‘Stutter’ and ‘Strip-Mine’, the band broke camp again and moved to Rough Trade in 89 to unveil a live collection ‘One Man Clapping’. All of it paved the way for the success of ‘Gold Mother’ in Britain during 1990-1. But it’s James potent stage performance that have cemented its bond with audiences there. As Jim Glennie sees it, “A lot of our concerts end up quite celebrational, though there’s a mixture of emotions going on. It can be stripped bare. Not sad, but emotive. On the other hand, we have some songs that are pretty nasty, with cutting lyrics. We have songs that are quite uplifting as well. Overall, we try to be positive. We want people to leave feeling knackered and sweaty, feeling they’ve gone through a range of emotions. We hope they feel better because of it.” The challenge now? To make their mark in the US – something the band members trust they have an honest shot at with ‘Seven’. As Jim Glennie admits, “All we’ve ever wanted to do is to have the opportunity to let people listen to our records. To say to them, ‘Do you like it?’ and if they don’t, then fair enough. We’ll content ourselves with playing in the drummer’s kitchen.” “But you know, we’ve always had this belief in what we do. Almost an arrogance. There were times when it felt like there was no place for us. We’d start feeling down, but then we’d walk into the rehearsal room and songs would appear. Wonderful songs. That’s why we kept going. It’s why we’ve kept faith. It’s the main reason why we’re still here.” March 1992 | Mar 1992 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Itinerary: 1992 US Club Tour | Tour Itinerary | This is the band itinerary from 1992 James March US and Canada Club Tour. | Mar 1992 | tour-itinerary article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Chicago Cabaret Metro – 13th March 1992 | Audio Archive, Live Performance |
SetlistDon't Wait That Long / Hang On / Hymn From A Village / Born of Frustration / Out To Get You / Stutter / Lose Control / God Only Knows / Sit Down / How Was It For You? / Come HomeSupportn/aMore Information & ReviewsAudio | Mar 1992 | audio-archive live-performance article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Minneapolis First Avenue – 14th March 1992 | Audio Archive, Live Performance |
SetlistStutter / Promised Land / Heavens / Ring The Bells / Government Walls / Lose Control / Live A Love of Life / Don't Wait That Long / Born of Frustration / God Only Knows / Come Home / Sound / How Was It For You?Supportn/aMore Information & ReviewsAudio | Mar 1992 | audio-archive live-performance article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
KROQ Los Angeles – 24th March 1992 | Audio Archive, Session | AudioSetlistLose Control / Protect MeDetails
SongsShare: | Mar 1992 | audio-archive session article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Best Interview (French) | Article, Interview |
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Blah Blah Interview (French) | Article, Interview |
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Guitare Et Claviers Interview (French) | Article, Interview |
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Les Irrockuptibles Interview (French) | Article, Interview |
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Multitop Article (French) | Article, News |
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Nord Matin Article (French) | Article, News |
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Phosphore Article (French) | Article, News |
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James Peel 45 From Seven – NME News | Article, News |
JAMES, currently on tour in the US, issue the third single from their Top Ten album ‘Seven’ next Monday, backed with a couple of previously unreleased tracks and two rare remixes of ‘Come Home’. ‘Ring the Bells’ looks likely to be the group’s seventh consecutive Top 40 hit and follows the recent Top 20 success of ‘Born of Frustration’. ‘Fight’, a new track recorded especially for the single, is available on all formats, while both 12’’ and CD formats include ‘The Skunk Weed Skank’ and ‘Hugo Live Dub Challenge’ mixes of ‘Come Home’, courtesy of producer Andrew Weatherall. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for James’ show at Alton Towers on July 4 stated that tickets for the 30,000 capacity show are likely to sell out within the next month. Tickets for the concert cost £17.50, while concert and free access to the fairground tickets are priced at £22.50. Postal applications should be sent to James Tickets, PO Box 275. | Apr 1992 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Starclub Article (French) | Article, News |
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LA Chimes – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
JAMES were first supposed to tour America supporting The Smiths in 1985. Seven years later, they’ve finally made it across the pond. Ted Mico caught up with them in Los Angeles and discovered how Manchester’s best kept secret has started to become got property in the US. ALARMED AND DANGEROUS “We’ve all been to LA before” Tim Booth tells the first interviewer on the morning of James’ debut LA concert. “Except our guitarist Larry who was only here for a few hours.” In fact, Larry Gott had been in LA for exactly one hour before he made his way back to Blighty. The guitarist went night-time window shopping on Sunset Strip, looked at the motorbike shop and the Western boot shop, and then got held up at gunpoint by two assailants. “You know when you walk round a city at night, you can get a feel for the place,” he explains. “How was I to know that in LA, the only people out at night are lunatics, winos and muggers? I was an innocent abroad.” During his second visit (later tonight), Larry returned to the scenr of the crime with the band’s 20 stone Samoan minder, but the muggers had taken the night off. James are in town again, but this time the only problem is fending off the 50 or so fans that congegrate outside the venue that afternoon before the soundcheck. HANG THE DJ Stumbling off the tour bus into the 10 o’clock LA sun, the seven members of James look conspicously out of place. In the middle of the LA hustle and bustle, James appear even more diffident, more reserved, more essentially English. While the rest of LA believes it’s living in a police state, James are content to live between polite statements. Like all English “alternative” bands visiting the city, James are asked to make the pilgrimage to the “alternative” and hideously influential radio station KROQ, where they’re supposed to be interviewed and to play a couple of songs live. Things get off to a flying start when the DJ gets everyone’s names wrong and keeps asking “Who’s James?” Once he gets on air, things go from bad to worse. “Hi, here in the studio we have Tim Booth from the band James,” he gushes, while Larry Gott and Jim Glennie look at one another, wondering when they became invisible. “Actually,” Tim says, “there are some other people here as well.” Later, Tim explains he’s now trying to shift to move the emphasis away from just him and onto the band. He’s sick of being portrayed as the weird lead singer of a band and would rather be described as a singer of a leading weird band. This is the main reason for calling the album ‘Seven’ and shunning most of the limelight. “So you’re playing a sold-out show tonight,” the DJ waffles on. “That’s really great.” “Yeah,” Tim agrees. “20 people – that’s really some achievement for our first time in America.” By now, Booth has shifted from detached civility to open hostility. Finally, the question we’ve all been waiting for: “So are you sick of explaining where you got the name from? I mean,” the DJ adds when he sees Tim glower, “you must have a pat answer by now.” “We have about six that we choose from, depending on the level of intelligence of the person asking the questions,” Booth says, his playfulness evaporating in the steam of idiocy. “Which one do you think you’ll get?” The DJ laughs nervously as Tim tells him that Jim Glennie won the fight for a name. The radio interview is now well off course and any attempt the DJ makes to right the ship is scuppered by Booth’s sarcasm. “So,” the DJ asks, “we have a mutual friend – Deborah O’Donahue.” “We do?” Tin shrugs, not having the faintest idea what the man is talking about. “I don’t know her actually. Is she someone you slept with, Jim?” “Several times, probably” the bassist replies. “So tell us about the show tonight,” the hapless jock asks. “What makes James different from the average run-of-the-mill pop band?” “Well,” Booth begins earnestly, “we do a slow striptease throughout the concert, which a lot of people really get into, and there’s the indoor firework display and a juggler and conjuror who makes rabbits and aardvarks appear&ldots;.” “Yeah right,” the DJ says, with another nervous radio laugh. Maybe there’ll be other towns for him to work in. For sure, they’ll be running him out of this one soon enough. “How is it you’re so loved in England and so unknown in America?” he stumbles on. “They’ve got taste in England,” Booth spits and then smiles. It’s decided it’s time for a commercial break. After the ads, James unload a savage acoustic version of ‘Lose Control’, which so overwhelms the attentive DJ that he completely loses the power of speech. “Wow”, he splutters. “That was fantastic. You know, some of the best work on the radio is actually done live on the radio?” What? In the space of 20 minutes, a grown man has slipped several rungs down the evolutionary ladder and is now barely capable of the mental skills of an amoeba. The intellectual cripple must want someone to run him over and put him out of his misery. “So tell me,” he demands, “what do you hate most about Americans?” “The insincerity with which we’re treated by most people in the music industry here,” Booth retorts. Glennie and Gott grimace uneasily. Luckily the DJ doesn’t realise he’s the target of the comment, and a lullaby version of ‘Protect Me’ cools everyone’s increasingly frayed tempers&ldots; The revolution may not be televised but at least some of it will be serialised on the radio. A week ago in Dallas, the band were on a Top 40 radio station and the DJ was conned into playing ‘Hymn From A Village’. “It was five-o-clock primetime radio in Texas,” Gott later recalls, “and they played a minor indie hit from 1985 from a group noone’s ever heard of. I think the bloke must have been sacked after that, but we had fun.” VOYAGES AND VOYEURS It may have taken James nine years to finally tour America, but now the band are making up for lost time, filling every available minute with TV or radio interviews. Their Samoan security man looks perplexed when told of their meek and mild reputation in Britain, and dumbfounded when told of their legendary lack of excess. “Well,” he says “I think America must have done them some good, because they sure as hell ain’t like that now.” “I’m not sure that travel does broaden the mind,” Gott offers. “I mean, not on a tour like this We’ve seen a great deal but we can’t assimilate any of it. Like, going to sleep on the tour bus in the middle of a snowstorm and waking up in bright sunshine – it’s too much. “I mean we played Boston, but all we saw was the hotel, the venue and the airport. We never even got to see the ‘Cheers’ bar in Phoenix, noone seemed to understand a word we said. We seemed utterly incapable of communicating with any of the locals, until we realised that they didn’t understand each other either. It was dead weird that all this misinformation was passed between people. The whole city was filled with cartoon characters.” “To be honest,” Glennie says, “I’d rather tour America than Europe. Here, we can immerse ourselves in the culture, whereas in Europe, because of our ignorance of languages, we’re just tourists who say things like, ‘You-o, get us-o a beer-o’, and then spend fifty quid on a pint of beer.” “People in Britain are still snobby about America,” Tim says. “But we’ve had a great time, met some interesting people and visited some fantastic places. There’s one street in Austin, Texas, which was just amazing. Larry said he saw the best guitarist he’d ever seen playing there. Then Saul (James fiddle player) said he saw the best violinist he’d ever seen in his life. It turned out to be the same guy. The landscape of the whole country is pretty devastating really.” America is a beautiful country, largely populated by morons. “We’re not finding that, although we’re never sure who to trust,” Booth says on the way back from the radio ordeal. “People can be so over the top here, it’s difficult to tell if they’re bullshitting or not. The shows have been wonderful, which comes as no real surprise to us, because we’re such arrogant f**kers, but we have been pleasantly reassured.” America should embrace James. It is, after all, a land where the size of vision counts, not necessarily the size of sound. “You’re being very tactful there, Ted,” Tim says warily as we speed down the Hollywood freeway. “We’ve always had the vision, though. The only time it’s blurred is when we’re drunk. Has America brought out the excess in us? Not really, that happened on the last British tour. Now we’re into the unprintable adventures of James. The X-certificate James.” Tim tells the story of how various statues at venues they’ve played went missing, including one three-foot memento they attempted to smuggle onto a plane in Toronto. Tim begins to elaborate on more tales of the drunk and unexpected, but sadly his voice is drowned out by a police siren – a sound that James feel has followed them around from the moment they touched down in America. “The most surprising thing about this tour is that it’s fun,” says Jim Glennie. “It seems like we’re having some kind of palpable impact. This is such a vast f**king country, the fear was that we could tour here for five years in the back of a Transit achieving very little. We at least feel that we’ve thrown a pebble into the ocean and caused a few ripples.” “There seems to be a real buzz about us being here,” Larry adds. “There are people who’ve just heard us and heard ‘Born of Frustration’ and then there are people who’ve been waiting since 1985 when we were supposed to come over here with The Smiths.” “It’s partly down to the American charts,” Booth concludes, “which have loosened up a bit and allowed in your REMs and Metallicas and Nirvanas. Perhaps there’s a little space for James.” “We only want the broom cupboard, and we’ve waited a long while,” Glennie pleads, but by now I’ve turned our car off the freeway and into Beverly Hills. “No,” Tim states, gazing out of the car window at the enormous mansions. “I want the penthouse and the swimming pool and the indoor golf course! I love the excess. In Phoenix two nights ago, we were supported by a band called One Foot In The Grave. It was a group of 60 to 70-year olds who perform Ramones covers. The sign outside the gig just said ‘James – One Foot In The Grave’, which was a bit ominous, but like I’ve said before, we’d have to do something very stupid to go into reverse gear now. In England, we’re treated as vegetarian nutters, whereas in America, we’re considered English eccentrics.” POOL’S OUT By the time we arrive at the Hyatt hotel and hit the swimming pool on the roof, the two usually silent members of James have hit their stride just as the normally garrulous Tim Booth crashes out. All the bad luck and bad timing seems to be behind James now, but are they worried about f**king up again? “I can’t see where the next downside’s going to come from unless we implode,” Gott says. Yet James are the band who’ve shot themselves in the foot so many times, it’s a wonder any of them can stand up. “I know,” Larry admits. “It’s a good thing that you can’t get Uzis in England. Can you imagine the damage we’d have done to ourselves with a sub machine gun. We shouldn’t take any of this for granted,” he continues, gazing through the late afternoon LA haze. “But we do. It’s just such a relief to be over the worry of whether we’d survive another week. Now it’s just nice to breeze along.” “I mean,” Glennie adds, “if it hadn’t worked, we weren’t qualified to do anything else. We committed ourselves to an occupation, which, if you fail, is totally redundant. Being able to use phrases like, ‘I can’t hear the bass in the monitor’, or ‘There’s no f**king champagne in the rider’, doesn’t do you any good when you’re trying to flog double glazing! We’d have gone to the employment office and they’d ask us what we can do and we’d say, ‘Well I’ve been a pop star for the past 10 years'” “Things are much more up and down now,” Gott explains. “This is like a rollercoaster ride that hasn’t got an end. You just have to keep your sense of humour handy.” The guitarist’s handy sense of humour has a knack of getting everyone into trouble. It’s the third day of the Rodney King court case, where four policeman have been charged with beating King senseless with 56 baton blows, each one caught on amateur video. During the photo shoot, Gott leans against the Sheriff’s car, looks around and goes, “I don’t think I’d better vandalise it, I’ve seen the video of what happened next.” The sheriff is unimpressed. The rest of the band wonder, “If Larry didn’t shoot the deputy, who did?” Are James coping well with success? “It’s easy to feel precious when you’ve had a bit of success,” Glennie says. “You feel like shit because you’ve had a late drunken night, and you expect everyone to run around looking after you treating you with kid gloves.” “Even though we’ve been together nine years,” Gott adds, “it’s a hard accusation to level at someone – you’re acting like a temperamental pop star and a complete f**king prat. It’s like you’re suddenly not just watching ‘Spinal Tap’, but playing a part in it. Especially with the US music business people around. They all seem so efficient and I think the music business should be shambolic. It’s in the very nature of the business, especially when dealing with a band like James. A magazine article about us last week said, ‘One place they certainly will not be is where their itinerary says they should be’, and that’s very true.” The poolside muzak fades out and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” kicks in. The combination of Nirvana and too much sun causes the guitarist to experience several bouts of nausea before he recovers his composure. “I used to like this song and the whole album,” he says. “But there’s been such an overkill, I can’t stand it anymore. The Pixies made a huge impact on a lot of people, but the record companies didn’t flood out to find the new Pixies. Now Nirvana have one single that was picked up by MTV, and the record companies are going ga-ga. Why couldn’t they see the potential before?” Other bands also owe their success to one spectacular single, like for instance “Sit Down;” “Indeed,” the duo chorus. SEVENTH HEAVEN Before the LA gig at the Roxy, Tim Booth declares himself immensely happy with the way James first US tour has gone. “All we have to do now is play a truly awesome show tonight,” he says, mockingly. Even he must have been surprised, however, by just how truly spectacular James are. For once, everything seems to flow in the right direction, new songs like ‘ Next Lover’ melting brilliantly into old favourites like ‘Stutter’ and ‘Come Home’. The opening bars of ‘Sit Down’ prompt the usual stage invasion, but the song now not only has The Glitter Band drum bear, but a slice of T-Rex’s ‘Ride The White Swan’. For the last gig in San Francisco, the band plan to throw in Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’, just to prove that it can be done. The night before Booth left the stage in San Diego, walked through the audience and opened the venue doors, where there were people under 21 who couldn’t get in who were outside listening to the concert in the car park. It was just another touching moment from a man who enjoys making things happen, and now enjoys what’s happening to him. It seems ironic that by playing a venue as small and intimate as The Roxy, James prove exactly how staggering they still are and just how foolish anyone would be to write them off as overblown and over the hill. Alton Towers, where the band will be playing this summer, may hold a few thousand more people, but James are still the only band around that can turn one man’s misery into such joyful celebration, and the increased numbers shouldn’t increase the numbness. Like the relationship between coal and diamonds, the added pressure seems to make James all the more precious – and I say that without teeth gritted. | Apr 1992 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sit Down And Shoot Up The Charts – Mean St Magazine | Article, Interview | When Manchester’s James began working on their third studio LP, Gold Mother, they made to a declaration — to go in for the kill. After almost a decade of success on England’s indie charts and countless gigs, they felt the time had come to go mainstream. So they released a single called “Sit Down” and sat back while the song shot its way up the charts, conquering the number one position in Britain for weeks-on-end. “In one respect, we did expect it to happen,” says the band’s bass player Jim Glennie. “But when it did happen, it was still quite a shock. There was a lot of pressure building up, the last three singles before that had gotten into the top-40 in the U.K. So they were on the border of what’s classified as being a hit. There was this real audience participation thing that built up some mystique around the song. People were really interested in what was happening. So when it was released, if anything was going to break that deadlock, it was going to be ‘Sit Down.'” Seven, James’ fourth album, is full of the same explosive, exquisitely crafted pop tunes that not only showcase the band’s new-found commercial appeal, but also provide insight into the rhythmic and musical strength the band inherited as a result of constant touring for Gold Mother. The growth is momentous. “It’s difficult for me to put into words,” Glennie says. “I know it’s moved on. To my ears, it’s very different, but it’s hard to say exactly what those differences are. When we recorded Gold Mother, we weren’t quite sure of the parameters of the band. With this album, it’s three years later and it feels very much more whole. We’re very pleased with it. “I hope there’s still a wide-range of emotions and different styles on it. It’s difficult for me to judge it, I’ve been so engrossed with it for the past year. I still love listening to it, I’ll put it on at home and I still get a buzz. Hopefully, people can judge for themselves what differences there are.” So far, people seem to like what they’ve heard. James released “Sound” in England just before Christmas and that got to number 9. “We were really excited because we wanted to release something that said a little bit more about James than the ‘Sit Down’-style of song that we do — the kind of cheery, uplifting ones,” Glennie says. “We thought ‘Sound’ was a little bit harder.” The band’s current single, “Born of Frustration” seems headed for the same fate in the states — and the band couldn’t be happier. “It’s going to be a crazy year this year,” Glennie says. “We’ve got a ridiculously busy schedule, with a lot of time over here, which should be nice. We don’t want to sit back on our laurels. All we ever wanted to do was travel and play music for people. And it feels like now the opportunity is there. If success comes from that, then great, we’re not going to change what we do for different markets.” “I wanna enjoy it, that’s my main goal for ’92. I don’t know how long it’s going to last. Maybe it’ll be 10 years, 5 years, or a year. I don’t know, I have no idea. It would be so easy to get sucked up in the pressure of it, in the chaos of it, in the business of it, and I don’t want to. This business could be a lot of pressure. It could go to your head. But you can have a great time too. It just has to do with your mental attitude. I wanna enjoy this. I think this can be a great few years…or it could be hell!” | Apr 1992 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
BBC Radio 1 Interview | Article, Interview | DJ : Tim Booth from James and Jim’s here as well. You’ve done so well in the States and you’ve sold out a tour and you’re selling millions of albums. You’re taking America by storm. So I suppose that this means inevitably, you’ll abandon us and take American citizenship and never return. Tim : Change our names as well. Jim Bob DJ : But you’re never here now Tim : That’s not true actually. We’ve only been, we’ve only played in America this year in nine years and everyone says “Why didn’t you go to America before?” and we’ve only been there for a few weeks. It’s just that.. DJ : It has taken off though, hasn’t it? Tim : Yeah, it’s doing so at the moment DJ : The sell out tour business. It must be very alluring as much as anything. Tim : Yeah it’s exciting going to another country so foreign as America because we’re kind of used to Europe just from holidays if nothing else. You get used to Europe but America is just like another planet and within the whole of America there’s like seven different countries at least. And you kind of, like Larry says, get on a bus in the morning and it’s kind of snowing and minus ten and you sleep and by the time you wake up it’s 80 degrees and kind of subtropical. It’s bizarre how the landscape changes so quickly. DJ : Talking about America, forgetting the landscape for a minute, they like to be able to put people in a box. Do you have an identity that they’ve imposed on you? Jim : Not yet. There’s not been sufficient press yet, I think, to actually build up some kind of identity for us over there yet. I know what type of…. Tim : That’s the music thing. It’s hard to talk about music. Journalists, you can’t talk to about notes and tempos and so journalists tend to say “oh, they’re like so and so” or they hope you’re going to give them a photograph where there’s an easily discernible image. DJ : Which is something you’re not keen on it, is it? Tim : No, we’re all sloppy dressers, so and there’s seven of us and it’s chaos. I mean we couldn’t coordinate a look, we can’t coordinate a sound so this idea of coordinating a look, it’s crazy. The trumpet player wears a dress, what are you going to do with the rest of us? DJ : Does that cause a problem? Tim : We’re quite happy with it. We play games in America, like we have a dice game where we roll the dice to see who wears the dress each night and then you have to carry it off on stage. We play games like that with each other. DJ : All the same size? Tim : Yeah, well the drummer has trouble because he’s about six foot four. Jim : Miniskirt Tim : He looks cute DJ : Sexy? Yeah. You’re playing this enormous gig at Alton Towers. You talked earlier this week, last week it was, maybe the week before with Philip Schofield. You’ve got Alton Towers which is not exactly your backyard. Why? Tim : We’ve been looking to play Manchester for a year or so, because the last gigs we did in Manchester were really special to us. It was like a homecoming. It was just when we were breaking and it was a huge celebration and we filmed it and we didn’t know how to top it. We’d been looking for a good gig to play in Manchester and we hadn’t got council permission. We tried aerodromes etc and this seemed it. It’s about an hour and a half from Manchester so it seems like a great idea. They can pay a little extra and do free fair rides in the afternoon. And it’s like a festival but you have real toilets. Jim : They’re setting the stage up actually in the lake, on the edge of the lake where the grass slopes down so we’ll get a great view as well. With the houses in the background. Tim : And we’ll have a big kind of firework display at the end of the night DJ : Sounds great. Just while we’re talking about performing. One of my obesssions is about encores because I’ve been to two gigs this week and the encores have been longer than the gigs. You have this ritual that bands are starting to go through now where you know they’re going to do 4, 5, maybe 6 song encores and an hour after they actually start doing the gig, then they’re into the encores and the encores take another ninety minutes or so. Do you plan yours? Tim : What we do is put down a pool of a few songs we might play if we’re asked back and we don’t always go back. Jim : That’s why it takes us so long to come back because we argue backstage “I don’t want to play that one, let’s play this one. We have huge rows.” DJ : So are they real encores? Tim : We write down a pool of six songs we know we can play as encores if we need to but we don’t always go back. The last concert we played we had a huge row. We went off stage. Half the band wanted to play one song, half the band another. So two went on stage and started to play the song they wanted to play and we were really angry because we didn’t want to play that song. So I went on and I started attacking Larry in a mock humour way. But he got really angry because he was trying to play guitar and I was shaking him so much he was out of tune. So he picked up his guitar and threw it at me and he stormed off and we played the song without him and he came back half way through and carried on playing and we were OK then. DJ : That’s good to hear Tim : It’s that kind of chaos where you don’t know what’s going to happen. DJ : It must be a nightmare for management. Tim : No, Martine likes that Jim : She’s got used to it. The eyebrows shoot up Tim : She comes on stage with us and sings some nights. She’s been with us eight years. She’s part of the band. DJ : Tim and Jim, thanks very much indeed for coming in. Thanks James. l!” | Apr 1992 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Radio Europe Black Session – 30th April 1992 | Audio Archive, Session |
SetlistProtect Me / Top Of The World / Heavens / How Much Suffering / So Long Marianne / Promised Land / Sound / Lose Control / What ForDetails
Songs
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Rock Et Folk Interview (French) | Article, Interview |
| May 1992 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
World Entertainment Tonight Feature on James | Article, Interview, Video Archive |
DetailsAnyone in the music industry can tell you about the importance of high quality recording. Just ask James. No, James isn’t a person, James is a rock band that earned a huge following in Europe by playing at large outdoor festivals, featuring such popular stars as David Bowie and The Cure. We recently caught up with James backstage at the Roxy Club here in Hollywood during their first tour of the US. It’s been ten years since the British rock group James made their first recording entitled Village Fire. In 1990, the band’s third studio outing Gold Mother went platinum in the UK. Jim Glennie, bass guitarist, explains that James love for their music has paid off. Jim : After all these years. That’s what’s fuelled us basically. Over the ten years we’ve been together. It’s the enjoyment of the music. I mean in England we’ve had quite a few problems with the business side of things, record companies and the radio kind of ignoring us. But we love what we do. Their fourth album, entitled Seven, includes the UK Top Ten single Sound and has sparked a successful debut US tour. When the group recently performed at an outdoor concert in San Francisco, the fans enthusiastic reception came unexpectedly to the lads from Manchester. Jim : They were really wild. The action was really wild. They were throwing flowers at us on stage and getting on the stage and grabbing hold of us. You know chasing us back to the hotel. And it was like, it was really weird. It was really strange, because you don’t know what to expect. You come over here and think yeah if you get people along, it’s like they’ll be stood there like “Come on then, impress us” and you have to win them over. But yeah, there’s a section there that are just really loyal, really loyal dedicated James fans and that’s strange. At a recent soundcheck before their concert in Los Angeles, guitarist Larry Gott explained how the group developed their own sound. Larry : It’s kind of like, it’s something that occurs naturally. It wasn’t something that we went looking for. Jim adds that the group has a really relaxed way of coming up with new songs Jim : You know that’s how we write. We don’t set aside time for writing as such as it doesn’t really work like that. I mean we do it in little bites. A few days at a time because you can’t just put the hours in and then the songs appear. It’s like they’re either there when you pick up your guitar or they’re not. New songs can even come along at rehearsals such as this one. Larry : We were just like jamming around and I know it sounded like a bit of a mess, but sometimes it really comes together and we tape it and listen back to it. And there’s a song in there somewhere. And how has James dealt with their new found popularity? According to Jim and Larry, it’s as easy as remembering what it’s all about. Jim : If you bring it back down to the core of what you’re doing. Writing and playing music. You know, it’s not flying off round the world giving interviews and being here and being there. It’s writing songs and playing music. Larry : Yeah, you can get lost in promotion and image. And all that sort of stuff. Even though staying in the spotlight can mean work, work and even more work, the members of James still consider it a whole lot of fun. Larry : The way people describe us as playing music. Using the word playing music, not performing or constructing music, you know what I mean, it’s playing and that’s what it’s like, it’s playing. Tim Booth, the lead singer of the rock group James says he compares his group to the E-Street Band which up to a couple of years ago performed with rock superstar Bruce Springsteen. Booth says both his group and the E-Street Band is comprised of players who are talented enough to front bands of their own. It’s true. | May 1992 | article interview video-archive | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Seven Single – NME News | Article, News |
JAMES, fresh from their Glastonbury appearance last weekend, issue a new EP on Monday, including three previously unreleased tracks. The band issue a reworking of the title track of their Fontana LP ‘Seven’, backed by ‘Goalies Ball’ ‘William Burroughs’ and ‘Still Alive’. All tracks are available on CD, cassette and 33rpm seven- inch formats. Tim Booth and co’s 30,000 capacity Alton Towers show this Saturday, also starring PiL and Galliano, has sold out and organisers wish to inform fans that no tickets will be available on the day. | Jun 1992 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Lentil As Anything – Sky Magazine | Article, Interview |
| Jun 1992 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Seven Single – Press Release | Article, Press Release | James release a new four track EP on July 6th. Available on a 33 RPM seven inch, CD and cassette, the EP features a different version of ‘Seven’ (the title track of their recent Top Ten LP), plus three brand new songs – ‘Goalie’s Ball’, ‘William Burroughs’ and ‘Still Alive’. This weekend James make a guest appearance at Glastonbury while on Saturday July 4th they headline their own Alton Towers bash in front of a capacity 30,000 crowd. The rest of the summer sees the band busy playing a series of continental festivals which includes an appearance at the Feile Festival in Ireland on July 31st 7″ JIM 12 SEVEN / GOALIE’S BALL / WILLIAM BURROUGHS / STILL ALIVE CASSETTE JIMC 12 SEVEN / GOALIE’S BALL / WILLIAM BURROUGHS / STILL ALIVE CD JIMCD 12 SEVEN / GOALIE’S BALL / WILLIAM BURROUGHS / STILL ALIVE | Jun 1992 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Glastonbury Festival – 26th June 1992 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistWe Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful / Sit Down / Lose Control / Goalies Ball / Seven / Johnny Yen / How Much Suffering / Gold Mother / Heavens / Say Something / Maria / How Was It For You? / Live A Love Of Life / Ring The Bells / SoundSupportn/aMore Information & ReviewsA late stand-in for Morrissey, they started the set with a cover of We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful, a song he wrote about James. Video | Jun 1992 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful (cover) | Audio Archive, Unreleased Song | In June 1992, James stood in late for Morrissey at Glastonbury Festival when he cancelled. They opened the show with a cover of his song We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful which he’d written about James. Details
LyricsListenReleaseAvailable OnGigsGuitar Tabs unavailable
Live – Glastonbury 26th June 1992
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O-Zone Interview BBC1 | Article, Interview | Interviewer: Their new album’s called Seven, their new single’s called Seven, they’re James and they’ve come to meet me on a number seven bus. Well, we didn’t really pick the right day to come sightseeing, I know, I’m sorry. How are you both anyway? Jim: Very well, thank you. Tim: Fine, thanks. Will you tell us if any low-hanging bridges are coming up? Interviewer: I’ll just shout duck. Now, your roots are in Manchester, how are you finding it here in London? Tim: How are we finding it? Wet. (Tree hits Tim’s umbrella) Hey, are you going to warn us about the trees? Interviewer: Now, your new album released in February is called Seven, and it seems to have a lot of diverse tracks on it, but are there any running ideas or themes on the album? Tim: Well, some people have said the word “God” crops up a lot. Jim: So does the word “and,” mind you. Tim: And the word “The” is a recurring theme as well. Interviewer: Now, when you were in the studio recording this album there were some strange things happening, is this true? Jim: We had this crazy producer called Youth, an ageing hippy, managed to find his way into the studio, and he was in the studio for a few days before us, and we thought he was like setting things up technically, but he wasn’t, he was actually decorating the studio! He’d gone in there and put rugs on the walls, and incense, huge flower displays… Tim: Hundreds of candles, everything we did was in candlelight. By the way, Youth, if you’re out there, I want you to know that it was Jimmy who called you an ageing hippy, not me. Interviewer: You have a new single out, also called Seven. Tim: Another coincidence. Jim: Amazing. Tim: Happens all the time. Interviewer: And there’s a great video to go with it, tell us about that. Tim: Basically, it was Larry’s fault, the guitarist’s fault. We decided on the idea of having seven awful things happening to the band, or seven elements attacking the band during the course of the video, we were gonna be tarred and feathered, stuff like that. Jim: And we had wind machines, big wind machines that could actually blow you over. We went for extremes, it wasn’t just “oh, we want a little bit of wind;” if we go for wind we want a lot of wind, and the fire… Tim: The climax was 9 to 12 tonnes of water dropping on us, we got hit by this tidal wave! You get hit by 9 to 12 tonnes of water, it’s quite a shock I tell you. We ruined this film studio, it was completely wrecked, all the equipment went 40 yards across this converted aircraft hanger. Jim: It flattened us. We thought we’d be able to play through this wave of water and it just completely flattened us, swept us about across the studio. It was really funny. Interviewer: So you’re really popular with the studio artist now? Jim: Yeah, little bit of cleaning up to do I think. | Jul 1992 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Alton Towers Information Pack (1992) | Era: Seven, Tour Programme | This information booklet was produced for those attending the 4th July 1992 Alton Towers gig. | Jul 1992 | era-seven tour-programme era booklet article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Alton Towers – 4th July 1992 | Audio Archive, Live Performance |
SetlistSound / Born of Frustration / Heavens / Hymn From A Village / Goalie's Ball / Maria / Live A Love Of Life / Come Home / Next Lover / Lose Control / Stripmining / Say Something / Johnny Yen / Ring The Bells / God Only Knows / How Was It For You? / What's The World / America / Seven / Gold Mother / Stutter / Sit DownSupportPILMore Information & ReviewsAudioPete McGrath, SoundsNot just a concert, more an event in itself – James at Alton Towers, the capital city of family fun, England’s own EuroDisney, only here blockaded by 30,000 pop pickers rather than a few hundred truckers. As bemused families made their way to the exits after a hard day’s queueing, in swarmed thousands of youngsters and not-so youngsters in James T-shirts. The rain came and ensured that Alton Towers own hooded plastic bin liners became almost as vital fashion accessory as the t-shirts, but this was always going to be an event that nothing could dampen. Not the rain, not Tim Booth’s croaky voice, nor even the fact the roof of the stage blew off at 4pm, threatening the whole concert, and causing the cancellation of Galliano’s support slot. And so to James. As a band, they haven’t really changed over the years. Songs from the days of apathy, bad luck and near splits, such as “What’s The World”, “Johnny Yen” and “Hymn From A Village” fitted perfectly alongside the successful material of the last eighteen months, (“Sit Down”, “Come Home”, “How Was It For You”, “Sound”, “Born of Frustration” etc.) The only difference between James way back then and James today is that they are now the darlings of serious pop fans all over the country, and officially approved by fabulous Radio 1 FM. James have taken this rollercoaster ride to fame with ease, so it would seem, and a huge gig in a rollercoaster park has perhaps always been their destiny. The only dark cloud for me, other than the rain clouds above, was the premonition which came to me during their slower LP “filler” tracks. All of a sudden, James became dull open air concert troubadours on a Simple Minds scale. Absent songs such as “What For”, “Ya Ho” and “If Things Were Perfect” would have made the performance complete and caused non-stop rather than fragmented delirium for the crowd. As the firework display ended it all. It was clear that this was an event about which people could say “I was there”. But so too was James at Scumbag College Union in nineteen eighty something when less than two hundred turned up. Let’s hope my premonition is mistaken and that James never change. | Jul 1992 | audio-archive live-performance article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Stately Homeboys – Select | Article, Interview |
They stopped short of stadium ignominy. Opting for mass tribal bliss-out at the surreal dodgem Disneyland of Alton Towers. James bang on course of lost in the credibility jungle? “Of course it was Select who started it all.” He remarks sourly. “the whole…Simple Minds…thing.” He spits the words out like they’re some kind of repulsive semantic kebab. James are due to be playing here on July 4th, and their recce has been a total wash-out. All they can see is rain. Where’s the audience gonna be? Er, just over there, mate, where all that rain is. It won’t be like this on the fourth, grant you. The sun will be smirking arrogantly. Rains name wont be down on the guest=list. It will be a perfect summer day, and Tim Booth’s face will be flushed, awed, sensuous vehicle for all the intense drama and wordy love that he crams into a James song these days. And he’ll have quite a view. James will be playing on a raft like stage set in the middle of a lake. Anyone wishing to indulge in a little time-honoured brushing-of-hands with the James frontman will have a bit of a swim ahead of them. Well its one way to meet your fans. And also one swift comprehensive way to have a major blast while striving to shed the excess critical baggage James have repeatedly been forced to check in since the release of their last album, ‘Seven’ and its first single, ‘Born Of Frustration’. Stadium rock! Pomp Pious shite! Just some of the quips lobbed James’ way (particularly Booth’s way!) in the last year. Who would have thought that, when Tim came up with the singalong afterthought bit to ‘Born Of Frustration’, he’d still be defending himself almost a year later, against allegations of plagiarism and worse- not loathing Simple Minds enough. Tim’s adamant that James fans simply don’t see it that way. “They understand that the new LP was a new avenue for us.” We understand the thing with ‘Born Of Frustration’, but that’s one song, one chorus. And people “ he says pointedly into the tape recorder, “ are missing the heart of something, just being sidetracked by the chorus. Anyway, our definition of success is sales plus respect. We’ve had respect – well, from some quarters anyway – but if you’re completely broke for years and everything’s a struggle and the record companies can’t or won’t, like your music or do anything to promote it, then that must be totally frustrating. “Then again.” He goes on “if you have success but everyone thinks you’re crap then that must be totally frustrating too. It’s something that’s hard to gauge at the time. You can’t tell which bands are going to be remembered well in six years’ time. That’s, “he looks around the table at bassist Jim Glennie and guitarist Larry Gott who are following his argument impassively,” the sort of respect we want – for the songs to be remembered. Good music lasts, whether its Talking Heads or Velvet Underground or The Doors or The Beatles. But there are very few bands that have got really big and retained their credibility.” He speaks measured, reasoned tone, but anyone can sense his anger. Larry Gott takes a long, cool squint at the rain bucketing down on the salubrious idyll of Alton Towers outside. And here, ladies and gentleman, we have an Area Of Great Natural Beauty, getting soaked. “Stately Home Rock,” says Larry. That’s where we are now,” THE USUAL LINE OF RECKONING WOULD HAVE James – yer nouveaux stadium rockers par excellence – lounging around and doing sod all artistically until at least the next eclipse. That’s the way the fat and indolent are supposed to play it: an album every three years and a gig every now and again if you’re lucky – maybe you’ll be fortunate enough to catch one of the drumsticks thrown into the crowd at the end. To which James have one, typically James-like, reply. Two week-long spells in a studio in Wales have already produced 14 new songs develop from what they call “seeds”, scraps of songs that emerge from their improvised stage sessions. They like to “road test” new songs, playing them live while they’re still being developed – often without any proper lyrics. Bearing in mind the plan for ‘Seven’ was to get in as many Nirvana, Pixies and Metallica influences as possible, reflecting the listening habits of the band members and also bearing, in mind that that idea flopped miserably, what kind of patterns are emerging with new stuff? Larry: “We’ve gone Goth. We’ve got a bluegrass Goth track called ‘Chicken Goth’, A song called ‘William Burroughs’, A really miserable one called ‘Goalless Draw’ which goes; ‘It’s a goalless draw and the goalies got the ball’, and you can’t get much worse than that in a football match. ‘Going Down On America’. Then there’s ‘Maria’s party’…” Ah. Tim’s particularly fond of ‘Maria’s Party’. We’ve been hearing about it all afternoon. “the lyrics a litany of all these exotic creatures that come to Maria’s Party,” he starts to explain, clearly enjoying himself. “A gypsy playing trumpet in a second-hand dress. A bear in a tutu that loves to sing karaoke. A slug that dances. Siamese twins from a broken home. A limbo dancer that makes love in positions unknown to man. It’s done in a style similar to Algerian rai music – very sexy, hypnotic.” “Admit it, “scoffs Jim. “It’s basically like a dodgy Spanish disco song.” “Whatever shrugs Tim. “It’ll kill the Simple Minds thing off once and for all.” What was the most annoying thing about being hailed as the New Simple Minds? “I think the most annoying thing for me,” replies Jim “was the idea that we deliberately changed our sound to achieve success. Which is something we’d never do and couldn’t if we tried.” “I don’t know,” shrugs Larry. “All that stuff written about us when the album came out doesn’t really seem relevant to us. We’ve spent most of this year playing pretty small places in Europe and America. Over here we’re a bit more popular and more people want to come and see us so we’re doing Alton Towers. It’s as simple and obvious as that. The idea that we’ve suddenly become this massive stadium band doesn’t make sense when we’re playing a 500-capacity club in Texas.” Yes, but when you are playing a 500-capacity club in Texas or wherever, are you thinking big? “We’ve always been ambitious in that respect” says Jim thoughtfully. “We’ve always thought we could be very big and we’ve never seen anything wrong with that. Even when things were going wrong we were quite arrogant in a way, believing we were a good group with good songs which a lot of people would really like. We’ve always been confident that we could be successful. To get to that position a lot of other things have to be in place – record company and all that business – but we’ve always believed that, given the opportunity to play to large numbers of people and get our records on the radio, we could be successful. But always on our own terms.” James own terms have become a pretty cool legend. Any band prepared to submit themselves to guinea pig drug tests in Manchester hospitals just to keep their band alive (as they did in 1987) obviously aren’t kidding. The spirit of James may have taken a real kicking over such energy-sapping traumas as the overplayed Buddhist Controversy of 1985, the Lenny Kaye Production Debacle of 1986, the Great ‘Strip-Mining’ Disaster of 1988 and the Ignominious Royal Bank Of Scotland-Loan of 1989, but killing it off altogether is something you suspect could never happen. The spirit of James was made, as they say, of stronger stuff. Some galvanised tungsten-carbide formula. Aluminium could well have been involved. Some things they do just seem bloody-minded. At last year’s Reading Festival a 40,000 audience waiting for a stupendous half-hour version of Sit Down had to do with a throwaway three minute extract, plus loads of songs they hadn’t heard yet. This, in the light of Carter’s performance-of-a-lifetime which preceded them, was seen as a totally blown opportunity. “The reviews of us at Reading last year seemed to completely misunderstand what we were trying to do,“ complains Tim. “The papers decided to say that Carter had blown us off stage, as if we were in competition with Carter, which is not something we had considered. They played to backing tapes, brought in a special light show, which is fine, but we wanted to treat it as a normal James experience. That meant five new songs, playing down ‘Sit Down’ things that we thought had integrity – but we couldn’t really win. We were told off for taking risks by journalists. They condemned us for it. The very people who are always talking about sterility in music and how bands get complacent shouldn’t be condemning us for doing shows that are challenging, that take risks. They should encourage us. “We are not crowd pleasers. We like to throw in new songs, improvise, make things as interesting as possible. It’s about stepping out of a formula. I think it’s important for us to do that. I like music that gives me something I haven’t had before, which is what we try to do with James. We change the set list every night, we improvise, we do new songs which I haven’t even got lyrics for and it’s to scare ourselves, to make us work harder.” He’s not joking about scaring themselves. Because, after all, whats the alternative? The credibility jungle. Ooh, you don’t want to go in there, son. A fearsome place to roam. All those tendrils of temptation and tackiness. Tim mutters something about U2 “treading a thin line”. Jim picks up on it straight away. “They blew it for me when I saw them live, “ he says fearlessly. “We all liked ‘Achtung Baby’ but then we saw the show in America. There’s just no need to put on a razzy show like that. They’ve got great songs, they’re great song writers. They should just chill out – just get up there and play the songs. Its fair enough if you’re crap. When I saw INXS it was well over the top and it distracted me from the music, but the music wasn’t great so it was fair enough. U2 don’t need that.” Larry: “Well, you’ve successfully blown our supports worldwide there, Jim.” “I like the idea of James playing to large crowds,” stresses Tim. “I’ve always liked festivals, even though they were quite unfashionable for many years. There seems to be so much going on this year but I wonder if this country’s too wet to support that many events. All you need is one Glastonbury like they had about six years ago when the whole place looked like a refugee camp and nobody went to festivals for about two years.” The rains still doing the dance of the pyramids out on the picturesque slopes of Alton Towers, and Tim is getting increasingly insular in this conference room. He’s got to sing – as in perform, as in project, as in reach out and touch – to around 25,000 people out there in the middle of a sodding lake next week. It’s hard to envisage that kind of transformation in the man. Does he never feel just too terrified to contemplate it? “I was petrified when I first went on stage,” he recalls. “I was a shy person who found it hard to communicate with people. Being in a group offered me a means of self-expression. I’d seen Patty Smith and Iggy Pop and others move me in a way that was really powerful. I saw the possibilities of what you can do in a live concert.” Do you ever feel like an idiot? “Most of the time its fine but other times I go onstage and, yeah, I do feel foolish. The songs start to fall apart, I can’t dance properly. Sometimes we go on and feel like a rock band – really hollow. It doesn’t happen often but when it does it’s horrible. And there’s ones when you go on in a weird psychological mood and can’t let the audience in, can’t smile even.” What’s it like on stage? “Onstage everything is amplified,” he explains, “from the basic sound to the emotions. So you get incredible highs, but when it goes bad you get an equivalent low which is why you get groups breaking up TV sets, smashing hotel rooms and behaving like arseholes. There’s so much emotion and energy you really have to learn how to deal with it.” And you obviously have? “It’s self expression and it feels valuable to my life,” he says, sincere eyes working overtime. “If you feel it’s not a worthwhile thing to be doing it’s because you’re not going deep enough. It lies within me to do that so if I’m getting bored it’s my fault. Some aspects of life I don’t like.” Such as? You’re not renowned party animals. “Touring is a moronic lifestyle,” he says wearily. “You’re up until four in the morning because after a gig you don’t want to sleep. Once a week I don’t mind staying up and having a drink or whatever, but as a lifestyle it’s really boring and destabilising. I have a son, Jims got two children, Larry’s got a step-daughter, Dave (Baynton-Power, drummer) has got a sort of step-daughter, though he’s not married – so for people like us it isn’t an ideal lifestyle. “But it’s the life we’ve chosen,” he say, warming up a little. “At the beginning of James we never looked beyond the next couple of years. We’ve been going a long time now but the thought of stopping is something we’ve discussed and rejected. We’ve seen a lot of bands who have stopped early then regretted it and tried to get back together and do it again, but you can’t just pick it up two years later. “We feel there will be a time when we realise its finished – were very conscience of that – but were determined to take it as far as it’ll go, to its proper conclusion.” He looks serenely at Larry and Jim, who have been watching him silently for the past ten minutes or so. Is that the rain easing off? “And it’s a long way off yet,” smiles Tim Booth. | Aug 1992 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
First We Take Manhattan – Vox | Article, Interview |
In the stuffy den of a Manhattan vegetarian restaurant, our legs corkscrewed under a narrow table. I am attempting to conduct an interview with Tim Booth. We’re doing it here because, in their obstinate way, James are making the point that they like to do everything on their own terms. Steak and chips would be just the job, but I have to make do with falafel in pitta bread, which seems to have been sprinkled with authentic Saharan sand. Tim Booth gives me a pitying look as I order more coffee, as caffeinated as possible for the war against jet lag. “I’ll have a carrot and parsley and spinach juice please,” he tells the waiter. “A large one.” He looks down at the tape recorder on the table and grins. “There you go – it’s on tape! I’m doomed.” He flashes back to what we’d been talking about a few minutes earlier, specifically : James image of vegetable-flavoured, vaguely spiritual wimpiness. “That thing about vegetarian stereotypes or ethereal stereotypes – if you’re ethereal, intellectual person, it doesn’t mean you don’t fight or fuck – it’s bullshit. When you get a tag like ‘intellectual’. I don’t like it – it’s one muscle, the one in the head and it’s unbalanced. There’s a heart one and a body one and a spirit one, and the key has to be balance and developing them all, so you don’t fall over because there’s too much weight in your head.” There doesn’t seem to be much weight in any part of Booth’s body. Beside him, a stick of celery would feel ashamed of its wobbling obesity. His pale face, with its bird-like bone structure and rather irritating angelic smile, makes him look about half his 32 years. It sits on top of a body so slight that it’s hard to imagine how it carries its occupant through the punishing demands of touring, recording and promotion, which are increasingly becoming an everyday routine for James. But James are tougher than they look. Booth insists that several band members often get quite drunk, actually, and tells me how he’d plunged into the audience the night before, brandishing his deadly tambourine at a troublesome coin-thrower. But the band’s toughness is spiritual rather than physical. Somewhere in Booth there’s a little bit of ascetic, even the Jesuit. Just like Kevin Rowland said : “I will punish the body until I believe in the soul” Booth, who studied drama at Manchester University after being ejected from public school in Shrewsbury, can trace his family tree back to John Wesley and General Booth of the Salvation Army. He says he was “conditioned in Christianity” as a child, and some of that Evangelical zeal – or Booth’s response to it – has plainly rubbed off in songs like God Only Knows or Heavens. Channel 4 banned James from singing Live A Love Of Life on the Johnathan Ross show, claiming it was blasphemous. “Channel 4, the cutting edge of British television,” snorts Booth. “We asked which part they were referring to, and it was the whole thing. The guitar solo! The drum-sound from hell! It’s weird.” “You do a song like God Only Knows and we get quite a lot of letters from Christianity, most of them complaining. Then we get Franciscan friars coming to the concert in Folkestone, and they think it’s wonderful. They think it’s anti-church and anti-simplistic ideas about the nature of God, which it is.” Booth promises that he’ll stop writing about God now, especially since a nightmare he had in which he was chased through a cinema by fundamentalists. “People were getting up and saying ‘Oh, it’s Tim Booth, can I have your autograph?’ I was going ‘Shhhh! There’s fundamentalists behind me.’ Still, questions of faith have inspired some of Booth’s most striking imagery, like the lines from Seven which declare “God made love to me, soothed away my gravity, made me a pair of angel’s wings, clear vision and some magic things.” You don’t have to like it to see that Booth is pursuing his own highly personalised agenda. There’s a sense that the James saga has been a question of mind over matter. It’s certainly been a damn long one. Their first record, an EP called Jimone (pronounced Jim One) was released by Factory in November 1983, but it wasn’t until 1989’s Sit Down and the Gold Mother album of the following year that James finally began to drag themselves up into the light of substantial chart success. By then, they’d left Factory, said hello and goodbye to Sire and Rough Trade and ended up on Phonogram’s Fontana label. Never in the remotest danger of being an overnight sensation, James had come within a hair’s breadth of remaining a no-hit wonder. Factory never even sent them a copy of their Palatine compilation, which included some of James early strugglings. James are proud of their history, and will sometimes have a go at old songs like Folklore when the mood takes them. But while Booth ascribes the band’s laborious slog towards the big time as partly the product of his unconscious desire to “take hard routes and make like difficult for myself”, he has been realistic enough to jettison unnecessary baggage along the way. The original James manifesto included “no advertising” and “no interview” clauses, which have now gone the same way as Labour Party’s commitment to unilateral disarmament. “We did have a load of ideals that slowed us down,” Booth agrees. “I don’t believe in fixed morality. It does shift with time and different cultures, and the same goes for ideals. You end up looking a complete idiot, running along a beach and planting a flag, and there’s nobody there to see your wonderful stance.” The whole independent ethic, a sacred cow ten years ago, has begun to seem creaky and unworkable. or at least its white-boys-with-guitars dimension has. “The term ‘independent’ no longer means this chivalrous, knights of the round table, ethical bards society,” argues Booth. “It means a lot of different things. We should look at individual bands and work out whether they’re making music that reflects them, that says something about their lives. If you can relate to what they’re saying, then all fair and well. If you can’t, then leave them alone.” To some pundits, James always seemed like dogged indie no-hopers, terminally and hopelessly grey. This year’s Seven (their fifth album) came as a bold and coherent surprise, showing a band suddenly bursting out of its shell and at last finding the knob to turn monochrome into shimmering Technicolour. Inevitably, for a unit which had first found its feet in the narrow musical and intellectual confines of Indieland UK, this discovery of a new vocabulary (and consequent big new audience) prompted many diehard fans to accuse them of having turned into a stadium band a la Simple Minds. Booth’s whoops and moans at the end of Born of Frustration can indeed bring to mind Jim Kerr in his papal robes and silly hat – and indeed, Kerr’s observations about the throttling self-obsession of British indie rock are probably beginning to make a lot of sense to James now. But there’s more to Seven than mere size. “I think the whole stadium rock argument has come out of basically one song which is Born of Frustration” opines Booth, guzzling the large glass of something slimy and eau de Nile coloured which the waiter has just dumped in front of him. Fascinatingly, it looks like it has pondweed growing on the surface. “We kind of knew it,” he goes on. “Sonically, I can hear what’s been said. But it’s one song. You think, if they’re going to be that superficial, it pisses you off. The other song is Seven. We knew it, but we didn’t think it would colour everything else that people would miss the rest of it.” The extraordinary thing about James is that throughout their years of running to stand still, they remained almost exclusively a British phenomenon. Whereas the groups they’re beginning to be compared to, like Kerr’s bunch or U2, were forever jumping on planes and ferries to flog their wares around Europe or across the USA, James have stuck parochially to their home patch. Pure economies of scale were partly to blame; for years the band simply couldn’t afford to travel. After their abortive sojourn with Sire they found themselves £50,000 in debt, but kept their finances afloat by selling their own distinctive t-shirts. Their manager and Booth’s ex-lover, Martine McDonagh, designed the famous James flower logo, and their three year old son Ben is part of the bandwagon when James hit the road. Ingeniously, James persuaded a friendly bank manager to lend them the money to assemble the live album One Man Clapping. Rough Trade released it, but a prospective deal with the label fell apart when RT toppled into insolvency. The label paid for the band to record Sit Down and Come Home, but when the new-look seven-piece were halfway through making the Gold Mother album, it became clear that Rough Trade would not be in a position to stick to the terms they’d outlined. Luckily for the band, Fontana wanted them enough not only to sign them, but to write off their debts too. “We may have helped Rough Trade; they might then have been able to help us, and it might have worked,” sighs Booth. “But probably not. They were probably too far gone by that time. No, it’s worked really well, and we’re really happy.” While their home crowd has swelled sufficiently to warrant a show at the Alton Towers amusement park on the July 4th (their sole UK show this year), James lopsided form of success means that they still have a few mountains to climb in terms of overseas acceptance. In New York to play at Spin Magazine’s birthday party, halfway through a coast-to-coast string of small-to-medium sized dates, this is their first American tour. How can this be, given most bands propensity to head for Heathrow as soon as the ink dries on their contract? “That’s the whole James thing,” explains Booth. “Patience is a major part of James, and it was always ‘Wait until it’s really right, wait until there’s a demand’,” Booth explains all this as if he’s talking to someone for whom English is a second language. “Once the band had become a seven-piece, we’d have lost so much money coming over unless there was an audience that we had to wait. We could have come over on The Smiths Meat Is Murder tour, but we had personal commitments at home at the same time, and we decided we should honour those instead. We also thought those opportunities would come again every year – and then they didn’t.” Was there, then, some resentment when James saw their old Manchester contemporaries shooting past them to stardom during the Madchester craze? “There was a kind of envy,” Tim admits. Bassist Jim Glennie, a founder member of James who pre-dates even long-serving guitarist Larry Gott, joins us, impatient for avocados and carrot juice. “There was no animosity towards the other Manchester bands because we liked what they were doing,” Glennie maintains. “When you see a lot of the dodgy stuff that gets in the charts, that annoys you a lot more than the Happy Mondays or the Stone Roses getting there. But it was like ‘Bloody hell! They pushed in – we were here first.” “When the ones got through who we didn’t think were very good, there was jealousy there,” Booth admits. “With the Mondays and Roses, it was like: ‘That’s a good song, they deserve it’. But I liked the Joy Division / Fall period in Manchester – sarky, hard, awkward. I preferred that, really. The stress wasn’t so much on drugs either. Okay, Joy Division were probably taking drugs, but that wasn’t the be-all-and-end-all.” Bring A Gun was written in response to changes Booth observed going on in Manchester. “It seemed like the government’s full of old men, reacting to youth, frightened. The tabloids got behind it and everybody over-reacted. The raves seemed to become pretty seedy and dangerous by the end of it, but at the beginning they seemed quite innocent and a real breath of fresh air. I don’t think old men in government can handle that from youth. They get frightened. That’s what it was about.” James hardly seem harbingers of teen insurrection, but their New York show grows from a cautious beginning to a roaring climax, punched out at staggering volume. The many faces of James are on display from folk-rock to dance-trance, pop star (Sit Down) to rock juggernaut (Sound and Government Walls) There’s something in the oft-drawn analogy between Booth and Cliff Richard. There’s the same weird youthfulness, the beatific grin, the sense that you ought to listen to this music because it can only be good for you. And no, they don’t sound a bit like Simple Minds. | Aug 1992 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Super Channel Interview | Article, Interview | Tim : We don’t see it as success. We kind of felt that was a separate world and whenever we hit the worst periods business-wise, we’d be hitting the best periods music wise. So we’d be really high and we’d kind of leave it to Martine really and she absorbed a lot of that pressure and didn’t really tell us when we were nearly bankrupt and we’d get inclinations whenever she’d go away for a couple of weeks and all the cheques would bounce, we’d begin to get the drift that something was amiss. What happens is when you have success is that you’re in incredible demand everywhere whereas before, also the lifestyle before was probably more pleasurable. We could rehearse four or five days a week, we’d live in Manchester in England rather than around the world in hotel rooms which sounds great to people – “Oh, you travel around the world.” You know, you can go to a country and stay in a hotel room because you’re so exhausted because you had a flight at six in the morning, you know you’ve got concerts and interviews all day and get on the plane the next day and you haven’t seen the country at all. So in those early carefree days, a lot of the times in a lot of ways it was more fun, more free. It was all we knew as well, so we didn’t get too depressed about it. The good things that come with all this is choosing where your concerts are, knowing people are going to turn up, there’s going to be a receptive audience, being able to travel the world and then trying to demand days off so you do actually get to see what’s going on. And some money. Oh yeah. I forgot about that one. Performances are always completely different, one from another for us. Different sets, different moves, different everything. Some nights you can’t do it, some nights you can, most of the nights you can, some nights you go out there and try and sing personalised songs to 100 people you know. We still play small gigs, like abroad and things. And warm-ups. And some nights you go on and you’re not very good. You know you’re not communicating those songs, you can’t get through to the feeling and then some nights you can go before huge audiences and it feels like a very personal concert and the feedback suggests that you’re not fooling yourself. Jim : Yeah, I mean a good gig for us if one where we feel we do communicate personally to people, you know, and we’re not just standing there running through the motions and you can stand there and run through the motions whether there’s three of you or a dozen of you really. Tim : We hardly ever run through the motions. The usual reason for us running through the motions is when you’ve got such bad sound on stage that you daren’t take any risks because you can’t hear what you’re doing or what other people are doing. Or if you’re just so exhausted or things have happened in your emotional life, your own personal life, that do you in. And then you have to go on stage and you’re shattered you know. And it’s like you do this shellshocked performance and you hope that nobody notices and you can’t hide that kind of thing very well. But we quite like the vulnerability and the variety. I’m not really writing for other people, I’m writing for me and they’re an expression of my life, so the way I feel I’m being given a reaction by the audience that’s really touching rather than me giving out this wonderful thing to them, isn’t that nice of me. I get more like. I put some pretty personal disturbing experiences in those lyrics, things that I’m not sure people will accept, things that I have difficulty accepting about my own life and so when an audience accepts them, it’s like “God, they accepted it” and it’s very touching and that’s our reaction I think. I think the whole band can relate to that, you know, I think a lot of the lyrics everyone can relate to because I think the things I fear or problems within myself are quite common to a lot of people. Jim : Quite common to the rest of us Tim : And common to the audience judging by the audience’s reactions. It’s a real surprise. I don’t think you can write for other people, that’s a ….. oh, I’m sure somebody can do it but I don’t think I could. I think you’d spot the difference, you’d spot the line that sounded like it was there for effect, to affect somebody else rather than coming from my own personal experience. We’ve been moved by music to a point where you know you don’t feel alone. That seems to be the most important thing you can get, that you don’t feel alone and that’s really what Sit Down was about and after that, there’s not much more you can do. It does hit you often when a child dies or a child’s favourite song was this and it used to run round the house singing it and will you dedicate a song or come to a hospital when someone’s ill. When things like that happen, you get some really personal letters from some people and it’s like yeah it really winds you. It’s really like, it gives you a shock. We don’t get many people where we feel like they’re trying to use you as a crutch and therefore you don’t feel responsible in that way and you feel you try and do your best and it might be a small thing to you and it could mean a lot to someone else so you do it. Style and fashion in music I think shifts all the time. But if you have a song that’s from the heart then that is almost kind of beyond markets and a businessman sitting at home trying to create a song that he thinks will sell. Jim : We’ve always believed, mainly naively, that if people hear what we do then people will buy it. You know, the problem was getting people to hear it in the first place, getting it played on the radio and that kind of gave us the drive, the kind of arrogant self-belief that kept us going through the hassles we’ve had. So in a way, I don’t know…. No, I don’t think we’re that surprised because that’s what has kept us going in a way, that belief that, yeah, people will buy it. Once they hear it, people will buy this stuff. That’s if you sit back today and listen to how Sound fits into the charts when it did, it’s like…. Tim : That was a weird one really. Jim : That did really well. It’s like Number 9 at Christmas and competing with the likes of Cliff Richard and Rod Stewart and it’s just like that was weird. That doesn’t sound like it fits but we’ve got a weird view of what we do, always have done and we believe the first singles we released should have been big hit singles. Naively as it might have been. People look back at the last couple of years and say you’ve wallowed in the kind of nether regions for eight years and suddenly you became successful. Tim : It’s good fun wallowing in the nether regions. Jim : Yes it is Tim : We’re great experts at wallowing in the nether regions. Jim : Very good. It’s always been a movement, a progression, a forward movement and I hope that the day that finishes either musically or business wise, we’ll have the sense to kind of call it a day and not start seeing the other side of the hill. Don’t want to start playing smaller venues you know. So hopefully we’ve got the sense to stop at the peak. What that is, where that is I don’t know. Tim : Hopefully there’ll be some kind of flag. Jim : A pot of gold under the rainbow. | Aug 1992 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Neil Young Support Slot – Press Release | Article, Press Release | Fontana/Mercury artists James have secured an opening slot for nine west coast dates on the upcoming Neil Young acoustic tour. The normal seven-member band will be short one from their line-up (trumpeter Andy Diagram had already committed to another outside project) – as they play many of these US cities for the first time ever. James performances on this tour will be solely acoustic, giving them a chance to present slightly different interpretations of their songs from one of their usual plugged-in concerts, and allowing both old and new fans to experience their material in a whole new light. The group’s current album ‘Seven’ was released this spring and has garnered James an enormous amount of positive press attention as well as a Top 5 single at Modern Rock Radio with the track ‘Born of Frustration’. Additionally, the band completed their first American club tour in March which included many SRO shows. On a slightly larger scale in their native UK, James just recently played to a crowd of roughly 100,000 during the annual Glastonbury Festival in June as well as putting on a spectacular July 4th concert at Alton Towers which attracted a crowd of about 40,000 fans. After completing the dates with Neil Young, James will remain in the US and begin a non-acoustic fall tour with the Soup Dragons, Black Sheep and the Tom Tom Club which is scheduled to start in late September and continue through November. | Aug 1992 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Itinerary: 1992 Acoustic Tour | Tour Itinerary | This is the band itinerary from 1992 James Acoustic Tour. | Dec 1992 | tour-itinerary article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
London Town And Country Club – 16th December 1992 | Audio Archive, Live Performance |
SetlistOut To Get You / America / Ring The Bells / Johnny Yen / Goalies Ball / Riders / Sit Down / Next Lover / Maria / What's The World / Chain Mail / SoundSupportSpaceheadsMore Information & ReviewsSee attached press clippings. The show was recorded and a hour’s highlights broadcast on BBC Radio 1 Audio | Dec 1992 | audio-archive live-performance article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: A Sound Investment – Issue 2 | Fanzine | A Sound Investment was a James fanzine produced by California based Chris Zych and Lori Chin. Download this fanzine as a PDF. A Sound Investment is © copyright 1993 Chin, Turner, Zych Ltd. | Jan 1993 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Martine McDonagh Interview with Andy Diagram – Chain Mail | Article, Interview | A: When did you first see James? M: Well the first time I went to see them was on The Smiths tour and I stayed in the bar so long that I missed them. The first time I saw them was February 13th 1985 at the Hacienda. A : What did you like about them? M : I liked the rawness. I hadn’t seen a band like James before and they were just really exciting. I liked the songs, I thought they had really good songs, and I liked them all as people too. At that time I was doing radio promotion and they excited me. Most of the stuff I was working with was pretty normal sort of indie stuff and then James came along and they just seemed to have that extra something. A : So what happened in between seeing James and becoming their manager? M : After I saw them at the Hacienda I got really into them and I travelled with them a bit on the tour. We all got on really well and they asked me if I wanted to be their manager. A : What other jobs did you have, except for the radio promotion? M : I worked on a trade magazine, I did passenger surveys on the buses, sold health foods on the market, I worked for Our Price and after that I went to work for Rough Trade. A : And that got you into the music business? M : Yes. At Rough Trade I saw the side of a record distribution company. While I was there I met Brenda Kelly (who did Snub TV), and she wanted to start up an independent promotions company. She wanted it to be all women and she asked me and Liz Naylor to join her. A: Are there many women managing in the music business? M : There are more and more, but I haven’t actually met any of them. There’s probably only a handful. I was talking about this with someone the other day and we started to name them and we didn’t get on to two hands! Compared to the number of men there’s none really. A : Do you find that people in the business are surprised to fmd that it’s a woman running James? M : I get lots of letters and phone calls for Mr. McDonagh or Martin McDonagh and so on. A : How do you deal with that? M: It depends what mood I’m in. Sometimes I just say “There’s no-one here by that name”, sometimes I just ignore it and other times I’ll send a letter back and change the person’ s name to the feminine gender. It just depends. I find it a bit offensive – but that’s just the way things are. A: When you became manager of James, was it a major sort of set-up? M : When I first started I carried on doing the promotions for a bit, just to keep some money coming in. Eventually I decided to move up to Manchester. I was earning £35 a week on James. A : So you had faith that one day. ..? M : Yes, well I was at a point in my life where I just wanted to do something new. I wanted a big change, to move out of London. When I got to that point I really didn’t mind just giving everything up really -so that’s what I did. A : And did you imagine that it would come to this? M: Ummm, well I never thought I’d manage a band. I’d worked with a lot of managers when I was doing promotions and I always thought “what a shit job – I’m never doing that”. But James just seemed a bit different to me – they seemed to have something special and we clicked – so I was prepared to put up with a lot. A : How did you get into T-shirt production? M : Out of complete necessity really, to make some money for the band. A lot of them derived from the first one really – just having things split around the shirt. The flower came about when we decided to get some posters promoting Come Home and it looked awful – just “James Come Home” and a black and white picture, so I put a flower over the J just to make it more interesting and that sort of stuck really. But I’ve carried on with the T-shirts because it’s something different – I can think along different lines. A: Is it something that bands are finding more and more now that the music that doesn’t really make any money? M: Yeah, I think it’s important for any business to diversify and actually set up an off-shoot business that is related as little as possible to the parent business. That’s really why I set up the merchandising company to build as a company in its own right, which is what is happening now. Just so if James ever went under financially, there’s the support there, something else to look to for income. A: Would James T-shirts still sell without James? M : They did in the beginning to an extent. The whole idea behind it was to sell shirts that people would buy whether they knew who the band were or not, and I think that did happen, so maybe they would. I mean, the Princes Trust approached me to design a shirt for them, which I’ve just done and that’s along similar lines to a James T-shirt. I think a shirt should be able to sell itself. There’s nothing I hate more than a band T-shirt that’s just got the album sleeve in a square on the front, really badly printed – it’s just a waste of time. I feel sick when I go to a gig by massive artists like David Bowie or Michael Jackson and they obviously don’t give a damn about what they’re selling – they just want to make some money. I think it’s really unfair -because if people are expected to pay fifteen or twenty quid for something they should be able to want to wear it. A: Are you going to diversify on to other things? M : There’s a couple of things that I want to do personally. But for James at the moment, what with the recession and all we just need to keep working on the merchandising company and expanding that. We’ve also got the building where our offices are and that needs money spending on it. But I’m always looking for new things to do – that’s just the way I am really -I get bored easily. A: Do you believe in re-incarnation? M: yes I do, but I don’t know how or what the process is or anything like that, but I just think that if you look at everything else in nature it’s all cyclical. A : Are you religious? M : Not in the church sense. I’m quite a religious person in that I give myself strict rules by which I live and I have to watch that because I can get really rigid and inflexible. I can get narrow-sighted, I just go for something and don’t think too much about anything else. I suppose that’s religious in a way. I was into meditation and led a very fastidious lifestyle. I’m not like that now, I’m all over the place. A : How do you think meditation helped you? Has it made a difference? M : Yes, definitely. It made me much more objective about myself and about my life. It made me more aware of myself. I mean, if you sit in a room for six hours and you’re not supposed to move, you just have to confront everything – you can’t just get up and walk away if something comes into your head. If it’s something that is difficult to deal with you can’t change the subject. It’s taught me that you have to stay put and sort things out. I’d say that’s the best thing I got from it. I wouldn’t still be managing James if I hadn’t had to deal with that. A : Do you see a clairvoyant? M: Yes I do. A : Does that affect the decisions you make? M : No, I always fmd that they don’t tell you anything that you don’t already know. What they do is like meditation, they give you an objective viewpoint. It shows you a situation from a third person’s point of view. So you get outside of yourself and get an angle on something. It helps me make decisions but it’s never made a decision for me. A: Do you believe in “Past Life”? M : I’ve been regressed, but you can’t just say’ ‘this was my past life.’ Again I see it as showing you a situation that’s relevant to your present life in completely different circumstances, perhaps in a different culture or a different time, and it can help you find a way of dealing with something that is difficult. The “last lifetime” I saw was in France and I was a carpenter or something and I just decided at the age of fifty that I was ready to die so I went to the river to drown myself and I couldn’t do it. Anyway this French dandy was going by in his carriage so I stopped him. I got him to throw me in and I died. The good thing that came out of that was that I’m not scared of death anymore, because somewhere in my subconscious I went through the whole death process. I’m afraid of pain still, but I’m not frightened of death. A : If you weren’t manager of James, what would you have done? M: There’s lots of things that I still think I’d like to do. I always liked to dance and I’ve done dance courses. I’d also like to pursue drama a bit further – I think I’d make a better actor than a dancer. At the moment I’m quite into studying Entertainment Law because I’ve hit a certain level with management where I need something to push me on a bit more – to motivate me a bit more. A : What’s the next step for James? M: It’s usually planned jointly between me, Tim, Jim and Larry . The current plan is to get the next album recorded. Once this year is over and all the touring is out of the way, the band will go into the studio with Eno and hopefully get the album out for autumn. A : Is it going to be another big budget album? M : I hope not. I think maybe we spent too much money and time on the last one. I think the next one should be back to basics, back to James roots -but James as it exists now – not trying to emulate what was created all those years ago. | Feb 1993 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim’s Bunk Diary – Chain Mail | Article, Interview | I’m writing this in my bunk of our tour bus, 4am, somewhere near Allentown, Pennsylvania. We’re six weeks into (half way through) this American trip and surviving surprisingly well. For the first two weeks here we opened for Neil Young. We played in some spectacularly beautiful outdoor amphitheatres. Often carved into mountainsides overlooking canyons, gorges, rivers. One night in Eugene, Oregon, Neil Young was playing “Like A Hurricane” while maybe 20 miles in the distance, lightning strikes, unaccompanied by rain or thunder, lit up the landscape. A lighting man’s dream. Because he was performing two hour solo acoustic shows, Neil Young asked us to perform acoustically too. Dave’s drum kit was stripped down to three pieces while Mark gave up the familiarity of his keyboards for an accordian and melodica (A melodica looks like a child’s keyboard into which Mark blows through a plastic tube. In a Radio 1 interview I told a DJ it was made out of parts from a vacuum cleaner and an enema kit – we call it a colonica.) We had never played a full acoustic set to an audience before, had only two rehearsals and were totally unprepared for our first gig. Neil Young’s audience are thirty / forty somethings and famously unimpressed by support acts. The first show at Red Rocks was before 10,000 people and was wonderful. The venue was so beautiful, hot and laid back that we could play a set of slow ambient songs ‘Top Of The World’, ‘Really Hard’, ‘Bells’ etc, the sound on stage was so pure and so quiet that we could really hear each other and improvise. It freed us and took us to a new area of musicianship. Dave seemed especially free from the tyranny of the snare and bass drum. After some weird tribal drumming in ‘Sound’ he would often receive a standing ovation. The tour with Neil Young was so magical that when we joined the Soup Dragons tour we continued to play acoustically, to the confusion of the record company who asked us if our equipment was broken. Update 1st February 1993 Some of you probably witnessed the acoustic sets, as we decided to play them at home. We were very happy with these shows although totally knackered by the end, having come from America via Japan with only a few days to recover from jetlag. After the London gig some music journalists told us that the editors of their papers were only sending journalists “hostile to James” to review us and that had been policy for 1992. This explained a lot – particularly some fairly vicious Alton Towers reviews. It also explains the cyclical nature of the British music press who strive to make a band fashionable, then turn on them. The reason we’ve tried to keep a distance from them. Thank you for keeping an open mind and ear to our music. Tim | Feb 1993 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Support Neil Young – NME News | Article, Interview |
JAMES have announced their only major UK date of the year supporting NEIL YOUNG at Finsbury Park on July 8. The Manchester band,who have just finished their new Brian Eno-produced album, cancelled plans to take the summer off so they can play the show. A source close to the band told NME,”They supported Neil twice on their US acoustic tour last year and they are just doing this because they love him.” No final release date has been set for their LP. Neil Young,who will be backed by BookerT & The MGs at Finsbury Park, has also confirmed his Slane Castle show along with Van Morrison and Pearl Jam in Ireland to take place on July 10. | Jun 1993 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Eno’s Wah Wah Notes | Article, Era: Laid / Wah Wah | 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. | Jun 1993 | article era-laid-wah-wah era | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Kevin Westerberg on the Laid Cover – I Music | Article, News | from I Music Interview with photographer Kevin Westenberg This James photo is an extremely striking photo that I’ve always admired because you chose to put it very small but you also chose to put it in the book. KW: The main reason that I put it in was because I was trying to decide, I had to go through everything and decide, what types of work people know me for vs. what things I really like. That was one of the albums that got big in America and because this thing is being slightly geared towards America, as well as England and Europe, I had to make a decision between all these things about what to put in. Originally I was just going to put in totally obscure things that only I like, but then I thought well that kind of defeats the purpose — you’re denying people photos that people might know you for. So I kind of compromised on this, and that ended small for various reasons having to do with layout and not really needing to put it much bigger because people have seen it as well. And it worked well with this with this sort of layout. Do you like that photograph? KW: Yeah, I do. I think color wise and compositionally it works. My favourite part is the white light on Tim Booth’s feet, because he’s the singer and he’s sort of the leader. He’s barefoot, so it’s kind of a Jesus image. I think it works compositionally as well. It’s a strange thing — I didn’t think it would work when we did it. I was pretty much against the dresses. I just thought, “Well, we’ll try a few and see what it’s like.” Inside I was thinking this is really naff. But we were in Marseilles, and it’s beautiful out, everyone’s happy, and it worked. | Jun 1993 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Get Laid And Improvise With Eno – Melody Maker | Article, News |
JAMES’ singer Tim Booth has been talking exclusively about the bond’s new album, “Laid” , which is scheduled for release in September. He has also revealed that during James’ six weeks in Real Life Studios, Bath, with producer Brian Eno, they recorded a double LPof impravised material, which will be released early next year. “Eno was wonderful towork with,” says Booth. ‘We’ve always wanted to. We first approached him when we were making our very first LP, ‘Stutter’, and he told us that he was busy for the next few years, but he’d get back to us. And he did – he got back to us!” Booth considers “Laid” a departure for James. He says, “It’s very different, very naked, big, but also vulnerable.” He describes the LP as less elaborate than the band’s last album, “Seven”, a development he says was heavily influenced by the James acoustic tour across America last year, supporting Neil Young. The idea for the improvised double album began in the studio, when James found themselves recording songs ata surprisingly prolific rate. “At one stage, we had 38 songs, and I had three lyrics,” says Booth. “This put a lot of pressure on me. So we got two studios going at once, and we’d just go into the second studio and play, I’d improvise a lyric, and then we’d just knock it into shape later. It’s the most exciting and rewarding thing that James hove done for a while.” Booth has also talked about becoming friendly with Neil Young during James’ support tour, and suggesting to the grizzled one that they should work together. “He said he’d love to do it, but he didn’t think his patience was up to it!” Booth reports. James release a single, “Sometimes” , described by Booth as “like magical realism”, on Fontana on August 31 | Jul 1993 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Still Folking Around – NME News | Article, Interview |
JAMES’ new single ‘Sometimes’ has been scheduled for an August 31 release, shortly followed by their Brian Eno-produced LP. The new LP, recorded in the spring and due out on September 20, is expected to be showcased at this Sunday’s slot supporting Neil Young at London Finsbury Park. Band frontman Tim Booth says playing acoustically in the US with Neil Young and working with Brian Eno has produced a “more simple, more naked” sound. He adds, “We’ve been doing first takes rather than seventh takes in the studio and we’re much happier with this kind of spontaneity. There’s a lack of fussiness about the way Eno works. Most producers aim for perfection in the studio but that’s a dirty word in Eno’s book.” Besides the ‘Sometimes’ single – which harks back to the band’s early lndie folk style -the LP is expected to include new songs ‘Out To Get You’, ‘PS’, ‘Raid’, ‘Lester Piggott’ and ‘Carousel’. Many of the tracks were unveiled at a low-key date in Bath last March. | Aug 1993 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sometimes – Channel 4 The Beat – August 1993 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsJames perform Sometimes live in the studio | Aug 1993 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Laid In Italy – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
JAMES evolution from bedsit folk-punk innovators to fully fledged international stadium band is now complete. They began the Eighties as peers of The Smiths, ended the decade as rivals to The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays for the Manchester crown, and entered the nineties with their biggest hits to date – the perennial crowd-satisfying ‘Sit Down’ and ‘Come Home’. But success has a price, as The Stud Brothers found out when, on the eve of the release of a new single (‘Sometimes’) and album (‘Laid’), they travelled to Italy to discuss fame, fortune and f**k-ups with singer, writer, philosopher and martial artist Tim Booth. We’re in the clouds talking to Tim Booth “We always knew we’d be successful, so it was never necessary to go looking for that. And we always knew we were good musically, even when we were crap. We’ve never been in a hurry.” We’re 36,000 feet up, just about as far from down-to-earth as it’s possible to get without some chemical rocket fuel. Booth, impossibly frail, infinitely polite, disarmingly honest (often, we suspect, to a fault), neurotic, sharp, funny and occassionally disturbingly lost, like he’s drifted off, wanted to talk to us on the plane. Like, get the work out of the way so we can hang out together and maybe get to know each other on a different level. He says that “hang together” just like real pop stars do. We’re on our way to Milan, Italy’s cultural capital, home of the fashion industry and, to many minds, a hotbed of ponciness. James are set to play with Neil Young, just as they did three days ago at Finsbury Park. There they were fantastic, opening with an acoustic version of Sit Down and building to a monumental, electronically enhanced Gold Mother. These days James sound like such a big band. “You spent the best part of 10 years f**king and being f**ked about. What does success mean to you?” “For me, the word ‘success’ is asssociated with the word ‘trap’. What we want is respect and to be outside the cyclical popularity of the media where you’re okay, then you’re not, then you are again. Like Neil Young. Noone can touch him, He can turn up anywhere, anytime and a load of people will turn up just to see what he’s doing. He’s even in a position where he can do four or five crap LPs and people are still interested. Larry (Gott, James guitarist) is well into that. He’s looking forward to our series of crap LPs. “I’m not so sure about that but it would be a success, to get out beyond the treadmill into hyperspace. And to get to the point where I wouldn’t have to do any interviews at all. All those people in all those places, all asking the same questions and talking to you on the same level of dialogue. It’s like a ‘Groundhog Day’ nightmare. I’d like us to get beyond all that. There’s a certain thing about us, a certain spirit you can get from us live sometimes which is always changing and should always be interesting because it’s real. We connect as people. Sometimes it’s not right, the sound in the hall is wrong or the audience reaction is too automatic, the subtlety is lost and we end up sounding like some big clod-hopping rock band. Then we don’t connect like that. But we have to try and it has to be real because human beings are not a mystery to me when they make up images for themselves and fake it. They’re a mystery when they’re standing there quite naked and doing what they do. The mystery comes when they reveal themselves.” Do you think many performers these days are prepared to reveal themselves? “Not many. Mary Margaret O’Hara does, but that’s almost too much to bear, that kind of nakedness. I saw her once when she actually broke down, she couldn’t sing for about 20 minutes. I’d had her ‘Miss America’ LP for a few years and loved it, but I never realised how directly it related to her. She came out and sang ‘Body’s In Trouble’ and you could see that her body actually was. I just started crying. It was really bad because we’d just done a concert and we’d been recognised by all these people, so I pulled myself together. And then she started again and started me off again. “I really didn’t think I’d make it through to the end. Then she lost it completely so I had a chance to take a breather. But even then it was brilliant. She looked like she could handle not being able to sing for 20 minutes, that she could handle whatever happened to her onstage. It was a wonderful acceptance of her own state of being and that’s what made it not a freakshow – you went with her. It was fantastic, one of the most amazing performances I’ve ever seen.” Do you think its possible for you to move people as profoundly as that? “Well, I don’t often crack up as substantially. I don’t think I’m at the same level of vulnerability in my life, anyway. I have been that way on stage but I don’t think it’s as apparent that I’m drowning, not waving. With Mary Margaret O’Hara, you get the feeling she’s drowning and waving at the same time. But I get a bit like that. At Finsbury Park, I was really f**ked up, I had a really bad night and I had to do a long session of yoga and Tai Chi and martial arts before I could go on.” Martial arts? “Yeah, it’s funny. We’ve been described as wimps for years, but most of the band members have done Tai Chi and martial arts on and off for five to six years. Two ex-members were put inside for GBH. We’re actually quite hard.” Why do you do those exercises? “To calm me down. I’m always attracted to what I’m frightened of. That’s one reason I go onstage, because it still terrifies me. I have to spend ages doing the exercises before I calm down enough to do it. Yes, it’s Tim Booth in James are like Henry Rollins shock. “It’s something I discovered on the Neil Young tour (James supported Neil Young across America), that Tai Chi actually centres me in the belly and I can do a really fierce set, right from the guts. It was an acoustic tour so I didn’t dance, I didn’t move, I just really wound it up and exploded only at points. Tai Chi enabled me to do that, it gave me not control but direction. I could really concentrate on the rage. “That was something we learned from Neil Young. We watched him almost every night for 20 dates. His concentration was amazing, so was the way he seemed to demand you concentrate at that level. There’s this one track he did on the piano that could almost have come from the Julee Cruise LP, really hypnotic. You could imagine that if Richard Clayderman had done it, you’d have hated it, but this big John Wayne trucker singing such a naked love song in a high voice is devastating. He had most of us in tears.” Booth originally joined James not so much to sing as to dance. He was sort of prototype Bez. Latterly, due to his constantly injuring himself onstage, he’s begun to take dancing very seriously indeed. You have a dance teacher, don’t you? “Yes, I found somebody who teaches an amazing form of dance which is linked to shamanism, which is a filthy word in rock. It’s really about finding your own natural form of dance. The teacher is a woman called Gabrielle Roth whom I met through an amazing series of synchronistic circumstances, really bizarre, and we’ve been really close ever since.” The synchronistic circumstances are, more or less, as follows. Tim visited the Manchester clairvoyant he (and by the way most of Manchester’s gun-toting gangsters) uses to divine his future. She told him that, should he see a sign of crossed feathers, he’d know he was in the right place. While touring America with Neil Young, Booth searched for the sign amongst Young’s native North American artefacts but found nothing. Young himself had no idea what it meant. At the time, Booth was thinking of taking dance lessons and, via a friend of a friend, discovered Gabrielle Roth. Above Roth’s doorway in America, says Booth, unbeknown to Roth, who’d lived and worked there for 12 years, was the sign of the crossed feathers. Roth’s theory of dance is based around five metaphysical compass points – the first three being the Female Flow, the Stacatto Male and, between them, Chaos. It’s in Chaos, says Booth, that he found his natural dance. So Tim, what’s the idea? “The idea is to get in touch with your body. Your body is in the Here and Now and then there’s lots of things going on in the different parts of it and I think if you get in touch with it and release those things, you find out a lot about yourself. I don’t really know how much I should say about this because I hate the idea that it might come out as something contrived and I know I’ll be asked about it again and again in a much more superficial way and it’ll be really irritating. “But basically, you do days and days of dancing with her, days and days until you’re completely lost. You get into some really strange states. At the very least, it’s helped me to warm up before I go on stage, and to centre myself. Anything can happen to you during the day, you could have a row, anything. And you can’t wipe that out before you go onstage, it all goes with you. If you connect the mood to your body, you’re fine. But if you fight, you’re f**ked, and sometimes you’re so f**ked you’re completely cut off from everybody. “That’s the ultimate bad trip. It’s incredibly lonely. And what tends to happen is that I’ll hurt myself trying to break through. I’ll do something violent to myself, force it. I get to the point where I have to scream but I can’t. That’s why I do these exercises beforehand, to connect myself with what’s wrong with me, why I’m so f**ked up on that day, and I can take it onstage and use it. “That’s what I did at Finsbury Park and I needed that because, like I say, I’d had such a bad night. When I was younger I was an insomniac and I got rid of that for a long time, but it comes back now and again. You just lie there getting angrier and angrier with yourself. It’s horrible.” A great many of your songs are about being f**ked up. Are you really as f**ked up as you’d have us believe? “Well, I’m f**ked up. Everybody is f**ked up. It’s a matter of finding ways in which you can live with it, so it’s comfortable rather than being overwhelming. And dance and Tai Chi are the ways that work for me. There might be a cure but I think part of the cure is acceptance. The other thing is that it’s part of my creativity. I went to see a therapist about three years ago and he said to me after about the fourth session, ‘I’m sure I could cure you but I don’t know what this would do to your writing’, so he stopped going. “Same with David Lynch. And look what’s happened to John Cleese (laughs). No, he’s still quite funny. He’s just not as dangerously out of control funny as he used to be. I stopped going. I decided it wasn’t the kind of therapy I needed. I wanted to feel better and still write good songs.” Why did you feel the need to go into therapy in the first place? “I really just needed someone to talk to and to unravel stuff in my private life that’d just got too painful to deal with (Just prior to the writing and recording of ‘Seven’, Booth split from long time love and James manager, Martine). I’m also very curious. I’ve always been interested in that kind of thing.” Tai Chi, martial arts, therapy, dance workshops – shouldn’t your music be therapy enough? “Well, it all goes hand in hand. I love music and anyone I’ve ever been interested in who’s been in a band did it because they love music. And if you genuinely love it and pursue it, really go into it in depth, follow the love and passion within music that’s moved you, then you will find out about yourself. “I agree music is therapy in itself – it is, you have no choice. You put so much of you into something and then it stands there as a thing in itself, as something you look at. It has to tell you something. It might be painful, it might be weird, but it is a reflection and it will tell you something. The rest is all a way of making that, me, more effective.” The Sometimes EP is in a small sense a return to your roots. It’s folkier, bluesier and it comes as something of a surprise after the excesses of ‘Seven’. Can we expect the same from the album ‘Laid’? “The album’s very stripped and naked. People have even asked us if it’s acoustic, but it isn’t. Again, that’s something we learnt from Neil Young. When we finished that tour, we had to continue playing around America for another couple of months and we kept doing acoustic shows. They were supposed to be electric, but we did them acoustic because we loved it so much. The record company went crazy and threatened to withdraw money from the tour, but they all came to this really ferocious show we did in New York and came up and apologised to us afterwards. “So I think it prepared us for being more simple. ‘PS’ for instance (third track on Sometimes – Booth at his tempestuous neurotic best, perhaps comparing himself to Patti Smith) we recorded on an eight-track a year ago and couldn’t better. We just chopped it down from eight minutes and it still worked. Like I say, it’s a very stripped down, naked thing.” According to Larry Gott, ‘Laid’ was the result of a series of jamming sessions presided over by Brian Eno. Anything that didn’t work immediately was put to one side, distorted and rearranged by the band, Eno and his assistant Marcus. Consequently, there is a double James album – described by Tim as “quite industrial, like nothing we’ve ever done, actually like nothing anyone’s ever done” – ready for release early next year. Tim, you talk a lot about nakedness, by which we presume you mean nakedness of the soul. It all sounds very self-obsessed. Are you one of those people who believe their emotions are bigger and more important than other people’s emotions? “I think probably everybody thinks that their emotions are bigger than other people’s. But, realistically, I don’t think my emotions can be bigger, otherwise noone would understand what I was talking about. I’d sound like I come from another planet.”
We’re in a restaurant in Milan, just off the Piazza Doumo (that’s Cathedral Square, dopey) where James will have their picture taken eating ice cream. The cathedral, a supremely gothic pincushion of spires and gorgoyles, was a preposterous undertaking, it took hundreds of years to build. It now rates as one of the wonders of the world. Ambition and patience paid off. We’re talking to guitarist Larry Gott, bassist Jim Glennie and Tim Booth. Both Jim and Tim are eating fish. Only Larry is now a vegetarian. We’re discussing James comeback because, despite the fact it’s only been 18 months since ‘Seven’, ‘Laid’ and the ‘Sometimes’ EP do feel like a comeback, like there’s an awful lot riding on them, like James have a lot to prove. A popular notion among music hacks is that, since Manchester was consigned to the dustbin of history, James have lost their audience. Larry : “It’s true that people have been telling us that our audience, the people who bought ‘Sit Down’ and the last album, just aren’t there anymore. I don’t know how anyone could tell. I don’t think they’ve gone, but neither do I think they’re anxiously anticipating the next parcel to fall from the James table. I hope people like the album but more important to us is that we’ve done something we think is good that people won’t expect.” Jim : “Live, it’s always been like that. When we headlined Reading, we did ‘Sit Down’ in the middle just to blow away the cliché of how things are supposed to be, and that pissed off a lot of people. But it’s supposed to be challenging, for us and the audience.” Have you ever had the feeling, especially after the success of ‘Sit Down’ and ‘Gold Mother’ that you could just walk out onstage and fart into the microphone and people would still love it, because it was you? Tim : “No, not at all” Larry : “I have. I know what you mean.” Tim : “You have? Jesus” Larry : “No, I’m not being arrogant. It’s just some of that adulation, the reaction you get sometimes when you walk on, or you get a really big cheer after you’ve done a song really badly, I think ‘Oh, they shouldn’t have done that. It wasn’t worth it.'” Tim : “Yeah, it can be a bit weird. When we played the Free Trade Hall, they were singing along all the way through. It was our acoustic set and they sang every word so there were no silences. It was like a great party but they weren’t listening to what we were doing. When we did it in New York, there were people stagediving and we had to stop it. There was just two of us doing this quiet, quite political song and people were bodysurfing. It was very strange.” Back in the clouds, at 36,000 feet, Tim Booth tells us he first fell in love when he was 12. The girl, Diane, was from Milan, 13 and six inches taller than him. He met her on the Tuscan island of Elba, on a family holiday. He followed her to the beach where he and her frequented and sat close by for more than three hours, trying desperately to pick up the courage to talk to her. Eventually he did. He asked her out to dinner. At 12. She accepted. She was late. A waiter, noticing Tim’s evident distress, went round to the girl’s hotel on his motorbike and delivered her to a relieved and besotted Booth. The romance was tantalisingly brief, just one kiss. A week later, returning to England via Milan, Tim called on her. She dumped him. In a cab now, on the way to Milan, Tim tells us about his second love. He was 20, at college, and so was she. This time he followed her to a laundrette. He got chatting to her, they got on, she liked him, they kissed. But she only wanted to be friends. He waited in vain hope. Some friends got her into heroin – nice f**king friends. Tim, frail, polite, but highly trained in the martial arts, went round and threatened them. The girl escaped. She’s now a well-known contemporary dancer. As is Tim’s present love. In the hotel, Tim talks football. Apparently, he attended Manchester United’s championship winning game at Old Trafford. After the game, the 40,000 crowd sang along to ‘Sit Down’, then burst into an impromptu series of anti Leeds United chants. Tim, polite to a fault, didn’t dare mention that he is a life long fan of Leeds United. He asks us not to mention it. But we think it is important. It’s our contention that James began as a bad band and took, in pop terms, several centuries to become a great band. They are now a very great band. The new EP opens with ‘Sometimes’, where a rough canter of a beat meets a furious, frustrated strum as Booth casts himself as a vagabond wanderer, taking notes on the travails of a young romantic in a rain-washed urban playground. The second track, ‘Raid’, sees the guitars embellished by a Hammond organ and is a melancholy celebration of love in the afternoon that itches with nervous obsession and piercing paranoia. ‘PS’ which may or may not be about Patti Smith but is almost certainly about Booth (‘You liar, you liar, how I love to be deceived’ he screams) is a glorious moody Cooder slide. ‘Out To Get You’ is too fantastically maudlin to write about without running the risk of electrocuting yourself as you weep onto the word processor. It’s unbelievable to think that this is the same band that ten years ago were scrabbling around in the refuse looking for a tune. Tim, are you proud of everything you’ve done? “I’m really proud of it all. Some things are more listenable than others, like I find ‘Strip-Mine’ more enjoyable than ‘Stutter’ even though there’s some great ideas on ‘Stutter’. It’s like the PJ Harvey record. You may not want to listen to it all the time, or even all the way through, but there’s something you respect about it, you can tell the people are looking for something, really putting themselves on the line. “That’s how I look at it. There are some LPs that come together, they get respect and they get a big audience. They’re the real rare ones. You’re lucky if you get one of those.” Have you ever made one of those? “I think the next one is it. I think that’ll be it.” | Aug 1993 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
What’s Eating You? – Select | Article, Interview |
How sussed is that poet in the window? The one with the waggy psyche? A reborn Tim Booth opens up on famemania, libido therapy, Brian Eno and giving Kurt Cobain a throat massage Tim Booth stands on the corner of 49th and Broadway; and he’s grinning. All around New York is putting on one of those shows that you’re sure are just being done for your benefit. It’s 88 degrees, a burst fire hydrant sends plumes of water coursing onto the sidewalk, loping youths in Onyx t-shirts give each other the high-five in subway entrances while taxi drivers give each other the finger. In Italian delis the World Gestural Olympics are in full-swing, in particular Men’s Shrugging and Team Forehead Slapping. Booth casts a happy eye around Time Square. “I just love this, don’t you?” he confesses. On the face of it, there’s not a lot of common ground between James and New York. The one brash, cut-throat arrogant and unyielding, the other warm, humane and liberal. But maybe there’s more to it than that. Mott The Hoople’s Ian Hunter said New York was like meeting Muhammed Ali head on and slowly realising he was quite a nice guy. Maybe being upfront is one thing James and New York have in common. What you see is what you get. Tim Booth is very aware that this admirable honesty and lack of guile is one of the band’s most immediate characteristics. And you get the feeling he doesn’t like it. “Has being honest done us any good, that’s what I want to know? Does it make you hip?” he asks with heavy cynicism. He’s got a point. Who would have thought that silly old Bono could have made himself cool just by donning the horns and the Alcan foil jacket &ldots; and not telling the truth. Halfway through a personal-ish question, he looks up with a mixture of amusement and suspicion. “Why exactly do you want to know this?” The 90s have been strange to James. In the last three years, James have translated the good reviews of the 80s into healthy sales, Hit albums. A number two single. Stadium gigs. Unfortunately they lost the good reviews. Chiefly because of the stadium gigs. Like all geeky maladjusted inadequates, rock journalists are obsessed with cool. And James have never been knowingly cool. Around their time of ‘Gold Mother’, the sheer weight of their admirers’ numbers, plus a kind of weird honorary association with the Madchester scene, meant that they could not be ignored. But by ‘Seven’ the penknives were out. James apparent transmutation into a new rock corporation, spreading good vibes and universal beneficence was greeted with a barely concealed sneer. Tim Booth is sanguine. “I stand by ‘Seven’. It’s a good record. And if people have got any problem with it they can fuck off. If it was up to me I just wouldn’t do press anymore. But I have a responsibility. James pays a lot of people’s mortgages. I can completely understand Eddie Vedder saying he’s never doing another interview. It’s not entirely the journalist’s fault either. You make certain disclosures and they seem natural in the flow of a conversation and then you see them in print and they look awful and you can’t believe you’ve said them, they’re crass and embarrassing.” So is honesty the best policy? Tim Booth has his doubts. On the other hand it can be very unhip. But on the other it makes for a refreshing kind of pop star. With his plaintive voice, lack of defensive mystique and even-handed charm. Booth is a refreshing kind of pop star. The kind you’re not likely to see wearing leather keks at Stringfellows. As the band’s lyricist, Booth’s concerns are writ large throughout James’ music. It’s tempting to see these songs as kind of protacted therapy. “Well I suppose there must be an element of that. On ‘Seven’ and ‘Gold Mother’ I was trying to come to terms with the disintegration of my relationship. (Booth had until then been the partner of Martine, still James manager. They have a young son, Ben.) In that sense I suppose that was a fairly public piece of therapy, a sort of slow essential process. “I wrote a song like ‘Walking The Ghost’ because of a whole load of stuff that was going on, not least being that I actually lived in a house with a ghost in it who used to rap on the walls. But it’s a mistake to assume that all my lyrics are autobiographical. It’s not that straightforward. I’m kind of loath to go too deeply into what they’re about, because you suddenly nail down what people’s interpretation has to be. I get amazing, moving letters from people who’ve interpreted them in their own way and that’s fine. Once a year, I play Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’ and it always devastates me. Each time I hear things she’s saying, for the first time. I was talking to Lenny Kaye about it and I said I love the part where she sings ‘Twist her leg’ and he said, Actually Tim, it’s ‘twistolette'” Booth admits that part of his reluctance to dissect himself and his lyrics is for the potential embarrassment, both to himself and those close to him. Nevertheless, some songs cry out for some kind of explanation. ‘One Of The Three’ is, for instance, a fairly direct critique of Jesus. Isn’t it? “Oh, you think so?” laughs Booth “Well, yes there’s a bit of that. But it was also about the release of the hostages. It’s about Terry Waite. I mean he looks like a biblical prophet. Did you see when he was released? He went straight up to this podium and addressed the crowd before he went to his family. So pompous. It’s that crazy Christian thing about the value of sacrifice. Imagine being changed to a radiator with him for five years. Compare that to McCarthy and Keenan who were so human. I found McCarthy’s release very moving because of Jill Morrell and lots of things. It was about individuals. And stories like that have a kind of mythic quality because they strike a chord within individuals. “There are terrible murders every day, but the case of that young woman who was murdered walking her young son on Wimbledon Common tapped into the national psyche at some very deep level. Well, anyway, as far as John McCarthy goes, I was in Manchester and was so overcome that I had to go into a café and sit down &ldots; and Black Francis was there who I sort of know. So I had to make polite conversation when I was on the verge of tears. It was very odd.” Christianity and people who think they know best in general get pretty short shrift from Booth. One of Gold Mother’s highlights was his ringing denunciation of televangelists on ‘God Only Knows.’ “I have a suspicion of gurus and the like because I’ve been taken in so many times. You can see it happen in pop music. People get elevated into things beyond any perspective. I’ve known Morrissey and I’ve seen it happen to him. We did Top Of The Pops with Nirvana and Kurt Cobain was so nervous he couldn’t sing. He ended up singing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in this bizarre strangulated voice. It was pure terror. But because there’s an industry at work turning Kurt Cobain into something superhuman, it was read as something terribly significant and important, something very cool. He just hadn’t done much TV, you know. He was nervous. He lost his voice. I offered to give him a throat massage but he declined.” As soon as the word ‘massage’ leaves his lips, Tim visibly tenses. He has forgotten himself. He has a whole range of interests in different philosophies and therapies which he deliberately censors from his conversation for fear of being thought as ‘new age’. It’s an understandable fear but sad because it shuts down a lot of interesting areas. It can take some reassurance that you’re not going to run a Loony Booth and His Fruitcake Remedies – Must We Fling This Filth At Our Grunge Kids-style piece. For the record, he’s into a variety of physical deficiencies, dance, meditation and Tai Chi and has been involved with Reichian therapy (an entertaining philosophy which places sexual repression at the root of all human unhappiness, and counsels lots of guilt-free shagging as the remedy. Its founder Wilhelm Reich was locked up in America as a communist sex fiend – Modern Philosophy Editor) and the often painful, emotionally draining, heavy-duty massage known by the innocent enough name Rolfing. Despite his fears, this actaully makes him more rather than less interesting. It certainly beats owning a trout farm. Still how are things progressing. Is he happy? He looks shocked. “Ermm, I don’t know. You tell me. How content do I look?” Pretty content. “Actually I feel quite edgy,” he chuckles. “I have to work quite hard at staying calm. I have a few, errr, demons. But I’m working them out. Things are going well. Things look good for the band. I’m thinking of doing a PhD in Drama, Last August was a turning point. I moved into a lovely little house, I met my girlfriend and then Brian Eno rang&ldots;” In a dark cool room, a score of storeys above the melting New York pavements, an intimate gathering – James, their wives and girlfriends, managers and American press types – are watching rough edits of the new James video. Guitarist Larry Gott is here and clearly over last year’s mugging incident (when in Los Angeles making a video for ‘Born of Frustration’, he was robbed at gunpoint and, terrified, immediately caught the next plane home, leaving the band to it). It rather put him off the Land of Opportunity for a while. Despite the band’s reservations, the video is a striking affair; the band is performing their new single ‘Sometimes’, up to their chests in an unruly sea, lashed by storm-tossed winds and manfully wrestling their instruments from the salty surf. At the song’s climax, there’s the added emotive weight of a whole chorus of multi-tracked Brian Enos, austere, dignified and pretty damn catchy. Provisionally entitled ‘Lester Piggott’, because of the driving racing quality of the sound, it’s a great pop noise. So let’s go back to the Brian Eno phone call. James had wanted to work with him as early as their first album but he had been busy. “He told us to call back in a couple of years. Well last August he called us. Said he’d love to do the record. We were delighted.” The results are spectacular. Whatever your opinion of ‘Seven’, the new album ‘Laid’ represents a significant shift. Spartan, dreamlike and haunted, it’s the best possible reposte to doubters. The germs of the record’s singular personality lie in two sources, and over both of them hangs the shadow of a rock titan. First, there’s Eno’s benign influence. Then there’s the Neil Young connection. Last year, Young was looking for an acoustic band to accompany him on his American tour. He came across James and has now become a champion of sorts, insisting, for instance, on their appearance at his recent Finsbury Park gig. “We haven’t told many English journalists. When Sonic Youth got the Neil Young support, they mentioned it in every bloody interview. Also, they got booed off quite a lot, according to the road crew. Whereas we, ahem ahem, went down pretty well” says Jim Glennie. Without Jim Glennie, James might be called Trevor. Or Alan. Or Gudrun. As a teenager he gave his name to the fledgling band. Now over a decade later he happily admits that his life had been unalterably shaped by this group. For one thing he might have ended up in jail. “I was a bit of a bad lad at 15. A football hooligan. Fighting was my fun. Nicking cars, that sort of thing. I think I would have ended up in jail. In a way, I’m a bit sorry I didn’t go. But then the band changed all that. I’ve gone through a lot of things. Getting into drugs, dodgy meditation groups, getting married, having kids, then that marriage ending. I suppose historically Tim and Larry and myself are the core of the band in that we’ve been there the longest. “To tell you the truth, I probably get on better with the other three or at least have as much to do with them. But they’re happy to leave a lot up to the three of us. To be honest, there’s a lot of the business stuff that they’re quiet happy to be out of.” The band has recently slimmed down from a septet to a sextet with the departure of trumpeter Andy Diagram to the twilight world of anarcho-jazz. “He has his own things he wanted to do. He told us after ‘Seven’ that he’d tour the album but after that he wanted to go. Basically he was fed up with touring because he missed his girlfriend, which is fair enough. We tried hard to talk him out of it but he wouldn’t have it. Still it was the most amicable split in James history.” Glennie gets most animated about working with Eno, whose memory he is still basking in. “It was incredibly liberating, He encouraged us to improvise, encouraged us to use takes where we didn’t know what we were doing, He made us realise that this imperfection was a good thing. We began to let go of songs much earlier in their life. It also helped that we hadn’t toured the songs to death beforehand. A lot of them are quite vulnerable, and if we’d taken them on the road sheer panic would have made us beef them up. But they’ve remained in this kind of natural state. He had this reputation as a bit of a cod academic, which is entirely untrue. Every night I would get a bit tipsy cos he’s a bit of a wine buff and he wouldn’t mind us taking the piss a bit. We used to refer to him as Sir Brian. In fact, we got so dependent on him that on the days he wasn’t there we had to appoint Larry as honorary Brian to stand in for him. The obvious question. Would you like to work with him again? Jim pulls a sheepish face. “Well of course, but that would be expecting too much. We recorded a whole other album while we were there, a double album in fact. It’s the kind of record that should make people say, Is this James? Very experimental, quite industrial in parts. I love it but it’s strange. It all arose from improvising. Tim invented vocal lines on the spot which he was sort of embarrassed about but Eno encouraged him. So there’s great lyrics like ‘Lay the law down in your home and smile’, which don’t mean very much on paper but which make perfect sense in the context of the song. It made me realise what a great spontaneous poet Tim is. And amazingly Phonogram hear singles on it. There’ll be Andy Weatherall mixes and stuff. It’ll be great. But then what do I know? I thought there were singles on ‘Stutter'” he says beaming. Later, in a room far too small to permit any form of dexterious cat manipulation, Larry and Tim and Jim are recording an acoustic session in some rooftop NYC radio eyrie. They perform a new song ‘Out To Get You’ which even in these conditions takes flight borne on the interplay between the delicate funkiness of the acoustic bass, the rhythm of the guitar and the frail earnest simplicity of Tim Booth’s voice. It’s an odd thing to hear in a shoebox in New York but it sounds terrific. Below the gesturing and shouting and swearing goes on, But up here, in their genteel way, James are saying “shut up already” to their own kind of critics and giving them a very elegant kind of finger.
| Aug 1993 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Melody Maker News Article on Sometimes | Article, News |
James are back with their first single of the year. Sometimes, released this week by Phonogram, is taken from the forthcoming album Laid, produced by Brian Eno. The b-side is a new non-album track called America, produced by Bob Margouleff for Greenpeace Records. It was recorded live in LA using solar generated power. The 12-inch and CD versions additionally contain another new track which will not appear on the album, the Brian Eno-produced Building A Charge. The LP is due for release in September and the band tour the UK in December. | Aug 1993 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
MTV Interview | Article, Interview | Saul : There’s a band called James. They’re amazing. I bought one of their t-shirts. Look. It’s amazing, look. A few years ago, James t-shirts were selling faster than their records. It seemed everyone in England’s North West was walking around with Come Home emblazoned across their chest. But they survived the Madchester backlash and went on to establish themselves as one of Britain’s premier guitar bands with their million-selling last album Seven. Now they have a new LP Laid produced by Brian Eno, a new single Sometimes and have recently completed a tour of the States with Neil Young playing acoustic sets. Tim : There’s kind of a confidence you get when people like Neil Young invite you to tour with them and when Brian Eno rings you up and says he wants to make your next LP with you. We had that confidence in ourselves but when it kind of becomes publically recognised, that was a big boost to us. Something that we learnt quite a lot from the acoustic shows in our ability was our strength. When you go on stage and you’re really naked and you’re just presenting something very simply to people, the power of that and that was Neil’s big lesson to us. Those shows. And you can’t get that with electric. Saul : I suppose it taught us we could play less and still be very effective. Live at least, and we took that into the studio and Eno took hold of that and that was a really wonderful marriage there as we were all going in the same direction, we were all wanting the same thing in a way. Despite spending only six weeks in the studio with Eno, the band managed to come up with plenty of material. Tim : We ended up with a double LP and a single LP in six weeks, which normally it would take twelve weeks to come up with one LP. We were very happy with that. With Brian, it was like, he’s not into perfectionism at all which nearly every producer you ever meet is into it – metronomic perfectionism. He just kind of wants to capture some kind of atmosphere, almost some kind of hesitancy so we often chose takes where people were hesitant, where they didn’t know what they were playing. Now James are off to the States again to play on the North American WOMAD tour. The invitation to join Peter Gabriel’s World Music project came when they were recording Laid. Larry : We did a concert whilst we were recording as well at a local club and he came to that and he liked what he saw so that was why we got invited to the WOMAD tour really. I think he just picked up on an energy or something about us he liked. Tim : We’ve actually always had quite a lot of communication with WOMAD because basically we like going to the festival ourselves so we tend to want free tickets and they say we have to play if we want free tickets. But even if Laid flops and they end up subsidising their income with t-shirt sales again, the band have enough confidence in their own ability not to quit. Larry : You’ve just got to do what you feel like at the time. It’s either going to hit with people or it isn’t. If it doesn’t then you’ve got another chance. | Aug 1993 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Laid US Album Release – Press Release | Era: Laid / Wah Wah, Press Release | Press release of James’ Laid album in the US.
| Sep 1993 | era-laid-wah-wah press-release era article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Tour – NME News | Article, Interview |
JAMES will embark on their first UK tour in over two years to promote their new LP ‘Laid’, released at the end of the month. Tim Booth and the band, whose ‘Sometimes’ single entered the Top 20 this week, are currently in the US supporting Peter Gabriel. Their UK dates kick off at Glasgow Barrowlands on December 1,continuing at York Barbican Centre (2), Manchester G-Mex (4), Wolverhampton Civic Hall (5), Derby Assembly Rooms (7), | Sep 1993 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Best Magazine Interview (French) | Article, Interview |
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The James Gang Rides Again – Entertainment Today | Article, News |
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O Zone Interview BBC1 | Article, Interview | Zoe Ball : Have you seen James get completely soaked in their new video? Well I’ve invited them here to the Serpentine in Hyde Park to recreate their aquatic experience and to see if they’ve managed to dry off yet. Your new video Sometimes is absolutely wild. It looks like you’re splashing around in the North Sea. Are you actually in the North Sea? Tim : Icelandic sea Zoe : Icelandic sea? Tim : Yes, we were warned about sharks and whales on the very day we were in there. Zoe : Really. Tim : That’s why we were looking so terrified. Zoe : Right, lifeguards and all that. I actually heard it was in a pool in Pinewood Studios Tim : Who told you that? Zoe : I don’t know, somebody told me. Tim : I don’t know where you got that rumour from. Zoe : Was it freezing? Tim : It was freezing. It was the lake where they filmed the Guns Of Navarone and the James Bond films. Zoe : Oh wow Tim : And we were in the water from about eight in the morning til nine at night and I asked if they could heat it up and they couldn’t. Zoe : And you had really pruny toes when you came out. Tim : We were wrinkled. It was really disgusting. The make up woman’s work was cut out. Zoe : You’ve just done your new album Laid with a new producer. How’s your music evolving? Tim : How’s it evolved? It’s learnt how to walk by now and it’s stopped eating green leafy vegetables. Become a fruitarian. Zoe : Thank you. Everyone still identifies you with your anthem Sit Down. Does Laid have an anthemic track on it that’ll kind of replace that, do you think? Tim : On each album, there’s a couple of tracks which I suppose you could call anthems. It’s accident, we don’t do it on purpose. But we do tend to release them as singles. Because they’re a bit more burly and robust and they’re not going to get beaten up in the marketplace. Zoe : In fact, two years ago, I don’t think there was anybody without a James shirt. Are you going to have new t-shirts? Tim : If we come up with a good picture. It was real chance last time. We hit the right time and we had a great shirt. So people bought it basically. Had a great shirt so people bought it. Zoe : The album wasn’t so good but we had a great shirt. Will you save my boat now, because I’m stranded. | Sep 1993 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sometimes – Press Release | Article, Press Release | New Single and December Tour Dates 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. | Sep 1993 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Laid Press Release Biography | Article, Press Release | Most bands can do little more than gamely chase fashion and look forward to the day when they catch up with it. But James are not most bands. For the best part of a decade, James have stood alone, ploughing their own furrow, individual and unique, innovative and original, letting fashion and popularity try to get hold of them. James are a cult group whose cult includes potentially everyone. They have the broad emotive sweep of the major rock band, able to fill arenas and stadiums with anthemic songs of mass appeal. And yet they have the alternative perspective of the most independently minded; a scorn for the easy move and the slick cliche. What James offer and demand from their fans is honesty, spirit and a natural elation far beyond the confines of most contemporary rock. In the bet sense of the word James are a people’s band. Amazingly for a group who are still growing, still developing, still climbing towards the optimum of their success. They formed in Manchester in 1983 when bassist Jim Glennie spotted singer Tim Booth dancing in his unique, whirling dervish style in a college bar. They quickly came to the attention of the enormously influential and unimpeachably cool Manchester label Factory Records. Their first two singles, “What’s The World” and “Hymn From A Village” immediately set them apart from nearly all their contemporaries. James had a sound all of their own; the angularity of the new wave married to an almost folkish tranquility. Then the band was singer Tim Booth, bassist Jim Glennie, guitarist Larry Gott and drummer Gavan Whelan. Plaudits were not slow in coming. James found themselves on every front cover in England and found champions in every quarter, most famously with Morrissey who professed a public love for the band and invited them to go on tour with The Smiths. In 1985 James signed up with New York based Sire Records, beginning a three-year phase of their career that was, by turns, exhilarating and perplexing. The albums from this period, “Stutter” and “Strip mine” drew praise for their striking individualism. But, despite critical acclaim, these records never reached the audiences they deserved and James, frustrated, left the label in 1988. At the very point where it seemed that their career may have stalled, James discovered a new lease of life. Drummer Whelan left and in came a massive injection of new blood in the shape of drummer David Baynton-Power, keyboard player Mark Hunter, trumpeter Andy Diagram and violinist Saul Davies. Inevitably the James sound changed. It broadened, became more expansive and colourful. It had long been recognised that James were one of the most compelling live acts around, their concerts characterised by improvisatory daring and adrenalin highs. In an effort to capture this excitement, the band financed their own live album, “One Man Clapping”, Phonogram snapped the band up and their next studio album “Gold Mother” was to prove the turning point. Here it seemed James had at least fully realised their potential with music of extreme originality, but mass popular appeal, passionate, infectious, all their own. The hit singles “Come Home” and “Sit Down” became centrepieces of their live shows, the latter the scene of nightly celebrations where thousands of people would commandeer the song for fifteen minutes at a time. Then and now, being in the middle of a James crowd is a goose-pimpling experience. 1992’s million selling “Seven’ consolidated their position as a major modern rock band, although by now there were only six following the amicable departure of Andy Diagram. Their new album “Laid” – an album that confirms James’ international status and yet is a bold stride in a totally new direction. Since the release of “Seven”, James have performed a succession of acoustic tours, both alone and as invited guests of Neil Young, another of the band’s champions. “Playing acoustically is playing without a net” says Tim Booth. “You’re naked, you’re vulnerable, but it’s exhilarating. That experience is certainly reflected in the new record. It’s not an acoustic record, but it’s a stripped down sound. We were quite sure that we didn’t want it to be cluttered with overdubs. If anything it’s more subtle than “Seven”, The lyrics sometimes tackle bigger themes, but are often quite intense and personal in their scope.” The album is produced by renaissance man Brian Eno, The partnership has been a long time in the making. “We wanted him to produce “Stutter”. but he said he was a bit busy and he’d call back in a couple of years. Well, one morning he did. He’d heard the demos and loved them. “Eno’s influence is evident in the delicate, shifting nature of the sound. “As a producer, he’s quite unlike anyone we’ve ever worked with. Very balanced, very focussed and extremely encouraging. He encouraged us to improvise and take chances. He’s never outwardly critical. He gets his own way inmore subtle ways. It was a very productive time. I came up with 34 completed lyrics in 6 weeks. We even managed to record a whole other double album of jamming type that will hopefully come out next year.” On the new album the classic James trademarks remain. Powerfully compelling songs, the result of a kind of organic interplay between the band’s musical fluidity and Booth’s plaintive, yearning voice. “Sometimes” is a personal favourite, I like “Laid” because it’s daft and uplifting, and “Low Low Low” would make a perfect football chant. The new James album is set to convince doubters and delight the converted. Reaction in Britain is already strong. They recently drew rave notices for their massive Finsbury Park show with Neil Young, “When you get that kind of encourage- ment,” says Tim. “that kind of support from people you’ve always respected like Neil Young and Brian Eno, it just vindicates what you’re doing. It really gives you the impetus to move forward.” For James the move forward to a new level of success and acclaim begins here. | Sep 1993 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Radio 1 Interview about Knuckle Too Far | Article, Interview | Jo Whiley : Now some more from Tim and Larry about the album Laid Larry : Hi, this is Larry from the band James. And I’m here with Tim and we’d like you to listen to a song called Knuckle Too Far which is off the Laid album which we’re just bringing out. This song’s history is kind of the, it’s been a wallflower in its early days. It was a jam we did and recorded in a practice and we never played it again and it kind of got lost for about nine months and then one day it just surfaced again on a practice tape and someone heard it and thought that it sounded perfect as it was and it was going to go on the album as that and we found it very difficult to capture the original essence of it. One night in the studio, we decided to have another go at it and I couldn’t hear Tim and Tim couldn’t hear me in the monitors and we tried to do this rendition when we were playing off each other and as a result of not been able to hear each other, we ended up with this curious kind of miscommunication. We tried to get it right on subsequent takes but when we got it right, it sounded worse than the first take so we decided to leave it how it was. I think the version that is on the album is about the second time we ever played it. | Sep 1993 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sometimes – BBC1 Top Of The Pops – 9th September 1993 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsJames perform Sometimes live from Pittsburgh for Top Of The Pops | Sep 1993 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Los Angeles WOMAD – 18th September 1993 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistPressure's On / Sit Down / Sometimes / Honest Joe / Lullaby / Born of Frustration / Laid / Gold Mother / SoundSupportn/aMore Information & ReviewsVideo | Sep 1993 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
London Astoria – 28th September 1993 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistOut To Get You / PS / Low Low Low / Tomorrow / Five-OSupport(supporting) The Wonder StuffMore Information & ReviewsJames were supporting The Wonder Stuff on a live TV show called The Beat. VideoLow Low Low / Out To Get You / P.S. / Five-O Tomorrow | Sep 1993 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Daily Insider Article | Article, News |
James recorded enough for three albums with Brian Eno. Less than half of what they recorded with producer Brian Eno made Laid, the new album James is releasing next week. It was the song Sometimes that initially piqued Eno’s interest. James delivered six hours of rehearsal tapes to Eno. Since he only worked with them for six weeks, they don’t know how much of the material he got through, but he picked the ideas he wanted developed into songs. “Sometimes it would just be 20 seconds,” says the band’s singer and songwriter Tim Booth. “We’d jam around on it a little bit.” From those snippets songs like Skindiving and Dream Thrum grew. Booth estimates they have enough material left over from the sessions with Eno for a double album. They may put some of the songs on disc next year. Eno’s involvement was just what they needed this time according to Booth as they were feeling some pressure to come up with something that would be at least as successful as their last album Seven which sold a million copies worldwide. Eno really got the ideas flowing. James just completed Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD tour and will be returning to America later this fall. | Oct 1993 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Creem Magazine Interview | Article, Interview |
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NME Discography | Article, News |
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La Folie Douce – Les Irrockuptibles (French) | Article, Interview |
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James And The Art Of Getting Laid – RCD | Article, Interview |
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Telemoustique Interview (French) | Article, Interview |
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The American Music Press Interview | Article, Interview |
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Sometimes – Jay Leno Show – October 1993 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsJames perform Sometimes live on US television. | Oct 1993 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Interview with Alan Pell (James A+R man) | Article, Interview | “Basically I am James’ A+R(Artiste and Repertoire) agent and that hasn’t got a job description as such. You pretty much have to make it up as you go along. I just do lots of things that need doing, there’s no set agenda, particularly with a band like James. I suppose my job is to steer their career but working with such strong characters like Tim, Jim, Larry and Martine I fit in as piece of the jigsaw rather than in a ‘captain of the ship’ role.” This works well and, for Alan’s part is made better by the fact that he includes himself as a “massive fan” of the band. “Although you do get a different perspective on the band as a fan working with them. For example, the album is out now, but for me the most exciting part of the whole album project was way back in mid- February when the band had their first day with Brian Eno. As an A+R man you tend to feel almost parental about a band – you know, getting them into a good studio with a good producer is a bit like getting a kid into a nice school and dropping them off at the gates. It was exciting, both as A+R man and fan to have them there with Brian Eno. Have you always been a fan of the band ? “No – to be honest. I was always aware of them, but I wouldn’t really say I was a fan. I’d always thought of their material as a bit wimpy until I heard some of the stuff that they were doing for ‘Gold Mother’ and I was knocked out by it. I expected it to be watered down in comparison to what I had seen live and it wasn’t. I started to fall in love with their stuff the more I got acquainted with it. I think the live versions of the songs from the back catalogue are better than the recorded versions. This is due to a combination of musical proficiency and the immediate impact of a live performance. The thing I like about James is that with them a song is never finished. I dare say that’s probably partly due to them getting bored if they play the same thing all the time.” What would you say was your favourite James song ? “It’s difficult to say what my favourite James song is. I like ‘Don’t Wait That Long’ and .’Out To Get You’ – that covers the ballady-type ones, and ‘Lose Control’, particularly the stripped-down live acoustic version with just Tim and Larry. I also like the rockier ones: ‘How Was It For You ?’, ‘Come Home’, ‘Born Of Frustration’ and ‘Live A Love Of Life’. My favourite on “Laid” is ‘Five-O’, especially the lyric “If it lasts forever / Hope I’m the first to die”. I’m a major fan of Tim’s lyrics – I love it when people put little twists in their lyrics and Tim is very good at that.” What is the best James performance you’ve seen ? “It must be the one at Edinburgh during the autumn 1991 tour. The start of the gig was fantastic – the stage was just black and then Dave came on and started the drum beat to “Sit Down”, and then the others just ambled on and laid into it. The excitement they created was amazing and they managed to sustain it right through the whole show. That’s another thing about James – whereas most bands build a gig up to a big finale, James start with their big finale and carry it through.” How influential do you think James are? “James are in a very weird position really. There are some people who love to hate them. I think that’s because they’re one of this country’s finest talents and if there is one thing that this country is good at it is ignoring its own talent. I think that James are more influential than they’re given credit for. There aren’t too many British pop/rock bands that make five albums like James have. There are people who bear grudges and it’s just a case of James coming through that, which I believe they will do. It’s the British disease again – there’s nothing that British people hate more than success – you can almost hear the knives coming out the minute anyone gets close to success. I suppose that it is healthy to have a bit of cynicism to keep your feet on the ground but in pop music it tends to have a negative effect. The inky-press British media can often be the worst, they really do ‘build-’em-up-then-knock-’em- down’.” “British pop music is going through a critical phase at the moment. We’re producing good records but we’re not really producing any stars. It’s almost a case of “Where is the next Mick Jagger going to come from?”. Anyone who does anything is slagged off, and we also champion things that aren’t really that good. I’ve been to some gigs that have been poorly attended and pretty bad all round and then I read a review of the same gig in the music press and they’re practically implying that Jesus was resurrected there. “The music industry here is very cliquey -you can get a good review if your manager drinks with a certain journalist in a certain pub and promises guest list and so on. Take a band like Suede. love them or loathe them, there were elements of a backlash against them before they even had their first album out. It’s never been like that before – if you look at all great artists and bands – The Smiths, Bowie, Prince …the list is endless – they’ve all had the benefit of a few albums to establish themselves, but that doesn’t seem to be happening any more. There’s also this peculiar indie vs major ethos around the bullshit of “Selling Out”, you know, it doesn’t hold with any other fields. If you translated it to literature you’d be saying “That book is crap because it’s published by Penguin and this one is good because it’s on Fred Bloggs Press or whatever.” What music do you listen to? “Recently I’ve been listening to Underworld’s new album, and the new Paul Weller album, “Wild Wood” is excellent. I’ve also been listening to Orbital, Rage Against The Machine and that Julianna Hatfield album. I’ve got the new Nirvana album too, but I’m not really sure about that yet.” Has there been a band supporting James that have really opened your eyes? “Not really, no. Although Nirvana did a good job at the Transmusicales Festival in Rennes in 1991, and Andy Diagram’s band Spaceheads were good too. But to be honest I haven’t seen many of James’ support bands.” Have you had any embarrassing or funny moments with James ? “Yes – loads. The trouble is they’re far too numerous to mention and they lose their funniness in translation. You probably had to be there to appreciate them. I suppose the weirdest time was when the band were recording “Seven” with Youth, purely because of his bizarre recording techniques.” How would you best describe James in three words? “That’s a hard one … I’d say indecisive, inconsistent and wonderful.” Who do you think works hardest for James? “Everyone does. No one person deserves that single accolade in my opinion. It’s more of a collective really.” What would you have as your epitaph? “I suppose it would be something like ‘It’s Only Pop Music For Chrissakes”‘ What do you believe in? “Health, wealth and happiness -and I’ve yet to achieve all three.” | Oct 1993 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Larry Interview with Guitar Magazine | Article, Interview |
At the time of the Laid release, October 1993, Larry was interviewed by the influential Guitar Magazine. Here is a transcript of that interview: ‘This is the first interview I’ve done with a guitar magazine,’ beams Larry Gott, ‘so to me this is proof that I’ve really arrived, heh heh!’ Typical really, James released their first single ten years ago yet it was only with 1989’s ‘Sit Down’ that they became anything approaching a success, became at all recognisable, became – whisper it – pop stars. Up until then, they were popularly known for two things; the fact that singer Tim Booth was a bit mad and couldn’t dance and a rather natty and lucrative line in t-shirts. But then came ‘Sit Down’. THAT song has since gone on to become something of a milestone round their necks, a reliable, hummable, anthem that moves otherwise well-adjusted people to spit, ‘Urggh! Stuuuudent bollocks!’ Luckily, James know this. Though their last album ‘Seven’, got them severely panned for moving dangerously near to Simple Minds/U2 bombastic stadium ‘rawk’; territory, they’ve suddenly pulled a fast one and returned with a stripped-down album that’s heavy on acoustic instruments, bubbling with slide guitar and about as far from stadium rock as you can get. James have gone folk… sort of. And stranger still, they’ve done it with the help of Brian Eno – producer of U2. ‘A couple of years ago’ explains Gott, ‘we went on tour with Neil Young, who was doing acoustic shows, and one of the stipulations of touring with him was that the support bands were all acoustic too. There was us and John Hammond, the acoustic blues player. We were playing in these fantastic amphitheaters across America, on the edges of canyons, places like Red Rocks (yes, where U2 recorded ‘Under a Blood Red Sky’) which is this huge cathedral cut out of the rock in Denver… And There’s 10-12,000 stoned deadheads out there, with their picnic baskets, their beer and their pipes, and they were really laid back but they really listened to what we were doing. It really was a stripped-down sound – Dave (Baynton-Power) was playing on just two drums, there were no synthesizers, no electric guitars, no effects. It was dead dry – when you finished a note, it ended. And the more we played around with this the more we enjoyed it. I think we discovered the power you can get out of an acoustic performance, so we came off that, did an acoustic tour of the UK too, and then immediately went into rehearsals for writing this new album. We realised then that we’d brought this whole attitude with us – we picked up electric instruments again but we played them with a real stripped-down bare feel’. James’ new LP, ‘Laid’ is nothing short of a revelation. The recent single, ‘Sometimes’, might well be a, erm, reliably hummable, rollicking yet shambling anthem, but this time it’s fuelled by manically strummed acoustic guitars and is one of the rockiest songs on the whole album. Most of the rest is seriously reflective and quiet – the folkish ‘Five O’, the slow wailing ‘blues’ of ‘P.S’ or the gently swaying pop of ‘Say Something’. And more than ever since their early days, ‘Laid’ also sees James songs powered by Larry Gott’s guitar. Having dabbled in all sorts of styles from African (‘Chain Mail’), through the usual indie-pop jangling to Stonesy R&B (‘How Was It For You?’), ‘Laid’ sees Larry getting seriously back into slide guitar, something which he first explored back in 1983. ‘I played it – tentatively – on the first album, ‘Stutter’, on a song called ‘Really Hard’, and that’s the thing about slide for me…I’ve always found it really hard! Your intonation has got to be so spot on, but it seems that in the last 12 months it’s just clicked with me. The slide fits really easily on my finger, playing it is comfortable, and it’s gelled really well with the sort of songs we’ve been writing. It sits great with the violin (played by Saul Davies), ’cause you’ve got two instruments without perfect intonation – effectively without frets – and they really weave around each other. So that’s worked and helped us keep the sound really stripped. I’ve enjoyed playing just simple melodies, and just discovering the possibilities of a slide guitar played in an open tuning. ‘There was a less precious attitude about this album,’ he confirms about Laid’s’ stark contrast to ‘Seven’. ‘With ‘Seven’ we started off producing it ourselves ’cause we hadn’t met a producer that we felt we could relate to, and then we started working with Youth from halfway through the project. Hence it ended up a bit of a mish-mash. At the beginning, because we didn’t have the confidence that a producer would have, we tended to over-fill the tracks, which was such a bad attitude ’cause we then couldn’t get rid of them. There were seven instruments always on the go on ‘Seven’, whereas in this one it’s really pared down. ‘Brian Eno came in at quite a late stage. He liked what we’d done up to that point, and really got interested in the jams we’d been having. He’d listen to these huge jams and come back and say, “You’ve got a whole song in there.” The title track ‘Laid’ came out of one of those huge jams, a song called ‘Lullaby’ too. Brian’s great, and he really came into the fore when we got into the studio, if something wasn’t working he’d just move us on to something else. He insisted we set up live in the studio and just play, and in the end we almost invariably went for the first take. Brian had the confidence to say, “Let it live with all it’s imperfections,” and although the second or third takes might have had the structure down a bit better, they didn’t have the naivete, this strange beauty that the first take had.’ There is of course some irony in James producing their most down-to-earth and honestly rootsy album with someone like Eno, though Gott insists the balding enigma is not quite some studio-bound boffin some people might think. ‘Brian’s not this studious character – he either discovers something straight away, or he forgets it. The thing is, he’s got a good chance of getting something he wants immediately because of all the background work he does. ‘A good example was when I was sitting in the car with him once and he had his notebook which he takes everywhere, and on it were all these dots and lines. There was basically this symmetrical dot pattern with lines going out from a central point and then coming back. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was working out the coefficient of reverb reflections in a pine forest! He’d heard a gunshot in a pine forest a few days earlier and when he heard the shot he noticed it had a particular reverb. It’s because you’ve got an organised plantation of trees, because the forest has been built by The Forestry Commission, and it’s all pine so you’ve got these very tall trunks, poles effectively because all the leaves are at the top,and a very dead floor because all the needles have dropped onto it. And you get a particular reverb because of this. So this is typical Brian – he worked all this out, and then he logs it in his notebook and when he needs that sound in the future he’ll know where to get it. But he won’t waste time laboriously trying to find it in the studio – he’ll know how to get sounds. It’s the best way because the biggest death of creativity in the studio comes from waiting around. ‘We had tapes rolling all the time in the studio – even when we were just tuning up, just in case something interesting happened, and very often it did. Brian set up these huge 14″ reels running tapes at half speed, so we could have all these ideas just jammed for up to an hour. It’s actually a very quick way of working because you discover what you’re writing as you’re actually recording it! And in the end we had an hour and a half of finished songs and this whole load, two and a half hours, of improvisation, including 90 per cent of the lyrics.’ If the folkiness of ‘Laid’ isn’t enough to confuse you, these improvised workouts are due to be separately released as an album next year. This, says Gott, will finally allow people to hear the whole James. ‘We’re still a song-based band, despite this album of experimentation.’ Gott qualifies, ‘but I hope that every album we do changes peoples perception – I know ‘Seven’ certainly did ha ha! But no, this one certainly will. We also wanted to release a Radio 1 live in concert thing we did, but, basically, they just want a ridiculous amount of money. We wanted to release three albums this year just so people would say “what fucking direction is this band going in?!” Still I think it would have confused the record company – it’d be like riding three horses with one arse heh heh! Gott joined James after meeting bassist Jim Glennie and original guitarist Paul Gilbertson at a guitar lesson. Gott was the teacher, the two young Jameses the pupils. ‘They played me ‘Hymn From A Village’ and I just thought, “God, here I am giving lessons to guys who’ve produced far superior to anything I’ve ever done,” and I just thought, yeah! Not long after, Gott was helping out with James’ live sound and adding the occasional backup guitar, and he soon replaced the wayward Gilbertson full-time. He admits his teaching forte was pointing out the right chords to kids who wanted to play along to their favourite Jam albums, though he insists that this is what learning the guitar is invariably about. ‘You show someone how to play one of their favourite tunes and they’re happy. This is why there’s all these people playing ‘Stairway To Heaven’ or ‘Smoke On The Water’ in music shops every Saturday afternoon – ’cause they’re getting a kick out of it. It should be fun; it’s not a study – or if it is, then take it up really seriously. I was never into that ’cause I’m a lazy player. You won’t hear any flash licks on my records! I much more enjoy playing simple melodies and finding a place where it’ll fit along with these five other musicians. That’s what I love about old blues stuff, or old folk stuff – every instrument has it’s place. On ‘Laid’, what noticeably cuts through is Gott’s acoustic and slide playing. It’s nothing too spectacular, but it’s also something that’s too rarely heard these days. ‘When I was young, I knew these people who had this amazing American import collection and those records were a big inspiration. They had this record callled ‘Sleepwalk’ by Santo & Johnny which had this beautiful Hawaiian slide playing on it, and it had this purity of tone which really impressed me. I know the lengths that Ry Cooder goes to – using old pickups, using very heavy gauge strings and stuff – to get that sound, and I’m starting to understand the tonality of slide guitar much better. I really love it. As soon as you start adding distortion or playing too loudly it reminds me of those terrible bands of the 70’s that used to freak out on heavy rock slide. I don’t like that; I like the purity of acoustics and dobros.’ Citing influences like Marc Ribot (with Tom Waits), Neil Young, Ry Cooder and Captain Beefheart’s nutty duo of Zoot Horn Rollo and Antennae Jimmy Stevens, Gott’s playing is refreshingly free from any blues-rock stylings. ‘It’s too much of a footprint,’ he argues. ‘I think it’s too easy to pull one of those licks out of the bag. I remember doing this huge big rock lick in rehearsals once and it was so gross, Tim sneered, “Your roots are showing!” I had to drop it straight away heh heh! But even though I play slide, I certainly haven’t got what the early blues players had, and I don’t think anyone has had it since the British blues players stomped all over it with heavy beats and stuff like that. Unfortunately that’s what most people are reminded of when they hear a blues lick; it has that leaden connotation as opposed to the really free spirit you hear in Robert Johnson and now, I think, Ry Cooder – he’s still got it, or he comes close to having it. ‘I think we do manage to avoid cliches as a band, ’cause we all like different things. There’s no common taste as such – the thing we have in common is our experience. All the things we like go into a big melting pot and when it beings to take shape it makes it’s own sense, if you know what I mean. It has it’s own sense and you play to that. It sounds weird but it means you don’t readily get into cliches. ‘In what James do, it’s all about songs, and I think it’s actually important in some ways for me not to stamp my personality on something so much that it’s to the detriment of the song. It’s not about showing off with us. ‘It doesn’t bother me that this record sounds “unfashionable”. The one reason it doesn’t bother me is seeing someone like Neil Young’s track record – the Godfather of grunge puts out ‘Harvest Moon’, a reflective country album! And before that when everyone was expecting him to be getting old, he puts out fuckin’ ‘Arc’! Amazing!’ James’ keenness to sunrise is unlikely to produce anything as extreme as ‘Arc’, but there’s no doubt that in ‘Laid’ they’ve given birth to a little gem. Their record company, Fontana, have certainly got high hopes for the band and even though they’re reluctant pop stars, Gott for one is feeling up to the task. ‘When we wrote ‘Sometimes’ I just thought, “Fuckin’ hell, that’s brilliant! What a stunning piece of work!” And it was written in 10 minutes. But it’s not in your control, it’s not in anybody’s control, it just happens…Thats it, it’s all been a fluke, heh heh! For the dobro-esque slide work on ‘Laid’, Gott used a Les Paul-ish shaped custom electric resonator guitar custom built for him by Parisian luthier Phillipe Dubreuille. It has an old Telecaster pickup on it at the neck and a transducer mic under the bridge, but it delivers a surprisingly dobro-like acoustic tone. ‘If you notice, all the slide work on the album is really slow. I tried playing slide way back on ‘Whoops!’ and I heard live tapes of that and sometimes my pitching was just awful! The song just got faster and faster as the drummer got more comfortable with the beat, but I just got more and more all over the place. So I’ve cut that out now, and I keep all the slide really simple. With a close mic on my Dubreuille, you can do a good impersonation of a dobro, though after playing John Hammond’s on that Neil Young tour, the difference is quite evident. Still I’m not under the spotlight solo, I’ve just got to cut through the row the others are making, so it’ll do for me! ‘My Strat is still my main guitar ’cause it’s so fundamental to our sound. It’s a 1961 – the one, so I was told. It wasn’t cheap but it sounds great and it was the first real good guitar I had. Up to ‘Seven’ I had a Strat copy with EMGs on it that cost me 70 quid from some dodgy geezer in a club in Liverpool! I got the ’61 from this guy in London called Phil Harris, who hires out very interesting gear. He’d just bought one of those classic ’59 flame maple topped Les Pauls but virtually mortgaged his house to do it, so he needed to sell some other stuff to pay for it and this Strat was one. ‘I also use a Gibson Les Paul Gold Top, and together with my Lowden acoustic and the electric dobro that more or less covers me. The main change for ‘Laid’ is that I’ve gone back to using my old Musicman HD212 which I used on all the previous albums. Until recently I had this huge rack with Marshall preamps and poweramps, put through two 4×12’s, but the more processing I used, the smaller the sound was getting. Now I just go straight into the amp, or just via a tc2290 which is the cleanest processor I’ve used, it doesn’t seem to affect the original guitar sound at all. Then it’s just two Boss footpedals for compression and chorus, though only on very gentle settings’. | Oct 1993 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Mercury Bets Touring Can Make James a U.S. Name – Billboard | Article, Interview |
“Born Of Frustration” was the name of the Modern Rock Tracks hit from James’ last Fontana/Mercury release, “Seven,” but it could also sum up the band’s continuing battle to win over audiences in the U.S. “It can be weird,” vocalist Tim Booth says of the band’s widely varying degrees of popularity in the U.K. and U.S. “We did one gig in England in front of 30,000 people, and then we come out here and it’s ‘James who?'” Yet Booth says the band actually prefers the support position when playing live. Just prior to the release of its new album, “Laid,” issued Oct. 5, the band concluded a stint on the WOMAD tour, headlined by Peter Gabriel, and last year it toured with Neil Young. “You’re up there for an hour instead of two,” he says. “It’s kind of more fun playing for an audience that doesn’t know you and winning them over, rather than playing for the converted.” Mercury is optimistic that this approach eventually will break the band in the U.S. “We will work ‘Laid’ like we have been working James for the last two years–by making friends at retail,” says Mercury Records senior director of marketing Josh Zieman. The label currently is negotiating with a few chains to include “Laid” in their listening booths and “buy it and try it” promotions, and it is anxious to get James back out on the road. “That’s the way they broke in the U.K., and that’s the way we will continue to work it here,” says Zieman. “Laid,” produced by Brian Eno, finds James taking a slightly more sombre approach. According to Booth, the sound of the album was at least partially influenced by the tour with Young, on which the band performed acoustically. “After we toured with him, we didn’t play electric again for three months,” Booth says. “Our ears were sort of tuned to that level of subtlety. The way we did the LP was just a gradual continuation of that, and Brian encouraged that. So we ended up with a fairly laid-back record.” Mercury has been working the title track of the album at alternative and college radio, and has long-term plans to take James to album alternative. “Off the bat, we are going back to where we had the most success, and we will build from there,” Zieman says. In its second week on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart, the song leaped to No. 15. James also will make an appearance on “The Tonight Show,” tentatively set for Friday (29). The band hopes to return to the U.S. in early 1994, once again as a support act. Meanwhile, the sessions with Eno were so fruitful that the band has another album in the can. “‘Laid’ is the LP we went in to make,” Booth says. “It’s the song LP, but we also did a double LP of mainly improvised stuff.” According to Booth, Eno heard the band jamming and said, “People would like to hear this.” Yet the rest of the Eno sessions won’t be released until next year. “We’ve kept it under wraps,” Booth says. “We haven’t shown the record company, except for a few people in London. No one in America has heard it. We don’t want to confuse people. We want “Laid” to be focused on properly, and then we’ll present the strange, artistic younger brother.” | Oct 1993 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
World Cup Song Is Our Goal – Manchester Evening News | Article, News |
Football-mad Manchester group James are hoping to follow fellow pop heroes New Order and supply the England soccer squad with the theme song for the World Cup in America next year. There’s the small matter of course of whether Graham Taylor’s boys will qualify after tonight’s crunch match with Holland. Tim Booth, the charismatic singer of the band, whose last LP went straight to Number 1, reckons their song Low Low Low from the new album Laid has just the right anthemic qualities. “We see it as a football song,” says the vegetarian frontman, who reveals that the recording studio’s kitchen staff crowded around the microphone to chant the chorus. “If England get through, we will put it forward as next year’s World Cup song.” says Tim, a Leeds fan. “We’d probably change some of the verses and change the chorus from Low Low Low to Goal Goal Goal. It’s one of those classic James anthems that always seem to end up being singles.” Manchester combo New Order wrote and performed the No 1 hit World In Motion with the 1990 World Cup team. It was credited with losing the reputation of the soccer songs Chas-n-Dave type singalong – and sold 400,000 copies. Unfortunately, the Football Association’s David Bloomfield reckons Tim is kicking off too early. “Selecting the song is not a luxury that we’re considering at the moment, because if England don’t qualify, there won’t be a record,” he says. So even if the England team packs its bags for the States, will the James gang actually be picked to play for the first team? “I admire James determination and enthusiasm,” adds diplomatic David. “But we’ll be looking at a lot of bands.” | Oct 1993 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Mean Street Article And Interview | Article, Interview |
James know all about the waiting game. After all, they’ve been playing for close to a decade now, waiting with patience for the world to recognise what they and their fans have known for years. James is a doorway through which you’ll find what you’ve been looking for. Sometimes it is achingly beautiful and, at other times, painfully real, and a little frightening. But no matter what, you’ll find it intermingled with the twists, turns and ramblings of the doorman, singer/lyricist Tim Booth, flanked on either side by the strumming duo of Jim Glennie and Larry Got, bass and guitars respectively. James’ audience finally began to catch up in numbers to the band’s legendary reputation when “Sit Down” broke through the Madchester masses in 1996. “Sit Down” paved the way for stateside exposure and airplay with “Born of Frustration,” the magnificent single from last year’s album Seven. This year’s offering is Laid, due out in September. It is an album whose sound is a combination of the departure of Andy Diagram, horn-player and dress-wearer extraordinaire, and the experience of extensive touring with Neil Young, where James opened his shows with stunning acoustic sets. The acoustic experience is plentiful on Laid, which was produced under Brian Eno, in the studios of Peter Gabriel. Larry Gott explains, “we went in with the intention of writing that [Laid], and we had other ideas as well.” They had six weeks to record the new album, so James welcomed Brian Eno’s suggestion that they use two studios to record simultaneously. That way, as Larry puts it, “there’s no hanging around – you’re doing two different things,” and, if there was a problem with recording one in one studio, they just worked on something else in the other studio. The results, from Larry’s perspective, were incredible. After the six weeks were up, James had, in addition to the finished album, an extra album and a half of material, which will be released at a later date. Gott becomes very excited when he discusses this mode of recording. He is energised by the spontaneity, and amount of new material that was generated under the time spent with Eno. Not surprisingly, he looks forward to working with him again. The tale of James is full of whispers tinged with rumour and murmurs of mythic proportions. From a band who was once known under the moniker Model Team International, boasting Tim Booth as a mascara-clad dancer, to the band you see before you today, laden with experience, full of optimism, and never jaded. Time has given James respect and, longevity. Laid will add on more of the same for those musicians, who dwell in brilliance and live in the realms of genius. | Oct 1993 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Los Angeles Roxy – 28th October 1993 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistPressure's On / Born of Frustration / Laid / Sometimes / Heavens / Five-O / Honest Joe / Tomorrow / Out To Get You / PS / Johnny Yen / God Only Knows / Sound / Lullaby / Ring The Bells / Sit Down / Gold MotherSupportn/aMore Information & ReviewsSee attached press clippings. Video | Oct 1993 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Laid North American Tour Dates – Press Release | Era: Laid / Wah Wah, Press Release | Press release announcing James’ US and Canada tour for Laid.
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Strobe Magazine Interview | Article, Interview |
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The Village View Interview | Article, Interview |
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Hey Nonny Eno – NME | Article, Interview |
The well-mannered madman stands on stage at Manchester’s Apollo theatre staring out beyond the empty rows of crimson stalls into the music hall past, He’s been here before, has Tim Booth. Back down the still un-enlightened path, when the embryonic pop dervish was struggling against the channeling of a church-going public school education in Shrewsbury, Booth organised a coach party from his school to go on an away-day to a blood letting. Somehow the school organist was recruited to drive the bus, and Booth and his classmates were shepherded up to Manchester fully expecting to be suspended fom school when their Bach-loving driver realised that the musical recital they were attending was a performance by someone little known in classical circles – the bounding maniac Iggy Pop. It was some sort of starting point that night. And maybe a step towards a conversion. In the venue Booth escaped from organist overseer, and when the Rock Monkey God himself sprang onstage. bare chested, blood smeared and with a horse tail strapped to his arse, teenage Tim ran with his heart pumping to the front of the stage, whereupon a security guard fisted him in the face and briefly laid him out. Neither Tim, nor the school organist were quite the same afterwards. “One of the reasons I came to Manchester in the first place was because it had such good associations for me. I’d had such good experiences seeing people play here,” recalls Booth still peering into the shadows of the Apollo, pulling memories from the glittery recesses. It was in Manchester that he saw The Clash’s ‘White Riot’ tour during the heyday of punk and it was here that he came to see his teenage saviour Patti Smith. “One night towards the end of school I couldn’t sleep. It was during a time when I thought my father was dying and I went down into the common room and I started listening to this record on some headphones and it was just amazing. It turned out to be a Patti Smith album, ‘Horses’. That record really helped me at that time. I got rid of my record collection and I went and saw her.” Gradually, out there in the stalls, TIm Booth became convinced that pop music was something that could be used to break through to emotional truth. Something that you could make deeper connection with. His personal compass fixed on a questing path that was to help James to stadium pop success in s Britain and which has more recently taken them deep into the heart of the American experience. But James’ conviction route through modern life has recently placed them at odds with the machinery of pop culture in Britain. The new Eno produced album Laid’ and their current British tour has returned James to us in a mood of dissension. In the Apollo, years after the Iggy revelation, Booth’s belief in the spiritual power of pop still acts as the band’s guiding light James do pop like they’re doing tantric sex. Like they’re trying to reach some higher state. On stage in the empty theatre where the six members or James and a technical crew have convened for a pre-Christmas tour rehearsal, Booth leads the band into ‘All Out To Get You’. A flickering, see-sawing lullaby for the insecure, it build. tremulously out of Larry’s shivers of slide guitar and Saul’s tender violin strokes. With his eyes shut, Booth rocks from side to side, flowing with the feeling, waiting for the emotional current to push him into one of his mad dances Watching Tim alternate between standing stock still and jerking into spasms of dance it occurs to me that James must be one of the few bands in existence who treat soundchecks as major catharsis. Each song rehearsed, from the bluesy, plainrlve ‘PS’ to the glistening, abstract ‘Sklndivlng’ is like a mini strategy for transcendence. Compared to the James of three years ago, swaggering through their powerhouse hits, this subtle, interactive, organic ensemble playing bruised, aching devotional songs from ‘Laid’ is a different band entirely. A LOT has happened to James in the years since their ‘Sit Down’ and ‘Come Home’ hits turned them into a major-league group. They have gone through a perspective shift which has affected them musically and mental1y. The simplest way to explain it is like this. James left home. “We spent like nine, ten years desperately trying to get some success in England and then got it and that gave us the freedom to move abroad and we have done,” explains bassist Jim ,” Glcnnie. “It’s just that if you move out of the limelight, you move out of concentrating 24 hours a day on England, then it’s going to make a difference. It just seems a small part of something much more large-scale really when once it was everything. “We knew that from ‘Seven’ this didn’t become the most hospitable place for us in terms of the media and things like that,” says Tim. “It was kind of practical as much as anything else. It does affect you – whether you feel wanted or not. We go to places where we feel wanted. “The ‘Sit Down’ thing came on the back of years of touring (that built to a head around that period, and since then we’ve been really trying to build up something in Europe and America. I know people in Britain tend to feel rejected when they read that, but that’s how it goes really. The media in Britain encourages a fashion music industry. I don’t think it’s got that much to do with music and we knew that it was our turn to get hit.” Timing is sometimes everything. James did well out of the rise of Madchester and baggy pop. Their pre-history as fidgety Factory Records folk oddballs kept them at once removed from the baggy fad but by the time it had run its course they’d sold enough T -shirts to revive the Manchester cotton industry and were big enough to play Alton Towers, In the following 12 months, however, while James toured the world, the British charts sucked in a host of new favourites, from Suede to The Lemonheads, and James came home to what they regarded as a hostile critical reception. ON THE surface James are the same unaffected and pelitely prickly group that they’ve always been. At their converted warehouse offices in a Manchester suburb, they mill around amiably. Avuncular guitarist Larry jokes about how they were going to set up an organic farm in the back yard just to confirm the veggy cliches about James. Hyperactive multi- instrumentalist Saul chats about doing ambient music with Youth under the Celtic Cross guise. Jim turns up still glowing from his weekend run. It’s a happy family kind of an atmosphere that persists even when Booth’s car alarm persistently goes off on the drive across town. But there’s a defensiveness there that quickly surfaces. The new James T -shirts come with two slogans; one says ‘Get laid’, the other ‘James Suck’, According to Martine, manager of James and mother of Tim’s son, the ‘James Suck’ design is “because we want to sell T -shirts to people who don’t like James as well as people who do”. But maybe there’s more to it than that. In the 1ast two years the longest consecutive time James have spent at home was the three months they took off earlier this year after they’d finished ‘Laid’. They have been busy. The period leading up to ‘Laid’ saw them spend five months touring America, including the lengthy set of acoustic shows with Neil Young, as well as playing in Europe and Japan, They were so “wiped” by , the time it came to start recording ‘Laid’ that Eno took one look at them and suggested they postpone the sessions. They went ahead, however, and in the six weeks that they spent in Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios near Bath, they attempted to record three albums’ ‘Laid’; a double album of experimental ambient industrial jams which they now don’t know how to release; and a live album recorded at Bath Moles club. The live set didn’t materialise due to their over-estimation of their readiness to play new songs, but it did persuade Peter Gabriel, who saw the show, to book them onto the recent WOMAD tour of America. A few days before I met them they had returned from playing in Los Angeles where they’d also appeared on the high profile TV show Tonight. The idea that since ‘Sit Down’ their career has drifted badly is therefore not something that they’re amused by, As Tim points out, ‘Laid’ is Top Ten in Australia, Number One in Portugal, and doing well in the States. “I think we’re hitting our peak in a way,” says Jim, “I don’t know how long it’ll last but I think we’re coming into our peak of songwriting. If England can’t handle that because we had a hit single two years ago then hard shit, we’ll go somewhere else where people can appreciate it” “The other thing is we’ve played in Britain such a lot that Britain becomes less of a mystery to us,” adds Tim. “The mystery comes from playing with Neil Young around America in weird venues you’ve never seen before, on mountainsides, rea1ly quiet gigs. Being forced to play acoustically and enjoying it. That’s where the mystery comes from. It comes from going to alien cultures. We’ve always said that. We want to tour in Egypt and India, places they’ve never heard of you and see whether you can translate, see whether you can communicate with those people. Listening to the hushed strummed atmosphcrics and Ry Cooder guitars of ‘Laid’. It’s hard not to assume that Jamcs simply shipped home the influences of their American travels and Neil Young dates to the studio. Previous album ‘Seven’ had, after all, been roundly ticked off for being ‘stadium rock’ Were the acoustic shows an acknowledgement of that criticism? “It had nothing to do with it” says Tim. “Neil Young basically asked us to play acoustically on his acoustic tour of America and so we said yes” “It was either do it acoustically or not do it,” explains Jim, “We were forced into it and we were f—in’ scared to death We’d never played gigs acoustically berore and suddenly there you were in front of 10,000 Neil Young fans. It’s not something we’d have chosen but you have to make it work or you get f-in’ bottled off stage. Fortunately it worked and it led us in a direction which we really liked. It was fresh and it was different. It was like ‘F-in’ hell! This is exciting’.” “I think we recognised that there was a simple undeniable power about when we played acoustically,” says Larry “And there was some recognition of the criticism that you talked about – the stadium thing. It’s like, if anybody came and saw James do this they wouldn’t be able to level those criticisms at us. It almost became a joke, like what would we be accused of next? Stadium folk?,’ BRIAN ENO, who the band had tried to involve as a producer as far back as the ‘Stutter’ LP in ’86, was drawn to work with them after seeing one of the acoustic shows. He encouraged them to keep things simple in the studio – something which was assisted by the fact that trumpet player Andy Diagram had left to play in his own band earlier in the year – and the blue thrummed plateau of ‘Laid’ was born. Inevitably, thanks to Eno’s work with U2, there are those who have drawn comparisons. Tim and Larry will have none of it. The songs which people cite as sounding similar are usually ones that Eno didn’t work on, they say. There is an aghast silence when I mention The Edge to Lany. “No, he doesn’t play like The Edge, he just looks like him,” says Tim. And no, James are not planning on acquiring supermodel girlfriends. Subject closed. They are not easily accounted for , James. Collectively they have a level of protectiveness about what they do which borders on the pathological. Mention the word ‘maturity’ and you’re likely to get drilled to death by Tim’s glare. “Maturity’s a dirty word! Only on the NME!” It would be preposterous if you didn’t know that they had something worth protecting. “You’re judging everything off ‘Laid’, argues Tim. “But we made another double LP at the same time which is totally different, which is more like a Tom Waits or industrial type record and it also reflects us working with Brian at that time and if you put those two together then there’s so many contradictions that you won’t be able to come to a linear conclusion – that James have turned into this mellow, mature band because the other LP is crazy! It’s like we don’t know what the f– we’re doing so how are we meant to give you an answer!” If anything, they argue, the move away from their celebratory stadium style shows to the current live mix of part electric part acoustic smouldering atmospherics, is proof of their desire to continue to challenge people. “I think there was a stage when people came to a James gig and they thought ‘Celebradon! Party! I know all the songs and I’m going to go along and have a sing-along’ and there’s something inside or me that wants to go, ‘Yeah, well we’re going to stretch this’ says Jim “But there’s no point in going on stage and talking in a language that no-one understands” adds Tim. “It’s a matter of communicating.” Certainly Booth was impressed by U2’s Zoo TV shows, but they were mostly he says about ‘image’. And image is something that he claims to have little interest in. “I think ultimately we’re more likely to head towards the Neil Young thing or stripping it all down. But it’s really hard to talk about because we stumble into things rather than consciously set out plans and we like that” For Booth to claim ten years into his pop star career that he has little interest in image manipulation might sound somewhat unlikely. But the story that surrounds the sleeve of ‘Laid’ supports the idea that James just stumble into things. The cover photo of them wearing floral dresses and eating bananas came from a long session in Marseilles where Booth suggested they wore women’s clothes for a few or the shots. They already had a sleeve for the album but when they saw the photos from Marseille everyone liked the shots. It was not a calculated act, they claim. Andy Diagram had worn dresses for years. They just liked the photos “It was done berore Kurt Cobain turned up in a dress and the guy from the Manic Street Preachers, so we thought it was quite original,” says Tim “And the picture goes with the title ‘Laid’ so well,” “We have a really hard time with our own, erm, image,” squirms Larry “We’re still awkward in front of cameras We don’t take great photographs usually. We get them back and we look at them and we think there’s nothIng special about them.” “We see bands time and time again reaching a huge public, seemingly with some good photographs,” adds Tim. “Not with the music but because they look great in the photographs. And we always think ‘Shit! We do not understand this language’ And we were just very happy with that photo.” Aren’t you being a bit coy about the sexual role play aspect? You wore dresses in the video for ‘Laid’. “We’re not coy”. answers Tim “We just don’t want to have to give some great answer, some serious uptight answer about sexual politics.” “We’re a bit confused, as you might say,” concludes Jim. IF JAMES have returned to us in a slighdy confused state, at odds with a pop machine which they believe wants to reduce them to something convenient, fashion friendly and superficial, then you can probably blame Booth. Driving round Manchester, Saul and drummer Dave think back to photo sessions past. “Do you remember that one where Tim’s standing waving in that arch looking like a complete f-in’ homosexual?” “Which one? There’s loads like that?” they chortle. The rest of James might share some of Tim’s disaffection with the dirty old music business but their sensitivities are less offended by it. Booth presents himself as a man who has no time for the ephemeral. His interest is in the deeper things. With the exception of the unreleased Kristin Hersh solo LP (produced by ex-James producer and ex-Patti Smith band member Lenny Kaye) he says he’s found little to inspire him in pop recently. Bjork’s career has been boosted by her photogenic qualities, he says. PJ Harvey doesn’t deserve the Patti Smith comparisons. On The Beat recently he stared down at the philistines who were shouting for The Wonder Stuff with an expression that screamed forgive-them-for-they-know-not-what-they-do. Booth expects James to try to be something more than just a rousing pop group. You get the feeling that he wants them to set souls on fire. Often they succeed, like with ‘Sometimes’ or ‘Five-O’ from the album. Occasionally they fail. What is clear is that Booth pours masses of heart into James. Life and death stuff. Talk to him about the tone of the last two albums and he’ll say that ‘Seven’ was “depressed” while ‘Laid’ is “sad”. Even the most amateur psychologist could deduce that those moods partly reflect the fallout from the break up of his relationship with Martine. “Sadness is a real emotion. It’s like joy or anger , it’s valid,” says Tim. “Depression is a black hole And it’s kind of a null. It’s not feeling. And I sung most of ‘Seven’ in that state. And on ‘Laid’ it’s almost like I’m confident enough to do some sad songs” Check the lyrics of ‘Laid’ and you’ll find a songwriter trying to wrench meaning from a car crash of sin, sex, faith, love and loss. ‘Low Low Low’ he says is inspired by the fact that there’s apparently one gene difference between humans and apes. “I swing from seeing human beings as apes to seeing them as divine depending on what day you catch me” And ‘One Of The Three’ is a mixture of a Godot quote about the chances for redemption and a contemplation of Terry Waite’s near martyrdom. “He seemed to have been teeing up his whole life for it.” Dirt and divinity! Sex and destiny! Can a mere pop group support the weight of this? How weighty should pop music be? “How Terry Waite-y? Ah, you mean are those themes the correct dialogue for trashy pop music?” he laughs. “I just don’t care. I really don’t know how to explain it. Obviously if you’re brought up on a diet of frothy pink pop music you might accept ‘Laid’ but you won’t get some of the songs. I don’t mind that at all. Noone has to understand my lyrics. I just hope people get useful images from them.” Did you sit down with Brian Eno and discuss the meaning or pop music? “Oh we talked about culture a lot. We had good evening meals. He’s a wine connoisseur and we’d all get drunk, well not drunk but high, and discuss things. We had great ones on culture with Brian.” In his tawny non-pop clothes, with his weather-beaten hair and stubbly chin, Booth looks out through philosophically sunken eyes on the tacky high speed vanity fair or pop and frowns. He doesn’t think he’s part of all that. One day he’d like to be in the some position as REM, just making good records and good videos and not explaining himself. He doesn’t think he had any mileage out of presenting an easy caricature for the papers. “I think we’ve failed to present a coherent myth,” he says. All that non-drugging, non- drinking, meditating vegetarian Buddhist stuff was grossly exaggerated. He got off the path to enlightenment years ago and anyway, he eats fish. As for the recent reports of his interest in Tai Chi and martial arts and sharnanitic dancing.. “I wish I’d kept my big mouth shut. When we were meditating, we never talked about it ever. We only talked about a year after we’d stopped so we couldn’t be seen to be selling it. So no. I’m a person who gets very enthuiastic about things, whether they’re films or plays or whatever. I become quite obsessive, but it’s not an a attempt to.. it’s just b enthusiasm” So what’s the current enthusiasm? “Football. That film, The Piano. Just whatever I love good work. DV8, the physical theatre group, I’m going to see them in London. It’s a piece on cottaging, sounds really heavy. I think there’s much more interesting things going on than pop music. I think that the comedians in this country are much more interesting than pop music. I’d rather go and see any of them than go and see nearly any British band at the moment. I think that the whole ground for pop music is very superficial at the moment. It’s not worth it. And I think it’s to do with record companies, bands and music press. And it’s particularly bad in this country.” “The fast turnover of frothy pop is what is promoted and encouraged at all levels. I don’t believe it’s just a matter of us having become a 30-second attention span culture. A few quite heavy and deep things break through, like The Piano. I believe it’s to do with what people are fed. Obviously consumerism is speeding up. It’s getting faster and faster and you can feel it in the media, there are so many magazines and papers and they’re feeding off whatever comes along and it eats it up for a couple of months and then on to the next thing and the next thing. It’s like a hungry shark. But at the same time there are things of depth that get through. And they should be encouraged. And of course…” AND OF course, James are one of them. A few days after the meeting in Manchester I talk to Booth again on the phone. He explains that it’s a weird time for the band, that they’re going through some sort of change. It all sounds a bit confused, secretive, obsessive, hyper-analytical, determined, mad. He says of himself “I really don’t have any sense of how I’m seen and of course I’m bound to see the contradictions in it because I’m me and I know I can be a shit and I’m very confused. I’m actually quite a ball of confusion” The curious thing is that after all the years on and off the path to enlightenment James have arrived in l993 with almost no certainties. And because they are in this state of anxious flux, displaced by travel, unsure of their own sound, suspicious of the media, and surrounded by “froth”, and because Tim insists that they should strive to reach into the depths of experience, this is probably the best time ever to go and see them. Their December shows should be astonishing. | Nov 1993 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Listen To James And You’ll Get Laid – London UWO Gazette | Article, Interview | Mancunian outfit is sporting a new sound and dress. James is a band that just won’t lay down and die. After surviving almost 15 years in the business and constant line-up changes, the Mancunian collective known as James have come into their own. Though 1992’s Seven provided them with a stadium-sized hit in Sit Down, guitarist/violinist Saul Davies explains his group’s latest work, Laid, “is a backlash against the way we recorded Seven – which was very precise. “I would say, in a sense, Laid is a return to a more spontaneous way of recording and demonstrates the ‘fuck it’ attitude from us, really.” On Laid, James have captured the element of spontaneity that Davies says he feels eluded them on Seven. “All of the tracks on Laid are first or second takes they’re played live in the studio. There’s virtually no overdubs.” The new approach to recording can in part be attributed to heavyweight producer Brian Eno (U2, Daniel Lanois), who was approached to produce the first James album in the mid-80’s. “He made us really hyper-aware of the need for space in our music. He showed us hot not to be precious,” says Davies. “He helped us realize what the center of a song was, quickly – get to it quickly, record it quickly, do it quickly without getting too frantic and too tense about the whole process.” As enthusiastic as James were about having Eno produce the album, Davies says they were still wary of handing control over to someone outside the band. “It’s very difficult when you ask someone to get involved with your work to give them entirely free reign. You have a vision of what you want the music to sound like. If you’re afraid of that that person will take your music away from that, then you tend to clam up and try and deny them the possibility of doing what they really want to do. “I think we all feel that we’ve never gotten the best out of our producers because of that feeling,” he says. “But you can’t fuck Brian Eno around. He just has such a wonderful way of communication that you’re very happy to give him as much space as he wants. He makes himself very clear and he’s very logical minded. So he makes everything seem attractive to you and it would almost seem like folly not to follow his guidance.” The open and brisk atmosphere they encountered with Eno resulted in a double album’s worth of improvised jam sessions that will be released in the new year. The free-spiritedness of their work with Eno appears to have affected more than their music. Instead of using impenetrable album art or a picture that obscures the band from view, the cover of Laid features a shot of the band modeling women’s fashion. “We were in Marseille doing a photo session. We just had this idea ‘Why don’t we take our girlfriends and wives dresses and try them on and see what happens. The Gendarmes were standing around watching us wondering whether they should arrest us. “The bananas came in because it was an attempt to stop us from laughing – give us something to do with our mouths and we might get away with the shot.” Though Freudians might attempt a psycho-sexual analysis of a photo that features six men wearing dresses and chomping on bananas, Davies insists the band was merely trying to have a little fun. “I think we’ve appeared to po-faced for too many years – too serious. I think that shot shows a different side to us,” he says. “People have tried to read a serious message into it, but there isn’t one.” | Nov 1993 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Laying Low With James – Toronto University Varsity | Article, News | James is a band that has evolved, since its conception in 1983, from being a folk punk band to the group of great, diverse artists that they are now. They have become not only widely successful, but critically respected, possessing both the talent and ability to break through to the masses. Unfortunately, James has never quite managed to “hit it big,” as groups such as U2 and REM have managed to do. Perhaps this will change with Laid, James’ fifth formal studio album released this September. James started as a three-piece outfit, debuting on Manchester’s now defunct Factory label. Their first record was promising in popularity, and it didn’t hurt that the infamous Morrissey had given them a public vote of support. James signed to Sire Records in 1986, and released two albums with them before being dropped by the label. Then came an independent release, One Man Clapping, followed by two albums on Fontana Records, Gold Mother and Seven. These last two albums were important because they really opened the doors of possibility for the band members, garnering them commercial and critical success. James’ colourful, expansive sound is now created by six talented musicians: vocalist/lyricist Tim Booth; bassist Jim Glennie; guitarist Larry Gott; drummer David Baynton-Power; keyboardist Mark Hunter and multi-instrumentalist Saul Davies. They recorded Laid in six weeks at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios near Bath in southern England. Amazingly, the equivalent of three albums of music was recorded during the sessions, as the band was always using at least two studios (and sometimes four) in order to record and mix. Recently, I spoke to Saul Davies about the process of recording in the studio with wizard producer Brian Eno. “Eno brought his own engineer as well as Marcus Draws, who was involved with Eno’s last album,” he explained. “Eno forced us to look at improvisation, so the album was recorded live with all the songs on the first or second take.” Davies also credits Brian Eno for enabling the band to have such a vast creative output. “He would know after hearing a song where the heart of it lay,” said Davies, “so we could go to work on it and make more out of it. He gave us confidence and the feeling that we were doing something special with each other. We had wanted Eno to produce us since 1986, but at the time he was tied up with U2 on the Joshua Tree,” Davies continued. “He was easy to get along with, but he still made us work hard. He made us look more closely at the relationship between the performers and the producer, which had a profound impact on the record.” Davies found much in common with Eno and working together gave them a chance to talk over philosophy, art, science, and reportage. These interests were often incorporated in his work in the studio, bringing real-world experiences to the music. Laid is a serious but subtle album. The sound is delicate and shifting, while the music has a stripped-down, almost naked feeling throughout. It is similar to vintage James, but much more mature, showing a growing boldness and artistic maturity in the band. James could be described as a “patchwork” band, as the band members take inspiration from the many things that they are involved with, but the result is a sound all their own. Watch for them to tour in early 1994, in support of a fine new album. | Nov 1993 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Lyon Transbordeur – 22nd November 1993 | Audio Archive, Live Performance |
Setlist(incomplete) : Out To Get You / Next Lover / Sit Down / Low Low Low / Laid / Come Home / PS / Five-O / Say Something / Lullaby / Born of Frustration / SometimesSupportRadioheadMore Information & ReviewsShow was broadcast on French radio and forms part of the “A Strange Day” factory pressed bootleg album. Audio | Nov 1993 | audio-archive live-performance article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Best Yet To Come? – Stop Press | Article, News |
| Dec 1993 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
A Typical James Gig – Tour Pamphlet from December 1993 | Article, Tour Programme | 8am The road outside the concert hall is chaos. Two 45ft trucks and three buses are reversing the wrong way up a one way street, getting into position for the load in. 8.45am On the crew bus the production manager starts waking up the four lighting crew and the three caterers. Inside the hall twelve local crew arrive and get ready to help unloading the trucks. 9am The first truck starts unloading. The first off is the catering equipment, this includes everything from cookers to fridges, juicers and microwaves. One of the caterers goes shopping to buy the £400 worth of food it will take to get through the day. The other two caterers start cooking breakfast for the crew. Meanwhile the lighting crew and the local crew start setting up the lighting rig. The complete rig weighs about three tons and takes around an hour to hang in the roof. 10.30am While the lighting crew finish off setting up the lights, the second truck manoeuvres into position ready to unload the sound equipment. The four sound crew are wandering in to get their breakfast. 11am The sound crew start setting up the PA (sound system) – it is capable of putting out around 20,000 watts and positioning is very important to the final sound. If necessary, the entire system can be flown in the roof (about three tons). 1pm The caterers start serving lunch for around 20 people. The backline crew (the people who look after the band’s personal equipment (guitar, drums etc) wake up from their drunken slumber and wander into the gig and start setting up the instruments on stage. 3pm The crew start checking all the microphones and instruments. This is called a “Line Check” 4pm The band arrives at the gig and does a soundcheck. This means playing five or six songs to check all the sound, lighting and backline equipment. 5pm The merchandise staff arrive to start setting up their stalls. 5.30pm The band finishes their soundcheck and the crew start setting up for the support band. 6.30pm Everyone stops for dinner. About 45 people have to be fed every day. 7.15pm There is a meeting with the house security staff and ushers to make sure that the audience will be safe for the concert. 7.30pm Doors open and the first James fans come rushing in to secure a place at the front of the stage. 8.30pm The support band start their set. 9.15pm After much rapturous applause, the support band leaves the stage, and the James crew start getting ready for the show. 10pm The stage should now be clear and another linecheck takes place. 10.15pm The stage is now ready. All the microphones have been checked, all the guitars tuned, all the lights dimmed and it’s time for the band to take over. 12pm After all the encores, the band leave the stage, the audience leaves and the load out starts. All the equipment that came in during the day has to be dismantled and loaded back onto the trucks. 2am The crew have finished loading the trucks, they go to have showers. 3am The trucks and buses leave the venue to drive to the next show. | Dec 1993 | article tour-programme booklet | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
City Life Tim Interview | Article, Interview |
Sitting backstage at the Labatt’s Apollo, Ardwick Green, where James are rehearsing for their European tour, Tim Booth is softly and assuredly explaining the unexplainable: the contradictory nature of James. “One of the things that has always made us different is that we accept the contradictions and we actually like them,” offers the affable and relaxed singer, his polite and patient manner in sharp contrast to the intense singer you see on stage. “We like it in the music, and that’s part of why it’s so difficult to do interviews, to rationalise what we do. You just can’t. It’s very instinctive, very accidental.” The core of James -Tim Booth, bass player Jim Glennie and guitarist Larry Gott – have been together for 11 years. In that time they’ve released six albums and worked with four different record labels – including their own for the self-financed live LP, One Man Clapping. Life in James has been anything but a smooth ride. “We struggled for seven to eight years to make ends meet,” recalls Booth, “to keep out of bankruptcy, and that was always hard. After about three years together, we went on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, even though it was supposed to be for new businesses.” The thought of this makes him laugh. “Well, we were so well-known we could pretend we were new and easily fool them.” That James have survived the rigours of record company machinations, music press indifference and near financial bankruptcy is a triumph of spirit over circumstance. That they finally broke through into the mainstream with ‘Come Home’, at a time when Manchester raved on and laddish bravado ruled, compounds the twisted nature of their long and winding success story. James were a product of a different era of Manchester music, the era of The Smiths, when Morrissey was redefining what it meant to be a tough modem man. “It takes guts to be gentle and kind,” he sang, and James epitomise this ‘new man’ philosophy. By ’88, when Manchester’s clubs were buzzing with a new wave of acidic house beats, Tim Booth and the band were more likely to be at home meditating. James have never immersed themselves in the rock lifestyle. They may have struggled their way through the ups and downs of music business intricacies, but their relation- ship with it has always been one of distrust. Since the very early days, they have recoiled from the jaws of commerce, fearful of being sucked into the corporate malaise. “The first song I wrote was called ‘What’s The World’, which was about selling your soul to some kind of business man,” explains Booth. “That was a commonly held fear by all of us. We didn’t trust record companies. And unfortunately we applied that to Factory (who released their first two singles), who were actually trustworthy. And then by the time we’d worked that out and gone and took the risk with Sire, we realised Sire were the ones we should have been careful with. So we really fucked it up.” ‘Folklore’, a song on the band’s first single for Factory, poured scorn on the notion of received wisdom, of learning the rules of life from jaded elders. It contained the pay-off line, ‘the only way I learn is put the fist in and get burnt’, a perspective which has informed the band’s thinking to the present day. Although words and deeds have not always tallied. “At that point,” admits Booth, “we were probably bolder in words than in actions. That was what we wanted to do, but we were actually quite timid. We were frightened of the whole thing of becoming successful, which I think is partly why it took so long. So it was something we were trying to do, but not always succeeding.” Regrets? “Well, you look back and you think, ‘Jesus, what a wanker I was’, but that’s life isn’t it? If you never stick your neck out, you’re never really going to find out who you are anyway.” A boarder at public school in Shrewsbury, expelled for being a bad influence, Booth came to Manchester to study acting at Manchester University. He ended up in the city’s most un rock-n-roll band, not because of his singing or his lyrical finesse, but by virtue of his ostentatious dancing. “I happened to be dancing in a club one night, dancing very flamboyantly because I was upset due to my girlfriend leaving me, and they saw me and asked if I’d dance for the band. And they might not have asked me if they hadn’t been stealing my drink. So when I sat down I picked an argument with them and that’s when they asked me.” “Now that,”says Booth, his voice hushed as if still shocked by the absurdity of it all, “is why I’m in this band.” Accidents, chance meetings, ludicrous coincidences. The band’s path from a struggling folk-tinged indie guitar band to G-Mex packing, Neil Young supporting international pop eccentrics is littered with them. Planning, making strategies, rationalising, are all things they claim to avoid. Fate, believes Booth, not forward planning, is what guides them. “To do interviews, to explain it all, you start to impose a mental structure on it, this idea that you did it on purpose, that you sat down, planned it and then created it. But when we create something we have no idea what it’s going to be like until it’s finished. And then we go; shit, look at this, this is interesting. That’s how it’s always been with us. The one frustration we have is when we try to consciously control something, because we never seem to be able to do it.” Another case of the band’s contradictory nature, perhaps, but Booth’s explanation – or lack of one – appears at odds with the band’s music. It may be emotional, cathartic at times, but it rarely sounds unstructured, off the cuff. In fact their last but one LP, Seven, following on from 1990’s acclaimed Gold Mother, sounded contrived, self-conscious and self-important, as if the band had decided to make a concerted effort to break the US stadium circuit. They hadn’t, asserts Booth. “It was a weird series of accidents,” he explains. “No one wanted to take the authoritarian role, and art does not work democratically..’ Producers came and went during the album’s recording, first Gil Norton, then Flood, followed by the band themselves. Finally, Youth took over, Seven was finished, the consensus being that James had decided to take the money and run. The record sold respectably, the critics recoiled. “We didn’t hear it as stadium,” continues Booth, still a little bemused by the tag. “I love the record. Brian Eno worked with us on Laid because he liked Seven. Neil Young heard it and invited us to tour America with him.” James, as Booth’s defence suggests, have been keeping good company of late. Their latest LP, Laid, is produced by Brian Eno, a man they had wanted to work with since their 1986 debut, Stutter. The fruits of this collaboration are something of a rebirth for the band, an album bursting with unfettered passion whilst avoiding the pompous pre- tensions of Seven. It is a sparse, acoustically derived collection of songs, harking back to the band’s earliest endeavours. An earthy, gutsy, guitar-pop masterpiece. But where does it leave James? Are they still the T-shirt selling, alternative ‘teen band they used to be? Do their acoustic gigs with Neil Young suggest they are seeking the attention of more mature rock fans? And if in the early days, as Booth has expressed in the past, the shared, unspoken philosophy of the band was the idea of burning out, what is the shared philosophy now, 11 years down the line? Booth is unsure. “This,” he says pensively, “is hard. We’re at a strange point at the moment, I feel that we’re at a strange crossroads. What I would have said two months ago – because at the moment I don’t know what to say – is simply to keep changing, keep being difficult, keep presenting music of a quality and a depth we believe in.” If this is what drives James these days, then Laid is a record they can be very happy with. Recorded in just six weeks at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Bath, Eno suggested they take the pressure off making it by simul- taneously working on another LP. The result was an additional, double LP derived from extracts of jamming sessions, an experimental collection of acoustic and heavier, technological tracks. It will hopefully be released in the first half of next year. “The next record has a lot in common with say, Tom Waits,” explains Booth. “It’s rough, quite ugly, but there’s a hidden beauty. You have to find the beauty under the ugliness.” The original idea was to release it at the same time as Laid – a kind of underbelly of Laid experience. But the record company didn’t go for that. “It is such a weird LP,” says Booth. “We didn’t really know what to do with it” All of this activity, working with Eno, touring with Neil Young, experimenting with acoustic performances, suggests a very definite wind of change in the James’ camp. Whether it is simply a case of being touched by the hand of Eno, or if something more fundamental is at work, is hard to fathom. Booth, ever the one for a spot of cryptic mysticism, is not about to give too much away. “There’s going to be a big change in James in the next year,” he suggests. Would he like to elaborate? “I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it. Inside us.” | Dec 1993 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
London Brixton Academy – 9th December 1993 | Audio Archive, Live Performance |
SetlistPressure's On / Born of Frustration / Sound / Laid / Knuckle Too Far / Honest Joe / Stutter / Chain Mail / Out To Get You / Ring The Bells / Sit Down / Low Low Low / Skindiving / PS / Five-O / Say Something / Lullaby / Johnny Yen / Come Home / Tomorrow / How Was It For You?SupportRadioheadMore Information & ReviewsThis show was recorded by BBC Radio 1 and highlights broadcast and then released on a bootleg CD called Sounds And Moods. A slightly different selection of tracks was also aired on the Westwood One syndicate network in the US. Audio | Dec 1993 | audio-archive live-performance article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: A Sound Investment – Issue 3 | Fanzine | A Sound Investment was a James fanzine produced by California based Chris Zych and Lori Chin. Download this fanzine as a PDF. A Sound Investment is © copyright 1994 Chin, Zych Ltd. | Jan 1994 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: James on Sunday – Issue 1 | Fanzine | James on Sunday was a James fanzine. This is the first issue. Download this fanzine as a PDF. © copyright James on Sunday. | Jan 1994 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Laid – Conan O’Brien Show – January 1994 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsLive US TV performance of Laid | Jan 1994 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Vous Avez Dit James – Le Soir (French) | Article, Interview |
| Jan 1994 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
MTV 120 Minutes Interview | Article, Interview | Int : I’m MTV’s Lewis Largent. I’m here with Tim Booth and Jim Glennie, two of the founding members of the band James. We’ve just seen a bit of Sit Down. People go crazy when they see you, when you play that in your native England. Can you explain what happens when you play that song? Jim : Everyone sits down basically Int : They do not Jim : They do Int : They do not Jim : They do Int : They rise to their feet and have their lighters out. And sway back and forth. Tim : That old chestnut. It kind of varies actually. First of all they used to invade the stage, they felt that was the song they could get on the stage and sit down and after a couple of incidents where we had a couple of hundred people on stage and the stage gave way, we decided to stop that and they sat down in process. The first night it happened, playing to about 4,000, they tried to storm the stage you know and failed and sat down in protest. 4,000 people and we were visibly shaken and it kind of went on from there. Now we never quite know what’s going to happen. Int : Do you still get like , I’ve seen you when you play that song, shocked when you play that song. I’ve seen people in the audience get moved like that Tim : It varies, doesn’t it? When you feel like it’s an automatic response, like getting out the lighters, it doesn’t get you. When you feel you’ve really played well, you’ve really touched people and then you play Sit Down and they want to communicate something to you, like an expression of solidarity, you can feel it. You can feel when it’s real. Then you get really hit. Jim : You don’t want to be sort of “Come on, join in the chorus” You know. It’s really crass Tim : We stopped playing it, we didn’t want that Int : Let’s talk about your new album, Laid. Your fifth album? In like ten years of existence. I get feelings from reading articles from when you were preparing to make that album that this was time to reinvent yourself. Like Seven had closed a chapter and it was time to open a new chapter. Is that a correct assumption? Jim : Whenever we record an album we always look for a new area to write in and to our ears all the albums are very different. And there were a few factors, it wasn’t really a conscious thing, in we were going to pull it off in another direction. There were some pretty big factors at the time making it happen. One was touring with Neil Young acoustically which kind of broke everything down again. So even when we were back in the studio to record electrically, it just changed the way we approached the songs. And the second thing was working with Eno. He didn’t let us overcook the songs. He kept them quite simple, quite straightforward. It was fun and the album came out pretty different. Not a “Hey,we have to play in a new direction” type of thing. Tim : Our trumpet player left as well. After Seven, he kind of got bored of touring and missed his girlfriend so he left. It was all this combination of things meant that we ended up with a more laid-back calmer record Int : Laidback Tim : Laidback Int : We’re about to watch the song and video for Laid which I had an advance cassette of. Was it originally called Raid? Tim : A lot of the songs change names. Many of the songs that we did with Eno were written at the time. We had a six-week period where we wrote fifty songs. There’s another double LP from the same period. And so loads of them were changing names and we couldn’t remember what they were called. Sometimes is sometimes called Lester Piggott. Which is the name of a famous jockey in England because it has a racing beat. That’s how we remembered it. We should have changed it to Willi Schuhmacher over here. Int : Or William Burroughs Tim : Or William Burroughs, the famous jockey. Int : I thought you said famous junkie. Tim : Where are the lawyers? (part 2) Int : You guys are humongous stars in England. You play soccer stadiums to 50,000 people. Tim : Humongous Int : Large, enormous, yet here you have a smaller following. What do you think the reason is? Tim : We’ve only been coming here for the last few years as I’ve just been told, reliably informed. Int : Why did you decide, you’ve been a band since 1983, why did you wait nine years? Tim : It’s been a long journey. You know, we walked it. No, we built up our following in Britain and Europe through touring constantly. And there wasn’t really time to get over here. And money. We had a lot of record company fights and couldn’t raise the ferry crossing. Int : The record company people who are with you are going “Ha” Tim : We joined Sire a couple of years ago. No, Sire were the first, we joined Mercury a couple of years ago. | Jan 1994 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
MTV 120 Minutes – 16th January 1994 | Session, Video Archive |
SetlistPS / Laid / Say SomethingDetails
SongsShare: | Jan 1994 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Wins Applause In The States – Providence Journal | Article, Interview | It took British band James a long time to discover America – and vice versa “We didn’t come over here at all for the first seven or eight years,” said bassist Jim Glennie in a phone interview. “No record company was prepared to pay for us to come over here and play.” Although in the past few years the band has not been total strangers to American audiences, James’s latest, Laid, could be the record that wins them some major attention in this country. Lovely atmospheric production from Brian Eno, a sure melodic sense, and smart vocals from Tim Booth make it a very appealing record. The title song (and first single) is a droll comment on sexuality, while Low Low Low takes a cold-eyed view of human extinction and Sometimes has an inviting passion. The cover of the record shows the band posed on the steps of the Marseilles cathedral, wearing dresses. “We were just fooling around with some pictures, and we were having fun,” Glennie said. “Although I suppose you could read into it a subtext about prostituting ourselves by selling what we do.” Glennie said the feel of the record dates to an acoustic tour the band did last year, opening up for Neil Young. “We agreed without thinking about it very much. Our first gig was at Red Rocks (in Colorado) in front of 10,000 people. We were terrified. It was such a change from playing those dark little alternative rock clubs.” When the band finished its tour and picked up its electric instruments again, he said, they heard things differently. And Eno, possibly best known for his production work with U2, kept the band focused. “He knew we’d overcook the songs, if we weren’t careful. He knew we were capable of messing them up,” Glennie said. “So we’d race through the songs. We had to put everything into them. I think the great thing about Brian is that, whoever he works with, he gets the best out of them.” There is a certain folkish quality to the band’s music, which Glennie said is not a conscious effort. “We’d hear that a lot, and in the early days, we reacted quite strongly against it,” he said. “We’re no great lovers of folk music. But there are certainly strains of folk in our music.” The band started in Manchester in 1983 and ended up on Factory Records, home of such local stalwarts as Joy Division and Happy Mondays. The band became heroes to the volatile English rock press, and were endorsed by Morrissey, who invited them to tour with his band, the Smiths. “He helped us a lot in the early days, just in terms of attracting attention to us,” Glennie said. After various record company woes – the band has been on five labels – James reorganized in 1988,expanding from four to seven members. (It is now down to six). “There was a period where we were feeling our way around,” Glennie said. “We really didn’t know what we wanted, and that explains the way we sounded on Seven.” Now the band is much more comfortable, Glennie said, and so far is very happy with the reception Laid has had in America. “We’re such a bunch of old cynics, so skeptical. It took us so long to make it in Britain, you know. But it’s nice to come here and get such a good response.” | Feb 1994 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Laid – David Letterman Show – March 1994 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsLive US TV performance of Laid | Mar 1994 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Laid – Jay Leno Show – March 1994 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsLive US TV performance of Laid | Mar 1994 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Mr Agreeable – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
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British Band James Returns – Seattle Times | Article, News | James arrives triumphantly from Manchester, England, with a hit called “Laid,” an urgent, compelling, slightly barmy rocker. The song, a fast, wild ride of sexual passion and paranoia, is the subject of probably the most interesting video on MTV right now. The black-and-white clip shows wan, curly-haired lead singer Tim Booth in a dress, handcuffs dangling from one wrist, sitting in what appears to be a laundromat. While the vocal builds and builds until finally he’s howling like a wolf, other members of the band drift through, some of them also in dresses. The imagery manages to be both ominous and funny, making it the kind of video you can watch again and again and still find interesting. That one song, and its video, have single-handedly redeemed James, which not very long ago was just one more competent, slick English pop group. Its last album, “Seven,” released in 1992, was so imitative of Simple Minds that every other song came across like a remake of “Don’t You Forget About Me.” Most of the time, Booth sounded like a clone of Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr. James toured with Neil Young last year and his influence shows. The band’s new album, also called “Laid,” has slow, folk-like songs that sound like early Young, and faster rock songs are marked by Young’s slow-building intensity. Brian Eno produced the album and he’s famous for bringing out the essence, the naturalness of a band (plus his productions always have a bright, lifelike sound). The band has a long, checkered history. It started in 1983 with the release of a couple of singles that sold moderately well in England. Then it disbanded for two years while Booth was ill with a chronic liver disorder. A 1985 folk-punk LP stiffed, but the band bounced back with a new contract with Sire, which led to James’ first American releases. But Sire eventually dropped the band. It got signed to Rough Trade and released a couple of albums, then was dropped again, and moved to the Fontana label, where it enjoyed a hit in 1991 with “Sit Down.” Its career has been building ever since. | Mar 1994 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth’s Rebellious Jukebox – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
1 VAL DOONICAN : ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’ “If the idea of Rebellious Jukebox is to choose songs and singers that strike a chord that resonates throughout your life then this has to be on the list.. Around the time we first started making records, we wanted to be on ‘The Val Doonican Show’. We thought it would be a cool thing to do – better than appearing on whatever the equivalent of ‘The Word’ was. Basically, I love everything about Val Doonican. His becalming influence goes way way back to my early childhood, when I was made to sing ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’ to my grandmother.” 2 THE BEATLES : ‘Twist And Shout’ “Even allowing for everything else that The Beatles went on to do, ‘Twist And Shout’ is a great, great song. It’s just perfect; the testosterone rush, just everything. One of my earliest memories was my sisters watching the film of that ‘Top of the Pops’ performance and arguing over which band belonged to them – The Beatles or The Stones. For me, The Beatles had something that noone else can possibly approximate. There was a purity, a certain kind of innocence, because after The Beatles what they did was turned into an industry. They progressed so quickly that the industry had to move quick to catch up with them. After The Beatles, a whole industry was built to try and repeat what they did. And the beautiful thing is that it’s impossible. You can’t manufacture a band like that.” 3 ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK : ‘Joseph And The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat’ “One of my cousins played this recently, and I realised on hearing it that I knew virtually every word. Perhaps it means so much to me because I identify with Joseph the sacrificial lamb! The fall guy in his coat of many colours! Um, then again, perhaps not.” 4 WILSON PICKETT : ‘Young Girl’ “The chorus to this used to haunt me. I didn’t appreciate its guilt ridden, ageist, sexist lyrics when I was six or seven. There’s this achingly poignant string arrangement lurking beneath it that slays me every time I hear it. I reckon there must have been a residue of frustrated genius string arrangers in the Sixties and Seventies who could only find work on otherwise mediocre soul records. String arrangements are just the best things.” 5 DAVID BOWIE : ‘Hunky Dory’ / IGGY POP : ‘Lust For Life’ “There’s a wonderful singalong quality to this. And songs like ‘Kooks’ are just perfect for f**ked-up pretentious adolescents to wallow in. The sheer panic and drama in Bowie’s delivery of ‘Five Years’ is like nothing I’ve ever heard. I wasn’t actually into Bowie the way a lot of people of my generation were. His obsession with image really irritated me. I much preferred Iggy Pop. I thought he was like Hyde to Bowie’s Dr Jekyll. Which is probably simplifying things a bit really, but the thing with Bowie was a bit too British for me; I didn’t appreciate his reserve. Iggy was more exotic. He was this wild animal from an alien culture who used to splatter the stage with his own blood. That spoke to me more than Bowie ever did.” “When I was at school, me and some friends desperately wanted to see Iggy at the Manchester Apollo. And our only hope of being allowed to go was if we could persuade one of our teachers to take us. Eventually, we persuaded this one teacher who ran the school choir. He was socially inept, had real communication problems, and, furthermore, had never heard any rock music in his life, let alone this man covered in blood. Anyway, we went in and lost him immediately, because we figured that the moment he saw what he’d let himself in for, he’d make us leave! After the gig, we’re walking out and we bump into him and he’s totally raving about it, saying it’s the most exciting thing he’s ever seen in his life! A few weeks later, we persuaded him to take a school party to The Clash’s ‘White Riot’ tour.” 6 PATTI SMITH : ‘Heroes’ “Patti Smith is to singers what Hendrix is to guitarists. So many people are singing that wouldn’t otherwise be if it wasn’t for Patti Smith; Morrissey, Michael Stipe, Mike Scott, Siouxsie, myself. The evening Patti Smith changed my life was when I heard ‘Birdland’, a 10 minute improvised poem about Pete Reich losing his father. And I heard it on the night I thought my father was dying. And, as far as I’m concerned, there was nothing before that and nothing after that. And I know it’s the same for all those other singers. She was the best, in terms of daring, honesty, performance or self-sacrifice. I’ve got these bootlegs of just her and Lenny Kaye on guitar where’s she just improvising this poetry, and she comes in the middle of the poem. Noone has gone that far.” 7 THE BIRTHDAY PARTY : ‘Prayers On Fire’ “Apart from our bassist Jim, all of James were tremendously influenced by The Birthday Party, and you can really see it in this song. We went to see them about 15 times. I’d never seen anyone infuse their music with so much sheer violence as The Birthday Party. And I think with that song they took it as far as that violence thing can be taken with music. It was round about the time that I was at Manchester University that I was madly into The Birthday Party. I was studying drama in the same class as Ben Elton. What was he like? Lovely man. A really fast worker, too – he could polish off a play in a few days. I used to perform in a lot of them. Some of them were really shit, but even then he was incredibly funny.” 8 PIXIES : ‘Doolittle’ “Three minute songs, great ideas, a f**k you attitude and a healthy pair of lungs. There’s really nothing else to say.” 9 CHRIS ISAAK : ‘Wicked Game’ / JULEE CRUISE : ‘Floating Into The Night’ “Wicked Game is one of those songs you hear for the first time and think, ‘That may well be the greatest record I’ve ever heard.’/ You know what I mean? It’s immediate. I remember it was on Jukebox Jury and Barney from New Order was on, and he was the only one that twigged it. He said, ‘I’m going to go out and buy that record tomorrow.’ Cool f**ker ; anyway, common to both Julee Cruise and Chris Isaak is their wonderful ability to write dreamy, aquatic sex songs.” 10 MARY MARGARET O’HARA : ‘Miss America’ “Morrissey said she’s the best singer since Patti Smith, and he’s right. I went to see her perform once and she was so vulnerable. She broke down for 20 minutes after the first song, and the band had to carry on playing as she paced the stage trying to find the strength to continue. Apparently, she has 20 reels of finished record company material waiting to be released, and they’re just sitting on it. So she’s basically resigned. She can’t get her material released. It’s a f**king tragedy.” | Mar 1994 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Happy Accident Makes It All Happen – LA Times | Article, Interview | James turned out weighty music for 11 years but finally found commercial success in the U.S. with the comic ditty `Laid.’ The English band James is headlining the Palace on Monday and Tuesday, demonstrating a huge increase in drawing power since last year. The reason? “A silly little catchy pop song,” says the band’s singer Tim Booth, laughing at the irony: After turning out a diverse array of fairly weighty music for 11 years, James has found its commercial footing in the United States with the popularity of the title track from the current album “Laid”-a bouncy, comic ditty about a relentless sexual pursuit. “We’ve been brought up on the kind of maxim that pain is deep, you know,” Booth said this week by car phone as the group motored south into California. “It’s a Western false concept. Very English, very European, I think-suffering for your art. And when something comes as easily and as simply as `Laid,’ you kind of don’t take it as seriously as some of the ones that you have to bleed for. “We’re very happy with it now. We’re very proud of it.” Booth calls the song “a happy little accident.” The sextet came up with it during one of the improvising breaks during its album sessions, then set it aside as too “pop.” When producer Brian Eno listened to five hours of tapes, he singled it out and encouraged the band to polish it up for the album. The song might not fit the James image-and that’s exactly the way they like it. “James has always been unpredictable,” Booth said. “Our fans love that in England. They love the fact that every night we play a different set of songs. You never know how we’re going to be. We can be very moody and difficult; we can be very uplifting and joyous. “That’s something that has been valued in England. But it also means it takes longer to become successful, because people find it much harder to pin you down.” James struggled through its first seven years after forming in Manchester in 1983. Following a major lineup change in 1988, the success of the single “Sit Down” moved James to the forefront of the English rock scene. “Sit Down,” an anthem of reassurance and solidarity that became a centerpiece of the live shows, bespeaks the group’s willingness to shoot for big emotions. “The idea is to move people really, and to move them in different ways,” said Booth, 29. “To upset, to agitate, to uplift, to give people happy endings now and again, but not for the whole trip to be a happy ending. . . . “You know, music is magic. It’s like, how can people cry when certain instruments and certain rhythms are played in a certain way? Why does it make people cry? Why does it make people laugh? It’s magic, and we try and keep connecting with that spirit of music rather than get sidetracked into any other cul-de-sac about power or money or fame.” That means there weren’t any career considerations taken into account when the “Laid” album was recorded. With an atmospheric edge provided by producer Eno, and with the band in touch with its mellow side after playing 50 acoustic shows as Neil Young’s opening act, the record is a distinct departure from James’ previous work-the kind of record that might confuse the fans. “I think we should confuse our fans,” said Booth, laughing. “It’s always a healthy thing to do. As long as you confuse them with beautiful music then that’s OK really.” | Mar 1994 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Say Something / Jam J – Press Release | Article, Press Release | James release a totally awe-inspiring brand new EP on March 21st. ‘Jam-J’ / ‘Say Something’ will be released as a double A-side through Fontana. ‘Jam-J’ – the first track on the double header, taken from the bands forthcoming alternative LP, is produced by Brian Eno, and sees James stripped down and dubbing it up with an electro dance floor mantra that is nothing like you’ve ever heard James do before. ‘Say Something’ is taken from ‘LAID’, the bands current LP and is the kind of lyrically disturbing yet beautifully rendered love song that James are so good at, again produced by Eno. The third track, ‘Assassin’, is a funky little number with Booth drawing out the word Asssssasssin ’til it hurts – A track produced by James and totally unavailable anywhere else. This initial CD (JMCD152) also carries a completely new version of’ ‘Say Something’ produced by the band themselves. The cassette (JIMMC15), released the same week, carries the previously mentioned versions of’ ‘Jam-J’ and ‘Say Something’. The twelve inch – ‘James vs The Sabres Of Paradise’ carries an amazing version of ‘Jam-J’ which can only be described as a thirty minute ambient techno trip – produced again by Eno and remixed by ‘The Sabres Of Paradise’. The instrumental tracks have been described as “Soundscapes to a space oddity 1994”. A second CD (JIMCD15), featuring the same tracks, ‘James V’s The Sabres Of Paradise’ will be released on March 28th – this is a 10,000 limited edition digi-pak. James are currently ‘Heatseekers’ in the US billboard chart with LP ‘Laid’ at number 95 and rising, and packing em’ out at gigs all over America. | Mar 1994 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
More Where They Came From – Rocky Mountain News | Article, Interview | The British band James has an interesting problem with its record company: Too many new songs. ”I don’t see this as being a big problem, the fact that we can write too many songs,” says bassist Jim Glennie from a tour stop in New Orleans. ”The record company might find it difficult to cope with.” While many bands wait for their muse to inspire new music, the six members of James uncorked the creativity bottle while working with noted producer Brian Eno on their latest effort, Laid. Eno, who has helped coax great albums from such acts as U2 and the Talking Heads, spent six weeks challenging James. At the end of the recording sessions, the band had not only its strongest record to date, but enough material to fill two more CDs. ”He (Eno) pushed us into new fields of working; he broke down barriers that we had. He pushed us into a new room,” says Glennie. Eno’s advice was to strip down the sound. ”What he said to us was, ‘Look, with six people in the band, you shouldn’t need to overdub, you shouldn’t need to layer things. There’s enough of you making sound in there, that should be quite sufficient.” The band members – Glennie, Larry Gott on guitar, Mark Hunter on keyboards, Tim Booth on vocals, David Baynton on drums and Saul Davies on violin and guitar – agreed. ”We sat in the control room with just screens in between us, but so we could see each other,” says Glennie, describing the recording set up. ”We’d blast through the versions and then we’d listen back on the monitors. If it sounded great, if it blew us away, then that was a take. If it didn’t, then we did it again. And if we couldn’t get it after a few takes, we’d move on. It was a very real way of recording.” The resulting album, the group’s eighth, is filled with simple yet completely engaging pleasures. Whether the slowly building opening cut Out To Get You, the galloping Sometimes (Lester Piggott) (named after a jockey) or the hook-heavy title track, James has boxed a collection of uncomplicated delights. ”I think it’s the best album we’ve ever done. I think we’re now coming into our best songwriting period. I have no idea how it’s going to last. It’s one of those things (where) you think one day you’re going to get in a room and it’s not going to be there anymore. It’s not like packing biscuits, or something, where you put the hours in and you come out with the stuff.” While the band waits for the opportunity to release the rest of the music from the Eno sessions, it’s busy working to make a name for itself in the United States. Despite a huge following in England – sold-out tours, gold records, playing to as many as 30,000 fans in a single concert – the group has started at the bottom again in building a name outside England. ”It’s good for us in a lot of respects,” says Glennie. ”It’s brought us back down to Earth. (But it’s a great) feeling – this rush again, this building. Like, you play somewhere and it’s sold out, and then people come and say, ‘Oh, you’ve got this television show and MTV has put the video in Buzzbin ,’ and it’s like, ‘Wow.’ It’s a really exciting feeling, (having) that momentum again.” Glennie describes James as having the best of both worlds – comfortable success at home and a growing popularity in the U.S. With support from radio and MTV, the band is hoping to educate Americans as to the joys of James. An important part in that campaign is spreading the popular live show that American audiences first glimpsed when the band was opening for Neil Young on his acoustic tour or playing a short string of shows back East with Duran Duran. As Glennie puts it: ”We’ve basically found ourselves on a wave now, just like we did in Britain. And we’re trying to ride it out and see where you end up at the end of it.” | Mar 1994 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Find Another Wave – The Advocate | Article, Interview | Many a memorable pop band has emerged from Manchester, England. The list includes the Fall, the Buzzcocks, Joy Division, New Order, the Stone Roses, Charlatans U.K., Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets and, perhaps most popular of all, the Smiths. Add James to the above, a veteran Manchester band that broke big in Britain in the early ’90s. In 1994, James is making its biggest waves yet in North America. A great single, “Laid,” and a Brian Eno-produced album of the same name, are winning new Yank fans for James. Jim Glennie, a co-founder of the group who plays bass and writes songs, is understandably pleased with “Laid. ” “It’s just such a short, cheery blast,” Glennie said from Columbus, Ohio, a stop on a James tour that also reached New Orleans. Given “Laid’s” encouraging stateside performance, is James finally breaking in the U.S.? “Everybody’s getting excited in the record company and management,” Glennie acknowledged. “I don’t know. We’ve become quite skeptical and cynical over the years. You’re near to so many things. You don’t actually believe anything’s going to happen till you’re actually there doing it. “But things are going very well. This album has made huge leaps and bounds for us over here and the single’s doing really well. ” North American cities showing strong James support have included Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Philadelphia. By popular demand, a second show was added in Toronto. In Chicago, police shut an in-store James appearance down because hundreds of fans jammed the place. “They suddenly decided we needed a permit,” Glennie said. “There are some places where we get great crowds and everybody loves us and there’s other places where people have never heard of us,” he added. “It still kind of feels early days to me, but it’s really good. ” James got a boost from its recent appearance on the popular Late Show with David Letterman. Following a lively rendition of “Laid,” Letterman greeted the band and mentioned singer Tim Booth’s explosive dancing. “You dance like I do,” the host cracked. Glennie claims no knowledge of the origins of Booth’s unique choreography. “I’m not quite sure, actually. It looks like he’s been electrocuted or something. ” In truth, it was Booth’s dancing that grabbed Glennie’s attention. “A friend and me were in a band and we went along to a club in Manchester where we saw Tim dancing. He was just freaking out, arms and legs flailing all over the place. We thought, ‘Oh, this guy’s really good. ‘ We asked him to come along to some rehearsals to dance and see what else he could contribute to the band. ” Booth, a former drama and dance student, initially banged the odd tambourine, danced and sang backup. When James’ singer quit, Booth stepped into the role of frontman. James subsequently joined one of Manchester’s many musical waves. “We got pulled into this latter wave, kind of when the Smiths broke. They took us on tour, which drew a lot of attention to us. And Morrissey said some really nice things in the press about us. That put the spotlight on us. ” By the end of the ’80s, the Smiths were no more. Dance beats ruled a new Manchester wave that carried Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses and Inspiral Carpets to fame. “Whenever one of these waves comes along things really kick in in the city,” Glennie said. “But once the spotlight’s shone upon it, it disappears. Things are fairly quiet in Manchester at the moment. Perhaps it’s a good idea that it’s left alone for a while. ” While peers such as Happy Mondays made their mark with hit records, James earned its fans through continuous touring. Ironically, radio and record companies weren’t impressed. “We had lots of problems with record companies. They had trouble finding space for James in the industry. But whenever we played live, more and more people came to the gigs. So we just kept playing, which kind of fueled us financially and spiritually and emotionally. ” James ultimately achieved major popularity in Britain in the early ’90s. “We got singles in the Top 40 without air play, just because we were pulling thousands of people live. The radio couldn’t ignore us any more. Once it broke in Britain, the rest of the world wanted to know. So off we went on our travels” “The demands of time are getting so great now. We were big in Britain and then things spilled into Europe. Now things are kicking in in America. Because of the size of the states, you have put in so much time into going around touring and doing promotion. It’s not a problem, but it means some will have to suffer. We don’t get a great deal of time at home. ” Even if success comes with some suffering, it also opens doors. One such opportunity was James’ realization of a longtime dream: Laid was produced by studio guru Brian Eno (David Bowie, Roxy Music, Talking Heads, U2). With Eno at the helm, Laid was recorded in a slight six weeks. “He’s a problem solver,” Glennie said. “He looks at the way you work and gets out the way the things that are blocking you. With us, the songs will play themselves, but we have a tendency to put too much in. Eno kept things quite simple. The first few takes and that was it; very little or no over-dubs, just keeping the songs straightforward and not being too fussy. The album’s more direct because of that. “ | Mar 1994 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Interview With Jo Whiley – BBC Radio 1 | Article, Interview | Jo Whiley : This is the dedication that we received when we went out to see James. I was telling the story to Tim on how we were sat on the 747. God, it was just dreadful, you know we got struck by lightning and he went “Hey, how fantastic was that” Tim : (from live show) This is dedicated to those who have been hit by lightning. (plays Sometimes) JW : And I guess in retrospect it was a fantastic experience and one I’m never going to forget. So James playing Las Vegas. The plane finally got there. A bit of a rocky ride. As we arrived we were cruising the streets of Las Vegas as you do and seeing who else was in town that evening like Moody Blues, Englebert Humperdinck and UB40. What a good gig for the weekend that was. And then James playing too. The gig was actually excellent. And the anthem being for them in the States – Laid. I had to go and get the reaction of the crowd outside as they left the gig and find out what they thought of the whole thing. Fan 1 : It was the best. I mean these guys, it gave the feeling, they give such feeling and you could feel what they were saying you know. And everything was great. Fan 2 : Killer, very psychadelic, just very entertaining Fan 3 : That was great and everything. We were down in the out and great. Fan 4 : I didn’t associate the songs I liked on the radio with the name of the band but when he called me up and went “Those guys who are really cool on the radio, these are the guys.” so it was great and I’ll be going to more. Fan 5 : The album’s pretty good. It’s a little more upbeat. It’s really good and this town, Las Vegas, is really slow Fan 6 : I’m from America and I love the English sound and these guys are great and they’re going to be big in my heart. JW : And do you know, he meant that, he meant that so much. So what about Tim, what did he think about the gig? Tim : The gig was pretty good. You come to Las Vegas and you don’t know what to expect really. It’s such a crazy cartoon type of town in the middle of a desert. Everything is larger than life and kitsch and you don’t know who you’re gonna get. You don’t know where the real people are and where everyone lives here. Last time we played here wiht Neil Young, he was wonderful and they didn’t listen to him and he got very angry and walked off after an hour. And his manager said to us “Whatever you do, don’t ever tell anyone Neil’s played Las Vegas” So now I’m thinking I shouldn’t have said that, should I? Opening my big mouth again. But it’s that kind of place, you know, it doesn’t have the great credibility of many other cities. The rest of the band really love it. They go out and gamble. Larry puts his stets on and dark glasses. JW : Larry went Vegas didn’t he? Tim : Yeah, we call him Vegas. A nickname. He goes out and gambles. He’s won every time here. Come away with quite a lot of money. JW : He was the Vegas kid on stage that night Larry. He was quite brilliant. So the image before was of meditating vegetarians, it seems that James have changed quite a lot and become party animals. I had to ask Larry. Party animals then, Larry? Larry : Well I think we always have been, we’ve just never had that image in England. Our image was set in the early years when we were kind of a lot younger. We were scared of everything we came up against in the industry and in the media and things like that. It seemed, it seemed bigger than we were and it would swallow us up if we weren’t careful so we seemed very reserved and very shy as a result of it. There have been some more parties on this tour, yeah. JW : Ah, but the thing is, is Tim indulging as well? Tim : There’s a front of the bus and a back of the bus and the back of the bus is the party area. JW : You sit at the front? Tim : And the front of the bus is my area. I make forays into the back of the bus when I feel like it on a full moon, but a lot of the time I spend in the front of the bus. It’s mainly because it’s smoky at the back of the bus and as a singer I have to watch my instrument. I mean I want to go out every night and give my best and I hate letting people down. Hate it. Passionate about that. So I look after myself. JW : There’s a lot of controversy at the moment about James and their desperation, no, passion to break America. And that’s what I wanted to find out from Tim. How important is it for James to break America? Tim : I don’t like this thing, breaking America. We would like to be successful in America. Breaking America often comes across as some sort of colonial invasion from Britain and it sounds very pompous and usually the bands that cite it, you know, they usually end up being defeated at Agincourt. Like they end up flat on their backs in the end, feeling rather stupid. What we want to do is come and play here. We get excited by playing here. It’s a very alien country yet they speak our language. That’s exciting. You can communicate on one level but this is very alien, very strange as you are finding out. I mean, Las Vegas, you can’t get much stranger than this. JW : So you’re feeling more at home in America now? I mean, on a personal basis. Tim : Yes, at first I was quite scared. I came with all the usual English, I think, preconceptions. Either you think it’s going to be really trashy or really superficial and everyone says “Have a nice day” and smiles at you really politely. English, I think, are really snobby about America. And so we came with those kinds of preconceptions and then you arrive at New York and it just isn’t like that. And you know there are some places like that. LA, it’d be hard to deny LA can be like that. But some of the other places are great, you know. And they really vary and so then you get your preconceptions smashed and you go “Wow, this is alright after all” And another thing that I think is really good about America for English people. The national psychology, if I dare be so bold, you know we live on an island, a cramp overpopulated island and it rains a lot, the weather’s not too good and you know we’re quite famous for coming second and success can be a dirty word in England. And you come to America and there’s vast landscapes, there’s vast landscapes where there’s no people, it’s very very beautiful and open expanse and people are very optimistic and they go for their dreams and they’re not embarrassed to be successful. And so for an English person coming from that kind of English background, it’s quite a release. I think it’s quite healthy for an English person to come here for a few years and then you probably have to get back pretty quickly after a couple of years. JW : Has it affected you personally? Tim : Yeah, I’m much freer, much more optimistic. I feel, I believe I can be happy whereas when I was in England, I never believed I could be happy. There’s a lot of social conditioning that I’ve received at public school and the English, the whole English way of life you know. I was brought up in a very Christian background. Between 13 and 18 I was at church five days a week. It was fairly rammed down my throat. I hated it and I really lost touch with how I felt and who I was and my twenties have been kind of rediscovering that. (plays Laid) JW : So that’s the one that’s doing it for James in America at the moment. You’re listening to Radio 1 FM talking to Steve (sic) and Larry from James in Las Vegas. The overriding feeling that I got from being at the gig and being with the band was that they were kind of starting over again, there was great enthusiasm. And I wanted to find out what the feeling from the band was at the moment. Tim : It’s very strong at the moment. It’s been very strong for a while. It’s been growing and growing. I mean we had that wonderful piece of luck when Neil Young invited us on the acoustic tour of America and that’s some introduction to America because we were playing in the deserts and on mountains away from the cities and 10,000 people would trek out there and sit on the mountainside and the view behind Neil Young would be 40 miles and you’d see lightning going off in the background 20 miles away. What an introduction. That was definitely a turning point. Playing acoustically and then Brian Eno coming and saying he wanted to work with us. That was wonderful and gave us a lot of confidence. You know because we all respect him so much and then saying, encouraging us to improvise more. The band’s come on a lot since then, we get on in a really good way. You know we’re not closest buddies who can fall out and fight like people who’ve been together eleven years. It’s pretty solid. JW : A lot of directions James go in tend to be the result of things happening to them. So I wanted to know whether James have a gameplan that they follow Tim : We’re open for magic to happen. You have to believe these things are going to happen I think then if you really believe it and stick out all the really bad times, then they will happen. So it’s kind of like having a faith that the thing will turn round. You know for ages it can feel like you’re pushing a boulder up a hill and noone’s listening and nobody’s getting what you’re doing and you know you can push that for years without, with very little feedback and that takes a faith and a courage then suddenly everything’s downhill and it’s wonderful. But if you haven’t pushed it up for those 3 years, you wouldn’t get the other side. And I think that’s the thing where James stuck it out for own lean years. JW : A couple of weeks ago there was a piece in the Melody Maker in the news page. The headline was “Booth bashes Britain”. That kind of provoked a lot of reaction in England and I wanted to find out the effect that had on the band and whether they realised what effect that had on their fans in England. Tim : Well, it’s a tabloid headline. I didn’t. When you actually read it, it isn’t about the headline. The headline is unfortunately what gets remembered. You know, I don’t believe those papers and I’d be surprised, I’d be really upset if people took that as being my attitude. What happens in that situation, in that piece itself, is a discussion. This guy rings me up in the hotel. We have a conversation that lasts quite a while. He then takes all his side out of it, all his provocation and whatever he’s had a go at and threads all my answers to him together making it look like a statement. And there’s also misquotes in it. I said, if James had our way, we wouldn’t release another single off Laid, the LP Laid, in England because we feel we’ve released two and that’s enough and it gets printed as James wouldn’t release another single in England and that sounds highly dramatic. So it’s like, you know, I can’t be responsible for how the press presents, you can’t be. You can’t control it, that’s the trouble. JW : Do you feel angry with the press? Tim : I feel angry. That particular piece is me whining at quite a lot of critics, music critics. It’s not at Britain, that’s not it at all. It’s, you know, our support’s in Britain, we’ve been supported in Britain for years. Our fans are brilliant there you know. We’ve had great support there. What I feel upset about is that I feel Laid is the best work we’ve ever done. It got some good reviews. Some journalists stuck their necks out. Radio 1 supported it like anything. Radio 1 has ended up being our main support actually and the only people who have really helped us in that way. But like, kind of the whole music scene, the whole fashion scene, music paper side, they really didn’t take too much notice of Laid and we felt like “Damn, this is really our best work.” and it’s like they’re all looking the other way. JW : Because they’re looking for new things to come along, you mean? Young and trendy. Tim : I think we’ve ended up being taken for granted because we’ve been around so long. I mean all these magazines now. There’s so much more competition, a lot more need for circulation, to sell copies, to find the next big thing. It’s become desperate. It’s become really desperate. And that desperation is strangling things. Strangling bands. I mean the pressure on a band like Suede is ridiculous and it’s unhealthy for them. They aren’t going to get a chance to breathe, to create their own music, to find their own voice because they’ve been leapt on and you know it’s not healthy. JW : So the overriding feeling is huge disappointment over Laid and while they were so sought after in America, that’s where they were going to concentrate. So I wanted to know if they still care about Britain and were concentrating their efforts on America Tim : We don’t see it in terms of countries like that. We see it in terms of making a record that communicates with people and we want to take it to people who want to hear it. And it’s like, you know, we love what we do and we’re really passionate about what we do. You know, we live in Britain and I love where I live. I’m very happy. I miss football when I’m out here. I miss lots of things from England. I don’t want to get into a nationalistic debate. I think it’s really trite. It’s like getting into a political debate. Are you left wing or right wing? I don’t accept nationalism in those terms. I think it’s really divisive and we make a record that communicates and we go and play where people buy that record. It’s kind of a law of economics, we don’t have a choice. We can’t go and play where noone wants to come and hear us play. And so we’ve ended up coming out to America quite a lot because they want to hear it at the moment and we don’t feel we’ve been very well represented by the music press in Britain and we feel that that has cut us off from some of our audience. But the ones that are still with us, we toured, we brought Laid to England and we’ve done that, we’ll be back again and we’ll play Glastonbury, I hope. JW : With this constant touring of America, all the hard work, Tim misses football. Apart from friends and family, what does Larry miss? Larry : Ridiculous things like beans on toast. The Americans haven’t discovered the joys of beans on toast. The greenery. The heart and soul. You know, of Britain. In such a small place, there are such diversities. Here’s there’s great diversity in America, but they’re all a thousand miles apart. From the flatlands of the Mid West and the Great Plains through to the Rocky Mountains and the West Coast, the hedonism of San Francisco, the obesity of Los Angeles, you know, right through to the vulgarity of New York. JW : I tell you, it’s surreal in Las Vegas. Talking of football, James have just done a version of one of the tracks off Laid for the World Cup. How does that go? Tim : We’ve just done Low Low Low as the soccer anthem. It;s going to go on the compilation record. I think with Tina Turner and Frank Sinatra and Daryl Hall. And Daryl Hall’s singing the main anthem and it’s “Glory Glory Hallelujah” And we do this gritty little English football song. JW : What have you done? Have you changed the words? Tim : Oh yes, I’ve written the song from a fan’s, from my, point of view which is a fan’s point of view and it’s Goal Goal Goal – “Oh, we’re so powerful, watch these giants collide, so individual, he was never ever ever offside. Goal, goal, goal, goal” Sort of like that you know. JW : Big music. I mean football fans. Anyway let’s hear some of the track Low Low Low, see how it sounds (plays Low Low Low) JW : So you can hear it in your head now. “Goal, goal, goal, goal”. 1 FM’s Evening Session talking to Tim Booth and Larry Gott from James. I asked Tim how the band maintains their enthusiasm after all these years. Tim : James maintain enthusiasm by their music. It’s always been as simple as that. We had seven years where we made no money. It was like dole money, basically. We did it because we love what we do and we love the new songs we’re writing. We write all the time. In a soundcheck two days ago, we wrote four new songs. It was like, you know, it’s fun. And that stimulates us. It’s like “Yeah, I’m looking forward to playing this to people.” When we come to Britain, we can show them Basic Brian which was one of the new ones we played tonight and another song called Honest Joe which we played tonight and it’s like we’re looking forward to showing that to our English audiences because they haven’t heard those two I don’t think. JW : And Honest Joe really did go down so well with the American audience. It kind of bodes well. Hopefully, they’ll be playing it at Glastonbury when they come over in the summer. This is Honest Joe. Thanks very much to Tim and Larry for taking the time out to talk to us. (plays Honest Joe) | Mar 1994 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Itinerary: 1994 US Get Laid Tour | Tour Itinerary | This is the band itinerary from the James 1994 US Get Laid Tour. | Mar 1994 | tour-itinerary article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Los Angeles Hollywood Palace – 21st March 1994 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
Setlist(incomplete) : Pressure's On / Don't Wait That Long / PS / Five-O / Sometimes / Basic Brian / Skindiving / Honest Joe / Lullaby / Laid / Sit DownSupportTexasMore Information & ReviewsCathy Maestri, The Press Enterprise James was deft and dazzling, masterfully building its Monday night concert from a hypnotic, atmospherics-laden beginning to a wild exuberance and a big, sweeping sound. It’s taken the English band nearly 10 years to break in America, but the success of “Laid” is paying off; the sellout crowd at the Palace was waiting for the big hit, yet everyone knew the words to a somber album track, “Out to Get You.” The six-piece band’s different elements shone brilliantly, from David Baynton-Power’s crisp drumming to the chiming sound of Larry Gott’s slide guitar, while Saul Davies played his violin to soothe at times and grind at others. The center of the magic is enigmatic singer Tim Booth, his clean voice calmly hypnotic. But his shy demeanor is belied when the music seems to possess him and he goes into spasms, his thin body wracked as he dances. James opened with a series of low-key atmospheric numbers, easing into the haunting “P.S.” and “Five-O” from “Laid. ” Mood established, they stepped things up with “Sometimes (Lester Piggott),” Booth grinning as the crowd became fluid and started to bounce. For the night’s most spectacular production, a mirrored ball at Booth’s feet during “Skin Diving” projected a stunning galaxy of colored bubbles, winding him into its center. The audience exploded for “Laid,” which got a very basic treatment from the band while the crowd concentrated on jumping around. The wonderfully anthemic “Sit Down” was met with a thunderous response – ironically, Voice of the Beehive covered the song at the Palace not so long ago, when James was still relegated to playing small clubs in LA. The pace continued with “Low Low Low” and its wobbly percussion, the ringing “Say Something” and the war whoops of “Born of Frustration.” It took awhile for the stunned (or exhausted) crowd to bring the band back for its semi-acoustic encore, which fittingly closed with the uplifting “Ring the Bells.” Video | Mar 1994 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Los Angeles Hollywood Palace – 22nd March 1994 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistLaid / Heavens / Come Home / Tomorrow / Low Low Low / PS / Five-O / Sometimes / Basic Brian / Honest Joe / Skindiving / Lullaby / Laid / Born of Frustration / Say Something / SoundSupportTexasMore Information & ReviewsVideo | Mar 1994 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Say Something (Top Of The Pops) – 31st March 1994 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsA live performance of Say Something on Top Of The Pops in March 1994 | Mar 1994 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James On World Cup Album – NME News | Article, Interview |
JAMES contribute a specially re-recorded version of ‘Low Low Low’ to the official World Cup soundtrack album ‘Gloryland’, released through Mercury on May 30. Retitled ‘Goal Goal Goal’, it is a paean to the delights of the beautiful game. Also on the album is the official song ‘Gloryland’, a stirring version of ‘Glory Glory Hallelujah’ by Daryl Hall and the Sounds Of Blackness gospel choir. Hall was an obvious choice for the song because he was a source of divine inspiration for footballers’ haircuts throughout the 70s and ’80s. Less obvious contributors are The Moody Blues, Santana, The Scorpions and Jon Bon Jovi. Old favourites like Tina Turner’s ‘Simply The Best’, Queen’s ‘We Are The Champions’, Kool & The | Apr 1994 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Band Outgrows Cult Status – Wisconsin State Journal | Article, News | James isn’t like most major rock bands. Its members don’t sell fashion, and they don’t go searching for popularity. For more than a decade, James has been a cult band content to do its own thing – marry new wave to folk rock in weird but wonderful ways. The fashion and popularity just happened to follow. ”Laid,” the title track and first single off their new album (which was produced by Brian Eno), peaked at No. 3 on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart. ”Say Something” is the second single off the album to hit the alternative radio airwaves. James formed in Manchester, England, in 1983 when bassist Jim Glennie spotted singer Tim Booth dancing in his unique, whirling style (think Grateful Dead) in a college bar. Early on, James was welcomed by English teenagers, and the members quickly found themselves on every music magazine cover in England. Morrissey punctuated their fame when he invited them to tour with the Smiths. With the loss of some members and the addition of others over the years, James’ sound changed, expanded and grew more colorful. Those colors especially shone through on the band’s 1992 album, ”Seven,” which solidified James’ place as a major international rock band. That same year, James joined Neil Young on an acoustic tour, and the experience put them in the mood to make their mellow new album, ”Laid.” The title is rumored to be a joke (Did you get ”Laid” yet?). | May 1994 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
St Louis Post – Acoustic Tour Leaves Imprint on James | Article, Interview | ONE of the more unusual concert pairings of recent years had to be Neil Young and the group James. After all, James made its reputation playing tuneful, full-bodied pop wth a strong British accent, while Young is the quintessential folk rocker. Yet, in the summer of 1992, James opened for Young on an ampitheater tour – and played for the first time in an acoustic format. The James record that followed the tour, “Laid,” makes it obvious that the Young tour – as well as the experience of working for the first time with legendary producer Brian Eno – left an indelible imprint on the band. The buoyant melodies that have always defined James’ music remain, especially on such appealing tracks as “Sometimes,” “One of the Three” and “Say Something.” But with liberal use of acoustic instruments and simpler arrangements, “Laid” brings more of a folk element into the band’s sound. Eno’s leaner production style also helped to capture more of the warmth and spontaneity the band displays in its live shows. In a recent interview, bassist Jim Glennie described the evolution of the band’s sound and recording approach during the “Laid” sessions. “I think it was basically circumstances, kind of, that dictated how the album started,” Glennie said, “Yeah, initially, it was the Neil Young acoustic tour. And then when we went back in the studio, we picked up our electric instruments again, but (playing acoustically) just changed the way we heard things, the way we heard the songs. We just chilled out a lot more basically. “So that did affect the songs in the studio, and also Brian’s idea of keeping things very simple, very live, no overdubs – virtually no overdubs. It had to sound like a band. It had to sound quite real. “I think that all contributed . . . so we didn’t end up with an overproduced, multi-layered studio album. The songs are quite simple, quite stripped.” American fans apparently like the direction James took on “Laid.” The record is easily the band’s most popular stateside, with the title track reaching No. 3 on modern-rock radio. This may not be a breakthrough of Pearl Jam proportions, but for a band that remained virually invisible in America for a decade, it represents a major step forward. Formed in 1983 by Glennie, singer Tim Booth, guitarist Larry Gott and the original drummer, Gavan Whelan, James was an early member of the then-burgeoning Manchester music scene in England. The group debuted with a British EP, “Village Fire,” then landed an American record deal with Sire in 1985. It was not a smooth marriage. The band’s two Sire releases, “Stutter” and “Strip Mine,” drew their share of positive press, but this never translated into airplay or sales. By 1988, James had hit a crossroads. Money was tight, and the Sire partnership would soon dissolve. Around the same time, Whelan quit. The band responded with a major shift by adding not only a new drummer, David Baynton-Power, but also keyboardist Mark Hunter, violinist Saul Davies and trumpter Andy Diagram, who left the band after the Neil Young tour. After releasing a British-only live record, “One Man Clapping,” on Rough Trade Records, the band signed with Phonogram in Britain and Fontana/Mercury in America. The labels, both part of PolyGram Records, reintroduced James in very different ways on either side of the Atlantic. In Britain, a studio album, “Gold Mother,” was released in 1990, and it became the band’s breakthrough back home. The song “Sit Down” reached No. 2, and another single, “Come Home,” also charted strongly. In this country, though, Fontana/Mercury opted to issue a self-titled best-of collection, which included those two hit songs as well as earlier tracks. These releases were followed in 1992 by the album “Seven,” which produced another British hit single, “Sound,” and gave the band a first taste of success in the U.S. when the song “Born of Frustration” received notable college-radio play. “Laid,” though, is clearly a high-water mark both in terms of the quality of the music and its popularity. The CD has drawn critical raves, with Musician magazine even calling James the last great hope among British bands for achieving major success in America. Glennie is reluctant to be seen as a standard-bearer for British music, although he did say that his country’s music has stagnated at the moment. “We’ve never felt really, you know – we’re not a nationalistic band,” he said. “So when we come over and play wherever it is, you never particularly feel like you’re representing your country. You know what I mean? You’re a band and you play, and they either like you or they don’t.” Glennie clearly likes how James is sounding these days. He gives Eno, whose many production credits include U2 and Lou Reed, considerable credit for refocusing the group’s sound and making the “Laid” project especally rewarding. “I think that Brian, he’s a great problem solver,” Glennie said. “He’s not just an intellectual, he’s a great kind of down-to-earth problem solver. “And that’s what we needed. we needed someone to see our faults, basically, and try to get them out of the way. It’s not like we needed someone to work on the bare bones of the songs and help on, like, bass drum parts or guitar sounds. We just needed somebody to basically sort us out, almost like people management. “He did that incredibly well, and very diplomatically as well. There wasn’t that much friction involved with people letting go of their ideas. Because the thing is, there are six of us, and we all have plenty of ideas. We can drag a song off in six different directions for days on end if we’re not careful. Eno somehow managed to involve everybody but keep it going in one direction rather than six. “I think we’re at our peak in songwriting. I just don’t know how long it’s going to last,” Glennie said with a chuckle, “but I’d like to think it will last for a long time. . . . “We’ve just relaxed so much more. We’re just not so uptight. And I think that’s enabling some really, really good, straight-forward, simple songs to come through. I think that’s our strength really.” | May 1994 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Home James – Chicago Sun | Article, Interview | Back for the third time since the beginning of the year, James sold out its Sunday show at the Riviera Theatre in a mere 10 minutes. That’s not too bad for a band whose “overnight success” took a mere 11 years. “I knew we’d never break (in the U.S.) until we played live,” says lead singer-songwriter Tim Booth. “It took seven years of gigging in England before we made it there. And we didn’t start playing live in America until 2 1/2 years ago. So we never expected anything to happen for a long time.” For a while it looked as if nothing would happen here at all. Although James’s record company cranked the hype machine in full gear to tout the band’s U.S. debut tour, the group failed to crack the radio playlists. But the six-man group remained determined and kept right on touring, expanding its fan base with each show. Pretty soon the fans were calling radio stations requesting James standards such as “Sit Down.” And “overnight,” alternative programmers realized James indeed was very radio-friendly. The release of James’ current CD, “Laid,” has won over its share of critics as well. Produced by Brian Eno, the album is the group’s strongest collection of work yet. Booth’s lyrics are pensive and passionate, exploring sex and religion with both awe and ease. As for the group’s haunting music – which is equal parts rock, folk and pop – it stands up well to Eno’s trademark ambient production. “We’ve wanted to work with Brian for a long time now,” said Booth, who asked Eno to produce James’ 1986 debut “Stutter.” “But he’d always been busy (though he said) he liked us and promised to get back to us. So when we were getting ready to do (`Laid’), I sent him a demo tape of some songs and a playful letter saying, `Come out and play with us,’ and he rung me up one Saturday morning to chat. We talked abut perfume, punk and cyberpunk and at the end of it, he said, `I’d like to make your record.’ ” Thanks to “Laid,” which already has produced hits in the title track and “Say Something,” the group has name recognition now. Their popularity is such that they’ve appeared on all the hot late night talk shows. And no less than David Letterman gushed after the band performed “Laid.” Letterman specifically directed his kudos to Booth, suggesting that Booth’s joyous dancing was not unlike his own. Booth, who originally was hired by the group to be its dancer and backup singer, became its singer and songwriter by default. Though his smooth vocals have been compared to Bono’s, he said dancing still is his first love. “We’ve always known that people like to watch me dance because I look a little bizarre,” he said. “But I can’t dance to all our songs (like `Say Something’) because they’re just not dance songs. Some nights, I just don’t dance and the kids are disappointed. “But I don’t think things should be forced. Like last night we didn’t do an encore and the audiencewas a little bit upset. But they have to respect us, just like we respect them, which is why we change our set every night so fans who might come to more than one concert will always see a different show. We never expect that people will want encores from us. That’s conceited. But when they want one enough, we do them. But we don’t force it on people who’d rather go home.” Judging by James’ strong Chicago following, there’ll be no question of whether an encore is warranted Sunday. | May 1994 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Jessie In James – Vox | Article, Interview |
In the back of the James tour bus, guitarist Larry Gott wraps his lips around the nozzle of a small gas canister and sucks hard. A mixture of oxygen and Entonox (a drug given to pregnant women in labour) fires into his lungs, he whoops like a crazed teenager, pummels the air and grins like a maniac. His fellow revellers clap faster and faster, until Larry’s 30-second high begins to fade. Bassist Jim Glennie refuels the medical equipment, hands it to the next band member and the rhythmic handclaps start up again. Meanwhile, Larry’s attention switches to a surreal, soft-porn video, flicking with a dull, yellow tint on the TV screen. “It’s more ambient this way,” he enthuses as he adjusts the set. For the next 20 minutes he fastforwards through a grotesque low-budget fantasy, featuring actors in bizarre genital creations made out of rubber and foam. One particularly gruesome creature, his back covered in a matt of thick black hair, gets the most popular encouragement, laddish roars of “Come on, Stavros”, greeting his frenzied encounter with a woman supporting 80-inch papier-mache breasts. One person is absent from this carnal mayhem, however. As a member of the crew flashes a penis inked with the signature of a young groupie, James singer Tim Booth sits in the relative quiet of the “no smoking, no partying” area at the front of the bus. Tonight’s gig at the Memphis Omni New Daisey was not a success. James twisted awkward experimentation baffled the audience, which expected the conventional pop show promised by their first US hit single Laid. After several aborted attempts to whip up the fans with his arm-flapping St Vitus dance, the band’s singer feels drained and is looking forward to a good night’s sleep. Beside him on the bunk bed lie his one-piece nightwear (nicknamed “bunny suit” by the band), earmuffs and aeroplane eye patches which he slips on at night to block out the hysteria in the “party room.” “I like to have the band around,” he explains half-heartedly attempting to shrug off the accusation that he’s a stick-in-the-mud. “I can live vicariously through them. I have champagne now and again. I don’t take very many drugs. Well, I do, but very sporadically. Maybe once a week on tour I’ll have a bottle of beer or something,” he says poker-faced, playing the straight man a little too well. He adds “I have a refined sense of humour, but it’s very dry. I am what I am. I’m enjoying humour more now than before. We have fun.” The image of James as a merry band of pleasure seekers is at odds with their old puritanical hairshirted image. Doubts about how much they’ve changed remain centred around Tim, who is still apart in his guided, self-conscious manner. The next day, talking in short considered sentences over the congenial chatter of a Memphis coffee bar, he makes it clear that he rejects many of his old constrictive principles. “I had all these ideas about pain being deep, which is a great Western fallacy that I don’t believe in anymore. You know, show me your scars and I will crown you a great artist.” In retrospect he believes he adopted this serious approach partly because “I was quite judgmental of image, which was me, perhaps, lacking in humour. White 70s trousers just don’t appeal to me.” More significantly, he argues: “I was genuinely in pain. I nearly died when I was 23 of a liver disease. I actually stopped breathing. I didn’t know I was ill physically. I thought I was ill mentally, because I was behaving in strange ways that I couldn’t understand.” In the 80s, Tim dealt with depression and his permanent liver condition by turning to alternative medicine, magic, tai chi and (along with Jim Glennie) a meditative religious sect, for whom he took a vow of celibacy. He now asserts that he’s ‘rediscovered’ his sexuality, proclaiming, “Celibacy fucks you up. It should become a sticker, shouldn’t it? Mind you, I didn’t feel confident before celibacy either. It was an escape for me, partly. My first sexual experiences were terrible and funny. It’s taken the past three or four years for me to enjoy it. And gain confidence in it. I’ve been practising,” he says, with an almost imperceptible leer. When several members of the group appear, Tim’s attempts to join in the banter seems forced. He slips into a bizarre American accent, declares “get laid by James, it’s a wonderful experience” and looks a little awkward as he boasts about his early sexual encounters. “I got laid a lot at university, Too much. That was part of my problem. It was just bouncing around.” As the stories of backstage gropes and wrinkly autographs filter through, the singer makes his own claim as a rock n roll stud. “I avoided groupies. For the first eight years I avoided that cliche, until one day…” he pauses, “I could no longer resist.” Tim slips away to refresh his frail physique with an afternoon nap. Fatigue appears to be a problem for this thin wiry-haired “rock star” with public school manners. Although he’s no longer the tortured insomniac of early 80s repute, he still rarely enjoys a full night’s sleep. The band shrug off his departure with typically barbed humour. “Tim’s not tired. He’s just being a wanker,” smirks violinist Saul Davies. His absence leaves them to enthuse about the looser, more upbeat mood of this tour. They point to their more light-hearted public profile in the States as a helpful catalyst. “People here know us for wearing dresses, eating bananas (on the cover of their 1993 album Laid, one of the few UK albums currently residing in the Billboard Top 100) and having a song in the charts about shagging,” laughs Jim. “We’re not seen as serious artists with pokers in our arses like we are in Britain,.” Their rush of success in America contrasts starkly with the band’s disappointment at the mediocre sales Laid has achieved back home. Larry complains: “It’s completely changed my perception of the British music-buying public. I always thought they knew a good thing when they heard it. But they completely missed it.” In the States, James have been able to gradually build up a wider appeal from their college radio base. However, the UK’s rapidly changing fashions have often left James trailing behind the current fad – they offered vegetarian politics and indie pop at the height of the Smiths success; broke commercially after their fellow Manchester-based acts Happy Mondays and Stone Roses, and more recently released a Sabres of Paradise remix of Jam J, which sees them taking a belated dive into the ambient scene. They’re already steeling themselves for a cynical reaction to the forthcoming alternative album (due for release in the autumn) which falls somewhere between Eno/Byrne’s My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts and U2’s Zooropa. Jim claims: “In practice we did it before Zooropa was released. We recorded it with Eno during the six-week sessions for Laid. But yeah, people are going to say that we’re just copying them. That’s the problem with fucking England. They’re too hung up on whether the music is current.” Larry weighs in with a resigned shrug. “It’s just timing. When The Smiths broke big, New Order’s manager Rob Gretton told us: ‘They’ve stolen your thunder.’ The Sabres remix was actually completed last spring. The trouble is we’re slow at making up our minds. We’re full of indecision so we always get pipped. We don’t want to get ahead of fashion. We want to get outside it.” Wrapped in a long leather overcoat, Saul rolls his tiny hips with a pimpish swagger as he walks up to the bar to order a coffee – much to the amusement of the others who snigger: “Oh look at him, he thinks he’s a star.” This is typical of the sarcastic trade-offs between the four but it’s rare for Tim to be the butt of their jokes. A couple of days ago, Saul pretended to kick the singer up the backside in a moment of unexpected on-stage slapstick. Fortunately perhaps, the frontman remained blissfully aware of the mirth behind him. “I think if he turned around, he’d be cool about that,” considers Jim. “Maybe,” he adds with a wry grin. “Tim’s always asking us to be quiet and telling us to take our porn videos off,” says the bassist, affectionately drawing a picture of his friend as a delicate, prudish fop. “It should be a good angle for pisstaking, but we’re not quite there yet, to be honest. A lot of the time when people have a go, it’s usually nasty because they’ve had enough. It’s not humour. We’ve got to pull him in more and give him some fucking stick.” Tim’s role as the band’s singer and lyricist means that the fans and the media naturally separate the 33 year old from the other musicians as the subject of special interest. “The singer’s is a weird fucking job,” says Jim. “The focus is on him. It takes a strange person to do it and I don’t think the circumstances you find yourself in help very much.” However, the bassist’s revelation that after a decade together he also treats him with circumspect care, signals an uneasy division. “It’s not good for him and us,” he argues. “We had a row the other day, and I told him I’d had enough. I flew off the handle and poured out all this stuff that had been building up inside me. The reason that I couldn’t say anything to him is that I’m worried about how he’s going to take it. That’s my fucking problem. He’ll come to the soundcheck, have a stroppy mood on and say something nasty and everyone’s like ‘oh shit’. If it was one of us lot, it’d be like ‘Fuck off, stop your whinging’. But if it’s Tim, it’s blown up into a big deal. And he doesn’t want that. He wants to have a grumpy head on and snap a bit, and then that’s the end of it. We put him in that situation and that’s our fault as much as his. He is trying really hard to change.” “He’s travelling lighter,” laughs the band’s drummer, David Baynton-Power. Later, back on the bus, Tim confirms that he likes to force arguments and then allow them to blow over. “I’m quite confrontational and it usually comes out in a pretty bad way. It can be really isolating. Some of the people personally connected to me have a rough time. They have to be pretty earthed.” As a child his judgmental nature – “I was always looking at adults, thinking they were all fucked up”- provoked arguments, especially when he claimed to hear people’s thoughts. “I used to think I knew what people were thinking,” he says, looking uneasy. “Whether I could, or not, I don’t know. In the end you don’t. It didn’t go down well,” he whispers, sucking in his breath. “You can imagine people’s reactions when I started telling them what they were thinking about. I really was an outcast at school, a misfit. I didn’t know how to get on with the lads.” While the others muck in together, Tim Booth’s approach to touring is more self-contained. He handles the claustrophobic living conditions and aftershow parties in his own polite, thoughtful way, keeping strangers at arm’s length. If his cordial manner doesn’t keep the inquisitive at bay, his personal bodyguard will. In fact, Tim’s leather-clad protector has little to do and only serves to underline the fact that the singer is different from the rest of the band. Meanwhile, in his dealings with the media, he retains a quiet, evasive control over interviews and photographs, making it clear that “wacky” shots are out of the question. “James don’t do comedy,” he declares with the dry, self-conscious smile of a man who only half fits in. | May 1994 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Goal Goal Goal | Song, Video Archive | Goal Goal Goal is a re-recorded version of Low Low Low that appeared as a b-side to the 1999 James single Just Like Fred Astaire after appearing on the official 1994 World Cup album Gloryland. The band wanted to put Goal Goal Goal forward as the England song for the 1994 World Cup until they didn’t qualify. It appeared on the World Cup album and James played a gig (date unknown) in the States organised as part of the World Cup. A clash with Glastonbury prevented James playing at a World Cup match between Argentina and Nigeria. Details
LyricsListenReleaseAvailable OnGigsGuitar Tabs I'm in love with a football club
At the age of seven my father took me He got me hooked into this game I'm a member of an ape-like race In the final days of the twentieth century When we don't win I go insane Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Wanna see you take that ball And make or break the laws of gravity Sell me a dummy on the way Curve the ball around the wall Make the play with a touch of clarity I get such pleasure from this game Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Oh, we're so powerful Watch these giants collide So individual He was never, ever, ever offside Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal Goal
Share: | May 1994 | song video-archive discography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Goal Goal Goal – Unknown TV Broadcast – June 1994 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsOne-off live performance of 1994 World Cup soundtrack album track Goal Goal Goal | Jun 1994 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James To Make Ambient Football Album (Mr Agreeable Parody) – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
| Jun 1994 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Musician Interview And Feature | Article, Interview |
| Jun 1994 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Take A Dip – Melody Maker News | Article, News |
JAMES have revealed details of their “alternative” album, “Frequency Dip”, which they hope will be released by Fontana later in the year. However, problems seem to be emerging with the parent label, Phonogram. Early last week, it was announced that the LP would be released in late July or early August. Days later, James’ press representatives were informed that the album did not appear on any release schedule. Those who have heard “Frequency Dip” say it’s James’ personal “Zooropa”, a record which will ensure their critical rehabilitation and at the same time enhance their appeal in the market place. James certainly hope so. In March this year, singer Tim Booth told The Maker that the band felt they were “taken for granted” in Britain, and were all disappointed by the response to their “Laid” LP. But he added: “We’ve got an ‘alternative’ record coming out in a few months, and maybe that’ll stir things up again.” “Frequency Dip” is still a double LP filled with improvised, experimental music, recorded during the sessions for “Laid”. Both were produced by Brian Eno. Some tracks have already been remixed by Andy Weatherall, including “Jam-J”, which was released as a single earlier this year. Weatherall was responsible for the 33-minute version on the 12-inch. The band recorded “Frequency Dip” and “Laid” in six weeks at Eno’s Real World studios. The experimental material began as a way of coping with periods of boredom or inactivity. According to Booth: “We’d put on this one-hour multi-track tape that Brian had specially made and we’d go into the other room and improvise for an hour. We’d take the tape into the other studio where Brian’s assistant was working, and choose four minutes from it. “The original idea was ‘music for films’, because that way I wouldn’t be pressured into having to come up with lyrics, and we wouldn’t be pressured into making them into songs – they could just be atmosphere tracks. But some songs just turned up anyway.” At the moment tracks are: “Hammer Strings”, “Pressure’s On”, “Jam-J”, “Frequency Dip”, “Lay the Law Down”, “Burn The Cat”, “Mad Maria”, “Low Clouds”, “Feeling Your Sex”, “Gospel Oak”, “Beefheart Jam”, “Say Say Something”, “Rhythmic Dreams”, “Dead Man”, “Rain Whistling”, “Basic Brian”, “Low Clouds”, “Bottom Of The Well”, “Honest Joe”, “Arabic Agony”, “Tomorrow”, “Laughter” and “Sayonara” | Jun 1994 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Washington Post Feature | Article, Interview | “Last night we literally brought down the house,” says James’ Bassist, Jim Glennie, referring to a small ceiling collapse during a performance at New York’s Irving Plaza. “It was great.” But it really wasn’t anything new for the British alternative rockers, who are best known for their hypnotic but raucous live performances. James’ new hit album, Laid (as in “Did you get Laid?”), is also causing quite a commotion. Produced by music guru Brian Eno, Laid ranges from moody introspection (“Out to Get You”) to staccato elation (“Say Something”) and is slightly reminiscent of another Eno production, U2’s The Unforgettable Fire. “We’ve known Brian for a long time,” says Glennie. “He’s a genius. He’s like a laser, so precise.” With the title track now on MTV’s Buzz Bin, James, which has been together for more than a decade, is endearing itself to an audience as diverse as its music. “In Toronto it’s young girls,” says lead singer Tim Booth. “And in Montreal it’s artists and intellectuals. We’re like the Talking Heads – they were considered artsy until pop fans came along.” But diversity, as well as perseverance, has proved to be the group’s strong suit: “Everyone told us to quit,” Glennie admits. “We had one 15-minute lapse of faith where we considered it, but we were just too f—ing passionate about the music,” A philosophical Booth pipes in, “And you know, the longer you wait, the bigger you think you’ll be.” | Jun 1994 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth Glastonbury Channel 4 Interview – June 1994 | Article, Video Archive |
DetailsInterview with Mark Radcliffe as part of Channel 4’s Glastonbury coverage | Jun 1994 | article video-archive | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Glastonbury Festival – 25th June 1994 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistJohnny Yen / Sit Down / Ring The Bells / PS / Five-O / Say Something / Low Low Low / Sometimes / Out To Get You / Don't Wait That Long / Live A Love Of Life / Laid / Jam J / Honest Joe / SoundSupportn/a - FestivalMore Information & ReviewsOut To Get You / Jam J / Honest Joe Laid | Jun 1994 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Wah Wah – Melody Maker News | Article, News |
JAMES release a new ‘alternative’ double album, recorded during the making of their last record ‘Laid’. The album, ‘Wah Wah’ is out on September 12 and was produced by Brian Eno at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios in bath. Singer Tim Booth described ‘Wah Wah’ as “an experiment in looseness”. “James have always been a serious jamming band,” he told NME, “making a racket that nobody apart from us would ever hear. But Brian Eno heard us jamming and said he thought it was wonderful and should be made public.” | Aug 1994 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Woodstock MTV Interview | Article, Interview | Int : Now guys, how was that? Saul : Wonderful, really good. Really enjoyed it. Jim : Really good fun, it was indeed Int : Now, in England, they do these really big festivals a lot, the Reading Festival, all those kinds of things. This is not a normal thing here. Can you compare and contrast the American thing and the English thing Jim : Yeah, the feeling backstage did remind me of Glastonbury a lot, which is kind of a big three day festival in England. The same sort of vibe, you know more than one stage, lots of things going on and the weather’s not usually as nice to be honest. It’s usually raining when Glastonbury’s on knowing England. Saul : This is obviously very special to people because Glastonbury comes around every year. Unless they kill someone one year and cancel it the next year. Which has happened. I think this is the first time in about 25 years that there’s been any kind of festival like this in the States and I think it means a lot quite special to some people. Int : Now Tim, you’ve just walked in. And how’s your neck? You have done something to your neck but you were dancing away. You didn’t seem to have a problem. Tim : I did. What I did was I put my neck brace on then I could dance with the rest of my body and keep my neck still. That was the idea. Int : But you weren’t wearing your neck brace out there, were you? Tim : Oh tonight, my neck’s fine. That was cool. No, it was just that period. It was really weird. They took me to hospital on a stretcher with a kind of Hannibal Lecter contraption around my head and took me into hospital just to give me a neck brace. Like in England, you just go to the doctors and ask “Can I have a neckbrace?” I was whisked off in an ambulance before one of the concerts. It was crazy. Saul : And we were all laughing Jim : He was. Saul : No, no, it was him Int : Now how much did you guys know about Woodstock, the original festival in 1969? Jim : Well, we weren’t actually around at that time, were we? Saul : No, we’re all so young Jim : We’re all so young. Yeah, you know, we’ve kind of seen the movie. Obviously very different to this really. The spontaneity of it all and the chaos. And the anarchy and the ridiculous number of people turning up when they weren’t supposed to. Tim : You’re getting signs saying “Go to Chris” Int : I am getting signs. I have to go to Chris…. part two Int : Hi, I’m here with James in the interview tent. Now guys, how did you get here? Did you fly from England recently or have you been here for a while? Dave : We’ve been over in Seattle doing a few shows and having a good time on our three days off between Seattle and here. Int : How long are you going to hang on here? Is there anyone else you really want to see? Tim : I’m staying, everyone else is flying back. Jim : You’re staying? Tim : Yeah, I’m staying Jim : Nice one Tim : Yeah I’m here for a while. I want to see Porno for Pyros, Chili Peppers and Peter Gabriel I’m quite interested in seeing. Int : Are you sad that Neil Young isn’t going to be here playing because of course you’ve toured with Neil Young? Tim : Yeah, we heard a rumour he was going to do the Alternative. I think that was a rumour put about by the people who want to promote the Alternative. Yeah, that would have been nice. Int : Now when you did your current album Live, you also, sorry Laid, you also did another album. When is that one coming out? Tim : The other album is called Wah Wah. I think it’s coming out here in October. Yeah, they’re trying to work it out. Put it out cheap. And do special deals and things. In England, they’re going, we think, they’re going to put it out for a week and then we won’t put it out again after that. We’re going to treat it quite weirdly. Int : Great, well thank you very much for joining us here. | Aug 1994 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Let Loose – Manchester Evening News | Article, News |
The famous Eno, once of Roxy Music, solo and producer fame, is the man you can thank for the new James album, due out on September 12. He says “I spent some days working with the band in their rehearsal room, seeing extraordinary pieces of music appearing out of nowhere. “It occurred to me that this raw material was, in it’s own chaotic and perilous way, as much a part of their work as the songs that would finally grow out of it.” Known for his eccentricity, and weird and sometimes wonderful, music, Eno says “The music was always on the edge of breakdown, held together by taut threads and full of beautiful, unrepeatable collisions.” Wah Wah follows the Mancunian’s splendid Laid. It’s being called in some quarters the “alternative album,” and is presented in a specially packaged double-album form. James vocalist Tim Booth offers his thoughts: “It’s an experiment in looseness. We’ve always been a serious jamming band, making a racket that nobody apart from us would ever hear.” Eno has seen behind the humour and the modesty. Expect James to go Top Five. | Aug 1994 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Woodstock 2, New York – 14th August 1994 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
Setlist(incomplete) Johnny Yen / Sometimes / Laid / Sit Down / Honest JoeSupportn/a - FestivalMore Information & Reviews
| Aug 1994 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
No Folk On The Wah Tour – NME Magazine | Article, Interview | They laugh! They drink! They ‘partake’ of nitrous oxide! Is this the JAMES of indie-folk wibble dancing legend? No! This is the About To Be Big In America James, taking on a country where no-one has any preconceptions of them– so they can do as they darn well like. BARBARA ELLEN joins them in Portland for a sermon on Mount Hood. “We don’t think of ourselves as a success in America. We don’t feel like we’ve arrived_. We’ve got to work for these audiences. We’ve got to prove ourselves to them. We’ve got to get out there and do the f***ing business.” –Saul Davies, Mount Hood, Oregon FIFTEEN minutes later, the Mount Hood crowd start to leave. Coats over heads, eyes blinking in the sour drizzle of rain, they grope their way down the hill one muddy, marvelous inch at a time until finally they skid through the exit gates to freedom. From the safety of their dressing room chalet, headlining band James look down on the mass exodus with mounting panic. They’re on in five minutes and it looks like they’ll be playing for the benefit of themselves, their sound crew and the sprinkling of unfortunates who were trampled and left for dead in the rush to leave. A disembodied voice barks out from amidst the chaos. It’s time for James to make their way to the stage. To get there they actually have to wade through the roaring human river leaving the site. The band disperse, still manfully attempting to laugh the whole thing off. My last sight of Tim Booth is of him shrugging on his jacket and zipping it right up to his neck with a wintry grin. When I look back, he is gone. “You know, I used to enjoy ending up in the gutter. I thought I was getting somewhere. I don’t think that way any more.” –Larry Gott TWO DAYS previous, on our first evening in crisp, clean Seattle, James’ PR takes photographer Sargent and I out for dinner with frontman Tim Booth and bassist Jim Glennie. Being a Japanese restaurant of Booth’s choosing– the food tastes of wet dog and aniseed, but it doesn’t matter. Sargent and I are in good spirits, having no reason to suspect that our two-date on-the-road stint with Britain’s latest unlikely Stateside success is doomed to metamorphose into The Assignment From Hell. Booth and Glennie are keen to relax, too. Having been hard at work rehearsing for the mini-festivals (also featuring Violent Femmes, The Afgan Whigs and House of Pain), they are to headline in Seattle and Portland over the next couple of days. At the time of our encounter, James are also less than a week away from taking the stage as one of only three British acts to play Woodstock 2. An ‘honour’ they have good sense to view with equal parts amusement and trepidation. Most pressing on the James psyche, however, is the brief, sneer-and-you’ll-miss-it release of their studio-improv album ‘Wah Wah’. Primarily conceived by ‘Laid’ producer Brian Eno as a diversionary tactic to diffuse the tension surrounding the main project, the unstructed but authoritative mish-mash of erotic folk, languid funk, primal screams, oriental spasms and savage dance energy that is ‘Wah Wah’ began to take on a life of its own. James, characteristically, dithered and fretted about releasing it and eventually another Eno improv-project– U2’s ‘Zooropa’, recorded six months after ‘Wah Wah’– surfaced first. Understandably enough, James now rue the time they spent procrastinating. As regards their current US success, drummer Dave Bayton-Power is only half joking when he quips, “We’re running out of territories to sell our records. If we dip out over here, we’ve had it. We’ll have to find new planets.” From cult Manc beginnings, James peaked in Britain around the ‘Goldmother’/’Sit Down’ Madchester period and steadily declined from there. Sales of the critically mauled ‘Laid’ were more than respectable (it went gold in both the UK and the US), but for a time it was starting to look like ‘drippy’, ‘worthy’, ‘folkie’ James had nothing to offer the Manics/Blur/Oasis generation but their entrails to dance upon. Bearing this in mind, does their American success make them feel vindicated, smug even? “Oh no, not at all,” protests Booth. “There’s a lot of satisfaction, but there is when we do well in Britain. . . I’m just glad that a lot of people have got ‘Laid” now, if you’ll excuse the pun.” The very singular Mr. Booth probably accounts for 99 per cent of the adoration, antagonism and derision directed at James. According to popular folklore: he’s a vegan (not any more); a closet God-botherer (only in terms of lyrics, and they won’t come knocking on your door); an inhuman piss-taker, pedaling epileptic fits as dancing (“That’s your projection,” sniffs Timothy); a pinch-faced little hippy hypocrite who preaches peace, love and understanding then runs around shagging everything in sight (let’s ask him about that later); and a sactimonious, teetotal oddball with a sniffy attitude about hedonists. Compared to the good-natured new-yobs who make up the rest of James, Booth is irrevocably odd. At times, he seems like an alien who has been sent to Earth on a fact-finding mission. You get the feeling that if you stabbed him in the forehead with a fork he would gaily carry on chattering about dance, betrayal and the boundaries of human potential until the slow drip of his green blood alerted him to the fact that he’s been rumbled. Touchingly, the rest of James are openly protective towards him, dismissing conjecture that he is the band outsider. “In any relationship there’s always going to be someone on the outside,” demures unflappable guitarist Gott, “but it isn’t always Tim.” After a recent spate of Tim The Ousider press, Booth is making an effort to be sociable tonight. He is even brandishing a beer in his frail, bird-like hand. It looks wrong, ridiculous, unsettling–like a nun smoking– and within three sips Booth is pissed. “I’ve tried joyful hedonism before,” he admits. “I’m not very good at it.” When Sargent goes to the loo, Booth ‘minxishly’ switches his full bottle for the photographer’s empty one. “Come on, catch up,” Booth exclaims to Sargent on his return, adding wryly, “If you can’t out-drink Tim Booth, you’re in trouble.” THE NEXT day we are informed by the James crew that the easiest way to get to their gig in the Breterman area of Seattle is by ferry. On our own. I’m sorry, could you repeat that?! “There’s no room in our cars, you’ll have to go by ferry.” A couple of hours later, Sargent, the PR and I can be found floating across the River Death, gripping the top of a formica table which may or may not turn out to be our life-raft. Put it down to the coffees sailing past our heads, the screams of the sea-sick or the undulating floor, but there’s a distinct Herald Of Free Enterprise vibe to this trip and we’re pathetically relieved when it’s over. On firm ground once more, we catch a cab to what first appears to be a huge dust-bowl full of corpses. It takes a while for our numb brains to realise that this is actually the concert and that those scary, motionless dudes in horse-hair waistcoats are the audience. When we unearth James themselves in the backstage area (a cavernous hall with sections tented off like a war-time hospital), they seem similarly appalled. Saul, the only violinist in the world with worse dress sense than Nigel Kennedy, actually has his head in his hands. “What a dump,” he keeps sighing to no-one in particular, “what a sodding dump.” The concert itself is standard James fare. Even those that hate them have to concede that their live shows are of almost text-book excellence. Stylish, balletic and direct, James are talented enough to hurl aural dynamite at the feet of their zombie audience and mischievious enough to enjoy the ensuing havoc. The audience not only stay, they even sit down during ‘Sit Down’ in time-honoured style, despite the fact that they have been lashed by rain since the set began. Garbed in only a wisp of chiffon and a backstage pass, I stand shivering on the side of the stage next to some bloke doing an action painting. When the thunder starts clapping along with the audience I grit my teeth and beg God, in His/Her mercy to sort me out with a lift home. Whatever happens, in this weather, the ferry must be avoided by all costs. “Once we had this idea of us all getting into a car and driving over a cliff. Everyone was ready to die. . .” –Jim Glennie STRAIGHT AFTER the concert, James have to show their faces at the promoter’s party in a nearby hotel. Within seconds of arriving, Gott, Davies, Baynton-Power, Glennie and the absurdly shy Hunter (keyboards) start scheming openly to leave at the first possible opportunity. Preferably without Booth. “Shall we tell him we’re going?” hisses Gott. “Nahhh,” grins Davies, “he might want to come.” Suddenly, Booth appears out of the midst, plonks himself down on the sofa next to me and demands I interview him. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve just spent the evening dangling by my bra-straps from a tree branch in the Garden of Hell and there’s no bloody way I’m doing anything remotely resembling work. Booth explain politely that there probably won’t be any time at tomorrow’s Mount Hood gig and looks a mite put out when I laugh with joy. The tour manager is brought over. Now the gloves are off. I am given a choice: interview Booth on the way back to Seattle in a car or take my chances with the ferry. BLACKMAIL! Five minutes later, I sit sulking in the back of James’ manager’s car, slopping a quadruple whiskey over my knees, still childishly refusing to ask Booth any questions. He sighs deeply, then, reaching over, grabs my tape recorder. “OK,” he smiles quasi-angelically, “let me interview you instead. How old were you when you first started writing?” Sod off, let me die in peace. “Come now, what was the first piece you wrote?” “Brookside (a lie)” “Really? Was it scary, were you scared?” Stop showing off, stop demonstrating how you can be the interrogator as well as the interrogatee. “No, really. . . I’m interested.” Well, I may not feel like being interesting. “Hmmm,” he purrs, “but you expect it from me.” That’s your job. You lot love it. You only come alive when the tape recorder comes on. “Oh, you think so, I don’t think so.” Booth falls silent and I grab back the tape recorder. OK, you win. Tell me about something you did recently. Something unusual. “I tried garlic ice-cream the other day.” What was it like? “Disgusting.” So, you would describe yourself as a person that’s up for new experiences? “Yes, I’ll try anything once.” How does this reconcile with your having been in the same band for over 3,000 years? “Eleven, actually,” Booth snaps. After a moment’s thought he adds, “There is a repetition that is scary and boring and unusual to me, but as a band we manage to avoid it more than most.” How? “Oh, you know, changing the set every night, improvising. . . That kind of thing.” Wild. Would you say you have been spoilt by life? “I am a little spoilt. I always have been. Everything has always fallen OK for me. It’s made me unpopular at times. So, what happened was, as I got older, I blocked out all the good things happening to me because I never thought I deserved any of it. It’s only been in the last four years or so that I’ve stopped blocking all the nice stuff and let it happen. Booth pauses. “I’ve had partners who’ve been jealous of me too. They couldn’t deal with my life being so good. Not just being in a band and having success, but other stuff, nice things happening to me.” Was it that you were instinctively choosing unsuccessful, easily impressed people just to massage your own ego? “Not at all.” Well, let’s put it this way– how come you never went out with somebody equally successful? He smirks. “Equally successful people aren’t around to have relationships with. They’re too busy being equally successful somewhere else.” So, it’s hard to form and maintain relationships? “Yes, very hard.” But you’re a pop star. Finding available women should be the least of your worries. “You can get sex easily if you want it. Which is OK. Sometimes all I want is sex.” Yes, I heard you were very promiscuous. “Did you? I go through phases. I have been very promiscuous. It comes and it goes.” What brings on a promiscuous phase? “It depends on a number of factors. If I’m in a relationship, that takes precedence. It also depends on how lonely I am. When you’re on a three month tour, you can get incredibly lonely and frustrated. But mostly it’s just feeling like it. . .” I thought most men ‘felt like it’ all the time. “I don’t think so. It’s quite common for men to not feel very sexual for ages and then suddenly hit a period when they’re horny as hell. What you must remember is, for the first eight years of James I hardly slept with anybody at all. I was actually completely celibate for a while because I was meditating and it’s fairly traditional to be celibate when you’re meditating. You’re supposed to put all the energy you usually put into sex into this other area instead.” What made you change? “Well, I read this Colin Wilson book which he wrote when he was about 50. In it he said that when he became famous years earlier he’d had all these sexual offers which he didn’t take up because he had a steady partner. And he said that was the one thing he’d always regretted, because he’s never found what it was like. “And I thought, yeah, I could see myself getting to 50 and thinking, shit, all those wonderful offers from beautiful women and I could have slept with them but I didn’t. I just didn’t want that to happen to me. (Booth grins somewhat evilly) I wanted to experience everything.” “In Britain, we’ve got an image which is difficult to shake off. We’re seen as mature and po-faced and very f***ing serious, no humour at all. It’s different in America because we’re seen as a relatively new band. I love that. It gives you the feeling of arriving.” –Jim QUITE WHY sargent, the PR and myself were surprised when the plane we were booked to fly to Portland on the next day turns out to be a ten-seater pram with wings is beyond me. Ditto our mystification when the ‘short cab ride’ James warned us we would have to take from our hotel to Mount Hood site turns out to cost $100 (Mount Hood, beautiful as it is, is practically in Canada). James arrive some time after us, take one look at the bleak arena topped by swollen, thunderous rain-clouds and, bless ’em, lunge strait for the balloons filled with nitrous oxide being handed out by some inspired roadie. Nitrous oxide makes your voice go all deep and your legs feel wobbly. Not much of a high– but when you’re desperate, anything goes. Just before they go on, Sargent forces James outside for pictures in the last remaining seconds of usable light. Anxious to avoid the usual Tim With Tree shots, he is at first grateful for the bundle of tyres he finds nestling underneath a wooden building. It is only afterwards when he spies punters wandering towards the same building with chilling regularity that he realises the ‘rain-splattered’ tyres James bounced so obligingly upon have been being pissed on all day by the crowd. The guilt-ridden Sargent is then allowed/forced by Booth, the self-styled Nureyev of the indie-folk circuit, to take pictures of his lithesome self ‘preparing’ for the gig. As Booth prances, preens and twizzles (with no top on!), Gott, Glennie, and Davies appear from nowhere and start throwing shapes behind their unwitting frontman. It is around this time that the heavens open and the crowd begins to leave. The PR explains to us all, straight-faced, that the reason they’re leaving is that the police have told everyone to go home before it gets too dark. James themselves can’t be bothered to attempt a face-saving excercise. After the intial shock, they fall about laughing and Booth confides to me that the local paper had, in fact, slagged James off that day: “They said, ‘You may as well go home after the Violent Femmes’,” he reports blandly, “‘James are lightweights’.” The band leave for the stage, but we don’t go with them. Having learnt our lesson from the night before, we’d secured ourselves lifts back to Portland within seconds of arriving at Mount Hood. The only problem is, the two jock-strangers we’ve begged them off not only look suspiciously like Ted Bundy, they want to leave now. No problem, on both counts. Home, James, home. | Sep 1994 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Honest Joe Folk Testosterone Abort Mix | Audio Archive | Audio | Sep 1994 | audio-archive article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wah Wah Album Release – Press Release | Era: Laid / Wah Wah, Press Release | Press release announcing James’ album Wah Wah.
| Sep 1994 | era-laid-wah-wah press-release era article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wuss-Stock – Select | Article, Interview | What you wanted and what you got. (Two days of paranoia, mud and bullshit… that’s Woodstock II. And what the hell were limey invaders JAMES doing there?) “This is CNN Live and we’re off to Saugerties, New York to Woodstock ’94. Come in Bob.” (Cut to Bob in tragic ex-hipster attire walking through starry-eyed bods covered in mud) “Hello Larry, yes. They were stardust, they were golden and now they’ve come back to the garden. But this time it costs $200 for a ticket, $6 for a slice of pizza and $30 for a T-shirt. What was peace and love is now greed and profit. The age of Aquarius had been replaced by the era of Mammon.” A kid pushes forward and blows the smoke from a joint into Bob’s face. Before Bob can finish his ridiculous gush, the studio cut to a clip of Hendrix doing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ Thus we are spared talk of the $2 million Pepsi sponsorship and the interview with a hippy who was at the first event. Ah, the memories, the nostalgia, the comparisons and the commercialism. Woodstock ’94 is knee-deep in it: mud and bullshit. Take An Other Hippie up there on stage. He’s 45 and he’s ranting “We’re the generation that stopped the war! We’re the generation that made a President resign!” Yeah, sure. The Vietnam war stopped because it was hemorrhaging money into an intractable conflict that most people in America had lost interest in by the time it ended. Nixon took the long walk because of a load of tapes leaked by some straight. A bunch of longhairs in kaftans waving flowers had little or nothing to do with it. We’ve heard it all before, all those myths and legends I blame the parents, especially as this time around they’re in charge. Woodstock ’94 is a desperate affair. Journalists traipsing around in Millets-style outdoors outfits, desperately trying to find out what “Generation X” believe in. Hordes of record industry Mafia running about believing their own hype and desperately protesting too much about what a fantastic time they’re having. The bands lost in this world of make believe, desperately wanting not to go under. And the punters desperately wanting something, without actually knowing what it is. They’ve come in the hope of experiencing the kind of hippy epiphany legend has it everyone underwent in ’69. But they have no idea of how to get it. Especially without any beer, let alone any brown acid. Walking past the 45th security checkpoint into the whimsical world of the backstage village, the airis thick with anticipation. No matter how you interpret it, this is a big event, if ridiculous. Look around: in the distance somewhere is ‘The Surreal Field,’ whatever that is. Just here are various tents encouraging you to get personally involved with every kind of wildlife creation. Save the Michigan beaver. Save the Miami sea cow. Adopt a dolphin. The whole thing has been designed as a media fiesta. The press corps here stretched to 1,500 people-the kind of numbers usually associated with covering international conflicts and natural disasters. And every one of them gets a huge fact-pack on everything you don’t need to know, which boasts about the logistical triumph of the festival: “65,000 gallons of diesel fuel will be consumed;” “4,000 cans of soda will be consumed backstage;” “7,200 latex gloves will be used;” “there is enough vinyl flooring to do 52 kitchens.” Each band playing is subjected to a three-legged press conference: first the one for MTV, then the one for the new Woodstock movie and then, at the end, one for the ordinary press. Right now Tim Booth and Saul Davies are on the end of the somnambulant series of questions in which the great American fourth estate attempt to get to grips with one of the few British bands here. A man from the Chicago Tribune looks at Tim: “For your dancing do you draw from Joe Cocker?” Booth stares blankly into space with the silently impassive expression of a man who’s just been shot between the eyes with a silenced pistol. The press conference is at an end. JAMES are big in the States: their last LP, “Laid,” was well received; they’ve toured with Neil Young; recorded an experimental album, “Wah Wah,” with Brian Eno; and helped in the opening ceremony of World cup ’94. Woodstock is the last gig on a large tour, which apparently had been an excellent laugh. Backstage the band are pondering what they’re doing here. “When success came in the UK with Sit Down we’d worked hard for it and were desperate to be taken seriously. But this time around, in the States, it’s like such a bonus we’ve all been able to enjoy it a lot more,” explains bassist Jim Glennie. Outside the band’s Portakabin, Tim Booth is dancing outside the picket fence which runs around his prefab structure. No sign of nerves you might expect to see from an outfit about to play the biggest gig of their career. The others sit in the canteen, arguing about the calorific value of cheesecake and apple pie. They are not the angst-ridden Manc bohemians you might expect. But they’re still not having a historic or epoch-making time of it. “You can’t even get a beer here!” points out Mark the keyboardist, swigging from a bottle of Beck’s, referring to the (largely ignored) alcohol ban. Five minutes before they’re due to go onstage, the band slouch around in the canteen. There isn’t supposed to be any beer here. There are no drugs. Everything is run like a scout camp. Worse still, DEL AMITRI are playing in front of 250,000 people. “Woodstock ’94?” mutters Jim. “This is Wuss-Stock ’94.” According to Newsweek, the first Woodstock has now become a rigid historical event. The original festival isn’t regarded merely as a weekend when a load of hippies gathered in a muddy field to watch some dodgy bands, but-like the Boston Tea Party or the Gettysburg Address-as a watershed for a developing nation still in its historical adolescence. British people might have it pegged simply as a US Glastonbury, an alternative to the traveling Reading that is Lollapalooza, but to America it’s much more important than that. To us, it might look much the same-a rainy farm filled with a daft mixture of hipsters, hippies, punters, psychotics and the criminally unstable. But where Glastonbury has developed into a quaint English tradition, an annual pilgrimage for anyone with even the most fleeting interest in music, drugs or falafels-for Americans, Woodstock ’94 is more like the recent D-Day celebrations, a commemoration of others’ glories and a tribute to their success. Of course the legacy of Woodstock isn’t as great as the old longhairs would have you believe. Aging beardies are often making a point of how apolitical and apathetic the Rave (UK)/X (US) Generation is, but we wouldn’t have been in this state if ’60s radicals had achieved just ten per cent of what they set out to. Their real legacy is not peace and love, but hedonism and good music. The concrete achievement of The Woodstock Generation is not that they changed the world, but that they gave us the mechanisms with which to cope with it. JAMES are not a typical Woodstock ’94 band. It’s a capital R-for-Rock weekend and the many all-American Beavis and Butt-heads in the audience are not big on perceived English ethereals. They go down amazingly well even with the stuff from “Wah Wah.” Booth dances in his wavy-gravy way and mouths through a megaphone over the Eno-manipulated weird-outs. The crowd doesn’t know what’s going on, but they know it’s different from everything else so far. JAMES refuse to grab their big moment in history like no-hopers further down the bill. Earlier, one of a succession of redundant metal acts tried to impress us by drinking beer, smoking joints and simulating sex with a cameraman. Watching the spectacle from half-way up the scaffolding (from which is suspended one of the slightly sad banners proclaiming ‘2 More Days Of Peace And Music’) it’s hard not to be awestruck by the sheer numbers of people. This is Desmond Morris material. “It’s funny,” says Larry after their set, peering over the seven-foot fence in front of the stage, designed to separate ‘talent’ from ‘customer.’ “It’s like a congregation. I’m a bit done in by it-you just provide the backdrop. It’s like The Kop-the Woodstock crowd will be more famous than the team.” And the crowd is all. In spite of everything, it erodes the event’s corporate identity. By mid-Saturday morning rain is sluicing down. Reeling bodies indicate that cracks have appeared in the alcohol embargo. The PTA atmosphere starts to evaporate as ticketless hordes begin turning up and security glimpse the enormity of their task. By early evening you can’t walk anywhere without falling over; the paths are now biblically-proportioned rivers of slurry. The summer camp atmosphere has begun to decay toward that of a rich man’s Rwanda. As dusk gathers, shadowy figures an be seen scaling the fence into the VIP enclosure. In a bizarre way the scene suits Tim Booth. “I used to think that if something was really commercial on the outside it would have to be on the inside. But now I can see that they can put up this huge bureaucratic machine and it can still be eroded. People are looking for meaning at Woodstock, they’re coming with preconceptions. It’s set up like that. It’s a contemporary pop culture ritual-25 years on from this weird happy accident that left a big impact, they’re setting everything in place and hoping the spirit comes.” Typical Booth-speak, which’d make him sound borne down under a weight of pretension, if not for the fact that he really means it. “It’s a bit sick what’s happening here. It’s so expensive ‘cos some of the bands are taking a mint.” They certainly are. Aerosmith got a reported million dollars, while Dylan got $300,000. James got less than the $18,000 that Hendrix got in ’69. “I hope the spirit doesn’t see all the commercialism and money, and decided not to arrive. (Tim is a descendant of William Booth who founded the Salvation Army. As a child he went to church six days a week, between the ages of 11 and 18, which may account for his slightly loopy, yet deeply-felt worldview.) The language has been devalued. Spirituality is just a feeling of aliveness. I get it from dancing. When people feel ‘the spirit’ all it means is they’re alive. At Woodstock they’re calling down some Dionysian, Bacchanalian revelry.” We spend the first part of Wuss-Stock ’94 looking for spirits of a different kind. All we find is half bottle of Passport Scotch and the slops in a can of Bud. It feels like an outward-bound course with the Young Liberals, a lurid combination of physical exhaustion and patronising glibness. Still, with enough inside you and ORBITAL onstage it’s possible to find ‘the spirit’… By Saturday night everything has fallen apart. The highway has been sealed off. The security have given up. It’s pouring. Ark-building is considered. Lightning is forecast. Everybody is told to lie low and steer clear of metal fences-seems the ideal chance to climb up the tallest piece of scaffolding and wish for deliverance. But things are improving, someone’s selling commemorative Woodstock acid. And we’ve made the wise provision of inviting friends down from Boston. Who arrive bearing beer, chocolate vodka, a bag full of herbal uppers and a very nice pill that, apparently, truckers use for late-night long distance journeys. Ideal for parties and other social gatherings. But be warned, we end up thinking it’s a “good idea” to go, shoeless, to a sodden tent owned by a guy named Hooter. He insists we drink fortified wine and smoke some rather powerful homemade cigarettes. The wine he later refers to as “pure L-S-D!” Consequently most of Sunday morning is spent trying to locate our motel which is half-an hour away and not, as we’ve grown to believe, a six-hour drive through a mountainous terrain filled with bears and leaping elks. The rain offers some respite during Metallica’s storming set. This is the only highlight of the event. They summoned up the spirit big-time, as the trucker’s speed, chocolate vodka and fireworks all mixed with the lightning. We are treated to an all-American spectacle. We understand. It’s in The Constitution, man! Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness! In the States, ROCK is part of the fabric of freedom. It’s about making big bucks, going for it and Rock and fucking Rolling. Or as Tim puts it, “Rock is just a small part of the tapestry of English Heritage. In the states, through, it’s much more part of the society.” Damn right, 25 years and history’s already warped. Parallel universes created with each new news report. Reality and history don’t mix. Well, only occasionally. In the Woodstock film-the groovy one, the brown-acid-no-rain-myth-making one-there’s an interview with a young guy sitting on the roadside. This is what he say: “People that are nowhere are coming here ‘cos there’s people they think are somewhere. Everybody’s looking for some kind of answer when there isn’t one why would 300,000 – 600,000 people come to anything? Was music that important? I don’t think so… People don’t know how to live, they don’t know what to do, and they think they’ll find out what it is or how to maintain with it. People are very lost.” If people’d listened to him – not Dylan, Leary, Lennon or the Woodstock legend-maybe they’d be happy now, and looking forward. Maybe we’ll never understand. But, then again, it’s only rock ‘n’ roll. And is there any reason left to like it? James’ spirit, however… if it comes in pints, let’s have a couple. Incidentally, if you ring me in 2019 I’ll be out. | Oct 1994 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: Change Of Scenery – Issue 1 | Fanzine | Change Of Scenery was a James fanzine produced by John Pude. Download this fanzine as a PDF. © copyright Change Of Scenery. | Jan 1995 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
A Year With Swollen Appendices – Brian Eno’s Diary | Article, Interview | February 8 Listening to new JAMES stuff – still muddled and looking for direction, but something dimly emerging. The question : “What is the vision?” February 9 Tidied studios, set up for JAMES visit. Who duly appeared – Tim, Larry and Jim. Played several things, but the nub was them asking me if I could work with them. They seemed to not want to record again until I could do it with them. March 6 To Westside, setting up (tackling the problems of hearing and visibility of seven players in one room) and, as band arrives, listening and making charts of song-starts in hand. Worked on “Assembly” (new chord section) and “Star” (ditto). Home at 11pm. March 7 To studio for 11.45, but whole band not assembled until 1. We talked about making new vocal music over the instrumental discoveries of Wah Wah and after. We started working on a song in that mode – Ambient opening song without any changes over it. Promising – the song was. Also worked on “Darling” and “Make It All Right” (very nice new low-register singing). Things are going well, but the poor band are tired (too much touring?) They need a lot of pushing. There are so many of us there, and therefore a tendency to submerge compositional problems in sheer density. Mark is brilliant but modest, so his contribution is always heard later (and therefore doesn’t help in the jams). Tim asked the assistant (with flu) to take time off. March 8 On to studio. Today felt like pushing a rock up a hill. I was directing, in detail. That’s fine – we try to get specific, controlled experiments; but it’s hard. I have to get bossy or everything will dissolve. Like many of us intuitives, they have a great ability to start things “by accident” but then it’s hard to improve them “by design”. I guess that’s my “outsider” job. Dave gets frustrated because nobody locks with him, so he’s trying to make all the rhythm in the drums. With a big band, every beat tends to get filled, and, unless expressly prohibited, everyone tends to play all the time. That makes for an evenness of density. Nonetheless, we made “Whiplash” come to rather triumphant life – a very beautiful, wistful song over a machine throb. March 9 Worked today on “Hedex”, “Waltzing Along” and “Avalanche”, for all of which I suggested new arrangements and sections. Things sounded really good. We tried to start at 11.00 but the band were not ready (I got bloody mad); but we did focus and stick to schedule after that, and it paid off. Came home for a brief child break at 6.30 while the guys were having dinner. Could I be as good-natured as them and still keep things moving? March 10 On to studio with fresh strawberries. 1 1/2 hours on “Honest Pleasure”, but no result. Then a jam – really strong, good bass line and great drums and guitar – pure Larry. I suggested we graft “Hey That Muscle” on to the jam, which seemed to work well, and we had a new, tougher thing. Later we attempted “Whatever The Sound”, but it’s basically a dull song with a nice atmosphere. Everyone was tired by the evening – time for a day off. March 12 In the studio everyone was completely passed out. Tim asleep on the sofa, Jim on the worktop, Saul late. Dave had done some late mixes last night. Good old Dave, the grumbling, laughing leek, a dependable spirit. Some OK, some disappointing. Four or five standouts: “Hedex”, “Avalanche”, “Assembly”, “Whiplash”, “Waltzing Along”. When I can listen without hearing the labour pains in the background, it’s good stuff. When I do, it’s strong stuff. The other songs still conceptually smudgy. Playing on most things tired. Saul tending to noodliness. Worked today on “Home Boy or Girl” and “All One To Me”. The first has some excitement, though not enough personality yet. The second ended up sounding proficiently poppish (and a bit pointless), so I suggested a completely different version – softer, more a cappella, melancholy – which was OK, but then started to think that the basic tune is too normal to do much with. Interesting watching the dynamics here. Saul, whose sonic contributions are erratic, is essential to the social ecology of the band. He’s the person (with Dave) most likely to say what’s on his mind, but without any rancour (so it doesn’t stir up bad feeling). This opens the door for other people to talk. These two, the most naturally undemocratic and un-polite, are the log-jam busters. Saul’s lively and funny and explosive; Dave’s a dry-witted Welsh sparkler. Both make for life and soul. March 13 At Westside, Tim ill and everyone hard to motivate. “Orson” ground on with me singing a semi-crappy chorus vocal part, but a good instrumental / bridge idea evolved. I suggested the tag go on to the end. Tim suggested having the last chord of the sequence as Bar 1. Weird, I said, but when played it sounded great, unsettling the sequence interestingly. The difficulty is keeping all those different attentions in one place long enough for a process like that – a process of sculpting – to take place. Later on “Strange Requests” I added a new bass part and some arrangement ideas. All these songs are either one-note-joes or monocycles. Laissez-faire composing – which is not to deny the force of some of the ideas. But songs that don’t depend on composition depend instead on performance – so the fire has to be there in the playing, which it isn’t after several long days work. After that we went onto “Waltzing Along”, in which I yelled myself hoarse shouting new structure cues over the music. That’s a great song – only they do songs like that. The emotional melange in Tim’s ainging is hard to pin down : yearning, abandoned, intimate, warm and wide-eyed. It’s interesting that he hardly ever sings in bluesy scales, so the result is very English – slightly nostalgic in a nice way. March 14 Worked on “Whiplash”, which shone with brave promise. Also “Honest Pleasure” turned out well with Larry’s new rhythm guitar part. I want Saul to think in terms of sections of strings (hard, when you’re only playing one), but he flits from idea to idea. Poorer musicians are so pleased to find just one thing that they can successfully play that they often contribute more to the architechture of the piece – because other people can then build on what they’re holding in place. March 16 At the studio we worked on “Hedex”, “All One To Me” and “Chunney Pop”. The shock of the day came when Larry produced the fax that Anthea had sent to Peter Rudge referring to my nightly grumbles (to her) about the difficulty of the work. I was excrutiatingly embarrassed. To grumble is one thing, but to have it in writing is another. They, however, were extremely gentlemanly about the whole thing, doing their best to make me feel better. December 6 Dinner in the evening with Peter and Joyce Rudge, Dave Bates and Amira, his Bosnian fiancee. Talking about James, their next record. Jim and Dave have been doing some good work, trying to push the envelope. The problem is that they have made music that doesn’t necessarily involve Tim; it’s good stuff, but hard for a singer. There’s rhythmic and sonic drama, but little harmonic drama for him to respond to. What singers like are shifts of harmonic gravity which they can either float above or succumb to. There’s two different polar types of singers : floaters and drivers. Tim tends to be a floater – some of his best work is when there’s a string vortex set up in the music and he manages to stay in the same place. Gospel singers tend to be divers – sucked down and thrown back up by the music, or engaged in great passions of will and surrender with it. But for either of these you need something other than a harmonic plateau. December 7 Later, a long meeting with James, discussing strategy for their recording, Surprised to discover that they hadn’t been all in the same room together since the Westside sessions. They have a list with something like 30 pieces on them. I reiterated the dinner conversation. I also suggested (on the importance of backing vocals) that they start working with a Digitech Vocalist, so perhaps Tim will have two mikes – one for his normal voice and one for creating instant harmonies via the Vocalist. Pleasant meeting, with the music playing quietly in the background as we talked – anything that caught our attention, we then talked about (a good test – music interesting good enough to stop the conversation). | Jan 1995 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: Change Of Scenery – Issue 2 | Fanzine | Change Of Scenery was a James fanzine produced by John Pude. Download this fanzine as a PDF. © copyright Change Of Scenery. | Apr 1995 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: Change Of Scenery – Issue 3 | Fanzine | Change Of Scenery was a James fanzine produced by John Pude. Download this fanzine as a PDF. © copyright Change Of Scenery. | May 1995 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wake Up Booth – NME | Article, Article (Solo/Side Project), News | NME | Feature | 1st January 1996 | Related:Booth And The Bad Angel
| Jan 1996 | article article-side news side-projects | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: Change Of Scenery – Issue 5 | Fanzine | Change Of Scenery was a James fanzine produced by John Pude. Download this fanzine as a PDF. © copyright Change Of Scenery. | Mar 1996 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I’m Sleeping With Your Daughter – Q | Article, Article (Solo/Side Project), Interview | Q | Interview | David Cavanagh | 1st June 1996 | Related:Booth And The Bad Angel
| Jun 1996 | article article-side interview side-projects | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Review of Booth And The Bad Angel – I-Music.com | Article, Article (Solo/Side Project) | I-Music.com | Review | Mike Pattenden | 1st July 1996 | Related:Booth And The Bad Angel
| Jul 1996 | article article-side side-projects | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Review of Booth And The Bad Angel – Sunday Times | Article (Solo/Side Project), Review | Sunday Times | Review | 1st July 1996 | Related:Booth And The Bad Angel
| Jul 1996 | article-side review side-projects article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Review of Booth And The Bad Angel – Select | Article (Solo/Side Project), Review | Select | Review | 1st July 1996 | Related:Booth And The Bad Angel
| Jul 1996 | article-side review side-projects article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Booth’s In A Bad Way – City Life | Article, Article (Solo/Side Project), Interview | City Life | Interview | 1st July 1996 | Related:Booth And The Bad Angel
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Penny Kiley James Biography | Article, Biography | “James just wanted to wake people up. That was why we improvised so much on stage; it was a way of scaring ourselves awake as well.” Tim Booth. James were formed in 1982 when would-be musicians Gavan Whelan (drums), Jim Glennie (bass) and Paul Gilbertson (guitar) spotted Tim Booth dancing at Manchester University (where he was studying drama), and asked him to join their band. Over the next few years James made their name on the Manchester scene, with two EPs on the city’s Factory label – Jimone (1983) and James II (1985) – and a tour supporting The Smiths. In 1985, Gilbertson was replaced by Larry Gott, and the band signed to Sire, setting to work on a debut album. Stutter (1986), produced by legendary New Yorker Lenny Kaye (guitarist with Booth’s hero Patti Smith), confirmed them as contrary, cultish and unique. The track “Johnny Yen”, with its themes of exhibitionism, despair and violence, set the tone for years to come and became an enduring highlight of the band’s live appearances. And it was as a live band that James were making their reputation, building a following strong enough to see them through more setbacks than most. 1988’s Strip Mine followed the course set by Stutter with its off-kilter folk influences, but added some simple singalong choruses which anticipated hits to come. But neither band nor label were happy, and they now parted ways, leaving James to finance their live album for Rough Trade, One Man Clapping (1989). The album made the top of the indie charts, but Rough Trade never saw James as a commercial band. They could not have been more wrong. In 1990 a revamped James – Gavan Whelan had been replaced by David Baynton-Powell, who was joined by Saul Davies (violin), Andy Diagram (trumpet) and Mark Hunter(keyboards) – signed to Phonogram, released the anthemic Gold Mother album and had three minor hits in “How Was It For You”, “Come Home” and Lose Control”. Then there was “Sit Down”, the re-recorded version of a 1989 single which gave James their breakthrough. It was the middle of the ‘Madchester’ boom, they had just supported the Happy Mondays (co-leaders of the scene), and their increasingly baggy (and big-selling) T-shirts were looking like fashion items. The band’s rhythmic sense and indie sensibility, present from the start, suddenly fitted into the indie/dance crossover sound that was making all the waves. An anthem for outsiders, “Sit Down” got to #2 in the spring of 1991 and James were on a roll. By now they were playing big venues, even supporting David Bowie at Manchester’s Maine Road stadium, and it all seemed perfectly natural. But there was a down side to all this. The first time an audience sat down for “Sit Down”, it was something special. The twentieth time, it was a hollow ritual and the one thing that the band had always tried to avoid. So they upturned expectations with unpredictable live shows full of new songs, with the hits in the wrong places. The audience didn’t know what to make of it, and the press backlash followed with Seven (1992), an album widely dismissed as ‘stadium rock’. But the big sound had gone as far as it could. 1993’s album Laid, produced by Brian Eno, had a subtle, stripped-down sound and improvisational feel, closer to the early days. The Laid sessions also produced a series of experimental, ambient jams which later surfaced on the Wah Wah album (1994). Meanwhile, James, still misunderstood at home, turned their back on the backlash, toured the US, and, at time of writing, are back in the studio preparing an album for 1997 release. Tim Booth, meanwhile, has recorded an album, Booth And The Bad Angel (1996), with the American composer Angelo Badalamenti (of Twin Peaks fame). | Aug 1996 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Interview with Tim Booth and Angelo Badalamenti -Discover.de | Article, Article (Solo/Side Project), Biography | Discover.de | Interview | Helmar Giebel | 1st August 1996 | Related:Booth And The Bad Angel
| Aug 1996 | article article-side biography side-projects | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
New Booth Explosion – NME | Article, News |
JAMES plan to return in 1997 with their first single and album in more than two years, as well as embarking on their first UK tour for more than four years. Tim Booth, lead singer of the veteran Manchester band, speaking exclusively to NME, revealed that the new single, ‘She’s A Star’, would be released on February 4 and the new album, ‘Whiplash’, would be out on February 24. He explained the band had made a conscious decision to take a break from each other and put James on hold, during which time it was agreed he could collaborate with Angelo Badalamenti on the album ‘Booth And The Bad Angel’, which was released earlier this year. “After the last tour we knew we needed to take a long break. We’d never really taken a year or two out for 11 years, so that’s what we did. We felt we’d overdone it, we needed a break and we felt people needed a break from us. Now it feels wonderful,” Booth said. He added the band had decided they needed a fresh approach to songwriting, especially in the light of the critical mauling the last two James albums (1993’s ‘Laid’ and 1994’s ‘Wah-Wah’) received. “We’re looking to work in a new way, to do songs, then improvise them, smash them up again. The only way we can keep going is make it interesting. I was disappointed with the critical reaction to the last two albums. It can seriously damage your ego,” he explained. “Will we split up if this album doesn’t do well? No, I think James will go on for a long time. But then, who the fuck knows in this world?” He also hinted there would be more Booth And The Bad Angel material, probably with the release of a re-recorded version of ‘Fall In Love’ from the album next year. Meanwhile, the new James album, produced by Stephen Hague and Brian Eno, has been described by Booth as very “uptempo”. The tracklisting is: ‘Tomorrow’, ‘Lost A Friend’, ‘Waltzing Along’, ‘She’s A Star’, ‘Greenpeace’, ‘Go To The Bank’, ‘Whiplash’, ‘Avalanche’, ‘Homeboy’, ‘Angel’ and ‘Blue Pastures’. Fans will have a chance to hear the tracks live when the band head out on tour in March, visiting Leeds Town & Country (March 12), Middlesbrough Town Hall (13), Glasgow Barrowlands (14), Newport Centre (16), Exeter University (17), Southampton Guildhall (18), London Shepherd’s Bush Empire (20), Leicester De Montfort Hall (23), Cambridge Corn Exchange (24), Wolverhampton Civic Hall (25), Liverpool Royal Court (27) and Manchester Apollo (28). | Nov 1996 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: Change Of Scenery – Issue 6 | Fanzine | Change Of Scenery was a James fanzine produced by John Pude. Download this fanzine as a PDF. © copyright Change Of Scenery. | Jan 1997 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Takes New Crack With Whiplash – Billboard | Article, Interview | In recent times, a fair number of alternative rock’s success stories have happened overnight, but there are still those who’ve climbed the ladder one rung at a time. Such is the case with James, the Manchester, England-based septet that struck gold in 1993 with “Laid,” the seventh album in its decade-plus existence. “I think the success we’ve had has been more a cumulative thing than anything,” says front man Tim Booth. “In a lot of ways, ‘Laid’ was less commercial than anything we’d done in the past, but it ended up selling loads of copies in the past couple years when we’ve been all but dormant.” That respite will end Feb. 11, when Fontana/Mercury issues “Whiplash,” the first release from the band since 1994’s experimental remix set, “Wah Wah.” (In the interim, Booth released “Booth And The Bad Angel,” a collaboration with composer Angelo Badalamenti.) “We desperately needed time off after working basically nonstop for 13 years,” says the singer. “We needed to find a new way of working, because we were going mad–or I was at least. I used to drive James and be there for every note, and I didn’t want to do that anymore.” While he’s still at the forefront of much of “Whiplash,” Booth does cede more control to his bandmates on surprisingly abrasive, industrial-tinged tracks like “Greenpeace” and the largely improvised “Go To The Bank.” Fans of the band’s trademark aggro-folk sound will find plenty to like in songs like the first single, “She’s A Star,” which goes to radio the last week of January. “They’ve delivered a very strong, very deep album, and I think ‘She’s A Star’ is their best chance yet at a multiformat hit,” says Josh Zieman, Mercury senior director of marketing. “Since it has been a while, we may have to solidify the foundation at radio and retail, but James does have a very loyal fan base.” Anticipation is strong for new material from the band. “We’ve supported James since the beginning, and the band has always done extremely well here,” says Jane Purcell, PD at modern rock outlet WWCD Columbus, Ohio. “We played several cuts off the last album to good response, and quite a few things from their catalog are still in our gold rotation.” Zieman says the band–which is signed to Fontana in Europe–will come to the U.S. for a promotional visit in late February. On that trek, James will perform on shows such as MTV’s “120 Minutes” and “Late Show With David Letterman.” A full tour, booked by Mitch Rose at Creative Artists Agency, will follow in April. “Playing these songs live should be interesting for a number of reasons,” says Booth. “They lend themselves to performance a bit more than the songs on ‘Laid,’ which tended to be somewhat introspective. Besides which, we’re not playing with Larry any longer, which is a big change.” The “Larry” Booth refers to is Larry Gott, the longtime guitarist who left midway through the recording of “Whiplash”–in Booth’s words “because he hated the whole fame thing even more than the rest of us.” Gott’s replacement is Adrian Oxaal, formerly of Sharkboy, who doubles on cello, making him a fine foil for longtime violinist Saul Davies. “Bringing Adrian in shook us up, which was a positive thing, since we needed to find a new approach to things,” says Booth. “We’ve always tried our best to do that.” Since a nascent fascination with the stripped-down style of bands like the Violent Femmes gave way to the more ornate, jaunty stylings of albums like 1986’s “Stutter” and 1988’s “Strip-Mine,” James’ career has been marked by more zig-zags than that of an all-star running back. After moving from Blanco y Negro/Sire to Fontana in 1990, the band (which is managed by Peter Rudge of Mad Dog) reconfigured its sound, emphasizing grand structures, including string and horn sections. The enlistment of producer Brian Eno, who produced both “Wah Wah” and “Laid,” brought yet another about-face. “Brian is as far from perfectionism as you can get. He’s very much into immediacy, into seeing what he can disrupt,” says Booth. “Stephen [Hague, who shares production credits with Eno on ‘Whiplash’] is just the opposite, which made for a fascinating mix.” Mercury’s Zieman says he views James’ mercurial nature as one of the group’s strengths. “This isn’t the kind of band that will become stagnant,” he says. “They always manage to stay a step ahead.” | Jan 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Whiplash Sessions | Era: Whiplash, One Of The Three Feature | During the 1994 US tour, James started to jam new material in preparation for the follow-up to the hugely-successful Laid album. No-one was to know at that time that it was going to be three long years before that follow-up was to be finally released and that release would be without long-term guitarist and key member Larry Gott. Following an outstanding performance at Woodstock 2 in August 1994, James set about the task of writing their new album. However, fate, in the form of Larry’s decision to quit, Tim’s desire to go off and work with Angelo Badalamenti and a massive tax bill, meant that the recording of what became the Whiplash album was to be spread out over almost 2 1/2 years. Early sessions at the Windings at Wrexham and Westside Studios in London had seen the band lose none of the creative energy that has fuelled its songwriting from the very early days in a South Manchester scout hut to the more luxurious studios the band can afford to use today. By the time the album came to be released after James had overcome the trials and tribulations that almost finished the band off, many of the songs written in that initial period following Woodstock were lost on studio DAT tapes or discarded by the band as new ideas and new songs took their place. Over the history of James, so many songs have been lost to the binbags of cassettes and DATs that Jim Glennie claims to have littering up his house. These songs never see the light of day despite continual badgering and the singles being littered with unsatisfactory mixes and live tracks. Wah Wah was an insight into the unique working methods of the band, but it was merely a scratch on the surface. Below that one suspects there lies a wealth of improvised, off-the-cuff and truly inspirational music that we will never have the pleasure to hear as the band have deemed it unfit for our ears or it has simply got lost on tapes never to resurface. One only has to listen to the unreleased tracks that appear on bootlegs over the years – Somebody Help Me, Gregory’s Town and Pitiful as three examples, but the list is much longer – to realise this. Maybe one day James will be honoured with a boxset which reveals this previously unheard side to their music. We can live in hope. Anyway, I digress. A selection of tracks in their early stages of development recorded during the post-Woodstock sessions has bubbled to the surface, featuring a total of twenty six tracks in total including fourteen songs that were not released on the Whiplash album or the singles that accompanied it. Dumb Jam and Make It Alright have since surfaced years later in a re-recorded format and Hedex featured in a different version on the studio disc of The Gathering Sound boxset, but there remain 11 songs, previously hidden somewhere away from the ears of the James faithful, a whole album of material that we were denied in place of the She’s A Star Dave Angel PAT Mix or the Tomorrow Droppin’ Cake Mix. How these songs have surfaced is somewhat of a mystery. Why other songs from other sessions have not done so is equally mysterious. However, their existence must be addressed and documented as they are as much a part of the musical legacy James will leave as the commercially released material. Brian Eno quite rightly identified in his first visit to a James rehearsal that the jams, the seedlings of James songs, are as much a part of the music James produce as the slick polished record that ends up in the shops. These songs exist somewhere in the territory between the pure jams of Wah Wah and the finished product of Whiplash. There are pure pop moments as well as experimentation, both instrumentally and in vocal treatments. These are some truly fascinating pieces of music. Many of the unreleased songs are documented in Brian Eno’s diary A Year With Swollen Appendices along with a number of other tracks which have yet to surface. The Whiplash Sessions songs are:
Find out more about the songs:
Share: | Jan 1997 | era-whiplash oott-special-feature era article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Bob Mills Show – February 1997 | Session, Video Archive |
SetlistShe's A Star / Sit DownDetails
SongsShare: | Feb 1997 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
She’s A Star – MTV – February 1997 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsA live performance of She’s A Star on MTV | Feb 1997 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
She’s A Star – Channel 4 TFI Friday – February 1997 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsA live performance of She’s A Star on Channel 4’s TFI Friday. | Feb 1997 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
She’s A Star – BBC1 Top Of The Pops – February 1997 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsShe’s A Star live on Top Of The Pops | Feb 1997 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Whiplash Press Information (US) | Article, Press Release | For the better part of a decade, the English sextet James have followed their own muse with little regard for British music trends. Formed in Manchester, England in 1983, James transcended their position as England’s C86 progenitors, their hyper-strummed pop eventually giving way to a modern and mature folkadelia. The new album ‘Whiplash’ (US release : February 25) displays the whole bandwith found in all of James work : the focused pop of ‘Laid’, the experimentation of ‘Wah Wah’ and the tragically beautiful arrangements found on Tim Booth’s recent release with Angelo Badalamenti. The germ of Whiplash began in August 1994, with pencil sketch tracks recorded at David Baynton Power’s studio at Cafe Mullet. In the spring of 1995, sessions reconvened with Brian Eno for two weeks at Westside Studio in London and Windings studios in Wales. James spent this time rehearsing and fleshing out matters organically, with Eno encouraging the band to explore every possible avenue. After the tracks ‘Avalanche’ and ‘Play Dead’ crystallised, producer Stephen Hague entered the picture. James spent January and February of 1996 recording the remainder of the album with Hague at Real World Studios and finished ‘Whiplash’ at RAK studio in London. Contrary to the advance cassette, two tracks have title changes : ‘Whiplash’ is now titled ‘Play Dead’, while ‘Angel’ is called ‘Watering Hole’. Tomorrow Play Dead Lost A Friend Avalanche Waltzing Along Homeboy She’s A Star Watering Hole Greenpeace Blue Pastures Go To The Bank produced by Stephen Hague, frequent interference and occasional co-production by Brian Eno additional production by David Baynton-Power mixed by Stephen Hague and Mike “Spike” Drake engineered by Richard Norris additional engineering by Steve Williams, David Baynton-Power and Mark Hunter, Sam Hardaker and James Brown assisted by Graham and Alex at RAK, Jacqui at Real World and Dave Green at Westside recorded at Rak, Real World, Cafe Mullet, Westside, The Windings mixed at Rak Studios, London mastered by Ian Cooper at Metropolis Mastering | Feb 1997 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Whiplash Press Biography (US) | Article, Press Release | August 1994 on the East Coast of America. After practically three years of non-stop touring in the States, James are about to come off the road. The non-stop slog has finally paid off: the band’s sixth album ‘Laid’ has sold 600,000 copies in America, while the title track has become the most played track on some US radio stations. For the 11 year old sextet, James, it had been a long march to freedom – freedom from a rollercoaster past that went from cult acclaim on Manchester, England’s Factory label, to an ill-starred sojourn at Sire Records, to their self-saving live album ‘One Man Clapping’ to hitting the motherlode with 1990s ‘Gold Mother’, 1992’s ‘Seven’ and 1993’s ‘Laid’. So now James are setting the seal on their success, by playing Woodstock II. Between Live and The Cranberries, in front of 300,000 people. In the rain, in the mud, in the middle of the biggest corporate advertising free-for-all in the history of rock music. And James being James, Woodstock was where they began writing their new album. “We improvised a few songs in a weird barn near Woodstock,” Tim Booth recalls, “Those were the first seeds….” “Apart from that,” smiles Jim Glennie, “Woodstock wasn’t massively pleasurable. Sweetness through strength, and strength through adversity. James have always been about finding leg ups in the breakdowns, the diamond in the muck, the brilliance in the humdrum. Tim Booth’s searching lyrics, the band’s insistent melodies, Booth’s yearning vocals, James epic intimacy – these are the things that make James unique and the things that shine on their new album. Through the deft simplicity of ‘Lost A Friend’ or the sparse electricity of ‘Blue Pastures’, through the clattering industrial disco of ‘Go To The Bank’ to the urgent energy of ‘Greenpeace’, to the bold pop of ‘She’s A Star’ and ‘Tomorrow’, Whiplash is a band proclaiming full steam ahead. All of which is remarkable given the backdrop to the writing and recording of Whiplash. After escaping the Woodstock mire with a few nascent song ideas, the band decamped to Wales and London for further writing sessions. Booth recalls that “at that time we had a very loose framework for the next album. We were gonna make 11 songs under three minutes, very well composed, almost Beatle-like. But we never got around to doing that, and anyway, other bands have taken that idea in the meantime….” Soon after came what the band refer to as Black Thursday, the day that Larry Gott (a founder member of James alongside Booth and Glennie) announced that he couldn’t go on being a part of the touring James; the day that the band found out that they owed five years in back taxes; the day emotional crisis gripped everyone in the band; the day James nearly split. “Still,” sniffs Glennie, “we’ve had a lot of these days, we have been together for a long time. It had been me, Tim and Larry for hundreds of years. And when Larry left it really altered the balance. Suddenly everything was completely broken. All we had was totally shattered. Which meant that the rest of the band came closer into things. And what we’ve rebuilt form that is much stronger, much more open and much more of an honest reflection of what James are about. But it was painful, seriously painful.” Throughout 1995, James worked. Dave Baynton-Power set up a studio in his house in North Wales. There, the entire band (sans Booth) began tinkering and overhauling and underdubbing and reworking and reflecting. They had big, big plans. They had a glut of song ideas, sound ideas, new ideas to work through. ‘Wah Wah’, late 1994’s double album of improvisations thrown up under the aegis of Brian Eno during the making of ‘Laid’, had energised the band. “We experimented with sound,” says Davies, “we tried to interact with each other differently. It wasn’t that it was drawn out, all this was just a logical extension of their earlier collapse. We needed to rebuild James and that’s gonna take a little bit of time. We did that through music.” Booth, for his part, was doing his own rebuilding. He had hooked up with renowned composer Angelo Badalamenti, and the two spent much of 1995 working on their ‘Booth And The Bad Angel’ album in New York. The sessions at Baynton-Power’s house let James regroup and rebuild. Jamming things together, unjamming things apart, constructing songs with Booth’s vocals, deconstructing everything except Booth’s vocals; five-sixths of James fiddled and noodled and doodled and drew together a new conception of making James music. One sixth of James, meanwhile, finally let go a little. “Things would have gone on festering otherwise,” Booth now shrugs. “and we needed a new way of working.” “I do a lot of things. I act, I dance and teach dance, and I wanted to work with Angelo. On past James records, I’d be there on every note, but I didn’t want to do that anymore. And the band wanted more creative input, so we decided we had to find a completely different way of working in order for James to continue. And we found it….” In February 1996, James finally began recording properly at Rak Studios in London and Real World, near Bath. As with ‘Laid’, they set up two recording workstations in the studios, one for the final tapedown and one for experimentation. As with ‘Laid’, Brian Eno was on board, less of a producer, more of a provider of tangential input, technological hints, backing vocals and production. Oh, and there was a third studio as well, for Booth to explore new lyrical and vocal avenues. Couple this with the proven pop suss and gloss of ‘actual’ producer Stephen Hague and ‘Whiplash’ was always going to sound special. So, three recording studios, two producers, nearly two years of writing and taping, one double album of improvisations, one solo album, one near band split, a welter of personal, emotional and financial crisis… Any other band would have been ripped apart by such conflicting forces. “Yeah, I know!” Booth laughs, “But we somehow have a good centre of gravity. This album has the same restless spirit of other James albums, it’s looking for some new language, something new. It’s got a lot more energy to it. ‘Laid’ was a hard record to tour because it was so delicate, but we want to tour this album. So it’s a definite thumping record, and it’s looking to combine the esoteric side of ‘Wah Wah’ with the pop ideas and rock angles that we obviously have as well. We’re always looking to take a snapshot of where we are.” And that’s James ’97. United, invigorated, hungry – creating hymns from the global village. And that’s ‘Whiplash’; born of frustration, but shaped in visionary contentment. And Tim Booth still dances funny. | Feb 1997 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wildpark.de Interview – German | Article, Interview | 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. | Feb 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Rodeo Ga Ga – Vox | Article, Interview | 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… | Feb 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sit Up And Listen – Scotland on Sunday | Article, Interview | 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.” | Feb 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Gang Rises From The Ashes – Toronto Sun | Article, Interview | 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.” | Feb 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Better Flagellate That Never – NME | Article, Interview |
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. | Feb 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Rock The Giant Peach – Atlanta 99x Live | Article, Interview | 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.” | Feb 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Whiplash Germany Album Release – Press Release | Era: Whiplash, Press Release | Press release for James’ album Whiplash in Germany.
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Whiplash USA Album Release – Press Release | Era: Whiplash, Press Release | Press release for James’ album Whiplash in the USA.
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David Baynton-Power Interview – Leaking Zine | Article, Interview | The following is a transcription of an interview with David Baynton-Power, James’ drummer, done at the Rendez-Vous restaurant in Atlanta, GA on March 1, 1997. L = me, D=Dave, T=Travis from the Morrissey fanzine, “Wilde About Morrissey” who sat in on the interview and helped with some questions. Leaking: So what happened after the last tour? Dave: Larry didn’t want to tour anymore, I think Tim wanted a rest. I didn’t. I didn’t feel it was a good time to stop, myself, we were making up so much ground. And so we had some time off, we started to try and write some new songs. L: What about the tax evasion thing? D: Oh, you heard about “Black Thursday”? That’s basically, we were holed up in the studio and we had a big meeting with the accountants and the lawyers and they basically said “You’re broke. You owe this amount and that amount and it’s basically not looking so good.” And it was also on that day that Larry said “Oh yeah, I’m leaving.” So it was a bit of a downer. Tim had also gone off, he was working with Angelo Badalamenti, so it was all very fragmented and it was looking a bit bleak. Well really, at the end of the day we pulled it all back together, it just took a while. L: So you went into your studio you have a studio, right? D: I have a space to set up some equipment at my house, so with the stuff we’d already jammed at bigger studios we thought, “Alright, lets take it to a small room and start editing and basically trying out new sounds and new textures on it. We weren’t really coming up with anything in a big studio where we set up as a band. It’s like you can really hone in on sounds and stuff and it doesn’t cost you a fortune, it doesn’t cost you œ750 a day to do it, you know. You can mess around for weeks and not spend very much money doing it. So finally, things started developing to the point where we found a producer and it was like, “right, let’s go back into a proper studio and put it all together.” Which really brings us up to where we are now. But there were some bleak moments. There always have been in James’ history. Like when disasters happen is when we sort of get going. L: In an article the NME printed a couple of weeks ago, it sounded like Tim wasn’t with you when you recorded, that he did his thing and you did yours in separate studios. Is that accurate? D: Umm, well he wasn’t when we were working at my house, and that was another reason for doing what we did. Cause like we had his rough vocals on tape, so it’s like, “Alright we’ve got the basis of the melody and the tunes that are going on. Let’s find an interesting setting to put them in, you know. But then hopefully, once he’s sorted out his album, he can come back which he did.” We all got together in a proper studio and got it sorted. L: It seems like you are taking a very different outward approach these days, a real change in attitude, umm, there was that lovely picture… D: Oh, you liked that? L: Yeah. It’s up on the webpage…. D: Good. Yeah. Just type in on your web browser “James’ Bottoms.” L: It’s actually Jamesbum. D: Jamesbum? Hahaha, good. L: But it really seems like there’s been a real change. I read a while back Tim saying something to the extent of “No funny pictures.” What brought this about? D: When you look back at the photographs the press have got, you just think, “What a bunch of boring sods we were.” We just thought, let’s do a photo where you’re going through the magazine and you go “AHH!” L: It worked… D: Yes. It worked. So that was basically it, you know. At that photo session it started out, Saul was sat in a chair, the photographer says “Everybody gather round him.” It was like, “Lads, we’ve been here before, let’s do something, let’s make a move.” You know what I mean? L: So who’s idea was that? D: Saul’s actually. L: Not surprising… D: Well, after I suggested that we’d been there before, it was like, what can we do? He was like “What can we do? Lets take our clothes off, yeahhhhh. Let’s get naked.” L: Well Tim didn’t… D: But no, I mean you can’t hide from the fact that, I don’t know if I should be saying this…oh well, fuck it… T: We know what you’re going to say… D: There is a bit of a division. Like Tim’s into a lot of stuff that he’s into, and we’re kind of into different stuff. We thought, well, let’s use it to our advantage. So that’s basically why he was there holding the whip and we’re the whipping boys. We thought it was a fun way to kind of show that off, you know. L: On that subject, have you ever objected to or censored anything he’s written, lyric-wise? D: Uhh, it goes all ways. You’re always going to come up with your part of a track and someone will go, “Ahh, I don’t know if I really like that…” It’s just the way you bring it up really. Not like “Well, I think its CRAP.” You’ve got to be able to say “Well why don’t you try THIS.” It’s how you do it really. L: So tell us about Adrian, the new guy. D: Where did he come in eh? He’s an old friend of Saul’s, and uh, obviously we had to find somebody else with Larry going and luckily he fit the bill. He’s a really good guitar player. He’s a bit more rocking than Larry, he’s got a bit of an edge, which has injected a new spark into the band. It was so good for us that we didn’t have to audition, put the advert in and then 100 guitar players and we’re “No we’ll give you a call…” It was like, “Adrian? Yeah, give him a go. Great. He works.” So luckily that was quite easy for us. L: So you were working with Stephen Hague and Brian Eno on the new album? D: Yeah. L: How do you feel that working with Stephen Hague, who’s done so much with New Order, affected the direction of the album? D: Umm… T: Versus Brian Eno. D: Brian didn’t have a great deal to do with this album really. He did a lot of backing vocals, great backing vocals. There, Brian Eno. Backing vocals. Yeah, Stephen was great. Really nice bloke, easy to get on with, and he’s made a lot of pop records so he has a good ear for a tune. He’s one of the guys who really wanted to get involved. And he has a great track record and it was like “Oh wow!” It’s always great when someone like that, when you get a phone call saying he really wants to do the record, when someone likes us. L: So are you glad to be back on the road? D: Well, after three years…There’s no point in being unrealistic and thinking “Well, perhaps no one is interested anymore.” There’s been a lot of change in music. In three years some bands have been and gone you know. So you put your record out and you think, “Is it gonna do anything?” And after all this time to come back to America, and we’re only doing 3 shows, a bit of a promotional trip, and we’ve sold them all out. It’s like, it’s grand! L: So what are your plans? I know you’re doing some dates in England. Then what? D: Gonna come back over here. L: What is the best tour story you have? D: Uhh, oh god. They’re not printable. L: Ok, something printable… D: I don’t know. Can’t you ask what’s the best gig we’ve ever done? L: OK then, your favorite way to pass time on the tour bus? D: Hahaha. Sleep, I suppose. L: What’s your favorite song to play live? D: Uhh, at the moment, I’d have to say, for me, personally, at the moment I really like doing “Come Home.” Cause we’ve reworked it, pumped it up and modernized it and it’s just like “Shit! If only we’d done this the first time…” *laughs* It so annoys us, you know, you record tracks very much in their infancy and once we’ve had them on the road for a while, they really start coming together and you think, “Shit. If only we had this on the record…” L: It seems it could get really boring playing them for so many years. D: Well it does, yeah. Well we’ve done this new version of “Born of Frustration,” which you may or may not like, but there was always a lot of baggage with that song, because it came out at a time when the press started turning on us in England, you know. There was one point where every gig we did we got a great review. Suddenly it just turned and we got slagged off as being a stadium rock band, and being called the new Simple Minds and that track was kind of the key of all that. T: That song broke you in the U.S. D: I know, but for us that song has a lot of baggage with it, and when we play it we’ve got all this shit going on in our heads and stuff and it’s like we knew a lot of people like it, so it was like, “How can we present it so it’s kind of new for us and not so stadium…?” L: But you did that slow acoustic version. Do you know what I’m talking about? D: No. When? L: In 1994. D: Did we? We can’t remember that one. L: I just remember seeing you play in 1992 and being shocked that you didn’t play it because it was the hit single. D: Yeah. That sounds typical of us. We’re great at shooting ourselves in the foot. L: No, people were really into it. You may not remember, it was in Boston on Halloween. D: Oh yeah…I remember that one. We all dressed up stupid didn’t we? *Laughs* L: Yeah. About the only costume I remember is Jim’s. He looked like a big dildo. D: Oh yeah, I remember that *grin*. L: So what’s your most embarrassing moment on stage? D: I’ve never had any. *laughs* No, not really. None I can remember. Probably you can ask other people and they’ll tell you something funny, but not me. I spent a lot of time getting into a headspace where I don’t get nervous on stage at all and I play much better for it. You get wound up and you make mistakes, and when you make mistakes you give yourself a really hard time about it. You really have to go on stage and not give a fuck and then you play well. It’s taken a while to get to that space, but I think I’ve managed it. It actually came from being in America. There’s a bit more laid-back attitude over here. I find most Americans far mor easy going in some ways. I caught the vibe. L: I noticed that the last time I saw you, at the Orpheum in Boston, you came out with a cane. What happened? D: Oh yeah. I damaged my foot. We’d been, uh, rehearsing in Woodstock, have you been to Woodstock? L: No. D: Not the gig, the town. Cause there’s a big studio there called Bayersville, and there’s a big wooden barn there that bands use to rehearse and we were there for a week before we started that tour and Boston was the first show. Well, me and Jimmy, we go running and stuff, we’d go running through the woods. So I’m bombing out through the woods one day, and I just landed on the ankle and my foot turned over like that. Luckily it was this leg [gestures] and not that one cause we would have had to pull the tour. I couldn’t have played. So that’s why I had the cane. L: What would be the lineup of your ideal gig? D: Umm, I’d have to say there wouldn’t be any rock bands. I’m a bit of a techno dude. Out in the mountains. No bands. L: Just a DJ? T: Like the Prodigy? D: Yeah…we like the Prodigy and Underworld and people like that you know. T: So it was your influence on the radio today? Prodigy…. D: No, there’s quite a lot of us really. We’re going for a lot more of that. We just find it a lot more exciting cause it’s new, you know. T: That’s why you mess around with remixes? D: Yeah, we’ve also started another side project as well, doing a lot of that stuff. We’re fishing around for deals at the moment. T: To put out a record? D: We’ve got one ready to go. L: So this is the trance/ambient album I heard rumors about? D: It’s not ambient really. Some of the songs are like 3-minute pop songs in a techno environment. T: Are there vocals on it? D: Yeah, a few, yeah. T: Is it Tim? D: No. T: Who? D: Saul. It’s Saul. T/L: Ohh, so he really DOES want to be the singer…. D: It’s wild up where I live, see, I live in Wales and I only discovered this last summer, I was getting a bit pissed off living in Wales, after being in London and doing the album. I was thinking, “What the fuck am I doing here?” I only know a few people, it was a bit boring. And when you want to go out you think, “Oh let’s go to Manchester, go to Liverpool to go to a club.” And all the time there were these banging parties happening out in the forests. People go out with a sound system and just techno away all night. Once I discovered that, I just thought Wales is the best place on earth. And I got the lads over, I said “You’ve got to come to these parties, they’re brilliant!” They’re totally unregulated so you don’t have to buy tickets, there’s no security, it’s just like people having fun. That’s really changed a lot of things. I have to give a plus to the people who put those on. People called the Dosse Posse. Stick THAT on the net. That would be good. L: Careful or you’ll have people coming over there to try and catch a glimpse of you at these parties. D: Yeah, well you’ve got to know the sites and all. It’s all underground, all word of mouth, know what I mean? That’s what I love about it you know. L: Do you feel you are trying to present a certain visual image to go with the music? D: There’s never been a big game plan. There’s probably more going on now than there ever has been. L: So where did that idea for the cover art come from? D: Don’t know actually. L: It’s caused quite a stir. You have an internet mailing list that you may or may not know about… D: I know there’s a big list of like – me and Mark were we use this little studio in Wales to do b-sides and various bits and bobs and Mark brought his computer down and his modem and got hooked up to the net. I’ve never really surfed the net before. And he said “Have a look at this,” and he pulled up this list and it was like every James bootleg that’s ever been made. *laughs* L: Oh my, I think my list is up there…. D: Hold on, I’ve got no problem with bootlegs. I’ve got no problem at all with ’em. I think they’re great. I know it’s only hardcore fans who buy them, it’s not like its dipping into our sales, that’s crap, you know what I mean? I think it’s great. It’s flattering that people are that into it, to be doing that shit. It was just like, lists, all these gigs. I mean bloody hell! Gigs I’d forgotten about. I was like “We played there did we?!” It was so long, I couldn’t believe it. L: There’s actually 2 different pages. The one you are talking about, and then another one that has a chatboard and icons and cursors of you and stuff. And there’s an email mailing list. D: Oh we could get it up and bang a few things out as well. L; They wouldn’t believe it was you. Someone once tried to convince people he was Tim, using a bogus address. But my point was, the album cover people were speculating it was a transvestite or even Tim in drag. D: Tim in drag? Ha. Well, I’ll tell ya, all I can say is like, figure it out. *laughs* T: Kind of like the Laid cover? It was like, FIGURE THAT ONE OUT, the dresses and the bananas…. L: That was real subtle…. D: Well, I’ll tell ya, that was because we were starving. We were doing a photo session and we were all miserable and going “I’m hungry.” And someone was dispatched to try and find some food and there was only a veg shop open. We were in Marseille, right that’s the cathedral in Marseille, those doors. And it was just like, that’s all they came back with, bananas. I’m telling you, there was no game plan. But as for the new one, you’ll have to guess. Sorry. Whatever you wanna think, think it. It’s probably more fun than the truth. L: I think we can come up with something good…. There’s a bit on the page that was posted for April Fools last year about Mark Hunter, that people believed…. D: What was it? L: Well, we said that Mark had been jogging and was nearly hit by a car. So he got mad and tried to kick in the car’s windshield and the police were called in. And he proceeded to moon the policeman and was dragged in for psychiatric evaluation. D: Ha! Good work! That’s far more interesting than the truth. *laughs* L: Yeah, well, 3 months later people were still going “What happened? Was it true?” D: Who did it? L: Me. D: Good work. Keep doing it. Mad stories I love it. It’s a good story innit. L: I thought so, especially after seeing that NME picture…Ok. Videos. Is there a story behind the latest video? D: I think so. I haven’t figured it out meself though. L: No, I mean, were you trying to emulate something specific? D: Fellini. L: Ahh. So who generally comes up with the ideas? You or the directors? D: Well, yeah, ideas are banged around. Then you’ve got to find a director, and you sort of muck a few things out with them and you end up with something. It’s kind of fairly hit or miss. L: How do you like doing them? It seems you’ve done low-budget stuff in the past, except for the last couple. D: Yeah, well we don’t feel very comfortable in them, you know, we’re not like some bands that really go out and perform. T: Well, based on the video in gorilla outfits, I’m sure you’re REAL comfortable in that…. D: I think one of the best videos I’ve ever seen was New Order “Round and Round.” T: Oh, cause they’re not in it. D: Just loads and loads of gorgeous women. T: Right. D: I thought “That’s so cool.” Why can’t we have a video like that, we’re not even in it, brilliant. L: I’ve always liked the Replacements video where it’s just somebody’s feet and the radio. D: And he kicks it in. T: I think I’ve seen that one. D: Most videos have a very simple but original idea. You know what I mean? You just go “I wish I’d thought of that.” L: In the “Seven” video, you’re wearing T-shirts and stuff with the numbers one through seven. There is no number 5. Was that just bad editing? D: Really? I never noticed. There’s seven of us, so what happened? L: No no, I mean, it counts up… D: There’s no five going on? L: 5 never shows up. D: I wasn’t aware of that. Did you watch the “Born of Frustration” video? L: Yes. D: Have you noticed what’s weird about that? L: Besides the wind? D: No, you’re not looking hard enough. L: Andy in a dress…*grin*? D: Have you looked at the guitar player? L: What, are you the guitar player? D: No no no. It’s not Larry. L: Then who is it? D: It was our tour manager. Our record company never noticed either. L: Now I have to go back and look. Heheh. D: I’ll tell you what happened. Basically it was our first trip to America. We’d run over to L.A. to shoot the video there, up in the “Troner Pinnacles.” Out in Nevada somewhere, that’s where it was shot. Well, the night we got into L.A., Larry got mugged. He was so shaken up he just buggered off home the next day. So he sent our tour manager out to take his place. He was wearing glasses and he wore Larry’s hat and all; but no one ever noticed. So there you go. A little bit of trivia for you. L: That’s great. Is there a sample of “Bring A Gun” in “Avalanche?” Do you know what I’m talking about? D: No, I don’t actually. I haven’t listened to “Bring A Gun” in years. L: There was one bit in there that sounded like a sample from Seven, a real fast staccato bit. D: I think it’s actually Larry’s guitar played an octave higher on the soundboard. For all the technical people out there who like that sort of stuff, that’s what it probably is. [waiter enters and refills David’s coffee cup]T: You’re not drinking tea? You like tea? D: Yeah, but I don’t want to offend you Americans. You haven’t got a clue how to make one. T: I drink tea all the time. D: You don’t have kettles. L: So what is your recipe for tea then? D: Boiling water. L: Well yeah…. T: With a bag in it. D: You take the kettle to the the pot to the kettle, or the other way around. Cause like you order tea over here and they bring you a cup of hot water with a tea bag on the side. And they bring you cream?! No. Sorry. Doesn’t work. You know what I mean. You put a man on the moon, but you can’t sort your tea out. [laughs] T: Have you ever tried iced tea? What do you think about that? D: It’s alright. Yeah. I remember doing an interview with Musician magazine. L: Yeah, something about Earl Grey…. D: Yeah, and I said it’s all about the water temperature. [laughs] L: So, are there any songs that you’ve done, that you would now disavow? D: Disown? Not want to know about? L: Yeah. D: Well, yes and know really. I mean it’s like, the longer an album takes to make, the harder it is to listen to it. Cause then you can’t have any objectivity because you’re just so wrapped up in every little step of the work that went into it, and it takes years for that to get forgotten and to just listen to it and go “Oh yeeeaaah.” But who knows. I really wish we could just sort of undergo hypnosis, you know, so once you finish the album, someone could go “ooooohhh” [makes noise] and you could listen to it like you’ve never heard it before and then you could make an objective opinion on it. But that’s just one of the factors that goes with the job. L: Are there any songs you feel like you’ve outgrown? Cause the sound has changed so drastically. D: Well we do, we always change, or we’d get bored. L: But I mean you listen to Stutter and you listen to Whiplash and it’s not even the same band really. D: That was a long long time ago. I’m sure even the Grateful Dead sounded a bit different later on, didn’t they? L: I would not know. D: I’ve never listened to them. L: You wouldn’t want to start…. D: But what a phenomenon. The biggest grossing act in America. L: And they only had one top 40 hit ever. D: It was brilliant. Not playing the commercial game and yet still having such a huge dedicated following. I would never knock ’em for it at all. T: Do you feel you guys play the commercial game? D: Yes and no. You’ve got to toe the line somewhere. I mean when you’ve signed to a major label, you know… T: There’s nothing wrong with that. D: Well, you know, it gets old. Maybe I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t playing the commercial game. It’s all about exposure, doing interviews, and getting across to people. L: Oh I don’t know, if you were big “rock stars” you probably wouldn’t have spoken to me in the first place. D: I don’t know. I mean you do an interview with a magazine and they send along a reporter who basically doesn’t fucking like you and he’s gonna do a hatchet job on you, you know. But you people actually like the music, you come to our shows. I’d much rather talk to you people, you know what I mean? It’s like far more real. L: Well, of course we think so. D: No, we’ve been set up loads of times. Send over some real lad who’s all “Oh yeah oh yeah mate and really like ya” and he just goes “Bunch of sods, don’t like em.” It’s like “Fucking arsehole!” Know what I mean? Such a cheap trick. L: It just doesn’t seem worth it to take the time to do an interview if you’re just going to trash a band. You could just as easily give them lousy reviews and then no more publicity and it would serve your purpose. D: They’re nasty, bitter people. L: They’re failed musicians…. D: Probably, yeah yeah yeah. L: Ok, now I have a bunch of rather….unrelated questions. Which other member of the band would you most want to be and why? D: No, I wouldn’t. I’m quite happy. That’s a perfectly ok answer as well. L: Which song, by another artist, do you wish you’d written? D: “Unfinished Symphony” erm, “Sympathy” by Massive Attack. Like “Damn! Why didn’t we do that!” L: What do you want the first line of your autobiography to say? D: Oh fuck. That’s probably it actually. “Oh fuck.” This is the story… I don’t know, I haven’t got a witty answer for you, I don’t know what to say. You’d probably only get a really good one for that from Jimmy or Bob. L: Bob? D: Bob. Bob’s Saul. We’ve all got stupid nicknames. L: Ahh, that answers a lot. I have an interview from a Toronto radio station and Jim keeps saying “Bob” and the DJ never said exactly who he was interviewing. “Bob” kept calling Jim, “Jim” though. D: Stick that on the net. Saul is Bob. L: So what are everybody else’s stupid nicknames? D: Well, I get called “Welsh,” which is fine. It could be a lot worse. L: Not very creative. D: Uhh…Mark’s “Chunny Lad.” L” Is that where “Chunny Chops” came from? D: Yeah. It was “Chunny Pops” but they misspelled it on the cover. [laughs] We thought it was hilarious. L: What is that supposed to mean? D: “Chunny Lad?” L: Yeah. D: Uhh…fuck it. I couldn’t explain it to ya. Well, Adrian, Adrian is called [laughs], “Mr. Pastry.” [laughs] T: Please don’t ask him about that one…. D: Jim hasn’t got one, cause he’s fucking’ untouchable. We’ve tried. They just don’t stick. So we couldn’t. Frank: Teflon. D: We tried “Teflon,” it just doesn’t work. So we’ve given up trying. Umm…and Tim’s “Monty.” [laughs] Greg: Where did that one come from? D: Uhhh, I can’t…I can’t say. L: Sure you can…. G: Incriminating factors as well? L: What is he? “Let’s Make a Deal?” D: [laughs] L: We could go really bad places with that…. D: Well, there you go. L: Ok, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever been asked in an interview? D: [laughs] T: I hope it’s not this one. D: It’s probably one of your questions. Umm, I don’t do a lot of interviews actually. So, I don’t have an answer to that. L: What’s the best album you’ve bought in the last year? D: Uhh, I haven’t bought much recently, actually. Uhh, I tell ya, umm, I don’t know. Can you hold it down to a track or something like that? L: Sure. D: I don’t know if I can tell. It’s by the Scot Project, it’s on umm, it’s like a fucking’ acid/techno album, a track. But it’s by the Scot Project. I’ll have to find the title out for you. L: You’re going to be up all night trying to think of it now. D: Oh, definitely the label’s Reactivate. It just reminds me of all the great parties last summer. They always used to play it when the fucking sun was coming up over the mountains. L: What’s the first album you ever bought? D: Ahh, I think it was The Move. L: The Move? D: British band. T: Never heard of ’em. D: Going back a while, yep. L: What’s the most embarrassing item in your record collection? D: Oh loads. These are the ones you get free off the record company [laughs]. There’s quite a lot in there. T: How about stuff you’re embarrassed to like? D: Uhh, I’m not embarrassed to like anything. I can always justify it [laughs]. L: Well, ok, what’s the last book you read? D: Umm, I don’t read books. L: You don’t? T: Good for you. D: I just read magazines. But see I can hold a conversation about most books because I’ve read about them in magazines [laughs]. L: If you were a slurpee, what flavor would you be? D: [exclaims] A WHAT?! L: Umm, an icee or a slush puppy, sort of a virgin daiquiri, only in any flavor you want… D: I’ve never had one. L: But but, I KNOW they have them in the UK. D: Yah I know, slush puppies. I’ve never had one. L: Well, hehe, pick a flavor. D: Make one up. L: Ok then, choose a bubble gum flavor. D: Pop. T: OK, that’s cola, there’s a cola flavor… L: If you could choose a way to die, which would you prefer: violent death, accident, or disease? D: They’re not very good choices are they? L: No, they’re not. D: They’re horrible choices. That’d be a Brumpton’s Cocktail wouldn’t it. You know a Brumpton’s Cocktail? L: No idea. D: I don’t know if they’re still used. They used to give them to terminally ill people. It’s just a fucking massive mix of pharmaceutical grade heroin and other things and you just fucking nuke out, you don’t know a thing about it. L: Ahh, now we just have Jack Kevorkian. D: Yeah. L: Ok, this one is particularly bad. If you were kidnaped by Martians, what body part would you want them to have three of? D: Sorry? L: If you were kidnaped by Martians, what body part would you want them to have three of? D: [laughs] Well, depends what they look like. L: Use your imagination. D: 3 nipples [laughs]. You said anything. L: Ok, uhhh, what’s the most disgusting thing you’ve ever eaten (excluding bodily fluids)? D: They’re quite alright those, usually. Umm, fuck it, I don’t know. Probably some kind of shellfish. Mussels…anything like that. I’d chuck. I’d throw up. L: It’s like snot…. D: Yeah, just the smell of all that sea water. I always used to have a problem when I was a kid and I used to go to the beach. Just that smell used to make me heave. I used to dread going to the beach because I knew every time I went it was like [makes puking noise]. I’ve gotten over it now like, it’s just one of those childhood traumas that you go through. T: You mean the old people didn’t scare you away? D: No no no, I’m fine now. Old people rarely smell…. L: Old people in bikinis? D: Eeew. T: Well in England, you go to Blackpool? D: Well only once, really, for a gig. T: Old people sit outside in chairs. They don’t sit on the beach. They sit outside and chat. It’s not a beach like here, it’s pebbles and everything. D: Yeah it’s horrible. It’s got Sallowfield up the road banging out loads of radioactive waste. L: Sounds great…. Ok, your most prized possession? D: Ahhh, uhhhh. T: Your drum kit? D: No. [garbled] It’s just something that you turn up and hit every night. Umm, I haven’t got one, cause when you have prized possessions they get taken away from you. L: Now that sounds sad. D: Of course I’d be too attached to something. I could say my girlfriend, but she’s not a possession, you know what I mean? L: Yeah. Your worst vice? D: You don’t wanna know…. L: Haha, another place we shouldn’t go eh? Then what was the first gig you ever saw? D: Uhh, Hawkwind. L: [laughs] and what YEAR would THAT have been? D: Uhh, 1974…something like that. It’s going back a bit. L: Well, that’s all I have. D: Well, I’ve got to chill a bit before the show anyway. [Bunch of stray garbage, i.e. us thanking him, him taking off…] | Mar 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
VH1 Interview | Article, Interview | Jim : This is the James rock n roll tour bus, part of the Vantool collection which is top of the range I’m told. Well that’s what the driver told us anyway. Oh, we’ve found a member of James asleep in his bed. Surprise, surprise. It’s Adrian Oxaal. Hello Adrian. Adrian : Hello Jim : How are you today? Adrian : Sleepy Jim : He’s always sleepy. Hangover. Surprise surprise. Alcohol. And this is the back lounge where we kind of meet the general public and acts of gross indecency go on. So I’m told, I’m also in bed by half nine. Tim : To me, Black Thursday wasn’t a catastrophe at all. It was one of those points where things have to change and it’s not going to change. Larry resigned, our accountant came to us and said we had a five-year tax bill that had been frozen for five years and money we’d been told had been put aside hadn’t been put aside and everything came down on one day. And so I went off to make the Booth And The Bad Angel record and left it to Jimmy to sort out. Jim : I had to sell things to try and meet the tax bill. Children. Tim : His body. Your little son Jim : Still miss him. Tim : It’s schizophrenic. We definitely have the tension of the yob and the saint working within the band continuously. It seems like a good balance, a good pivot. We don’t believe in black and whites. The whole press view of James has always been very weird to us. We’ve never understood it. They were calling us Buddhist vegans. There’s no Buddhist vegans here. There never were and we’d tell people this and they’d never believe us for some reason. So for years people had this view of us as a very polite band, this band has been very rock n roll, very cliched for a number of years. Partly, I mean some of the reputation has come because I’m a sick man. I had an inherited liver disease so I have a very clean life out of physical necessity. It’s not something I preach to anybody else. It’s what I do and I do a lot of things like yoga and meditation and things like that. Mainly because I nearly died when I was 22, I stopped breathing and I’ve had to find ways of nourishing myself in that way. But it’s not something I’d like to get self-righteous about. The lyrics I’ve been writing, a lot of the stuff has been about spirit and the nature of spirit. I got a lot of it out on Angelo. It’s probably more suited to his cheesy keyboard than it is to James guitars so me and Angelo could indulge in that area and do a record like that because then I didn’t need to force it upon these guys. Oh no, not another one, can’t you sing about birds and tits and football Jim : Well you like football as well. It’s not just God Tim : No, I want to sing about God again. Jim : (sings) God is good Tim : It was like I almost got the right medium for it I think, probably with Booth and the Bad Angel. And then it meant I could come back here and appreciate this and they could appreciate me again. That break was fantastic because it was like you know. There must have been about a year when we hardly saw each other. And when we came back it was like “Oh God, these are my friends. You know when you’re too close to something, you forget to appreciate it sometimes and we’d got into that place. And now it’s like we’re having a blast. | Mar 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
MTV Interview / News | Article, Interview | James are back with a new single She’s A Star from the album Whiplash and a video that pays tribute to one of the world’s most famous film directors. Tim : The video was meant to be a kind of homage to Fellini and a kind of parody of it and took the idea of, yes, film stars and the other black-haired woman becoming the star even though there’s the more obvious blonde star. So it’s kind of a cruder version of what I think I was probably writing about which is about people coming into their own power and realising their own strengths. | Mar 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Radio 1 Website | Article, Interview | JAMES – SPLIT James have revealed they nearly split up as a result of their huge success in the early nineties. They were touring like mad in the States and got sick of the sight of each other. “We played in Britain for 11 years virtually the whole time. We felt like people needed a break – we were getting taken for granted and we were taking ourselves for granted. We were just going to play stadiums and we didn’t want that – so we ran away. Our guitarist left, and Tim wanted to do his own things – so there was a big question over whether we’d hold it together.” JAMES – GETTING IT TOGETHER They did their own thing for a bit but then the band’s creative juices got flowing again – they released She’s A Star and now the album Whiplash. Tim Booth says “I went and made a record, but it felt like a rest because I wasn’t doing it with James. We needed a break from each other, we needed a rest. We need to unpack our bags and do our washing! We’ve got our legs back now and we’re ready to get out there and have some fun.” | Mar 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth’s Rebellious Jukebox – Melody Maker | Article, Interview | Tim Booth of James tells us about the records that make him feel like a star 1 LOUIS ARMSTRONG : ‘Wonderful World’ (HMV Single) “I have childhood memories of this. I hated it when I was younger. It was too positive. I love it now because it’s so generous and rich and, his voice, it’s so &ldots;. ridiculously big. It’s a heart song.” 2 JOY DIVISION : ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ (Factory single) “I love this even without its poignant history. I love it for the haunting keyboards and the scratchy, crappy recording of this beautiful love song, and its beautiful chorus – you can’t really tell what he’s singing in the verses. I like that. I was in Manchester when he died. People were just devastated. Friends I knew just sat on a bus all day and went round and round Manchester.” 3 DOLLY PARTON : ‘I Will Always Love You’ (from the RCA LP ‘Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits’) “I only got into this in the last year. I was in a clothing shop and they were playing ‘Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits’, and I left the shop and bought the cassette. She’s written some great songs: ‘Jolene’ and ‘I Will Always Love You’. Whitney Houston’s version is atrocious. Awful. Theatrical laryngitis. Dolly Parton’s version is heartfelt and moving.” 4 JAMES : ‘Sometimes’ (from the Fontana LP ‘Laid’) “All these songs aren’t so much influential as my faves. And, if I’m saying my faves, I would say a load of James songs. When you write a song, you’re so much connected to it. Even if it isn’t as good as some of the other songs, to you, it is.” “‘Sometimes’ was the song that got Brian Eno to make the record ‘Laid’ and Brian said it was one of the greatest musical moments of his life when we recorded that, which is the highest honour we’ve probably ever had paid to us. We just used to get high playing this song. That’s the best thing – getting high when you’re playing your own songs. That happens with ….” 5 TIM BOOTH AND ANGELO BADALAMENTI : ‘Fall In Love With Me’ (from the Fontana LP ‘Booth and the Bad Angel’) “I love singing this. I sing it at parties. People can’t stop me singing in. It’s like a spell to me, a love charm. And it’s quite sneaky really, cos people fall in love with me when I play it. It doesn’t always work, though. It failed badly for me last weekend.” 6 AMERICA : ‘Horse With No Name’ (Warner Brothers single) “I love the scarcity of this song. It’s like a narrative – and I’m a sucker for narratives. It’s also got a double meaning – ‘A Horse With No Name’ is a phrase for heroin – but you don’t even need to know that because there’s a whole separate narrative about going through the desert on a horse with no name. In fact, Angelo and I did a cover of it when we were mucking around doing radio stations in America. Also, it was produced by George Martin. Now there’s a real genius.” 7 ROLF HARRIS : ‘Sunrise’ (Columbia single) “When we first formed James it was the only cover version we ever did. We used to do it on radio with toilet rolls pretending to be didgeridoos. I changed the lyrics to something corny about the last sunrise, a nuclear sunrise. ‘The sunrise too early in the morning.’ That was our version of Rolf’s masterpiece. I think I went for it because it was the first time I’d heard a didgeridoo, which is such a magical instrument. But you can really only hear it on the one song. It doesn’t have much variation in itself.” 8 VAL DOONICAN : ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’ (Decca single) “One of my favourite songs ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’ was probably the first song I ever sung to anyone. My mother used to make me sing it to my auntie. I was so shy – I used to sing it from behind the sofa. ‘Oh Paddy Mc Ginty’s an Irishman of note / Fell in for a fortune so he bought himself a goat / Said he ‘I’m sure of goats milk I’m going to have my fill / Till he got the nanny home and found it was a bill.'” 9 PATTI SMITH : ‘Hey Joe’ (Mer single) “A Hendrix cover. Astonishing . She interweaves in the myth of Patty Hearst robbing the banks – you know the little rich girl in the Seventies who got kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and four months later she was on videos robbing banks. So, Patti Smith interweaved that story with Hendrix’s ‘Hey Joe’ and Tom Verlaine’s playing guitar &ldots; and, it’s just amazing. It starts out with her reading a poem : ‘Honey, the way you feel guitar makes me feel masochistic / And you standing beneath the Symbionese Liberation Army flat with your legs spread / I wondered whether you were dead, or whether you were getting it every night from some black revolutionary and his women / You know what your Daddy said / He said ; he said ; he said; Sixty days ago she was my little child and now here she is with a gun in her hand.'” “It’s like this ridiculously melodramatic wonderful poem. It’s my favourite song ever. In fact, Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’ album influenced my whole musical agenda. She wasn’t frightened to make an arsehole of yourself, and I think to be a good lyricist you have to make an arsehole of yourself. To fly, you’re going to have to crash, too. If you look at some of Neil Young’s lyrics, some of them are terrible and some are pure genius.” 10 JOHN LENNON : ‘No 9 Dream’ (from the Apple LP ‘Walls And Bridges’) “A mediocre album, but what I like about ‘No 9 Dream’ is that it’s got three parts which shouldn’t be together in the same song; it’s very hallucinogenic and very composed. Only a very good musician could ever attempt anything like that. It sweeps you in to this dream world and then half way through it changes into the daftest thing.” “The first time I discovered how brilliant it was, I was on the tour bus, going between Seattle and San Francisco, and we were in the mountains, at nine in the morning and I put it on and it was so beautiful, I just started to cry. Then I went and found Saul, who was awake, and I said ‘Come here, listen to this song and look at the mountains.’ And he did and he started crying as well. I thought ‘I knew it was scientific.’ I was convinced.” | Mar 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Top Magazine Interview | Article, Interview |
On entering the LWT building on London’s South Bank, one could be easily unnerved. Immediately to the left, glossy photos of such toothy-grinning celebs as Cilla, Richard & Judy and Beadle stare surreally down on the reception area. Soon to be added to this Hall Of Fame, no doubt, is Mr Bob Mills – comic, footie expert and chat show host. James are here to perform their trimphant single ‘She’s A Star’ on his new Saturday night slot. Map and compass in hand, I venture out in search of the mercurial Mancunians. ventually I stumble upon the Green Room where Mr Mills, a Giant Haystack of a human specimen, is organising rehearsals. I stare into his kneecaps, grab a beer and scale further heights to the restaurant where the James boys have eloped for an early evening nibble. Previous preconceptions would suggest nothing more than a vegefest, a rock ‘n’ roll rice dish. But this was never James. Singer Tim Booth, maybe – the original man to put the green in runner bean – but not the rest of the band. It’s appropriate that, tonight, Tim is busy in the wardrobe department, wearing the most antisocial of tartan trousers. There’s also been changes in James’ land -a new openess and democracy which means Tim doesn’t do all the talking. Surrounded by red meat and red wine, I’m talking to the cheeky coupling of Saul Davies (guitars) and Jim Glennie (bass). James have been together for 14 years; have been compared to U2 and The Srniths, survived Madchester baggie and simmered below Britpop. Not uncommonly it was their efforts to crack the US (Laid has sold a healthy 600,000 there) that nearly led to their demise. Having attempted to bribe me with a tenner to say something nice about the band, Saul takes up the story: “We’d been going strong for about four years, then after the American tour, we came as close as we’ve come to disaster. Larry (Gott, guitarist and founding member) left, the taxman got hold of us (for five years non-payment) and then Tim went off to record with Angelo (Badalamenti ). We could’ve just given up, got into four or five different bands and done nothing. Or we could re-group.” “We were forced to re-evaluate what we wanted to do and whether we wanted to do it. Had we got the legs for it?” adds Jim. Although outflanked by U2’s Zooropa the Eno-inspired Wah Wah sessions helped refresh the spirits. Saul reckons its experimental noodlings to be the band’s favourite work. “We all love the sound of the album, it’s the band’s favourite. It was the first time we’d used technology through necessity. But we knew we couldn’t afford to make another weird album now. We wanted to make a record with that technological edge to it but one that was married to some blinding pop songs.” The retrenchment process began with Saul, Jim and drummer Dave Baynton- Power assembling at the latter’s Wrexham home studio. Tim carried on with his side projects, occasionally dropping in with some vocals. They moved on to Real World studios and Mickey Most’s (“always dressed in white Versace”) RAK studios in St John’s Wood, “to get the well urban vibe,” quips Saul. Stephen Hague (New Order, PSB et al) was brought in to produce some pop sheen, Eno recalled for the sonic quirks. The resultant new pervy James comes by the name of Whiplash (Fontana), mixing the old style sweeping pop melodrama of ‘Tomorrow’ with the jungly modernity of ‘Greenpeace’. Slightly schizophrenic, but still unquestionable class. Only now everyone’s involved. “We’ve all had to take more of a role,” says Jim,”Being a founder member it had always been me, Tim and Larry – we thought we had to guide the others but we didn’t. The nucleus grew. For Tim it was a big relief. It took a lot of the responsibility off him. He could have some fun and for the first time we were a band that could all chill out. Some of the songs we just smashed up, not too many ‘cos we wanted it to sound up. Like, we had a little room where we could sort out the mad ideas before going into the £l,000-a-day studio (carefully avoiding being financially singed for a second time). We transferred ideas to Eno and vice versa. Bouncing ideas backwards and forwards. We ended up with a kind of b!oadstroked, haphazard, creative democracy .The only thing that stopped us was The Simpsons and the footie – we ended up being completely nocturnal.” You could call James underachievers, suffering from a perennial identity crisis. But Whiplash slips in easily betwixt the likes of Radiohead and Oasis – the odd esoteric twist and socially concerned muse thrown in as trademark. But what about this new found laddishness? Common consent was an evening with James comprises yoga, Buddhism, followed by large helpings of tofu. “James have always been seen as being po-faced but anyone who comes out with us for a night would realise that’s a load of old tosh. If they don’t end up with alcohol poisoning or a black eye it would be quite unusual.” “But we’ve got to be careful,” adds Jim.”You don’t want to become too compartmentalised. We’ve not become a lad’s band who think they’re Oasis. We’ve always been fairly ordinary. Sometimes we’re arrogant like most people in a band, sometimes we’re stupid and immature, making idiots of ourselves and all points in between. It’s fun, we’re just playing with our image.” So, at last, James seems to be playing themselves, knowing their place and quite content with that. Almost at home James. “We don’t mind being slagged off, ‘cos that’s better than being ignored,” Saul concludes, “We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the reaction so far. A lot of people don’t have preconceptions of us and they’ll go out and buy our records. We don’t intend to get paranoid.” Time to sit down and tune in . | Mar 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Top Of The Pops Magazine – Do You Want To Be An MP? | Article, Interview | Top Of The Pops “Do You Want To Be An MP?” TOTP: Do you have any juicy secrets in your closet? Tim: Oozing through the cracks and keyhole they shall remain! TOTP: What would you do if someone sold a story about you to the papers? Tim: Ask them for a split and make sure they say I’m well-endowed TOTP: What’s the minimum salary you’d work for? Tim: Love TOTP: Do you have the ability to send people to sleep when you talk? Tim: That’s a vicious rumour. I wake people up when I sleep-talk TOTP: How important is power to you? Tim: I’d be nothing without it! TOTP: When was the last time you wore a suit and tie to work? Tim: Have you seen our last video? TOTP: Jeremy Paxman wants to interview you. Are you scared? Tim: No, he’s a fellow Aquarian and he supports Leeds! TOTP: What’s the correct way to address an M.P. in the House of Commons? Tim: Arse! TOTP: Who can’t vote at elections? Tim: Anyone with any intelligence! TOTP: Liam Gallagher wants his photo taken with you. Do you say yes? Tim: He’s too good-looking TOTP: What would you do about the Criminal Justice Act? Tim: Make it illegal TOTP: Do your very best impression of an M.P. Tim: What do you want me to say? No, unfortunately Mr James hasn’t made it. Anyone with a sense of humour isn’t allowed in the Commons. We think Tim could rethink his lobbying approaching but perhaps he could start by making the tea. | Mar 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth Succumbs To Pre-Millenium Tension – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
BRITAIN “Apparently, about 40 or 50 years ago, it dominated the whole world. Then it started a so-called righteous Second World War, and then the Americans took it over! It’s never quite got over that. It’s a tough, fiery little island doing better in terms of creativity than size would suggest. I tend to call it home, sometimes reluctantly.” BRITPOP “I’ve liked a lot of the music and loved a little bit of it, but it bugs me when people consciously lift from the past. It’s one thing to influenced, you can’t avoid that, but when it’s deliberate it’s called theft, and it’s a different thing. Jarvis (Cocker), in terms of attitude, is obviously wonderful, and I’ve loved some of his songs, very much lyrically. He could end up being the Alan Bennett of this generation. In terms of his literary ability, he could probably go and do whatever he wants now. And he’s an original character – it’s not like, ‘We’re lads, we go and get fuckin recked all the time and screw everybody.’ It’s something we haven’t seen before.” MANCHESTER “I live just outside now. I had a house just outside Manchester for a long time, and now I’m actually moving back in. It is a pretty frightening city, when judged against most of the other cities I’ve been in. I like Glasgow.” TOURING “We’re really looking forward to it! We haven’t done any gigs for three years, and I’ve just been looking at some footage of the last one we did, which was ‘Woodstock2’ in America. Then I’ve just been watching the band rehearsing and working on the new songs, and we’re really hungry. James became famous because of touring, and we know we can do that really well. But it’s been so long that I’ve forgotten what it’s like, so ask me again in June and I’ll probably say it was like giving birth.” SKYDIVING “I did it for a ritual that I was doing in America, which was all about ‘choosing your own life’. The most frightening bit was that the plane took off almost vertically, and we hadn’t got our parachutes on. So you’re sliding back towards this huge open door. I kept going, ‘Excuse me! Someone’s left the door open!’ Once you’ve got your parachute on, you feel like you’ve got a chance. The funniest thing is that they video it, and I had this huge fight with the video guy because he wanted to stick Def Leppard on the soundtrack, and all these other rock tracks that I couldn’t stand! I had to fight to get the only halfway decent music he had there, which was ‘Freefalling’ by Tom Petty.” RELIGION “I would say that it’s the organised thugs, the vultures who come in and carve up the market immediately after a wise person has died. To me, finding one’s spirit or finding your true nature – that’s my purpose in life. It’s been in a lot of James records, but it’s been hiding. It didn’t sit well with James’ music. One of the main reasons I wanted to work with Angelo Badalamenti was that I knew he’d give more poetic licence to free- associate in those areas, which is simply about finding out how to get into altered states without drugs. I do it through dancing, meditation or jumping out of areoplanes. I used to do it through drugs and I’m not averse to them every now and again, but that’s all too short-term.” HOME “I’ve always felt like an alien. I’ve always been desperate to get from here to home. I’m still looking, and the way I feel at home is when I’m in love – when I have people I love with me.” LONGEVITY “James were always built to last. It was always our intention. If you take short cuts, you can get there quicker, but you can’t hold it. Longevity for me is about staying alive – keeping your enthusiasm and curiosity.” GENIUS “The one out-and-out genius that we’ve worked with is Brian Eno. He’s clear of obstacles. His creativity is direct. On another level, I would call Angelo a genius, and Neil Young. It’s being clear-sighted and clear-minded and not letting your personality get in the way. Most of the music industry doesn’t know half of what Brian does. He writes papers for Mitsubishi on the future of urban transport. He did a lecture tour of Britain on perfume, and sold out Sadler’s Wells! He’s designing a crystal museum in Scandinavia with Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson. His interests range so far beyond music.” INDULGENCE “Well, you stick a group of young lads in a tour bus for three months, with all kinds of offers coming your way, and …it’s whatever you want to make it. I know I’m seen as a monk and the band are seen as animals, in the positive sense of the word. That isn’t accurate, because I’ve done a lot of wild things in my time, only in a different area. I mean, I’ve gone dancing for 10 days.” ANTHEMS “We’re scared by the whole thing. The reaction to ‘Sit Down’ got a bit overwhelming – beautiful but scary. It meant so much to people. We had parents whose children were on life-support machines writing in and asking us to come in and sing to them. ‘Sit Down’ struck the balance between being a big anthemic song and being very personal. We do write anthems, but not consciously, I promise. There’s a lot of very strong, catchy songs on this new album, but God knows if we’ll ever write another ‘Sit Down’.” MILLENNIUM “Did you know that the island which will be the first point in the world where the sun will rise on that day has already been bought up by Japanese businessmen? They’ve got a new car, and they want the sun to rise on that new car! I mean, you’re going to want to remember it. Your’re not going to want to go to bed at 11 on that date! We’re living in an astonishing time anyway. Information technology is getting well out of hand, and God knows what is going to happen in the next 20 years. These are really exciting times. We could destroy ourselves, or we could find amazing new technologies to liberate ourselves.” | Mar 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Milk Magazine Interview | Article, Interview | No rational being can deny that Woodstock II was an ugly marketing scam that took in far more suckers than the precious event for which it was named. But through a circuitous route, it actually helped James. At the time, though, no one in the Manchester sextet knew it. All they understood was that, riding the success of their 1993 album Laid, they were were suddenly minus one founding member of 11 years’ standing, guitarist Larry Gott. “That forced the brakes,” understates Jim Glennie, bassist and another charter James member. “It wasn’t an easy time, obviously.” While the remnant of James tried to decide what to do, lead singer Tim Booth took time off to work with composer Angelo Badalamenti. The results came out as the seriously odd Booth and the Bad Angel. For the hell of it, James released Wah Wah, a double-album collection of improvised ideas Brian Eno had encouraged them into while they were recording Laid. Gradually, normal work resumed. “We needed this break,” Glennie says. “We were careering at a ridiculous pace toward a brick wall,and something a lot worse would have happened. It’s given us the enthusiasm back.” Their latest album, Whiplash, also restores a sense of grandeur. Laid, the album that broke the band in America, was ironically constructed on a smaller scale than either the band or American radio listeners were accustomed to. But a two-year learning process allowed James plenty of time to work back toward epic heights. “We’ve needed this break,” Glennie says. “We were basically chopping up, sticking together, throwing ideas down, finding the best identity for a song. The process is quite time-consuming. We’re bloody-minded; we like to make things difficult for ourselves.” Difficult for them, not for the listener. Without pandering to some imagined demographic, Whiplash is as friendly as a big rock album can be. The dramatic sweeping wave of “Tomorrow,” the easy roll of “Lost a Friend,” the fey charm of “She’s a Star”: all catch the ear, and Booth acknowledges his vocal limitations even as he gently prods it to the edge. In songs like the clattering “Go To The Bank” and the jungle-derived chorus of “Greenpeace,” James push against the conventional pop and rock combinations. (The use of dance forms in mainstream pop/rock was first widely heard on U2’s Zooropa. With a mild dash of pique, Glennie points out that while Zooropa was released first, Wah Wah was actually recorded first.) In England, distinctions between styles — rock vs. techno, band vs. computer — are starting to dissolve, and James take advantage of that. “Boundaries, not just music but the audiences, are getting blurred, Glennie noted. “Segregating things gets a bit silly. Technology brings a whole new music to explore. It opens the door of how you can approach your songs. You’ve still got to go in there and be creative.” James were fortunate in the creative regard. They snagged producer Stephen Hague who, as producer for Pet Shop Boys and New Order, had already shown flair for electronic sounds. And Eno periodically wandered in to mess around and make suggestions. “Eno didn’t want to baby-sit the album,” Glennie says. “Hague was the foil he needed. Hague will happily stew over a mixing desk doing the bulk of the donkey work. Very meticulous. And he had always wanted to work with Brian Eno, so we were really spoiled with two brilliant producers.” In the interim, Booth and Glennie had mainly been concerned with convincing the rest of James to stick around. A new guitarist had to be recurited, and meanwhile, three band members who were still considered “new boys” (after eight years) had to be made to feel at home. “Larry’s departure unified us as a band,” Glennie says with a hint of surprise. “It could no longer be carried by Tim and me. We had to hope things would solidify again. People in the band, whose creativity we’ve barely tapped, passionately believe in this album because they worked their fucking balls off to get it finished.” Back in action, James face new problems. In the marketplace, bands who don’t immediately consolidate their success tend not to get a second chance. Whiplash is selling briskly in England, but America is an unusual place to have to win over twice. James barely know what happened the first time. “‘Laid’ took off on its own,” Glennie says, referring to the single. “But just the scale of things…you can’t get your head around it, so you end up being shepherded around, doing things you don’t really understand. We come back four years later — maybe people just aren’t gonna be bothered?” Nevertheless, the tradewinds are blowing in the right direction. After all, other struggling lifers such as Pulp and Manic Street Preachers have finally made inroads here. And after fighting to keep James together, Glennie is reasonably enthusiastic about fighting to get America interested again. “It isn’t the public having trouble accepting James, it’s the industry,” he says. “We’ve seen different waves of music come and go. We’ve always sidestepped that, because if you jump on a wave as it comes in, you get dragged out with it. There’s something wonderful about throwing yourself back in again, not preaching to the converted. We have this naive view that if we think it’s great, the rest of the world will as well.” | Mar 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Itinerary: 1997 March UK Tour | Tour Itinerary | This is the band itinerary from the James 1997 March UK Tour. | Mar 1997 | tour-itinerary article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: Change Of Scenery – Issue 7 | Fanzine | Change Of Scenery was a James fanzine produced by John Pude. Download this fanzine as a PDF. © copyright Change Of Scenery. | Apr 1997 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tomorrow – Channel 4 TFI Friday – April 1997 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsTomorrow performed live on Channel 4’s TFI Friday. | Apr 1997 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Melody Maker News | Article, News | JAMES have been coming together with Jacques Villeneuve. The Formula 1 racing driver bought tickets for the band’s gig at the London Shepherds Bush Empire on March 21 and declared himself a major fan when he was introduced to them backstage. The following weekend, on Sunday, March 30, Villeneuve was told just before his race in San Paulo, Brazil, that a package had arrived for him from James-a fact which clearly put him in a spin, since he lost his lone on the first corner and shot across the grass! After a restart, he won the race. The friendship between James and Jacques began after his press officer contacted the band’s representatives. She said that Villeneuve had bought tickets for the Empire show and would really love to meet the group. “He’s a massive James fan,” said Jayne Houghton, spokeswoman for the band. “He came backstage to say hello, and for someone who drives round a racetrack at 200 miles an hour, he was so nervous, really shy. He was a very, very nice bloke. He charmed everybody. “The band were so chuffed to meet him. It was like a mutual appreciation society. They signed things for each other. “Afterwards, I got Jacques a package of limited-edition James stuff, and the first thing he said to his PR when he was about to start this race in Brazil was, ‘Did Jayne send me the limited edition records?'” Villeneuve has returned James’ favour at the Empire by inviting the band to Silverstone at the end of May. There, he will be testing the car for the British Grand Prix. Meanwhile, James have announced the release of a new single, “Tomorrow,” on Fontana on April 21.Written by James and Brian Eno, this is a reworked version of the “Whiplash” album track. There will be three separate CDs. The first offers three new songs, “Gone Too Far” (also co-written with Brian Eno), “Honest Pleasure” and “All One To Me.” The second features live versions of “Lost A Friend,” “Come Home” and “Greenpeace,” recorded especially for the Mark Radcliffe show. The third features remixes of “Tomorrow” by Fila Brazillia, Archive and Dirty Beatnik. James go off to the States at the end of April for a sell-out tour, returning in time for their date at Silverstone and a series of outdoor appearances at V97, Glastonbury Festival and T In The Park. | Apr 1997 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James : From Manchester With Love – Intro.de | Article, News | Ja klar, kennt man: Auf und ab, so geht unweigerlich das Leben. Und auch die Karrieren von Popgruppen verlaufen höchst selten gradlinig. JAMES, mit immerhin schon 14 Jahren auf dem Bandbuckel, stellen da keine Ausnahme dar, nur ist man sich bei ihnen nie so sicher, ob es nun gerade auf- oder abwärts geht. Sie waren halt schon immer etwas anders als andere Bands. 1983 unterschrieben die sechs aus Manchester bei „Factory Records“, dem damals eigentlich einzigen für Indie-Bands akzeptablen Label der Stadt. Man veröffentlichte Singles und EPs, wechselte zu „Sire“, zu „Rough Trade“ und schließlich zur „Phonogram“, ohne große Erfolge vorweisen zu können. Die sollten sich erst 1990 mit der Veröffentlichung des Albums “Gold Mother” einstellen. Plötzlich, auf dem Höhepunkt von Madchester, als die Kinder der Rave-O-Lution im Nordwesten Englands und anderswo Hosen, T-Shirts und Augen weit trugen, wurden JAMES zu den Helden einer Bewegung, mit der sie außer der Geburtsstadt nicht viel gemein zu haben glaubten. Doch ihre Hitsingles wie “Come Home” und “Lose Control” besaßen jenen damals angesagten Soul II Soul-Beat und wurden abgemischt von Flood, dem Produzenten, der auch für die wundervolle Eintagsfliege “I’m Free” der SOUP DRAGONS verantwortlich war. Für eine Zeitlang sah es tatsächlich so aus, als sei JAMES die ultimative Studentenband. Sie füllte 10.000er Hallen, als so was für Indie-Bands noch ohne Vorbild war, und wer Anfang der 90er einen Trip nach England machte, mußte unweigerlich auf eines ihrer Blumen-T-Shirts stoßen, von denen die Gruppe insgesamt mehr als eine Viertelmillion verkaufte und daran mehr Geld als mit Schallplatten verdiente. Drei Jahre, zwei Albumveröffentlichungen (“Seven” und “Laid”) und einen riesigen Open-air-Auftritt im Vergnügungspark Alton Towers später ging es mit JAMES in ihrem Heimatland bereits wieder bergab – sicher, ihre Platten verkauften sich noch immer stattlich, die Euphorie des Sommers von 1990 aber war verflogen, und ihre Songs wurden ruhiger -, doch genau zu dem Zeitpunkt begann man in den USA, erstmals von dem Sextett Notiz zu nehmen. Beim schrecklichen Woodstock II durften Tim Booth und Co. zwischen LIVE und den CRANBERRIES auftreten, und die softe LP “Laid” avancierte zum Dreiviertelmillionen-Seller. Die Band mußte, wie in den USA so üblich, Kompromisse eingehen: Viele Hände wollten geschüttelt werden, ein Auftritt in David Lettermans Late Night Show war sogar verbunden mit der Forderung, die Frauenkleider auszuziehen. In Deutschland hingegen interessierte sich bis auf eine kleine Britpop-Gemeinde niemand für die Lieder von JAMES. Was die Band dazu veranlaßte, das Land bei Tourneeplänen meist zu ignorieren. “Nicht, daß wir etwas gegen Deutschland hätten”, so Sänger Tim Booth, “wenn wir aber in den USA mit der gleichen Anstrengung 100mal mehr Platten verkaufen können, richten wir unser Augenmerk doch lieber auf dieses Land.” In den letzten Jahren nahmen JAMES erstmals in ihrer Karriere eine Auszeit: Bassist Larry Gott verließ die Gruppe, Steuerschulden mußten bezahlt werden, einige der Bandmitglieder zogen um, andere suchten sich neue Freundinnen …. Tim Booth nahm derweil eine Platte mit seinem Idol ANGELO BADALAMENTI auf, die im letzten Jahr floppte, weil die Plattenfirma sich weigerte, eine Single zu veröffentlichen – um den Erfolg von JAMES nicht zu gefährden. “Das hört sich bekloppt an und ist es sicher auch”, gesteht Booth, “aber die Plattenfirma war von meiner Kollaboration mit BADALAMENTI sehr irritiert. Jetzt, wo das neue JAMES-Album erscheint, wollen sie es auf einmal promoten.” “Whiplash”, das inzwischen veröffentlichte achte Album, dürfte über die weitere Karriere entscheiden. Erste Anzeichen lassen Positives hoffen: Die Single “She’s A Star” erreichte die englischen Top 10, und für Lettermans Talkshow wurde die Band auch wieder gebucht. Verdient hätte die Platte den Erfolg. Songs wie “Greenpeace”, “Go To The Bank” und “Play Dead” klingen so, wie man sich U2s “Pop” gewünscht hätte. Zuckelnde Breakbeats, harte Gitarren und Elektro-Bleeps wirken angenehm zeitgemäß, ohne typische JAMES-Charakteristika zu zerstören, und nehmen den Faden des ‘94 unter der Führung BRIAN ENOs entstandenen Experimentalwerks “Wah Wah” wieder auf. Zusammengehalten wird alles von Booths prägnantem Gesang. Die Lieder entbehren nicht einer gehörigen Portion Melancholie und Sehnsucht, und dennoch läßt sich fröhlich das Tanzbein zu ihnen schwingen. JAMES selbst sind noch unsicher bezüglich des Erfolgs: “Das Gute an dem Durchbruch von OASIS – wie auch immer man sonst zu der Band stehen mag – ist, daß sie Gitarrenmusik in England wieder erfolgreich gemacht haben. Nicht zuletzt durch ihren Erfolg verkaufen Gruppen wie die MANIC STREET PREACHERS oder SUEDE heute mehr Platten als je zuvor. Ob dieser Trend auch eine Auswirkung auf uns haben wird, weiß ich nicht. Bisher wird uns aber mehr Respekt entgegengebracht, als ich erwartet hätte.” An Deutschland wird Booth bei dieser Aussage bestimmt nicht gedacht haben. Mit aller Wahrscheinlichkeit dürfte das hiesige Publikum auch “Whiplash” ignorieren. Schade eigentlich. | Apr 1997 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Snap Cackle And Pop – Big Breakfast | Article, Interview | Tim: Hello, this is Snap, this is Cackle, and I’m Pop, and you’re watching James. Today, full-on glamour pusses James Tomorrow, the latest single from their seventh album Whiplash Tim: It’s a wonderful song about trying to grip love, trying to catch it like a butterfly, then finding out it’s got smeared all over your hands. Snap caught up with the band during a gruelling photo session in London, a part of the business it’s taken them a while to get used to. Tim: If you make music, these are things you have to do. We were so idealistic when we first started, we did no interviews at all for about the first three years, no press shots, just let the music speak for itself, folks. Then after a while we realised you can’t do that, no-one’s going to buy your music. Taking music on the road is another part of the process, though you might not always return whole. Tim: Last time we toured America was on the back of Laid, and it was amazing but we did it for too long. We were touring on and off for about three years, and we had a few casualties. I think we all made it through didn’t we? Jim: Just about. We’re still here at least. Tim: We’re still here although Larry Gott is no longer with us, probably a victim of that tour. Jim: Lost a guitarist. Tim: Fell off the back of the bus. Saul: The girls keep you going as well, don’t they? Jim: The girls? Saul: The absolute knowledge that you’re gonna meet someone groovy, someone that you know you’re never going to see again. After seventeen years, James are going through something of a change in attitude, or rather less of one. Tim: We do look for the fun in things a lot more now, we don’t believe in the tortured artist myth as seriously as we used to. We’re still probably as immature as we’ve always been, I think that’s one of the major criteria of being in a rock band on one level. However, larking about a bit does have its pitfalls. Tim: I’ve got whiplash in my neck from dancing. When we call an L.P Laid, we have a great time, then we call an LP Whiplash and I end up in a neck brace. The next L.P’s gonna be called Big Money. | Apr 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Times Of Change – Sessions Magazine | Article, Interview |
James have had a checkered history, bouncing back and forth in the public heart and facing constant dissection by press. It is perhaps due to the many twists and turns of fate that through their battles they have become stronger. Jonathan Wright probes Tim Booth and Saul Davies for their reflections and projections. “We know what we’ve made. It’s really triumphant. Very up. Or relatively aggressive…” Tim Booth pauses. He is in a good mood, talking about the new James album “Whiplash.” As he speaks, the album is whizzing up the charts all over the world, and James, one the few British bands in recent years to have made a decent stab at breaking America, are gearing up for live work. He is proud, aggressively proud. Well, relatively proud… This, after all, is Tim Booth, a gentleman and a gentle man. You remember him? The one who talked about meditation, the new man who was so new he was the prototype on the production line when the phrase was invented. The man who implored those who felt themselves ridiculous to sit down next to him, which they did at gigs across the country. Yes, that Tim Booth. Except maybe that Tim Booth never really existed outside our own imaginations. Yet that Tim Booth, (and the version of James he represented), was one we needed desperately. It is time to rewind a little. It is 1990, the scene is a portacabin which is being used as a dressing room and, if that sounds bad, you should see the toilets. In short, it is the Glastonbury Festival and James are getting ready to play. A wide-eyed Tim Booth is trying to explain what the festival is like. “There’s every form of human behaviour here. It’s like a surrealistic tent city,” he says in awe. It is easy to understand his wonder. The festival has yet to expand into its current proportions so there is only one main stage and the crowd is huge. The cream of British pop is also here to play-The Cure, Happy Mondays, Sinead O’Connor, even a fledgling Lush-but James are about to blow them off the stage, with a set which conveys more warmth, and more identification between audience and band than any rock ‘n’ roll show most of us privileged enough to see it are ever likely to experience again. You see, if Shaun Rider and the Mondays crystallised the darker, hedonistic side of the blissed out, baggy, acid nose, (okay let’ say it) Madchester period, Tim Booth was its guru. Tim Booth was the man who told us it was okay to feel bad, the man who told us it was okay to not be okay. So when, inevitably, our collective hangovers sometimes got too much to bear, we needed Tim Booth desperately. So what went wrong? After the huge success of Sit Down and the “Gold Mother” album, what happened? The conventional wisdom is that James released a bombastic album of stadium rock in 1992’s “Seven” and blew it, big time. But is that true? “That’s a fair question,” says Tim. “But what happened to us was that, after Sit Down, we got big in America and each of our records has sold more and more. So, to us, we’ve just been on a forward trajectory. There’s not been a retreat. There’s not been a dip in general.” “In Britain, we stopped playing. We chose not to play in Britain. We hadn’t played there for four and a half years until recently. We knew once we did that, then the whole thing would go underground. We needed to do that. We’d played in Britain for eleven years up to that point and we’d done too much. We then came to America. We’d never played in America until four or five years ago and we broke America.” Emigration, though, is a carrot and stick process. If James were moving into new territories, both literally and musically, there was also a sense that the band had gone as far as they could in the UK. The band’s 1992 headlining appearance at Reading was a watershed. “We could do not wrong when we were unknown, as far as the tabloid music press was concerned,” explains guitarist Saul Davies. “James were heralded as the saviours of pop. We headlined at Reading and did a shitty show. We fucked up, but one of the reasons we didn’t get it together was because we wanted to underplay the fact that we were this huge band and, maybe, headlining a major festival like Reading isn’t the place to do that-you know, just go out and do the fucking tunes and go away.” “But, in our own heads, we were very conscious of that fact we’d become this massive stadium band. So you had this weird confusion between the excitement of doing something and a kind of creeping fear that you shouldn’t really be there.” “So, we were slagged for giving a huge stadium show and then slagged for not giving a huge stadium version of Sit Down and just playing a version with some acoustic instruments. So, the press had us, they really wanted to have us.” In truth, it was an awful show, virtually the total opposite of the Glastonbury set, a show that left many in the audience puzzled and even hurt. James, after all, were supposed to be a band you could believe in. Although there would, (and will), be plenty of stadium shows to come, James reacted by retreating and reinventing themselves, working with Brian Eno on 1993’s “Laid,” an album which combined the band’s trademark melodic strengths with a looser, improvised feel. “The time I spent with Brian Eno was very special,” says Saul. “I hear the music through that experience. I really didn’t like “Seven.” I felt we had got caught in a few little traps, the way that we worked with eath other and the way that we related to each other as a band.” “It was so exciting because someone from the outside, who we respected, came along and completely redefined the way we worked together. It gave us a new lease on life, new energy. All the staleness went for us. Suddenly, he’s in the room and it became really exciting again.” But, if “Laid” assured the band’s success Stateside, things were maybe going just a little too well. After an appearance at Woodstock 2 in 1994 and the release of the experimental “Wah Wah” album (typically perverse James behaviour, releasing an almost ambient album while on the verge of a huge commercial breakthrough), guitarist Larry Gott quit the band. Tim, meanwhile, was recovering from a serious neck injury, which meant he had to have intensive medical treatment and perform live wearing a neck brace. Martine McDonagh, the band’s long-standing manager, and the mother of Tim’s son, left the James set-up. So what went right? Far from destroying the band’s reputation, “Wah Wah” was greeted as a flawed but worthwhile experiment. Tim went away and recorded “Booth and the Bad Angel” with Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti. The band took some time off, before reconvening to lay down the basic tracks for “Whiplash.” And, importantly, Tim Booth was learning to relax a little, freeing himself from the need to be involved in every facet of that band’s activities, learning to enjoy life a little: to the point where he can now say, “It’s a very rock ‘n’ roll band. There’s more stories here than Led Zeppelin.” He is (half) serious. “Since “Laid,” my biggest thing has been learning to receive what a great life I have,” he says. “I was pretty miserable up to the age of about 28.” Never have guessed… “Are you joking? You’re joking. I wouldn’t know. Then, in the last few years, it’s been getting better and better. It’s a case of believing that it can continue like that, believing that I can have a happy life, not falling for the tortured artist myth and the bit that I have to end up self-destructing. Those have been the biggest things I’ve been trying to come to terms with over the last few years.” This, remember, is a man who, looking at the example of Nick Cave during the Australian’s junkie years, said that, if he thought it would help the creative process, he would consider fucking himself up by taking Heroin. But, Tim Booth. Happy? Well, why not? Maybe he has earned it. Think about the James of Sit Down and Gold Mother again, think about the band who had to cope with fucking up Reading big time. Think, in particular, about Tim Booth and the reason James connected with their audiences so well in the first place. While the success of “Gold Mother” was largely due to its glorious guitar melodies, it was also due to the demons which went into its making. The very vulnerability which drew an audience was writ large in the album’s lyrics, with its tales of frailty and personal betrayal. “Betrayal has been a big issue for me,” he explains. “There’s been at least one song a CD on it, whether it’s been me betraying somebody or me being betrayed. Betrayal is very common. I think in this culture at this time, nearly everyone can give you an experience of being betrayed, even on a day to day level of feeling that somebody has exploited you and taken advantage of you.” “To me, these issues come up time and time in life until you learn to let go of them. That’s something all the time in my life. I come up against the clocks that are me all the time-what I can take and what I can’t take-and then you just go thought it. You just go, “I don’t have to do that anymore, I don’t have to be this guy who has insomnia.” “I used to have chronic insomnia and used to feel very self-pitying, whining and neurotic. Now, a lot of the time, I get to that point and think, “Hang on, I don’t have to do this, this is bullshit. Do something else. Don’t go down that road. It’s about having choices and being more creative.” James and Tim Booth long ago outgrew the popular British ‘New-Age’ view of them (which, in a recent album review, this journalist was as guilty of perpetuating as anyone). And that statement, of course, makes assumptions which James and Booth ever truly were that band. Because, in surfing the Zeitgeist so well in the early 90’s, and being the first band to (almost certainly) unconsciously document the fears and neurosis’ of the post-Ecstasy generation, James inadvertently created a whole set of assumptions they have had to live with ever since. Sure, Tim Booth mediated. (Although he now admits his interest might have been unhealthily close to a know of mystical escapism). Sure he wore, and wears, his heart on his sleeve. But maybe it is time to take a second look at James. Strip away the preconceptions and “Whiplash” emerges as a rock ‘n’ roll record which is adventurous, which James have always specialised in. They are also still with us, still making music as a band, a rare feat when you consider they formed in 1983 and once toured with the godfathers or indiedom, The Smiths. If, after that, we still want the old James, and that Tim Booth, perhaps it says more about our own need for someone to ease our own neuroses than it does about themselves. | Apr 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Will Manchester’s Brilliant Sextet James Ever Crack America? – Pulse Magazine | Article, Interview | The wood-gabled farmhouse is centuries old, picture-postcard perfect, and several rustic miles outside of Brighton, England. Who knows? Maybe Shakespeare himself once downed flagons of mead from its gnarled dining-room table. This chilly January afternoon, however, said table is hosting the members of classy pop combo James, with cans of Boddingtons bitters and greasy sausage sandwiched. For a few days, this multi-cottaged estate-and all the British food in it-belongs to the band, a rented rehearsal retreat where James will streamline the eclectic material from its new album Whiplash (Mercury). It’s a relaxed, casual atmosphere-there’s a steady stream of jokes and witty asides, vocalist Tim Booth is running around in flannel cow-print pajamas, and over lunch, guitarist Saul Davies strums tentative chords to bassist Jim Glennie, who ponders them and makes a few melodic suggestions. Booth-after showering and changing clothes-calls this idyllic meeting to order. Everyone at the table agrees that the simplest, most straightforward Whiplash track is its closer, “Blue Pastures,” which follows Glennie’s skeletal bassline through Mark Hunter’s soft forest of keyboards and Booth’s gentle ruminations on mortality. “I’ll give you the Twilight Zone story on that song,” offers the singer, sipping some tea he’s just prepared. “We improvised that years ago onto 24-track, and I improvised a lyric, basically what you hear on that take. Then when we came to get this LP together, we improvised it once more and I did the rest of the lyrics in that second take. And I didn’t know what it was about-just someone going for a walk and lying down in the snow and they were dying. As far as I could see, that’s what the story was about. Then what happened is, two weeks before we recorded it, my best friend’s [spiritual] mentor wen tout on his favorite walk and laid down in the snow and committed suicide. So if you ask me what ‘Blue Pastures’ is really about, I think it’s exactly about him, and the reasons why he did it are in that song.” Davies and Glennie are both staring wide-eyed, still spooked by this strange turn of events. Booth turns in his chair to address them. “Actually, I never told you this, but it’s amazing.” That same spiritual adviser, he says, also trained another friend: “A woman who was deaf, with whom I did some dance work. And I told her the story of the song, and she said she’d love to hear it. So we sat her between the speakers and turned it up full, and I sand her the words so she could read my lips. And, fuckin’ hell, it completely did me in-I was singing her the words and she could hear the vibrations and she was crying. It was the most astonishing thing, and she wanted to hear more of the record, so I ended up doing nearly the whole record like that. And it was devastating, re-experiencing what you’ve done again from another angle.” Davies (who does double duty on violin for James) stops playing and sets his guitar down. He’s moved by his partner’s story. “It’s especially weird when you’re playing a record for someone who, in essence, can’t actually hear it,” Booth sighs. “They can’t hear all the things that people normally get so beguiled by when they hear a record, like, ‘Oh, I quite like ho those drums sound.’ Things that ultimately don’t really matter.” Booth has spent over a decade studying “any method you could have possibly heard of” to heighten his innate psychic abilities. “When you make music,” he insists, “you tune into songs that’ve already been written. That’s what it feels like-the song’s been written, and you’ve got to re- discover it, which is why I don’t always know what my lyrics are about. But I know when I’ve written the lyric that’s meant to be sung. When Whiplash producer Stephen Hague asked him to change a few words here and there, Booth adamantly declined. “I just can’t do that, because there’s a complete sense to me that I’m given those lyrics and if I betray that, I won’t be given them any more.” Booth wants the distinction made: He sees James, and creativity in general, as one of the most healing things you can do as a spiritual exercise; the rest of the group doesn’t necessarily feel the same way. A small discrepancy. But it’s one that literally saved them in their darkest hour, a bleak moment known in the James camp as Black Thursday. The Mancunian sextet had survived numerous lineup changes, even the Stone Roses/Happy Mondays “Madchester” craze in the late ’80s, to finally strike sales-figures gold with its sixth album, Laid (Mercury), a Brian Eno-produced masterpiece of intellectual, folk-jangles sunniness. This (and a surreal Eno-enhanced outtake disc, Wah Wah [Mercury]) led to an ostensibly pivotal movement: James playing the prestigious Woodstock ’94 festival, before a crowd of 300,000. The future appeared bright indeed. “Then we went into the studio to start writing material for the next album, which would end up being Whiplash,” recalls Davies. “And suddenly, everything collapsed around us, and it happened to be a Thursday.” Slide guitarist, key songwriter and founding member Larry Gott announced he would no longer tour with James. Tim Booth announced his plans to go to New York and record his long-stalled solo project with film composer Angelo Badalamenti (the lush Booth and the Bad Angel, released last year on Mecury). And the U.K. tax man announced the unfortunate discovery of an overlooked James debt of roughly 150,000. “We realized that everything we’d taken for granted, even the existence of the band, was now in doubt and required serious re-evaluation,” Davies adds. Black Thursday still sends a shiver down Glennie’s usually staid spine. “We owed all this money, but there was no money coming in, because the only we get money is from completion of the album. And we were only just beginning to start _writing_ song-starting and finishing an album was a long way away.” With the zenlike Booth away, pursuing both his album and dance/improv theater work in Los Angeles, James’ survival instinct kicked in. The musicians set up studio shop in drummer David Baynton-Power’s house, dropped by individually to record their ideas, and tinkered with every other number but “Blue Pastures” until all concerned were satisfied. What Davies terms “a completely different was of working for us.” All of the traditional James ingredients (even an Eno vocal/keyboard/occasional co-production cameo) figure into the Whiplash mix: Booth’s breezy sandalwood acrobatics on pop gems like “Homeboy” and “She’s a Star,” Gott’s spiraling slide that propels both the dreamy “Lost a Friend” and the raucous juggernaut “Tomorrow,” and that certain aura of mannered grandiosity that flutters over every cut. But new flavors waft in: throbbing techno (the title track), heart- attack jungle patterns (“Greenpeace,” “Go to the Bank”), even industrial-strength riffing alongside fluid Beatlesque beauty (the brilliantly schizoid “Avalanche”). Glennie says that “Greenpeace” is the most extreme example of James’ new way of working. “It came about through a little spindly jam of me playing bass, Saul playing guitar, and Mark playing keyboards-very pretty, very nice and cyclical. And Tim came over the top of this with a very sweet vocal. And then Dave had a vision and said, ‘Leave it with me.’ And we came in the next day to hear what you hear on the record.” Baynton-Power beams proudly. “That creaking noise you hear is a marble cutting board rubbed up and down a brick wall. And Tim ran out of the room when that beat kicked in. That’s when I thought, ‘Ah, we’re onto something!'” The secluded farmhouse, you figure, is probably one of the first peaceful moments James has had of late. But the muse still beckons: Davies and Glennie retire to the living room to finish their spur-of-the-moment song. Booth stays behind to conclude the tale. “Black Thursday wasn’t as big a thing for me, partly because I walked away from a lot of responsibility.” A placid all-knowing smile inched across his face. “But I wasn’t worried-I knew James had to transform to survive. James in the past has been much more like a novel, songwise; you start pretty well, there’s a good middle and you peak at the end. But we’re now in a space where we though, ‘Well, why not grab people right from the start?'” Booth gazes out the window at-ironically-miles and miles of rolling blue pastures. Then he, too, gets back to work with James. | Apr 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth A Pain In The Neck Official – Melody Maker News | Article, Interview |
JAMES singer Tim Booth has seriously injured his neck and the band have had to call off their six-week American tour and cancel their festival appearances at V97 and T In The Park. Booth hurt his neck during the band’s first date in Vancouver (April 30).Despite doctors’ advice to pace himself, due to previous neck problems, Tim gave his usual vigorous performance and ruptured a disc in his neck. This,in turn, is pressing on a nerve, causing severe pain. The rest of James have now flown home, but Booth has stayed onto be treated by the San Francisco 49ers’ football team neck specialist. He has been told to remain horizontal for at least seven days, and not to perform onstage for at least six weeks. However,the organisers of this year’s Lollapalooza have offered James a slot after hearing about their tour cancellation. The band “deeply regret” the cancellations, but have managed to take four days off from Lollapalooza to perform at Glastonbury as planned. They also hope to join the Reading bill at the end of August. | May 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Long Live Tibet News – Melody Maker | Article, News |
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NME Magazine News | Article, News |
JAMES may have to cancel their appearances at T In The Park and V97. Their summer touring schedule was thrown into chaos last week when singer Tim Booth was hospitalised in America with a neck injury. The injury forced the band to cancel their entire US tour just four dates in. Booth injured his neck while dancing onstage at the first date of the band’s North American tour in Vancouver on April 30. He played the next two gigs in pain but had to ‘sit down’ during a gig at Seattle’s King Cat Theater on Saturday (May 3). By the time the group arrived in San Francisco a few days later, Booth was unable to perform at a promotional slot at radio station Live 105 where he was replaced by backing singer Michael Kulas. Booth was taken to a San Francisco medical clinic where he was put in traction for seven days. James’ spokeswoman told NME: “He’s got a ruptured disc in his neck and it’s pressing on a nerve in his back. A physiotherapist told Tim he wouldn’t be able to perform ever again unless he got horizontal for seven days. He said it would be four to six weeks before he recovered enough to play. They’re really gutted. Ninety per cent of the US dates were sold out. But they’ve been offered some of the Lollapalooza dates and if Tim is well enough they will do that.” She added this would mean the T In The Park and V97 shows would probably have to be cancelled. | May 1997 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Valiant James : Back From The Brink – Q Magazine | Article, Interview | Roxy, Atlanta, Georgia – March 1, 1997 It’s James’ second gig in America after two-and-a-half years away. It’s way below the Mason-Dixon line in that magnolia-scented South whose sniffiness regarding matters pungently Mancunian saw off the otherwise rampant Oasis only last autumn. On the face of it, a sticky one could be in prospect. However, it turns out that the “Coca-Cola” Roxy is jaunty with “James Sold Out” signs. Cometh the hour, cometh 1,800 Atlantan fans to jam the theatre to the fire limit. They babble and gabble expectantly. When the band mooch on with nervy grins and half-waves, they draw closer, raising the temperature by about 10 degrees. James, surprisingly, mean a lot to them. A taut swing of piano and drums presages Come Home, from Gold Mother, Tim Booth goes into his crazy shaker dance and his voice begins its ascent from the conversational-“I’ve got the bends from pressure”-through snarly self-contempt-“After 30 years I’ve become my fears/I’ve become the kind of man I’ve always hated”-to rage-“The way I feel just makes me want to scream.” On the first”scream,” a groundswell of voices screams or moans or just yells “Yeah!” right back. Almost everyone is singing along with the forgiving chorus, “Come home, come home.” Two minutes in and, after all that time away, James have re-connected, not so much by a shoutable hookline as by the detail: words that hit an audience where they live. When the song’s finally done, while Booth’s colleagues busy themselves with instrumental swaps and sundry adjustments, the singer just stands there and grins at the crowd. He didn’t know they cared. “After a concert like that I’m blasted open,” says Booth, sweatily slumped on a dressing-room sofa. Post-show, he’s glugging mineral water and calling for champagne. A rake-thin 37, the former Manchester University drama student talks with the oddly knowing innocence of Michael Palin. He’s also adrenaline-fuelled to an altitude way above embarrassment. “It’s like psychic sex with the audience,” the frontman ventures. “Or rather some nights-this is a corny, atrocious thing to say-but some nights it feels like love. It can be quite shocking to receive that real appreciation. Fuck it, I’m completely wallowing in it; it’s great.” “We got that reaction to Come Home the first time we played it live, in Blackpool just after Gold Mother was released (in 1990). I wrote it right in the middle of leaving, uh, the mother of my child (Martine McDonagh, former manager of James). I remember the whole crowd singing those lines about ‘I’ve become the kind of man I always hated’ with complete joy. Fucking hell. Out of one of my bleakest hours they transformed pain into something quite beautiful.” He whirls onward, tying in his celestial experience of the gig with his provocateur notion of a God both female and highly shaggable which his lyrics have been exploring for some years. “To me, ecstacy is as close as we get to God. I don’t mean the drug. It’s that, Waaaaah!, that feeling of being one, that unity most of us are searching for. You can find it in sex and you can find it at a concert. James concerts have intimacy, a big sound, astonishing musicians everywhere you look, weirdness, darkness, light, joy: the human experience. I don’t think all that usually gets pulled into a ninety-minute set of songs.” Of course, ecstacy will come and go. Sometimes, from Laid, finds James launching a triple axe attack courtesy Saul Davies, curly new boy Adrian Oxaal and Depp-dishy temp and band pal Michael Karas. The trio give it their all, remarkable in their relentlessness without quite hitting the spot. Then, recent British single She’s A Star fails to stake a claim. But its Whiplash album companion, Lost A Friend, starts to froth with bliss-seeking five-man vocals sung valiantly in the teeth of the full-band soundstorms, before Sit Down reclaims that initial spirit of shouty elevation. Although never released as a single in America, Sit Down was always bound to be an irresistible anthem to James fans anywhere. Again, the detail does it as the band (and the admirable deskperson) retain pristine clarity to convey that final perfect knowing/naff invocation: “All those who find themselves ridiculous/Sit down next to me.” One girl is moved to such devotion that she vaults up on stage then drops to her knees in obeisance-before being ushered gently back to the crowd. The next new one, Greenpeace, promptly loses the momentum again. There’s a false start. “All right, so we don’t know it. Let’s try again,” says Booth and gets a titter for honesty. But it’s an irretrievable shambles and the quiet bits reveal even this crowd of keenies conversing loudly as if they’d forgotten the band were there. They’re not done, though. The American hit Born Of Frustration, from Seven, pulls it round with its declamatory way, its mass “la-la-las” and barmy Indian war whoops to join in with. At that, the Atlantans actually seem ready for what might have been the alien thunder of Avalanche, one of Whiplash’s excursions into drum ‘n’ bass bedlam, sheer mass and volume fit to bury an entire ski resort. Except that the lyric implies that the “avalanche” in question is a political revolution. But this time lyrical detail is pulverised, so nobody can work the gist out and yell, “Commie!” Later, on black coffee with beer chasers in the hotel lobby, bassist Jim Glennie and guitarist/violinist Saul Davies say they don’t want to talk about business. But they can’t stop themselves. They’re great friends and on the opposite sides of an intra-band negotiation because, legally, James actually comprises Glennie, Booth, and Gott with “new boys” (since 1989) Davies, drummer Dave Baynton-Power and keyboard player Mark Hunter, together with recent signing Oxaal, on fees and wages. Overdue adjustment is about to take place, triggered by the serial crises James plunged into in 1994 when they went home tired out after working American tour after tour while they cranked Laid up to 600,000 sales. Four years on from her split with Booth, McDonagh left because she’d “had enough” of band management (she remains on good terms with the singer, who is a regular visitor to their son Ben at her Brighton home). She was ably replaced by Who/Rolling Stones and current Pulp/Manic Street Preachers associate Peter Rudge. But then Larry Gott quit the band for a quieter family life and, later that same day as it happened, their accountant told them they owed in the region of 250,000 (pounds) in previously overlooked back-tax. Furthermore, Booth was off the scene recording his album with Angelo Badalamenti. Glennie, who’s been in James and antecedent line-ups for 18 of his 33 years, spun into a four-month tiz: “Larry leaving especially was disastrous to me. I’d been so entrenched and then suddenly I was a fucking insecure little bastard wanting everything to be OK again. Waaaaaah!” He wails like a child lost in a supermarket. Nonetheless, they got through it. The protocol of seniority elbowed aside by the desperate need to keep the band afloat, they all pitched in-Booth only occasionally, at first, because of his other commitment-and now Glennie and Davies constantly chorus that “it made a real band of us.” In fact, their mood appears almost light-heartedly optimistic. Luckily, Born Of Frustration’s use in an American TV ad for the Marriott hotel chain paid their tax bill. Freshly bonded, they enjoyed recording Whiplash. Then, when they played their first, small comeback gig in Britain, at Sheffield Leadmill in February, despite their long absence, they found a great warm glow of goodwill beaming back at them. Still, Glennie remains Mancunian about the band’s prospects: “What could happen is, after devising the perfect working structure to create our best music and have a brilliant time in the process, the album sells fuck-all, we get dropped by the record company and that’s the end of it all. That would be such a fitting end for James. I’d have to laugh. Then commit suicide.” “Winning round an audience is a joy and we’re really cocky about it,” says Booth. “Sometimes before a gig we actually say to one another, We’ll take them in the fifth. Like Naseem Hamed.” The boxing analogy doesn’t quite hold in Atlanta because the Roxy was KOed in the first (Come Home), and again in the fifth (Sit Down), the eighth (Born Of Frustration) and the 12th (Laid). Theencores, properly clapped and stamped for in old-fashioned “we’ll-tear-the-building-down-if-you-don’t-come-back” vein, take them beyond the modern championship distance: Out To Get You (notably, no audience chatter through this well executed quiet one), Waltzing Along (Whiplash highlight featuring a new key James line, “My life’s in plaster”), Honest Joe (bold excerpt from the much-reviled Wah Wah album) and Tomorrow (frantic bashing and aspirational anthemic chorus, “You’ve gotta keep faith that your path will change/Tomorrow”). Once more, the Atlanta Roxy goes, “Waaaaaah!” It’s not the world, but it is encouraging. Glennieand Bayton-Power, bonded old and new, high-five one another. Less concerned with transcendence, Davies coolly lights a fag. Booth is the Cheshire cat centre-stage, grinning ecstacy. | May 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James The British Outfit Survive – Orange County Register | Article, Interview | Rock groups, it has often been said, are like marriages. Sometimes they end in divorce; sometimes well, rarely they live happily ever after. Then sometimes they just need to go through periods of separation so that those involved can remember what they mean to each other. The easiest way to understand the past four years in the history of the British sextet known only as James, then, is to look at it as a much-needed separation. At least, that’s how lead singer and chief songwriter Tim Booth looks at it. The rest of the band, though, has a different name for it, or, at least, for the moment when the separation began. They call it Black Thursday. That was the day founding guitarist and driving spirit Larry Gott said, “That’s enough,” and left the group to become a carpenter. That was the day Booth departed to pursue his own, more contemplative muse with the moody exercise “Booth and the Bad Angel,” a collaboration with David Lynch’s favorite screen composer, Angelo Badalamenti. It was also the day that the U.K. tax man discovered that the band owed $ 150,000. It was the day that much of James didn’t know if it still had a future. “You know, it’s funny, but I never saw it as Black Thursday at all,” Booth said recently by telephone from New York. “I thought it was just a great moment of change. The rest of the band thought it was a panic. ” Booth, it turns out, had the proper perspective. He returned to James with a new guitarist, a rejuvenated spirit and a willingness to step aside more and let the others call the shots. “Basically we needed that break from each other to come back to it with a new way of making an album,” Booth said. “Make it less of my thing, my lead, and put more focus on the band itself. I wanted less responsibility and they wanted more. “Though,” he added, “they didn’t quite know that at the time. I saw that’s what they wanted, so I (left).” DIFFERENT APPROACH What ultimately resulted from this reconfiguration was “Whiplash,” James’ ninth album and a marked departure from the languidness of much of 1993’s “Laid” and ’94’s mysterious experimentation with Brian Eno, “Wah Wah. ” Instead of aching acoustic guitars, “Whiplash” chimes in with sonorous, U2-esque soundscapes. And where “Laid” benefited from Eno’s spacious production, the new record is informed more by the raucous approach of producer Stephen Hague (known for his work with the Smiths and New Order), though Eno served as an adviser. “This album was done partly as a reaction to the tranquillity of ‘Laid,’ but I wouldn’t call it an intentional effort to do exactly the opposite of it, really. We tend to react to whatever bothered us about the last record, and ‘Laid’ wasn’t the sort of album we could tour. We wanted something more full and lively. ” The initial strategy, hatched backstage at an otherwise dreary time for them at Woodstock ’94, was to cut an album almost exclusively of three-minute Beatle-esque pop gems. “And if I had been holding the reins, that probably would have happened,” Booth said. “But I didn’t, and then Oasis waltzed in and did that idea anyway, so I’m glad now we didn’t go anywhere near it. ” Instead, the band concocted a new approach: a more powerful sound wrapped around two of Booth’s constant themes, activism and spirituality. The former took shape in songs such as “Lost a Friend” and, especially, “Greenpeace. ” “Their work actually is something that’s come in and out of our songs throughout our past,” Booth said of the conservation group. “We’ve worked with Greenpeace for about 12 years, and to me, it’s the most important organization on the planet. And after all this time, all their efforts, things should have gotten better, but even though more people have the information about what’s happening to our world, the ideas, the progress, it’s all getting buried. I needed to address that. ” But Booth says the deeper issues for him lie in spirituality _ particularly aspects such as meditation, shamanism, ecstatic states, trances and metaphysical healing. Booth, who turnedto alternative therapies after nearly dying of an inherited liver disease at age 22, says that though his beliefs and experiences have often been on James’ records, he tried to downplay it this time out, relying on his work with Badalamenti to satisfy his soul. “It was necessary that I get that out of my system before we started work on this album,” said Booth, 33. “Sometimes I think I try to hard to force it into our music. Sometimes it fits, and other times it doesn’t make any sense. That was part of the change, learning to understand when it’s right to discuss it. ” Instead, that self-editing tack has led James to create some of its most rousing, anthem-like work, with potential hits in “Tomorrow” and “She’s a Star. ” Booth added that what some saw then as near tragedy has now offered James a chance at renewal after more than a decade of making records. “I have come back to this finally appreciating what James is all about,” he said. “I think we all have. Now it makes much more sense. And at the moment, we’re on fire.” | May 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Videotech Interview | Article, Interview | Interviewer: Tim and Jim from James, welcome to Videotech, now I would ask you both to sit down but it’s a bit too much of a corny line. But if you remember back in the day, there was a time when you were selling more T-shirts than records, what did that feel like? Tim: No, this was just a rumour put about by our manager because she designed them. No, it didn’t bother us, people bought the T-shirts because they loved the music, and when people get passionate about a band they buy the shirt. It was amazing, you’d be walking down any street and there’d be a number of James shirts on that street. It was very entertaining. Interviewer: Now is it true you’re going to be doing the Lollapalooza this year? Jim: We are indeed. We fly out to Miami on Sunday, the first show’s on Wednesday; we’re there for eight or nine weeks. Interviewer: And what’s going to be happening out there? Jim: Well, Lollapalooza’s a festival that travel’s around from place with loads and loads of bands playing and different stages. So yeah, I’ve never actually been to Lollapalooza before but there’s some great bands playing. Interviewer: Now, what’s this about your neck injury? Tim: I’ve ruptured some discs in my neck, dancing on stage, didn’t feel it for a couple of days, then found out I’d actually smashed some discs in my back. Interviewer: So does this mean you’ll be touring England or you’re not going to be touring England for a while? Tim: We won’t be playing England for a bit, but we are committed to an American tour, the Lollapalooza tour, and I’ll just have to stand, I can’t move, it’s gonna be really weird. So the band have been taking up dancing lessons, they’re gonna be doing the moving. Interviewer: The James sound seems to have changed over the years, and you seem to have done a few collaborations along the way. Any plans for any more of those? Tim: Basically, each record reacts to the last one, there’s no plan, and it’s who you get to work with. We’ve worked with some amazing people, you feel very lucky when you get to work with Brian Eno, and you work with them when they’re available and see where the music goes. Laid was very low-key because the one before was quite rocky, and this one’s more uptempo because Laid was low-key, the next one will be God knows, whatever we write. We improvise all our songs, we don’t control them that well, although we’re trying to learn that. Certain members of the band are fed up with this technique, they’re saying “We must be able to write the song we want to write,” but personally I like it being whatever comes out comes out. Interviewer: Now this one seems quite mainstream, the latest single. You worried about that? Tim: It’s very happy. It’s hard to write a good happy song. When we wrote it, Saul and I were moved to tears, and it feels to me like this is a brother song to Sit Down, and we’ve never tried to write one but it just came out that way. I’m really proud of it. Interviewer: The new video looks like it was shot in America, was it? Jim: No, it wasn’t actually, it was shot in the desert in Spain, one near Malaga, but yeah, it was fun. Well, it was hot, but it was fun. Interviewer: It seems like there were some great characters in there. Jim: Yeah, there were some great people there. This mad, local irate Spaniard that we dragged in, and a couple of huge brothers, twins, really funny characters. So yeah, it was really good fun doing it, everybody got on incredibly well, usually video shoots are really tense, time pressure, you know, but everybody was so relaxed and chilled out, it was really good fun. Interviewer: Tim and Jim, it’s been great having you on Videotech, I think we’ll check out the new single now. | Jun 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Not To Tour – NME News | Article, News | JAMES have been forced to pull out of this year’s Glastonbury Festival due to the demands of their Lollapalooza schedule in the US. The band were added to the Lollapalooza bill at the last minute after they had to cancel their earlier North American dates when lead singer Tim Booth badly injured his neck dancing onstage in Vancouver. Lollapalooza’s schedule and Tim’s neck injury had already seen off the band’s appearances at V97 in Chelmsford and Leeds. With Glastonbury scratched, the band’s only UK festival appearance this summer will now be at Reading on August 22, as previously reported in NME. James release a new single ‘Waltzing Along’, the follow-up to their Number 13 hit ‘Tomorrow’, on Monday (June 23). The track, taken from their Top Ten album ‘Whiplash’, is released on three different CDs featuring a number of new songs including ‘Your Story’, ‘Where You Gonna Run’ and ‘Long To Be Right’. There’s also remixes of the A-side by Skint’s Midfield General and drum’n’bass genius Flytronix. As for Tim’s neck injury, a spokeswoman said: “He’s really got to take it quite easily, but he is on the mend. They’re really looking forward to playing Reading, though.” | Jun 1997 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Lost Control? – A Change Of Scenery | Article, News | This year has witnessed an alarming string of events striking at the very foundations of what makes James special and has done so for the past fourteen years. Here is the case for the prosecution. Let’s start with the set lists. This isn’t a question of die-hards wanting to hear “What’s the World” or “Hymn from a Village”, it’s about challenging the audience’s expectations, doing something different every night – remember all the times the band have boasted how they tear the set list up each night and start again the next day. You set your own standards in this business. Tim’s assertion that the band need time to ‘re-learn’ the songs and for Adrian to learn them is weak. If his old “E-Street Band” comparison is true, he’s contradicted himself immediately. Anyone who has heard Adrian play can recognise he could quite easily pick up ten or so ‘old’ songs to allow changing set lists. It wouldn’t be so unusual for James to play new songs either would it? So what is the issue? Laziness, preoccupation with side projects, management direction to take less risks, who knows? Curiously, the set lists for the curtailed U.S. tour were printed on A4 paper – which is not used in the U.S. The mystery deepens. Next the 3CD singles – taking the corporate game still further. I’m sure if the singles were packed of high quality new material, fans would have no issue. The real rip-off here are the appalling remixes which make up the third CD (and just how many times are we expected to buy “Come Home”?). It’s like putting an unreleased instrumental on a film soundtrack and expecting fans to fork out £15 to hear it. Now who’s just done that? Festivals- I would take this opportunity to personally thank whoever made the decision to pull out of V97 and T in the Park on behalf of those people who’ve shelled out hard earned cash for tickets on the premise that James were playing. The good news is Glastonbury’s still on – there’s a single to promote so we can’t cancel that can we? Or we could all spend another £75 to see them at Reading. If the festival cancellations were due to re- scheduling the U.S. tour this would be understandable. But to do it for a travelling freakshow (Lollapalooza), where real American James fans are charged exorbitant prices to see the band play short sets is beyond the pale. If you really want to crack the States boys, re-schedule the tour as soon as Tim is fit and able and market it properly. The local Seattle. San Francisco and LA listings magazines did not run any features on the band in the lead up to the recent tour and my U.S. friends tell me the marketing of ‘Whiplash” has been conspicuous by its absence. And don’t buy the doing Lollapalooza because the tour was cancelled line, as this was being discussed well before Tim’s injury. I’d hate to speculate what. or who. is at the heart of this malaise. Is it the 15 year old girls who seem to be appearing backstage at shows? Is it the management? Or is it the band themselves -can they be arsed any more? (Brian Eno’s diary in 1995 states they were not even in the same room together for six months) It’s just as well they’re still making the best music of anyone on the planet. Otherwise it might be all over. And for Gods sake, let’s not have a “Sit Down (97 Remix)” before the Greatest Hits album please. What is the case for the Defence ? | Jun 1997 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Lollapalooza Biography | Article, Biography | Tim Booth — vocals Jim Glennie — bass David Baynton-Power — drums Saul Davies — violin Mark Hunter — keyboards Adrian Oxaal — guitar Michael Kulas — guitar Stoked by the success of 1993’s Laid and convinced that they’d followed it up with one of the best albums of their career in the new Whiplash, the members of James were poised to conquer America this spring when singer Tim Booth was waylaid by some damaged nerves in his neck. “When the tour fell through, and before we had Lollapalooza, we thought, ‘Oh shit, that’s the end of it on this record. We’ll never be able to come back to the States again!” he says. “And about two days later, Lollapalooza was confirmed. We’ve always been a live band, and now we’ve got a second chance to prove it.” It’s been 15 years since James formed in Manchester, England, and released its first recordings on the legendary Factory Records. Over the course of eight albums, the group has never stopped changing and evolving; indeed, its last two Brian Eno-produced records, Laid and Wah Wah, opened new creative vistas, introducing elements of ambient music and studio improvisation to the group’s always expansive folk-rock. But Booth believed that in order to move on, his bandmates needed even more freedom. So Jim Glennie, David Baynton-Power, Saul Davies, Mark Hunter, and Adrian Oxaal were left to start Whiplash on their own (aided by producer Stephen Hague and abetted once again by “frequent interferer and occational co-producer” Eno), while their singer toiled on Booth and the Bad Angel, his solo project with Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti. “It’s just that I got bogged down with the responsibility of it [all],” Booth says, “I put to much on my shoulders. It just takes a stepping back. When I walked away from James and said, ‘You guys have to run this for a while, I am going to make a record with Angelo’, they found a new way of working through it with each other where they shared it a lot more. That hadn’t happened before, and it was a huge relief.” Now the group has come together again, stronger than ever and joined by another new member, backing singer and guitarist Michael Kulas. “The last British tour we did was probably the best we have ever done, ” Booth says. “It was much more aggressive live than what we had been. We had a good break, and when we came back from it we really appreciated the band we were in. It’s very healthy at the moment.” Except, of course, when Booth twists his neck in a certain way. … | Jun 1997 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
FHM Interview | Article, Interview | Q. Would you lie on the ground if a bank robber told you to? TB. Instantly. If he was just taking money, i would have no problem complying with his demands. If he was injuring somebody, it would be different, although I wouldn’t do anything that would be like committing suicide. Q. Have you ever come a cropper while showing off in a car? TB. I don’t know if I was showing off, but when I was 18 I was driving along with two passengers when we skidded on some black ice and ended up in a ditch. My mum’s car was a write-off. I think I’d had a drink beforehand. Q. Have you ever fired a gun indoors? TB. Yes. I fired a 2.2 air rifle at some birds outside when i was about eleven. But when i went out and saw the results i was so devastated that i threw them over the wall and hoped next door’s Alsatian would dispose of the evidence. Q. Could you eat a raw egg? TB. Yes I’ve had them in drinks. Thats a bit of a spit or swallow question. I don’t have that many odd foods in my diet. I ate crocodile a couple of years ago in America. It was like very chewy chicken – not very pleasant. Q. Have you ever set yourself on fire when lighting a barbecue? TB. No, but I have been set on fire. It was a Tibetan purification ritual. I was covered in alcohol and, then set alight for about ten seconds. I got burned, but the shock was the hardest part to deal with. Q. Have you ever ended up in bed with someone whose name you didn’t know? TB. No, but sometimes I’ve forgotten names of people I’ve slept with then been phoned up and reminded of the fact. Although I tend to be very conscious when I go to bed with someone, I do have a very bad memory. Q. Have you ever been bitten by anything poisonous? TB. About a month ago I was bitten by a spider in Glasgow. I’ve no idea what type it was but I found the spider on my bed in the morning and I had these five bites on my head. One of them still hasn’t gone down. Q. Would you climb an 80 ft tree to rescue a kitten? TB. No. I’d call the fire brigade – they get paid for it. I’d probably manage if it was 30 ft but I would get a bit shaky after that and start thinking that my life was more valuable than the kitten’s. Q. Have you ever been out in the snow wearing just a T-shirt? TB. No, but I’d do it if I was coming straight out of a sauna, like they do in Sweden. I like those extremes of heat and cold. Q. Can you remember the last time you were rude to a policeman? TB. I resisted arrest in Greece once. We’d gone naked on one of the beaches and the locals didn’t like it. The policemen said they were going to take us to prison, then deport us. So we legged it and jumped on a bus out of town. | Jun 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Waltzing Along – Press Release | Article, Press Release | Following their chart-topping single ‘Tomorrow’ and a sell-out UK tour, James release a new single on 23rd June – ‘Waltzing Along’. It is a completely re-recorded version of the song from the band’s gold album ‘Whiplash’. ‘Waltzing Along’ is released on 3 CDs – CD1 contains 3 brand-new songs, ‘Your Story’, ‘Where You Gonna Run’ and ‘Long To Be Right’ as b-sides, whilst CD2 has live versions of ‘Homeboy’, ‘How Was It For You?’ and ‘Greenpeace’ recorded at the band’s sell-out show at the Shepherds Bush Empire in March this year. CD3 is the remix CD with Skint’s Midfield General chopping out the big beats and Flytronix smoothing the edges with mellow drum n bass. ‘Waltzing Along’ is produced by Stephen Hague with additional production and interference from Brian Eno and drummer, David Baynton-Power. The full details of ‘Waltzing Along’ are : CD1 (JIMCD18) – Waltzing Along (Single Version) Your Story Where You Gonna Run? Long To Be Right CD2 (JIMDD18) – Waltzing Along (Single Version) Homeboy (Live At Shepherds Bush Empire) How Was It For You? (Live At Shepherds Bush Empire) Greenpeace (Live At Shepherds Bush Empire) CD3 (JIMED 18) – Waltzing Along (Single Version) Waltzing Along (Disco Socks Remix) Waltzing Along (Flytronix Remix) ‘Waltzing Along’ is released on 23rd June through Fontana. The top ten album ‘Whiplash’ is out now. James tour America as part of the notorious Lollapolooza and return to the UK to play Reading Festival. | Jun 1997 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Launch.com Biography | Article, Biography | James are the Rodney Dangerfields of Brit-pop, er, make that British pop. They get no respect in America, even though they’ve been around longer than that catchy little nickname for popular music hailing from England. In fact, when the band’s stunning debut, the Village Fire EP, was issued in 1985, they were hailed by Morrissey of the Smiths, who were still together at the time. Since then, the Smiths have broken up; along came Pulp, Blur, and Oasis. Now the Chemical Brothers and Prodigy are all the rave, and most Americans still don’t know James from any other group of Limeys. That’s too bad, because for more than a decade James has been one of the most consistent British bands around, no matter what the fashion of the day. Although the band’s recordings for Sire Records, Stutter and Strip-Mine, failed to live up to the promise of such early tracks as “Hymn From A Village,” James regained its footing on its 1990 effort, Gold Mother, which featured a new, expanded line-up that was seven members strong. Although the album was a hit in the UK, a U.S. version, simply titled James, merely spawned the modern rock semi-hit “Sit Down.” The band continued to move in the right direction with 1992’s Seven, which contained another minor modern rock hit, “Born Of Frustration.” However, it wasn’t until its ranks were slimmed to six members and that it teamed with producer Brian Eno that James fully hit its stride. The collaboration with Eno resulted in two albums, 1993’s acoustic-leaning Laid and 1994’s improvisational Wah Wah. After singer Tim Booth’s collaboration with Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti, “Booth And The Bad Angel,” James resurfaced with Whiplash, another worthy effort. | Jun 1997 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Lucky Jim – The Independent | Article, Interview | The land around here looks like nothing much at all, which is why it can be made to look like almost anything you like. The rugged red hillocks and dull yellow plains around the Andalusian town of Guadix are where you come when you need desert footage, and your budget won’t stretch to Arizona, Jordan or Australia. Sergio Leone came here to film his great spaghetti westerns; the sets for Once Upon a Time in the West are still collecting dust next to a nearby railway crossing. This weekend, a pop group called James are making a video here for their new single, a song called “Waltzing Along”. “I hope this all works out,” says James’s singer, Tim Booth. “It’s my favourite song on the record. But you should have been here yesterday. We did some filming at the local brothel.” The idea for the video is a vague narrative about a battered old convertible being driven across the badlands of mid-west America and picking up various odd characters as it goes. These will be played by the six members of James, a model called Rachel and two immense Turkish brothers, who are taking a couple of days off from their London chip shop. The role of the car’s driver was, at one stage, going to be offered to James’s favourite celebrity fan, the Formula One driver Jacques Villeneuve. Then it was to go to James’s semi-celebrity sometime producer, Brian Eno. They have eventually settled on an actress with an unnerving resemblance to Bet Lynch. As video shoots go, it’s a relatively tolerable experience. Video shoots are usually terrifyingly boring ordeals for all concerned, long hours of sitting about doing nothing occasionally punctuated by being screamed at by agitated young men with megaphones and clipboards. Today, however, the sun’s out, there’s plenty to eat, the mood is genial, and everyone seems to be having something that looks startlingly like a good time. If James look, today, like a band that are enjoying the things that bands aren’t supposed to enjoy, it’s possibly because they know that they nearly didn’t make it this far at all. James formed in Manchester in 1982, released a couple of winsome EPs for hip local label Factory, toured with The Smiths, and were regarded as fellow-travellers in Morrissey’s conspiracy of ascetic withdrawal – though you wouldn’t guess that from the now from the enthusiasm with which a few of the band demolish the contents of the hotel’s drinks cabinet after dinner. Two albums, Stutter (1986) and Stripmine (1988) came next on the American label Sire, from which the band departed rather acrimoniously. A live album, One Man Clapping (1989), which the band financed by volunteering for medical experiments, followed, and just about saved their career, landing them a deal with Fontana. A hit single, “Sit Down”, and a bigger hit album, Gold Mother (1990) made James one of the biggest bands in Britain, and their T-shirts an era-defining fashion accessory. After that, James were widely perceived to have sold their souls to Simple Minds on the epic-sounding Seven (1992), bottled out of becoming vastly successful with the acoustic-oriented Laid (1993), and finally wandered altogether off the reservation with the experimental and largely incomprehensible Wah Wah (1994). “We have always,” says Booth, “been about doing the last thing everyone expected, including ourselves.” It got worse. Shortly after James appeared at the ghastly, mud-covered fiasco that was Woodstock II, founding member Larry Gott decided he’d had enough. So did James’s long-term manager, and mother of Booth’s son, Martine McDonagh. It seemed, as 1994 drew to a close, that the only people who hadn’t had enough of James were the Inland Revenue, who chose the moment to send in a bill for five years’ back taxes that the band thought they’d already paid. With the Grim Reaper knocking loudly on their door, James reacted with typical bloodymindedness. They vanished from sight for a few years, restructured their working methods to allow Booth the freedom he wanted to pursue other projects (he has since recorded an album with Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti under the name Booth & The Bad Angel), before emerging with Whiplash, arguably their best album yet. Then, with credits due to roll after this happy ending, it all went wrong again. Tim Booth’s unique dancing style – think of a man with one foot in a bucket of water sticking a knife into a toaster – finally caught up with him. Earlier this year, Booth ruptured a vertebral disc in his neck, an incredibly painful injury that immobilised him in San Francisco for a month, and forced the abrupt cancellation of a major US tour. Booth is still under instructions to take it easy. Most of the interview proper takes place in a taxi between Guadix and Malaga airport the day after the shoot, hired at some considerable expense (it’s a 220km trip) so that Booth can lie down on the back seat. The irony of the new album’s title is not lost on him. “Also,” he elaborates, “the day we decided to call it that, our product manager at the label got whiplash as well. We should have titled it Great Wealth & Happiness.” Booth, now 37 and a resident of both New York (where his fiancee lives) and Brighton (where his son lives) doesn’t seem much like the credulous new age mooncalf he’s often been painted as. (He is almost certainly the only Leeds United fan on earth who’s ever been called a hippy.) He does, granted, talk of his involvement with a group in California who teach a method of dialogue that is something to do with the boundary between creativity and therapy, and he also admits to training in movement intended to induce trance states, but he does all this very self-effacingly. He has, by the sound of it, been on a bit of a mission of self-discovery since fame came calling a few years ago. “It was lovely, in lots of ways,” he remembers. “We’d been going seven years and nobody bought any of our records. While we always knew it would happen, when it did, it was a bit of a shock.” It feels like a long time ago now, but James were massive. Sought after as festival headliners, able to comfortably fill Alton Towers in their own right, and fronted by a man who looked very much like he fancied Bono’s job. “I’m glad to have experienced it,” Booth says now. “There are some really nice sides to it, like free tickets to gigs and football matches, and getting to meet people you wouldn’t have got to meet otherwise. And then there’s a side where you realise that you are in some sense public property, and I didn’t like that at all.” That said, Booth denies that their decision to tour America for years and retreat from the bombast of Seven was a deliberate refusal of massive success. “It was less conscious than that,” he says. “We just didn’t know what to do. We didn’t want to just play stadiums, and we realised we’d never really been to America, so we did that, and had to start playing to 200 people a night again. We didn’t think it through as far as how it would alienate people in Britain, and that was a bit distressing. I’ve been amazed, really, how quickly people have taken to the new record. I thought it would be much harder than it has been.” Whiplash was Top 10 in Britain, and the first two singles both made the Top 20. Whether Booth likes it or not, the success he evaded the first time may not have given up its pursuit of him. “I wouldn’t object,” he decides, eventually. “But I’d want to do it differently. And our fans are good for us like that. They’ve always been involved. I mean, there’s a James fanzine that’s been going for many years, and they didn’t like Whiplash at all, and they ran a big editorial lambasting us. Our own fanzine! But that’s absolutely as it should be.” `Waltzing Along’ is out now on Fontana | Jul 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Eyenet Interview | Article, Interview | It’s the kind of thing I’d do: spend an entire interview talking about what a freaked-out genius my producer is and forget that my record company would like me to add that I too am evidently some sort of minor deity. Actually, my chatter would probably lean toward sharing the merits of Murray’s hairdressing and the wisdom of doing one job at a time, the real secret of success which I learned from my mom. For James bassist Jim Glennie, I think it’s an overdeveloped sense of awe (as opposed to an underdeveloped ego) that had him gushing earlier this spring about the arrogant genius and meticulous masterwork of Brian Eno and Stephen Hague, both producers for James’ latest record, Whiplash (Mercury/PolyGram). Eno first worked with James on 1993’s Laid (and thus inspired the soundtrack to my days working as an east-end sandwich maker). Since then he’s produced 1994’s art-romp Wah Wah and Whiplash, and when Glennie talks Eno, his enthusiastic, racing conversation shifts into overdrive. Oh, he’ll joke about the oddly intimating little man — gold teeth and a bald head and a smashing suit — but will leave you every time with a quick reminder that “the man’s a genius.” Or by enumerating some of the little projects Eno had on the go while working with James (designing an art gallery interior in Cologne and a park in Barcelona, thinking in a tank for Sony for future music technologies). Seems that Eno started off by stripping the lads of everything they held dear. “He came in when we were recording Laid and said, ‘You don’t need to do that. You don’t need to approach it like that at all,’ ” Glennie explains, gaining momentum. ” ‘You can take the rough seeds of a jam or an improvisation and take that into a studio. One person, two people, however many you want, and completely smash it up. You can take away what you don’t want, put in what you do want, speed it up, slow it down, sample bits, throw them in wherever you want and stick the whole track through distortion pedal if you want. You can totally abuse your songs if you really, really want to.’ ” As it turns out, trashing stuff for art’s sake was good training for other imminent changes: founding member Larry Gott ditched the band; cute-as a-button singer Tim Booth took a sabbatical to record with Angelo Badalamenti; other members took the time to grow up and presumably um, fill out and, for the first time, as Glennie tells it, became a real band. “Things fell apart. And looking back on it, it was brilliant, because it shattered what we had. Now at the time it was totally disastrous, but what came out of that was a lot stronger, different and fresher.” Abounding in freshness, the band’s next move was to meet with what Glennie calls the ‘chalk and cheese’ combo of producers. Hague, who is “incredibly meticulous… oooh” and famed for his twiddling for New Order and the Pet Shop Boys, agreed to work with Eno, to a certain extent relieving Herr Deconstructive-Vibe-Meister of duties which were just “not Eno.” “We thought Stephen would be sort of upset because he’d sit there slaving over the desk 24 hours a day and Eno would march in and go, ‘Change this and don’t do that,’ ” Glennie says, forgetting that reaction is reserved for mere mortals, “But he was brilliant. Hague was like, ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to work with Brian Eno.’ ” “We just couldn’t not do it. Because the two people were too strong and they both wanted to do it. And it was like oil and water. Let’s put oil and water to produce the album. Wonderful. Wonderful.” Wonderful for you, dude. For me, all this experimentin’ Brian Eno talk finds me mixing my metaphors and all the Whiplash description words in my head could equally well describe a Happy Meal: fast, fun, meaty and icy. Glennie, still digging the trash-stuff-for-art’s-sake mode (listen to the man describe performing) will no doubt know I mean to say Whiplash kicks. “Yeah, you can go there and go, ‘I’ll just play all the songs I know.’ Or you go, ‘Oh, God, let’s put ourselves on the edge. Let’s throw ourselves into a song we’ve not played for two years. I can just about remember the chords. And weird mishmashes, collisions of people changing in the wrong place and you’ve got, WHOAH, I’ve just about made it through this weird collision. It’s brilliant and it’s scary, but you know… What’s the other option? Pretend you’re not up there. Why bother going up then?” | Jul 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Will Lessen The Whiplash – Allentown Morning Call | Article, Interview | Tim Booth, lyricist and vocalist of Manchester, England, songcrafters James, professes to know not a whole lot about the state of pop music. In fact, he was rather shocked when “Laid,” the title track of the band’s 1993 Brian Eno-produced masterstroke, went on to become one of the most heavily rotated singles of that year. “I hadn’t really seen it’s potential,” claims Booth. “I thought it would wind up a B-side to some single.” “Laid,” a rousing, 2-1/2-minute nugget of acoustic pop perfection, explored the histrionic, comic nature of sexual politics (as well as the strength of Booth’s lilting falsetto) and earmarked a disc loaded with a fair share of soulfully intimate ballads (“Out to Get You”) as well as emotional folk anthems (“Sometimes”). “Laid” went on to sell 600,000 copies in America, and put James on the map once and for all after the release of a decade’s worth of solid recordings. But if Booth is going to plead ignorance to the success of that disc, which Eno pushed to be christened after the track “Laid,” then he’ll claim the naming of the band’s eighth and latest disc, this year’s techno, drum and bass-laden “Whiplash,” to be somewhat prophetic on his part: During the commencement of a world tour in support of “Whiplash” earlier this year, Booth injured nerves in his neck, bringing the entire tour — including a scheduled appearance in last month’s Y-100 Summer Festival at the Blockbuster-Sony Music Entertainment Centre in Camden, N.J. — to a grinding halt. “That’s the irony,” said Booth. “I suppose we should name the next album ‘Health, Wealth And Happiness,’ or something very positive.” No matter — James will be surfacing at the E-Centre on Saturday as part of Lollapalooza ’97. Booth’s neck sometimes smarts if he turns it a certain way (which, he reports, is impeding his trademark whirls and spins), but now that James is touting a harder-edged disc utilizing those jungle rhythms that are all the rage, a Lollapalooza tour may be the best outlet to show it off. Or is it? “No, actually,” explained Booth last week over the telephone from Toronto, where Perry Farrell’s annual traveling marriage of outrageousness and political correctness was stopping. “We go on right before Korn, and (‘Whiplash’) just wouldn’t suit the bill, so we play some more mellow stuff, we slow things down, pull the audiences back a bit. We’re the antidote, I suppose.” Booth takes pride in adding variety to Lollapalooza by deliberately inhibiting moshing and crowd-surfing. However, there is some disappointment in not being able to showcase the fierce “Whiplash.” ” ‘Laid’ was difficult to tour because it was so low-key,” explained Booth. “We deliberately set out to record a more aggressive album (in ‘Whiplash’) so that we could do a heavier tour. Ah, well, I guess we have to say goodbye to that one.” Booth was a drama student at Manchester University when he first met his future band mates in the early 1980s. The fledgling group named itself after Irish novelist James Joyce and signed with the legendary Manchester label Factory Records in 1983, around the same time fellow Mancunians The Smiths were originating and New Order was hitting it big “Blue Monday.” James made its contribution to the “Madchester” scene of 1989 with both the oddball anthem “Sit Down” and the baggy flower-print shirts that became a fashion staple of the rave movement. And while The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays may now be things of the past, James is still kicking with “Whiplash,” as the band crosses over into the realm of electronica and beyond. “Whiplash” was produced by onetime New Order knob twirler Stephen Hague, with some input from Eno. “They worked together, yet they work very differently,” said Booth. “Brian moves in a big, bold sweep, and Stephen works step-by-step.” Booth noted he and his band mates often record “way too many songs” for each record. And so, in 1994, the double-disc set “Wah Wah,” a collection of Eno-produced outtakes of experiments and improvisations from the “Laid” sessions, was released. Booth temporarily jumped ship last year to record “Booth And The Bad Angel” with film composer and David Lynch crony Angelo Badalamenti. “That was a necessary thing,” explained Booth. “I needed to take the weight (of James) off my shoulders and shuffle the deck a bit and leave them to carry on. And I’m pleased. ‘Whiplash’ is a good album.” But was the title a harbinger of bad things to come? “I think every songwriter has psychic powers,” says Booth. “It can have magical effects but can work negatively as well as positively. I don’t quite think some of these bands out there realize what they’re writing and singing. I mean, something like ‘Kill your mother and (rape) your father’ can be an awfully negative mantra, don’t you think?” | Jul 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Michigan Daily Times Interview | Article, Interview | In an interview with The Michigan Daily after their set, Booth, Davies and bassist Jim Glennie were partially saddened that the majority of the people in the crowd were ignoring them. “We’re the only tuneful band out there,” Booth said. Still, in addition to spending a great deal of time hanging out with fellow Brits Orbital, who were headlining the first part of the tour, the group does feel thankful that it is playing to a larger audience than if it just played to its fans in clubs. Furthermore, the band is lucky to be playing at all, given what happened to Booth earlier in the year. Following the second date of James’ U.S. tour, Booth felt tremendous pain in his neck. He was diagnosed with a lateral disc protrusion in his neck and right shoulder, which produced pressure on his nerve root. He remained “on (his) back for three weeks” in San Francisco, and the band had to cancel the rest of its tour, including a May date at Clutch Cargo’s in Pontiac. Once Booth was in suitable condition to tour, James promptly decided to sign on to do Lollapalooza, a move that, it was hoped, would help the band crack America. Unfortunately, James has had to miss a prime slot at last month’s venerable Glastonbury Festival in England. “It was hard (missing Glastonbury),” said Booth, “but there was a terrible deluge and they almost had to cancel it, so we weren’t so upset.” But by doing Lollapalooza, the band is essentially nixing the chance that it will honor its club dates in the near future. “No, this is it,” laments Booth. James fans shouldn’t fret, though, for the group is going back into the studio in the fall (after playing at the United Kingdom’s Reading Festival in late August). Glennie said the album should be ready “by the early part of next year” and that the band wants to “keep movin'” to make up for lost time this year. It is imperative that James rebuilds its momentum, for the group has encountered numerous stumbling blocks in addition to Booth’s severe injury. First, founding James member and slide guitarist Larry Gott told the remaining band members that he was leaving the group prior to the making of “Whiplash.” Gott “had to choose between staying with his wife or us and chose her,” Glennie said. The same “black” day that James was informed of Gott’s decision, the band found out it owed hundreds of thousands of pounds in back taxes. In addition, Booth had decided that he needed to go off on his own for a little while, which resulted in his collaboration with “Twin Peaks” composer Angelo Badalamenti, “Booth and the Bad Angel.” Nevertheless, James got back together and recorded the excellent “Whiplash,” which you wouldn’t know about if you listened to radio or watched MTV. Neither “Tomorrow” nor the album’s first single, “She’s A Star,” has received much airtime or video spins. As such, it seems quite apparent why the band is itching to get back in the studio and come up with an even better album. And despite the fact that “She’s A Star” is quite possibly the most catchy song on “Whiplash,” James didn’t play it at Pine Knob. When asked why the song wasn’t performed, given that one would think the band would try to promote its latest album as much as possible, Booth said, “We’re trying out different setlists (at every show), and this is what we played today.” Booth did note a change, however, in James’ approach to determining what to play before each concert. “We used to always change (the setlist), but now we try to get more stable for our sound guys and ourselves.” Part of this newfound stability can be witnessed in Booth’s ritual of leaving the stage (he no longer needs a neck brace or a wheelchair) and wandering into the audience on the “grassy knoll.” “We’ve done it about twice before (and we plan to keep the tradition),” Booth said. “It breaks the ice.” The bandmembers had plenty of interesting insight into some of their British musical contemporaries. When asked if fellow Mancunians the Stone Roses could’ve been as big as Oasis in America if the band put more effort into touring – the Roses had sold-out gigs at Madison Square Garden in New York City and another in L.A. before pulling out at the last minute and never fulfilling them – Booth said, “No. Ian Brown (lead singer of the now-disbanded Stone Roses) can’t sing in tune and Liam (Gallagher of Oasis) can. You can’t tour the States with an F-you attitude.” Davies also has a critical opinion of a current U.K. music giant, Radiohead. Despite the fact that Oxford’s Radiohead has garnered critical adulation for its third record, “OK Computer,” Davies feels it is “self-indulgent shite.” Booth, on the other hand, was impressed with the success of the Prodigy, a techno band whose new album, “The Fat of the Land,” debuted at No. 1 in the U.S. two weeks ago. “By number of first-week sales, Prodigy is bigger than Oasis and will (eventually) be bigger than the Spice Girls,” Booth said. As for James, perhaps it is not realistic that the group will sell as many albums as the aforementioned artists, but its members have a positive attitude and are putting lots of effort into expanding the band’s popularity in the States. Don’t count them out, for a year or two down the line, James may well be headlining shows at venues like Pine Knob. | Jul 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Home James – SOS Publications | Article, Interview | For their latest album, style chameleons James retreated from commercial recording studios and found a new creativity working in the comfort of their own houses. PAUL TINGEN hears why they’ve decided there’s no place like home… During their 14-year existence, James have had more than their fair share of setbacks, many of them catastrophic enough to be make-or- break affairs. And yet every time they’ve managed to bounce back and come out of their crises stronger, rejuvenated or more successful. Their latest tales of adversity involved the loss of one of their three remaining founder members, the discovery that they owed five years of back taxes, and a neck injury for their singer, which forced them to pull out of their American tour a few months ago. Despite all this, they’ve had a UK top 10 album and two successful singles this year, and appear to be creatively and commercially stronger than ever. In a small, idyllically-located residential recording studio in central Wales, four of James’ six members — drummer David Baynton-Power, guitarist and violinist Saul Davies, bassist Jim Glennie and keyboardist Mark Hunter — are having a few days of recording and bonding, rehearsing a dance music project for a live performance in Toronto. (“Something different from James,” explains Baynton-Power: “four-on-the-floor, mindless, repetitive music. I love it!”) The studio, named Foel, features a wealth of trendy ’70s equipment, including the only Trident B-series desk left in Europe and an MCI analogue 24-track; the likes of Gong, Hawkwind, John Foxx, Peter Hammill, Youth, The Stranglers and The Fall have all recorded here in its 23-year history. In Foel’s rustic control room, Baynton-Power, Davies and Glennie talk about how creativity, technology and adversity blended together in the making of Whiplash. The adversity started one particular Thursday three years ago, when they were working in another studio in Wales called the Windings, brainstorming and writing ideas for a new album. So deeply ingrained is the day in their memory that they call it Black Thursday. It was on this day that founding member and guitarist Larry Gott broke the news to them that he couldn’t be part of James any more, because he had found that family life and touring were incompatible. It was also on this day that their accountant broke the news to them that they had five years of back taxes to pay, and they might not be able to afford to continue the band. Combine this with the fact that singer Tim Booth was scheduled to start work with composer Angelo Badalamenti on a duo album that was to be called Booth And The Bad Angel, and few people would have put any money on James’ survival. “It was like: ‘Fuck, this is the end!'” says Baynton-Power, and Jim Glennie adds: “Tim, Larry and myself had been together for what seemed infinity, and suddenly that was all over. Suddenly everything was completely broken. We were totally shattered, and had no idea what do next.” LONG AND WINDING ROAD The band’s resilience, and their aptitude for reinventing themselves, may well have to do with the fact that their musical style and identity have often run in what seems, with hindsight, a bewilderingly zigzag line. James’ beginnings were auspicious enough. Their first releases were two EPs on the Manchester Factory label in the mid-’80s. Their melodic, punk-influenced indie rock earned them a cult following, a tour with The Smiths and a major deal with the American label Sire Records. Stutter (1986) and Strip Mine (1988) contained an unusual folk/indie mixture, and were only marginally successful. An acrimonious parting of ways between Sire and James followed, and many people thought that was that. But the band refused to lie down, and rose to their first major challenge with a rather unusual mixture of creativity and technology: they financed a live album on Rough Trade, One Man Clapping (1989), by participating in medical experiments. The band survived the experiments intact, and the album was successful enough for them to be snapped up by the Phonogram label Fontana. Gold Mother (1990) contained their UK Number Two single ‘Come Home’ and, together with the re-release of their anthemic song ‘Sit Down’, it spelled commercial success in both the US and the UK. James appeared to be walking on air, but they blew the critical support they had enjoyed with 1992’s Seven — a rather bombastic, stadium-rock affair — and an allegedly awful performance at the Reading Festival in 1992, where they were the headlining act. They repaired the damage admirably in 1993 with Laid, an intimate, minimalist, acoustic-sounding affair, produced by Brian Eno, which was a million miles away from Seven. Laid reaped much critical acclaim, and they had their biggest ever US hit with the title song. Having cracked America, James followed Laid with an uncommercial, eccentric, experimental album of out-takes from the Laid sessions. Wah Wah (1994) veered around somewhere between ambient, industrial and dance music, and divided fans and critics alike. And now, three years after their last album, there’s Whiplash, and again the band have made a musical left turn. Whiplash is awash with full-throttle, distorted electric guitars, heavy rhythms and electronic eeriness, all held together by pop producer Stephen Hague (Pet Shop Boys, Jimmy Somerville), with Tim Booth wailing over the top in a stereotypical mid-’80s indie vocal style. If ‘Greenpeace’ is preachy and sentimental, and ‘Go To The Bank’ and ‘Play Dead’ full of industrial clutter, the anthemic ‘Tomorrow’, the elegant ‘Lost A Friend’, the slide-guitar driven melodic rock of ‘She’s A Star’, the lilting ‘Waltzing Along’ and the atmospheric ‘Blue Pastures’ are the best tracks, and arguably the best work, that James have ever done. There are some echoes of Wah Wah on Whiplash — in the industrial and dance music influences, and in the track ‘Tomorrow’, which is a revamped version of the final track on Wah Wah — but overall Whiplash sounds as if it was made by a different band from the one that made Laid. Jim Glennie agrees, saying: “We always tend to react to the album before. Laid was a reaction to Seven, Whiplash a reaction to Laid,” suggesting that the change of direction on Whiplash was purely the result of that reactive process. But other factors contributed to Whiplash, most of them part of the fall-out from Black Thursday. Although James’ music had always come into being through collective band improvisations (“It never happens that someone brings in a finished song,” says Baynton-Power), until that day singer Tim Booth had held tight control of the music, involving himself in every single musical decision. Now the band was in ruins, both financially and emotionally, and Booth was about to go off to make his duo album with Angelo Badalamenti. Clearly they would have to either disband, or find other ways of working. FAREWELL TO DEMOCRACY When the band found themselves in disarray after Black Thursday, it was drummer David Baynton-Power, a member of the band since 1989, who unexpectedly took the lead. He remembers, laughing: “Well, none of us are much good at doing anything else except make music, and we also felt that we were good for another album, so we thought ‘Let’s just do it’. I suggested ideas for how we could work cheaply on a new album, such as recording stuff with rented equipment in band-members’ homes.” The other musicians were also keen to find a way to simply go on making music, and they therefore naturally warmed to Baynton-Power’s suggestions. “During those sessions at the Windings we had already improvised and written many of the seeds for what eventually would become Whiplash,” says Saul Davies, “and a lot of what we had done was really good. Then everything hit us that Thursday. If what we’d been doing had been rubbish, we might have given up at that point. But the music sounded really good to us, so we felt inspired to carry on working on it. Yet we also knew that we had to work on things in a new way.” The new way of working that Baynton-Power suggested didn’t only involve working in the band’s houses, but also working in small groups, rather than having the obligatory plenary sessions of the past, and this meant that Tim Booth had to let go of a considerable amount of control. While Booth was working on his album with Angelo Badalamenti, Baynton-Power set up shop in his house in North Wales. He rented two Tascam DA88 recorders, NS10 monitors, an Allen & Heath mixing desk, and some other studio paraphernalia, and started working with them, initially with help mainly from Saul Davies and Jim Glennie. For the first time ever, band members were working separately, and without Booth. Baynton-Power elaborates: “Until that time we had worked by jamming with the whole band in rehearsal studios, and then we’d go into a commercial studio and record what came out, listen back and pick out the good bits. With six people, we’re a big band, and for that reason we’d always needed to rent big studios, and big studios cost a lot of money. And the disadvantage is that when you’re paying £1000 a day, nobody is prepared to stick their necks out and try weird things, for fear of wasting time and money. So I thought that we needed time to try out any crazy idea that might lead to something brilliant. That’s where the idea came from to work in people’s houses. We siphoned off all the multitrack tapes of the sessions at the Windings onto DA88 tapes, and started the process of listening back, picking out the good bits and expanding on those, or trying out completely new ideas.” With band members living as far apart as Wales, Stirling, Brighton, Leeds, Manchester, and New York or London (Booth), Baynton-Power’s plan had the added advantage that the old logistical problem of getting the whole band together in one room ceased to exist. And so individual band members made their way to Baynton-Power’s home, and occasionally Jim Glennie’s home in Manchester, and reacted to the material on the DA88 tapes. Baynton-Power engineered most of these pre-production sessions, and tried to keep them focused — part of the reason why he is credited as Associate Producer on Whiplash. He describes the process in more detail… “We sifted through all the material from the Windings and the good bits that we found we sampled on an Emu 6400, or an Akai S1000, and looped them using Cubase software on the Atari. We constructed tracks from these loops and played to them, encouraging each other to come up with weird noises and all kinds of new ideas. It’s a great way of working, because there was no pressure. People are often at their best when they’re not thinking about what they’re doing. When the red light goes on in a studio they tense up and often a pile of crap comes out. So you have to capture them in moments when they’re not self-conscious.” “We found that this way of working was really good for developing seeds,” adds Jim Glennie. “When you’re all together in a room, it’s a difficult environment to control. You may not be able to hear what’s going on; or it may sound great, but when you listen back it’s no good at all; or it may be very hard to suggest an idea to a group of people who all have their own ideas. To get them to understand what you mean and agree that it’s a good idea is not easy. So you often get a compromise that everybody is happy with, rather than being pushed to extremes by an individual who has an overview that they can push through. Democracy is a wonderful process, but you do have to be careful that you don’t end up with a musical compromise that’s a dilution of what could have been. So we got really into this new working method of creating an initial seed with the whole band in a room, and then taking it away to another room where one or two people work on it and listen to it and select the best bits and piece it all back together again. You can push things to extremes like that, and if it doesn’t work, it’s OK, because you’re not spending a grand a day in a room.” SPANNER IN THE OINTMENT James found this working method so attractive that, when they eventually returned to working in big, commercial recording studios, they rented two rooms simultaneously: one where the main producer, Stephen Hague, worked with the whole band, recording and editing tracks, and one where David Baynton-Power deconstructed those tracks and tried out weird ideas with one or two band members. (The other reason for his Associate Producer credit.) The recording sessions with Hague started in February 1996 — which meant that the pre-production sessions at Baynton-Power’s house had taken well over a year — and took place at RAK studios in London and Real World Studios near Bath, with a few sessions in other studios: new guitarist Adrian Oxaal’s overdubs on ‘Tomorrow’ took place at Foel studio. “Dave grabbed the album in the early stages when it looked as if everything was grinding to a halt,” says Jim Glennie. “He took the reins, dragged us all kicking and screaming into his living room, and instigated a process that became the foundation for Whiplash, which was to break away from the idea of sounding like everybody playing together in a room. We opened the boundaries of what James could sound like, and by late 1995 we’d arrived at a point where we had songs and sounds and felt that it was a good idea to go into a studio with a producer and finish the album off. At that point we went to see Brian Eno, but he realised that we knew what we were doing, and that we didn’t need him to to stop us messing things up. He said that he didn’t want to babysit us through the album, and that he would only come in occasionally, to make sure things were still on track.” Stephen Hague was appointed as main producer instead, and Brian Eno made his way about once a week to RAK and Real World, ending up with credits for “frequent interference and co-production” as well as “keyboards and backing vocals”. The whole band actually felt confident that Dave Baynton-Power could have seen the album through on his own, Glennie explains, but their record company was keen to give the overall responsibility to a big-name producer, and insisted on Hague’s involvement. “They want the security of being able to go: ‘Yeah, brilliant, Eno’s involved, Hague’s involved, nothing can go wrong’,” Baynton-Power agrees. “And it is really good to have an outside opinion, someone who can be objective and tell you what’s good and bad. Often we’re way too self-critical and think something is bollocks, and Eno was very good at saying ‘Stop there, that was great’. And we’d think ‘It can’t be that easy, you have to struggle’.” “The best example is the song ‘Laid’,” says Glennie, “the single that broke us in the USA. It’s screechy, scratchy, badly recorded, the timing is all over the place — it was thrown together really haphazardly, just one of the silly run-throughs in the very early life of the song. And Eno said ‘That’s great, leave it’. And we were saying ‘Are you sure? It’s all over the place’. But he insisted it was fine. So then you ship it off to the record company, and they listen to it and, because Eno has done it, they say ‘A work of genius, so scrappy, isn’t that brave?’ But if Dave had done it, they would have said: ‘It sounds shite, it sounds like a demo’. It’s how all record companies think, and it can be frustrating.” It could be argued that, while James talk with some bemusement and maybe even a hint of awe about the working methods of Brian Eno (“When you think you’re just jamming, but someone like Eno tells you it’s brilliant, you think that maybe he has a point”), they do actually still need a producer who can do what Eno does. But then, Laid is almost as uneven an affair as Whiplash, with some beautiful songs, gorgeously played, sung and recorded — ‘Dream Thrum’, ‘One Of The Three’, ‘Say Something’, ‘Five-O’ — but some, ‘Out To Get You’ and ‘Knuckle Too Far’, that sound just like haphazard rehearsals. In any event, according to Glennie, Eno’s instant, intuitive way of working and Hague’s contrasting perfectionist approach did complement each other: “We weren’t too sure about how Hague would react to Eno coming in now and again and sticking a spanner in the works. But they actually worked together incredibly well. Sometimes one would suggest one thing and the other would suggest something else, and it was quite an amazing experience for us to have these two top producers suggesting things to us. It was an impressive line-up!” laughs Glennie. “And then there was Dave holding the reins in the other room, throwing ideas around. Tapes were being sent to and fro between the two studios, and even occasionally to a third studio, where Tim would explore lyrical and vocal ideas. And out of this three-studio situation came several brand new songs, such as ‘She’s A Star’, ‘Lost A Friend’, ‘Greenpeace’ and ‘Go To The Bank’.” NEW TOYS James are often compared to U2 — for their cause-carrying rock, for their musical changes, for the way they write through band improvisations — and the process by which James created Whiplash sounds remarkably similar to the way U2 recorded their recent Pop album (see SOS, July 1997). David Baynton-Power explains that it’s the inexpensiveness and flexibility of new gear that’s given James a new lease of life: the DA88 recorders and the Cubase plus Emu 6400 MIDI setup at his home gave the band the chance to record cheaply at home without sonic compromise. The DA88 material and Cubase sequences were transferred directly to two Sony 3324 24-track digital recorders at RAK and Real World, where Stephen Hague used the two 3324 recorders to create new arrangements by shuttling between the two machines, and using slave reels for overdubs. Technology also helps James to perform live, says Baynton-Power: “A lot of people don’t realise how much hardware we use live. But we don’t show it off. We keep it hidden and so no-one notices. We work with drum machines and use a lot of pre-recorded stuff — we never use tape, it’s mainly samples triggered manually by Mark [Hunter, James’ keyboard player], or loops that we run off the old little Alesis sequencer, the MMT8. That’s a brilliant piece of gear for live use, because it’s stable, it never crashes, and it’s user-friendly and quick to use. You can mute tracks with a touch of the button on the MMT8. Try doing that live with Cubase and a mouse! “Live, Mark uses a Clavia Nord Lead, Korg Wavestation keyboard, Emu Orbit, Roland Super Jupiter rackmount and the Emu 6400 sampler, with 128K memory and hard drive. Brian Eno sang many of the backing vocals on Laid — he’s brilliant at that, doing them very quickly with a Shure SM58 mic sitting behind the desk. To be able to perform these tracks live, we sampled many of Eno’s backing vocals into the Emu and Mark plays them from a keyboard. And he often sends me a click track or a little drum beat from the MMT8, which only I will hear, via headphones, to make sure that all the backing vocals that he’s firing from the sampler will be exactly in time with my drumming. Other than that, I don’t use any MIDI live. I try to keep live drumming simple.” Finally, Baynton-Power reveals that James have taken so strongly to their new working methods that they’ve acquired a whole batch of recording gear which they’re planning to take on their forthcoming tours, starting with the legendary open-air Lollapalooza tour in the USA (their first public appearance with Adrian Oxaal, who will take care of Larry Gott’s guitar parts, including Gott’s trademark slide-guitar work). The new setup consists of a Soundscape version 2 system, with a laptop PC and Emagic Logic software, two Tascam DA38 machines, and an Allen & Heath mixing desk, and they intend to use it to work on new material, together with the Roland MC303 Groovebox, Clavia Nord Lead, Emu Morpheus, a Korg A/D rack and a few reverbs and other effects. “We’re planning to write new material while touring,” he says; “either in hotel rooms, or using the jams that we usually play during soundchecks. The Soundscape hooks up straight to the PC, and it’s a really portable system that’s eminently compatible with the DA38 recorders. We can load material recorded on the DA38 into the Soundscape and edit it digitally. Or we can configure the Soundscape into any kind of mixer that we want. We’re planning to use Emagic Logic in the PC for MIDI sequencing and link it with Soundscape, and we’re thinking about getting Logic Audio for the PC, which is supported by Soundscape, so you can use the Soundscape hardware to do the audio — rather than the PC, which will inevitably crash! That would make a great combination. We think it’s a brilliant portable unit as it is. Working directly on audio material with Soundscape is a lot easier than sampling the section you want, naming and looping it and then triggering it from Cubase, which is what we previously did.” Anyone who has toured knows how draining it can be, because there’s only an hour here or a couple of hours there to concentrate on something. It’s incredibly difficult to be creative in such circumstances, and so hats off to James if they indeed manage to do significant writing while on tour. But then, bearing Jim Glennie’s elegant summary of James’ motto in mind, they may well go where few have managed to go before them: “We always try to push things to extremes. We don’t like to sit on our laurels and milk what we have done and never change. We’re always looking to change our sound and looking for different ways of working. What us kept us going for a long, long time is the fact that we still manage to find ways of working together that keep our music fresh.” | Aug 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Join A Band – Jim interview in NME Student Guide | Article, Interview |
“I had no intention of being in a band at all. I got talked into it by a friend, because he’d bought this stolen guitar. An imitation Gibson SG, one of those really weird guitars out of a catalogue, which he’d got off a mate. We used to rehearse through my little 10 watt amp, singing through my dad’s hi-fi. It broke, of course. “Finding people to be in your band can be pretty difficult. Especially drummers. And bass players. That’s why I became the bassist, actually – originally I was the guitarist – because no-one else wanted to do it. “The best thing to do is get a gig a couple of months away, when you haven’t even got a band or any songs together. That way you’ll get people interested and you won’t spend a year in your bedroom trying to perfect everything and get really pernickety and protective about it. “You’ll need somewhere to practise, too. Somewhere you can make a real racket, somewhere a long way away from any houses. Failing that, the drummer’s kitchen will do! “As for songs, if you want to do cover versions then go for your favourite bands’ early albums. Not only are they more credible but, more importantly, they won’t have too many chords in so you should be able to play them at least half decently. We used to do ‘Never Trust A Man With Egg On His Face’ from the first Adam & The Ants album and ‘She’s Lost Control’ by Joy Division. “Transport’s essential. We went to all our first gigs on the bus; we’d stick all our equipment in the luggage hold, so we had to stand up all the way and hold on to it really tightly to stop it falling off. “It was even more difficult, because back then we didn’t know how to tune our guitars and the Scoutmaster at the Scout hut we rehearsed at had an acoustic guitar -obviously -and he’d tune our guitars for us. Not that anyone noticed -it’s really not that important when you can’t play your instruments anyway. “You’ll need a good name. We chose James because it didn’t sound like a band name at all, but we had a few good ones before that. Venereal and The Diseases was the first one. Then Volume Distortion – sounds quite techno, that – and Model Team International. We were only called that because the guitarist’s girlfriend worked for a model agency called Model Team International and she had a T-shirt with the logo on. That’s a top tip; if you can’t afford merchandise then change your name to something that’s on a T-shirt already.” | Aug 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Reading Festival – 22nd August 1997 | Audio Archive, Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistSit Down / Tomorrow / She's A Star / Laid / Jam J / Honest Joe,Out To Get You / Say Something / Lost A Friend / Come Home / SoundSupportn/a - FestivalMore Information & ReviewsVideoAudio | Aug 1997 | audio-archive live-performance video-archive article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
At Home With James – The Mix | Article, Interview |
With their new album already clocking up sales of 60,000, James are back with a vengeance. Nick Sorre visited co-producer and drummer David Baynton-Power at Foel Studios in Wales. Sit down and I’ll tell you a story… James have been through a lot of changes in their fourteen year history. As a struggling four-piece, they made an impact on the trendy Manchester scene in the early eighties. They released two EPs on Factory Records between 1983 and 1985, before moving to Sire Records. They contacted Brian Eno in the hope that he would produce their debut album Stutter. Eno was busy, but it wouldn’t be the last he would hear from them. James left Sire Records in 1988 and recruited drummer and producer David Baynton-Power, as well as a new keyboard player, violinist and trumpeter. The fuller line-up gave James credibility as a live act to be reckoned with. This led to a live album, and James’ signing to Phonogram and the release of Gold Mother which spawned the hits “Sit Down” and “Come Home”. Achieving better and better sales with each consecutive album, 1992’s Seven was a million seller. An all acoustic tour ensued with Neil Young, which helped the James sound to become further refined. The band didn’t play an electric set for three months. On return from tour, James felt they were ready to re-approach Brian Eno. Having heard demo tapes of material the band were working on, he readily agreed to produce material with James. The result of six weeks of writing and recording over forty songs was the acclaimed Laid album, released in 1993. At the same time, it earned James the Stateside recognition they had been yearning for. Where did they go? Until earlier this year, things had been rather quiet in the James camp. Singer Tim Booth embarked on a project entitled Booth And The Bad Angel with renowned Italian-American composer Angelo Badalamenti, putting him out of James’ composing equation for quite some time. Almost simultaneously, founding member of James, Larry Gott, decided he couldn’t go on touring. Coinciding with a realisation that they owed five years in back taxes, the band were on the verge of splitting. Baynton-Power recalls with posthumous humour that this time was referred to as “Black Thursday”. Ever undetered, 1995 saw Baynton-Power set up a studio in his North Wales home. The band, with the absence of singer Booth, jammed and reflected, and emerged with a plethora of material, ripe for the renewed collaboration with Brian Eno. The main reasoning behind building the studio was financial. In David’s words….. “It costs a lot of money to get a band as big as this into a studio, so I suggested that we could do a lot of the preparation in just one room. There’s all the equipment available, which doesn’t cost much to rent. So you can just sit in a house, which has the added benefit of allowing everyone to develop their sounds.” This was evidently preferable to the standard rehearsal room experience which James have been well accustomed to in the past. “When you’ve got a load of people banging away in a room there’s often not much interaction, and it just becomes a noise. It sounds great at the time, but then you listen back and can’t decipher what you were trying to achieve.” To this end, James, and David Baynton-Power in particular became heavily involved in sequencing, initially employing a simple Atari with Cubase set-up, and then adding DA88s to the equation. This technology changed the working process for the band. The methodology of recording to digital multitrack and having the flexibility to edit the best takes into the finished product has been embraced wholeheartedly. “We just stripped all the multitracks onto the DA88s” says David, “and set it up at home with a couple of samplers, Cubase, and a small mixing desk, and just sifted through the whole lot.” He goes on to explain the additional advantages of recording every take. “If someone’s just doodling on guitar or whatever, and you dash into the room saying ‘that’s great, play it again’, the response will be ‘I can’t’, so I guess my role on how the album occurred was to take the approach of getting absolutely everything on tape, and then having the job of piecing it all together to sound like a live recording. Which, essentially, it was.” Perhaps as a consequence, there are definite nods to the dance fraternity on Whiplash, but David maintains that this was not a conscious decision. “All our albums have been a definite reaction to whatever we’ve done previously” he says. “We just felt comfortable with the ideas we were coming up with, which happened to be dance influenced. We didn’t know how it would turn out, but it just seemed to work.” In with Eno The recording of the album was a very natural process for the band. Having been afforded the luxury of spending an abundance of time thrashing out ideas before going into the studio with Eno and co producer Stephen Hague, the result is an album that is enticingly at ease with itself. The production process was equally re!axed; having collaborated with Eno before, Baynton-Power cites the partnership as “ideal, because he doesn’t turn it into an Eno production, he’s more of a guiding force without dominating.” Eno also appears as main backing vocalist on Whiplash, to which he took a slightly unorthodox approach. Baynton-Power laughingly explains, “He’d just sit at the mixing desk, SM58 in hand, listen to the track and lay down some guide vocals. We ended up keeping a lot of them.” David employed a similarly spartan approach for miking up his drum kit. His favoured 4-piece Tama kit was often miked with just a stereo pair. “You just get a much livelier sound. Multiple miking can often sound a bit dead and clinical. You know, you listen back to classic old records with massive drum sounds, and they were recorded with just two mics. The only downside is that you don’t have the control at the mixing stage.” This raw style of production appears to stem from the unpretentious approach Baynton-Power has to the task. On how he got into production, he simply explains, “I’ve always fucked around with mixers and studios; it’s really not a big deal.” So no top secret effects to get those huge industrial vocal sounds? “Nah,” says David, “That sound on ‘Go To The Bank is just a combination of Tim’s dynamic voice and one of those little Boss compressors.” Intriguing. On the question of which one, the nonchalant reply is “you know, the blue one.” Top producer Stephen Hague was also involved, but according to Baynton-Power, he had little influence on the final product. “Stephen was really keen to get involved with Whiplash, but he’s so busy that he didn’t have a whole lot of time to spend on it. And since so much of the groundwork had already been done, his input was limited. Anyway, he didn’t really want to babysit the whole album, he wanted to just pop in and see what was going on.” David is in the rare position as a drummer to have production skills, and he finds this a major advantage in achieving the sounds he wants. “It’s about ideas really. When you’ve got a specific sound in your head, it’s certainly a bonus to be able to capture it. Instead of having to explain it to five other people, and convince them that it’s a good idea, and then get them to do it.” Unusually, David records the live drum tracks after much of the other instrumentation has been committed to tape. “On a lot of the tracks, we’d have virtually everything on tape, and I’d just bash away until I get that groove. If you’re recording a guide track live, you might get a good feel, but you won’t be able to recreate it, so I prefer to do it after.” There are dangers of working in this way, though, which David is fully aware of. Manipulating, sampling, and lots of overdubbing can be detrimental to the live feel which is so vital in James’ music. “It doesn’t detract from the live feel at all”, he explains, “because what we do is write and rehearse loads of songs together. We all learn our parts, and play it as a band.” Mastenng the whip Recording at Foel studios was also an essential element in the mastering stage of Whiplash, as David enthuses. .. “This is a great place to work, the atmosphere is superb, and the studio has one of the few Trident B desks in the country.” The culled equipment of the band members is installed at the studio, too, and includes some surprisingly modern kit for essentially a guitar based rock band. Units such as E-mu’s Orbit and the Nord Lead feature heavily on Whiplash, along with the omnipresent samplers, including Akai SlOO0′ s and the E-mu 6400, yet David is a tad sceptical about editing sounds just for the sake of it. “You can fall into the trap of limiting your options. I just find that if you start fiddling around, you can lose the original ideas. It’s far better to stick with the sound you thought was great in the first place. Keep it spontaneous, that’s the key. “We’ve always used stacks of synths, and we use them on stage, too,” David explains, “and I don’t think the audience realise that there’s a lot of pre- recorded stuff going on too.” On the subject of tours, James’ recent tour of north America was cut short due to Tim Booth injuring his neck. There were rumours of substitute vocalist Michael Kulas filling the position, which were misconstrued by the press as Booth having left the band to continue his collaboration with Angelo Badalamenti. Patently untrue, of course, but it prompted the cancellations. Booth has fully recovered now and is on top form, if his country and western rendition of ‘Star’ is anything to go by. David has few qualms about the situation though. “They were only club gigs really. Not many people knew about the tour anyway, and since we’re doing the Lolapalooza gig, and some festivals, people will have a chance to see us at some point.” Also on the bill for Lolapalooza are acts such as the Chemical Brothers, Orbital and the Orb, but David is confident that with the dance inspired meanderings of the Whiplash material, there won’t be a disparity with their show. James are versatile live, too, which stems from their willingness to tryout new material live. This has a number of benefits according to Baynton-Power. “The thing is, you have the opportunity to hone songs you’re working on in a live environment. You can see the audience’s reaction, you can develop the song even further, and also, hearing the stuff in alive context rather than a rehearsal room is an added bonus. Because you’re playing at high levels and you’ve got huge monitors, the kick drum, for example, is just…” (punches his hand -very hard). The live arena is of particular importance to James. Their shows are eclectic and highly acclaimed, and the band view touring as essential part of their progression. As David enthuses, “Getting up on stage is just so inspiring. You really lose yourself in it. Then you take the experience back to the studio.” What’s next? Keeping himself ever busy, Baynton-Power’s latest project is a female fronted dance-oriented band called Money. Collaborating with some of the members of James, David sardonically describes the project as “making music that we’re probably totally unqualified to make.” But surely this at odds with the band’s foray into everything dancey? ” Although we had some dance leanings on Whiplash it wasn’t really deliberate. This latest project is out-and-out dance. Half the band are involved in the project as writers and producers, and it just kind of stemmed from going to parties around here in Wales.” The Money project were just heading off to Canada for their first clutch of gigs, and David is excited at the prospect: “It’s really a kind of experiment, with the upcoming gigs we’ll have live guitars and everything, but within a dance act. And we’re funding it all ourselves as well, and we just want see where it goes. If it goes anywhere. It’s quite crossover, and the upcoming gig in Toronto will be mainly a rock audience, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens. Money is a completely external project to James, but I guess people will use that as a marker.” And some marker that may prove to be… | Sep 1997 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: A Sound Investment – Issue 4 | Fanzine | A Sound Investment was a James fanzine produced by California based Chris Zych and Lori Chin. Download this fanzine as a PDF. A Sound Investment is © copyright 1998 Chin and Zych. | Jan 1998 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: James on Sunday – Issue 2 | Fanzine | James on Sunday was a James fanzine. This is the second issue. Download this fanzine as a PDF. © copyright James on Sunday. | Jan 1998 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Winner By A Neck – Melody Maker | Article, Interview | James’ Tim Booth has revealed how a Tibetan healer is helping him recover from a neck injury which has been plaguing him for months. Booth hurt his neck onstage in Vancouver in April last year, at the beginning of a six-week US tour. The band called off the rest of the dates while doctors told Booth to remain horizontal for seven days. He was then ordered to rest for at least six weeks. The injury had not healed at the end of the six weeks, but Booth carried on as James played the Lollapalooza tour and Reading Festival, where he surprised fans by appearing in a neck brace. The pain got no better as the weeks went by, and it was only last week that Booth was well enough to attempt physiotherapy for the first time. Nevertheless, James are coming back with a full schedule, and they launched their latest projects with an acoustic gig last week in a London studio. Bernard Butler, Zoe Ball, Orbital, Jo Whiley, Texas, Dubstar, and Chris the mechanic from “Coronation Street” were among the audience watching the band run through a selection of favourites and a couple of new songs. “Destiny Calling”, one of the new tracks, will be released as a single on March 2. Along with “Run Aground”, another new song, it will be included on a greatest hits album, “The Best of James”, which follows on March 23, and a UK tour will follow. Dates are Manchester Apollo (April 11), Glasgow Barrowlands (13), Doncaster Dome (14) and London Brixton Academy (17). The band will be playing electric instruments on the tour, although they may separately set up a few acoustic gigs – which the specially enjoy, being multi-instrumentalists. They plan one for Radio 1 and another in Manchester, possibly on a barge. Acoustic gigs are also less of a threat to Booth’s neck injury, which is more serious than anyone realised at the time. “At one point, I was looking at being crippled,” he said. “I only started doing any exercise, physio, in the last week. Before that, every time I tried to do physio, I’d be on my back for two days. It just wasn’t healing. I couldn’t lift a paper bag.” The Maker suggested that playing the Lollapalooza tour probably hadn’t helped his recovery. “It probably would have been quicker if I hadn’t done those dates,” he agreed. “We couldn’t get out of them because of insurance. It was very interesting, I was one of the main survivors of Lollapalooza. A lot of bands split after that, or got seriously damaged. I think I did quite well.” “I was being moved around all the time in the bus and I had to withdraw and be quite quiet, and I had a nurse with me virtually the whole time.” “I’ll still have to be more careful for a while but I can’t not react to the music. I’m a dancer, and dancing’s the thing I love. I adore it. I can’t stay still. When I had the neck brace on at Reading, I was still moving more than most people. So we’ll see how it goes. I’ll be a bit tentative on this tour, and the band will be shouting at me if I forget.” Asked if he intends to do what the doctors tell him, he said: “I’ve never really gone with established medicine, ever since I nearly died of a liver disease. I’ve had a number of injuries, but they’ve also been life-saving.” “Illness is an amazing teacher. I’m happy with the end result, and I’ve gone through hell in some periods, but it teaches you a hell of a lot. I will get better from this one.” “As I said, I feel it [the healing] has really started now. If you’d asked me two months ago, I’d say it hadn’t started.” “I’ve been having some really good treatment from a lunatic. I know enough shamens and healers around. I’m seeing a Tibetan doctor.” “I had two ruptured discs in my lower neck – the spongy discs between the vertebrae. Two of them burst. Eventually, the bones fuse together naturally. That’s what traditional medicine says, but I don’t necessarily think that’s what we’ll be doing.” “You can heal anything, that’s my attitude. I’ve done that before.” James, meanwhile, have been working on new material – “the best we’ve ever done” – with a view to an album release in the autumn. | Jan 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James To Leave Home – NME | Article, News |
James kick off the year with news of a Greatest Hits LP featuring two new songs and a short UK tour. The album was due to be released before Christmas but was put back because singer Tim Booth was still suffering from the neck injury that caused the band to pull out of their Glastonbury and V97 performances last year. The album called “Best Of” is released by Fontana on March 23. It is preceded on March 2 by a new single “Destiny”, produced by Ott, who has worked with Embrace, Elastica and Gene. The single marks a departure for James. “It’s a mad little song about the whole notion of fame and success and the machine”, Booth told NME. “I’m happy putting out a greatest hits album but it’s all part of the machine so the lyrics to the single highlight that. Watching MTV I get the impression that rock n roll is just as manipulative as any crap game show or chat show” The album features material spanning from the band’s Factory days to the present and includes the single and another new track “Run Aground” “It’s about general rock band attitudes to women”, Booth said of Run Aground. “When you’re in a band, you’re offered sex on a plate and you get to see what happens if you take that and if you then try to have a relationship of substance” James play a handful of dates in April, by which time Booth hopes to be fit again. “The Lollapalooza tour was hell for me” he said. “I was in a neck brace and in a lot of pain. It’s still not healed. I’m hanging upside down a lot at the moment. I’m gonna start doing some training soon.” James play Manchester Apollo (April 11), Glasgow Barrowlands (April 13), Doncaster Dome (April 14) and London Brixton Academy (17). | Jan 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Top Of The Crocks – Manchester Evening News | Article, News | It was not so long ago that Tim Booth of Manchester band James was known as one of the most energetic dancers in rock. Not for him the slow-motion so-called “live” approach of Liam and Noel Gallagher. A show by James — who have had 13 top 40 hits in a 12-year career — was always notable for the former Manchester university student’s jerky dancing. Alas, all that livewire frugging caused a nasty neck injury to the frontman not long after their appearance at the Manchester Apollo last year. The mishap was so serious it cut short their American tour. But the band were determined to play last summer’s Reading Festival, at which the poor chap appeared wearing a neck brace to go with his spangly shirt. Now James are set to roll again with the charismatic Tim braceless but still bouncing. They’ll take the stage again at the Apollo on April 14 — tickets go on sale today — and doctors have told Tim he’ll have to restrain himself. “He can dance, he can express himself, but he’ll just have to be careful where his neck is concerned,” says a band insider. Maybe he should take his own advice from one of the group’s biggest hits — and Sit Down. | Jan 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Studio Eye – Melody Maker | Article, News |
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Fanzine: Change Of Scenery – Issue 8 | Fanzine | Change Of Scenery was a James fanzine produced by John Pude. Download this fanzine as a PDF. © copyright Change Of Scenery. | Feb 1998 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Destiny Calling – Channel 4 TFI Friday – February 1998 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsLive performance of Destiny Calling on Channel 4’s TFI Friday show. | Feb 1998 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Manchester And Success Bound… Thanks to a Crystal Ball – Manchester Evening News | Article, Interview | When vocalist Tim Booth was searching for new members to help return Manchester band James to the forefront of the British music scene there was only one person, outside the band, he knew he could rely on — his clairvoyant. His trusted Manchester-based confidante and adviser – Avril – offered him two names and addresses and, sure enough, her explicit detail was spot on and the last two pieces of the James jigsaw were set in place. The more cynical among us may write this off as lucky or the height of coincidence but Tim, a man whose success speaks for itself, is nobody’s fool — and he knows something extraordinary when he sees it. He says: “Avril, a clairvoyant in Manchester, has been guiding my business decisions for the past 10 years and I see her a lot. You have to put your own spin on what she tells you but she has been a wonderful help to me for a long time now. “It’s not something that I talk about a great deal, possibly because many people wouldn’t understand, but I know and see a lot of clairvoyants. I suppose it suits my particular brand of lunacy.” It’s both ironic and well-timed then that, following Tim’s crystal ball confessions, James’ new single is titled Destiny Calling. It’s out next Monday and is followed by the band’s Best Of compilation and two live home-town shows at the Apollo Theatre on April 10 and 11. And Tim’s just grateful to be around to take part in the return of the hugely popular band, who’ve been touring their unique brand of inspiring pop longer than any of their Manchester contemporaries. The singer feared he might have to hang up his microphone and dancing shoes for good last year after a pain in the neck developed into a spinal problem which was close to leaving him paralyzed. Incredibly, it was the alternative medicine of a Tibetan healer which saved him from life in a wheelchair. He said: “I hurt my neck on stage in April last year at the beginning of an American tour. We called off the rest of the dates and I was told to lie down for seven days and then rest for at least six weeks.” The injury hadn’t healed at the end of his recuperation period and Booth stunned fans by appearing on sage at the Reading Festival in a neck brace. It wasn’t until November that the freak injury — two ruptured discs in his neck — began to feel like it was healing after help from a Tibetan doctor who practised alternative medicine. Tim says: “I could have been disabled for the rest of my life by this injury. I’ve never really been one for conventional medicine. I got into alternative medicine when I almost died from what was supposed to be an inherited and incurable rare liver disease when I was 22 and it was controlled by alternative medicine. It’s obviously not for everyone, but it seems to work for me.” Tim is pleased to have come through it, for obvious reasons, but also wants to repay the loyal fans who stuck by the band during their seven-year wilderness. He says: “There are not many bands who can go seven years without success and still have a huge fan base. We have been incredibly fortunate in that respect.” “Until last year it was four years since we had played a live show in the UK. The reception we received, especially in Manchester, was just amazing. We could feel the great wave of relief, not just within the band, but among our fans, when we finally had another hit again.” Tim is promising the fans’ faith will be repaid 10-fold with the Best Of compilation, a handful of heart-stopping live shows, the new single and, later in the year, an album of brand new songs. In the meantime he is to appear on stage in Bolton, without his band and microphone, when he takes the lead role in a new play, soon to be announced, which he described as “pretty intens.” His faith and neck restored, Tim believes 1998 will be James’ best year ever. Why? Well, because Avril says so. | Feb 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
MTV Up For It – March 1998 | Session, Video Archive |
SetlistLaid / Destiny CallingDetails
SongsShare: | Mar 1998 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Destiny Calling – Pepsi Chart Show – March 1998 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsPerformance of Destiny Calling on Pepsi Chart Show. | Mar 1998 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Hit Therapy – The Times | Article, Interview | A weak liver and a bad neck didn’t keep James’s lead singer Tim Booth sitting down. “I hurt my neck when I was on stage in Vancouver last year. I was ordered to rest for six weeks but the injury didn’t heal. At one point I was looking at being crippled. I’ve never really gone with established medicine – my healing started after really good treatment from a Tibetan doctor. You can heal anything if you find the right curer. As a child I was called ‘Chinky’ because my skin was yellow. It went that colour because I couldn’t break down fats. By 22, I was desperately ill and had to be hospitalised. The doctors told me that I had an inherited liver disease and there was nothing they could do. I discharged myself and sought alternative advice. I tried acupuncture, which was enormously healing because the liver affects the mind – jaundice is just a mental condition. The Chinese understand these things much better than us – they’ve realised that liver conditions can be explained entirely in terms of anger and confusion. My body was full of toxins so I progressed to colonic irrigation. It was the most dramatic treatment. I felt fantastic as soon as I started. I also tried the gall bladder flush which is rather slower. You drink a small dose of olive oil and lemon juice every morning for a year, then suddenly down a litre and a half in one go. I flushed out a jam-jar-full of gallstones. It was pretty uncomfortable for two nights but better than an operation. Music can be very healing. I know that some of my songs are therapeutic by the letters I get. Our best-known number, Sit Down, touched a lot of hearts. I have been approached to perform in hospitals and psychiatric institutions. I’m very wary of group meditation because of all the gurus involved. When people think they have the power to help people transcend to a higher being, they usually turn out to be creeps. Alternative medicine is all about realising your full human potential – you have to find the right life-system. I’ve tried all sorts – vegetarianism, teetotalism, celibacy – but in the end you just have to find peace with yourself.” | Mar 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Difference A Day Made : Tim Booth – The Guardian | Article, Interview | Manchester-born Tim Booth, 38, is lead singer with James, who release their Best Of album today and will tour the UK in April. We have no way of assessing and understanding our own lives in a greater sense, so the day that changed my life was probably some seemingly uneventful day, on which I blew my nose and triggered off a quantum reaction that sent my world on a different spin. However, here is a list of esoteric incidents in chaotic order, that left a deep impression on my software. Mother nearly miscarrying me left a sense of being unwanted and a fear of walking on sidewalk grills. Being born and son being born. The horror of boarding school. The need to please, to fit in. Loneliness and dealing with bullies. Having a near-death experience in hospital. Living with an undiagnosed, inherited liver disease for 22 years. My son nearly dying of croup at six months in Portugal and driving 120 miles through the night to the nearest hospital. Discovering that dancing and singing take me closer to the spirit. Discovering that spirit is alive and well, despite the attempts of organised religions to kill her. Rupturing discs in my neck; illness has been a great teacher, but I wish he’d piss off now. Working with inspiring people: Brian Eno, Angelo Badlementi, Gabrielle Roth. Love affairs and break-ups. A couple of incredibly vivid dreams that warned me about the self-destructive direction my life was taking. They were about the dire consequences of the tortured artist myth I was trying to live up to at the time. Meeting, loving and proposing to my beloved. Today. | Mar 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Best of James Due This Month – Rolling Stone | Article, News | British rock act James is set to release their greatest hits at the end of the month. Titled James: The Best Of, the 18-track album will be released on Mercury in the U.K. and Canada on March 24. As of now there are no plans for a U.S. release. The collection culls the band’s greatest hits from the last 15 years, and features two new songs, “Destiny” and “Run Aground.” James will follow the release of The Best Of with a short tour of England and Scotland. That road trip will start with a two-night stint at Manchester’sApollo Theatre on April 10 and 11. From there, the band heads to Glasgow’s Barrowlands on April 13, Doncaster’s The Dome on April 14 and London’s Brixton Academy on April 17. Plans for a new studio album, set for a fall release, are currently in the works. In related news, Money, a James side project, has started to get a lot of recognition. The techno dance outfit — which does not feature James’ quirky frontman Tim Booth — has been seen performing at various clubs around London. | Mar 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
MTV Interview with Tim Booth and Saul Davies – March 1998 | Article, Interview, Video Archive |
DetailsJames 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” | Mar 1998 | article interview video-archive | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Best Of – Band Biography | Article, Biography | Because it has been a policy of James not to minimise the risks of accidental music, they’ve always had little in common with their play-safe British contemporaries. At early rehearsals in Manchester in 1981 and 1982 (when the band was called Model Team International), the emphasis was never on the barre chord or the obvious riff. Why write songs that will rescue you from material discomfort when you can write five that no other human beings would ever think of? The first single by James, ‘JimOne’ (Factory, 1984), was pop music of dizzy and unusual character. Constructed from lengthy jams, the songs paradoxically had a gleeful and ‘once-only’ quality to them, as though this hybrid of folk, sea shanties, postcard and king sunny ads would be too audacious to attempt twice. By the equally startling follow-up, ‘Hymn From A Village’ (Factory, 1985), James fragile yet intense art had a besotted audience. As a music unit, James were the UK independent music scene’s nearest thing to cult: secretive, misunderstood, eagerly gossiped about, even a little sinister. The long-awaited debut album, Stutter (Sire, 1986), was produced by Patti Smith’s guitarist Lenny Kaye and included the keynote track ‘Johnny Yen’, which addressed one of singer/lyricist Tim Booth’s most urgent topics: how much madness is too much when you are creating a work of art? For certain, there were few more intense ‘performance’ bands than James in the 1980s. As improvisors, they were all the more compelling for being non-virtuosi. There was no technique to hide behind. After a second album, Strip-Mine (Sire, 1988), the band underwent one of its periodic restructuring, releasing the high quality live album ‘One Man Clapping’ (Rough Trade, 1989), and increasing ultimately to a septet with a trumpeter, a violinist and a keyboard player. Their hometown had exploded as a worldwide force in youth fashion. Yet James, for all their local success, had seemingly been omitted from the party invitations. A commercial-sounding single, ‘Sit Down’, in the summer of 1989, had failed to ignite as intended. Hardly ever given a bad review, the band released their third studio album, ‘Gold Mother’ (Fontana, 1990), to terrific acclaim and the commercial breakthrough came at last in the spring of 1991 with the re-recording of ‘Sit Down’. A bouncy anthem for the downtrodden and the eccentric, the song became one of the most popular of the decade. Only the peculiar boy-man that was Chesney Hawkes prevented it from getting to number 1. From being Manchester’s forgotten sons, James now whizzed to the other extremity: a crossover success story, a band that could headline a festival and a group with a total up-to-date attitude towards dancing rhythms. The next album, Seven (Fontana, 1992), lodged itself at number 2, behind Stars by fellow Mancunians Simply Red, yielding the hit singles ‘Sound’ and ‘Born of Frustration’. There was an imperative at the heart of Seven that epitomised the band’s music and beliefs: “do something out of character.” Whenever they’re playing, and whichever song they’ve just started to play, James have always respected the element of risk, believing that if you take risks a great movement could potentially be only a few seconds away. In the studio, conventional procedures are avoided. Nobody actually writes James songs. They emerge from the intensity of jams, as shapes will emerge from a 3D puzzle if you stare hard enough. For many years the band had wanted to work with producer Brian Eno, whose reserves of intellect and emotion marked him out as a must-have collaborator. When the sessions finally got underway in Bath in 1993, they turned out better than anyone had dared hope. For one thing, James went in to record one album and came out with two. Laid (Fontana, 1993) was the ‘official’ release: an intimate and soulful work, it not only delighted the band’s European fans, but also proved highly successful in America, where James toured heavily in 1994. Indeed, in a year when British music was struggling to make any headway whatsoever in the states, only James and Radiohead could rightfully claim wholly to have articulated their full-on psycho-dramatic-physical art to the North American continent, with nothing being lost in translation. It was then revealed that, while making Laid, James and Eno had recorded an additional double album: a hidden treasure of proper songs, fully-blown jams and extra-curricular ambient footage that existed in a slightly different continuum to the parent album, but was far from mere over matter, since it gave a vital and unprecedented glimpse. It was released as Wah Wah (Fontana 1994). If the music on Wah Wah pointed towards a non-song based, deconstruction alist, industrialised future for James, the actual outcome was even more minimalist: a long hiatus that stretched to three years. During this extended layoff, the six members of this once-parochial band were rumoured to be living in four different countries; in the meantime, the music world was a blur of genres, sub-genres and proto-genres. James hibernated. Tim Booth recorded an album with movie composer Angelo Badalamenti, Booth and the Bad Angel. For a moment it looked as if James might have run its course. But there’s a momentum to this band that nobody can rightly pinpoint. In 1997 James returned, refreshed, slightly changed and armed with a glamorous new creation called Whiplash. This album – as momentously sexy and downright melodically uncanny as any the band had ever delivered – would have been a brilliant comeback under any circumstances. But it shot them back into the top 10; claimed a key place for James in a modern world; re-awakened those who had forgotten about them. Still their modus was mysterious: where did something as short-skirted and horny as ‘She’s a Star’ come from? How did it get there? As we approach the third millennium, James continue to shine out in the dark like a lighthouse (not quite belonging to the land, not quite separated from it), a band whose music is beyond fashion – often better than fashion – and whose fans are a by-word in loyalty. We have some news for you. James remain active, vivid, hot, coy, sensual, and absolutely inexplicable. by David Cavanagh | Mar 1998 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Pop Group Deny They’re Splitting Up – The Mail | Article, Interview | Don’t panic, James fans… They are alive, well, still together – and working right here in Scotland! Rumours that the boys were on the verge of a split were fuelled by the announcement that they’ll have a “Best Of…” package released this week. But, no, they are NOT milking the cash cow before a final curtain call. Singer Tim Booth says that work on a new album is in progress – at a SECRET Scottish location. All very exciting. “Split rumours have been going around since our Whiplash album and my solo project Booth and the Bad Angel,” says Tim. “I can tell you they are just not true. We’ve no intention of splitting up. We’ve got too much still to do. We’ve already written about 20 or 30 new songs in a house somewhere near Dollar and they are the best things we’ve ever done.” There will be a taste of the new material on the Best Of album and they already have enough songs for a completely new album later in the year. “We’ve got that feeling again where you know you are writing a classic and it feels so right. I haven’t had that since writing Sit Down. “All the band have enjoyed coming to Scotland. I holiday here quite a lot, especially near Inverness. “Scottish people are a lot cooler. They leave us alone to get on with things.” There was a time when James would never have been left alone. In the early ’90s, no self- respecting Indie kid would be seen dead without a James T-shirt and the band sold more shirts than copies of their 1990 album, Gold Mother. On the front cover of every magazine and Features paper, they were hailed as the new U2 or Simple Minds, playing gigs to 30,000 people a night – and, amazingly, not very happy about it all. Over the past few years, James have deliberately worked hard to under- sell themselves, to get out of the glare of the spotlight. “We shut our fan club and said ‘no’ to a lot of media opportunities that would have probably sold us the next 100,000 albums,” says Tim. “We were normal people who, all of a sudden, had this massive hit with Sit Down. It went out of control. We had people sitting on our lawn, following us to the toilet. A group of Japanese teenagers even flew to Manchester and stayed for six months until they eventually bumped into me. “This time, if we have a runaway hit, I think we’ll be ready for it. We won’t spend any time trying to keep control of it. We’ll just let it go. “Once we’ve picked the best of the 20 or 30 tunes we’ve got, we’ll have the best album from James yet and it should be out in September.” James could have been forgiven if they HAD decided to call it a day in the last three years… Guitarist Larry Gott quit to spend more time with his family and the band discovered they owed £250,000 to the tax man. “And I should have been a bit more careful when it came to naming the last album,” grins Tim. “No sooner had I called it Whiplash than I GET whiplash… I ruptured two discs in my neck and spent three months in a neck brace. “It was agony. I was right in the middle of a tour and I had to keep going. “I managed okay, but the damage was too much and we had to cancel our next tour.” “But we are doing a short tour next month, including the Barrowlands in Glasgow on April 13, and we’ll see how we hold out. I think I may have to cut out the erratic dancing and jumping about, but the show will still be good! “I thought I was feeling better but, in the last couple of weeks, the neck is sore again and I may have to wear that brace.” “It’s either that or quit, because if I do any serious damage, we may never be able to tour again. It’s literally a right pain in the neck,” says poor old Tim. But don’t worry about the band bowing out. Dig out your old James shirt and remember that the best could be still to come. | Mar 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
All Rise For The Second Coming Of James – The Independent | Article, Interview | Dominic Utton sits down with James to talk about the ‘Madchester’ fallout, a few humbling experiences and getting back on their feet in the UK… Although having come to prominence as part of the “Madchester” scene at the end of the Eighties – alongside bands like the Charlatans, the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays – the career of James has been less straightforward than that of most of their baggy contemporaries. Formed as early as 1982 after bassist Jim Glennie invited a dancer (then drama student Tim Booth) he spotted in a Manchester disco to sing for his band, they released a couple of EPs on the seminal independent label Factory, before eventually achieving a brief and sparkling success with singalong folk-pop singles such as “Sit Down” and “Come Home”. Despite being revered in their home city (Morrissey: ” James are the best band in the world!”), and despite in “Sit Down” having the anthem of 1990, they never really emerged from the shadow of their fellow Mancunians. “We tried to side-step that Madchester thing really,” says Jim Glennie. “We were worried that if you come in on a wave you can get dragged back out by it. . . but, I mean, I loved that period. We took the Happy Mondays on tour, we played with the Stone Roses. . . we weren’t shunning that time or anything, we loved it. We were just a bit scared it would work against us in the long run.” For a while it seemed it did. Several of James’ peers survived the Madchester fallout: the Charlatans came back with the superb Tellin’ Stories, Happy Monday’s Shaun Ryder formed Black Grape, John Squire of the Stone Roses achieved commercial (if not critical) success with the Seahorses, and the same band’s singer Ian Brown recently released a solo debut album Unfinished Monkey Business. In comparison, James looked to have gone the way of the many also-rans. Until, that is, the end of last year, when they burst back into the pop consciousness with “She’s A Star”, an infectious, soaring blend of guitar pop and vocal harmonics that recalled the whirling optimism of their best Madchester songs. Now the success of that single is to be followed this month with another release “Destiny Calling” and a Best of CD. Jim Glennie is cautious about how the public might react: “People tend to think it means the band is going to split up, which was something we didn’t even think about. But we’d spent four years slogging around America, and when we released “She’s A Star” we wondered if anyone over here would be interested – and then it entered the charts at Number 9 and it was like, bang, we’re right back in there. So we decided to get things moving a lot quicker, and the easiest way to do it was to get the Greatest Hits out.” It’s a surprising album. Surprisingly chiefly for the number of hits they’ve had, for the number of songs you’d forgotten about, or forgotten where James songs. Songs that on reflection were actually all rather good. From the angular folkiness of the Factory released “Hymn For A Village” through the anthemic “Sit Down” and “How Was It For You?” to the lush confidence of “She’s A Star”, the CD is fascinating in the way that only a Best of CD can be – charting as it does the band’s musical evolution. Jim agrees that the James sound has changed, but rather resents the folk label: “Folky? Do you mean adopting a mock muso-journo-whine spindly indie-folk-music?” Erm. . . He laughs. “Yeah, we have changed a lot. ‘Hymn From A Village’ sounds so, kind of, young and naive and scritchy-scratchy now. It sounds like we’re purposely trying to make it sound like a demo – although we weren’t at all. . . And then later we went through a phase of dragging loads of technology on board, samplers and drum machines and stuff. . . Now I think it’s almost kind of breaking it back down again, to the bare bones. We’re recording new things very quickly, keeping them fresh, keeping them a bit raw, not overcooking things. In a way it’s getting back to the principles of the early days.” Does this mean there’s more new stuff to come? “We’re hoping to get another album out for the end of the year. That was another reason for the Greatest Hits – it’s the easiest way to get back on course: get a greatest hits out, two singles off that and straight into the next album. . .” With all this obvious enthusiasm for new material, one cannot help but wonder exactly where James have been for the past three years. Prior to “She’s A Star”, their last real hit was “Laid”, back in ’93. Jim laughs again. “Funny you should say that – it was ‘Laid’ that kicked things off in America. It just took on a life of its own over there, it was completely played to death, so we thought right, let’s capitalise on this. We went over there supporting everybody, trying to gradually build up a support of our own – but the place is so bloody big it does literally take years. It was strange. It was humbling. We left on the back of the success of ‘Sit Down’, doing laps of glory around Britain; and suddenly we were back in places where nobody knew who we were, or supporting Duran Duran. . .” Duran Duran? “Oh yeah, them and lots of other cool people too. People would ask us, do you like Duran Duran’s music and it would be like laughing I think they’re very good at what they do. . .” The new CD is to be backed up with a small British tour in April – playing two dates in Manchester as well as one each at the Brixton Academy, Glasgow Barrowlands and Doncaster Dome. The band are excited at the prospect. “It’s going to be mad,” says Jim, “it’s going to be a huge big celebration from start to finish. James gigs tend to be celebrations anyway, but with this being wall-to-wall hits, it’ll be especially mad. It’ll be brilliant.” James’ new single ‘Destiny Calling’ was released on March 2. ‘The Best of James’ CD is released on March 23. | Mar 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Britpop’s Big Brother – The Independent | Article, Interview | He’s the man who inspired Noel Gallagher to start a band, yet the front man of veteran band James is no fan-punching, hotel room-trashing wild man of rock. No, definitely not cool, by any stretch. And yet… “THEY’RE certainly not cool,” says the James publicist as we wait for Tim Booth, the band’s singer and lyricist, who’s gone out to feed his parking meter. “They’re not cool in any shape or form.” They may not be cool, but they’ve certainly been around for a while. The Best Of James album, released this week, charts a career which has lasted 16 years, during which time they have had a few notable fans. Morrissey once called them “the best band in the world”, and Noel Gallagher is said to have decided to form a band after witnessing a James soundcheck. Brian Eno, who produced one of their most successful albums has said, “Their best songs rank among the very best of British pop music.” “No, we’re not cool at all,” laughs Booth, when he returns to the somewhat uncool venue for this interview, which is his sister’s small terraced house in Hammersmith. Booth is currently homeless and looking for a house in Brighton, where his eight-year-old son lives. “You don’t mind if I eat while we’re talking, do you?” he asks, coming back from the kitchen with a bowl of cereal. This is no fan-punching, coke-snorting, hotel room- trashing Wild Man of Rock, but a quietly-spoken model of politeness. And intelligent with it. Definitely not cool at all. “The whole rock world is based around the myth of sex and drugs and rock’n’roll,” Booth observes over his cereal bowl. “But I think it’s a load of crap. It’s fine for a while, but there’s a point where you have to grow up.” Booth is 38 and has long been considered in music circles as something of an eccentric, if not a downright crank. In particular, the press have mocked his alternative lifestyle, which takes in a gamut of New Age concepts such as tantric sex (“it should be taught in schools”), primal scream therapy and “shamanistic dancing”, which he teaches to drama students in his time away from the band. He even once spent three years as a follower of a strange, semi-religious cult which enforced celibacy and 26 hours of meditation every week. “I’m into using any method I can to unlock human potential,” says Booth, whose journey along the alternative highway began when he was hospitalised at the age of 22 with an inherited liver disease. Doctors told him there was nothing they could do, so he looked elsewhere for a cure and found it in acupuncture and colonic irrigation. “Once you start investigating in that way, things just turn up,” he says. “‘New Age’ is usually a journalistic term of abuse, but it’s becoming more and more the norm. I mean, the Daily Mail runs articles every day on it.” He hails from a middle-class background in Wakefield, where his father worked in the wool industry. At the age of 13, he was dispatched to a public school in Shrewsbury, which he “loathed” and he was eventually asked to leave. He worked for a while in a brewery in Tadcaster and then found his way to Manchester University to study drama. Ben Elton was a near-contemporary and directed Booth in a couple of plays. (Later this year, Booth will once again be treading the boards when he appears in Edward Bond’s Saved for two months in Bolton.) It was at a Manchester disco in 1982 that the other three founder members of James first met him and invited him to join their band, which at that time was called Model Team International. The change of name came shortly afterwards, James being chosen simply for its singular lack of resonance. “We liked it because it gave nothing away,” says Booth. “The first time we did a gig under that name, the promoter put ‘not a poet’ in brackets underneath.” In their early years, James established a cult following and eked out a living in Manchester on the dole, occasionally supplementing their meagre income with payments for undergoing drug experiments at a local hospital (with the exception of Booth, who was rejected on account of his dicky liver). Only in 1990 did they finally hit the big time, with the release of their fourth album, Gold Mother, which contained the irritatingly catchy hit single, “Sit Down”. At the time, the so-called “Madchester” scene was in full swing and James were right up there with Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets and The Stone Roses. They were certainly pretty cool at this point and, along with baggy jeans, the flowery James shirt was an essential fashion item, not to mention an important source of income for the band. Indeed, some cynics have suggested that they sold more T-shirts than they did records. Booth denies this, but he concedes that sales of the T-shirts “kept the organisation afloat”. Their success was to be short-lived, however. If anything is predictable about James, it’s what Booth calls their “chaotic unpredictability” and their somewhat perverse desire to confound the expectations of their public. Hence, in 1992, their next album, Seven, heralded a new epic sound for the band and it was promptly panned by the critics as “stadium rock”. The following year, they were back on track with the release of Laid, which broke them in the States, selling 600,000 copies. However, true to form, the follow-up, Wah Wah, a series of “ambient jams” from the Laid sessions, put them back to square one yet again. “Yes, we’ve managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on several occasions,” says Booth laconically. Things hit rock bottom in 1995, when the band discovered they owed £250,000 in back taxes. A temporary split followed, during which Booth released a solo album. Then last year James bounced back once more with their Whiplash album, which spawned the hit single, “She’s A Star”. And for once the success appears to be continuing. Early reviews of the Best Of James have been good, while the band’s new single, “Destiny Calling”, entered the charts last week at number 16. The single takes a humorously cynical look at the way the music business treats artists like bubblegum and includes the lines “Cover us in chocolate, sell us to the neighbours, frame us in a video/Clone us in a test tube, sell is to the multitude, guess that’s the price of fame”. Booth considers it realistic rather than cynical, but that’s what all cynics say. “It’s a huge, multi-million-pound industry and I know I’m a commodity,” he says. His record company’s marketing department recently presented him with a 20-page research document, but marketing isn’t really Booth’s bag. “I read half a page of it and then I conveniently lost it,” he says. “I’m not interested. I never know what chart position we’re at. I only really care in terms of whether it can assure I can make another record.” With his latest re-emergence, Booth finds himself in the midst of the new Britpop pack, surrounded by callow young wannabes who were barely out of nappies when James were first being hailed as the Next Big Thing. But he isn’t fazed. “We’re a major influence on Britpop,” he says. “I know that because a lot of the bands have come to us and told us. But we aren’t cool enough for them to do it in public,” he adds with a grin. | Mar 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Bond – Scotland On Sunday | Article, Interview | THERE’S a general rule in pop that longevity sucks. Think about it: the Rolling Stones plodding theglobe like a mummified parody of a pop group; U2 flabbily reinventing themselves every couple of years, feverishly reading cyberpunk fiction, growing goatees and hiring happening DJs in the musical equivalent of monkey-gland injections, the Spice Girls outstaying their two-single welcome. James somehow get away with it. They’ve been knocking around in one form or another for 16 years now, spending most of the Eighties languishing in obscurity in Manchester bedsit-land, beloved of the bleary-eyed obsessives who listened to John Peel, unknown to the rest of the world. When they had a hit, its hugeness was in proportion to the obscurity that had gone before. The humanist anthem ‘Sit Down’ swept the nation’s student common-rooms, encouraging the sort of smartass tertiary education ironists everyone wants to punch to occupy the dance-floors in a seated position. Ho ho. ‘Sit Down’ was one of the first indie records to kick down the gates of the chart castle, and show the way for a spate of arch, small-label guitar-pop records to storm in and change the consensus of pop music in Britain. Now indie is the new orthodoxy, James are elder statesmen of the predominant pop genre in this country. Singer Tim Booth is beginning to come to terms with the group’s legacy. “We meet these people like Oasis and they tell us how important James were to them,” he says, “how they would all listen to us and come to the gigs in Manchester back in the Eighties.” Booth has been remembering James’s history recently, coming up with a track selection for their new hits collection, Best of James. It was a chance to follow the group’s mutations, from the folky, surreal songs on the first two albums, through the harder sound that followed ‘Sit Down’, to the freeform experimentation of their recent work with Brian Eno. As often happens with these affairs, Booth found the early songs difficult to listen to. “They didn’t sound right somehow,” he says. “They just weren’t recorded as we would have wanted.” They were also a reminder of the decade of struggling that formed James’s beginnings, a time of uneasy relationships with record companies, low sales, occasional bouts of wilful obscurity. “We were artists, we were very weird, meditated a lot,” he says. “We always knew we had a certain pacing to James. We knew it wasn’t going to be quick. Like when we were invited to America to support The Smiths, we thought ‘no’. It scared us. So we retreated. We were always on our own trajectory, that was just going to play itself out.” Their fondness for the post-punk purity, their desire to be known purely for the music rather than for any image, made them seem almost self-defeating. They turned down the opportunity to be on the front of the NME, when it might have meant something, because they thought it entailed a certain selling out. They embraced the artistic cliches of independence. Ironically, given their mistrust of commercialism, they were kept afloat in the wilderness years by huge sales of their striking flower-motif T-shirts (still a must-have for certain cadres of environmentalist twentysomethings). They remembered this need for independent development when they seemed in danger of mutating into a stadium-rock band. ‘Sit Down’ and the expansive, rockier Seven album garnered James a huge live following, and their shows became mass, communal celebrations. When their Laid album sold well in America, the temptation was to take the road for a couple of years and move into the rock dinosaur league. Instead the group took a step back, took three years off to regroup and rethink. They came back last year with the successful, if not ground-breaking, Whiplash, and a single, ‘She’s a Star’, that immediately became one of those songs destined to crop up on every film and TV soundtrack around. James were still around without being embarrassing, or even noticeably that old (although Booth was sidelined for a while by a muscle injury that suggested all those years of yoga were catching up with him). “We look around for people who’ve been around for as long as us, and I suppose there’s REM, the Cure even, but we feel we are still making music that people want to hear, that we still are relevant. When we came back last year we found we do still inspire each other musically. We still have that creative streak.” | Mar 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Short-Take – Record Collector | Article, Interview |
Here’s an amusing tale about James. In 1992, Morrissey was asked to perform on an Amnesty International TV special. He agreed, but only on the understanding that his fellow Mancunians would be approached to play too. Since Moz was still pretty hot property back then, the promoters complied. It was only on the night of the concert itself that the singer’s ulterior motive became clear – he wanted them present at the unveiling of his forthcoming single, “We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful” … “We hadn’t seen him for about a year,” recalls James’ singer Tim Booth. “We’d had ‘Sit Down’ out and were starting to get big. I asked him after the show if the song was about us, and he led me to believe it was. We’re very good friends, though, and it was all good-humoured. It was a great boost for us at that time.” The biggest irony, of course, was that James had taken so very long to become Moz’s “hated” rivals. Both artists had started out around the same time (1982) and in the same city (Manchester), but the Smiths’ mercurial career was over a good four years before James’ had even started to take off. There was at least one good reason for this: James’ ill-fated tenure with Sire, whose lack of support for the band in the mid-80s has passed into legend. Before that, of course, James had established themselves as minor cult deities, via a trio of wonderfully original EPs on Factory, combining a folk-rock sensibility with a diffident, post-punk twist. However, Sire’s indifference to the chequered “Stutter” and “Strip Mine” albums (the latter was put on hold for a year) meant that any early momentum was lost. Once the band were released from their Sire contract in 1988, things finally began to fall into place. Signing with Rough Trade, they recorded the two songs that would make their name, “Sit Down” and “Come Home”, though commercial success wasn’t to come until those two singles were reissued – in a different form -by their next paymasters, Fontana, at the turn of the 90s. It’s at that point that the cult of James really took shape, and the era captured on “The Best Of James” begins. Fontana’s interest in the group was, in part, geographical – ‘Madchester’ was in the ascendant, and though James didn’t fit in with the prevailing mood of 60s revivalism and clubland hedonism, they were sufficiently entangled in the Manchester myth (Factory, the Smiths) to be seen as key players. However, it was abundantly clear that the group’s ability to write anthemic, idiosyncratic pop songs and, more importantly, to deliver the goods live, provided them with a definite advantage over their contemporaries. “I thought a lot of that stuff – the Mondays and the Stone Roses – was incredibly overrated,” declares Booth. “We tried to avoid that whole scene, because if you go in with a movement you’ll burn out with it. But it was inevitable that we’d be roped into it by some people.” When their “Gold Mother” album reached No.5, and the reissue of “Sit Down” hit No.2 (in March 1991), James were catapulted from the murky margins of indie-pop into stadium territory .There then followed four amazingly fruitful years, spawning a string of hit singles (“Sound”, “Born Of Frustration”, “Sound”) and a brace of magnificent albums, “Seven” and the Brian Eno-produced “Laid”. Their expansive sound seemed tailor made for large venues, and it made perfect sense when Neil Young invited them to support him on his 1992 U.S. tour. In stark contrast to most of the arena acts of the ’80s, James always resisted the temptation to sing about ‘big’ issues, offering instead intensely private meditations on the subjects closest to their and most people’s hearts – relationships, love, destiny, personal insecurity. Though permeated with a community spirit, their folk-rock wasn’t cut out along nationalistic lines, nor did it celebrate anyone’s cultural heritage. Thankfully, flag-waving wasn’t their bag. “If you get into that big, epic thing, and you write about wide open spaces and not your own experiences it gets vacuous,” argues Tim. “The good side of epic is Lawrence Of Arabia; the bad side is The English Patient. What we do can’t be used politically because there’s too much frailty in the lyrics.” Occasionally, Booth’s personal visions have erred on the gauche side and, as a result, James’ have never been tagged as “cool”. Certainly, he’s been guilty of coming across ‘like a sex-obsessed freshman -“How was it for you?,” “she only comes when she’s on top”, “we messed around with gender roles”, etc. – but there has also been a wonderfully poetic turn to Booth’s finely-crafted words (“The waves are turning into something else/ Picking up fishing boats and spewing them on the shore”). By mid-1994, the workload was beginning to take its toll, and James went to ground for a while. Booth recorded the solo album, “Booth And The Bad Angel” with Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalementi, before learning that, not only was his longtime creative springboard, guitarist Larry Gott, quitting the band, but James owed five years of unpaid taxes. “It was a bad time,” puffs Booth, “but we’d already been through so much that we had to go on. If we’d have split up, it would have been ten years earlier. We’d experienced everything before.” Returning in 1997 with the dynamic “Whiplash” album, James scored three more hits with the U2-esque “She’s A Star”, “Tomorrow” and “Waltzing Along” (perhaps the only “waltz”-titled rock song not to be in 3/4 time). They also headlined Reading and consolidated their Stateside profile with a prestigious Lollapalooza slot. It was proof positive that James had secured themselves a reputation as a classic, timeless rock group. Listening to “The Best Of’, its curious how a group with such an erratic, rambling biography have managed to produce such a consistently rich and satisfying canon of work. So much here sounds warm and familiar and striking, whether it’s the moody, stadium melodrama of “Born Of Frustration” or the tight, snare-roll powered pop of “Laid”. The album also includes two new songs – their celebration of manufactured pop acts, “Destiny Calling” (out now as a single), and “Runaground” – both of which sparkle with James’s magical, atmospheric stardust. “We don’t usually write hits to order, but the record company wanted another two tracks,” laughs Booth. “They turned out really well.” With Booth set to appear in an Edward Bond play, Saved, being staged in Bolton this month, and “Destiny Calling” looking set to supply them with another hit, everything has turned out pretty well for James, too. | Mar 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Castlefields Show – Melody Maker News | Article, News |
James are playing a free open-air gig on a barge in Manchester on Wednesday M arch 25, in conjunction with a local radio station. At about 2pm, the band will pull up on the canalside at Castle Quay, behind Key 103FM’s building in Castlefields, and play a selection of their hits, as featured on their “Best Of” album, which is released on Fontana this week. Fans are invited to the show, which will be broadcast live on the station after the band have been interviewed. A crowd of approximately 5,000 is expected, so fans have been requested to make their way there on foot, to avoid traffic congestion. | Mar 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Eurostar Magazine | Article, News |
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Top Of The Coco Pops – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
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The Best Of EPK | Era: The Best Of, Feature, Video, Video Archive |
DetailsAn electronic press kit to promote The Best Of in March 1998 presented by Sean Hughes. | Mar 1998 | era-the-best-of feature video video-archive era article discography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Granada Reports Castlefield Interview – 25th March 1998 | Article, Interview, Video Archive |
DetailsGranada 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. | Mar 1998 | article interview video-archive | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Destiny Calling – BBC1 Top Of The Pops – 26th March 1998 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsJames performing Destiny Calling live on BBC Top Of The Pops from 1998 | Mar 1998 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Reentry fuer Stubenhocker – Intro.de – in German | Article, News | Möchten Sie sich erinnern? Anfang der 80er. Man selbst sah noch gut aus, zumindest jung. Da gab es viel zu erleben: the years that punk broke (first time), JAMES veröffentlichten in England ihre erste EP ‘What’s The World?’, und in Deutschland übernahm Kohl fast zeitgleich die Schirmherrschaft über dieses und jenes. Liebe, Pop, Politik – alles hängt mit allem zusammen. Ende der 90er. Punk bricht mal wieder aufs neue, JAMES veröffentlichen gerade eine ‘Best Of’ aus 16 Jahren Bandgeschichte, und mag sein, der Kanzler beweist Ende Herbst weniger Sitzfleisch als die britischen Sophistication-Popper. Denn zu dieser Zeit wird ein komplett neues JAMES-Album erscheinen. Wer will da mithalten? Zumal sich auf der ‘Best Of’-Edition just zwei Stücke befinden, die zum Material ebenjenes neuen Albums gehören, das Sänger Tim Booth sowieso großspurig mit dem Vermerk ‘the best ever’ bedenkt – und er kommt damit durch. Was ist geschehen, und wie stur muß man sein? JAMES – und das wird speziell in der Retrospektive deutlich – haben eine Vorstellung, wie Musik geht. Der Wiedererkennungswert des catchy Chorus oder der smarten Melodielinie bleibt immer irgendwie gleich, ohne dabei langweilig-auf-Dauer zu meinen, vielmehr bezeugt sich in diesen stabilen Kleinigkeiten der Charakter der Band. Das kann man nicht planen, das ist Teil einer guten Sache. So ist das, und so wird’s immer sein: Synthie-Sounds, offensive Hooks und alles original britisch – schließlich kommt man aus Manchester. Auf der Insel sind sie eine Bank, richtig Starstatus, Super-Pop und mehr, in Deutschland dagegen wirkt ihre Reputation eher mager. Zwar sind Hits wie ‘Sit Down’ wohl irgendwie präsent, aber halt nur irgendwie. Vielleicht haben sie zu selten auf dem alten Kontinent gespielt, was sich, so ist zu hören, auch im Zuge der Neuveröffentlichungen kaum ändern dürfte. Das ist für die Ausgehtypen natürlich ein Reinfall, aber immerhin gibt es am Standort Ende der 90er den Pop-Konsens per Musikfernsehen. Mit Hilfe dieses Mediums kann es mittlerweile auch ohne live-dabei laufen. Vor allem, wenn man bedenkt, wie relevant Pop aus England mal wieder oder weiterhin ist. Außerdem ‘haben wir BritPop mit erfunden’, konstatiert Tim Booth in einer unbescheidenen Direktheit. Stimmt sogar. Kennt man SUEDE, sollte man um JAMES wissen. Oder auch SIMPLE MINDS, OMD und dergleichen, all das findet sich in ihrem Rahmen wieder. Doch wer zahlt ihnen dafür genügend Tribut? Noch nicht genug, also wieder an den Start. Unzählige Krisen, Hits, Musiker-Ab- und Zugänge später wollen sie es erneut probieren. JAMES sind back, remember, ‘the best ever’. Keine Alte-Männer-Attitüde, sondern lediglich das, was sie schon immer meinten und konnten, auf den Punkt gebracht. Das Wissen um zwei Jahrzehnte Popgeschichte und die eigene Historie liefern dabei den Background. Die BritPop-Old-School ist aus dem Lehrerzimmer zurück und verteilt dicke Anoraks an diejenigen, die sich warm anziehen müssen. Dazu wenig Live-Präsenz, aber Funk und Fernsehen. Das reicht. | Apr 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Videotech Interview | Article, Interview | Interviewer: Tim and Saul, welcome to Videotech. Now, we’ve just seen Sit Down, which for me was about being at university and having a good time. That was the song that broke you into a different audience. How do you look back on that now, what kind of a song is it for you? Saul: You shouldn’t have been having a good time at university, you should have been working. Tim: And getting into huge amounts of debt. Um, it’s really hard, it was sucha rollercoaster that it’s quite hard to remember, it was just every day getting different news about the song. Not only did it go to No.2 and stay there for a long time, but we were hearing stories that they would play it in all the night clubs, and people in the nightclubs would sit down on the floor and dance on the floor, and for a number of years we’d hear this. We’d hear stories that this was happening in Turkey. A friend of mine went to the biggest nighclub in Europe, holds about 10,000, in Istanbul, and they played Sit Down and all these Turkish people sat down and danced to Sit Down. We’d hear these bizarre stories, and it was like, this song’s got a life of its own, it’s doing its own thing. Audience reactions were amazing, they’d started sitting down at the concerts and singing it to us, or they’d get on the stage and sit down, or we’d get in the audience and they’d get on stage, and each time you didn’t quite know what as gonna happen at that moment. That was really thrilling, and it was totally spontaneous, it just was not planned. Interviewer: Now, that song’s on the greatest hits album, but you guys have been around for a lot longer that that, so which way is the greatest hits going, is it from then to now or from then going backwards? Saul: It covers the whole history of James really, back to 1985, the second single they did, I wasn’t in the band then, but Hymn From A Village, on Factory records, that’s there, and it and it charts all the way through to two very new songs, one of which you’re going to play later, Destiny Calling, and an even newer track, the latest thing we’ve done, a track called Runaground. So it covers basically the whole history of James. There’s no really early scratchy demos on it though. Tim: There’s not much from the first eight years, there’s one song, mainly because some of then we couldn’t get permission for, and some of them we’d recorded so badly we didn’t want to use them. Saul: Couldn’t dare listen to them. Tim: We’d be embarrassed. So it seemed that we were gonna stick to the singles, and if we called it Greatest Hits we’d all be arguing over what was, or if we called it Best of, I mean it’s called Best Of but that’s rubbish really, it’s greatest hits, it’s singles. Interviewer: Ok, well lets take a look at one of the new tracks we’ve mentioned, this is Destiny Calling. So, that’s the new single. Are we gonna be hearing it when you guys tour, when you hit the Brixton Academy in April? Tim: Oh yes, we’re working on quite a few new songs at the moment, and we hope to have some of them ready for this tour. Interviewer: Fantastic, we’ll look forward to that. What about the festivals, are we going to be seeing you at any of them this summer? Saul: Three or four have come through yeah, so we’re gonna be doing a few of those. Interviewer: Are you looking forward to getting out on the road again? Saul: Totally, yeah, especially the festivals. We were meant to do them last year but we went off to America, so this summer it’ll be good to be in our own country and making some noise. Tim: I think live is our strongest suit, anyone who’s seen us live, that’s what’s kept us going for fifteen, sixteen years, the fact that people trust that they’re gonna get something unusual live. Interviewer: Thanks for that, and we’ll see you guys after the break when we’ve got the brand new Top Ten. | Apr 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Bravo TV Interview with Tim Booth and Saul Davies | Article, Interview, Video Archive |
DetailsReporter : This is the big bit of the show, the one we’ve been crossing our fingers for. We’ve got a satellite hovering over the building and a satellite hovering over Los Angeles. We’re off now live, that was James ‘Sit Down’ hence standing up sitting down. Now we’re going live to LA to talk to two members of James. Hello James. Hello James. Saul : Wish they’d hurry up, Jesus. Reporter : James, James Saul : Come in Moscow, come in Moscow Tim : Hello Saul : Hello Reporter : Hello, you little swines, hello Tim : We’re in LA. Saul : We’re in LA Reporter : I didn’t ask you a question Saul : We’ve got this satellite gap Reporter : Listen lads, we just heard that brilliant song Sit Down. Your biggest hit, frankly you’ll never get better than that in my eyes. What was it like having a hit like that? Saul : Sit Down went in the charts at number 7 and I think all of us went “Hang on a minute, something’s happening here. Now we’ve got to focus”. And we never did. Reporter : What’s the price of fame lads? During this answer, the one of you on the right just laugh Tim : We’ve had an easy ride with fame. We’ve haven’t been…. Saul : (laughing) sorry Tim : What are you laughing at? Saul : He said “Divorce” Tim : Is that what he said? Yeah, the costliest thing about fame is divorce. Saul : That’s why I couldn’t help laughing, because it’s genuinely funny. Tim : Very good Andy Reporter : What in hell was that all about? Tim, you’ve had a neck injury Tim : Speak up Grandad Reporter : Tim, you penis, you’ve had a neck injury. You penis. Tim : We had to do Lollapolooza which was a 36 date tour of America with me in a neckbrace and a kind of travelling nurse with me. Which was a really bizarre experience cos it was the tour from hell anyway. It actually meant that I got my own quieter bus which was quite nice. I actually had one of the best rides but it was quite bizarre. Reporter : You ponce. Rumour has it, Tim, that you’ve been performing in bandages Tim : I can’t dance like I used to dance with my neck at the moment. I’ll have to wait another year or so before I can do that. Reporter : Does that mean we won’t be able to see your hilarious dance style Tim? That manic thing you do. Come on Tim : We had this amazing festival in Switzerland, Hultsfred, where we had to stand in for Status Quo when we had to play to 15,000 Status Quo fans and we won them round which was a very weird and nervy experience. Saul : I think if anyone, if this programme goes out anywhere in Sweden, we should say that Hultsfred is in Sweden. Tim : Perhaps we should, it might help Saul : You see this is what happens all summer. We get on less festivals than we should because we keep turning up to the wrong country. Reporter : You’re crazy guys, I can tell that much. Last week, Liam was slapped for being a bad boy, what sort of fun and games do you get up to? Saul : How about this? Dave, our drummer, on the roof of our bus in Auburn Hills wearing nothing but a pair of old Calvin Klein boxer shorts with a rolled cigarette in one hand and a pint of beer in the other with a pair of Wayfairer shades with a prostitute bent double in front of him wearing a bikini for example, and the whole Lollapolooza tour. We’re all there taking photos and it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen. Reporter : What a bunch of rubbish that was. I bet you made that up. Right James, you’re releasing your Greatest Hits now, is that not selling out? I bet it is. Come on. Saul : Why are we doing this? Tim : Because somebody pointed out to us that we’d had something like 14 consecutive Top 40 singles and we were like “Have we really?” and “Yeah, do you want to put them out as a Greatest Hits record?”, “OK” Reporter : Tim, give me a hippy nomad answer to where you’re living now Saul : He doesn’t know. He’s going through what I went through for years. Tim : I’ve lived in a suitcase for the last few years. I have a woman I’m marrying in New York, Saul : One in Barbados Tim : A son in Brighton, a house in Manchester and work in London. Reporter : The satellite link is breaking up lads, thanks very much, you’ve been brilliant Saul : I have this lovely house beside a mountain in Scotland Reporter : Shut up Saul : I’m having the time of my life up there when I get to see it, surrounded by forests and wonderful people, it’s a mad party house actually. Reporter : I didn’t even ask you a question. Shut up. Goodbye. Off you go. | Apr 1998 | article interview video-archive | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Sinks Titanic In The UK – Billboard | Article, News | Although it seems the numbers that matter are the SoundScan sales figures in the United States, James managed to dump Titanic from the top spot on the U.K. charts. The group’s James: The Best Of sold 60,000 copies during its first week out and nailed the No. 1 spot. The album has already gone gold by Brit standards with more than 50,000 albums sold, according to a spokeswoman for James. In related news, James frontman Tim Booth will be making his first theatrical performance since leaving Manchester University. Booth will play “Len” in an Edward Bond play titled Saved. The play will run for a month. A spokeswoman for James said since Booth has always enjoyed acting, he may pursue other roles. | Apr 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Coming Up Tour Preview – Melody Maker | Article, News | Sixteen years after their Manchester formation, James might just be the closest thing we’ve got to an English REM. There’s certainly comparisons between the two bands careers : years of cool cult underground status singing witty little ditties before going through a butterfly-like metamorphosis into international stars; both bands with enigmatic and, occasionally, Messiah-like front men and a fan-base which stretches right across the board. We often underestimate the size and popularity of Tim Booth and James. Their story is that of a band experiencing the very highs and darkest lows of maturing in public : dodgy record deals leaving them testing drugs in the local hospital to earn rehearsal money, to hitting the Number Two spot with “Sit Down” at the same time providing an anthem (and matching T-shirt) for a million students. But the extent of their success lies beyond one single. Headline shows with over 30,000 people in attendance, touring the States with Neil Young, being banned from TV for blasphemy, yet attracting a horde of Franciscan monk fans who turned up at gigs claiming they were great. From thriving at the heart of Madchester to selling a million records at the end of the Nineties, recent times have seen James go from strength to strength. So much so, in fact, that recent single “Destiny Calling” (taken from their new singles compilation) is possibly their best yet. Ever the cynical but sharp ones, the single is an ironic stab at the music industry which has dealt them injustices which they battled through to survive. It’s an underdog’s anthem which highlights the band’s outsider element, a position they thrive upon. With songs this good, James, after all these years, are at their peak, winning new fans and, by golly, playing packed out shows like these. Lovely tunes, too. Go see, go see. | Apr 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
One Of The Three Webmaster Interview With Tim | Article, Interview | At the final date of the 1998 Best Of tour, Tim asked me to come back stage with a tape recorder. Below is a transcription of our conversation: T: What it is is that I’d like to make a statement, if that’s alright with you. D: Yes. T: You can use it, and if you don’t mind letting the other fanzines use it… D: Well, I don’t actually run a fanzine T: I thought you did. D: No, that’s John and Su. T: Well, whatever. It was simply because I’ve been reading, in the latest one, A Sound Investment, the stuff about us not changing the set list anymore and seeing you there every night, it was just I thought what I’d better do is address it. It’s simply that we… that’s gone now .. you know, James has changed and we won’t be changing the set list very often again. There’s lots of reasons. I’m the only one that wants to change the set list and has wanted to for a year. And no one else does, and the reasons are quite sensible. It started out with the Adrian thing, and him learning a small set. And it was also that, like, if we’re playing to 4000, and maybe a few hundred people come both nights we’d be changing the set and maybe making the set not as good just for those 400. D: I guess it’d mean messing around with the lights as well. T: No, the lighting guy wants us to change it, that’s what he’s done for 10 years. D: The lights last night were much better. T: He loves the difficulty of not knowing what the hell we’re going to do next. And, it’s like we should make the set list for the 4000 rather than the hundred or two that are coming both nights. That was one of the reasons. And the other was that most of the others believe we play better when we’re playing the same songs. I actually disagree with that, but I’m outvoted. And that’s as it is. So I kinda wanted to say that, because I know people are coming with this expectation and it no longer applies. But, unfortunately, we just aren’t… D: We’ve been coming watching you for years, quite a few of us… T: I know. I know. I mean, I miss it, but it’s like… I also see why the others don’t want it, and obviously when we do the Christmas tour it’ll be all the new songs and it’ll be that kind of change, but… D: Have you got anything specific planned for later on in the year? T: Almost certainly something in December. D: It’ll be even colder outside. T: It’ll certainly be colder outside. You’ll have to come a bit later. Or you’ll have to bring your thermals. D: How’s the album going? T: Fantastic, it’s nearly platinum, by the fact that we get a platinum disc tonight, in advance. D: On stage? T: No, no… we haven’t gone that far. D: It nearly stayed number 1 the week Pulp came out. T: Yeah, even the second week we were only a few hundred copies away… and now we’re at number 3. It’s doing great. Oh, the other reason is that the last couple of years have been more about survival… like, my physical survival and other people’s kind of survival in different ways. D: Yeah, we weren’t expecting you to come back last year, we thought it was all over. T: Yeah. I think in a sense we probably did… or parts of us did. And changing the set list… the other reason why, which is, really sensible, is that it used to cause so many rows before we’d go on stage. D: We’ve been outside venues sort of… when the doors have been open… T: It could cause a lot of division, and it was like… well, you know, and in that sense “can’t be arsed” is fair enough… (refering to an article in A Change of Scenery Issue #7) D: Well, that wasn’t the exact comment I made. The guy who wrote the article in the last fanzine (A Change of Scenery Issue #8)… T: Well… No, I think there’s some… you see, I’m in two minds… cause I can hear those arguments and I agree… I can see the sense in a lot of them, but there’s something in my spirit that’s very upset by it not changing, and… “can’t be arsed” can be levelled as a criticism sometimes. But it’s more… it’s not so much “can’t be arsed”, it’s that we’re very chaotic… and getting us to rehearse songs… let’s say, two people don’t want to do the song, and you try to get people to rehearse it… it doesn’t work anymore… D: Is that why some of the songs you’ve been doing, you’ve been doing with three or four members… the other guys not being involved? T: On the stage you mean? Not really…. D: Ah, with the sessions… T: Ah, the sessions… Partly, cause those sessions sometimes the room’s not big enough for bass and drums. It really varies. I mean, partly it’s been, you know, who wants to do that session. It’s kind of, shambolic… D: Cause I guess it’s the first time in a long time that you’ve been doing that many sessions in such a short period of time… T: Yes… They’ve been great. I thought the GLR was the best we’ve ever done… D: Was the song you did at Radio 1 – the jam between playing into the show – was that actually… T: I can’t remember it, actually. I don’t know what we were doing at the time. D: I think Mike at the BBC was recording it. T: No, that was just us messing around. Noone’s even listened back to it. Like, we made up a song today in soundcheck and one yesterday, but to be honest they get lost a lot. It’s like us just playing. D: How much stuff have you got, like all this unreleased stuff that’s hidden away? T: The new stuff? D: Well T: Over the years? Oh don’t, I don’t know D: Well we’ve got a tape that we’re doing on the internet which we’re basically people are sending us a tape and stamps or whatever to post it and it’s basically just the songs from bootlegs from over the years and it’s all the live songs that you never actually got to the studio. T: We never got to release … D: There’s some really good songs on it. T: I’d like to hear it one day. D: I can send you a copy. Most of them are from the eighties. T: And the other issue, the one about us releasing different formats for the singles, again it’s something I’m totally uncomfortable with, but has been a matter of us competing and surviving. D: If you don’t get in the charts, you’re lost. T: All I can say to people is discriminate and don’t buy them automatically. You know, look at them and see if you want them. D: But I mean the multimedia one was a lot better. T: Good D: Because the remixes we thought weren’t that great. The mulitmedia was something different. T: We’ve been stretched a few times and it’s been like … we haven’t got it so there’s been a few remixes and again it’s kind of a compromise with the survival basically. D: Do you know what you’re putting on Runaground yet? T: Saul, Dave and Mark with Ott did a remix. This really good one. D: Of Runaground? T: Yeah, it’s really odd though. It’s got like extra guitar and extra different things in. And I think we’re putting some of the GLR on one of the tapes, I actually wanted the whole of the GLR and I think there’s something else. D: I guess it’s rarities, like on Destiny. T: Yeah, yeah I think so, there might be, I don’t know. D: Do you have a planned date for the album? Is there going to be a single with the festivals then the album? T: I hope so. If we’re lucky, we’ll get a song out in the summer before the thing gets released, but I’m doing the play you see. So that’s gonna be a little bit …. D: How that’s going? T: We start next week D: That’s sort of when the single’s coming out? T: We start next week. I have a couple of promo things I can probably do and that’s it. It won’t give it as much push. (to press officer)Is that it? D : I guess you need to go now. | Apr 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
On The Couch – NME | Article, Interview |
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. | Apr 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Addiction – Uncut | Article, Interview | 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. | Apr 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Manchester Renegades – Uncut | Article, Biography | In 1983, James released their first EP, JIMONE **, on Factory. Like The Smiths, they were stillbashing away on guitar, bass and drums while all around them loaded up with hi-tech, state-of-the-art production. ‘JimOne”s unremarkable guitar-pop had an edge that appealed to many – not least Morrissey, who turned “What’s The World” into a live Smiths favourite. JAMES II ** (1985) include “Hymn From A Village” and “If Things Were Perfect.” Their debut album, STUTTER (1986, Sire) **, was produced by former Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye. It had an improvised indie/folk feel, while Tim’s vocals swooped from high-pitched melodrama to a surprisingly deep tenor (on the thoughtful, quite lovely “Really Hard”). Held back by Sire for a full 18 months, STRIP MINE (1988) ** was seen by some as dreary and dated. A handful of tracks worked well, especially the rabble-rousing “What For”, a precursor to “Come Home” and “Sit Down.” The live album, ONE MAN CLAPPING (1989, Rough Trade) **, featured a number of retreads, though the relief of having left Sire shows in less strained vocals. “Sit Down” and “Come Home” were released as singles with little company backing, and thus went nowhere. Still, the album topped the indie charts. GOLD MOTHER (Fontana, 1990) *** was something rather different. In a daring James are hip! shock, the new seven-strong line-up, produced by Flood, boosted their lily-livered strummings, while the turbulent Booth got real embittered angst into his lyrics. A string of imperative hits – “Come Home,” “Hang On,” “Lose Control,” and a re-released “Sit Down,” plus “How Was It for You” – whipped fans to a frenzy and perfectly fitted the indie/dance crossover. And then they blew it, though it’s hard to see how. SEVEN (1992) *** was wild and possessed, with Tim howling like a coyote, angelic trumpets and powerchords lifting the sound beyond Simple Minds territory. It was a big sound – too big for its boots, said the press, who slaughtered the album on grounds of pomposity and arrogance. Produced by Brian Eno, LAID (1993) **** was spare, dreamy and sexy, from the deeply insecure and touching “Out To Get You” to the groovy “PS,” and it brought America to its knees. Session outtakes and ambient jams constituted the now-deleted WAH WAH (1994) ***, intended as a rebirth of cool – but a delayed release date meant it limped home well after U2’s Eno-produced ‘Zooropa.’ Near implosion in 1995 gave Tim space for the solo project, BOOTH AND THE BAD ANGEL (1996) ***, with Angelo Badalamenti, a low-key gem, with desolate sonic landscapes. By contrast, WHIPLASH (1997) **** was unexpectedly raucous. Unselfconscious, rockin’, playful (“She’s A Star”, “Waltzing Along”), but shot through with dark shafts of alienation. After the current ‘1998: The Year Of The Hits, a new album is scheduled for later this year. | Apr 1998 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
They Sat Down Then They Got Up Again – Vox | Article, Interview |
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.” | Apr 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
My First Gig (Saul Davies) – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
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.” | Apr 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The James Gang – The Guitar Magazine | Article, Interview | 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.” | Apr 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
A James Axeology – The Guitar Magazine | Article, Interview | 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!” | Apr 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
In Residence With Tim Booth – Select | Article, Interview | 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.” | Apr 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth’s Rebellious Jukebox – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
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.” | Apr 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Special Tour Of The Month – Q Preview | Article, News |
JAMES Why waste time with bands made up of smokin’ and drinkin’ borstal rejects when there are decent healthy specimens of pop star manhood like James? And you can thank tofu, cheese and carob-flavour malt drinks for that. But surely the pinnacle of each hit-packed night comes with the rendition of Manchester’s all-time favourite Sit Down, a song where – believe it or not – everyone actually sits down. What about that then? Manchester Apollo (11 April), Glasgow Barrowlands (13), Doncaster Dome (14), London Brixton Academy (17) | Apr 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Tour Preview – Vox | Article, News |
Sixteen years on from their first single, James have reached greatest hits time. After March’s The Best Of album comes this short tour, where they will allow themselves to be persuaded to play Sit Down just a few more times. Manchester Apollo (April 11) 0161 273 6921; Glasgow Barrowfands (13) 0141 339 8383 0141 286 5511; Doncaster Dome (14) 01302 370 777; London Brixton Academy (17) 0171 924 9999 | Apr 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Lucky Jim – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
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Itinerary: 1998 April Best Of UK Tour | Tour Itinerary | This is the band itinerary from the James 1998 April Best Of UK Tour. | Apr 1998 | tour-itinerary article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Manchester Apollo – 11th April 1998 | Audio Archive, Live Performance |
SetlistCome Home / Sometimes / She's A Star / Say Something / Born Of Frustration / Ring The Bells / Out To Get You / Five-O / Destiny Calling / Waltzing Along / Johnny Yen / Runaground / Laid / Tomorrow / Top Of The World / What's The World / Sound / Sit Down / How Was It For YouSupportTheaudienceMore Information & ReviewsAudioDaily MailWHEN Manchester DJs played the James song Sit Down in the early Nineties, many dancers took the sentiments at face value – and sat down. The reaction as James returned to Manchester on the back of their first Number One album was more animated: the crowd sang the chorus before the band started the song. To call this homecoming show a triumph would be an understatement. It was a glorious vindication of all that James have stood for in a career which has survived three generations of Mancunian rock. Contemporaries of the Smiths in the Eighties, they rubbed shoulders with the Stone Roses and now coexist with Oasis. The set list, which drew heavily on the ‘best of’ album, was a perfect indication of their enduring strengths. From the opening dance-led Come Home through to the epic Laid, Sometimes and She’s A Star, the performance had a rousing, anthemic quality. For all the arena-filling aplomb they can bring to a rock anthem, however, it is subtlety that sets James apart. As Sit Down, driven along by glam-rock drumming, provided an intense finale, frontman Tim Booth acknowledged his home crowd in the best way possible: he sat down. Dave Simpson, Melody MakerIt’s like Last Night Of The Proms without the flags, pomp, and dubious patriotism and with infinitely better music. To my left, the first of many James war veterans departs on a stretcher (eerily, at the exact moment Tim Booth sings “Help comes when you need it most”, during “Waltzing Along” – is this man a God?) Behind me, several beered-up prannies do their best at impersonating Booth while surely knowing that in order to do this you need to 1) be able to yodel, 2) dance like a demented marionette and 3) have had several “revelatory” experiences, most of them involving religion and Aqua Libra. Around, beer and hands fly into the air, the entire audience sings along with all the songs and you couldn’t find a more committed bunch of followers this side of England in the World Cup. And, arguably, James have a much, much better team. They could certainly give Hoddle’s boys a few lessons in surviving the first round. This year, James are 17 – almost old enough to vote, and certainly experienced enough to make whole albums about the other stuff (1994’s “Laid”). Implausibly, when they formed in 1981 they “rejoiced” (ahem) in the unfortunate name of Model Team International, “thanks” to a friend of theirs who worked for a modeling agency and lumbered them with promotional T-shirts. Hardly surprising that bassist Jim Glennie donated his Christian name and the band became James. Thank Jim’s mum he wasn’t called Sidney. Seventeen years, several line-up changes, several very embarrassing cardigans, Tim penchant for drastic hair reshuffles, insanity and neck braces later, the rest is history. But James aren’t. Today, James “Best Of” hit Number One. The Bunnymen had better haircuts, New Order better beats and the Charlatans more bona fide “baggy” status, but it’s a sobering thought that in 1998 James are (gulp) bigger than Pulp. It’s the songs that have kept them there and, as they flow past, it’s remarkable how many hits they’ve had (15), and not only Tim Booth and Jim Glennie have portraits in the attic. There’s an occasional whiff of stadium bluster, but “Come Home” (1990) is fresh, inviting and urgent, “Sound” (1991) is as uplifting as a Boeing and “She’s A Star” (1997) actually sounds better this year than last, its twirling guitar motif floating upwards like a balloon. Freed of his recent medical troubles, Booth dances furiously to entertain us and equally thoughtfully, the band provide a Mid-Set Lull – very handy if you’re aching for a piss. But normal euphoric service is resumed as “Waltzing Along” echoes “Born Of Frustration” and the achievements of “Sit Down” in taking lyrics about mental illness into the Top 10. Curiously, despite considerable success, James are still perceived as outsiders, not least by themselves, which is why “Destiny Calling” cornily rants about the rock biz. However, long-time fans would point out that they did this far more acutely with 1985’s dissection of rock exhibitionism, “Johnny Yen”: “Ladies and gentlemen, here’s my disease… give me a standing ovation and your sympathy”; in sympathy, they play it. But any “decline” is countered by the new “Runaground”, one of their most hypnotic moments in years. James will take us to newer, more intriguing pastures with their next album, but from 1985’s Factory classic, “What’s the World” (not on tonight’s original set-list) to the standing ovation-earning “Sit Down”, James remind us of their mainly glorious journeys so far. Some may have appreciated fewer Big Hits and more Idiosyncratic Moments (“What For?”, “Stutter”, “Folklore”…), but for two hours this is their youth, and – for fans of varying ages – our generation. Tch – to think Tim Booth once wore a T-shirt saying “James suck”. Dave Simpson, The GuardianSomeone get the chairs! Veteran rockers James are trying to play a whole gig standing up. Dave Simpson feels for them. Once upon a time, when James performed their most famous song, Sit Down, whole audiences would do just that. Nowadays it’s tempting to suggest the band take their own advice, lest their creaking joints make the decision for them and they crumple in a heap. Implausibly, this is the Manchester survivors’ 17th year, celebrated by a Best Of album (number one today) and a marketing campaign that proclaims the band’s songs have “soundtracked our lives”. This is probably a salesman’s way of saying that James have always been there, or more usually thereabouts. Never truly enormous (although they were megastars in both 1985 and 1990), they have survived largely because their stirring folky rock has taken in (and occasionally inspired) every trend from indie minimalism to baggy beats but has always remembered the tune. While vampires attain immortality by feeding on the blood of virgins, the James beat has had a legendary appetite for drummers, trumpet players, guitarists and, more recently, even founding strummer Larry Gott. Original members Tim Booth and Jim Glennie remain, the latter because he provided the band with their moniker, and presumably if he left they’d be forced to rename themselves Timothy. Inside Manchester Apollo on a second sold-out night, hordes of ageing indie kids chanted for their heroes. Sadly, City were away at Wolves. “Boothy” isn’t some hairy centre-forward, although the spindly James frontman has endured his own career of slipped discks, twisted vertebrea, instability, worrying cardigans and ghastly follicular injuries. But with the whirling Booth in fine shamanic form, the gig soon became an Event. Beer flew, chants arose, and it felt like soccer used to be, before seats and Kenny Dalglish conspired to ruin the fun. Oddly for an idiosyncratic and often intellectual group, James have always had a footy following. Suddenly, the explanation was here at full volume – it’s those massive, crowd-surging anthems that usually arrive at their gigs every few songs but tonight came thick and fast to promote The Best Of. James’s great moments – Come Home, Say Something, Sound – boast an unfathomable spirit. It’s a bit like gazing over the English countryside after five pints of Guinness. But, as anyone who’s seen Manchester’s slagheaps will tell you, the view can be disturbing. Booth made sure Born of Frustration’s lyrics hit home. “I don’t need a shrink, but an exorcist,” he howled. Suddenly his demented marionette dancing took on new meaning – this was the demons being driven out. But the most startling moments were comedic. First, during Sound, whirling spotlight’s were held aloft by two burly blokes in balaclavas… perhaps they were trying to spring Deirdre Rachid but had arrived at the wrong venue. Then, as the septet prepared to launch into their expected encore of Sit Down, the audience got there first and sang it themselves. It was an incredible moment, and Booth could only stare dumbfounded at the crowd. There was only one decent response, and he knew it. He sat down. | Apr 1998 | audio-archive live-performance article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Later With Jools – 24th April 1998 | Session, Video Archive |
SetlistShe's A Star / Runaground / Sit DownDetails
SongsShare: | Apr 1998 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Replace Jim At London Fleadh – NME | Article, News | JAMES (singer Tim Booth pictured) have replaced SIMPLE MINDS as Main Stage headliners at the Guinness Fleadh in London’s Finsbury Park on Saturday, June 6. A spokesperson for Guinness Fleadh promoters the Mean Fiddler organisation, says Simple Minds are unable to perform due to what is termed “contractual obligations”. The London Guinness Fleadh will mark the beginning of a busy outdoor festival touring schedule for James throughout Europe. The band recently hit the Number One slot in the UK with their ‘Greatest Hits…’ package. | May 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
How Was It For You? – The Band | Article, Interview |
After 15 remarkable years, numerous line-up changes and countless highs and lows, James are back. Pat Reid sits down to meet the survivors. Tim Booth, singer with James, has got amazing eyes. Penetrating yet sympathetic, suggestive of both sharp intelligence and playful humour, they sum up the band far better than those best-selling “Ja” t-shirts you saw everywhere in the late 80s. With a new Best Of album to promote, Tim, along with guitarist/violinist Saul Davies, is on the interview treadmill in a London hotel. The pair’s personalities are contrasting, but oddly complementary. Tim is gentle, Saul is aggressive. Tim’s agenda is mystic and spiritual; shade-wearing Saul talks about “beer and tarts”. What they both have in common is a passion for James. The band formed in Manchester in the late 80s, releasing weird indie-folk records and supporting The Smiths on tour. After years of struggle, they broke through in 1991 with the anthemic Sit Down single and the successful Gold Mother album. In 92 a critical backlash unfairly dismissed the fine Seven album as “pomp rock”, but the following year the Brian Eno-produced Laid made inroads for the band in America. After experimenting with electronic music, James returned last year with the strong Whiplash album, yielding the hits She’s A Star and Tomorrow. Now, with the ‘Best Of’ album setting the seal on their past efforts, it seems an appropriate time to ask: how did all this get started? Tim’s EYES SPARKLE AS he thinks back to 1982: “Three 17 year-old scallies from Manchester saw me dancing in a nightclub while they were stealing my beer. When I went and confronted them they asked me to join.” The main thing Tim remembers from the band’s earliest performances is fear. James were petrified of playing live. And not only that, their own audience was distinctly heavy. “They had a fanbase of the 40 most aggressive people in Manchester,” Tim grins. “It was scary.” The first few James gigs were supporting Orange Juice, then came the real test -Manchester’s Cyprus Tavern, by all accounts a bit of a hellhole. “About 40 people just sat there with their arms folded,” Tim recounts. “Giving me a real fucking stare. They were mates of Danny, the previous singer, who’d ended up in Strangeways for GBH, and they didn’t like some middle class student taking over his position…” For Saul, the call to take up with James followed an eerily sirnilar pattern. “It was totally by mistake,” he insists. “I was in a club in Manchester on player’s night with these arses playing 12 minute guitar solos. Larry, the original guitar player in James, came up to me and said ‘Get up there, have a go’:’ It was another one of those portentous accidental encounters which so enliven musical history… “I don’t know why he did that,” Saul says, still bemused. “I’d never met him before and I didn’t know James at all.” In the event, Saul got up on stage and rattled off a one-note violin solo. A suitably entertained Larry invited him along to a rehearsal the next day. As the band improvised and Saul joined in, he had the distinct feeling that he was being auditioned: “I wasn’t taking it seriously,” he insists. “I thought they were pretty crap really.” However, a week later when Saul was on stage with the band while an admiring Morrissey swooned in the wings, his impressions underwent a rapid re-evaluation. Not much of a fan of the music of the time, he had a crash course in the late ’80s Manchester scene. “James had taken the Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays on tour. When I joined, our support band was Inspiral Carpets. Suddenly I had a quick history lesson in what James was and what its place was.” At this time, the band had been a cult attraction for five years, but had been unable to translate their popularity into commercial success. By 1989 they were so skint that they were reduced to testing drugs at a local hospital to pay for rehearsals. “We all went on the Enterprise Allowance scheme,” Saul says. “They gave you 40 quid a week to set up your own business, 17 quid more than if I was on the dole. But within a year we played at Free Trade Hall in Manchester, which holds about 1800, and it was sold out. It started to bubble up in Manchester, until by 1992 it became massive, and then we played Alton Towers to 35,000.” CERTAINLY, WHEN SAUL JOINED in February 1989, James were about to enter a golden period. Hit singles and critical acclaim were their lot. That is, until the press turned against them. Today, Tim no longer reads their reviews. “1 know how the machine works too well,” he explains wearily. “and I just get tired of it. I decided four years ago not to read any more reviews of James. When Seven started getting very bad reviews it affected the new people a lot because all they’d had was real positivity. We became terrified of making anything that sounded ‘pompous’ -on some journalist’s definition of what that meant -so I found it a very negative influence on the band. You go back to Seven now, it’s a great record.” It is indeed. But then, despite the detractors, James always have been touched with greatness. This is, after all, a band who won their first hardcore audience by resolutely upstaging an outfit as legendary as The Smiths on the Meat Is Murder tour. “We’ve been an amazing live band,” Saul argues. “Which is why I hate it when we get slagged. Our Reading performance got slagged and we were brilliant. We were up against Cast and Suede and we were the only band that got everybody going. That’s what we do 30,000 people having a fucking good time.” JAMES MAY HAVE CARVED a reputation as a near-definitive live band, but last year, Tim confesses, he lost the urge to perform. However, recording an acoustic set for joint release with the “Best Of’ compilation helped relight his fire. “We didn’t know what we were doing,” he recounts happily. “It was very improvised. I told stories in between songs, just like the old days.” James songs do tend to accumulate a certain anecdotal weight over the years. Like the woman who ran a mental hospital telling Tim that Out To Get You (from Laid) was the inmates’ favourite song. Or the refugees from a weird cult in the states who had a soft spot for Seven… “These kids had been born into a religious cult,” Tim confides, “they broke out when they were about 14. Born Of Frustration was their breakout song. They felt it gave them the strength to do it.” Wow. Obviously Tim’s devotion to spiritual matters really works for some listeners. It’s this desire to truly touch people that makes James so cherishable. “Obviously Sit Down did it on a mass scale,” Tim continues. “We went into hospitals and sang that song to a kid in a coma. A lot of people who’d had bereavements wrote to us and told us that it was their favourite song.” Saul’s thoughts on the band’s most famous song are characteristically sharp: “Sit Down obviously is part of popular culture,” he says. WHICH BRINGS US TO the 18-track “Best Of’ offering which should restore the band’s place in the hearts of the populace. If Crowded House hadn’t already used it, ‘you know more James songs than you think you do’ would be an appropriate tag. “There’s 14 top 40 hits on it,” Saul says “and two new songs which I think will be successful. The second single, Runaground, will probably be our biggest since Sit Down. Everyone who hears it goes ‘Fuck, it’s gorgeous’.” Of course, in the reference books, James sit resplendent in fine company, sandwiched between The Jam and blues hero Elmore James. So do they ever sneak into WH Smiths and proudly survey their page in the Guinness Book Of Hit Singles? “No, I’ve never done that,” Saw replies. “But the other day we were looking up to see who’d sold the most records. Up to 1989 The Beatles had sold 1.2 billion records. Then we read that Paul McCartney has 39 gold discs and I thought, Wait a minute – I’ve got nine!” He cracks a cheeky grin: “That’s not bad.” Tim prides himself on the band’s consistency over the years: “Even when the albums have failed as wholes,” he says, “you can see the integrity.” What have been his highlights so far? “When we did the live video at G-Mex 1 remember thinking it was actually perfect. It summed up everything I wanted us to sum up. Laid was an amazing thing, just to work with Brian (Eno). And to tour with Neil Young in America. To have Neil Young’s respect at the same time as Brian Eno… We felt that was our kind of peer.” Tim tells a touching tale from the Laid sessions. While recording Sometimes, Eno had never heard the completed chorus. When Tim reached that part of the song the producer was clearly moved… “We get to the chorus and I sing ‘Sometimes when I look deep in your eyes I can see your soul’. I was looking at him when I sang it and he nearly fell over. He slumped into a chair and sat there with his eyes closed. At the end he said, ‘That was one of the musical highlights of my life’:’ Now that’s a compliment. So, if Tim could go back and meet himself 16 years ago as the ride was just beginning, what advice would he give himself? “Relax,” Tim says simply. “Enjoy it.” By his own admission, the singer has often felt “too responsible” to simply have a good time in the band. Additionally, James have always been perceived as rather moral – and not at all hedonistic – figures. Tim argues that this is more a reflection of his lyrics thanan accurate view of his fellow James-ers. “They would much prefer to be seen as a hedonist band. James are like The Happy Mondays a lot of the time, and I’ve toured with The Happy Mondays, I’m not exaggerating.” So how come we don’t know about it? “We don’t tell the press,” Tim says, twinkling again. | May 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth Explains The James Ethic – The Band | Article, Interview | The early James had three rules: not to have any lessons (“because you end up learning to play like everyone else”); to ditch any song that sounded like anyone else, and to be unpredictable on stage at all times. Tim elaborates: “That meant changing the set list or improvising new songs, or singing a song in German. We used to make up songs a lot on stage in those days” This whole approach arose from one gig when the band arrived at a venue to find themselves billed by a helpful promoter as “James (Not a poet)”. Tim decided to unleash some wilful confusion by going on and reciting a poem as a joke. He strode up to the microphone , but the lights failed to come on, so he stood there in total darkness, savoring an ominous silence from the expectant audience. When he finally read the poem, the applause was thunderous, “It was really powerful because of the tension,” he explains. “The band came on and we played the best gig of our lives.” From then onwards they decided to always take risks. “There’s a theory about pop music,” says Tim. “That it’s 90% predictable, 10% unpredictable – and the 10% is the crucial part. If it’s too predictable, the audience goes into automatic pilot. When you do something where you and the audience don’t know what’s going to happen, everyone is in a higher state of concentration. Most bands play three songs and the gig’s just a variation on those three songs.” So how can bands avoid getting stuck in a rut? “Strip down!” Tim urges. “Do a poem! Sing a song on your own, then go really big! Do a dance song. Fuck people’s heads…..” | May 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
T.O. Musician Becomes Fully-Fledged Member Of James – Jam Magazine | Article, News | Canadian Michael Kulas is an official member of the Brit-pop septet James, whose Best Of… album entered the British retail charts at No.1 and has remained in the top 10 for eight weeks. “I just received my first platinum album,” says Kulas excitedly. Kulas had been hired on a 12-month contract by James last March to play acoustic guitar, percussion and sing back-up for the Whiplash tour. But, a year later, as his contract came to an end and visa came up for renewal, Kulas was “officially inaugurated” into the band as the rhythm guitarist and backing vocalist. “What that means is I’m actually credited and start writing and playing stuff on the records. Before The Best Of…my role was kind of ambiguous,” says Kulas, speaking on the phone from Dollar, Scotland, a town 45-minutes northeast of Glasgow he has called home since leaving Toronto. His relationship with James dates back to the early `90s, when he met the band’s guitarist/violinist Saul Davies through a mutual friend. Davies, who had a girlfriend in Toronto at the time, would often get together with Kulas to hack away on their guitars. In 1994, Davies produced and played on Kulas’s solo album, Mosquito. In the summer of 1996, Kulas played electric guitar and sang on James singer Tim Booth’s solo album, Booth & The Bad Angel, in New York. It worked out so well, that when James reconvened to record Whiplash, he was asked to audition as the utility player for the band’s live show. Within a week of auditioning, he joined James on the David Letterman show, then embarked on a full British tour just days later. The Peterborough, Ontario-born singer-songwriter, who was once in a band with ex Skid Row metalhead Sebastian Bach, has a few credits in the liner notes of The Best Of and limited-edition live album, for contributing backing vocals on several James songs, but is now fully working on the new studio album. “We’ve been working on the record since last November,” says Kulas. “But at that point, we had to do two new singles for The Best Of, “Destiny Calling” and “Runaground”. Since that was released in March, we’ve been recording at Real World, Peter Gabriel’s studio, and we’ve got songs ready for the next record, but we still have 24 new songs that aren’t fully worked out. So at the end of it all, we’re going to have about 30 songs to choose from. The album release date is sometime in the fall.” While it is self-produced, says Kulas, Brian Eno, who has worked with James before on Wah Wah, Laid and Whiplash, might “get involved” with recording the album. Stephen Street, of Blur and Suede fame, is also a possibility. A guy named Ott is mixing it. Ott has also been engineering Kulas’s new solo project. Between touring and recording with James this summer, Kulas plans to finish the album, which he describes as “the Propellerheads meets the Jam” with huge break-beats. “I went down last week and did some work with (James keyboardist) Mark (Hunter) in Leeds and I’ve been doing some work here with Saul on and off for the last few months,” says Kulas. “I’m going to take those tapes and go down to Bath this summer and just build on them and then come back and do some more work with who ever is around. When every body has a few days off,” he adds, “the last thing they want to do is get back into the recording studio.” Meanwhile, James is playing some half-dozen U.K. festivals this summer, including Glastonbury (June 26), and concerts in France and Portugal. Because of the recent No. 1 album, the band is already booked to do a U.K. arena tour in December (5th to 15th). “It’s a really good renaissance for James,” says Kulas. “The band is cool at the moment, following up on the Verve and Texas who have all had a resurgence from slumps and I think James is at the same point.” | May 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Chief Sitting Down Bullshit – NME | Article, Interview |
JAMES have been here before – on the verge of world-slaying success and then – doh! – their credibility-lovin’ frontman goes and spoils it all. So, can they make it a second time around with their new ‘Best Of…’ riding high? Read on… Silently, without a stir to harm the karmic solemnity, we enter the meditation chamber. We step over a prone drummer, slumpled against the wall, deep in spiritual communion with his inner child. Beyond him lie a bassist and his girlfriend locked motionless in an ancient configuration that the druids called ‘spoons’. Further into the darkness we can make out the figure of a guitarist balanced torturously across two plastic chairs as if, through the enlightening quality of extreme discomfort, he may levitate at any moment. In ten minutes’ time they will be called upon to offer up three songs in sacrifice to the Dali Jools Holland as part of his eternal televised quest to bore Britain into some kind of jazz-based righteousness. But first, they must be fully prepared in body, mind and spirit. Yes, after getting heartily ripped to the tits on champagne and jazz fags the night before, James are having a kip. Bless. But they are not complete. In his own separate dressing room deep in the bowels of BBC Television Centre, Tim Booth readies himself in isolation, far from the soul-polluting forces of cigarette smoke and decent conversation. Perhaps he’s reciting a mantra for one of the group, wire-framed guitarist Saul Davies, who cannot rest. He paces the corridors, seeking more booze, driven and twisted by the terrible secret that haunts his every waking moment. For Saul, unbeknownst to his slumbering band mates, has today revealed James as evil, manipulative fakers of Milli Vanilli proportions. “When I wrote ‘Destiny Calling’,” he admits furtively, “I just stuck a capo on the guitar and played ‘She’s a Star’ twice as fast. When Tim started coming up with his ideas for the lyrics having a go at the music business I started pissing myself. He doesn’t know this, but that song is actually a very clinical piece of marketing. It’s recycling.” He sighs and swigs, eyes skyward. “If Linda were still with us, she’s be proud.” EXPOSED! EX-BAGGIES in hit swap cash con! So James’ cocky, self-defacing satire anthem aimed at the cynicism of production line pop is actually less original than ‘Theme From Cleopatra’! Triple bluff! Game, set and match to the elf-faced cocktail god! But then, nothing is what is seems in Jamestown. NME arrived at BBC HQ ready to toast the valadiction of some of Britain’s most dogged survivors and underrated triumphalists. A band who sniffed the big shorts of stadium USA, cracked under the pressure of terminal uncool, almost bickered themselves out of existence and then clawed their way back to Number One thanks to a startlingly fresh comeback album (last years ‘Whiplash’) and enough ‘Greatest Hits’ to stun a rabid buffalo. A band who have just completed a sold-out Big Sheds tour to the rapturous acclaim of mobile phone salesmen across the nation. A band only a few feet short of being on top of the world again. And climbing. Instead we find ourselves chairing an internal debate that makes the Northern Ireland peace talks look like the Jo Whiley TV show. Just when James should be at their most ambitious, assured and elated we find them riven with insecurity and indecision, awash with the same frictions that forced them to spend the four years after the 1993 ‘Laid’ tour as far from each other’s armpits as possible. And it’s all Perry Farrell’s fault. “Lollapalooza fucked us bad,” Saul recalls of last year’s US festi-jaunt. “The lid came off the things we’d been keeping the lid on for an easy life. Fundamentally, it’s avery difficult band to keep together. A lot of our problems come down to Tim. He’s a fucking alien. He can be such an arse sometimes when there’s no need and only an alien would do that. But he’s not always at fault and when he applies himself he’s got a good voice.” Jim Glennie, sly-smiling bassist and one-man eyebrow crop, touches his arm. “Steady on…” “We’re seen as these yogic flyers,” Saul continues, “but I’m not, Jim’s not, Tim is. And Tim is James, publicly. I can’t stand it sometimes. The way he represents us is so one-dimensional.” It’s a fame thing, a dream thing, an ambition thing, a fear thing and – in one particular case – a large dose of New Age hippy bullocks thing. And it has built barriers, driven stakes and opened chasms withing James in the past few months. And so, adopting our most slimy Tony Blair smile, we split the People’s Republic Of James into its various camps and hit the peace-keeping trail. First stop, Camp Michael… I WENT TO THIS GROOP Dogdrill party,” Saul grins, plunging his filter coffee, “and they had bucking bronco women with their arses in the air. You get on them and you like you’re fucking this thing. I lasted for what seemed like an eternity, but I was told later that it was a second. So par for the course, really. Then they had an ice torse and they were pouring vodka into it so you had to wrap your gums around this ice cock. It was great!” Camp Michael gathers around a hotel breakfast table in Swiss Cottage and proceeds to celebrate itself. The generals-in-chief are Saul and Jim, but they speak largely for the rest of the ground troops (brooding keyboardist Mark Hunter, affable drummer David Baynton-Power, balloon haired guitarist Adrian Oxaal and fresh-faced new boy guitarist Michael Kulas). These are men of extravagance and excess, men who are proud of their peccadilloes “but only the unmentionable ones”. They plot to bag as many free World Cup tickets as possible, shudder with the previous night’s hangovers and consider George Michael as the patron saint of their wild-living cause. “It just reflects people’s narrow-mindedness, ” says Jim. “If it goes against society’s judgements and society’s rules then you go to a public toilet and get a buzz out of doing something like that. It’s seedy and scummy but that’s sex! It’s fucking great! It’s a reflection of society, not him.” The polarities in James, however, reach far deeper than their stances on public Jodrells. For the first time since the early-’90s they’re faced with their fundamental crisis point again. The point where Madam Unit Shifter lifts her skirts to reveal a world of unlimited fame and possibility, of magastardom beyond their admittedly pretty wild dreams. And, frankly, it scares James shitless. Last time, after the Simple Mindish bluster of ’92’s ‘Seven’ blasted them to within howling distance of the mega-league and ‘Laid’ became a bona fide stonk-on hit Stateside, they almost purposely bullocksed it up for themselves. They headlined Reading with an acoustic version of ‘Sit Down’ and a handful of songs they’d written the week before. They argued and fractured, the opposing ambitions in the group brought to the fore by thir fear of failure and success, the risk of losing credibility if they made the big push or sliding back into car mechanics if they didn’t. A five-year stint in the wilderness later and Fame rears its ugly yet strangely alluring head once more. A Number One ‘Best Of…’ compilation. A fan-base moshing like your mam on trucker speed to all their fave stude classisc. The distant call of Wembley. An abyss, but the bunjee rope looks firm. Fancy a plunge James? “I was trying to have a conversation with some of the band about how we’re gonna approach the next album,” Saul muses, “but they couldn’t take the idea that we just go for it, that we could really do something on this album that we haven’t been in the position to do since ‘Seven’. Instead of fourth on the festivals next year, we could be headlining, won’t have to share a dressing room with Space. We could probably make a record with 12 singles on it. Personally, I think it’s time to hammer it home.” “We’ve always shied away from situations like this,” Jim continues, “turned inward and done something weird. We’ve done that sidestep too many times. Doing the bleedin’ obvious for us is so different. It’s like, ‘Do ‘Sit Down’ last? Can’t we do two really quiet ones after it?’ ‘WHY? Give them what they want! They’re gonna go out the door buzzing like bastards! That’s unusual for us.” “It’s gonna cause conflict on the next tour,” says Saul with trepidation. “A lot of people are gonna drag mates along to Wembley going, ‘They were AMAZING last time!’ and they’re gonna hear a new album that may be quite weird.” And here we reach the crux. To shit cash or not to shit cash? To get caught soggy and satisfied with your metaphorical pants down in public, giggling like an extremely rich hedonistic rock pig, or to live a worthy and limited career and gain belated respect when you inevitably pass away having achieved arse all. James, you see, are caught in the wide and hazy gap between George Michael and the lovely Lady Linda. Jim drops his head and considers this ridiculous and ill-conceived concept for a second. “Basically, yeah,” he decides eventually. “You’re spot on.” “THAT WAS REALLY SAD actually,” Tim Booth whispers in his delicate half-lisp, crouched praying mantis-like on his chair. “It really caught my breath. She’s one of the people, like Diana, who tried to use the position they were in to actually do something, and that has to be commended. I was really upset. That sweet woman was here.” In Camp McCartney, all is serene. Tim Booth carries his own atmosphere of calm around him, talks like a hypnotist in full swing and has the solid gaze of someone who has brushed past The Other Side (he died for a few seconds from a liver disease aged 22) and come out smelling of tofu. You are the closest to a Linda McCartney figure we have left, aren’t you? For nearly a minute he laughs. Then pauses. Weighs up the correct response for a clear conscience. “Arsehole.” Oh, come on, pal. You champion vegetarianism, don’t do drink or drugs, dabble in arts beyong your immediate shere (to wit: his forthcoming appearance in controversial slapstick child abuse caper Saved in Bolton) and, publicly, at least, you come across as a bit of a characterless hippy-dippy space cadet. “I commend your bravery,” Tim glistens. “Hmm… Hmm… I don’t care to answer that. I don’t need to defend myself. I don’t fit and I don’t intend to fit. To me it isn’t just about success, it’s about how you carry it and how you live it. In most people’s cases it’s a cancer not a cure, it’s a nightmare not a dream. Most people cannot deal with it. That’s the challenge. Can you carry that energy? There’s a vortex to it. It’s litterally a twister and you have to respect it and have discipline. You have to be disiplined enough to be free.” And he’s off, spiralling unprompted into internal discussions of Glenn Hoddle’s faith healer, his teachings of ‘ecstatic dance’ in Manchester, his former lives as Roman gladiators and humble beasts of the field blah blah oooohhmmm. It’s a little like being stopped by an Oxford Street monk who doesn’t want to sell you his guru’s book for 50p and wouldn’t much like you in his cult, to be honest. But, in describing his torturous inductions into Shamanism, he does eventually attain a mild state of pertinence. “You have to really face your dark side,” he hisses, “your disowned self. You have to go onstage in front of a hundred people and act our your darkest secrets. It’s a good way of blasting anything you’re ashamed of. People can no longer kill you with those statements. ‘You’re a fake, you’re full of shit’. Yeah? Well I remember sitting on a stage in San Fransisco with a bag full of shit, bringing it out and covering it on my body going, ‘I’m full of shit’. How can you hurt me more than that?” And thus NME’s sarky piss-taking slides from his back like water from the immortal mongoose of enlightenment. The twat. Still, such techniques can’t help relations within James, can they? Doesn’t your method of attacking your inner demons face on increase the tension? “I like to plunge in and confront and that isn’t always the right thing to do,” Tim admits. “We’ve had some tense fucking times and it’s been the worst we’ve ever had in the past couple months. Survival is the key. I have quite a wild fury and my spiritual path is not about being a nice Christian person who turns the other cheek. Uh-oh, no fucking way. I’m not into revenge because revenge is no good for me.” Saul says you’re an alien. Do you ever feel like that? “Yes.” Why? “Because I’m an alien.” Oh. Right. “I think the others blame me partly for holding them back before,” he continues, “and that invented a lot of anger. Saul has a really conscious awareness of marketing and I have a real fear of losing integrity. Those are two polarities. For now, I’m in the minority. They aren’t incompatible. Part of the excitement is the contradiction.” Trouble is, Tim is the contradiction in James. As his band mates are slavering to capitalise on the glory of being the New Beautiful South, to race into the first class cabin of life and drown themselves in top booze, to live out their days as credibility-free but extremely rich and happy rock sluts for ever, Tim steps back, respects “the vortex”, measures his strength and worthiness to tackle it and then pisses off to Lancashire for two months to be an actor. Meanwhile, the back-stepping has already begun. James’ new single ‘Runaground’ – the second of the two songs specially written for the ‘Best Of…’ LP – is a slow-burning alienation epic that is simultaneously their boldest and least commercial single since ‘Hymn From A Village’. And it was almost the new ‘Candle in the Wind’. “I wrote most of that lyric on the day that Diana died,” Tim confides. “I thought of it that way, but God knows how the others would have reacted to that! But really it’s about the fact that I used to have relationships and leave a door open.” And it is with an exit clearly signposted that we leave James hanging in the balance of their own contradictions once more. We may next see them through a flash of firework smoke from the far side of Shea Stadium or through the flames of an overcooked cheesburger across a fast food counter in Barnsley. But rest assured, we will see them again. “We’ll carry on,” Jim states from the nerve centre of Camp Michael. “As long as people keep listening to it we’ll keep doing it. One day we’ll get up and it won’t be there any more. I don’t know what won’t be there, but we’ll just go ‘It’s gone, hasn’t it? Yeah it has. See ya’. It’s therapy being in this band, it really is.” “Yeah,” Saul interrupts, “but a really dodgy type of therapy. You get charged loads to do it and it doesn’t really work but you think it’s doing you good. And everyone still tells you you’re a prick.” Thus saying, Saul has not the slightest inclination to prick himself with hundreds of pins in front of an audience of baying Buddhists. Vive la difference… | May 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Destiny Calling (Saved preview) – City Life | Article, Interview | Paul Flynn talks to Tim Booth about a new stage in his career . The short trip from Bolton to Manchester in the modest Saab (rear windscreen missing, tapes everywhere) of erstwhile James frontman Tim Booth is enough to persuade you that the man himself is of a slightly more actorly disposition than he is of a true, blue-collar, rock’n’roll one. Not to dismiss his self-evident services to muslc with the pop group that are currently, to quote music biz parlance, ‘doing a Beautiful South’ with their formidable Greatest Hits package, just that it’s odd to sit in the passenger seat of a pop star’s motor having a cerebral discussion on the nature of argument. Here, though, is a man that began his musical life with the scholarly invitation to “go and read a book, it’s so much more worthwhile”. Argument, then: Tim doesn’t have them. The character that he is to play in his first professional theatrical engagement, Len in The Octagon’s revival of Edward Bond’s maladjusted ’60s gang drama Saved, can’t stop. To his desired end of character consumption he’s begun to have them and only this morning argued with a flatmate over breakfast in the cockney accent that he’s getting to grips with. Impressively, when he files off into his newly learnt tongue he doesn’t take the usual shortcut of punctuating every sentence with ‘Innit.’ “I want him to take over me,” he says. Meet the real Methodman. Tim Booth’s acting history is erratic but committed. His contemporaries as a drama student at Manchester University number impressive alumni: Bhaji On The Beach brains Mera Sayal, playwright Charlotte Keatley and, most famously (fill in the occupation at your own leisure) Ben Elton. He acted under Elton’s direction, then “James came along and I was happy to do it.” He’s been offered parts before, including Tommy on Broadway (“I went to see it and turned it down.” Wise man) and is a discerning spectator, describing both Theatre de Complicite and Sam Shepherd as “inspired.” More relevantly, away from the glare of publicity, he teaches Five Rhythms Movement work at the Metropolitan University’s drama campus in Didsbury and is a watchful student himself. In anticipation of a move into acting -“If I just did James I’d go crazy. This is a risk, but that’s how I live my life” – he spent three months last year at Acting For Life in Los Angeles studying under Jean Bour. The Octagon connection came about after artistic director, also Saved director, Lawrence Till approached a mutual friend with an eye on Tim for providing a score for the show. They met and Tim was promptly offered the role of Len. For Till, only a week and a half into rehearsal, Booth has a clear reverence. When asked if there was any sense of’ aye-aye, there’s a pop star in the room’ with the other actors he’s quick to deflect the suggestion. “Not here. Not with Lawrence. Which is really reassuring. He is really reassuring. So detailed, so calm, so clear. And extremely good fun. He has a magical way of keeping the focus away from tensions outside of the script.” Saved is at Bolton Octagon from 14 May to 6 June. | May 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
O-Zone Interview with Tim Booth – BBC1 | Article, Interview, Video Archive |
DetailsJayne Middlemiss : From the baggy brilliance of Sit Down to the subtle sophistication of Destiny Calling, James are celebrating 17 years in the business with a Best Of album that resolutely refuses to leave the Top Ten. (to Tim) You’ve got the Best Of album out and a lot of times when a Best Of album comes out it’s often when bands are just about to split up. Tim : You want us to split up do you? JM : Of course not Tim : No, this came about almost by chance. Someone in the record company pointed out to us that we’d had something like 15 Top 30 hits and would we like to put them on a record. We said “Yeah, great, that’s fine. Do it” It’s obviously done very well. We didn’t expect it to go to Number one. That was a great thrill. But the other thing was it allowed us to take stock of the whole kind of career. I think we’ve been taken for granted in this country for four years. And it suddenly made people go “God, wow, they’ve had a lot of records, haven’t they? A lot of good records.” JM : Your last single Destiny Calling seemed to take a critical look at the way the music industry treats artists. Was this a personal thing that you lot have experienced? Tim : Destiny Calling was playfully critical. It was also acknowledging that we’re part of it. You become a product to a certain group of people who are making money out of you. And you have to accept that. I mean, that used to be terrifying to me. And the fear of success kind of blanding you out as an artist or a musician. It was always a great fear of mine. When we first did Sit Down I was quite freaked out by it. We were getting amazing letters from people, people playing it at funerals and weddings and all kinds of things. We were asked to play it at hospitals to children on life support machines. People in comas and things like that. It had a very strong impact and at one point we tried stopping playing it and I wanted to keep it, like if we played it, we would do it acoustic one week and heavy metal the next week. You know change it. I’ve come much more to terms with it now in the past few years that it’s its own thing and it’s not much more to do with me anymore. It’s like a gift, like something you have to let go of. JM : I want to talk to you now about Laid. I saw one of the best pieces of music television. Unplugged, it was you and the guitarist. Just singing that song. There was so much emotion. What goes through your mind when you’re doing a song like that? Tim : When I’m doing songs we’ve had for a while, a song like Laid, for me the really important thing to make it fresh and get vulnerable with it. Cos you can just act it or you forget why you wrote it, the initial impulse that sparked you. And so the way to keep present and fresh and not become a stale dinosaur. You have to keep getting vulnerable. JM : It was so sexy that. I was in the gym and it was on the thing… Tim : We figured everyone would think we were gay after that. We’d turned it into almost a gay love song. JM : It was just so…. It really moved me. I was on the step machine and I had to stop. Tim : Lovely | May 1998 | article interview video-archive | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Big Breakfast Interview with Tim Booth and Saul Davies – Channel 4 | Article, Interview, Video Archive |
DetailsSnap, Cackle And Pop popped round to James frontman Tim Booth’s house for a bit of chat with him and guitarist Saul Davies. After coming to prominence as part of the Madchester scene in the late eighties, James outlived their baggy contemporaries and have now put 16 years behind them. Tim : I don’t know how we’ve kept together this long. The first seven years we made no money and it didn’t matter to us. We were doing things that we loved passionately so we’d carry on doing them and then we had success and it’s almost much harder from then to deal with success and balance all those things out. And with Sit Down the anthem of 1990, their gigs packed out with a sea of those famous flowery t-shirts, the band decided it was time to try and crack America. Saul : We just think we had a lot of critical success and it was married to sales, big sales in the early nineties and going off to America, which was a wonderful experience for us, you know we went on tour with Neil Young and did all sorts of amazing things, went to places I never thought I would go to, never mind playing. Abandoning big stadium gigs in Britain for the smaller crowds of the States gave bands like U2 and Oasis the chance to take the megastardom tag that seemed destined for James. Tim : You see, I don’t see James as having made any mistakes, I see James as having been James which is having their own path and I don’t see any problem in not being as huge and famous as Oasis. I wouldn’t trade places with Noel or Liam for any amount of money. Because that’s not what it’s about for me. But with Noel reportedly inspired to form a band after seeing a James soundcheck and Morrissey calling them the “greatest band in the world”, the boys are aware of the influence they’ve had on the music of the last decade. Tim : It’s great when your peers, when Neil Young takes you on tour or when Noel Gallagher says what he says and Morrissey. You know lots of bands have the signed t-shirts from the Dominion concert and you know really sweet things we get and that’s really gratifying as a musician. And with their recent Best Of album already platinum, there are more fave James tunes than you might expect. Saul : I think that’s probably a process that people have bought the album, have listened to it and were vaguely familiar with Sit Down or whatever and suddenly kind of thought “Oh my God, I remember what I was doing when this came out” and it would send some shockwaves through people’s lives as well that process, which is a really good one. And their new single Runaground looks set to follow the fate of the other 17 singles on the album. Tim : We didn’t get to ride any of the horses. But we got to sit in the beautiful Irish pubs and see the Irish culture. | May 1998 | article interview video-archive | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Mark And Tim Singles Reviews – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
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Runaground – Channel 4 TFI Friday – 29th May 1998 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsLive performance of Runaground on Channel 4’s TFI Friday show. | May 1998 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Fleadh Preview – Melody Maker | Article, Biography |
Rebirth? Revival? Second wind? Whatever you call it, James have thrust themselves right back into the fray with the release of their “Best Of” and the two new accompanying singles. In fact, the band themselves claim to be writing the best material of their lives, so it ain’t going to stop there. Headlining the Fleadh, platinum album sales, more hit singles – there’s time for world domination yet, eh fellas? Listening to their new stuff, it’s hard to believe they’ve been doing their thing for nigh-on 16 years now. I mean “Destiny Calling” raised a fair few eyebrows (including both of mine) with its impassioned mantra and “Runaground” is probably as good as anything they’ve done to date. James sound fresh, happy and meaningful once again – which can’t be easy when you’re well, let’s say, “getting on a bit.” In fact, the “Best Of” reveals just how utterly swoonsome James songs always were, they can still hold their own to this day – jostling for prime position in our record collections along such upstarts as Travis, Embrace and erm Oasis. Although they haven’t always been the epitome of cool, James have kept on churning out the soaring, heartfelt pop songs one after the other and now they can finally capitalise on their consistency. So whether you’re looking for a nostalgic night of top tunes from the past, or, like the band themselves, you’re looking ahead at what to come, James look like a pretty safe bet for a stomping night. The Fleadh it is then. | Jun 1998 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Team Spirit World Cup Feature With Saul – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
What was the first football match you attended? “Liverpool vs Barcelona 1977/8” Which team do you support? “Barcelona” Which footballer would you like to go out with? “Luis Enrique, Barcelona” Have you ever had trials with a football team? “Yes, the Central Schools under 16 team” What football position do you play? How good are you? “I just run after the ball. 7/10” Who’s your favourite player? “Stoichkov” Compare James to a football team&ldots;.. “Man City” What would you call your World Cup song? “You’re Wasting Your Time” Predict the score of the Scotland vs Brazil game “3-1 to Brazil” Which World Cup side do you rate the highest? “Spain” Who will be the highest goalscorer in the tournament? “Ronaldo or Batistuta” | Jun 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Score On Blur – Soccer Match | Article, News | With a swift slide tackle or two James snatched one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most coveted titles away from Blur last weekend in London. In an embarrassing 7-0 victory, the British sextet defeated reigning champions Blur in the fourth annual “Music Industry Soccer Six” — the sporting match dubbed as a cross between Wembley and Woodstock that has featured famous footballers like Oasis, Pulp, Jamiroquai and the Sneaker Pimps. Approximately 35,000 fans packed London’s Mile End Stadium last Sunday to watch the U.K.’s most celebrated musicians, their managers and roadies suit up in shin guards and goofy jerseys, and slug it out on the pitch. In a round-robin championship, Blur crushed the Levellers in the quarterfinals and Reef in the semifinals before facing James in the final match. “The Six Ego Have Landed” — featuring Leeroy Thornhill of the Prodigy — fell to the trophy-toting James in the semifinals as well. This year’s notable participants also include Liam Gallagher, the British alternative group Space, the Top 10 trio Stereophonics and Finlay Quaye. Last year’s event, which crowned Blur as the winner, raised about 10,000 pounds for the Help a London Child charity, according to Mark Abery of CUP Promotions. This year’s figures have not been tabulated yet. CUP promotions is also circling the globe on a comical jaunt with heavy metal pioneers Iron Maiden as they battle international soccer teams during an odd promotional tour for their come-back release, Virtual XI, Abery told JAMTV on Thursday. CUP also coordinates Def Leppard’s annual charity soccer match, “Stars Cup,” which pits film, television and music celebrities against each other. | Jun 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
VH1 Fleadh Interview | Article, Interview | Mike : Baby, baby, baby Saul : Baby, baby, baby Mike : Hello. We’re talking about rocking and rolling and folking Saul : Yeah, that’s right, we’re going to folk all the way Mike : That’s right. Let’s folk. Saul : Simple Minds were supposed to play here yeah, but they’re sick. They needed to replace one old pompous has-been rock band with another and we were the next thing available. We’ve done it before though. We did some mad festival in Sweden, Status Quo were the headlining act in front of 25,000 people in a forest and we came out, hapless idiots with borrowed equipment because we’d played our gig two days before and got put in this slot. We came out on stage and there were these 2000 pissed-up Swedish nutters at the front going “Status Quo, Status Quo” and we were like “Doh, what are we going to do?” By the end of this summer, the Best Of will have done well enough for people to have sat up and taken note. I think that has happened already but after the performances at the festivals that we know we can do. If we do what we know we can do, then people, it will be kind of undeniable, I suppose people will begrudgingly like us, accept us. Not many bands get five stars out of five, do they in Q for a live performance so we feel like we’re doing OK. | Jun 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Last The Distance – The Sun | Article, Interview | On the eve of their Fleadh headline spot, Tim Booth tells ALLY ROSS why the big brothers of britpop are bigger then ever Blimmin’ Chesney Hawkes. February 1991 and James were all set to spend a few months at No.1 with the classic student sing-a-long anthem Sit Down. Then along skips ****ing Chesney with The One and Only. And what a prophetic title that was. For apart from a couple of ‘where are they now’ features, Ches had the good grace to slope off into the showbiz ether. James still haven’t got that No.1 single, but there are no hard feelings says singer Tim Booth. “Some time later Chesney contacted me to apologise” chuckles Tim. “He kept going on about how much better our single was and how guilty he felt “Poor kid, I felt sorry for him, it was unfair to have all that fame thrust upon him so young.” Things also went a bit dingly-dangly for James after Sit Down. A follow-up album was mauled in the press and it’s been feast or famine ever since. The soaring high was the 1993 album Laid which was followed by a crippling blow of a #250,000 bill from the tax-man. Summer 1998 marks a new pinnacle. The band headline tomorrow’s Fleadh at Finsbury Park and their ‘Best Of’ album illustrates why Morrissey called them his favourite band and Noel Gallagher formed Oasis. “Noel’s been very generous in his praise,” smiles Tim. “I have vivid memories of him as a roadie for Inspiral Carpets. “Friends saw Oasis when they were great but I saw them in New York six months ago and it wasn’t healthy, they looked bored. As for Liam – Jesus, that poor kid is adrift. I wish him luck, he needs it.” Has to be said though, Tim can come across as a trifle odd too. He has been through the whole sex, drugs and blah blah blah and is now immersed in the whole ‘new age’ malarkey. However, none of it seems risible when he gently explains he got into alternative medicine to treat a liver diesease. “I don’t fit into rock circles as I look at alternative methods of getting high – dancing drumming,” he says earnestly. “People are narrow minded, it all gets dismissed as ‘new age’.” The one vaguely annoying aspect to all this is that Tim echoes the old rock star refrain: “I don’t consider myself cool.” It’s all self-deluding nosense of course. For a start, if Tim Booth wasn’t cool he would’ve spotted the most glorious double entendre when asked if he was looking forward to the Fleadh. “I intend to go out there and completely expose myself,” he said, without a smidgen of irony. “I love exposing myself and taking alot of risks.” Well, it should help sell a few more tickets. I confidently predict that unless Chesney turns up, Tim Booth exposing himself will be the talking point of the day … musically speaking, of course. – James will be joined at The Fleadh by The Corrs, Sinead O’Conner, Billy Bragg and Shane MacGowan. | Jun 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Interview With Tim Booth – Radio 1 | Article, Interview | JW – Jo Whiley TB – Tim Booth JW: Special guest today is Tim Booth from James, hello. TB: Hello JW: It’s been far too long you’ve been absent from this show. We’ve missed you. TB: Well I came minus my brain, I left that in New York. We’ll have an interesting interview, but you’ll have to excuse my dumbness. JW: So a serial experience? TB: Yes. JW: You’re doing Glastonbury, tomorrow night. Is this story, this myth true that you were due to play when the game was going on, and you said no I don’t think so. TB: Yeah, it was definitely, certainly I think, in the last 15 minutes of the England game (laughs). We said, you’re joking, and THEN, (still laughing) they lied to us and promised that there were no screens at Glastonbury, and that people would be glued to us, and it’s a lie, there’s huge screens there for the football. So I think, but no we’re about 15 minutes after the game finishes we’re going to have 2 set lists, one very up and positive, and one completely, grief stricken, mourning. JW: Oh God, which one do you reckon you’ll going be playing? TB: (laughing) Hopefully, the up one! Please God!! JW: Yeah. Have you been to any of the matches? Did you manage to blag any tickets? TB: No! I watched the games in America, I’ve just been to America. Um, cos’ my fiance lives there. And, er, it was amazing watching it on American TV with American commentary, very different to England. JW: Really. You say you’ve been over to New York to see your fiance. Do you get to see each other very much? TB: She’s moving back here in September. So we are rectifying that. We’ve had about a year and a half of plane. JW: It must be very difficult? TB: It’s very weird, having that amount of water between us. JW: Is there going to be a wedding? TB: There will be a wedding. I don’t know when, and there’ll be one in America and one in this country. JW: Ah, to please all friend and relatives. TB: And because we’re schizophrenic. JW: Yeah, of course. There is that. Have you enjoyed the whole Best Of James, that album coming out, the attention you got from that? TB: YEEESSS!! I did enjoy it. We were really, flattered to be received so well. Um, it was like really touching. We didn’t expect number 1, and we didn’t expect the fans at the concerts to be so celebratory. Those gigs were amazing! JW: Did it suprise you how many hits you’d had when it came to putting the album together? TB: Yeah. I mean we were told about a year ago, and it was like, you’re joking?! JW: Yeah. You said that you are an Aquarian, and you like to try different things. You just don’t do music, you studied drama at University, and you’ve just finished on stage at the moment. Can you tell us about the play you’ve just done? TB: I’ve just finished a play in Bolton called Saved, by Edward Bond. Which was a play in this country that changed the censorship laws in the 60’s. There’s one scene in it, that’s particularly harrowing, that people objected to. JW: What’s that? TB: Well it’s a murder of a baby. Er, that takes place in detail, in so far as, it really shows you why people get to a point of doing something so atrocious. And that, obviously, is a totally disturbing thing. On the opening night of the play, 30 people walked out, in that scene. But we got great reviews, and after a couple of weeks audiences came from afar to see the play, and then it was going down thantastically, it was an amazing experience. JW: Will you be doing more acting then? TB: Yes. JW: Is this the beginning? TB: Definitely. I loved it. JW: So are you actually talking about certain things? Do you know what you’re next project is going to be? TB: I’m getting a lot of offers. We got great reviews in the Guardian, and in different papers. So I’m getting good offers. JW: How exciting! Must be brilliant! TB: It is brilliant. I’m made up actually. I couldn’t believe how well it went. JW: Ok, we’ll play the single. This has been out before, I’m not going mad am I? TB: It has been out before. You’re not going mad. This is one of my favourite songs I’ve ever written. I wanted to write the most romantic love song I could. With a lot of vulnerability in it, so when people fall in love, they all go, I love you, and really, often what they want, is the other person to say, I love YOU. So I made the chorus, please fall in love with me, so it’s straight forward vulnerable. (‘Fall In Love With Me’ is played) JW: Have you got a pet? TB: Have I got a PET?! No not at the moment. JW: Have you ever had a pet? TB: Oh! Basset Hounds! Basset Hounds are special, they are untrainable. You take them to a dog trainer, and they say, we train every dog except the Basset Hound. Fred Basset is the perfect psychology. I mean this thing used to steal food from everyone, it used to eat frozen raspberries from the deep freeze, and butter, packs of butter, anything that fell on the floor. JW: What was it’s name? TB: Samantha. I think I loved it for it’s rebellious outlook. JW: What would the band say was your worst habit? TB: My worst habit? The band would say, tenacity, that I just don’t give up on things, to the point you know where it’s hard to win an argument, if I’m really set on something. JW: You’re in a newsagents, you’ve got 3 Pound 50p, what would you buy? TB: 3 Pound 50. It used to be a magazine called Ethics, that came out for about 4 months, and then folded. It was the first magazine I’ve subscribed to! And they were so ethical, that they sent me my cheque back!! Which I was really impressed with. But that’s gone, Vanity Fair’s gone crap in the last few years. Scientific America I’m quite into at the moment, with Quonton Physics theories, which I find fascinating. JW: So not a packet of fags, and Walker’s Crisps? TB: OH! I’m saying completely the wrong rock ‘n’ roll stuff aren’t I!! I’d say, the Daily Mail, The Independent and a bottle of water. JW: Who’s you’re favourite character in Star Wars? TB: In Star Wars? I’m a Star Trek fan. And Captain Picard is my hero. JW: Have you met him? TB: No I haven’t. I saw him do a one man show in America. That’s how much of a fan I am. And one of the first things I said to my acting agent, was I want to be on Star Trek. Get me on Star Trek. In my dreams! JW: What would you like to have on your epitaph? TB: Huh!! (laughing) ‘He did his best!’ Or, ‘I’m not coming back!’ JW: And your most drunken moment? TB: 16 throwing up in a friends back garden. JW: That long ago? TB: I’ve had a few other drunken moments, but I haven’t been drunk for a long time. JW: The light don’t come on in your kitchen, what do you do? TB: Curse. Call an electrician, (laughs) no, I’d change the BULB!!(Laughing) JW: And if you could hear just one last tune, as you’re on the Titanic, and it’s going down, what would you hear? TB: That’s cruel! ‘Please Fall In Love With Me’. I’m sorry, at the moment that would be the genuine answer. | Jun 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Award Themselves A Red Card – NME | Article, News | JAMES are to voluntarily cut short their set at Glastonbury Festival this weekend so that the crowd can watch England’s crucial match against Colombia in the World Cup. The band (singer Tim Booth pictured) will “send themselves off ” during their Friday evening set 20 minutes early so fans at the Pyramid Stage can watch the second half of the game uninterrupted. Glastonbury organiser Michael Eavis told NME: “People seem to be preoccupied with football so we’ll be showing the match in the film field and also the second half will be shown on the Main Stage. The band want to watch it anyway; they’re rather reluctant musicians!” | Jun 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Glastonbury Previews | Article, Interview | James: Saul Davies (guitar) “The first time I played at Glastonbury after joining James was in 1991, I think, and I remember Del Amitri arguing that they should go on after us because they’d had a hit and we hadn’t. It fired us up so much that we did a really amazing show. You could see people sticking their heads out their tents, like ‘who’s that?’ By the time we’d finished the crowd stretched way, way up past the mixing desk and up the hill. It was really something. “I’m going to enjoy watching Robbie Williams, seeing him work the Glastonbury crowd is going to be hilarious. I think he’ll be the hit of the festival.” James play the main stage on Friday night. Tim Booth – James What was your first Glastonbury experience? “James first played in 1985, the mud year. Saul (Davies, guitarist) wasn’t in the band then, but watched while covered in mud!” What was your best Glasto moment? “The whole band having a collective out-of-body experience in the ambient crystal tent.” And the worst? “The worst thing about Glastonbury is turning up on site in a huge double-decker bus with all the luxuries: clean sheets, flushable toilets, champagne, caviar, the works; and looking out over all those dirty people in tents. That makes you feel really bad.” | Jun 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
BBC Glastonbury Interview | Article, Interview | Tim : We’ve played it for many years. It’s one of the best festivals easily. Just don’t put us on at the same time as England. Int : And if they’d said, we can’t do that Tim : We wouldn’t have played Int : You wouldn’t have played? Tim : No. It’s a waste of time. Int : Really? People are here for the music aren’t they? Tim : They are here for the music. But… we wouldn’t have played. | Jun 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
London Finsbury Park Fleadh – 6th June 1998 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
Setlist(incomplete) Tomorrow / Out To Get You / Laid / Sit DownSupportThe Corrs / The PoguesMore Information & ReviewsTania Branagan, Melody MakerAnd sticking folky fiddle on the tail of “Johnny Yen” won’t convince anyone that James are Irish. Or indeed, that they are any good. But (deep breath, confession time) I’m actually quite fond of them. Tim Booth still can’t dance. They still use horrible contrived puns (“She knows where to hide / There’s nowhere to hide”). They can be clumsy, pompous, embittered and often are. But “Come Home” and the sheer glee of “Laid” warm up the whole rain-tinged, wind-chilled crowd. For all their faults, they’ve still got the spark; they can still burn and glow. Video | Jun 1998 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Glastonbury Festival – 26th June 1998 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
Setlist(incomplete) : She's A Star / Sit Down / Laid / Surprise / Sound / TomorrowSupportn/aMore Information & ReviewsJohn Robinson, NMETim Booth appears in a souwester and announces that since – in a world a million miles away with flushing toilets, running water and warm weather – England have won a football match, James will play a greatest hits set. Result, strange tantric hippy bloke! Result, English footballers! Goodnight, sadomasochistic noodles and ruminations on “fame”! This decision does however represent a significant advance. Finally it appears that after decades of blowing it at every conceivable opportunity, James have risen to the occasion. VideoShe’s A Star / Laid / Sound / Tomorrow | Jun 1998 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Eighties Icons Remembered (Tim Booth) – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
EIGHTIES ICONS as remembered by TIM BOOTH of JAMES MARAGRET THATCHER: “She summed up the Eighties, she certainly dominated how things were seen in this country, ambition without caring who you tread on. She was like some weird twin of Madonna, with the emergence of the power woman, working in a male world and beating them at their own game.” MORRISSEY: “It was very weird with Morrissey because I knew him and I watched him become an icon. When you see behind the scenes, you realise what an illusion it is. It was just so bizarre the way that he was worshipped. What was good about Morrissey was the sensitive male aspect. I think it allowed people like Jarvis Cocker to come through now.” NELSON MANDELA: “Nelson Mandela’s inaugural speech is one of the most inspiring pieces of writing I’ve ever read. He goes to prison for what he believes in and then maintains his dignity and integrity , even in an incredibly vicious regime. Gorbachev and Mandela are the two most amazing men of that time, incredible icon archetypes.” LOADSAMONEY: “He was an absolutely brilliant character, I found him hilarious. Harry Enfield really got it spot on with him. He sent up the worst aspects of the Thatcher era which was basically making lots of money. It stated the whole philosophy of capitalism in a nutshell. I don’t think the character would make the same sense today.” ALSO REMEMBERED: Sam Fox, Ronald Reagan, Marilyn, Bob Geldof, Prince, Madonna, Roland Rat. | Jul 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
People Who Aren’t As Rich As They Should Be : Tim Booth – Q | Article, News | Tim Booth, £ 500,000 Why? James’s total of only two million album sales over 15 years plus the amount of band members (six or seven). If calculated as a sixth share, Booth would have £ 1.02m of £ 6.16m revenue but costs and years of hardship have reduced that to nearer £ 500,000. | Jul 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Hollywood? I Chose Bolton Again – City Life | Article, Interview | Tim Booth’s in love and he’s got it bad. The lead singer with top indie band James has just returned after visiting his fiancee Kate, who works in fashion photography in America, and the couple are hoping to fix a wedding date soon. “We’re going to have one wedding on the beach at Big Sur – one of my favourite spots in the world – and another here in England” he reveals. “I met Kate a couple of years ago in Los Angeles and we got engaged six months later. I’ve met the woman I love and if I’m meant to be with anyone, it’s her” Things are looking good for Tim, 38, and the Manchester band. They’ve had 14 hit singles – Sit Down and Come Home the most memorable – over the last 16 years. With their recent Best Of album having just spent a month in the Top 10 and a new single and album on the way, now’s no time to call it a day. “If we split up, I’d probably last for about a year. James has some big overheads and a lot of the money I earned got ploughed back into the band,” says Tim, who admits to being financially naive in the early years. “I didn’t fritter it away on fast cars as such, more like fast women. When you’re young, you don’t know how to save and think it’s going to last forever. But I’m wiser now and over the last few years have been careful to save and invest.” He’s also keen to move into other areas, particularly acting. He reveals that having trod the boards in the controversial ’60s play Saved in Bolton recently – for which he earned £250 a week – he’s been offered a series of TV films and has even considered a number of Hollywood scripts. “I’ve really got the bug from doing Saved,” he says. “And now I’ve done Bolton, it’s ‘tomorrow, the world.’ James will come first but I’ll make space for any decent roles.” It’s not his first contact with acting – he studied drama at Manchester University with Ben Elton and Rik Mayall (he met the band James in his final year there). But his renewed interest began by chance when he was offered the part of Tommy on Broadway three years ago. He turned it down but later decided to get an acting coach and moved to Los Angeles where he met his fiancee. After a chance meeting with a Hollywood film mogul, a series of scripts came his way and he auditioned for the part of Nicholas Cage’s brother in the hit film Face/Off. “I was at a record company party when I was taken aside and told ‘Tim Booth, I want you to meet Tim Robbins’ and all I could say was ‘Hey, you’re huge’ because he’s 6ft 4in” Tim recalls “I started talking to this guy next to Tim Robbins and he asked me what I did. So like a lunatice I sang out our latest record to him. I don’t know why I did it. It’s so unlike me to do that. But we got on really well and when I told him I was interested in acting, he gave me his card – he was head of Polygram Films. “If I had the choice, I’d love to act in the X Files or go into space with Star Trek. The Jean-Luc Picard character was the best.” One place the Leeds-born singer’s going back to on a more permanent basis is Brighton where he’s just bought a house. This will allow him more time with his nine year old son Ben from his first marriage to Martine McDonagh, the band’s former manager. “He’s going to live with me occasionally, which is great,” he says. “I also get on well with Martine still. She’s going through my new flat advising me on what kind of paint to use.” But the move spells the end of an era for a man who’s live in Manchester for two decades. “It’s sad, but I’ve hardly been there in the last four years,” he says. “The thing that strikes me these days is the violence – all these gangland shootings. “My Saab 900’s been broken into four times in the last two years and that’s just ridiculous.” | Jul 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Out – NME News | Article, News |
JAMES have announced a massive December arena tour to round off a very successful year. The band have also started work on their next album, working once again with Brian Eno, who produced 1993’s ‘Laid’. The forthcoming new LP, which is as-yet untitled, is due out early in 1999. This year the band notched up their first Number One with their ‘Best Of’ album, which has now sold 500,000 copies. The new album will be the follow up to last year’s ‘Whiplash’ which went Top Ten. James play Hereford Leisure Centre (December 4), Birmingham NEG (5), Plymouth Pavilions (7), Newport Centre (8), Brighton Centre (9), London Wembley Arena (11), Manchester Evening News Arena (formerly NYNEX) (12) and Glasgow SECC (14). Support has yet to be confirmed. For tickets call the NME 24-hour ticketline on 0870-1212 500 | Aug 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Irish News Biography | Article, Biography | THE 1990 student anthem Sit Down could well have been something of a weight around Tim Booth’s neck, but the fact that James had been labouring for eight years previously probably helped them put the success in context. It was in 1982 that guitarist Paul Gilbertson, bassist Jim Glennie and drummer Gavan Whelan invited a possessed dancer they saw at a Manchester disco (drama student Booth) to join their band. After headlining the Hacienda, James were approached by that club’s owner, Tony Wilson of Factory Records, and in 1983 released an EP, Jim One. By now James were having an effect on other local contenders with lovestruck fan Morrissey hailing them as “the best band in the world” and inviting them to tour with The Smiths. A major label deal soon came courtesy of maverick major label Sire and while it produced just two albums the experience helped the band hone their sound with Stutter and Strip Mine. Tim Booth’s lyrics, too, began to show potential. The escape from Sire left James testing drugs at a local clinic to earn money but when live album One Man Clapping topped the indie charts in 1989 it must have seemed worth it. Phonogram/Fontana, rescued the impoverished lads in 1990 and released Gold Mother the album that would go on to sell 350,000 in the UK alone. It was fuller sound and with Manchester, in full swing, embraced James, Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses, the coolest fashion statement became the baggy JA (front) MES (back) t-shirt, a serious earner. In an unprecedented philanthropic coup, when Sit Down lodged itself at No 2 for a hundred years and was included on repressings of the album, the band insisted anyone who’d bought Gold Mother be allowed to swap it free for the new completed version. By 1992, Andy Diagram was on board, and Seven showed his presence in the majestic trumpet that backed the album’s hypnotic, windswept mood. His personal life in continuing turmoil, meanwhile. Tim was making a feature of songs for the lost, lonely and questing. James were drawing vast audiences 32,000 at the Alton Towers knees-up and, in their anthemic charisma, comparisons to Simple Minds and U2. 1993’s Laid gave the band their first US hit, courtesy of the title track which had to be censored before it could be played on the airwaves. The album did the business in the States, selling over 600,000 copies. 1995 was a year of anti-climax, and the following year seemed like the ideal time for Tim Booth to do a solo album in the shape of Booth and the Bad Angel. Meanwhile, Jim, Saul, Mark and Dave were revitalised and back in the studio. They corralled the lads, and with new guitarist Adrian Oxaal, last year unleashed Whiplash. The first single to be released from it, She’s a Star, turned out to be one of James’s biggest hits and was swiftly followed by top 20 single Destiny Calling. Those who wrote James off in the mid-90s swiftly had to revise their opinions and this year the release of a Best Of LP proved James’s enduring popularity. The Best Of James entered the UK charts at no 1 and has not left the top 10 since it’s release in March. It would seem there’s plenty of time to be yesterday’s men. | Aug 1998 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Seaside Rock! – Weston Mercury | Article, News | Radio One roadshow rocks Weston’s sands today (Thursday) with a line-up of top musical talent broadcasting live to the nation. Indie chart-toppers James (lead singer Tim Booth pictured above), singer Karen Ramirez and success-hungry newcomers Ultra are all booked to appear, with station stalwart DJ Simon Mayo presenting the package. Thousands are expected to pack the beach for the event, which is always one of the best attended roadshows in the country. The whole affair goes on air from 11.30am but DJ Chris Hopkins treats the early-birds to tunes from 10.30am, with things winding up at around 12.30pm. The 1998 roadshows started in Blackpool on Monday, August 3, and end in Bangor, Northern Ireland on Bank Holiday Monday. Roadshow manager Richard Greeves said: “We are getting really good crowds. They’re bigger than ever this year.” | Aug 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
V98 Website Interview With Tim | Article, Interview | Band Name: James Chat with Tim Booth from James, Sunday 23 August. Question: Hi Tim, thanks for braving the rain to chat to us! Answer: Hello. Question: Tim, are you looking forward to the gig in Manchester? I am going. Answer: It’s too long away to look forward to but the Manchester gigs are all amazing celebrations. If I held my breath that long, serious damage would ensue. Question: How has V98 been? Who are you looking forward to seeing again? Answer: I saw Robbie Williams yesterday and his big charisma and I think he’s a very well hung performer. Question: What’s next from James? Answer: We are working with Brian Eno on a new masterpiece that the critics will hate. Have I got a chip on my shoulder or what? Sarky northern git. Question: Why did you do that free gig in Manchester down by the canal? Answer: Sounded like a good idea at the time. Question: Which of your albums do you think is your greatest? Answer: Laid. That’s why we are working with Brian Eno again. Question: I just want to say you have total stage presence. You really got everyone pumped up. Answer: Gee thanks. Question: Do you ever get sick of all the attention you get? Answer: Seldom, I’m very greedy. Question: As, ahem, “Elder Statesmen”, what do you think of the younger bands today? Not saying you are Status Quo like! Answer: They’re all too young. I like Nick Cave – he’s my favourite, that famous Aussie octogenarian. Question: Frank Sidebottom! Is he a top bloke or an arse in a papier mache head? Answer: Arse in a papier mache head. Question: Who are your favourite band ever? Answer: The Doors or the Beatles, sorry to be so predictable. Question: To continue a theme: Pet Sounds or Revolver best album ever? Answer: I hate Pet Sounds. It’s a musicians album, not for me. Question: Ok, since we’re on the subject of down under rockers. Do you like Kylie? Answer: What do you mean by like? She’s very sweet. I ended up in a corridor at Top of the Pops telling dirty jokes with her. Question: Are you sick of Sit Down? Answer: Sometimes, but the song has a life of its own and I’m grateful to have co-written a song that touches so many people. Question: What is the scandal that would get you on the front of the News of the World; girls, booze, drugs… dodgy politics? Answer: Well, the rest of James are more akin to the Happy Mondays and any day would provide enough scandal for the News of the World. Question: Do you ever find yourself ridiculous and why? Answer: Of course. Human life is often ridiculous and I’m not immune. Question: Who are your greatest influences? Answer: Patti Smith and Iggy Pop. Question: Have you had a chance to see Iggy Pop at this festival? Answer: Not this time but I’ve seen him maybe fifteen times when I was an impressionable youngster and he impressioned me. Question: Where will you be in ten years? Answer: In a rocking chair wearing Val Doonican pullovers in Hawaii. Very high. Question: If you could spend thirty minutes with anyone on earth ever, who would you pick? Answer: God. He’s got a few questions to answer. Sorry, she. Question: Were you ever into Northern Soul? Ever followed a youth cult? Answer: Punk. I was a teenage punk. Question: Thanks a million Tim! Nice one. Answer: Goodbye good people. May your gods be with you. | Aug 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Chelmsford V Festival – 23rd August 1998 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistSit Down / Sometimes / Destiny Calling / She's A Star / Come Home / Out To Get You / Surprise / Laid / Tomorrow / SoundSupportn/a - FestivalMore Information & ReviewsOneOfTheThree.comChelmsford, however, made up for it in spades. Faced with a torrential downpour, James took the momentum provided by the rather excellent Stereophonics and bombarded the crowd with an opening medley of Sit Down, Destiny, She’s A Star, Sometimes and Come Home creating a moshpit going back beyond the sound desk. Tim’s dancing seemed even more frenetic than usual and Saul took every opportunity to encourage the now drenched audience. Out To Get You was played to slow things down and seemed oddly inappropriate in the setting and was followed by another excellent version of Surprise. This audience (myself included) really just wanted to hear the hits in the rain and so Laid and Tomorrow were dispatched as conditions got worse before the opening bars of Sound signalled the show was nearing its end. Tim took the opportunity to tell the crowd that “when you read in the papers how shit we were, remember what you witnessed with your own eyes”. Tim’s megaphone failed and he smashed it in annoyance, so we were treated to Tim hollering without it which made for an interesting take on the song, the sheer awesomeness of the improvised ending not being lost despite the rain and the size of crowd. This was James at their very best and a complete contrast to the day before and the tedious Space and Texas who were to follow later. They were the band of the weekend – but we knew that already. Video | Aug 1998 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sit Down – Manchester Albert Square Commonwealth Games Handover – 21st September 1998 | Session, Video Archive |
SetlistSit DownDetails
SongsShare: | Sep 1998 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
December Tour Preview – Q Magazine | Article, News |
Their Greatest Hits album reached Number 1, and their singles continually trouble the charts. but it’s as a live act that James come into their own. Their three-guitars-and keyboards sound is large enough to fill these arena venues. they have a massive bank of hits to draw on and frontman Tim Booth’s voice is strong and urgent. And even in amongst the hits set there’s room for a touch of Tickets £16. ***** Binningham NEC, December 5 0127 780 4133 Plymouth Pavilion, December 7 01752 229 922 Newport Centre, December 8 01633 662 666 Brighton Centre, December 9 01273 290 131 London Wembley Arena, December 11 0781 902 0902 Manchester Arena, December 12 0761 834 2700 Glasgow SECC, December 14 0141 287 7777 | Nov 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Top Of The Pops Radio Interview | Article, Interview | Interview with Jayne Middlemiss JM : I was wondering “Have you seen Madonna?” Tim : Have we seen her? Do you mean in the biblical sense? Yes JM : Have you? Tim : You mean Mary Magdalene JM : No. The Madonna Tim : She’s The The Madonna JM : Madonna. Like A Virgin. Material Girl Tim : Yeah, that’s Mary Magdalene. Mother of Jesus JM : Lord is as man. You know Lord is as man. Tim : Lord is as man. Has she got some sort of speech impediment? Where’s she from? From Newcastle JM : I don’t think I’m getting any luck there second part of interview JM : How are you two getting on? Tim : With each other? Really badly, we had a punch up this morning. JM : Did you have a punchup? Who ended up winning? Tim : It was a draw. Saul : In true James style it was democratic end to a dour three-each. Tim : A couple of broken ribs JM : Well you still managed to perform on the stage over the way. Fabulous. Tim : Well you see we’re very technically gifted. I bit one of his fingers off and he still managed to play guitar. I was impressed Saul : I’m going to take one of my toes off and put it back on here. You can do that apparently you know. JM : You could start a trend Saul : All the musicians hobbling around in Austin and Texas have all had their toes chopped off. They go to the hospital and they put your toe in a jar for a week and then they stick it back on and give you $10,000. And all these poor musicians who can’t get gigs and stuff. Somebody told me, I was either being wound up or…. Tim : No, it’s true. It’s a toe-sewing program that they have for surgeons practising sewing back organs on JM : So, that’s absolutely horrible Saul : These aren’t really our heads. We’re actually members of the Happy Mondays. JM : You’ve got Sit Down out and number 7 in the charts. 98 version. Why did you release it in a 98 stylee? Tim : In a 98 stylee. Money JM : Oh well. Fair enough Saul : No, we wanted a mixer in for having it as an extra format on a release or something like that and Apollo 440 wanted to do it and it was really hard to know whether it was actually any good or not but everyone around us was telling us it was fantastic, you’ve got to stick it out. They hardly got any money for it because it wasn’t meant to be a release. We didn’t give them very much. JM : Did you rip them off? Saul : No, no, we haven’t. No JM : Number seven’s very good Tim : Number seven’s very good at Christmas, yeah. Very good. The reason we did the dance version is that I can’t sing any more and we’ve bitten off so many fingers of the piano player he can’t play it very well either. JM : Play with your feet Tim : That is my feet. On my hands. | Nov 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Amazon.com Biography | Article, Biography | James were formed in 1982 when would-be musicians Gavan Whelan, Jim Glennie (bass) and Paul Gilbertson (guitar) spotted Tim Booth dancing at Manchester University (where he was studying drama), and asked him to join their band. Over the next few years James made their name on the Manchester scene, with two EPs on the city’s Factory label — JIMONE (1983) and JAMES II (1985) — and a tour supporting The Smiths. In 1985, Gilbertson was replaced by Larry Gott, and the band signed to Sire, setting to work on a debut album. STUTTER (1986), produced by legendary New Yorker Lenny Kaye (guitarist with Booth’s hero Patti Smith), confirmed them as contrary, cultish and unique. The track “Johnny Yen”, with its themes of exhibitionism, despair and violence, set the tone for years to come and became an enduring highlight of the band’s live appearances. And it was as a live band that James were making their reputation, building a following strong enough to see them through more setbacks than most. 1988’s STRIP MINE followed the course set by STUTTER with its off-kilter folk influences, but added some simple singalong choruses which anticipated hits to come. But neither band nor label were happy, and they now parted ways, leaving James to finance their live album for Rough Trade, ONE MAN CLAPPING (1989). The album made the top of the indie charts, but Rough Trade never saw James as a commercial band. They could not have been more wrong. In 1990 a revamped James — Gavan Whelan had been replaced by David Baynton-Power, who was joined by Saul Davies (violin), Andy Diagram (trumpet) and Mark Hunter (keyboards) — signed to Phonogram, released the anthemic GOLD MOTHER album and had three minor hits in “How Was It For You”, “Come Home” and “Lose Control”. Then there was “Sit Down”, the re-recorded version of a 1989 single which gave James their breakthrough. It was the middle of the ‘Madchester’ boom. They had just supported the Happy Mondays (co-leaders of the scene), and their increasingly baggy (and big-selling) T-shirts were looking like fashion items. The band’s rhythmic sense and indie sensibility, present from the start, suddenly fitted into the indie/dance crossover sound that was making all the waves. An anthem for outsiders, “Sit Down” got to #2 in the spring of 1991 and James were on a roll. By now they were playing big venues even supporting DAVID BOWIE at Manchester’s Maine Road stadium, and it all seemed perfectly natural. But there was a downside to all this. The first time an audience sat down for “Sit Down”, it was something special. The twentieth time, it was a hollow ritual and the one thing that the band had always tried to avoid. So they upturned expectations with unpredictable live shows full of new songs, with the hits in the wrong places. The audience didn’t know what to make of it, and the press backlash followed with SEVEN (1992), an album widely dismissed as ‘stadium rock’. But the big sound had gone as far as it could. 1993’s album LAID, produced by Brian Eno, had a subtle, stripped-down sound and improvisational feel, closer to the early days. The LAID sessions also produced a series of experimental, ambient jams which later surfaced on the WAH WAH album (1994). Tim Booth recorded an album, BOOTH AND THE BAD ANGEL (1996), with the American composer Angelo Badalamenti (of Twin Peaks fame). Meanwhile, James, still misunderstood at home, turned their back on the backlash, toured the US, and went back into the studio, preparing WHIPLASH (1997). Not the most risk-taking of releases, the album had James tentatively meandering back to the style that got them into the stadiums — anthemic, singalong rock. It went gold and laid the ground for 1998’s JAMES… BEST OF (Mercury). | Nov 1998 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sit Down 98 – BBC1 Top Of The Pops – 20th November 1998 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsSit Down 98 performed live on Top Of The Pops with special guest Robbie Williams | Nov 1998 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: Change Of Scenery – Issue 9 | Fanzine | Change Of Scenery was a James fanzine produced by John Pude. Download this fanzine as a PDF. © copyright Change Of Scenery. | Dec 1998 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Best Of 98 CD Destiny Calling – Q | Article, News |
Destiny Calling FROM GREATEST HITS (MERCURY) Fifteen years on from their first single, James’s Greatest Hits album topped the charts, while Destiny Calling demonstrated their new added clout sound. Their big-band approach creates | Dec 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
In The Shops Soon – Q Magazine | Article, News |
James are currently in the studio with Brian Eno working on their next album. due for release in early 1999. Working song titles include Surprise. I Know What I’m Here For, If Anybody Hurts You and Confusion. | Dec 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Celebrated Reappearing Act – The Times | Article, Interview | Suddenly James are back from the indie graveyard. Nigel Williamson talks to singer and former wild man Tim Booth. This time last year James were so out of fashion they seemed on the point of disintegrating. Yet the end of 1998 finds the former indie champions in the middle of a huge stadium tour after a renaissance year which gave them their first No 1 album in a 15-year career. There have also been hit singles with Destiny Calling and Runaground, while a remix of 1989’s Sit Down scored all over again, and saw them cavorting on Top of the Pops with Robbie Williams. Their eagerly awaited new album is scheduled for April release and it promises to be as strong as anything they have ever done. Lead singer Tim Booth is discussing this unexpected turn of fortune over a late breakfast at a converted studio in a former farmhouse in the heart of the Sussex countryside, where the band have spent two weeks rehearsing for the tour. He freely admits that the stories of James’s near break-up are all true and has no problem with the suggestion that they are in line for “Comeback of the Year.” Most artists offered such an accolade would insist that they never really went away. “We did disappear. We went to America and we didn’t play here for three years so people had a right to be pissed off with us,” he admits. “We had some very black days but we put out the ‘best of’ album and we turned a corner. It produced a wave of euphoria and it lifted us and the audience. We suddenly got a new lease of appreciation, which definitely fired us up.” It certainly did. The lacklustre James that made an unpropitious return to Britain at the Reading Festival in August 1997 and the one that gave a performance of quite awesome energy at the Brixton Academy in April this year immediately after they had gone to No 1 might have been two different bands. Somehow the reminder of their glorious past which the ‘best of’ album provided captured the imagination all over again. “We are one of those bands that gets overlooked because as a frontman I haven’t taken the big rock’n’roll loudmouth role,” Booth says. “We’ve always crept up on people. A couple of the old songs sound dated but, in the main, people were surprised how fresh they sounded. We write songs like German cars – built to last.” Once revered as leaders of the “Madchester” scene, along with the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses, they quite Britain in the early 1990s after the critics savaged their album Seven as pompous and overblown. “We were steeped in the NME indie myth and then the indie police came looking for our blood,” Booth recalls. “We took it very personally. We were stung by it. That’s why we just buggered off.” At the time they were one of the most successful bands in Britain, headlining huge venues such as Alton Towers. “We bought all that indie myth that playing stadiums meant you had sold out. So we went to America and the first gigs there were for 200 people. We needed that challenge because we didn’t want to be like Simple Minds and U2. When we finally came back here, we had to prove ourselves again. We are at our best when our backs are against the wall.” Now the scene has changed, he says, and bands such as Oasis and Pulp have made it cool to play stadiums again. But there have been other more personal changes too. In earlier years Booth’s erratic behaviour was legendary. Wild-eyed and manic on stage, he became a leader for the lost and confused, a turbulent and troubled figure prone to depression and breakdown, at one point joining a religious cult which espoused celibacy. Today he lives contentedly in Brighton with his new wife and his son Ben from a previous relationship. So has the famously tortured artist found true peace at last? “I don’t know if I’d go that far,” he says. “I have found a contentment in a relationship I’ve never experienced before. It’s really new for me, believing that it will last or that I am allowed such happiness. I’ll always be a neurotic person but I have never swallowed the idea of the tortured artist. The rock’n’roll myth is based on it and it is voracious. There is something fascinating about a person living their life on the edge in the public gaze. As a performer you feel this energy pulling you that way and it’s dangerous. You have to be very strong to find your own centre.” Booth, who went to drama college with Ben Elton, has also branched out this year into acting with a role in Edward Bond’s Saved at the Bolton Octagon. He is thrilled because he has been nominated as best newcomer in the Manchester Evening News drama awards. “In my student career I was in a few plays with Ben but I was no good because I had no confidence. I wanted to prove that I could do it, so I went to LA and retrained,” he explains. Alongside his thespian tendencies, I can’t help noticing that reading matter for the tour includes Simon Heffer’s biography of Enoch Powell and the new Tom Wolfe. So is this a new mature James we are now witnessing? “This is still a very wild band, believe me,” he says. “As night creeps in, a transformation takes place.” Faith restored in their rock’n’roll credentials, it seemed like a good time to take my leave. | Dec 1998 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Coming Up – Melody Maker | Article, Biography |
Love or hate Apollo 440’s version of ‘Sit Down’? Reckon James care that it has the Top 10, just like the original did seven years ago? Surely it will generate extra sales for that ‘Best Of’ album, already topping figures of half a million? Certainly, the success of the remix is timely for James, who are also marking their return to the big arenas – something which hasn’t happened since the early Nineties. The tour is being promoted as a celebration, as opposed to a retrospective, with the promise of new songs off a forthcoming album. You get the feeling they haven’t given up on the Big Time; yet. A band who started their career at Factory Records (home of miserabilists Joy Division) and ended up being folky WOMAD faves. A band who would never let their pop anthems fake their orgasms. Flower power. The sound of violins. Well, the sound of one violin, anyway. And Tim Booth. An earnest voice with a penchant for high notes (move over youngster Brett Anderson) and the reason James will never become just another Hothouse Flowers – even though he converses with his angel (s) and knows the correct order of colours in a rainbow. “Britain’s answer to Michael Stipe,” they’ll be saying. Again. Although, undoubtedly, he’s closer to Julian Cope. So shake off that wintertime apathy, polish your Cheshire cat smile. It’s that time 5 ASIDE – look out for Since the Apollo 440 boys are reputedly very shy, watch out for the boys in disguise, trying to hide from all those hardcore James fans who hate the remix Odds on, old James fave Brian Eno will be around Listen out for new songs. Listen out for old songs in new outfits. And watch out for occasional guest appearances too. Try and get yourself invited back to Youth’s place. You can bet the band – or some of them – will be there, rather than at the after-show shindig. | Dec 1998 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Virtual Manchester Bio | Article, Biography | James are a band who through their 1991 single Sit Down became associated with the Madchester scene but who are really a band with origins and inspirations far away from the spirit of those times. James from their early eighties origins have always been an unpredictable unit, even fey at times. There is none of the belligerent aggression of the Stone Roses in James but there are very adroit lyrics. Partly this is down to the lead singer Tim Booth. Oh rare Tim Booth! If Freddie Garrity of Freddie and the Dreamers danced like a frog in a blender in the 1960’s then Booth, when he gets in the mood, dances like a frog in a really, really fast blender. Proving their longevity the band achieved something they had never previously achieved when, in 1998, their Best Of album reached number 1. James had started out in 1983 at Factory Music. Championed by Morrissey of The Smiths and manipulating influences from very diverse sources – early songs included sea shantie references – they built an amazingly devoted following which sticks by them up to the present. Their reputation grew through albums such as Stutter and One Man Clapping to the excellent Gold Mother in 1990. The single Sit Down followed with its well known middle section where all the audience are required – you guessed it – to sit down. It reached number 2 in the singles charts and in no time at all James became a big stadium player on both sides of the Atlantic. This followed a re-release of Gold Mother and a new album Seven . Their recording high point was reached with perhaps one of the finest albums by any Manchester band, Laid , in 1993. Here the group with Brian Eno in attendance produced an ethereal mix of innovative sounds which sustained itself over most of the songs. Laid came as close as any subsequent Manchester music had to the sheer inimitability of The Smiths. The band’s best work after Laid was Whiplash in 1997 which was followed by the Best of album mentioned above. | Dec 1998 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Programme: Arena Tour (1998) | Tour Programme | The programme from the 1998 Arena Tour features band bios, interviews and pictures. Click on an image to browse the tour programme. | Dec 1998 | tour-programme booklet article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jamestheband.com – Newsreel – 1998 | Article, News | This page lists all news item that were originally published on the James official site Jamestheband.com in 1998 that were lost when the band split in 2001 and the site was later discontinued
Random News From the Tour 18-Dec-98: James new album (not yet titled) should be released in late April/early May, and should be preceeded by the first single sometime in February. Most likely, “I Know What I’m Here For” will get the nod as the first single, though the band plan to return to the studio this week to work on “Fred Astaire”, which they’ve been having trouble getting a suitable studio recording of so far. A tour of smaller UK venues will follow the album release in May, followed by a European tour, and possibly some co-headlining shows at Stirling Castle with the Stereophonics. Another large venue UK tour is tentatively planned for next December. There are currently no plans to tour the US, because of the costs involved.
There are no plans for a video release at the moment, as the band can’t find deal that would actually allow them to make money. This is also why there was no Best Of video release.
There were tentative plans for former James guitarist Larry Gott to make a guest appearance on stage in Manchester, but apparently some sort of problem with his arm prevented him from doing so. Evidently he’s been joining the band in the studio from time to time, and played on the original jam of new song “I Know What I’m Here For”. Word is, he was in the studio with the band on the day the Best Of went to number 1.
Tim has been offered a few acting roles, but hasn’t agreed to anything. Apparently, one of the offers was for a role in Heartbeat.
Both James side projects – Booth and the Bad Angel and Money are now defunct, as both were considered to be serious obstacles to James. Backing vocalist/guitarist Michael Kulas is continuing to write and demo new solo material, but no release is scheduled in the near future. Meanwhile, Saul’s side project, Celtic Cross, which was released in May, has finally been located in the “dance” section HMV stores across England. It is also available (though expensive) at CD Now. Full details, including the catalogue number, should you need to special order it, are available in the Related Releases Discography.
Tim Takes “Best Newcomer” Award 17-Dec-98: Tim Booth took time out from the tour to attend the Manchester Evening News Performance Awards in Manchester last Wednesday, where he was given the award for “Best Newcomer” for his work in the play Saved, in which he starred earlier this year.
James Wrap Up Tour 15-Dec-98: James finished their UK tour in Glasgow tonight, playing their second show at the SECC to a sold out crowd. By all accounts, the December arena tour, which saw the band playing to crowds ranging from just over 2,000 to just under 15,000 per night, was a great success. In the course of the tour, the band introduced a total of eight new songs from their upcoming album (due out in spring ’99), along with playing a variety of greatest hits and non-Best Of… tracks such as “Johnny Yen”, “Heavens”, “Lost A Friend” and “Top of the World”.
And the Tour Begins 04-Dec-98: James kicked off their tour tonight in Hereford, debuting 4 new songs, and playing “Heavens” and “Top of the World”, in addition to a handful of “Best Of” songs. | Dec 1998 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jamestheband.com – Newsreel – 1999 | Article, News | This page lists all news item that were originally published on the James official site Jamestheband.com in 1999 that were lost when the band split in 2001 and the site was later discontinued
‘We’re Going To Miss’ You Chart Position 20-Dec-99: The third single off ‘Millionaires’, ‘We’re Going To Miss You’ entered the official UK charts this week at number 48. Meanwhile, on the strength of the band’s recent UK Arena Tour and radio airplay of the single, the album itself re-entered the UK Top 75, coming in at number 66.
‘We’re Going To Miss You’ Midweek Chart Position 16-Dec-99: James latest single, ‘We’re Going To Miss You’, came in at a disapointing number 44 in the UK midweek charts yesterday.
James Night in Manchester 08-Dec-99: J.I.M. (the James Information Mailing List) will once again be sponsoring James Night in Manchester following the gig on Saturday 11th December. Like last year the event will be held at Cyberia at 12 Oxford Rd., Manchester M1 5AN, running from 9pm-2am. As Cyberia is a cybercafe, people who are not able to attend will be able to join in the fun via the chat room on this site. More information about the event is available at the J.I.M. website.
‘We’re Going To Miss You’ Release Date Pushed Back 27-Oct-99, updated 29-Nov-99: The release date for the third single off ‘Millionaires’, ‘We’re Going To Miss You’, has been pushed back until Monday 13th December. The b-sides are as follows: CD 1: We’re Going To Miss You, Wisdom of the Throat, Top of the World (live at Embassy Rooms) CD 2: We’re Going To Miss You, Pocketful of Lemons, We’re Going To Miss You (Eno’s version) James to Play Live Set on GLR for Children In Need 25-Nov-99: James will be playing a live set on BBC GLR (94.9) on Friday 26 November, between 10am and 1pm, to support the BBC’s Children In Need Appeal. To benefit the campaign, a live CD-R of the session will be auctioned off, as will the chance to introduce the band live on air.
James to Play Accoustic Set on Radio 1 09-Nov-99: James will be in the studio with Jo Whiley on Wednesday 1st December to play a three-song acoustic set. Whiley’s show is broadcast on Radio 1 between noon and 2pm daily.
James Need Your Help 07-Nov-99: James are looking for t-shirt ideas for the upcoming UK tour. They’re interested in new designs, suggestions on old designs to be re-introduced, or any other general comments or feedback fans might have on likes/dislikes, sizes available, quality, colours, prices, etc. More information is available in the Survey section of the site, and a special T-Shirt Message Board has been set up for you to post your comments and suggestions.
James in Ireland 27-Oct-99: James will be playing two shows at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, Ireland prior to the start of the December UK arena tour. The first will take place on Monday 29th November, the second the following night, Tuesday 30th November. Ticket details will available shortly.
‘Nevermind the Buzzcocks’ Appearance Postponed 20-Oct-99: Tim’s appearance on the music quiz show ‘Nevermind the Buzzcocks’ has had to be postponed due to the band’s promotional trip to Portugal and Germany this week. It will be rescheduled for some time in November. Details will be posted here as soon as they’re confirmed.
James Radio and TV Appearances in Germany 19-Oct-99: Tim, Saul and Michael will be in Germany this week doing some radio press and TV interviews. On Thursday 21st October they will stopping by Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne for an on-air interview and short acoustic set as part of the radio programme ‘KultKomplex’. They’re scheduled to be on between 21.00 and 22.00h. They’ll folow that on Friday 22nd October with an appearance on MTV’ Berlin’s ‘Live Aus Berlin’ between 15.00 – 17.00h.
James Enter the UK Album Charts at Number 2 17-Oct-99, updated 18-Oct-99: ‘Millionaires’ has entered the UK album charts at number 2, tying ‘Seven’ for the band’s highest placing studio album, second only to the ‘Best Of…’ which topped the charts at number 1 last year. For those who are curious, below is are the highest chart positions for each of James ‘ albums thus far: Album Highest Chart Position James: TheBest Of… 1 Millionaires 2 Seven 2 Laid 3 Whiplash 9 Wah Wah 11 Gold Mother 16 Stutter 68 Strip-Mine 90 One Man Clapping — (data courtesy Vox, April 1998)
James Visit Portugal For Album Release 16-Oct-99, updated 17-Oct-99: James will be appearing at the Valentim de Carvalho Megastores in Libson and Oporto, Portugal, on Monday 18th October, in celebration of the Portuguese release of Millionaires. They’ll stop by the Oporto Megastore for an autograph signing session from approximately 3pm, before moving on to the Lisbson location to play a short showcase set at approximately 6pm.
Millionaires Release Details Outside the UK 14-Oct-99: A number of people have been asking about the availability of the Limited Edition, double cd version of ‘Millionaires’ outside the UK. It will be released in limited quantities in Germany, but people outside the UK and Germany who want the limited edition version will need to order it on import. Check the Where To Buy section of this site for a list of shops that stock the limited edition (or will soon), or ask your local importer to order you a copy. As a reminder, ‘Millionaires’ is released worldwide, with the exception of the U.S. and Canada, on Monday 18th October. Unfortunately, there is no news to report yet on a possible U.S. or Canadian release, but we promise to keep you posted.
Millionaires Midweek Chart Position 13-Oct-99: ‘Millionaires’ is listed at number 2 in the UK midweek album charts! If you haven’t bought it yet, what are you waiting for? 😉
James To Play Top of the Pops 12-Oct-99: James will record a performance of ‘Feel Like Fred Astaire’ for Top of the Pops tomorrow. The show will air on Friday 15th October at 7:30pm and again on Sunday 17th October at 2:10am on BBC1. The band follows TOTP with an already-recorded appearance on Later with Jools Holland on Saturday 16th October, during which they will perform a handful of live songs. On Friday, 22nd October, Tim will be a guest on the music quiz show Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Check the TV & Radio section for stations and times.
‘Millionaires’ Released Today! 11-Oct-99: James latest album, ‘Millionaires’ is released today, Monday 11th October in the UK. To celebrate the release the band will be up bright and early for an appearance on Channel 4’s Big Breakfast. They’ll follow that up with a very special, small venue show at London’s Embassy Rooms later in the evening. For more information on the new album, visit the Millionaires section of this site. Once you’ve run out and bought your copy, drop by the message board to let others know what you think.
‘Feel Like Fred Astaire’ Enters Charts at Number 17 10-Oct-99: James latest single, ‘Just Like Fred Astaire’ debuted on the UK Top 40 at number 17 this week.
‘Feel Like Fred Astaire’ at Number 13 in Midweek Charts 07-Oct-99: ‘Feel Like Fred Astaire’, the second single off ‘Millionaires’, was listed at number 13 in the midweek UK sales charts on Wednesday. The official Top 40 charts will be announced Sunday at 7pm UK time, or you can listen to the Top 40 countdown beginning at 4pm on Radio 1.
James Play London Gig to Celebrate Album Release 04-Oct-99: James will be playing a small gig at Embassy Rooms on Tottenham Court Road in London on 11th October, the day ‘Millionaires’ is released. Tickets will be £16 in advance (subject to booking fee). Tickets are available from: Stargreen (0171 734 8932) Ticketmaster (0171 344 4444) Wayahead (0115 912 9000)
Or, you can win a pair of tickets, by visiting the Millionaires section of this site.
‘Millionaires’ Limited Editon Double CD 30-Sep-99: In addition to the regular release of ‘Millionaires’, there will also be a limited edition double cd version, comprised primarily of live material from this summer’s festivals. The track listing for the second cd is as follows:
‘Millionaires’ “Launch Nights” Scheduled Around the UK 24-Sep-99: Approximately thirty “Launch Nights” have been scheduled throughout the UK in the week leading up to the release of ‘Millionaires’. The events will give fans the opportunity to hear the new album in its entirety prior to the official release, as well as win tons of promotional items. For a full list of all the venues and locations, click here.
James Play Secret Show in Glasgow 15-Sep-99: James played a very secret, very small, invite-only acoustic gig in Glasgow last night, September 14th. The crowd consisted of approximately 200 music industry folks, friends, and families. The thirteen song acoustic set was recorded to be released at a later date. Included in the set list were: Lullaby, Lose Control, Feel Like Fred Astaire, She’s A Star, Strangers, We’re Going to Miss You, Someone’s Got It In For Me, Destiny Calling, Laid, I Know What I’m Here For, What For, Sit Down and Out To Get You.
James to Play Shows for Album Release 15-Sep-99: James will be playing a small club date at the University of East Anglia, Norwich on Sunday, October 10th to celebrate the launch of ‘Millionaires’. Tickets are £16 and are available on 01603-508050. There is also the possibility of a second club date in West London on the day of the release, October 11th. The show hasn’t yet been confirmed, and no details are available yet on the venue, but it will be “something special”. In the event that the show goes off as planned, you can win a pair of tickets here.
Sinead O’Connor on ‘Just Like Fred Astaire’ B-side 14-Sep-99: One of the B-sides from the upcoming single, ‘Just Like Fred Astaire’, will be an “amazing” duet with Sinead O’Connor. According to Tim, the track should have been on the album, and could very easily stand up on its own as a single. Apparently, the band have made a concerted effort to provide quality B-sides for the ‘Millionaires’ singles, as a result of criticism over the past couple yearsfrom people who felt they were being ripped off by being charged for singles with re-releases and remixes as the B-sides. ‘Just like Fred Astaire’ will be released in two parts on 4th October in the UK. The track listing is as follows: CD 1: 1.Just Like Fred Astaire, I Defeat, Long To See CD 2: Just Like Fred Astaire (with video), Mary, Goal Goal Goal
‘Just Like Fred Astaire’ A-Listed on Radio 1 12-Sep-99: James’ next single, ‘Just Like Fred Astaire’ is currently on the Radio 1 A List, which means it’ll be getting tons of airtime. Radio 1 is now broadcast live via the ‘net, so those outside the UK looking to hear the single can have a listen at Radio 1 website. Other stations playing the single which broadcast on the web are London’s Xfm and, believe it or not, Santa Monica, California’s KCRW. DJ Nic Harcourt has been playing it on his show, Morning Becomes Eclectic, which is on the air weekdays from 9am to noon and broadcast live on the ‘net and again from 4-7pm and 2-5am local time.
‘Millionaires’ Release Update 29-Aug-99: According to their management, James’ new album, ‘Millionaires’, is now scheduled for release on October 11th in the UK. Unfortunately, the band haven’t had any luck finding a label in the states to release it yet, so there is no US release scheduled at this time.
James to Play Free Gig in Manchester 27-Aug-99: James have been added to the bill at a free gig sponsored by Radio 1. Radio 1 Live in Manchester will be held on Sunday 12th September in Heaton Park, Manchester. Tickets are free, but you have to win them from Radio 1. Other acts on the bill include Mel C, Supergrass and All Saints, with more big names to join the bill in the coming weeks. See the Radio 1 website or listen to Radio 1 for more information.
James to Play Radio 1 Roadshow 16-Aug-99: James will be playing the Radio 1 Roadshow at Stewart Park, Middlesborough on Monday 23 August. Also on the bill is Martine McCutcheon. For more information, visit Radio 1 on the web, or call the Radio 1 concert line on 08700 100 100.
James Set at Lizard Not Included in Web Cast 11-Aug-99: James set at the Lizard Eclipse Festival was not included in the Lizard web cast yesterday due to objections from their label, Mercury Records. Apparently, Mercury refused to grant Lizard permission to broadcast James’ performance via the internet. Here is the response given when people wrote to Lizard to complain about James set not being shown, despite the fact that it was listed on the schedule:
Unfortunately the record label for James refused permission to broadcast their performance live on the Internet, they gave us no reasons, and did not care about the fans and the publicity involved. We were very disappointed but we did everything we could to try and broadcast them, I am very sorry if this caused you disappointment, I’m sure that other fans were also disappointed with the record label’s decision.
Lizard Eclipse Web Cast Reminder 15-Jun-99, updated 10-Aug-99: James will be headlining the main stage at the Lizard Eclipse Festival, being held at Goonhilly Downs, Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall, on Tuesday, 10 August. The festival, which is being touted as ‘The planet’s ultimate eclipse celebration’, is being held in celebration of the last total eclipse of the sun this millennium, which will take place at the 11th minute of the 11th hour on the 11th of August. Tickets are still available through the box office on 0870 125 2959. Those not able to make it to the festival will be able to watch the entire event via the web, as it will be webcast live by livereality.com.
James Impress at Blackpool and Guildford 29-Jul-99, updated 07-Aug-99: James played a spectacular sold out show at the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool last Friday night, where they delighted the crowd by playing all the hits plus a handful of songs off the new album, including the current single ‘I Know What I’m Here For’, complete with three PVC-clad dancers crowding the stage, and the forthcoming single, ‘Feel Like Fred Astaire’. Other new songs included ‘Crash’, ‘Someone’s Got It In For Me’, and ‘If Anybody Hurts You’, all of which sounded brilliant and garnered a great reaction from the crowd. The band made a grand entrance, as Mark rose up through the floor of the stage playing the opening strains of ‘Laid’ on the Ballroom’s famous Wurlitzer organ, and the set continued to build as the band moved effortlessly from the old favorites to the new tracks off ‘Millionaires’. They capped of the show with a rousing rendition of ‘Sit Down’, puncuated by a shower of balloons and confetti falling from the rafters. Afterwards, even the band agreed that the show was one of the best, if not the very best, they’d ever played.
The support band for the night were Manchester band ‘Exit 52’, who are made up of two of Jim’s brothers — Dave Glennie on lead vocals and Pete Glennie on lead guitar. Find out more about them at their web site: http://www.wirespider.demon.co.uk/.
Earlier in the afternoon the band held an record signing at the Virgin Megastore in Blackpool, where they spent nearly two hours signing autographs, chatting with fans, and posing for pictures. The band arrived in a custom detailed ‘James’ Roll Royce, pictured to the right.
James continued their successful weekend with a fantastic headlining set at the Guildford Festival on Saturday night, where they again played a near flawless set, again impressing the crowd with well-known favorites and the same selection of new songs as was played in Blackpool. They topped off the night off with an extended version of ‘Sit Down’, during which, at Saul’s direction, the entire crowd sat down.
Perhaps the only disapointment of the weekend came on Sunday night, when the official UK singles charts were announced, with James current single, ‘I Know What I’m Here For’, topping out at a disapointing number 22, despite a tremendous amount of airplay over the past few weeks. The single plummeted to number 39 in its second week on the charts.
Next Single Due in September, ‘Millionaires’ by October 4th 29-Jul-99: James next single, ‘Just Like Fred Astaire’, is tentatively scheduled for release on September 27th. The single, previously known simply as ‘Fred Astaire’, garnered the band quite a bit of coverage in the press recently when it was revealed that the estate of Hollywood legend Fred Astaire was threatening to sue the band if they did not change the title. The band had originally approached the estate seeking permission to use footage of the legendary entertainer in the video for the single, only to be threatened with legal action if they released the song with the original title.
New Album, ‘Millionaires’, Set for October Release 29-Jun-99, updated 29-Jul-99: James’ new album, ‘Millionaires’ is tentaively scheduled for release on October 11th and features contributions from Sinead O’Connor, who lends vocals on ‘Vervacous’, and Faithless, who produced the song ‘Afro Lover’. The album itself was produced in part by Brian Eno, with Steve Osborne, Ben Fenner, and Dave Bascombe also filling various production roles. It has already been voted number 1 new album by Music Week, a British trade paper, and is being widely acclaimed as the band’s best album to date.
James’ Status in the US 27-Jul-99: Numerous people have been asking about the US release date for the new singles and album, and unfortunately, the bad news is that James were dropped by the US arm of Mercury following the North American release of the Best Of, and currently do not have a record deal in the US. As a result, there is no US release date scheduled for either the singles or the new album at this time. However, the band are in the process of trying to re-negotiate a deal with Mercury or to find another label that would be willing to sign them to a US contract. More information on James’ status in the US will be posted here as it becomes available.
‘I Know What I’m Here For’ Released July 19th 29-Jun-99, updated 19-Jul-99: James new single, ‘I Know What I’m Here For’ will be released in the UK today, July 19th. It will be released in two parts: CD 1: I Know What I’m Here For, All Good Boys, Imagine Ourselves CD 2: I Know What I’m Here For, Downstairs, Stolen Horses
The single has been getting a great deal of air time on UK radio, and has been on the Radio 1 A-list for the past few weeks now.
December Arena Tour Dates Announced 12-Jul-99: According to the postcard sent out to promote the new single, ‘I Know What I’m Here For’, James will be playing a short UK arena tour in December, similar to the one they played last year. For a full list of dates, see the tour dates page.
Blackpool Warm-Up, Portuguese Festival Added 27-Jun-99: James have scheduled a warm-up gig for the day before they headline the Guildford Festival, at the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool on Friday, July 23rd. Tickets are £16.00 and are available by calling 01618 321111. Also added to the list of summer dates is the Festival Sudoeste, in Zambujeira do Mar, Portugal on 8th August.
News on the New Album & Single 03-May-99, updated 11-Jun-99: James’ new album is finished, and the tentative release date for the first single, ‘I Know What I’m Here For’, is July 19th. The single will be debuted on Radio 1 during Jo Whiley’s show on Monday, May 24th, sometime between the hours of noon and 2pm. The second single, ‘Fred Astaire’, should be released in mid-August, and will be followed by the new album, titled ‘Millionares’, in early September. A UK tour is tentatively being planned for December.
Liverpool Warm-up Announced 04-Jun-99: According to the Liverpool Echo, James will be playing at the L2 Club in Liverpool on Friday 9th July. The show is scheduled to start at 8:15pm and tickets are £13.50 (subject to booking fee). Tickets can be ordered through the box office by calling 0151 709 4321 or via credit card at 0151 256 5555.
Soccer Six Update 23-May-99: Due to scheduling conflicts, James have had to pull out of this year’s Soccer Six Tournament. Instead, they’ll be heading to France for a photo shoot for album and promo photos.
Tim Booth to Appear at Bolton Octagon 02-May-99, updated 15-May-99: Tim Booth will be appearing at a benefit for at the Bolton Octagon on Sunday, May 16th at 7:30pm. The theatre, which played host to the play Saved last May, in which Tim starred, is facing financial difficulties and may be forced to shut down . The benefit will also include appearances by comedians Peter Kaye and Smug Roberts, actor/folk singer Bernard Wrigley, and poet Hovis Presley. Tim will top off the night with a 30 minute acoustic set including songs from the new James album. More information and tickets (£12.50) are available by calling 01204 520661.
James in Germany 11-May-99: James will be playing the Halderner Open Air festival, in Rees-Haldern, Germany, on August 6-7, 1999. This will apparently be James only appearance this summer in Germany. Tickets are available on 02553 98056. More information can be found at http://www.haldern-pop.de/.
James to Headline Guildford Festival 22-Apr-99: James will be the main stage headliners at the Guildford Festival, on Saturday 24th July. Other main stage acts include Jools Holland, Ian Dury and Bob Geldof on Friday and the Saw Doctors, Shane Macgowan and Bjorn Again. Three day tickets cost £52, Friday tickets, £18, Saturday tickets, £27, Sunday tickets, £25 and camping (per tent) is £20. Tickets are available at (01483) 454159. More information is available at the Guildford Live Music Festival web site.
New Album Release Delayed 10-Mar-99, updated 11-Apr-99: The release of James’ new album has been pushed back until September, and possibly even later. The latest delay is due in part to producer/mixer Chris Potter’s decision to work on Richard Ashcroft’s new solo album instead. The album is currently slated for a September release, but that will depend on who is chosen to replace Potter, and what their schedule is. Two singles are tentatively planned for release prior to the album, the first sometime in May/June, and the second around July, though no release dates have been set as yet. It is likely that James’ only UK festival appearance this summer will be at T in the Park, in Balado, Scotland, where they will be third on the bill on Sunday, July 11th. The band have decided to concentrate on playing more European festivals this summer, instead of the usual UK ones, since they played most of them last summer, and prefer to wait until after they’ve got a new album out before playing them again. They hope to introduce a few more new songs into the set list at the European festivals, which will form the basis for another tentative UK tour in December.
New Album & Single News 11-Apr-99: James next album is being mixed this week and is still on schedule for a September release. Most of the mixing will be done by Dave Bascombe, who mixed the 1990 release of Sit Down, and has worked with bands such as Depeche Mode, Erasure, Lightning Seeds, Suede, and Placebo, just to name a few. Saul and Mark will be mixing the rest with Ben Fenner, who mixed most of Laid and has worked with the likes of David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, and The Cranberries. The first single will be released to radio at the end of May, with release to the public coming at the end of June. The second single will come out roughly a month or so after that. Which songs will be released as singles won’t be decided until after mixing is completed.
James Lyrics To Be Auctioned For Charity 06-Mar-99: James have donated the lyrics for “Sit Down”, written on a chair, to an upcoming charity auction. The auction, to be held on March 22 at London’s Sound Republic Club, is part of the Hits Under the Hammer campaign, which will raise money for children’s charities Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy and Norwood Ravenswood. Other high-profile artists who have donated lyrics for the event include the Spice Girls, Madonna, Alanis Morissette, the Rolling Stones, Elton John, and Eric Clapton, among others. Ticket information and further details are available by calling 44-181-420-6849 (fax 44-181-420-6800). An internet auction of an additional 170 items will be open for two weeks starting March 15 at the Interactive Collector site. More information on both events is available from Billboard.
James To Defend Their Title at Soccer Six 01-Mar-99: James will return to the Music Industry Soccer Six this year to defend the championship title they captured last year by defeating Blur in the finals. This year’s event will be held at Stamford Bridge, the home of Chelsea Football Club, on Sunday, 29th May, 1999. Confirmed participants in this year’s event include Robbie Williams, Simply Red, Damon Albarn, The Levellers, and Bush, with more stars added daily. More information, including photos of Saul’s fine treatment of last year’s trophy (now “retired”), is available from Cup Promotions, the official sponsor of the Music Industry Soccer Six tournament. Tickets are now on sale at the venue and through First Call and TicketWeb. Listen to Capital FM or check the sites above for the latest tournament news and ticket information.
New Album and Single Release 11-Feb-99: James’ new album is finished, but will not be released until August, with two singles preceeding its release. One of the two singles will definitely be “I Know What I’m Here For”, and the first could come out as early as April, although no date has been set.
Tim on Faith and Music 23-Jan-99: Lead singer Tim Booth will be featured on the UK television show Faith and Music tomorrow, Sunday, at 11:45pm. The blurb for this week’s show reads:
Series in which musicians discuss their spiritual beliefs. This programme features the lead singer of pop group James, Tim Booth, who discusses his quest for enlightenment and a true relationship with his God. The show can be seen on most ITV stations. Check ITV Online for local listings.
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Home James – Front Magazine | Article, Interview |
Blagging free tickets is one thing, but when you’re asked to go on tour with one of the UK’s best bands, you’re not going to say no are you? Well we bloody weren’t. When the house lights go down and nearly 16,000 people from your hometown roar their approval, the noise at the front of the auditorium is simply unbelievable. Then, in the glare of a single spotlight, you walk out on stage, and that noise moves from the realms of the unbeliveable to the downright terrifying. For a moment, before the opening bars of the first track kick in , you stand there gazing across an ocean of heads and hands stretching as far as your squinting eyes can see. It’s in the lonely moment of exhilaration that you realise you’re a star. ” A one, a two, a one, two three four….” Let’s go back in time 3 days before this momentous night in Manchester. It’s half seven on the evening of December 10 at the Marriot Hotel in North London. Six out of seven members of James are hanging around in the foyer waiting for the “Front” people carrier to take them for a night out on the town, courtesy of the mag. “Don’t forget the lads are playing Wembley Arena tomorrow night” says their press woman, “so take it easy tonight, alright?” Exactly 14 hours of “taking it easy” later, it’s 9am on the day of one of James’ most important gigs ever and not one member of the gang has had a wink of slumber. Everyone has piled into Dean’s (the chief of security) hotel room and the procession of orders from room service has been as endless as the queue for the bogs. “Courshe we can bloody drink”, slurs Saul Davies, violinist, guitarist and smallest, most shaven headed member of the band. “Shonly the media that like to make ush out as vegan folk rockers”. And with that Saul finally keels over and quietly auditions for next months ‘Mate in a state’. Meanwhile, Jim, (bassist) and founder member, is arguing with Dave ( drummer and Wales’ only contribution to the band ) about the merits of sheep shagging. On the bed, Adrian (lead guitar) and Mike Kulas (guitar and vocals) the newest additions to the band, are talking some of the most purest bollocks known to man. Ten thirty is fast approaching as Mike waltzes in the room wearing the shirt he has selected for tonight’s show. Rightly he receives a general barracking for a garment that resembles a 1970’s Hawaiian dishcloth. “You can’t go on stage wearing that rubbish!” I shout, jabbing a very wobbly finger in his direction, “Let ‘Front’ buy you something decent” “Alright” says Mike, “You’re on” “I’m coming with you” mumbles Saul, raising himself from the dead . And with that me, Piers (the ed), Saul and Mike weave our way down to reception and jump in a cab. “Make sure you get them to soundcheck by four!” barks a worried looking Peter Rudge (James’ manager). Ten shops, two pubs and one Burger King later it’s four o’clock alright, but we’re still in Piccadilly trying to find a taxi – along with 100,000 Christmas shoppers. We eventually arrive at Wembley Arena just after five to a withering ‘you two keep out of the way’ look from a less-than-happy manager. We slink off to the dressing room and tuck into the bands’ nosebag : one bottle of vodka, one of gin, four of wine, six of champagne, a huge icebox filled with Fosters and, oh yeah, a couple of sarnies. Sound check over, the arena slowly fills with fans. Tim Booth enters wearing a coat covered in mirrored sequins. “We’ve got something special planned for “tonight” he explains. “For the encore when the crowd are waiting for me to walk on stage, I suddenly appear in the middle of the crowd at the back of the arena wearing this.” The support act the Stereophonics, leave the stage and in James’ dressing room anxious, pale men pace up and down, chewing fingernails and smoking heavily- it’s like being in a hospital waiting room full of expectant fathers. The sound of Tim and Mike singing scales and warming up their vocal chords drifts eerily through the walls….Mr Rudge checks his watch :8.56. “Right you lot, let’s go” he yells and the band queue up with shaking limbs and rolling heads -like they’re in the tunnel at Wembley. Piers and I leg it to the photographers pit between the bouncers and the stage, and as the lights go down the noise is well on the way to frightening. Saul strides on stage with adrenaline blood and murder in his eyes. “Come on then, are you fookin’ up for it?” he screams. And as the band launch into Laid, and Tim does a convincing impression of a rag doll at a rave, it seems that everyone is. A dazzling array of foot stomping, hands-in-the-air classics follow ( She’s a star, Destiny Calling, Confusion, Come Home, Born of Frustration, Say Something etc) along with 3 new tracks from the forthcoming album, provisionally entitled “Millionaires”. One and a half hours later, the set ends with a simply storming rendition of the perennial crowd pleaser Sit Down. As the band troop off no one could guess that six-sevenths of James had less sleep last night than your average barn owl. The encore begins with Top of the World and all eyes are on the crowd where Mike, bless him, is wearing the Front sweatshirt we presented him before the gig. Meanwhile Tim, ten security blokes and two guys from Front are sprinting through the labyrinth of passages and corridors under Wembley Arena. Under cover of darkness and unnoticed within the waiting crowd. Then two spotlights split the night, tracking slowly across the crowd until they converge on Mr Booth in his technicolour dreamcoat. “The view from here’s breathtaking,” he sings, grinning .The look on the faces of the punters as they realise who they’re standing next to is a treat. Two songs later the show’s over and one buzzing band are slapping backs, guzzling ale and swapping stage stories. After a quick shower, ‘band tartmeister’ Saul ushers us to the after-show party with promises that there will be “Birds aplenty”. This surely is what being in a band is all about. The previous night, in various watering holes around London, the band were furiously dishing out tickets and aftershow passes to any female that didn’t closely resemble Jo Brand. Throughout the show security chief Dean has been busily doing the same. We open the doors to the after-show partyand- surprise, surprise!- the place is wall-to-wall fan…. erm, fans of a high quality and definitely female nature. “They’ve got to be young, eager, tasty and there’s got to be enough so there’s a few left over for the likes of us,” Dean explains. The rest of the night involves booze, birds and hotel rooms, and at ten the next morning, after a luxurious 3 hour kip, ten bleary eyed bastards shamble onto the tour bus. Destination :Manchester the gig that will finally see the band Come Home . “Saul”, I ask, as he clambers wearily into his bunk. “What does this gig mean to you?” “This gig”, he sighs, “is gonna be in front of nearly 16,000 fans in our home town. It’s the biggest indoor gig James have ever played in Britain, so it means a lot to all of us. Now would you kindly piss off and let me get some sleep”. It’s a relatively reasonable request from six stone of knackered sex machine, so we do. In Manchester the pre-show build up follows a similar pattern to the previous night– except for one dressing room bombshell, an hour before the gig Tim announces he may have to pull the gig because his voice is “totally fucked”. By the time the house lights go up, it has all proved to be a powder puff of precious balderdash. The band tuck into some well earned dressing room booze and then its Groundhog day behaviour as Saul ushers us off to the after show party where he once again assures us that there’ll be “birds aplenty”. Once again he’s right and, over breakfast the next morning, I promise not to tell a soul about his night time athletics. This, of course, precludes me from mentioning room 459 and the two nurses from Manchester Royal Infirmary, but hey! As he sits there rebuilding his strength with a large plate of bacon and eggs, the dirty bastard has only one thing to say “You know Mark” he grins “It’s only rock ‘n’ rolll but I like it.” | Feb 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
She’s A Star – The Guitarist Magazine | Article, News |
THE GUITAR’S THE STAR by Adrian Clark Manchester’s trend-bucking off-spring, James, aren’t adverse to a bit of bottle… DESPITE HAILING FROM MANCHESTER, James have never really slotted into the ‘Manchester band’ mould. During their first flush of success in the late 80s, they sounded nothing like the trendy ‘Madchester’ bands, such as the lnspiral Carpets and the Stone Roses. Ten years later, James are still going strong, but guess what – they sound nothing like Oasis! Part of their appeal lies in the fact that they’ve always staunchly refused to follow trends, which may explain why they’ve never achieved fame on a huge level – the general public, it seems, just can’t cope with a bit of originality. Anyway, to fit in with our slide theme this month, I’ve decided to transcribe the lead guitar part from the song She’s a Star, which can be found on the ‘James: The Best Of ‘compilation. This sort of thing would be a good introduction to non-blues slide – it’s reasonably easy, not least because you can play the whole thing on one string! In the transcription below, you’ll see that I’ve placed the part on the third (G) string, but it’s s just as easy on the second (B) string – just move every note down by four frets. One possible reason for using the G string is that, if your guitar has quite light-gauge strings and low action, the G string provides a little extra resistance to prevent the slide rattling against the frets. For more info check out the Introduction To Slide on page 140… Theory-wise, the underlying chords are G, Gmaj7 (F# bass), Cadd9 and D. These chords all derive from the G major scale (G A B C D E F# G) and if you scan through the slide part, you’ll see that all of the melody notes do indeed come from that scale. It’s very easy to map out a scale fingering when you’re only dealing with one string at a time, so why not figure out where all of the G major scale’s notes lie on either the B or G string, and then use your new-found slide expertise to improvise some melodies of your own? You can always use the backing track on the CD. Have a thoroughly slippery month and I’ll see you next issue. This song appears in James: Whiplash- Guitar Tab. Order no. AM944009, published by Music Sales Ltd. and is available from your local music shop or directly from Music Sales Ltd, Distribution Centre, Newmarket Road, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk IP33 3YB. Tel: 01284 725725. Visit the Internet Music Shop at www.musicinprint.com GUITARIST • MARCH 1999 | Mar 1999 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: Change Of Scenery – Issue 10 | Fanzine | Change Of Scenery was a James fanzine produced by John Pude. Download this fanzine as a PDF. © copyright Change Of Scenery. | May 1999 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Millions Like Us – NME | Article, News | JAMES return with a new single on July 19 called ‘I Know What I’m Here For’, the first to be taken from their eighth album ‘Millionaires’, the follow up to last year’s ‘Greatest Hits’ album. James headline their first shows since last year’s arena tour at T In The Park on Sunday July 11, before headlining at the Guildford Festival (July 24) and then the Lizard Eclipse Festival (August 11 – 14). The band’s new album is released in September and will be accompanied by a second single called ‘Fred Astaire’. | May 1999 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Play Tower Of Song – NME | Article, News | JAMES are to play a one-off gig at Blackpool Tower Ballroom as a ‘seaside summer special’ to celebrate the release of their new single. As reported yesterday on nme.com, ‘I Know What I’m Here For’ is out on July 19, backed over two formats with other new tracks ‘All Good Boys’, ‘Imagine Ourselves’, ‘Downstairs’ and ‘Stolen Horses’. They play the legendary Blackpool venue – famed for gigs by The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays – on July 23, the day before their appearance at the Guildford Festival. | May 1999 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Reading Announcement – Melody Maker | Article, News |
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Boyztown Millionaires Giveaway | Article, News |
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James Reunited With Eno – Music 365 | Article, News | JAMES have turned once again to Brian Eno to produce the follow-up to 1997’s ‘Whiplash’, Music365 can reveal. Due for release on Fontana in September, ‘Millionaires’ sees the band working with Eno for the first time since 1993’s ‘Laid’. Already being acclaimed by insiders as “the best album of their 16-year-long career”, ‘Millionaires’ also features contributions from Sinead O’Connor and Jamie Catto from Faithless. The full tracklisting is: ‘Surprise’, ‘Fred Astaire’, ‘I Know What I’m Here For’, ‘Afro Lover’, ‘If Anybody Hurts You’, ‘Strangers’, ‘Someone’s Got It In 4 Me’, ‘Crash’, ‘Dumb Jam’, ‘Hello’ and ‘Vervacious’. The album comes on the back of an unexpected new peak in the band’s fortunes generated by the success of 1998’s ‘The Best Of James’ compilation which gave them their first ever Number One album. “We were aware that last year’s success had created an expectation of this record,” says guitarist Saul Davies. “The songs were written just as that was kicking off and it generated a lot of energy. I think we struck a really good balance between being commercial and being interesting and different. We derived enormous encouragement just from Brian Eno being there.” The first single, ‘I Know What I’m Here For’ is released in late July and will be followed by ‘Fred Astaire’, described as the album’s key track and “the best love song the band has ever written”. The band will unveil material from the new album at the Guildford Festival on July 24. James also appear on TFI Friday on July 2. | Jun 1999 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth – Faith And Music, ITV transcript | Article, Feature, Video Archive |
DetailsI can’t see a reason for living unless you want to ask, or answer, or try and ask very difficult questions, but otherwise you’re born, you live, you die. There’s more than that. This world is far too intelligent, and too interesting, fascinating a place for there to be nothing. For a start these things are hard to talk about. They’re often not rational or logical so communication is very hard, so yes, I’ve been misunderstood because it’s damn near hard to understand in the first place. It’s no-ones fault. Secondly, the rock world obviously has problems with anything that’s not sex, drugs and rock and roll. It’s every limited tabloid world, very cliched and I don’t fit. I’m happy with that. Then there’s been those papers aren’t the right place to talk about this and so yeah, I’ve been ridiculed and laughed at, but that goes with the job. A song like Seven was one of the first times I openly referred to God, much to the annoyance of my fellow band members who don’t really like me talking openly about these things because they don’t share those beliefs and that’s totally fair enough and James got painted as a Buddhist band, really because of the stuff I did. I got this lyric in: “God made love to me, soothed away my gravity. Gave me a pair of angel wings, clear vision and some magic things.” When I’m singing “Love can mean anything”, it could be “God can mean anything.” They’re just highly abused words. Well the idea behind that, if you really pursue the idea that everybody can get in touch with God, that everybody has God within them, then the ultimate union would be having sex with God, so “God made love to me…” That was the first time I started getting interested in that idea. That’s what I think ecstasy is, not the drug, the state, is when you feel totally at one. You’re free from all of your smallness, your day-to-day identity. I was brought up in a very Christian religious household. My parents were very proud of the fact that we were related to John Wesley. My father was strong in the Church and I used to go every week or every two weeks. I used to like the stained glass windows, and I used to like the Bible stories with the big pictures of floods, and arks and dramatic sweeps like that. And then I was sent to public school at 13, which I hated, and I didn’t fit in, and had all these feelings running through me which I couldn’t explain, couldn’t fit. I think of one of the big nights was when I was about 15 and there was an older boy who wrote out four questions on a piece of paper and they were: Who are you? Where do you come from? Where do you go when you die? Three questions. And he handed these questions round and everybody else didn’t like them, and I felt a huge sense of relief as someone had asked the questions which must be the most important questions of one’s life, if you want to have any idea of what the hell we’re doing here. I can’t remember what I answered but I remember getting very excited by that. My state of mind was very strange and I thought I was quite crazy. I didn’t eat much as a kid, so my mum made me drink a lot of milk, and milk is one of the worst things for the liver. So I would drink a pint of milk and go into an altered state through illness, but it was never diagnosed, so I was always dealing with very strange states of mind, which is part of why I didn’t fit in. When I was about 22, I ended up in hospital. I couldn’t walk up stairs. I stopped breathing at one point and I remember that very clearly as very peaceful. I actually breathed out and the breath just kept on going and I remember thinking “Wow, this is fantastic.” I was sick of life, and I gave myself a year to investigate alternative medicine and therapies and meditation, and I actually gave myself one year to find proof of the existence of spirit or of God, and if I didn’t find that proof, I decided that I was going to burn myself out. I then looked at meditation, as it seemed safe, you were on your own. I was scared about falling into a religion and being caught in a dogma, being caught by a guru, being caught by a great leader. So I looked at different meditation groups, I went to a Buddhist group for a while and tried transcendental. I was shopping around. I was a tourist. And I eventually heard of a group in Manchester which all the other groups were slagging off, because they said they can get you to enlightenment in two years, they can show you your own spirit within a few months and I thought that’s the one for me. In a sense, the meditation was the first peace, I’d had in my life where you really sink into yourself. I had a huge resistance to meditation as I’m quite an active person. I used to do 18 hours, 1 meal day. At first I had huge resistance, the first 4/5 hours would be hell, where you’d be screaming to get up and run and then you’d hit certain things where you’d just feel like this light was passing through you and you’d just sit there nailed and you’d be letting energy just pour through you. It blew my mind. All kinds of things started happening to me. I’d see light around people. And I got my proof basically and unfortunately I succumbed to the usual trap of cults which is to think, “My God, this man did this to me. He must be powerful,” and I started falling for the dogma and the whole trip. I was celibate, no alcohol, no drugs, two hours meditation a day, 16 every weekend. It was a very aggressive path as I did it for 3 and a half years, and then we found out that the guru had been sleeping around and he wasn’t who he said he was. As a personality, he was a bit of a dick, and we disbanded the group an we went on our way, wiser hopefully. I wrote a few songs looking at the nature of Christianity, which I’d had force fed for 20 odd years and included observations on the cult I got into. God Only Knows is probably the most successful and the song is really “What is the nature of God? And the chorus is “God only knows.” I mean, anyone who sells himself up as a holier-than-thou religious leader is going to come crashing down. The thing I see about religious leaders, or spiritual leaders, is that they’ve often focused on just their spirituality and as a result, they haven’t dealt with their sexuality, their greed, their ego, their flattery. If they haven’t learnt to deal with the more mundane parts of their character, they’ve gone straight to their spirit, they become op-heavy, like some kind of body-builder who thinks only about their muscles. To me it’s about a balance, you have to get the mind, the body, the spirit, everything. You have to keep them in balance too. If one gets over-developed it’s always going to be to the detriment to the others. Traditionally, dance has been used by shamens, tribes, to get people into ecstatic states. These are receptive to information of from the spirit world and I’ve always been fascinated by this, especially in this culture which the main way people get into altered states in the West is through altered states. I thick drugs can be very instructive at first, because they show you that this isn’t all that exists, that there are other ways of seeing the world and I think that’s very useful to people but then the trouble is that what happens is it turns into a problem and it turns into a negative and destroys the body and mind. So I’ve been very interested in the way drumming, dancing, music, fasting, sleep deprivation and meditation can get you away from the monkey mind and the human machine and allow more spirit. It’s not New Age, it’s ancient healing that’s been used for thousands of years, and predates religions. And it’s quite fierce. New Age suggests something quite wimpy about embracing the light and for me you have to embrace the darkness before you get any way near the light and if you deny your dark side it will come back big time. When we did Gold Mother, I had just split up with the mother of my son, and I had just left her and my son. That was probably my darkest time and a lot of the lyrics in Gold Mother are about that. In Come Home, “After 30 years, I’d become my fears, I’d become the kind of man, I’ve always hated.” Which is about as dark as it gets. Like a lot of that record, I kind of hated myself. I dunno how close to suicide I got, but I got fairly dark. I don’t think I’ll get to suicide, I just don’t believe in it as basically, I know that you’ll come back, and secondly, I don’t think that it’s a way out. The first gigs that we played were in Blackpool, and I remember when we got to the lines, “After 30 years…” the audience sang it back to me, punching the air with joy, and I remember being completely done in by it, completely devastated by it. They’d taken something that I’d written as self-abuse and dark, and turned it into a celebration, and I thought, that’s healing. And they did that on all those songs that night. And I suddenly realised that was what being in a band was all partly doing for me. It was helping me heal my on pain. And that’s been my promise to myself each time, to go in deep each time, to keep writing about the things that are uncomfortable because it gets to the real stuff and it also touches people on a deep level. (part 2 of interview, some time later) In the first part of this interview, we fell into the trap of setting a beautiful white environment with candles, the clichés of religion, and really religion has been ghettoised. It’s thought of in pious, probably very dull terms, probably because the dominant religion in this country is Christianity and it’s been force-fed to children at school, and so most of us are like, “Jeez, don’t talk about that crap anymore,” where it should be something passionate, something discussed in cafes. I should have a fag in one hand and a beer in my other hand, and I would have faked it for the camera, but, you know, it’s not me. It should be a day-to-day thing. I think more and more people are getting into it. To be honest, I’m trying to make it more concrete for this programme, cos a lot of my life, I couldn’t talk about here, because a lot of the realms, the altered state realms you go to are by definition, outside language and outside the rational, therefore how the hell do I explain it to anybody. And I believe in following dreams and I mean that in following your own dream in your life, what you really want to do in life, your real passion. I think dreams are an amazing way into your instinctive self. Everything in this culture wants us to believe in the concrete, the rational, the logical. We can’t possibly do that. We get so trapped in our day-to day crap, that we forget who we are, and its like, people are capable of magic. The danger with message, it’s like you asking what is the message? That’s the usual danger of any spiritual organisation, is that it becomes a package to sell. And it’s also, “I’ve found a way that’s right, and right for you.” And I can’t say that because I’ve found a way that’s right for me and I mean, so I don’t have a message, only that all that I’d say in that case, is that everyone has to find their own way. | Jun 1999 | article feature video-archive | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I Know What I’m Here For – Channel 4 TFI Friday – June 1999 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsLive performance of I Know What I’m Here For on Channel 4’s TFI Friday | Jun 1999 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Lose A Dimension – Creative Review | Article, News | British indie band James have a new slick promo from post-production company, Glassworks. It accompanies their latest single, ‘I Know What I’m Here For’ (out on Mercury Records) and features the band and five dancers turning from 3D to 2D amidst bizarre kaleidoscopic effects. Glassworks’ Flame operator Jonny Hicks worked closely with the director, Academy’s David Mould to create the futuristic environment. “The director asked me if I could create a modern version of Victorian paper theatre, with the characters sliding in and out.” says Hicks. The band and dancers were shot against a green screen, but when they were put into the proposed textured background they looked too small. In the end the team opted for super futuristic shapes.” | Jul 1999 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James On Britain’s Politest Rock Festival – Q | Article, Interview |
The Guildford Festival is very different to the hedonistic Glastonbury experience isn’t it? We did – as you call it – the hedonistic festivals last year, so we felt we’d OD’ed on that. This year’s detox, and then next year we’re going back into the frying pan again. Would you like to share a favourite festival moment? At Lollapalooza we played before bands like Korn so the audience kept shouting “faggots” at us. We went out and got these glitter tops and skirts. I was in a neckbrace, wearing a cowboy hat and glitter outfit, and when they’d scream abuse, I’d walk out into this audience. I had a really good time playing up this “cabaret transvestite” we all have inside of us. Why are James seen as a big festival band? We know how to reach out to large numbers of people. I think a lot of bands keep their eyes down and don’t really see who they’re communicating with. And other bands hide behind technology and lights. Have you ever taken too many drugs and lost it? I used to go to those really small harvest festivals, they were really wild. I remember my first acid trip at one of those. I saw an American sweat lodge with all these naked people. I thought it was a hallucination but these people were naked and were dancing around a fire and going into a steam tent. If you had to expire at a festival, which time-honoured method would you choose: on-stage electrocution, drug overdose or hypothermia? Struck by lightning! Last year at V-ninety-whatever-it-was there was rain and there was lightning, and we started with “Sometimes”, a song about a boy wanting to be struck by lightning. A puff of smoke, then. I’d like there to be no remains except my boots. | Jul 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Want To Honour Hollywood Hero – Radio 1 | Article, News | The estate of the legendary actor, Fred Astaire are none too pleased that James want to release a track in his honour. The band have released their latest track, ‘I Know What I’m Here For’, this week, but are keen to follow it with an ode to the late great Mr Astaire. “We’ve heard from the Fred Astaire estate that if we call it ‘Fred Astaire’ we may suffer the legal consequences”, Tim and Saul explained to Radio 1. “It’s a love song. It’s about a man who goes to the doctor with a bad temperature feeling really ill and really has all the symptoms of being blindly in love”, say the lads. “We approached them (the estate), we tried to get footage for the video and they were like ‘under no circumstances would we allow the name of the great Fred to be linked with a snotty band of four men from Oxford playing pop music in England. We know all about your type’.” James play a sold-out show at the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool this Friday ahead of their headline appearance at the Guildford Festival on Saturday: “We’ve been told it’s a nice quiet family festival. People I know that have been say it’s like wonderful, really nice, low-key, you know, very easy-going.” | Jul 1999 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Guildford Festival Programme Biography | Article, Biography | James are probably best known for their many hit singles and mega-selling “Best Of” album, but there is a lot more to them than that. From their first releases in 1985 until the as yet unreleased new album, they have never written a song in the traditional way. They have always just got together and jammed and whatever came out came out. This was how “She’s A Star” came about and “Sit Down” and “Destiny Calling”. Seems so simple, doesn’t it? But, you don’t make records like those by just jamming unless you have got an awesome amount of talent in the band. Tim Booth as singer tends to be who people think of as “James”, but there is a lot more besides. Saul Davies plays violin and guitars and is becoming a more dominant force in the band. Dave Baynton-Power is the man behind the drum kit. Jim Glennie is on bass while Adrian Oxaal, from Canada, provides lead guitar and also plays cello. Mark Hunter plays keyboards and Michael Kulas gives us backing vocals and sometimes guitar. | Jul 1999 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Rock Gods Who Refuse To Make The Sacrifice – Sunday Express | Article, Interview | Ten years ago, there were three bands that really mattered – all from Manchester. The Stone Roses had brought an optimism and Sixties-influenced harmony back to the charts, the Happy Mondays had reintroduced swagger and danger, and James had … well James just busied themselves with crafting a succession of finely-tuned, beautifully weighted pop songs. “We didn’t really feel part of Madchester,” claims singer Tim Booth, “we weren’t taking the same narcotics really…” As their contemporaries imploded – victims of egos, substance abuse or their own success – James quietly got on with it, even, with 1993’s Laid breaking America. Through the Nineties they became a kind of pop fixture – a top 40 single here and there, an album now and then – one of those bands that always seemed to be around but never spectacularly so. Then came last year’s Best Of compilation. Suddenly, it seemed James were cashing in their chips, saying look, here’s the result of 15 years in the charts, here’s 18 songs you know and love and probably didn’t even realise were all by us. Sit down. Enjoy. The album promptly hit Number One and sold more than a million. “I think it really brought home to people that we are a big band in this country,” Booth says. There’s no trace of arrogance – he simply feels that after a decade and a half, James deserve to be recognised not just a “credible” band but as one that sells a lot of records. “We’re artistically very ambitious and we’re ambitious in terms of getting through to a lot of people.” He pauses. “I think it’s an old-fashioned point of view now. I think the attitude behind a lot of modern music is that fame justifies everything. The quest for fame in most bands seems totally at the expense of creativity.” But that’s why it’s called the music business. He laughs: “Well, it suits the record companies – certainly more than bands who have artistic goals.” When the Best Of came out, it was viewed by many critics as a sign that James were calling it a day. In much the same way that a Lifetime Achievement award can imply there’s no more left to achieve, a Best Of can imply that there’s nothing of quality still to come. Booth shrugs. The time was just right for that record, he feels, there was nothing further to it. “By the time the Best Of was out, we already had some more songs written,” he says. “We’re perfectionists, our standards are really high, so we just keep working on the songs and going further and further over budget and trying out different ideas until we get it right.” The result is the new single I Know What I’m Here For – resonant with the kind of funked up keyboard riff and clear vocals which defined so much of what was good about their Madchester period – and the forthcoming album Millionaires. “We’ve ended up with a record that’s got five singles on it. It’s very unusual for us.” Perhaps James have got a taste for million-selling records. Perhaps it’s time Tim became a proper rock star? “You mean a traditional rock star?” he laughs. “I’ve been given quite a hard time for not being that. Part of my position is reacting to the rock world. “I mean, it’s an adolescent fantasy. You can have whatever you want – as much sex, as much drugs, as much booze. “You’re treated like a god and what you don’t realise is that you’ll end up being sacrificed. What I did was learn to develop my own values, otherwise it would have eaten me alive.” There have been changes to the way James work. The traditional creative process – get all of them in a room and jam until something interesting emerges – has been replaced by a more disciplined approach. “This is the first record we’ve ever made where we’ve turned up with chord structures,” says Tim, completely straight-faced. “To us, it’s totally new and original. I suppose to everyone else it’s how things normally work….” Maybe they will learn how to be a million-selling act. | Jul 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Interview With Boyz Magazine | Article, Interview | Indie Gods, survivors and thoroughly nice blokes, James are back with a new single, album and tons of great stories about trying to be gay and going with hookers. Tim Booth and Saul Davies talk to Eric James So, there are seven of you in the group, any benders? Tim : We wanted to make sure you knew beforehand that there weren’t. We’re honoured that you want us in your magazine, but I thought we should make sure you know there isn’t anyone. Have you ever tried it? Tim : I’ve tried it a couple of times, but it wasn’t my thing. I had two men who I was very close to and I thought I must see if I can sleep with them, and it just wasn’t the thing. We had a bath together and got into bed and it was like ‘Sorry’ Were they gay and you weren’t? Tim : One of them was gay and the other was pan That’s the best one to be. Tim : It’s weird, but when we called one of our records ‘Laid’ our libidos went up a lot. Then we called the next record ‘Whiplash’ and I ruptured two discs in my neck so we thought this time let’s be very careful what we call this record. I wanted to call it ‘Millionaires’ cause I wanted us all to make a lot of money. You should have called it Laid Again Tim : We know what your agenda is Saul : I’ve slept with Jimmy, the bass player, now I come to think of it. Any good? Saul : He was amazing actually Are you for real? I can’t tell because you’ve got shades on. Saul : You don’t want to see these eyes Tim : They’re very beautiful eyes actually You’re having a homoerotic moment right here and now Saul : No, he was great, we did it a couple of times. Who did who? Saul : There were no givers and takers, it was just a shared experience. We’re really good mates but sometimes it spills over into this really weird area and it’s great. Shall we talk about how the band got together and all that? Tim : No, let’s give you some more homo stories. OK, Have you ever snogged each other or anything? Tim : I’ve only ever done it in plays. I was Jean Genet in a play. It was partly to test myself out, to see what it was like. And what was it like? Tim : He had a moustache. With bits of food in it. It didn’t taste very good as far as I was concerned. So, what sort of girls do you go for? Tim : Oh, this is fantastic. I love it. Personally, I’ve met the love of my life so I’ve been faithful for the last three years. A woman called Kate. We have a blast. What about you? Hooked up? Saul : I find it very difficult to have a relationship with anybody So, a girl in every port Saul : There have been times when it’s been like that, but recently I’ve cleared the decks. I’m trying to get rid of all extraneous things from my life. Shags are never extraneous Saul : I’d rather fuck myself, do you know what I mean? It’s quicker. Do you get good girls being in a band? Saul : Naaaasty girls. Erm, I suppose the answer to that is that being in a band you’re in a situation where you’re more likely to get whatever you want, whether that’s drugs, money, women, whatever you want. But you know what’s it’s like. You can get so wrapped up in someone sometimes, you begin to miss your own faults, cause you’re in this person, not in your own head. So you just phone up for hookers now? Saul : I have done. Just to see what would happen And what did happen? Saul : A hooker arrived…. Hello room service. I was more intrigued about what you would get for your money, how it would work, was it fun or frightening…. And was it fun or frightening? Saul : It was really frightening. I tried to cancel the reservation, but she was already knocking on the door of the bloody hotel room. She was probably out there waiting. She was probably some groupie. Saul : No, I specifically asked for a six-foot black woman and that’s what was standing there, and I was like ‘Oh no, this is madness, I don’t want this.’ So you sent her back Saul : No, I sat her down and said ‘Do you want a drink?’ And she was thinking ‘Oh no, a talker’ So you did fuck her? Saul : No, she fucked me, completely actually. It was great What do you mean? Saul : I encouraged her to do really weird things, and she was totally obliging. And the next night we went to a late-night movie together and then she went home. She was really cool. Tim : I had a friend once who was on the streets in New York, a woman, for a couple of years and she was getting so many men that just needed to talk she gave it up and became a therapist. She’s a healer now. That’s what most people want. Saul : Sexual therapy Yeah, a shag Tim : I’m not sure about the shag thing. In the end, it’s better if it’s connected with your heart. Yadda, yadda, yadda Tim : It’s not all yadda, yadda, yadda. In the end, you just think ‘Oh no, I’ve just been shagging around. THIS is what I’ve been looking for’ But say you stay with Kate for the next 25 years, it’s bound to fall off a bit…. Tim : Check back in 25 years Don’t straight people think that to be in a long-term relationship you have to be monogamous? Tim : In straight relationships, there’s a lot more dishonesty about the nature of the male, about what a man needs. When there’s two men in a relationship, it’s easier for them to be honest, because they both have a direct experience. I see people and want to shag them and me and Kate talk about that and laugh about it and play with it, but I know that’s a short-term thrill that would damage something long-term for us. Why? Tim : Because, sex, to me, is not just a physical act. Something goes on in sex that is much more profound whether you like it or not. When you have an orgasm, I personally believe on some psychic level you become entwined, you become connected to that person. What is an orgasm? What is that? It’s nature’s way of making you want to shag Tim : I believe in a more mystical aspect. You’re energetically connected. Did you connect with your hooker? Saul : Well, we ended up going to the movies together, doing something normal after extreme and odd circumstances. There’s a nice confusion there. | Jul 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
BBC Radio 1 interview with Jo Whiley | Article, Interview | JW: How are you both ? TB: Good JW: Saul the shades aren’t coming off at all ? SD: No they are glued. JW: Are we gonna get any details about last night’s activities at all ? SD: No not on air JW: Tim do you know anything ? TB: I’m sorry he’s only just arrived but the shades are tattoed on they are 3 dimensional virtual shades SD: I’ve become a cliche of myself haven’t I ? JW: You do look the rock star part it has to be said, swagger and attitude. TB: It’s fantastic – We have to have someone in the band who takes care of that department – he was voted it for 1999. SD: Which bit do you do then ? you do the the juggling. TB: I do the fire-eating JW: You both look very well ’cause Tim everytime I have done something you have been on there’s been some kind of ailment that’s stricken you down TB: Yeah I’m Woody Allen – I can’t help it – the people in Scotland think I’m really pathetic and we cancelled T in the Park 2 years running cause of my health. It was Eddie Izzard’s fault last time you remember. JW: Yeah you went over to New York was it ? TB: Yeah I caught some germs from him – sitting too close to the stage. JW: But you are good now. TB: I’m fit and feisty. JW: Now the video we were talking about earlier is very glossy, dynamic, where did the idea come from ? It looks a bit Pet Shop Boys to me. TB: It wasn’t ours – I haven’t got a clue how videos work – it doesn’t work on the basis of making a movie – you get a script it looks fantastic, you make the video and you look like an idiot and then you get another script and it looks like nothing and you kinda think well I trust the Director and he makes it and its being played all over MTV – personally I think it’s cause we’ve got women around us. JW: But it’s not you see – I didn’t notice there were women in that video. SD: We feel guilty about this you see TB: Do we feel guilty? SD: I do JW: You are too liberal you. JW:But the cowboy look has gone, the boots and the hat in the video, cause you are in camouflage today. TB: I couldn’t ride my horse down Oxford St JW: We got a space for you outside. TB: You have ? Shoot If I’d have known I would have brought it with me. JW: We’re gonna play an exclusive track off the album and you are going to announce some tour dates. TB: Aye JW: Do you want to get that over and done with? TB: Defintely said the dentist – we are going to do another of our brief tours SD: (Announces dates) the big arenas, the big horrible sheds where we look like tiny little people in the distance – I wish we weren’t doing them. JW: So why are you ? SD: ’cause we are lazy. TB: we will have cameras that will make us look bigger and we’ll find a way of making it intimate. SD: It’s cause we are really ugly you are probably best to see us from afar actually. JW: Never go and see them at an intimate venue cause it will be harrowing. JW: How was T in the Park, a lot of people were saying it was one of the outstanding performances of the whole festival. TB: Yeah from 100 yards JW: What’s your most memorable bit ? TB: I did this speech in rehearsal and said that I’d really like this year if we don’t play Sit Down as much and Saul kind of went look we haven’t played Scotland for 2 years running cause you cancelled it and if we don’t play it there’s gonna be a riot and so he talked us into playing it so we played it at the end and 40,000 people were dancing and I can’t argue with that it was fantastic. JW: Saul do you feel vindicated ? SD: It was a bit of a no brainer though – stick 40,000 scotsman in a field, give them a load of cooking lager, stick them in front of a band called James playing a song called Sit Down – can’t lose. JW: How do you manage to put so much raw emotion and soul into your lyrics ? TB: I’m a highly unstable person and basically I write from that point of view – it’s very easy – I’m a raw human being. At the moment my life is quite stabilised so I wait for other band members to have a wild night and come crashing down the next day and then I follow them round with a pen and photogrpahs. JW: I can imagine Saul’s giving you and awful lot of material at the moment TB: Masses all the songs on the album are about Saul. JW: Is there a theme to the album ? TB: There’s not. There’s a few out and out glorious love songs cause I’m madly in love. JW: Still, that’s pretty good. TB: It’s not bad is it 3 years. I think this one’s the real thing. SD: We’re very happy JW: Are you ? I’m very pleased for you both. TB: He’s cute isn’t he JW: He’s very cute TB: But those sun glasses have got to go Em and then there’s some songs about revenge. JW: Where do they come from ? TB: She’s getting so excited, look how excited she is – she’s a vulture this woman. You think she’s a nice cute easy going….. JW: No none of that – so the revenge comes from where ? TB: A number of people in the last few years who would wish us harm – in fact the song you are going to play from the album which sounds like a really lovely perky chorus “Here’s a mirror with your name on, singing we’re gonna miss you when you’re gone” It’s not a song at all its a spell of protection, it’s like a mirror around myself that anybody wishing me harm will have this mirror reflect back at them their energy. JW: We’ll play it then (Plays If Anybody Hurts You) JW: That sounds very powerful. TB: It’s fun, we’re happy with that. JW: Its not fun though is it ? TB: No its a devious dark song with a chirpy chorus. JW: And that’s not gonna be a single. TB: It might be if we get round to a 4th or 5th JW: At the end of the Rough Trade version of Sit Down someone sings the words Lester Piggot over and ever again – then 5 years later on the Laid album his name is in brackets after Sometimes. TB: It was a very strange sound engineer in Bath – forgotten his name looked like a hippy and he used to check the sound by saying Lester Piggot and we taped him one day and stuck him on the record. He was quite happy with that. JW: Are there any plans to do another enhanced CD Single like the Destiny Calling CD’s ? SD: I didn’t know we’d done one, JW: Did the people from the X-Files talk to you personally about using the Ring the Bells ? TB: I completely forgotten about it and I bought the X-Files box set and was going through them on a boring day and I heard this song on the jukebox and I thought that sounds like the Eagles – I know this song and then we came on and they used us for about 2 minutes – a very cool moment. JW: How do you feel about the eclipse ? TB: Saul lives in a permanent eclipse. SD: I have to say. Its not even a total eclipse – Its getting blown out of proportion – the idea of 4 million withering hippies looking at something which happens every few years anyway all around the planet – connecting this with the end of the century – I hate it all – I’d like to get in an aeroplane and go up there and put smoke out and obscure their view – that would be fantastic – take the moment away from them. TB: I love it JW: When was your last big row ? TB: That was it just there. We don’t have big rows – of course we do SD: We can find a really good way of working with each other – we have different lifestyles but are complimentary to each other – I don’t understand it I think we quite like each other don’t we ? TB: Yeah I think so – yeah definitely. JW: If you disagree how do you deal with that ? TB: Liam and Noel – sometimes we call in Jimmy to arbitrate. We put him both sides cause he’s quite balanced. SD: And if his balance goes he threatens you – well he threatens me cause I’m much smaller than him. TB: We have big disagreements and we take it in turns to back down – we’re both very emotional and every so often…. Saul chokes on his coffee. JW: Are you gonna play Booth and the Bad Angel live again or make another ? TB: Probably not – I’d like to make another with Angelo cause I love the man and I had such fun making it – the record company didn’t like the record and it seemed to conflict with their big investment in James – so at the moment no. JW: Saul, Money – does that mean anything to you ? SD: We’ve done all these mad big, in-your-face house tunes and this is taking up a lot of time and we wanna get it out. Its big euro house – big cheesy stuff we can’t do in James – we’re gonna send some of it to Orbital and ask them to if they will do little bits. (Plays I Know What I’m Here For) JW: Sounds a bit like the Pet Shop Boys – What were you saying about Dave the drummer? SD: He’s doing a track with the drummer from Catatonia and the drummer from the Stereophonics – they’ll get confused the three of them – it’s a Cozy Powell track Dance with the Devil – Dave if you are out there wake up. JW: The single’s out on Monday “I Know What I’m Here For” could you not have chose something a bit snappier – its difficult to remember ? TB: It sounds like a Manics title doesn’t it. JW: It does actually. TB: We nicked it from one of Bevan’s speaches in 1952. JW: The new album’s called Millionaires – the last album was called Whiplash and you suffered at the hands of that. SD: The one before it was called Laid though remember. JW: Didn’t suffer quite so much then. Why Millionaires ? TB: Well we need some money quite simply. And also playing with the idea that everyone thinks we’re loaded – we’re sick of buying rounds in pubs – here comes a rich pop star he can buy a round. Have a look at my bank statement – not true. JW: Well something’s gone with your record company then surely. TB: Definitley – we’ve been ripped off for £325 Million as Mr Elton John said today. JW: How do you feel at the moment you do seem very enthusiastic, energised, not surprised that you are still here but that people are so receptive to you. TB: Its drugs. JW: We’ll leave it there shall we. TB: We are happy bunnies. SD: When the Best Of came out I was really worried thinking this is our wave goodbye – and when it kicked off I was so surprised, so happy in a way we’ve got a place in all of this. So when we made Millionaires we had a new found enthusiasm for it and for each other and it does feel like a weird new beginning. JW: No it does come across in what you are doing. Thanks for coming in, good to see you. TB: You too – Look forward to seeing you presenting a car show programme. SD: Holiday TB: Thats it Holiday JW: Can we have a whip round for the lads from James cause they’ve not got much money. | Jul 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
BBC Top Of The Pops chat with Dave and Mike | Article, Interview | Dave and Michael from James joined us backstage at Top Of The Pops to answer your questions, and discuss the mystique of the recording process. See what they had to say… James live on beeb.com madchester: “Would you like to return to the days of Madchester?” Dave says – “No. It’s been and gone. I don’t want to return to those days. It was the first time we were famous and you don’t really enjoy it at first. You’re a bit too uptight. It was a shock suddenly becoming a pop star.” Michael says – “I saw it from afar, coming from Canada. Canada has had a really close connection with the British music scene so we did get it, but it was from a distance. I’d heard of James from the whole ‘Sit Down’ thing. It was a really good time for music.” Dave says – “What happens is that when you’re linked to a movement then when the movement goes down you go down with it. The Madchester holy trinity was the Roses, the Mondays and the Carpets and looked what happened to them. I’m glad we weren’t linked to it that closely.” garbo: “Why did you release a Greatest Hits album? Surely that’s the sign of a band going down the drain…” Dave says – “Mmmm. I think the sales of the album speak for themselves.” Michael says – “There was a lot of record company influence in there.” Dave says – “I think a lot of people knew the songs but didn’t realise that they were all by the same band.” Michael says – “It was really to consolidate what the band had done. The new fans could find out about the band’s history and realise the musical accomplishments of the group. More people have a more rounded idea of what the band is about. The album going to number one gave us a pleasant jolt and really gave us confidence for the new album.” Aldo: “What’s the most satisfying album you’ve ever released?” Dave says – “Wah Wah.” Michael says – “It would have to be the new one for me, cos that’s the first one I’ve been involved with fully.” larac: “How was it working with Brian Eno?” Dave says – “Good to have the old git back again.” Michael says – “He’s a good person to understand a large band like James with different people playing different roles. He brings people’s strengths out. Understanding the ecology of the band. Definitely making this record you realise his strengths. He’s also very modest so he doesn’t force you to take on his ideas due to his ego. He has a good sense of humility, not always pushing his ideas.” Dave says – “If you’re working on a track and there seems to be a problem with it then he tends to look for problems in places other people wouldn’t look at. His best one is that if it doesn’t sound too good then speed the track up.” Becky Uline asks: “Will you be touring in the U.S. anytime soon? The show I had tickets for was cancelled in San Francisco, and I am dying to see you guys again.” Dave says – “We were almost there.” Michael says – “We were so close to playing. At the end of that summer we did Lollapalooza, so we did end up doing a big chunk of America.” Dave says – “We stared into the abyss with Lollapalooza.” Michael says – “The whole schedule makes a man do funny things. We had far too much times on our hands.” Dave says – “It was the most rock ‘n’ roll tour we’ve done.” Michael says – “It was a journey into the dark sides of everyone’s character. We tended to get onstage when we’d been through the rider. Various levels of debauchery and sin going on.” Dave says – “There were 25 buses on that tour and our’s was number 13.” Michael says – “We were labelled by bands like Devo and Korn as the hardest band on the tour.” Dave says – “The tour finished after that tour. I hope we didn’t finish it off. We were also fighting from the complete lack of interest from the crowd and the media because we had no record to release.” beloved asks: “Have you dabbled with the Internet? Do you like MP3s?” Michael says – “Good question. We’ve got someone from the record company here so when you say MP3 they go white. I don’t know what impact it’s going to start making. It’s one thing to technically start getting one over on the record company, but what happens if it affects us. The technology is fabulous but if it means the collapse of artists and their possible incomes then I dunno. It’s an intoxicating idea for the up and coming and the independent. But there is the whole other corporate side which has to exist for the music industry to work.” Dave says – “There’s 3 really good fan sites. The fans who do the Stutter site know more than we do. I got there to find out what I’m doing next.” Michael says – “It’s on eclipse net. Stutter on eclipse net.” turbo asks: “Why call your single Fred Astaire?” Dave says – “We’re not allowed to use a picture of him as well.” Michael says – “When the song was originally jammed he started singing that line immediately. He came out with the line “when I hold her in my arms, I feel like Fred Astaire” and we kept it in.” mccallum asks: “Will you be watching The Phantom Menace?” Michael says – “Good question.” Dave says – “Possibly, I’m in no rush.” Michael says – “I’m interested in seeing the film, but it seems to have been universally panned. But I think it’s made for the kids. When I was 10 I collected all the Star Wars figurines. I think there’s been a lot of disappointment from adults but what they don’t realise is that Lucas is aiming at the really young kids so he can hook them for the next two films.” Dave says – “I really like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” sicknote asks: “Who are your tips for the top from the next generation of bands coming through?” Dave says – “I only listen to minimalist techno.” Michael says – “I liked the new Travis album, There’s a guy from Canada, Ron Sixsmith. Since the dulcet tones of Radiohead there’s been a rash of really good sensitive songwriters.” 6500 asks: “How are you at cooking?” Michael says – “I’m a good cook. I enjoy making food and I do it well. I enjoy any type of meal from poultry, fish and vegetables. I like Canadian food, I like peamail bacon and eggs.” Michael says – “The food’s improved greatly since I came here 10 years ago. Even in Tescos the stuff is a lot better.” Dave says – “Cooking is the new DIY. I used to cook, but since having kids the novelty’s gone out of it. There’s only so much you can do with chicken dippers. No kid will eat vegetables. I don’t know where they get their vitamins from.” berru asks: “What would you say is the core of your music?” Michael says – “7 people sharing their deepest desires to find a space, where everybody can feel satisfied with their contribution. It’s also, livin’ in the friction of incongruity. Living in the friction of that is what the band thrives off. Everyone has such different influences, that when we get together the core of the music is this friction. It seems to make perfect sense. The James Gestalt. Everyone has their own individual stuff that we do outside James. If you take someone like Dave who does a lot of stuff with dance music, that brings a new perspective – pushing people in a new direction.” Dave says – “I found the Greatest Hits album focused what we were about. I realised James isn’t about being weird or breaking new ground.” Moose asks: “Do any of the band speak any foreign languages?” Dave says – “We’re all fluent in 13 different dialects of Chinese – mandarin, tangerine, orange. Saul has a bit of Spanish. I’ve got a bit of Welsh.” Michael says – “But not in front of the rest of us.” Dave says – “We have a great time whenever we go to Portugal. They really treat us like royalty over there. They like us in Germany.” sicknote asks: “Do you ever get fed up of the lifestyle of being in a band-the touring, recording sessions …” Michael says – “It’s awful. I can’t think of anything worse. … No, it’s a great way to see the world, meet new people.” Dave says – “I used to watch TOTP and wish to be a pop star when I was a kid.” Michael says – “I’ve caught myself at points at the year having a pop star strop. My Mercedes was late picking me up from the airport and I had to pull back from having a strop. You need to ground yourself a lot.” Dave says – “A lot of my friends are normal people, on the dole or whatever and recognising how lucky you are is really important.” Boogit82 asks: “What do you enjoy more your own tours and gigs and that atmosphere or festivals and the huge crowds that they pull” Dave says – “It’s fifty fifty. I like festivals cos you can get drunk and fall about. I’m one of the few people who stays for the whole festival and stays after I’ve done me stuff. I really love festivals.” Michael says – “James are a really good festival band. When you get reactions like we got earlier on at T in the Park you realise what a huge connection you have with so many people. But then, when you play a gig for a smaller audience but one who’s come for you then the feeling of elation is great. When you really get it right at either end then it’s fantastic.” Dave says – “We’ve tried starting our set with Sit Down and it really flopped. At festivals you have to be populist. A band at T in the Park played all their new stuff and I was like ‘standing in a field is hard work, give the crowd what they want’.” Michael says – “There was talk at T in the Park about whether we should do Sit Down. We were originally going to drop Sit Down. Afterwards you can’t deny the impact it had.” Dave says – “A lot of people say Sit Down is the only song we’ve got. But that’s rubbish because look at all the greatest album sales we had.” Michael says – “There’s something rousing and anthemic in Sit Down. It really caught people when it first came out. It made such an impact that it made a wave over all the other hits we’ve had. It’s bigger than itself in many ways. It also has the ability, because it’s such a simple song, to progress. It always sounds fresh whenever we play it. The 98 version of Sit Down was due to Apollo 440.” JohnnyYen asks: “Do you plan on playing Homeboy, Greenpeace or any other non-singles from Whiplash again?” Michael says – “There’s some good songs on that record. Hopefully yes.” Dave says – “If we play longer sets, we’ll do it. It’s just hard to fit them in to our set.” Michael says – “Homeboy and Avalanche haven’t been played since the original tour.” Dave says – “There’s loads of tracks on laid we’d like to play. The last few shows we’ve been playing 4 new songs from the new album.” beeb says: “Here’s Dave and Michael with a final farewell…” Michael says – “Thanks for sending in your questions. Thanks for your continued support and remember we do try our hardest.” Dave says – “We’re sorry if we stink.” Michael says – “I hope you like the record.” | Jul 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I Know What I’m Here For + interview – RTP Herman Show – July 1999 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsLive stripped back performance of I Know What I’m Here For and interview on RTP Portugal | Jul 1999 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
T In The Park – 11th July 1999 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistDestiny Calling / She's A Star / Crash / Waltzing Along / Someone's Got It In For Me / I Know What I'm Here For / Say Something / Sometimes / Tomorrow / Sit DownSupportn/a - FestivalMore Information & ReviewsTommy Udo, NMEJames – Main Stage 6.45pm Sunday “This is for everyone who wants to have fun,” says ageing bad singer Tim Booth in his piss-whiny voice. “Everything after us is so serious.” James are well past their sell-by date as the stream of tuneless new songs are trotted out. One song, about victims or something (written apparently with Paul Gascoigne in mind) is a truly cringe-inducing ballad that would be better suited to some overwrought loser pub band, maybe a self-penned obligatory social conscience song about Kosovo or veal calves or something. Booth drags it out painfully. They animate the crowd when they play the hits – ‘Come Home’, ‘She’s A Star’ and of course ‘Sit Down’ – all of which are a decade old. And people are sneering at the Mondays for cashing in on the past? James were shit in the 80s, wrote a few good pop tunes and have relied on them ever since. God help us if they are still churning out this pap in the middle of a festival bill in 2009. Seems like that long already. Video | Jul 1999 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James New Single And Tour – Melody Maker News | Article, News | JAMES have announced that they’ll play an arena tour of the UK at the end of the year. The dates are: Brighton Centre (December 4), Birmingham NEC (5), Cardiff International Arena (6), Newcastle Arena (8), Glasgow SECC (9), Manchester Evening News Arena (11) and Wembley Arena (12). Tickets are priced £17.50. In the meantime, you can catch James at the Lizard Eclipse Festival at Rosuic Common on Goonhilly Downs. The band’s latest single, “I Know What I’m Here For”, which is out now, is taken from their forthcoming eighth studio album, “Millionaires”, which will be released through Mercury on October 11. The album’s second single, originally entitled “Fred Astaire”, has had to be renamed. The band’s record company legal department suggested the reference to the legendary dancer could cause legal problems. The single is planned for release on September 27 and is now called “Just Like Fred Astaire”. | Aug 1999 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James At The Lizard Festival – Radio 1 | Article, Interview | Radio 1 caught up with James just before they took to the stage at the Lizard Festival, and whilst Tim was into the Eclipse experience, Saul wasn’t that impressed by the soothsayers, druids and tourists who’d paid a fortune to be there: “These people are lunatics! I’m actually gonna go on a one-man mission to try and stop this whole thing completely”, said Saul. But Tim defended the event: “You’re a killjoy partypooper! It’s gonna be great fun!” And Saul replied: “Oh yes, it will! Sorry! I got that all wrong, didn’t I? Sorry, I meant it’ll be great! I’d rather see the one that’s in southern Europe four years from now, when there’s no hype ‘coz it’s not the end of the century. That would hold more interest for me – an un-hyped eclipse”. “So it’s the hype you hate?”, Tim asked Saul. “Yeah, totally”, replied Saul. | Aug 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Just Like Fred Astaire – Radio 1 | Article, Interview | James have been hitting legal wrangles over one of their album tracks. The track, which will be the band’s next single in September, was originally to be called ‘Fred Astaire’ but now it’s going to be called ‘Just Like Fred Astaire’ for legal reasons. “We’ve heard from the Fred Astaire estate that if we call it ‘Fred Astaire’ we may suffer the legal consequences – of a bruised shin, I should think, if it’s Fred Astaire. He’ll tread on our feet while dancing the tango”, Tim explained to Radio 1. “We approached them (the estate), we tried to get footage for the video and they were like ‘under no circumstances would we allow the name of the great Fred to be linked with a snotty band of four men from Oxford playing pop music in England. We know all about your type.'” The new James album, ‘Millionaires’ also features contributions from Sinead O’Connor and Faithless, who are also hoping to work with Sinead, but since becoming a Catholic priest and her subsequent impersonations of a fruit loop, plans have been put on hold. “Interest expressed from Sinead and Sinead’s people, as it were. But Sinead’s got a few things to get through so we’ll see what happens over the coming weeks”, said Maxi from the band. | Aug 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Out Of The Darkness – The Sun Source Magazine | Article, Interview | When he’s singing, Tim Booth has one of the most powerful voices in music. But offstage the James frontman is so softly spoken it’s almost advisable to be accompanied by a sign language expert. Yet Booth has a lot to shout about. It might be 17 years and a few line-up changes since James first formed but Booth’s never been happier : gigs are fun again, the infighting has stopped and the band have made their most “amazing” album yet. That’s what he says anyway. “I think we’re about to go to a new level,” he whispers. “Which is odd for a group which has been going for as long as we have. “The band is completely galvanised at the moment.” Yet a year ago it was a different story. “When we had the greatest hits album out, we were having a lot of arguments. “In fact the time it went to Number 1 was one of the darkest weeks in the history of James. We didn’t enjoy it.” Now though they’ve sorted things out and Booth seems poised for a repeat trip to the top of the album charts with the release of their Brian Eno co-produced album Millionaires. t continues the anthemic tradition of past successes like Born of Frustration and She’s A Star yet strangely sounds like nothing they’ve ever done before. “We had so many good songs we actually had to throw away a lot which would have normally made it on. “We’ve got about five potential singles on this album – we’ve come up trumps.” Millionaires isn’t out until October, but fans can get a preview when James headline the Lizard Eclipse Event, alongside Kula Shaker and The Levellers on Rosuie Common in Cornwall next week. “We’re playing the night before the eclipse and we’re really looking forward to that one,” he says. The magnitude of such a momentous gig is not lost on Booth as he starts to get a touch philosophical. “I believe things happen around these events, though not necessarily in the way we might think about it,” he says. Sorry? “I think that story in the papers the other week about those monkeys who’ve been taught to talk is incredible. “If this is true then it’s going to change our whole perception of what we are. That is a truly cosmic event.” Whatever happens, one thing’s certain. If James play Sit Down, there won’t be much to eclipse their show next week. | Aug 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James And Their Influences – Record Mart | Article, Interview | James have never made life easy for themselves. Their early gigs started with a couple poems read by singer Tim Booth, causing instant confusion — is he James, is he a poet? Some audiences didn’t wait to find out. Then they were signed by Factory Records, whose A&R man Mike Pickering (now leader of M People) chose them over the Smiths. Their first single ‘Jimone’ (aka Jim One’, an EP) had no proper sleeve design, yet became NME and Melody Maker Single of the Week. It was released simultaneously with the Smiths’ ‘This Charming Man’, and though their fellow Mancunians had the hit they toured the UK together. James signed to Sire but found they had linked with the wrong record company: their second album, ‘Strip Mine’ was delayed for 18 months, forcing band members to take days jobs (two became car salesmen!). Slipping their contract on a technicality, they financed their next album with a bank loan — then, when their new label wanted to put a re-recorded single on it, insisted fans who’s bought the earlier version of the album could exchange it. But James had enjoyed the safety net of a huge fan following gathered while waiting for their contract to expire; they’d kept bread on the table by playing anywhere and everywhere they could. Bruce Springsteen had done likewise, and also garnered the eventual rewards. Its doubtful the Boss was throttled on stage by his drummer, though – the fate of Tim Booth at one eventful gig in Stoke! No fewer than four new members had joined the band after that fiasco (one, needless to say, a new sticksman) and the result, ‘Gold Mother’, was the album that changed everything. Released in June 1990, it sold 350,000 in the UK alone and with the Top 3 single success of ‘Sit Down’ confirmed James as a major band for the new decade. Then they charged up the rock ladder with big-selling but very different albums like ‘Seven’ – a real stadium rocker – and the considerably more laid-back ‘Laid’ which struck a chord in America, selling 600,000 copies there alone. But James couldn’t somehow embrace success. “We’ve always turned inward and done something weird,” says bass-player Jim Glennie, and they proved it by taking their acoustic set to the Reading festival (where even the mighty Meatloaf got bottled off) and playing some new songs they’d put together a few days before. James have always had a love-hate relationship with America. Larry Gott was mugged hours after landing in LA to shoot a video, and flew home. When they played Woodstock in 1994 they chose to play not hits but obscure and unreleased songs. ‘Laid’ saw them greeted like conquering heroes, and they milked it — but, having spent three years solid on a tour bus there, long-serving guitarist Gott decided he wanted out for good. Being the main music writer, this would be a problem. “We knew we had to rebuild James,” said Tim Booth, “and that took time. We had no idea what reaction our comeback would get. We hadn’t done anything in the UK for four years.” But the single ‘She’s a Star’ came in at Number 9, album ‘Whiplash’ was a major success and their ‘Best Of’ album released last year was a Number 1. The success of the ‘Best Of’ not only opened up a new audience for James’s music, but meant the group members were under a bit of pressure; Saul Davies admits “We were a little surprised about how well it sold. We’re quite nervous creatures in James and that’s one of the reasons we’ve been going so long — we’re not entirely sure where we’re going to be listened to.” They’ve no problem there…but categorizing their music is an entirely different matter. As Saul says, “Because there’s seven people in the band who all listen to different types of music, there’s a lot of influences on what we do and as a consequence we make diverse-sounding records.” But then that’s what makes them interesting. With the September-released ‘Millionaires’ set to confirm their place in the big league, let’s examine those influences that have made James the most popular indie group on the planet… NICK CAVE Everyone from James with the exception of bassist Jim was hugely influenced by the Birthday Party, Nick Cave’s pre-solo band. Tim had “never seen anyone infuse their music with such sheer violence.” JULEE CRUISE The woman who sang the Twin Peaks theme produced an album called ‘Floating Into The Night’. The “dreamy, aquatic sex songs” contained therein influenced Tim to collaborate with film theme composer Angelo Badalamenti, the result being ‘Booth And The Bad Angel’. VELVET UNDERGROUND James cut a version of ‘Sunday Morning’ for a tribute album to the 1960s band patronised by Pop-Art icon Andy Warhol in which Lou Reed made his name. It showed up in the live set circa 1990. NEIL YOUNG When they were invited to support grunge granddaddy Neil Young across America, they didn’t realise they’d been asked to play acoustically so as not to upstage the headliner, who was doing a simple guitar and vocal set. “It was either do it acoustically or not do it at all,” recalls Jim, who remarked they’d have been bottled off stage by 10,000 fans if it hadn’t worked. “Fortunately it worked, and it took us in a new, fresh direction we really liked.” That lead to ‘Laid’, whose easy-strumming and overlaid guitars took America by storm. GABRIELLE ROTH An American dance teacher who’s work influenced Tim Booth. He warms up for two hours before going onstage, and credits Roth with “…helping me get in touch with my body…to centre myself. I do exercises beforehand to connect myself with what’s wrong with me. Then I take it on stage and use it.” MARY MARGARET O’HARA Acting on Morrissey’s tip-off that she was, “…the best singer since Patti Smith…”, Tim Booth checked out Mary Margaret O’Hara in concert and was shocked that she was “So vulnerable”. Apparently she broke down for 20 minutes and the band had to carry on playing while she gathered her strength to continue. It’s not something he’s tried himself. KILLING JOKE That bands bassist Youth produced James ‘Seven’ and Saul has since collaborated with him subsequently on some low-key ambient music under the band Celtic Cross. Youth cohort Durga McBroom, singer with Blue Pearl of ‘Naked in the Rain’ fame also contributed backing vocals to ‘Seven’s ‘Don’t Wait That Long’. U2 The comparisons here are manifold. Does Larry Gott sound like the Edge as much as he looks like him…do they share the same producer…and did they both record improvised, Eno-helmed albums (‘Wah Wah’and ‘Zooropa'”) within months of each other? Unfortunately, as James had just released a ‘proper’ album, they held back ininadvertently let their rivals steal the glory. TALKING HEADS When James signed with Sire, they were seduced by becoming lablemates of David Byrne and company who were also produced by Brian Eno. “We should also have noticed Sire had signed Madonna,” sighed Tim when it all went sour. Saul likens the current single ‘I Know What I’m Here For’ to them “It sounds like dirty white boys who can’t quite play funk properly in the same way that Talking Heads couldn’t really play funk but were brilliant at it.” THE ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND They may not advertise themselvess as “the listening bank”…but by lending James £10,000 to fund a live album they kept the band going in a period of flux. Something that help persuade them was the best-selling James T-shirt with JA on the front and MES at the back that had become a fashionn item (over £2,000 worth of James merchandise was sold in Leeds in a single week). Another factor was the ecstatic reaction the bank manager witnessed at a gig. The album ‘One Man Clapping’ topped the indie chart, and the RBS got their money back with interest. PATTI SMITH At the end of his schooldays Tim discovered Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’ lying around the school common room where it had been left by someone else. His father was very ill at the time and, listening to the album on headphones he was staggered to hear the words, “His father died and left him alone on a New England farm.” Two weeks before his ‘conversion’ he’d thought Patti Smith was “…this woman who sang out of tune…she was utterly alien to me until that moment.” When he went and saw her live, it wasn’t just Patti that impressed him, but guitarist Lenny Kaye, who was duly appointed producer of James’ first album ‘Stutter’ (1986). ORANGE JUICE The Scottish jangly-guitar group of the early 1980s signed to the trendy Postcard label that gave the world singer Edwyn Collins. But it was guitarist James Kirk who is said to have unknowingly lent his first name to the group formed by three 17 year olds and the 21 year old art student (Tim) they’d seen idiot dancing at a disco. A previous name, Model Team International had been taken from promotional T-shirts they’d been given and lasted just the length of a set! But it would be a different T-shirt that gave James a financial sideline when they needed it most. REM Comparisons with Georgia’s finest centre around the similarities between the ‘spiritual vegetarian’ characters who front them. We can however reveal that…Tim eats fish! Both Stipe and Booth appear to be men apart from their band, though James play that down. “There has always got to be someone outside in any relationship,” Larry Got has said, “but it isn’t always Tim.” For Saul, “Tim can be an alien sometimess.” while manager Peter Rudge says, “I always think Stipe looks like a loner in his own band, and Tim’s a loner in James.” ROLLING STONES The may not have been around as long as Jagger, Richard and Watts, but James (founded in 1982) are a lot longer in the tooth than you think. Also, manager Peter Rudge was once in their management, Olympic Studios, where the Stones recorded classic albums like ‘Let It Bleed’ and ‘Beggars Banquet’ was one of three west London studios used to complete ‘Millionaires’. Listen carefully too and you can discern a touch of the Stones ‘Start Me Up’-type riffery in ‘How Was It For You’. By the way, Tim was approached to play Tommy on Broadway, but was too busy, so that ties in the Who, too! JAMES Yes, James have influenced themselves, notably the music of ‘Destiny Calling’ which Saul wrote as a bonus track for ‘Greatest Hits’. “I stuck a capo on the guitar and played ‘She’s A Star’ twice as fast in a different key,” he confesses. Ironically when Tim came up with the lyrics they ended up having a pop at the music business — so the irony of making people pay again for a track they already owned was priceless! PETER GABRIEL The ex-Genesis singer invited James to record at his Real World studios, perhaps empathising with the fact that both he and Tim Booth turn their depressive lyrics into something approaching a celebration. And while Gabriel has toured in support of human rights for Amnesty International, James’s songs have attacked secrecy (‘Government Walls’) and examined attitudes t the Gulf War. SIMPLE MINDS The stadium rock feel of ‘Seven’ brought comparisons with Jim Kerr and company and Tim Booth admits that there were two songs that triggered comparisons. “We were about to record one of them when someone brought in the Simple Minds track ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ and we thought what the f*** are wer going to do? It sounded just like it but I hadn’t done it consciously…you don’t do that kind of thing!” The comparisonss led to James deliberately ‘de-epic’ing their songs, and even doing that acoustic ‘Sit Down’ at Reading, “…when people wanted the big one they’d seen on the G-Mex video. We don’t want to be trapped in a pattern.” SINEAD O’CONNOR The tempestuous Irish chanteuse crossed paths with James relatively recently, as Saul Davies explains. “She came down to the studio on night to see Eno, He played her some of the stuff and she was dead cool. She asked if there was anything we’d like her to sing on, and we suggested ‘Vervacious’. It had previously just ended with music, quite turbulent, aggressive music, and its whole end section with her voice andthesee weird little pulses was Eno doing his thing. It’s funny because she’s got such a beautiful voice and he made her sound like a robot!” THE SMITHS After Patti Smith, the Smiths were the major early motivators for James. After Morrissey named them his favourite band in an interview the world suddenly wanted to know, and a series of support dates to the band they beat to a Factory contract certainly didn’t harm them. Larry thought touring with the Smiths “…would hammer home the fact that we were nothing like them,” but now admits, “it backfired and made the association stronger.” Tim calls the Smiths comparisons, “…a millstone we put up with for about five years.” CHRIS ISAAK The ex-boxer’s atmospheric ‘Wicked Game’ was used as the intro tape to James’ 1990 gigs…and having been featured in David (Twin Peaks) Lynch’s movie Wild At Heart it comes to no surprise that the song was Tim’s choice. “When I heard it for the first time I thought it must be the greatest record I ever heard.” THE BEATLES Tim recalls as a kid his earliest memory was watching Top of the Pops and seeing the Fab Four singing ‘Twist and Shout’. It was an early release, a cover of the Isley Brother’s soul original rather than a Lennon/McCartney composition, but the power and energy touched him, “the purity, a certain kind of innocence” before the music biz took hold. GARY GLITTER Critics seized upon the powerful drum intro to ‘Sit Down’ and claimed the glam-meister was number one on the James playlist. Bassist Jim admitted he was worried Tim might be turning into Glitter Mark II, “…especially if he wears any more (glitter).”, but a fan put it all in context: “Gary Glitter wears platform boots. Tim Booth wears Jesus sandals!” Interestingly by 1992 James were adding a tribute to another glam god, Marc Bolan of T Rex, to the song when in concert, courtesy of a snippet of ‘Ride A White Swan’. SUEDE Original guitarist Bernard Butler played on Tim’s ‘solo’ album ‘Booth and the Bad Angel’. The pair shared a love of early Smiths, but Booth managed to steer clear of the problems vocalists Brett Anderson and David McAlmont ran into with Butler. “He was on fire, so I just let him get on with things, stood back and let him create.” BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN The link between James and the Boss is the fact that both had to play their way through record-company hassles, using live gigs as both a means of support and a testing ground for yet to be recorded songs. Tim was dragged to a Springsteen concert in the early 1980s. “I thought he was a corny old American, but he blew me away. Not really the music, because it wasn’t very original, but it was more the heart of how much he was giving. I always wanted to be in a band that was like that.” JOSEPH AND THE AMAZINGTECHNICOLORR DREAMCOAT Tim was amazed when one of his cousins played him the Tim Rice/Andrew Lloyd Webber rock opera — and he found he knew every word. Perhaps I identify with Joseph the sacrificiall lamb,” he laughs. “The fall guy in his coat of many colours…” IGGY POP Songs like ‘How Much Suffering and ‘God Only Knows’ have guitar riffs similar to the Stooges, while Tim recalls getting the slightly straight-laced teacher from school to take him and some classmates to see Iggy at the Manchester Apollo in the 1970s. “It was our only hope of being allowed to go.” As it happened, the teacher enjoyed it so much he took them back to see the Clash a few weeks later! THE CURE Robert Smith’s Goths were big heroes of James in the early days, notably because the stuck around and kept their standards up, “…most of my favourite bands burn out after two albums,” Tim admits. Smith was also approached to produce the band, but nothing came of it. INSPIRAL CARPETS James’s mates added backing vocals to ‘Gold Mother’s title track though James haven’t always welcomed the attentions of fellow Mancunians. Graham Massey from 808 State remixed ‘Come Home’ but then didn’t care for the result. They’ve never been great ones for dance remixes, considering them too trendy, but made an exception in 1994 for Andrew Weatherall who turned out a 33 minute 17 second version of ‘Jam J’. DAVID BOWIE As with the Beatles, Tim only enjoyed the early work of the man who created Ziggy Stardust. ‘Five Years’ from that album appealed to the former drama student, but his favourite album was 1971’s ‘Hunky Dory’ — especially the track ‘Kooks’, which is “…perfect for f**ked-up adolescents to wallow in.” James have also worked with producer Tim Palmer, the man who helped Bowie record his heavy-metal project Tin Machine. The New Album We doubt if James themselves are ‘Millionaires’ yet, but their record company think it’ll be a nice little earner — so much so that its release was delayed so as [not] to clash with labelmates Texas. Not that there’ll be a ‘Hush’ as the new album appears this month (September), and with a Number 1 to follow it will be stripped for five singles to ensure it remains in the stoplight for well into the new millenium. Guitarist and songwriter Saul Davies takes up the story. “The album started when I started writing at home in Scotland more for fun than anything else. After three months I ended up with 26, 27 ideas which I worked on with Mark, our keyboard player. Tim started getting involved offering lyrics and more advanced melody ideas, and suddenly we had something really pleasing to our ears. I brought the songs down to London one day to play to Brian (Eno) and he was very complimentary about their potentiall. So we’d started the album without really thinking about it! “It’s hard to say there’s a particular song that reflects what the album is, thought it’s slightly more unifiedd than some of our other records have been because a lot of it was done by Mark and me. We’re all very proud of ‘Someone’s Got It In For Me’ — a very big, slow song, almost ballad, that’s very powerful lyrically. In a way, it reflects the emotional content of the record… I wouldn’t say aggressive, but tough on people around us. “‘I Know What I’m Here For’ was choosen as the first single because we felt it didn’t really sound like James — It’s up, quite joyous and , I thought, not very commercial. I’m surprised by the reaction to it from the media: this is the first time in a long time we’ve had MTV support, so we’re quietly pleased. The second single, ‘Fred Astaire’, is probably our best shot at replacing ‘Sit Down’ as our biggest song. “It’s huge, and has an enormous amount of potential as a crossover tune to a public we haven’t really had before — although we might’ve touched to an extent with the ‘Best Of’. ‘Fred…’ is a prefect late-summer song — If I hadn’t done it, I know I’d buy it if I heard it! You know that feeling you get when you watch Fred and Ginger Rogers, there’s an amazing joyous kind of sensuality going on, completely untainted and totally 1950s. “The oldest song was jammed live in a room in a studio in Woodstock, New York in 1994. It’s called ‘Dumb Jam’. I found it on a tape one day and thought bloody hell most bands would kill for this… and we’d forgotten about it! We knocked it into shape and we were aware that at that point that the record maybe needed a bit more fun on it. “The album starts with a track called ‘Crash’ and finishes with ‘Vervacious’. ‘Crash is there because it’s one of the more uptempo songs and we wanted to keep the first half of the record in your face. It’s also unusual in that it has a very strange intro, like a call to arms — a mad backing vocal that Michael and Eno did on their own. You hear it and think yeah, this is the way a record should start! And ‘Vervacious’ ends it because the outro section of that song is Sinead O’Connor singing with a weird pulse of reverb behind it. Eno’s production on the voice at that point made her sound like a very small robot in a space capsule floating through the atmosphere. The obvious way to end. “We’re old bastards now, but we reckon we’ve made out best record yet, and we’re playing better live than we ever have done. It’s beginning to kick off again and it’s very exciting. I really feel like it’s the first page of a new chapter.” | Aug 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Reasons To Be Cheerful – Glasgow Evening Times | Article, Interview | It’s quite ironic that the new album from James is called Millionaires, because these days they probably are. After all, James have been one of the most successful groups of the nineties, not just here but in America and all over the world. What a lot of people don’t know is the hell that the Manchester band went through to get where they are today. It’s all very well going on about working your fingers to the bone but as Saul Davies, the Scottish-based guitarist, explains that would have been easy in comparison. It was really tough at the beginning. He recalls: “The problem was that we didn’t have any money, we needed to get cash together for rehearsals and equipment and had no finance whatsoever.” “Eventually things got so bad that we had to go to hospitals and offer our services as guinea pigs trying out various medications and what have you to raise money for the band”. Extreme measures indeed, but it did, depending on what way you look at it, pay off. By 1991, the UK was awash with people wearing James T shirts, most of whom probably hadn’t even heard the band, but once they released the anthem Sit Down they became household names. Now we are eight years on with a new album, Millionaires, out next month and Saul says he’s never felt more confident. “Normally I’m the one who gets really nervous about our career”, he says. “I always expect the worst even after all this time, for instance, last year when our Best Of came out I didn’t think anyone would buy it but they did. It has sold over 800,000 copies and now because of that, I have a new found confidence”. “We’ve never had a number 1 but I’ll stick my neck out and say our next single Fred Astaire will change all that, I firmly believe that both the single and the album will top the charts.” The guys will be going on tour towards the end of the year to play all the big sheds up and down the country including a December date at the SECC which is a kind of homecoming for Saul. “Scotland is my home now, I’ve lived here in Dollar for 12 years. I spend a lot of time in London running around like a maniac doing nonsense so when I get time off I like to chill out and relax, so I moved up here and I love it. | Aug 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Yee Hoo – Q Magazine | Article, Interview |
The also-rans became most-likely-tos when 1998’s Best Of compilation saw James scale unexpected chart heights. Suddenly the pressure’s on and the fault-lines are groaning within the most loosely bound band in Britain. “We lurch from one disaster to another,” they tell David Cavanagh. If you squint hard enough at the Biarritz sea front, it’s just possible to make out the ghosts of Marcello Mastroianni and an incognito starlet in dark glasses and a white headscarf. Pursued by paparazzi, they are strolling to the restaurant for discreet cocktails ´ deux in the shadow of the white, five-star hotel and the casino. Then they’re gone. As the century ends, however, the famous French resort has a touch of the Southends about it. The hotel is now battered and cream-coloured, and the ritz of Biarritz wanes in comparison to the cachet of Cannes and the nightlife of Nice. The only invariant is the gluey and laser-like midday sun. Among the party of Englishmen lunching al fresco opposite the topless beach, the talk is of another bygone age: the 1970 Isle Of Wight rock festival, which two of these men attended. Little Saul Davies, aged five at the time, was taken there by his parents. Peter Rudge, who was 23, worked for The Who. Later that year, Mick Jagger invited him to manage the Rolling Stones. As one can imagine, Rudge’s stories have an unfair advantage over those of his younger companions. These days, Rudge is the manager of James, an unpredictable and enduring band whose fluctuating fortunes bring out his black comedy side. “I have this saying about James,” he confides. “They lurch from one disaster to another.” Saul Davies, now 34, is the group’s violinist, second guitarist and increasingly prominent creative force. James have never had a songwriter before — their music has always emerged from lengthy and democratic jamming processes — but on their new album, Millionaires, Davies has come to the fore as the key writer and catalyst. Far from resenting this threat to the group’s equilibrium, his colleagues have given him their full support. As singer Tim Booth explained in the sleevenotes of last year’s Best Of “Whoever has the energy and drive leads the band until someone else is inspired and takes over.” On their 1997 album, Whiplash, it was drummer Dave Baynton-Power and bassist Jim Glennie who took control. Unlike most groups that succeed and stay the course, James are at once rudderless and devolved. The Best Of (which sold a million copies and spent several weeks at Number 1) has been a hard act for them to follow. Although the compilation confirmed James as a topline singles act, it’s intriguing to discover just how many of its songs were conceived as potential singles: precisely none. Millionaires, on the other hand, has five and possibly six singles on it, which will keep the band in the public eye long into the year 2000. There is great deal riding on the album. Mercury, James record company, has held back its release until September to prevent it clashing with their aggressively marketed Texas album. But as the The Hush is already underperforming, the onus is on Millionaires to be the autumn’s big money-spinner. It’s a far cry from Whiplash two years ago. THE LAZIEST RECORD James have ever made (according to Booth), Whiplash suffered from poor intra-band relations — Booth was working concurrently on an album with Angelo Badalamenti — and from the departure of guitarist Larry Gott, the group’s imperturbable mediator and father figure. Whiplash was supposed to grab back the American audiences James had wooed by means of conscientious touring three years earlier, while keeping their British fans on board at the same time. But as Rudge says: “You cannot write, record, produce and mix a record that’s going to be successful on Radio 1 and K-ROQ. They’re two different cultures. James missed the boat — they went totally UK. And Whiplash suffered as an album because of it. It sold shit.” The single She’s A Star was a Top 10 hit in Britain, but three dates into a US tour, Booth hurt his neck and the remaining concerts were cancelled. Now, like Pulp, James don’t sell any records outside their homeland. “It’s the dilemma of most British bands,” Rudge notes. “Because inevitably you burn out the British market.” If The Best Of was a death-or-glory release, well, at least James are still alive. Everybody is friends again and sunning themselves in Biarritz, the Mercury budget just stretching far enough to enable the seven musicians to pose for promotional photos at this dissipated lido, in honour of an album tide that is both boastful and wistful; cocky and ironic. Millionaires? James are still considerably unrecouped. NINE MONTHS before The Best Of restored the confidence Whiplash had undermined, James started work on the new album while travelling around America in two buses on the Lollapalooza tour. Dismissed as “faggots” by audiences that had come to watch Tool, they began to drink more and more. “Everybody got wrecked day and night,” recalls Booth. “We were meant to be writing the next record, so I’d go round each day going: Anyone want to do some writing? About once a week Saul would be sober — he was the only one sober in that whole period — so I’d drag him into the back of the bus for a couple of hours.” They wrote Destiny Calling and Runaground, which would appear on The Best Of, and a track called I Defeat, subsequently jammed into shape at RAK Studios in London. One of two songs from that period to feature Sinead O’Connor on vocals, I Defeat would narrowly miss the cut for Millionaires. The other song was luckier: Vervacious, jammed in Wales towards the end of 1997, was willed and bullied into being by Baynton-Power, who sat down with a multi-track digital editor and turned 20 minutes of exploratory sound into something cohesive and magical. “We’ve always jammed,” Davies explains. “Nobody’s ever brought even a chord sequence into the room. It’s always served us really well — we’ve had no trouble making records — but it’s inefficient if everybody is spread around the country.” Indeed, the members of James have homes in England, Scotland and Wales. In December, as the snows came, all the equipment ended up at Davies’s house in Scotland, where, bored and ambitious, he wrote the first of 15 pieces of music on his own. James’s backing singer and occasional guitar player, Michael Kulas, who lives with Davies, cannot recall him having doubts about submitting these ideas to his bandmates. In fact, Davies was extremely worried about what the others would think, since it challenged the very ethos of James. “We thought jamming was the bees’ knees,” says Booth. “It meant that we wrote songs differently from everybody else and it was a part of our character. And we defended our character to the death. We thought it was a precious entity that needed protecting.” Lead guitarist Adrian Oxaal, who replaced Gott in 1997, remarks: “Occasionally, they’ll talk about the old days and it’s funny to hear how naive and purist — and how committed — the attitude was. There’s more pragmatism in the band these days.” Davies took his musical sketches to the Leeds home of Mark Hunter, the group’s modest and reticent keyboard player. Like Davies and Baynton-Power, Hunter joined James in 1989, and the three men have tended to function as a close-knit unit ever since. Until recently, they were paid wages by the group’s senior caucus of Booth, Glennie and Gott. When Gott left, the power structure of James was exposed as an anachronism (“Decisions were patently being made elsewhere by other members of the band,” Davies observes) and as of this year, for the first time, the Class Of 1989 have become equal partners with Booth and Glennie. The choice of producer was Brian Eno, who had helped James make Laid and its experimental sister record, Wah Wah, in 1993. Eno is particularly highly thought of by Booth, and is credited with prodigious gifts of coordination and organisation by almost everyone in the James camp. Eno, however, could find only an eight-week window in his schedule. Just as work got underway at Hook End Manor in Berkshire in July 1998, Glennie started receiving anxious phone calls from Davies. “I said, Saul, we trust you and we’re there if you need us,” Glennie relates. Booth adds: “When you join a band, for the first two years you’re paranoid that you’re going to be kicked out. I certainly was — and I know that some of the others have felt the same. For Saul to step out of the block, I think, was psychologically quite difficult for him.” Drinking lager outside a French café, Glennie admits he made little contribution to Millionaires. He and Adrian Oxaal seem to have been used the least, and as a result Glennie listens to the album with mixed feelings. “The Eno way of working didn’t get the best out of Adrian,” he says. “Michael’s perfect for it. He’ll sit there all day, not needed, smiling enthusiastically, on the edge of his seat, with guitars and various instruments round him. Eno goes, I need a bit of keyboards. Mike’s there. With Adrian it’s, We need a bit of guitar. Oh, I think Adrian’s either asleep or in the pub. He’s not a workhorse, not a jack of all trades; he’s a master of one. You stick him in front of an amp and give him a guitar and a wah-wah, and he’s a fucking genius.” Like Oxaal, Kulas — an amusing and self-assertive Canadian — was brought into James by his friend Davies. Kulas can play a variety of instruments and will almost certainly increase his role on future James albums. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation,” he says of recording with the band. “It’s expected that at certain times somebody has to step up to bat for the team. Do a guitar part, or a bit of backing vocals, or whatever it takes to push it into a new area.” One of Eno’s strengths is that he can see ways to move a song forward in both a linear and subversive fashion. Davies enthuses: “Eno is good at twisting a song, injecting some oddity that will allow you to still have a valid pop song but make it a bit weird.” Sure enough, on a song called If Anybody Hurts You (which was earmarked early on as one of the album’s set pieces), Eno corralled Davies and Oxaal to make up a two-man orchestra. “Adrian plays cello and I play violin,” Davies explains, “and Eno came up with this mad melody line. We recorded about thirty-six passes of Adrian and me being marshalled by Eno, who was standing there conducting, wearing a mad hat, with a banana sticking out the front of his trousers, going, This is giving me the horn! This is giving me the horn!” However, when Eno’s egg-timer ran out, the album was very much unfinished. (“Not even 50 per cent there,” Rudge calculates.) Glennie wouldn’t have picked Eno in the first place. “We needed a nuts and bolts man,” he says. “Eno’s not like that. Eno comes in and farts about for an afternoon, sprinkles oofle-dust and disappears for a couple of days.” Post-Eno, the album became irritatingly hard to complete. “We’d been relying on the captain, and the captain was man overboard,” says Booth. “The ship drifted for a while.” Some songs remained unrecorded because Eno hadn’t liked them. A tune called Afro Lover was produced by Faithless, and Steve Osborne rerecorded the song that everyone in James and at Mercury presumes will be the biggest hit of them all. A luminous ballad entitled Fred Astaire, it’s the album’s second single. By the end of 1998, as James toured indoor arenas playing critically acclaimed greatest hits sets, things were overrunning and inertia loomed. “We’re not the hardest working band in the world,” Davies concedes. “We were in a rehearsal room for ten days before the tour, playing for an hour a day. Fucking lazy bastards. The crew were threatening walkouts if we didn’t work.” FEBRUARY 1999, Metropolis Studios, West London. Booth is alone save for an engineer, working on a song called Confusion. It is sung in the voice of a man itemising his sexual conquests, of which he has made a list. In one verse he sleeps with a mother and a daughter in combination. Booth doesn’t rate the song and it will not be included on the album. He decides to break for dinner. We walk to a nearby restaurant where Booth, serenely and persuasively, explains that he wants a takeaway. We are a restaurant, sir, they reply; we do not do take-aways. He protests politely. Minutes later, the restaurateur has instigated a takeaway service for one night- and one customer-only, wrapping the sumptuous food in tinfoil. On the way back to the studio, Booth points out the headquarters of the Ballet Rambert. “Tim is not a rock star in the traditional sense,” Rudge will say fondly. “Rock isn’t his life. I think (R.E.M.’s Michael) Stipe is a good analogy. I always think Stipe looks like a loner in his own band — and Tim’s a loner in James.” Painted as the band’s sole intellectual — although he’s not the only member with a university degree — Booth professes to dislike tension in James while in reality being unable to resist it. The idea that he might one day leave is always at the back of everyone’s mind. “James need that edge,” Rudge says stoically “It’s what keeps them together. It’s what they get off on. They need to be dysfunctional. Tim needs always to think that he can walk away from this at any moment. But he never does.” The heavy studio door at Metropolis swings open and a bald man enters wearing a thick winter coat, rubbing his hands warm. He looks like Yul Brynner in Taras Bulba, but he is Eno, returning to the James album to patch up Confusion before getting on a plane tomorrow morning. Booth reveals that Eno has passed up the opportunity to see tonight’s performance by Pina Bausch, the German choreographer. For Booth, that is a compliment. Eno sits there, with a blindfold over his eyes. “I’ve set myself a task for every day this year, he divulges. “Today I’m finding out what it’s like to be blind for one hour.” You can see why there’s such a long waiting list for his services. After a two month delay, the mixing sessions take place in April. James have two West London studios on the go: Metropolis and Eden. As of tomorrow; there will be a third, Olympic in Barnes. At quite some expense, they are not only mixing tracks at Eden but attempting to salvage, at Metropolis, the arrangements of two songs from a tape that has inexplicably disappeared. “Three very important… four very important tapes have gone missing,” says Davies. He suspects sabotage. The album has been recorded on several different formats — including a digital facility called Soundscape — and an engineer named Ben Fenner is in Metropolis, staring at a computer screen like a police psychologist examining a polygraph printout for subtle signs of dishonesty. Fenner is trying to reassemble the intricate sonic map of If Anybody Hurts You, whose arrangement has vanished. It’s particularly ironic as Booth’s lyric for the song was specifically designed to ward off such catastrophes. “My belief is that some of our songs have acted as self-fulfiling prophecies and charms and spells,” Booth says without a hint of irony. “So you call an LP Laid and suddenly your libido goes through the roof. And you call an LP Whiplash and you end up in a neck brace for two years. If Anybody Hurts You is very purposely a spell, a protection against anyone who is directing any negativity towards me or the band. ‘There’s a mirror with your name on…’ If you direct any shit at me, it’s going to come back at you. It’s like a very happy threat.” With so much technology surrounding this album (Baynton-Power, at Metropolis, is studiously surfing a hard disk in search of dimly remembered percussion tracks), it’s tempting to think James are in danger of attaining perfection at the expense of spontaneity. The phlegmatic Baynton-Power sees computers as “a means to an end. It means we don’t all have to be in the room at the same time. We could make the next album by post if we had to.” For his part, Booth believes it’s a question of “putting as much detail and care and love as possible” into the music. “That’s what love of a song is,” he says. “Refusing to accept that a song is finished. Finding another subtle twist to put in there.” Or, in the case of If Anybody Hurts You, getting the bugger back. A mile away in Eden, Davies, Hunter and mixing engineer Dave Bascombe are nearing a result on Someone’s Got It In For Me, a bombastic show-stopper with lavish Walker Brothers echo an mighty drums. It’s such a brilliant track that one half-expects everybody to cheer, slap palms an shout “That’s the one, baby!” when it ends. In ill silence, Bascombe suggests: “It’s getting there.” Davies nods his head slowly. Someone’s Got It In For Me is not the only song on the album to sound expansive and audacious. Vindicated by The Best Of James have brought dose of grandiosity into play “There’s a let’s-be-the-best-band-in-the-world thinking to it now, Davies acknowledges. “This time we’re in a much stronger commercial situation. This album is a really good response from us in some ways — regardless of how it’s been put together — to the pressure of having to follow up The Best Of. But the album is also quite strange and not unified at all in terms of sound or vibe. It’s not an Urban Hymns, and James fans will love it for that reason.” IN BIARRITZ, BOTH Booth and Rudge let slip that James’s deal with Mercury will expire after one further album. If Millionaires is the record every one thinks it is, the band’s bargaining power will never have been higher. When Q tells Booth that there are strong rumours back home that James are about to split up, he groans impatiently. But there are always rumours, he retorts, and this year’s rumours are no more true — and no more false — than those of previous years. “My only regret,” he says, speaking in a doubtless unconscious past tense, “is that we should have been bigger. There’s a feeling that we haven’t quite left our mark in the history books, or as big a mark as we would have liked to have left… But it’s Man United. It’s the eighty-ninth minute and Ferguson’s thinking, Maybe it’s not my year again. And then God puts his hand in, or whatever the fuck it is that happens. Some weird twist of fate that completely defies all rationality and human control. It’s called extra time.” | Aug 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
In It For The Money? – Melody Maker | Article, Interview |
James – who recently returned with a new single ‘I Know What I’m Here For’ on Mercury – are set to release their eighth studio album, ‘Millionaires’, on October 11. Their next single ‘Just Like Fred Astaire’ is released on September 27 and the band play a massive arena tour in December. In the meantime, James are headlining the Lizard Eclipse Festival at Goonhilly Downs in Cornwall next week. Frontman Tim Booth got on the phone to talk about his busy schedule. Are you looking forward to your appearance at Lizard? “Very much. We haven’t got anything planned that is special for that. We are flying in by helicopter, which is our treat, so we can avoid the crush and make sure we get there on time. We’re looking forward to that. But apart from that, it’ll just be a big celebration. “We’re really enjoying playing at the moment. It’s weird, cos last year, although we had a Number One (album) and had an amazing year externally, we were having a really bad time internally in the band. But this year, we’re just flying and getting on really well with each other. We’re just getting such a buzz when we go on stage with each other. We just want to play more gigs.” Is the Eclipse important to you? “It’s a moment of light and shade. The greatest darkness and greatest light. The sun is the energy source of the whole Solar system, so if that energy source is paused to the Earth, even for just a couple of minutes, I suspect something quite profound takes place. Without the sun, we are dead.” There’s been a bit of a gap between studio albums. “There has been a gap, because we had the ‘Greatest Hits’ last year and we were in quite a lot of disarray. “A lot of work went into the ‘Greatest Hits’ album. There was a lot of promotion, compiling and we did a tour with it as well. So we haven’t been completely sitting on our arses. “We’ve found a new way of writing on this album. Saul (Davies, guitarist) and I wrote over half the songs with Mark (Hunter, keyboard player) and usually it’s all improvised. But this time we did it in smaller clusters and the rest we improvised. It’s turned out groovy.” How do you feel ‘Millionaires’ has progressed from 1997’s ‘Whiplash’? ‘Whiplash’ wasn’t a record that we were totally satisfied with by the end, and it was made under a lot of difficult conditions. This one is really focused, you can hear it in every song. It’s a different thing, really, we’ve hit one of our purple patches. This new one is more us going out into the world and taking something we know people will like. It’s a very bold and varied record. Everything is very heartfelt, all the tensions we had in the band are in the songs. When you have a lot of friction in your life, it quite often makes interesting music.” The next single is called ‘Just Like Fred Astaire’. Is he a hero of yours? “I think he was a wonderful dancer, but I preferred Gene Kelly. But it’s just that effortless lightness he had when he danced, that kind of pure joy you sometimes get. That, for me, is like the feeling of being totally in love and off your head, and that was what I was trying to capture. “It’s about a man going to a doctor with all these different symptoms. He’s saying ‘I’m sick, I’m losing my hair and my mind and when I hold her in my arms I feel like Fred Astaire.’ That is the punchline he keeps coming back to. The doctor actually tells him that love is just a disease and a plague for the naïve. I don’t have a high opinion of doctors. “Fred Astaire’s estate didn’t want us to use his name as the title. So we had to add ‘Just Like’ which is the lyric of the song, so it wasn’t a big problem.” Are you happy playing in arenas? “I love them. I used to have an attitude to those places that they weren’t right, but we’ve had some amazing big-venue celebrations. You can make it work and there are a lot of people there to amplify it all. Wembley is supposed to be a faceless cavern and we made it into a small nightclub. It was really intimate and felt fantastic. I don’t think many bands can play really big venues, but we have the ability.” | Aug 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fred Astaire News – Melody Maker | Article, News |
| Sep 1999 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Fred Astaire Single – NME News | Article, News | JAMES release a new single, ‘Just Like Fred Astaire’, on September 27 through Mercury. It is the second single from the band’s next album, ‘Millionaires’, released on October 11. James have also announced a major UK arena tour for December. The band play Brighton Centre (December 4), Birmingham NEC (5), Cardiff International Arena (6), Newcastle Arena (8), Glasgow SECC (9), Manchester Evening News Arena (11) and London Wembley Arena (12). | Sep 1999 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Heisser Herbst – Intro.de – in German | Article, News | Tim Booth, Sänger von James, sieht schön jugendlich aus. Damit war nicht unbedingt zu rechnen. Schließlich datiert die erste James-Veröffentlichung aus dem Jahre 1983. Und trotz knapp 17 Jahren Show-Biz trägt Tim nur einige interessante Linien im Gesicht. Einzig der Kampfanzug, den er trägt, scheint darauf zu verweisen, daß hier gerade ein Unwetter-erprobter Dauer-Künstler Platz genommen hat. Oder ein Vietnam-Veteran. Der Tarnanzug paßt zu überhaupt nichts – außer zu der olivgrünen Kappe auf Tims Kopf. Denn die Devise von James lautet auch noch kurz vor 2000: „Pomp-Pop with guitar will never die!’ Und zu solch einem Statement wird gewöhnlich eher Bundfalte getragen oder ein geil exaltiertes Hemd. Aber – und das wird im Gespräch mit Tim schnell klar – James dürfen alles. Nicht schlechter Erziehung halber, nein, sie haben es sich verdient. Selfmade-Popstars aus Großbritannien. Aber so was von selfmade. Es war 1989, als sie ihre damalige Plattenfirma verließen, aus Stolz und Überzeugung, um hernach wissentlich mit nichts, wirklich nichts dazustehen. Doch der Wiederaufstieg folgte prompt. Pop machen und tough sein. So konnte es weitergehen, so ging es weiter. Und die unstraighte Vita ist das, was übrigbleibt. Popistische und britische Unbescheidenheit ritt die Band nun bei der Namenswahl ihres neuen Longplayers: „Millionaires’ – schön wär’s. Klassisch ist dieses Album geworden, ohne anachronistische Widersprüche oder Altersweisheit rauszuhauen. Aber vor allem ist es irgendwie Comeback. Denn nach Grübelphasen und der „Lollapalooza’-Tour in den USA sah es aus, als wär’s das gewesen. Gerade auch wegen Tims schwerer Nackenwirbelverletzung on stage. Vor Jahren. Touring, der ewige Feind von James, schien das übergelaufene Faß endgültig umgestoßen zu haben. Doch nun „Millionaires’ – nachdem bereits auf der „Best Of’ letztes Jahr zwei neue Stücke Grund zum Hoffen gegeben hatten. Und „das ist keine Episode, es ist definitiv ein Neuanfang.’ „Meßt sie an ihren Taten’, ruft es vom Himmel. Okay: bestes Zeichen für back in the ring ist die Nummer, daß James wieder auf dem europäischen Festland, gar Deutschland, spielten und spielen werden. Etwas, das seit sieben Jahren nicht mehr geschah und auch der konkrete Punkt ist, warum die Band hier und dort alle irgendwie nur halb kennen. Den Anfang vom Neuanfang machte das diesjährige „Haldern Open-Air’, wo James vom Publikum aufgenommen wurden wie der sprichwörtlich verlorene Sohn. Einfach schön, ihn wiederzuhaben. Daß er dann noch vorgibt, Millionär zu sein, ist doch nur die sexy Sahnehaube. Denn klar, James haben den Pop nicht neu erfunden, ignorieren im Gegenteil eher die eine oder andere Erfindung, aber sie kommen von einer wahnsinnig langen, beschwerlichen Reise, und da dürfen sie ruhig mal ein wenig prahlen. Hauptsache, sie sind zurück. Und gesund. | Sep 1999 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Recording I Know What I’m Here For – SOS Publications | Article, Interview | Following the success of their recent ‘Best Of’ album, James’ first single for over a year was much anticipated — especially as it saw them renew their relationship with production legend Brian Eno. Tom Flint reports. People often point out that the band James have been around for a very long time — but then they were saying that even back in 1991, when the huge success of the single ‘Sit Down’ transformed the group into a stadium act at the height of the Manchester-dominated ‘baggy’ era. James had already been active for the best part of a decade by then, and had a clutch of commercially released records to their name, including a couple of EPs on the seminal Manchester Factory label, home for so long to New Order and the Happy Mondays. They had even, despite their relatively low profile at the time, undertaken support slots for The Smiths (Morrissey even went on record at one point saying James were his favourite band). You could say they were just latecomers to success. Of course, the days when The Smiths ruled the indie charts have long since passed, the Factory label no longer exists and many of those bands who rose to fame during the baggy late ’80s and early ’90s are a distant memory, or faded photocopies of their former selves. Nevertheless, James have kept going, never quite reinventing themselves, but constantly tweaking their own anthemic type of pop just enough to keep pace with the changing sound of modern productions. Proof of their enduring appeal came only last year when their hugely successful Best Of… album reached the coveted number one spot in the UK album chart. They’re Millionaires! This month, James (currently a seven-piece band comprising keyboardist Mark Hunter, vocalist Tim Booth, drummer David Baynton-Power, backing vocalist Michael Kulas, violinist Saul Davies, bassist Jim Glennie, and lead guitarist Adrian Oxaal) return with their eighth studio album, Millionaires, produced once again by eclectic sound sculptor Brian Eno, whose distinctive touch graced the band’s earlier Laid and Wah Wah albums. For the task of mixing the album, the group hired engineer and producer Dave Bascombe, whose previous production and mixing credits include work with Depeche Mode, Tears For Fears, Echo And The Bunnymen and The Lightning Seeds. Bearing in mind Eno’s reputation for creative sonic experimentation and Bascombe’s uncanny knack of producing lively pop mixes, the nature of the first single release from the album comes as no surprise. Entitled ‘I Know What I’m Here For’, the track is cunningly awash with inventive sonic ideas, but also possessed of a tremendously catchy tune. The single was released in July 1999, but work on the track first began when the group arrived at Ridge Farm Studios in May 1998 for a one-week recording session working with engineer Ott (best known for his engineering work on the Embrace track ‘All You Good Good People’). Over the past couple of years, several members of James — for example Saul Davies — have taken to working pretty much alone at home, making initial demos in their home studios which they then bring to the rest of the band. This process continued throughout the Millionaires sessions, with much work being added to songs in band members’ homes and then being brought back to the commercial studios where work on the album was progressing. The new single was one such track. Sketched out at Saul’s house in Scotland with just a guitar, a drum machine, and a rough Tim Booth guide vocal, ‘I Know What I’m Here For’ was one of several home recordings the band brought to Ridge Farm with the intention of working them up into full band recordings. Almost immediately, however, the plans changed. Drummer David Baynton-Power, who produced James’ Whiplash album (see the SOS feature August 1997) takes up the story… Ridge Farm — Drums & BVs Baynton-Power: “We were going to try out a few songs, to get some parts recorded that would be worth keeping, but in the end we just decided to work on ‘I Know What I’m Here For’ and get it really good rather than ending up with four or five sketches. We had no concept of how the song should be at that time, we just thought we’d see what would happen.” During the Ridge Farm sessions, all the members of the band were on hand apart from vocalist Tim Booth, who was unavailable for the week. The band recording was built around a short rhythm loop prepared by keyboardist Mark Hunter. Baynton-Power elaborates: “Mark had a nice vibey loop, which remained in the background all through the track on the final mix; we just wanted something more inspiring than the tick-boom of the drum machine on the demo. Mark went through the bank of sounds on his Emu e64 sampler and found that one-bar sample loop, which he triggered from an Atari. It was just looping to the tempo which was about 103bpm at the time.” In traditional fashion, the first item to be recorded was the drum track, on a Remo Mastertouch kit set up in a room at the back of Ridge Farm. Baynton-Power: “There’s a big wooden barn there with a loose, warm sound, not too sharp or brittle.” Engineer Ott set up the drum mics using an AKG D12 on the kick impact spot, a Neumann U47 outside the kick pointing in, a Shure SM57 on the top side of the snare, a Neumann KM84 on the hi-hat, two more KM84s on overheads, Sennheiser 421s on the toms, and two Neumann U87 mics set up to capture room ambience. To ensure a consistent drum sound which could feature high in the mix, Ott applied several compressors to the drum tracks: the studio’s Urei 1178 compressor on the overheads, a Dbx 160 on the toms and kick, a Urei 1176 to handle the snare, and the studio’s SSL desk compressor on the ‘hi-hat’; though in fact Baynton-Power had modified his kit slightly, and was using a stand-mounted tambourine to play the eighth notes rather than the hat. He also used Hot Rods instead of drum sticks. “They’re like little bits of thin dowling wound together in a bunch with shrunk plastic — halfway between a brush and a stick. Instead of getting a donk, you get a bit more of a splat.” he explains. To give Baynton-Power something to react to, the band played along — and they used their own monitors rather than headphones. Unsurprisingly, Ott describes the situation as “a bit of a handful, until I worked out how to cope with it. Dave had this great big foldback wedge pointing at him in the drum room blasting out kick drum at everyone. It worked a treat, even though we had spill from the band on everything!” With the band recording live in the studio to 2-inch analogue multitrack, it was important to make sure everyone and everything kept in time for future recording purposes. Ott: “Mark’s got his keyboard rig with a Clavia Nord Lead, Korg Wavestation, Atari ST, Emu e64 and a Roland drum machine. I sent him MIDI Clock from my computer setup in the control room, which was obviously sync’ed to the code on the multitrack. That kicked off his Atari sequencer with which he runs all the clicks. I recorded their performance to tape and took a feed of their loop into the desk and then down onto its own tape track. I also sent it back out to Dave’s wedge. Dave’s magic on a click — when I played it back later I found he’d stuck to it like glue.” After recording the band’s performance to tape, Ott transferred the drums onto the group’s Tascam DA88s, and from there directly into his Soundscape hard disk recording system. Baynton-Power explains why: “The Soundscape system interfaces perfectly with the DA88 via the TDIF interface, so we used it to get the drums into Soundscape for editing. Ott did all the Soundscape work. I’d rather someone else did it, otherwise I get to know every little beat and fill and become thoroughly bored with it. Ott pieced together one of the fills from two separate ones I’d done. It was ridiculously complicated; I wouldn’t have done them myself, but I’ve had to learn to play them now!” Ott elaborates on the extent of his Soundscape work: “I did sit there for a few hours chopping the drums about to suit the backing track. I also comped down the guitars, bass and guide vocal. There’s no quantising involved though; it’s basically a whole take with a few repairs. I did as little as possible.” Apart from the obvious benefits of using Soundscape as an editing tool, Baynton-Power contends that the working method helped to improve his actual performance. “Using Soundscape allows you to play without worrying about getting it perfect. You’re more up for taking chances. You might try a stupid fill you wouldn’t normally do because you’d think you’d get it wrong. You know you can always paste another bit in there, so you play better.” After the editing on Soundscape, the drums were transferred back onto two-inch analogue tape. Without Tim Booth available to work on his lead vocal, Ott concentrated on recording Michael Kulas’ backing vocals. Baynton-Power: “Mike went to town on the multitrack vocals. During that session he recorded the ‘la la la’ vocal lines you hear at the end of the track. We also found the perfect place to put them in the middle eight.” Ott explains how the BVs were recorded: “The band had their Tascam DA88s set up in a side room to work out ideas. I made a slave reel for Mike, and he went in there with just a horrible little microphone you get free with your stereo, and recorded this amazingly impressive bank of harmonies, completely dry. He’s like a one-man Beach Boys!” The middle eight section of the song had already been conceived by this stage, and now underwent the first of several stages of processing. Baynton-Power: “We filtered the drum loop through an old Octave Cat synth, using its external input. We did a filter sweep on it and took all the high end out. The track drops down to just the loop, then the low-pass filter opens up. Then my snare comes in doing the big fill. That roll is part of the Soundscape drums track, and it’s three bars long, which is an odd length. I tried to put a bit of a shuffle into it to give it a bit of a groove.” Another sound effect contributing to the middle eight was a heavily tremoloed Les Paul guitar played by Saul. As Ott remembers it, “Saul has these Coloursound, Boss and Lovetone pedals and a tremolo. When he wants it all to go a bit bananas, he leaps onto his pedals. That’s what’s making the wobbly sound”. Finally, Ott himself added some additional processing: “I put the whole middle eight through a filter on the Eventide H3000; if you listen to the backing vocals and the drums you’ll hear them filtering in the background. That was the last thing I did on that session.” Hook End — Enter The Eno By the time work on the track moved to Hook End Studios in July 1998, the loop, drums and most of Kulas’ backing vocals were finished and down to analogue 2-inch tape. The July session was the first of two three-week stints working with producer Brian Eno (the second was in September 1998) who asserted his influence on the track immediately, as Baynton-Power explains: “Brian set himself up at Hook End with his Yamaha DX7, his EMS Synthi VCS3, and a rack of effects units that he likes [see the ‘Eno’s Gear’ box below]. At that point, ‘I Know What I’m Here For’ sounded pretty much like a conventional James track — guitar-driven like ‘Destiny Calling’. The original guide vocal at that tempo was a bit slow-moving, so the first thing Eno did was speed up the tape by about 12 percent! The pitch went up by a tone, but we got away with it. Eno said he thought the rest of the track was all right, but the vocals were too slow. I have to admit that when he first did it I thought it sounded a bit ridiculous, because I was so used to hearing it at 103bpm, but now it was kicking around at 115 or 116bpm. But in fact, that proved to be the key moment. The whole track happened fairly quickly after that. Once the bass had gone down on tape I saw what Eno was getting at by speeding it all up.” As this quote of Baynton-Power’s indicates, the next Eno-driven addition was a new, prominent bass line played on his DX7 synth through a miked-up amp to Hook End’s Studer A800 two-inch, replacing the previous guide bass recorded at Ridge Farm. Baynton-Power: “Mark and Brian did a live take to two-inch with Mark playing the bass notes on the DX7 and Brian applying the mod wheel. That was great to watch, far more exciting than watching someone moving stuff around on a computer screen. You can hear it in the vibe of the take. Brian hates sequencers; he just does everything hands-on. When he creates a sound, too, he’ll get it exactly how he wants it, and record it with the effects he wants already on it. With everything you’ve got in studios these days, it’s so easy to postpone your decision until a later stage, but Brian just bangs it onto tape and it’s finished. It saves a lot of time later. Everyone who heard the track later thought the bass was an analogue synth, but the DX7’s the only keyboard Brian uses. I think he said that he wasn’t very well once and couldn’t go out, so he got right inside it and learnt how to use it properly. He’s probably the best DX7 man on the planet; he swears by them.” With the song now running at a faster pace, the feel of the track had changed enough to require some new guitar parts to replace those recorded at Ridge Farm. The first to tape was the toppy-sounding funk guitar which can be heard on the verses, played by Saul Davies on his G&L Telecaster-style guitar. Although the song’s speed change had been agreed, Davies nevertheless recorded the part at the original speed of 103bpm (Baynton-Power: “so it sounded tight when we sped it back up”). Davies also double-tracked the funk part, playing slightly different inversions each time. After these parts were recorded to tape, Eno passed them back out through his rack for some additional processing. Saul then added the track’s heavily distorted, dirty guitar line (which can be heard during the second verse and just before the middle eight, and right at the very end of the finished track), this time using his purple Fender amp recorded via a Marshall 4×12 cab close-miked with a Shure SM57. The next contribution was again one of Eno’s — and it proved to be one of the song’s major hook lines. The distinctive lead keyboard line appears first at the start of the song, then repeats after the first chorus and middle eight. Once again, it was coaxed by Eno from nothing more than his beloved DX7, and DI’d straight to tape. He also added a VCS3 synth line to the end of the middle eight, coming in under the Baynton-Power’s three-bar drum roll. The Townhouse — Lead Vocals Although the backing track was more or less complete, Tim Booth’s lead vocal lines still needed recording. Eno found a spare week in November and recording resumed, this time at The Townhouse in London. According to Baynton-Power, Booth sang his vocals along to the main monitors in the control room without headphones, at Eno’s suggestion, the producer not being terribly concerned about spill into the vocal mic and instead favouring ease of communication with Booth. A couple of mics were used, including a Neumann U47 and even a Shure SM57 for some handheld takes. Eno then started experimenting with the vocoder on his Digitech Vocalist. Baynton-Power: “Brian’s had that Digitech for ages; he always brings it along to a session in the hope that it’s going to do something amazing! In the past, it’s sounded African, which isn’t really what we’re after, but this time he coaxed something out of it that was alright!”. Engineer Alex Haas explains the process: “We sent several recorded vocal tracks to Brian’s rack, where he added whatever treatments he wanted and then sent them back to the desk. We re-recorded the processed vocals onto another track, and then blended the wet and dry tracks together, or just used one of them”. This was how the heavily vocoded ‘Follow me’ section came about, as mix engineer Dave Bascombe explains: “Tim was singing ‘follow me, follow me’ and Brian decided to take Tim’s lead vocal out altogether there and just use the effects. It makes another sort of middle eight break there. He used the same effect behind the lead vocal in the second verse”. Eden — Mixing It With the lead vocal in place, the track was deemed complete. Eno now compiled the various parts making up the song on to one 24-track analogue tape. Baynton-Power comments: “Brian doesn’t like to work on anything larger than 24-track; his attitude is that if it can’t be put on to 24 tracks it isn’t worth recording. He’s got a point, hasn’t he?”. Eno’s last task on the single was to prepare a rough stereo mix for Dave Bascombe to work from. This he sent on DAT along with the 24-track tape to Eden Studios, where Dave had chosen to work: “‘I Know What I’m Here For’ struck me straight away as being potentially a great single, and by the time the Eno tapes got to me the track was fairly finished. Brian had done a mix and had sifted through quite a lot of stuff. I referred to his mix for the arrangement.” At Eden an SSL desk was used, recording to a Studer half-inch and an Otari RADAR. Also involved in the process was Dave’s own collection of gear. “I’ve got a rack with a Mac G3 running Emagic Logic Audio, and also a lot of guitar pedals. I use the Lovetone stuff like the Meatball and Doppelgänger. Those type of pedals don’t like being used on insert points, because the line level is too much for them, so I had them on effects sends. The Meatball was always available on the desk, so if I wanted to try something I could send to it immediately from anywhere. Sometimes if I wanted a specific effect on something I just recorded it into Logic Audio and used a plug-in before feeding it back into the mix.” Another regular send effect in Dave’s setup was a Leslie speaker cab: “We miked it with a couple of Neumann U87s either side on the top speaker and anything that was knocking around on the bottom one, such as a Neumann U47, AKG D12 or Electrovoice RE20. The bottom speaker didn’t really matter, because I only used a little bit mixed in; otherwise, the sound got very muddy. I had the mics on three channels of the desk; with that arrangement, I could instantly try any guitar or vocal through the Leslie.” As Dave began work on the mix, some extra material was sent to him by the band on DAT, which Eno had apparently omitted when compiling the master 24-track tape — specifically, Michael Kulas’ ‘la la la’ backing vocals, and more of Saul Davies’ distorted guitar part. Dave Bascombe explains: “After Eno had got it down to 24-track, Saul realised that some of the grungy guitar had gone missing in the process; originally he played it all through the track, and Eno had wiped it, using it only in the chorus. Fortunately, Saul had often taken slaves off to work on at home on his Fostex D80 8-track. He wanted to hear what it sounded like during the rest of the song, so he brought it back in, but the guitar had no timecode and drifted, so we had to put it in the RADAR and snip it around to get it in time”. Dave Baynton-Power advances a possible explanation as to why the backing vocals were also omitted from Eno’s multitrack and mix. “There was a bit of contention within certain camps as to whether those vocals should be used or not. Some people think, ‘brilliant, pop vocals’. Others find them too poppy for their taste, and Brian usually veers towards the more arty side of stuff. But prior to going into Hook End we had played the original Ridge Farm version live a couple of times, and Mark [Hunter] had pulled the backing vocals off to DAT so he could trigger them live. Otherwise, they’d have been history!”. With the extra guitars and vocals recovered and running on the RADAR alongside the 24-track, Bascombe continued with the mix, applying EQ, compression and effects.”I always EQ individual channels with everything running. Obviously if you solo something and it sounds horrendous, you do have a muck around with it, but it’s got to fit in a mix context. I tried to build the track as quickly as possible, just so I could hear everything and get a balance on it. Then I went through trying stuff out to see if I could make anything sound better. I used the SSL compressor on the overall mix, and a bit of voice doubler from the Eventide H3000 to thicken things up a little bit. I also put Saul’s grungy guitar through the Leslie to make it swirl around a little bit as it was too static, and panned his two funk guitars, one left and one right. Panning is always important to separate things out in the mix; in the middle eight I put the wobbly guitar through the [Audio Design] Pan Scan auto-panner and sent it whizzing around. “The most tricky thing during the mix was getting the balance between the drum kit, the loop, and Eno’s bass. The drums and the loop balance was fairly crucial, you didn’t want to hear it flamming but you did want to hear them both. I thought the bass was a great Eno sound, and I also noticed that it featured high in the Eno mix. I struggled to get it as loud as possible without letting it dominate everything else.” Finishing Touches Although James were present for most of the mix process, the final version of ‘I Know What I’m Here For’ was mixed later, at one final session. Bascombe: “I played a couple of different versions of the mix to Tim Booth, and we both agreed I hadn’t quite cracked it; there was still a balance problem between the loop and the drum kit. It was the only track I remixed on the whole album, but we did use the new version in the end.” Dave mastered the finished mix onto half-inch tape and handed it over to Mercury Records in good time for its July release. ‘I Know What I’m Here For’ proved to be a complex project, involving Ott, Alex Haas, Brian Eno, Dave Bascombe and the members of James, all working on different aspects of the track. Looking back, Dave Bascombe reflects: “It’s quite an involved process with James, and rather like the way U2 work, from what I gather. They try out shit-loads of ideas, and it can make life very complicated — someone has to log all these little things in their head, or you end up going ‘where’s that bloody guitar we did 10 months ago?’. But it’s using all these snippets, these ideas that have been gathered together over the months, that makes it different, rather than just bashing it on to tape and adding two standard overdubs. When you put it all together, it makes for a very interesting record.” | Sep 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Radio 1 Interview from Heaton Park | Article, Interview | Jo Whiley : I’m in James dressing room, I’ve got Tim Booth with us here now. And he’s told everyone to shut up. Tim : And they’re all whispering. What do you reckon we’ve got? About twenty seconds. They’re doing something very naughty. There are some naughty things going on over there. JW : Put it away now. Contrary to popular belief, I thought you’d be meditating in here, but there’s vodka bottles and nude people Tim : Ah, well, errmm. They’re not mine. They’re Jim’s. I believe you must find God amongst vodka and debris of life. And it’s very important to find spiritual calm amongst the chaos. JW : Tim, have a good gig Tim : Thanks JW : And it wasn’t me bouncing on the castle with you Tim : It was. | Sep 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Millionaires Press Biography | Article, Press Release | Musical history is littered with bands who have briefly blazed brightly, to sink prematurely into depressing mediocrity as they repeat themselves with ever-diminishing effect. The path JAMES have forged has taken the band in exactly the opposite direction. Endlessly inventive, always taking risks and never satisfied with the easy option, James have dug deep into the wellspring of their creativity and come up with ‘MILLIONAIRES’ – the most adventurous and rewarding album of their 16 year roller-coaster career. That they were threatening to produce something special was signalled last year when the band raced to the top of the album charts with ‘The Best of James’. Although the collection contained 14 of their (top forty) hits, significantly it was the two new songs, ‘Destiny Calling’ and ‘Runaground’, which caught the attention and suggested a band returning into peak form. Both, of course, became hit singles in their own right and heightened the anticipation for the next album. “We were aware that last year’s success had created an expectation of this record,” says guitarist Saul Davies. “The songs were written just as that album was kicking off and it generated a lot of energy. I think we struck a really good balance between being commercial and being interesting and different”. “But we made the new album on the back of a mixture of things,” adds Tim Booth. “The optimism of last year did give the band a real lift. But there were a lot of problems and conflicts at the same time which hadn’t been resolved. Those tensions are all there in the songs as well. I think this is the best album we have ever made.” It is a bold claim given James’ impressive track record since they began recording for the Manchester-based Factory Records back in 1983. Championed by Morrissey as “the best band in the world”, they toured with the Smiths, became Hacienda favourites and cult heroes and signed to Sire Records. Their debut album ‘Stutter’ in 1986 and ‘Strip Mine’ two years later established the basic guitar-driven James sound, and marked Tim out as a provocative lyricist and an emotive singer, but they found the label unsympathetic and unsupportive. By 1989 they were delighted to escape from Sire’s clutches, even though it left them skint. “After seven years we were living on dole-level wages and radio wouldn’t play us,” Tim recalls. Many bands would have folded. Instead James volunteered as human guinea pigs in medical tests at a local hospital and used the cash to release ‘One Man Clapping’, a rather fine live album on their own label. Although it included an early version of ‘Sit Down’, the distributors Rough Trade told them it was “minority music with no commercial appeal” and let them go. They then re-grouped later and added new members Saul Davies, Mark Hunter (keyboards) and David Baynton-Power (drums). They recorded an album of songs for Rough Trade who sold the record on to Fontana. It was released as ‘Gold Mother’ and was the breakthrough they had waited so long for, selling 350,000 in Britain alone while a reworked ‘Sit Down’ became one of the most memorable anthems of the nineties. The Madchester scene was in full swing and, together with the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays, James suddenly found themselves at its apex, hailed as the saviours of British rock music. The sweepingly epic ‘Seven’ followed in 1992 and was only kept from the number one spot by Simply Red. The following year they secured the services of Brian Eno to produce the extraordinary’Laid’ and it’s experimental off-shoot ‘Wah Wah’. Spending increasing amounts of time in America (including playing Woodstock Two),’Laid’ took off there too, selling 600,000 copies at a time when British bands were finding it particularly difficult to penetrate a grunge-fixated market. Then, at the highest point of their career, James almost fell apart. One day in 1995 guitarist Larry Gott, the longest serving member apart from Tim and bassist Jim Glennie, decided to quit. So did manager Martine and, for good measure, the band learned that they owed a huge sum in back tax. Shell-shocked they took a break that as it stretched into its third year looked like becoming terminal. Booth went off to make a solo album with Angelo Badalamenti and no one seriously expected ever to hear from James again. Yet adversity has always brought the best out of the band. With the addition of new guitarist Adrian Oxaal they eventually re-emerged in 1997 with the boldly melodic ‘Whiplash’. Brimming with rejuvenated confidence, it went gold and gave the band one of it’s biggest singles in ‘She’s a Star’. Last year’s ‘Best Of James’ only served to confirm their resurgence and gave them their first number one album keeping “Titanic” from the top slot in Oscar week, going on to be the band’s first double platinum album and sell out tour. ‘Millionaires’ finds Brian Eno back as co-producer and the band at a new creative peak with a set of sumptuous songs full of light and shade – accessible and yet complex, dense but somehow full of space. “Saul and I basically disagree when we are writing a song. There are a lot of contrasts and paradoxes. We have totally different philosophies to life and that gives us a certain creative tension. It’s that fight between us which produces the best writing,” says Tim. “James is a very intense group. There’s usually one of us cracking up at any given time.” The conflicting lifestyles on the surface appear irreconcilable. The band has strongly hedonistic impulses while Tim is these days famously sober and ascetic. But as Saul explains: “We’re all trying to get to the same place in our different ways. I can write the music for a song like ‘Someone’s Got It In 4 Me’ at six in the morning after I’ve been up for three days drinking litres of vodka. Tim gets there through his trance states and meditation. But we’re both experimenting with removing ourselves from the normal humdrum day-to-day existence.” ‘Surprise’ was written about a friend Tim thought was on the verge of suicide – although it could also be taken as an allegory for the band and a response to those who wrote them off. “Fred Astaire” is simply one of the best love songs the band has ever recorded. “I am completely and totally in love but I also have this English embarrassment that goes with it. That’s what the song is about,” says Tim. The slightly sinister ‘If Anybody Hurts You’ is a protective charm, he says. “There have been people who wished me harm and someone actually put a curse on me. The song is a shield.” Several of the songs emerged from jams, a traditional way of working for the band who like to trust first instincts. ‘Hello’ is an entirely intuitive song with an improvised lyric Tim professes not quite to understand. ‘Vervacious’ similarly started life as a jam before Sinead O’Connor was invited to lend some hypnotic vocals. Jamie Catto of Faithless helped out on ‘Someone’s Got It In 4 Me’ and also on ‘Afro Lover’, an anti-war song with an almost religious intensity but a contrastingly upbeat arrangement. Eno’s ineffable influence weaves its magic throughout the album’s eleven songs. “On some things he had fixed ideas and on others he was prepared to roll with the flow”. “We derived enormous encouragement just from him being there.” As for the title, Tim has a strong belief that words have certain properties of cause and effect. “The album should have been called “Love, Money and Revenge”, because those are the themes. But when we made ‘Laid’, we got laid. When we made ‘Whiplash’, I got whiplash. This is the best album we have ever done so we settled on ‘Millionaires’. Well you can see the logic. And if there is any justice, it should prove to be yet another of James’s self-fulfilling prophecies. | Sep 1999 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
TFI Friday Biography | Article, Press Release | The original members of alternative folk-pop group James met at Manchester university, forming the band in 1982 with singer Tim Booth, guitarist Paul Gilbertson, bassist Jim Glennie and Gavan Whelan on drums. The band played local club circuits before releasing 2 EP’s in ’83 and ’85 then signing to Sire Records in the summer of 1985. The debut album, Stutter, was released in 1986 and featured new guitarist Larry Gott. Stripmine followed in 1988, establishing James’ sound as Booth’s falsetto leaps rose above the underlying Gaelic feel of their music. After being released penniless by their record company, the band convinced their bank manager to load them the money to release a live album on their own record label, proving their viability to him at one of their shows. One Man Clapping was released in 1989 and went to number 1 in the UK indie album chart. By 1990 the band had increased their sound, adding keyboardist Mark Hunter, trumpeter Andy Diagram and violinist Saul Davies, with Whelan being replaced by David Baynton-Powell on drums. The third album, Gold Mother, was released on Fontana Records in the same year, becoming the breakthrough record for the band as a re-recorded version of the single Sit Down went to number 2 in the UK chart. Often overlooked, Seven was released in 1992, followed by the US popular album Laid. Brian Eno’s production of the 1993 album changed the direction of the band, steering them towards the darker musical corners of their career. During the Laid session, Eno co-wrote and performed tracks with the band that became the 1994 LP Wah Wah. The album contained 23 songs and was the last album release before the band returned in early ’97 with Whiplash. Millionaires is released October 1999, as high expectations have been building up around the transcendent sounding band’s new album. | Sep 1999 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Musik fuer Millionare – Gaesteliste – in German | Article, Interview | “Der Albumtitel ‘Millionaires’ soll zum Ausdruck bringen, dass wir noch hoffen”, grinst Gitarrist und Geiger Saul Davies, als wir ihn in einem zur Nobelherberge umgebauten Schloss am Niederrhein zum Interview treffen. Dabei war lange Zeit niemandem bei James zum Lachen zu Mute. Nach außen hin schien zwar alles rund zu laufen, aber innerhalb der Band kriselte es gewaltig. Natürlich, die ehemalige Lieblingsband von The-Smiths-Mastermind Morrissey, die schon 1983 ihre erste Single veröffentlichte, war gerade in ihrer Anfangszeit nicht unbedingt vom Erfolg verwöhnt. Erst 1990, mit ihrem dritten Studioalbum “Gold Mother” und der Hymne “Sit Down”, gelang ihnen der lang ersehnte Erfolg. Nachdem sie sich einer soundtechnischen Radikalkur durch Produzentengenie Brian Eno unterzogen, sorgte 1993 das Album “Laid” dann auch in Amerika für Aufsehen, aber obwohl sich die Band nach außen hin auch 1997/98 mit dem Album “Whiplash” und der englischen No.1-LP “The Best Of James” im Erfolg sonnte, kam es intern zum Zusammenbruch. Doch James rauften sich zusammen und ihr bisher eher unscheinbarer Gitarrist und Geiger Saul schwang sich zum Hauptsongschreiber für die exzellente neue Platte “Millionaires” auf, die vertraut und neu zugleich klingt. Gästeliste: “Millionaires” ist die erste Platte, an der du als gleichwertiger Teilhaber am “Unternehmen James” mitgewirkt hast. Bisher war das 1989 zur Band gekommene Quartett aus Schlagzeuger David Baynton-Power, Keyboarder Mark Hunter, Trompeter Andy Diagram und Saul von der alten Garde – Sänger Tim Booth, Gitarrist Larry Gott und Bassist Jim Glennie – nur als bezahlte Musiker angestellt. Kommt daher das neue Selbstbewusstsein und das wiedergekehrte Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl? Saul: “Da ist was dran. Auf jeden Fall ist diese Platte so etwas wie ein Neustart – nicht nur musikalisch, sondern vor allem, was das Verhältnis der Bandmitglieder untereinander angeht. Für mich klingt sie auch ein bisschen wie “Gold Mother”, die erste Platte, die ich mit James aufgenommen habe.” Gästeliste: Schon beim letzten Album “Whiplash” vor zwei Jahren steckte die Band in der Krise. Vor allem, weil Tim zeitgleich ein Solo-Album einspielte. Waren die Aufnahmen zur neuen Platte denn nun ähnlich kompliziert? Saul: “Nein, diese Platte war viel einfacher zu machen. Viele der Songs haben wir nämlich in meinem Haus in Schottland und zu Hause bei unserem Keyboarder Mark aufgenommen. Als es dann an die eigentlichen Aufnahmen zusammen mit Brian Eno ging, sagte der nur: ‘Okay, dieser Song ist schon komplett, der ist auch schon fast fertig.’ Wir stellten fest, dass wir schon eine Menge der Arbeit erledigt hatten, und das war eine große Erleichterung.” Gästeliste: Neben typischen James-Songs gibt es auf dem Album ja auch einige Überraschungen. Das ziemlich tanzbare “Afro Lover” zum Beispiel. Saul: “Dieses Stück haben wir zusammen mit Jamie von der Band Faithless aufgenommen. Allerdings muss ich sagen, dass uns der technische Aspekt der Musik insgesamt nicht allzu sehr interessiert. Die besten Platten überhaupt sind schließlich immer noch von den Beatles und die haben mit nur vier Spuren (und oft nur mono) aufgenommen. Das Interesse an der Technik überlassen wir lieber Leuten mit kahlrasierten Köpfen. (lacht) Zum Beispiel Orbital!” Gästeliste: Die erste Single “I Know What I’m Here For” erinnert dagegen ein bisschen an die große Zeit des Manchester-Sounds Anfang der 90er. Viele andere Bands aus der Zeit – The Stone Roses, Inspiral Carpets und eigentlich ja auch die Happy Mondays – haben inzwischen das Handtuch geworfen… Saul: “Wir waren nie wirklich Teil der Manchester-Szene. Das gleiche gilt auch für dieses Brit-Pop-Ding. Wir gehören einfach nicht dazu. Wir sind NICHT Ocean Colour Scene – Gott sei Dank! Ich hasse diese Band. Das ist die einzige Gruppe, über die ich das öffentlich sagen würde. Ich hasse sie, weil sie sich für das Nonplusultra als Songschreiber halten, genau wie Paul Weller. Dem würde ich am liebsten seine Gitarre dahin schieben, wo die Sonne nicht scheint. Deren Sichtweise, dass Popmusik kompliziert sein muss, halte ich für Blödsinn. Morgen spielen wir ein Festival in Portugal, bei dem wir Headliner sind und Ocean Colour Scene die zweite Band am Nachmittag. Unser Name ist riesengroß auf dem Poster und Ocean Colour Scene musst du mit der Lupe suchen. Am liebsten hätte ich ein Foto davon gemacht und es ihnen geschickt. Mann, war ich stolz, als ich das gesehen habe.” | Sep 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Record Mart and Buyer Style Merchants | Article, Interview |
James have never made life easy for themselves. Their early gigs started with a couple of poems read by singer Tim Booth, causing instant confusion – is he James, is he a poet? Some audiences didn’t wait to find out. Then they were signed by Factory Records, whose A&R man Mike Pickering (now leader of M People) chose them over the Smiths. Their first single ‘Jimone’ (aka ‘Jim One’, an EP) had no proper sleeve design yet became NME and Melody Maker Single of the Week. It was released simultaneously with the Smiths’ ‘This Charming Man’, and though their fellow Mancunians had the hit they toured the UK together. James signed to Sire but found they had linked with the wrong record company; their second album ‘Strip Mine’ was delayed for 18 months, forcing band members to take day jobs (two became car salesmen!). Slipping their contract on a technicality, they financed their next album with a bank loan – then, when their new label wanted to put a re-recorded hit single on it, insisted fans who’d bought the earlier version of the album could exchange it. But James had enjoyed the safety net of a huge fan following gathered while waiting for their contract to expire, they’d kept bread on the table by playing anywhere and everywhere they could. Bruce Springsteen had done likewise, and garnered the eventual rewards. It’s doubtful the Boss was throttled on stage by his drummer, though – the fate of Tim Booth at one eventful gig in Stoke! No fewer than four new members had joined the band after that fiasco (one, needless to say, a new sticksman) and the result, ‘Gold Mother’, was the album that changed everything. Released in June 1990, it sold 350,000 in the UK alone and with the Top 3 single success of ‘Sit Down’ confirmed James as a major band for the new decade. Then they charged up the rock ladder with big-selling but very different albums like ‘Seven’ – a real stadium rocker – and the considerably more laid back ‘Laid’ which struck a chord in America, selling 600,000 copies there alone. But James couldn’t somehow embrace success. “We’ve always turned inward and done something weird,” says bass-player Jim Glennie, and they proved it by taking their acoustic set to the Reading festival (where even the mighty Meatloaf got bottled off) and playing some new songs they’d put together a few days before. James have always had a love-hate relationship with America. Larry Gott was mugged hours after landing in LA to shoot a video, and flew home. When they played Woodstock 1994 they chose to play not hits, but obscure and unreleased songs. ‘Laid’ saw them greeted like conquering heroes, and they milked it – but, having spent three years on a sold out tour bus their long-serving guitarist Gott decided he wanted out for good. Being the main music writer, this would be a problem. “We knew we had to rebuild James,” said Tim Booth, “and that took time. We had no idea what reaction our comeback would get. We hadn’t done anything in the UK for four years.” But the single ‘She’s A Star’ came in at Number 9, album ‘Whiplash’ was a major success and their ‘Best Of’ album released last year was a Number 1. The success of the ‘Best Of’ not only opened up a new audience for James’s music but meant the group members were under a bit of pressure. Saul Davies admits “We were a little surprised about how well it sold. We’re quite nervous creatures in James and that’s one of the reasons we’ve been going so long – we’re not entirely sure where we’re going to be listened to!” They’ve no problem there, but categorising their music is an entirely different matter. As Saul says, “Because there’s seven people in this band who all listen to different types of music, there’s a lot of influences on what we do and as a consequence we make diverse-sounding records.” But then that’s what makes them interesting. With the September-released ‘Millionaires’ set to confirm their place in the big league, let’s examine those influences that have made James the most popular indie group on the planet… Nick Cave Julee Cruise Velvet Underground Neil Young Gabrielle Roth Mary Margaret O’Hara Killing Joke U2 Talking Heads The Royal Bank of Scotland Patti Smith Orange Juice REM Rolling Stones James Peter Gabriel Simple Minds Sinead O’Connor The Smiths Chris Isaak The Beatles Gary Glitter Suede Bruce Springsteen Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat Iggy Pop Cure Inspiral Carpets David Bowie The New Album We doubt if James themselves are ‘Millionaires’ yet, but their record company certainly think it’ll be a nice little earner – so much so that its release was delayed so as not to clash with labelmates Texas Not that there’ll be a ‘Hush’ as the new album appears this month (September), and with a Number 1 to follow it will be stripped for five singles to ensure it remains in the spotlight for well into the new millennium. Guitarist and songwriter Saul Davies takes up the story “The album started when I started writing in Scotland more for fun than anything else. After three months I ended up with 26, 27 ideas which I worked on with Mark, our keyboard player. Tim started getting involved offering lyrics and more advanced melody ideas, and suddenly we had something really pleasing to our ears. I brought the songs down to London one day to play to Brian (Eno) and he was very complimentary about their potential. So we’d started the album without really thinking about it! “It’s hard to say there’s a particular song that reflects what the album is, though it’s slightly more unified than some of our other records have been because a lot of it was done by Mark and me. We’re all very proud of ‘Someone’s Got It In For Me’ – a very big, slow song, almost a ballad, that’s very powerful lyrically. In a way, it reflects the emotional content of the record…I wouldn’t say aggressive but tough on people around us. “’I Know What I’m Here For’ was chosen as the first single because we felt it didn’t really sound like James – it’s up, quite joyous and, I thought, not very commercial. I’m surprised by the reaction to it from the media: this is the first time in a long time we’ve had MTV support, so we’re quietly pleased. The second single, ‘Fred Astaire’ is probably our best shot at replacing ‘Sit Down’ as our biggest song. “It’s huge, and has an enormous amount of potential as a crossover tune to a public we haven’t really had before – although we might’ve touched to an extent with the ‘Best Of…’. ‘Fred…’ is a perfect late-summer song – if I hadn’t done it, I know I’d buy it if I heard it! You know that feeling you get when you watch Fred and Ginger Rogers, there’s an amazing joyous kind of sensuality going on, completely untainted and totally 1950s. “The oldest song was jammed live in a room in a studio in Woodstock, New York in 1994. It’s called ‘Dumb Jam’. I found it on a tape one day and thought bloody hell most bands would kill for this…and we’d forgotten about it! We knocked it into shape and we were aware at that point the record maybe needed a bit more fun on it. “The album starts with a track called ‘Crash’ and finishes with ‘Vervacvous’. ‘Crash’ is there because it’s one of the more uptempo songs and we wanted to keep the first half of the record in your face. It’s also unusual in that it has a very strange intro, like a call to arms – a mad backing vocal that Michael and Eno did on their own. You hear it and you think yeah, this is the way a record should start! And ‘Vervacious’ ends it because the outro section of that song is Sinead O’Connor singing with a weird pulse of reverb behind it. Eno’s production on the voice at that point made her sound like a very small robot in a space capsule floating through the atmosphere. The obvious way to end. “We’re old bastards now but we reckon we’ve made our best record yet, and we’re playing better live than we ever have done. It’s beginning to kick off again and it’s very exciting. I really feel like it’s the first page of a new chapter.” | Sep 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
A Song N Dance – The Sun | Article, News | James have run into problems with legendary dancer Fred Astaire’s estate over the title of their next single. The group were set to release a tune called Fred Astaire but have been forced to rename it. A band spokesman said “Fred’s name is a trademark so the boys can’t use it purely on its own.” The track has now been retitled Just Like Fred Astaire. | Oct 1999 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Millionaires Car Competition – The Sun | Article, News | Oct 1999 | article news | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
How Was It For You? – Gratis Online | Article, News | Chris Cooke looks back at the epic career of James as they release their twelfth album IT’S HARD to believe that it was in 1990 that a young band by the name of James played an impromptu gig on the roof of Manchester radio station Piccadilly Key 103. “Who’s this James guy?” many a Mancunion asked that day as ‘Come Home’ blared out across the City. Nearly ten years later, however, few can still be unsure of the identity of Tim Booth’s band. Actually, James have been on the go since 1983. In their early days they were championed as ‘the best band in the world’ by Mo rrissey and soon found themselves touring with the Smiths and becoming favourites at the infamous Manchester club Hacienda. They spent the eighties with a label know as Sire Records where they developed that distinctive James sound but received little lab el support, and pretty much no financial reward for their efforts. They left Sire behind in 1989 and by selling themselves as human guinea pigs in medical tests at a local hospital managed to raise the cash to record ‘One Man Clapping’ – a fine live album which, despite featuring an early version of nineties anthem ‘Sit Down’ was described by distributors Rough Trade as ‘minority music with no commercial appeal’. But credit where it’s due – it was with Rough Trade’s support that ‘ Gold Mother’ – the album which made the band – was recorded. Once a deal had been struck with major label Fontana, who released ‘Gold Mother’, the James story with which we’re more familiar began. After an eight year wait the release of ‘Sit Down’ was timed to perfection. With the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays dominating the music scene all eyes were on Madchester for saviours for British rock music, and so the mainstream eye fell on Booth and the boys, and so ‘Sit Down’ became an indie club anthem the country over. Albums ‘Seven’ and ‘Laid’ followed in 1992 and 1993 respectively – the latter selling well Stateside despite the slow uptake of the Manchester scene across the Atlantic. Then it all went wrong. The departure, in 1995, of guitarist Larry Gott and manager Martine, leading to a two year absence, gave the impression James has called it a day. An impression strengthened when Booth released a solo project. But, despite the odds, in 1997 the band returned, with a new guitarist and the boldly melodic ‘Whiplash’ – a surprise return from which both ‘She’s A Star’ and ‘Tomorrow’ achieved single success, the former nearly equalling ‘ Sit Down’ in anthem status. Safely back on stream James released their greatest hits last year, and album which successfully kept the Titanic soundtrack off the top of the album chart in oscar week. And so to the new album release ‘Millionaires’. Co-produced by Brian Eno, who last worked with the band on ‘Laid’, the album offers a sumptuous set of songs, fully accessible yet encouragingly complex. “We were aware that last year’s success had created an expectation of this record,” says guitarist Saul Davies, ” The songs were written just as the Best Of album was kicking off and it generated a lot of energy. I think we struck a really good balance between being commercial and being interesting and different.” “The optimism of last year did give the band a real lift,” Tim adds. “But there were a lot of problems and conflicts at the same time which hadn’t been resolved. This album was made on the back of a mixture of things – the highs and those tensions both feature here. I really believe this is the best album we have ever made”. While Madchester brought James to the limelight they were never truly part of the Manchester thing. In retrospect that individuality gave the band a longevity that could overcome the fickle nature of rock ‘n’ roll. “When we made ‘Laid’ we got laid.” Tim explains. “When we made ‘Whiplash’, I got whiplash. This is the best album we have ever done, so we liked the name ‘Millionaires'” So, assuming you find yourself ridiculous, sit down with Tim Booth and enjoy the next decade of James. James’ new album ‘Millionaires’ is out now on Mercury | Oct 1999 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Galerias Mexico – Millionaires Biography (in Spanish) | Article, Biography | El nuevo disco de James se reencuentra con Brian Eno como co-productor, además la banda está en la cima de su proceso creativo y lo demuestra con un set de canciones llenas de luz y sombras, “MILLIONAIRES” es a la vez un disco accesible y complejo. “Saul y yo estamos en desacuerdo cuando escribimos las canciones. Hay muchos contrastes y paradojas. Tenemos una filosofía diferente de ver la vida y eso crea cierta tensión, pero es precisamente esa pugna entre los dos la que produce cosas excelentes. Esta banda es muy intensa” declara Tim. Generalmente hay un integrante que siempre está deprimido o cansado. La banda tiene impulsos hedonistas muy marcados mientras que Tim se ha vuelto serio y austero. Saul habla al respecto: “Todos estamos tratando de llegar al mismo punto por diferentes caminos. Puedo escribir canciones como “Someone’s Got It In For Me” a las 6 de la mañana luego de tomar varios litros de vodka en un lapso de 3 días. Tim por su parte llega al mismo punto con la meditación y estados de trance; pero ambos estamos experimentando saliendo de la cotidianeidad tan monótona” | Oct 1999 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Galerias Mexico – James Habla Sobre Las Canciones (in Spanish) | Article, News | “SURPRISE” habla sobre un amigo de Tim que parecía estar al borde del suicidio, aunque también es una alegoría de la banda y una respuesta a aquellos que los rechazaron en algún momento. “JUST LIKE FRED ASTAIRE”es una de nuestras mejores baladas. “Estoy completamente enamorado pero también me acompaña ese sentimiento de vergüenza tan característico en los ingleses. De eso se trata esta canción” dice Tim Booth. “WE’RE GOING TO MISS YOU” es un amuleto de la suerte, “Hay gente que me ha deseado el mal y hay quienes me han echado el mal de ojo. Esta canción es un escudo”. (Tim) Muchas de las canciones surgieron de palomazos, una forma muy tradicional para una banda que le guste estar cerca de los instintos primarios. “HELLO” es una canción intuitiva con letras improvisadas que según Tim ni él entiende. “VERVACEOUS” también nació de un palomazo antes que Sinead O’ Connor fuera invitada para agregar su hipnótica voz. Jamie Catto de Faithless ayudó en “SOMEONE’S GOT IT IN FOR ME” (cuya traducción no sería “Alguien lo tiene adentro para mí”) y en “AFRO LOVER”, que es una canción anti-guerra con una intensidad casi religiosa acompañada de arreglos muy contrastantes. La influencia de Brian Eno en el album es inefable ya que se esparce su magia en las 11 canciones del disco. Para algunos tracks él aportó ideas muy valiosas y en otras les sugirió que se dejaran llevar. | Oct 1999 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Galerias Mexico – James Por Ultimo (in Spanish) | Article, Interview | ¿PORQUÉ SE LLAMA “MILLIONAIRES” EL DISCO DE JAMES ? Tim cree que las palabras tienen esa propiedad de causa y efecto. “El album debió llamarse “LOVE, MONEY AND REVENGE” porque esos son los temas que se manejan en el disco”, dice el vocalista de James. Cuando hicimos Laid tocamos fondo; al hacer Whiplash recibí lo mismo (un latigazo). Este es el mejor album que jamás hayamos hecho, así que lo bautizamos como MILLIONAIRES. Tim Booth y compañía harán dos presentaciones en el Olympia Theatre en Dublin, Irlanda previas al arranque de su gira en Inglaterra que se llevará a cabo hasta el mes de diciembre. La primera presentación en Dublin es el lunes 29 de noviembre y la siguiente es el martes 30 de noviembre. También hay noticias adelantadas sobre el tercer sencillo de “MILLIONAIRES”, nuevo album de JAMES (que ya está a la venta). El single es “WE’RE GOING TO MISS YOU”, que será lanzado el lunes 6 de diciembre en INGLATERRA. La historia musical está llena de bandas que han alcanzado un éxito inmediato para después hundirse en la mediocridad repitiéndose así mismos obteniendo resultados vergonzosos. El camino que JAMES ha forjado ha tomado una dirección completamente diferente. Creatividad e inventiva sin fin, siempre tomando riesgos y nunca satisfechos con la opción que parezca más fácil, es por eso que James ha escarbado hasta lo más profundo de su creatividad para lanzar “MILLIONAIRES”, el album más arriesgado de toda su carrera. Pero fue al lanzar su album the éxitos “JAMES, THE BEST OF&ldots;” cuando se dieron cuenta que tenían que hacer otro disco más especial que los anteriores. A pesar que su compilación contenía 14 hits que entraron al TOP 40, fueron 2 canciones nuevas (Runaground, Destiny Calling) las que llamaron la atención de la gente. Obviamente esos 2 sencillos se convirtieron en éxitos deslumbrando lo que nos esperaría para el próximo album. “Estábamos conscientes que el éxito que alcanzamos el año pasado creó bastante expectativa sobre este disco” dice el guitarrista Saul Davies. “Las canciones fueron escritas justo cuando el album estaba arrancando y generó mucha energía. Creo que hicimos un buen balance entre lo comercial y lo subterráneo”. “Pero hicimos el nuevo album con una mezcla de varias cosas” añade Tim Booth. “El optimismo del año pasado abrió nuevos bríos. Pero también hay muchos problemas y conflictos al mismo tiempo y todavía no han sido resueltos. Esas tensiones están plasmadas en las canciones. Creo que este es el mejor disco que hemos hecho”. JAMES grabó por primera vez para la Factory Records en Manchester en el lejano 1983. Condecorados como “la mejor banda del mundo” según Morrisey, se fueron de gira con THE SMITHS, y se volvieron una banda de culto hasta ser firmados por Sire Records. Su album debut fue STUTTER, en 1986 y STRIP MINE dos años después, establecieron a Tim Booth como un compositor provocativo y cantante emotivo, pero les parecía que su disquera no los apoyaba lo suficiente. Para 1989 se escaparon de Sire Records. “Después de 7 años de estar viviendo sin dinero y sin el apoyo de la radio” recuerda Tim “Muchas bandas se hubieran dado por vencidas. En vez de tomar esa actitud, James se ofreció como conejillos de indias para pruebas de medicamentos en un hospital local y ese dinero que ganamos fue usado para la grabación de ONE MAN CLAPPING”, un album hecho en su propio sello. Aunque éste incluía una de las primeras versiones de Sit Down, los distribuidores de Rough Trade les dijo que era “música minoritaria sin pegue comercial” y se deshicieron de ellos. Más tarde volvieron a re-agruparse añadiendo nuevos elementos: Saul Davies, Mark Hunter (teclados) y David Baynton-Power (batería). Grabaron un disco con canciones para Rough Trade quienes vendieron el album a Fontana. Fue lanzado como GOLD MOTHER, siendo para ellos el parteaguas que habían estado esperando ya que vendieron la cantidad de 350,000 copias en Inglaterra mientras que SIT DOWN se volvió todo un himno a principios de los noventa. La escena de Manchester estaba en todo su apogeo y, junto con los Stone Roses y los Happy Mondays, JAMES había llegado a la cima, ganándose el mote de salvadores del rock británico. Posteriormente llegó SEVEN en 1992 y fue privado del número uno gracias a Simply Red. Al año siguiente se aliaron a Brian Eno para que les produjera LAID y su album más experimental WAH-WAH. A partir de ese momento JAMES comenzó a pasar mucho tiempo en los Estados Unidos (de hecho tocaron en la segunda edición de Woodstock), y LAID despegó allí también vendiendo 600,000 copias justo cuando muchas bandas inglesas no conseguían entrar al mercado norteamericano por la euforia del grunge. Entonces JAMES comenzó a desmoronarse. Un día de 1995 el guitarrista Larry Gott y el bajista Jim Glinnie, quienes habían estado desde el principio decidieron renunciar, al igual que su manager Martine dejó la banda; en ese momento se dieron cuenta que debían muchísimo dinero en cuestión de impuestos. Booth lanzó un album como solista con Angelo Badalamenti y ya nadie esperaba ver a JAMES una vez más. Pero la adversidad trajo lo mejor de la banda. Añadiendo al guitarrista Adrian Oxaal re-surgieron en 1997 con un latigazo melódico llamado WHIPLASH, que se convirtió en disco de oro además de tener uno de los sencillos más exitosos “SHE’S A STAR”. El año pasado lanzaron JAMES, THE BEST OF; que sirvió para reafirmar su continuidad con album doble de platino y giras completamente llenas. | Oct 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
It’s So Tough At The Top – Daily Mirror A-List | Article, Interview | He’s had knives pulled on him, he’s collapsed on stage, he’s even clinically died, but James singer Tim Booth is soldiering on. By Gavin Martin. In their seventeen years together, James have become the most resilient British band of their generation. Emerging as fey indie outsiders in 1983, they surfed the Madchester wave alongside Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, helped inspire Noel Gallagher to form Oasis and enjoyed a stint as US stadium stars in the early 90s. Last year’s double platinum Greatest Hits set highlighted an unerring knack for crafting brooding and exuberant pop anthems and the new album Millionaires stands as their most accomplished and musically rewarding to date. But James history is filled with turmoil and near disaster as frontman Tim Booth has endured violent standoffs, numerous nervous breakdowns and a traumatic separation. On their last US tour he performed in a neck brace after nearly disabling himself in rehearsals. At 22, during treatment for lifelong liver conditions, he was clinically dead for a few moments. Tucking into a plate of calves liver in his favourite Brighton restaurant the one-time celibate, Yoga-practising vegan explains he has had to learn to adapt to survive. “My health is not always as robust as I would like it to be. I’m in a band with these guys who party continually. They’re as strong as oaks and I’m the fragile waif. I feel like the poncey middle class kid. “I was off meat for 12 years but on long tours I’d find myself collapsing and losing three pounds a night, just getting weaker and weaker. When you dance as I do, you’ve got to have protein in big quantities. “I started eating salmon. That was my compromise. I ate it every day for a year and a half. I couldn’t stop my body craving it. So I extended it out. Now I eat anything.” He needs his strength. And not just for dancing, either. “We’ve punched each other out a few times. We kicked our first drummer out because he got violent and abusive with me onstage. The singer they had before me ended up in Strangeways jail on a GBH charge. “But I’ve been lucky. When situations turn violent, I tend not to get hurt or show fear. Which is just as well as over the years I’ve had knives drawn on me, people threatening to cut parts of my body.” Booth’s lifestyle remains at odds with the rock n roll excesses of his colleagues. In Brighton, he lives close to Martine, mother of his ten year old son. When they split, Martine was still managing the group. Booth shaved his head and often cried onstage. “We made it work. We had to. The sort of arrangement we’ve come to is one that more and more people have had to make for the sake of their children.” In Brighton, Booth runs a shamanistic dance class (“teaching people to get into trance states with dancing rather than drugs”) with his American fiancee. The latter is the inspiration behind the heady new single Just Like Fred Astaire. Tim’s new found contentment has helped heal internal divisions within the band. He admits that in the past he’s judged his bandmates too harshly. “People need to express their wildside and just because they spend five years doing it, doesn’t mean that they can’t change.” Though he talks proudly about the band’s cult fans – including monks, American teenage escapees from a religious cult and “people from mental hospitals” – Booth has been accused of holding back from large-scale success. Perhaps that’s changing too. “I always thought success was the death of any band. I don’t want to be someone who can’t go out on the street, but put me onstage and I am very competitive. I love to see a great band, like the Chili Peppers and Radiohead, but there’s so many who are masquerading as great bands. “I stayed at Flea’s place in LA recently and, after seeing how much money he had, I came back feeling quite envious but in a positive way,” he says. “I think we’re overdue Top 10 success in America. My feeling is that now we should just get on with it.” | Oct 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
And The Band Goes Marching On – Daily Telegraph | Article, Interview |
James were on the verge of splitting up last year. But they’re back with their best record yet. Simon Briggs reports. James are the Manchester band that time forgot. Discovered by Factory Records in 1983, they toured with The Smiths, admired the Stone Roses, hung out with the Happy Mondays in the halcyon days of the Hacienda club. Fast forward to 1999 and while ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr flits between guest appearances and former Mondays singer Shaun Ryder dreams up another illfated reunion, the inconspicious James are about to release the best album of their career. “That’s pretty weird,” muses Tim Booth. “After 18 years, to make a record that might be our best yet. That’s something that no band has really done.” Millionaires more than justifies his confidence. Produced by the Midas-fingered Brian Eno, it kicks off with the pogoing whoops of Crash and closes with Sinead O’Connor’s spaced out vocal on Vervaceous, never missing an artfully distorted beat in 11 tracks. Millionaires is a bold comeback for James, who were on the verge of splitting up last year. They released a Best Of compilation – often a sign of declining ambitions – and the temptation to take the money and run might have been all the greater when it shipped a million copies, knocking the Titanic soundtrack off the top of the album chart. Instead, this seven-man collective settled their differences – or most of them, anyway. “When you have a lot of friction in your life,” says Booth, “it makes for interesting music.” In many ways James career mirrors that of American supergroup REM. Both bands were formed in the early eighties and spent a decade playing to student audiences before finally breaking into the mainstream in the spring of 1991. REM’s Losing My Religion reached number 19 in the UK charts on March 16. A month later, James replied with their best-known song, the rabble-rousing Sit Down, which was only kept off the No 1 spot by Chesney Hawkes. “Again, we were a hair away from splitting up before we released that record.” says Jim Glennie, the saturnine bassist who originally formed the band at school. “We were just stuck there on our own, hugely in debt, signed to a record company that had no interest in what we were doing. It was so, so depressing.” “But the thing was, we knew we had this rather amazing song up our sleeves,” rejoins Booth. “When we jammed Sit Down, we couldn’t play it after 20 minutes because we were laughing so much. We knew we’d written something wonderful. And then when we were in one of our worst periods last year, we wrote Just Like Fred Astaire. And again, you just know you’ve got something great here.” Fred Astaire is the showstopping tune on the album. A dewy-eyed ballad that captures the dizziness of a new romance. It skips along as deftly as its eponymous hero. But it’s more than matched by the disturbed techno-gospel of We’re Going To Miss You When You’re Gone, a song that Booth says he wrote “as a charm of protection, because there have been a few people wishing us harm over the years.” “Songs are spells,” he goes on matter-of-factly. “They’re very simple mantras that people repeat and sing all day long. I was once cursed and this guy said the only thing you can do is make a mirror and send it back to the person it came from. So that’s why I gave the song that lyric ‘Here’s a mirror with your name on.’ If James are the British REM, then Booth is a dead ringer for Michael Stipe. He has the same enigmatic air, maintains the same distance from the rest of the band, and is, if anything, even more of an eccentric. He grew up in Yorkshire, then attended Manchester University before joining James as a dancer in 1983. “Singing very much came second. I didn’t like my voice for seven or eight years. My natural way of expressing myself was through dance.” We’re standing around in the make-up room at Channel 4’s TFI Friday, where James are due to play Fred Astaire. Suddenly Booth starts to whirl his limbs like a sapling in a gale, then pitches his torso forward until his nose is virtually touching his knees. “I still do loads of confrontational dance workshops,” he explains once he has straightened himself out. “I don’t like to use the term ‘New Age’ which is a dirty word, but you’re really looking for a psychological edge in yourself, looking to cut through your own bull****. I’m doing a whole month of it next summer. It leaves you a complete wreck in one sense, but a fantastic wreck. You’re completely blasted open and vulnerable and hallucinating and clairvoyant and telepathic, and just mad.” Mad or not, Booth’s interest in all things spiritual has a direct bearing on the way James work. His lean, ageless face takes on a wistful look as he sighs, “The fact is that all the best music has been written by people who have been fairly wrecked. I was inspired by Patti Smith and Iggy Pop, but I felt let down when I realised they needed artifical substances to perform like that. I wanted to go to those places consciously, and the only way was through spiritual techniques – drumming, dancing, sleep depravation. It was 16 hours of meditation every weekend for three-and-a-half years.” It can be no coincidence that James best albums Millionaires and 1993’s Laid, are the two produced by Eno, whom Booth describes as “a mystic, though he doesn’t like me saying that.” “When we were jamming,” he continues, “he would write things on little sign boards and come up and show them to each musician individually and they’d be different things, Some of them would be incredibly abstract commands – ‘Play more wobbly’ Or ‘Insist’. So you have to interpret that in the middle of a jam. One guy got ‘Change key continuously.'” Sympathetic handling is required, as James have never been enamoured of the recording process. When they first formed, their intention was to be a touring band who never put an album out.” “We knew we were really special live,” says Booth, “and we thought playing live was the authentic test of a band. Still do, actually. But round about Laid, we decided we wanted to make great records as well.” And so it came to pass. Perhaps he does have supernatural powers after all. | Oct 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sense And Sensuality : Tim Booth – Daily Telegraph Magazine | Article, Interview |
Tim Booth Tim, 38, studied drama at Manchester University with Ben Elton before quitting to form pop group James. The band has been together for 15 years and became famous for their 1991 hit single Sit Down. Tim has a 10 year old son by a former relationship and lives with his partner of four years, Kate, in Brighton. The couple plan to marry in California next year. Paula Kerr reports Q : When was the first time your heart was broken? A: When I was 11, I had a crush on an Italian girl on holiday. When she flew back to Milan, I was devastated. I knew her flight left at 7am and I lay in bed listening to the take off and wept and wept. I rang her a few months later and I don’t think she even remembered who I was. Q: Have you ever turned down a marriage proposal or made one and been turned down? A: I’ve never been proposed to. I recently asked my girlfriend, Kate, to marry me and we will wed next year in California, where we met. Q: If you could go back in time and change one thing about your love life, what would it be? A: There isn’t anything I’d change – all the mistakes have been necessary. Q: Have you ever had sex outside? A: Yeah, of course. But the best place to make love is in your heart. Q: Have you ever had a one-night stand? A: I’ve had some fantastic ones and some awful ones too. I’m quite conscientious and telephoned a few of the women afterwards to check if they were OK. I’m glad I don’t do that anymore. Q: What’s the biggest age difference there’s ever been between you and a partner? A: When I was 32, I had a romance with a 17 year old. She completely seduced me. I was quite freaked out by the age gap, but it ended because I knew we couldn’t pursue a full relationship. I don’t think age gaps are always a problem though. Q: Do you believe in platonic friendships? A: Yes, very much so. I have a lot of friends who are women. Some of my ex-partners are my closest friends. Q: Has anyone ever had a physical fight over you or have you ever had a fight over someone? A: Noone has had a fight over me. But I once threatened someone who was trying to involve a friend with drugs. Q: Could you forgive an infidelity? A: Yes, I have done. I think I completely forgave the person, though my feelings ran pretty deep. Q: Have you ever had a holiday romance? A: Oh, yes, loads. When I was 18, I went to a nudist beach in Corfu. I was at the bottom of a steep cliff, which only young fit people could get to. About 100 of us were living there and I had two wonderful romances in three weeks. The police eventually threw us all off the island. They charged us with something ridiculous like ‘enjoying oneselves too much in a Catholic country.’ Q: What is your biggest regret over a love affair? A: I regret people getting hurt. The nature of things is that sometimes you love someone less than they love you and at some point you have to walk away. Q: Have you ever been in unrequited love or been the object of it? A: I’ve been in unrequited love. I hovered around her for about 18 months. Eventually she had to leave town for a new job, so I told her how I felt. But she left anyway. Q: What is the worst way you’ve ever dumped anyone? A: On occassions, I’ve stopped contacting the person. It’s the chickens way out. Q: Have you ever fallen in love with a friend’s girlfriend? A: It happened once, but my friend had decided he was gay. She and I got together as soon as they split up. Q: What’s the one piece of advice you would give on relationships? A: Always be true to yourself Q: What are the top three qualities in a partner? A: Truthfulness, playfulness and they must be loving. Q: What was your most romantic moment? A: I once surprised Kate by flying to New York, where she was living. I broke into her apartment, bedecked it with flowers and love messages and hid until she came home. Q: Have you ever fallen in love at first sight? A: The two deepest relationships I’ve been in were love at first sight. I saw Kate dancing in California and I remember thinking “Oh no, you’re in trouble now.” Q: Do you take baths alone or with your lover? A: Baths with your partner using aromatherapy oils are wonderful. But my next bath will have taps in the middle. Q: Does your partner own any clothes that make her look really unattractive? Have you told her? A: She wears a woolly hat, left to her by a friend. It looks really silly, and, yes, I’ve told her. Q: What is the most useful thing you could tell a child about love? A: Take your time James new album Millionaires is out now. | Oct 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Launch Millionaires – Radio 1 | Article, Interview | James played a low-key gig on Tuesday night in London’s Embassy Rooms to launch their new album, ‘Millionaires’. In a venue crammed with around 500 fans, the band, who have been more used to playing to a hundred times that number, stormed through a couple of hours’ worth of old hits and new material. Tuesday night’s intimate show doesn’t represent the way things will be going for the band. If anything, they want to play bigger shows so they don’t have to be on the road for most of the year: “We haven’t done the long tours, really, since late, ‘coz we got fed up with them and they wear you down”, Tim Booth told Radio 1. “It’s hard to keep inspired when you’re doing like a three month tour in the back of a bus, travelling around America to places like Lubbock. So, really now we do more hit and runs and the most we’ll ever tour for, probably, is about three weeks. People get too drunk otherwise!”, he said. | Oct 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Later With Jools Biography | Article, Biography | James began recording for Manchester based, Factory records back in 1983. They have had a sixteen year career mixed with equal quantities of hardship and success and throughout all this have managed to hang in there at the top. Their debut album Stutter in 1986 followed by Strip Mine two years later established the James sound and marked Tim Booth out as a provocative lyricist and emotive singer. Despite this they split from their record company in 1989 which left them virtually penniless. They were living on dole-like wages and it seemed James had disappeared for good. To make money band members took part in medical tests at local hospitals and managed not only to keep the band together but to also release a new live album, One Man Clapping. Even though this album included an early version of Sit Down their distributors let them go for having no commercial appeal. The band regrouped with new members and released Gold Mother which sold 350,000 copies in Britain alone while a reworked version of Sit Down became one of the most memorable anthems of the 90’s. The bands’ popularity continued to grow in the UK and they had managed to conquer the US market even playing Woodstock 2. But in 1995 when the band were at the height of their success the whole thing fell apart. Both the guitarist and bassist decided to quit and as if that wasn’t enough they then learned that they owed a huge sum in back tax. Yet the band re-emerged in 1997 with the addition of a new guitarist and with rejuvenated confidence. James now seem to be facing a stretch of good luck and are going full force into the new millennium. | Oct 1999 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Later With Jools Interview | Article, Interview | Jools: Firstly Tim (Booth) Jim (Glennie) welcome to the show. The first song “Fred Astaire” I like that very much, now tell us how did that song come about? Tim Booth: It was a jam, a James jam in Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios and I wanted to write a love song for the woman I am in love with. She kept pestering me you see. Jim Glennie: Does she leave you alone now? Tim Booth: Yeah, she leaves me alone now, and that was it really. Jools: She immediately fell in love with you presumably. Tim Booth: Oh, she’d done that before actually, this was the after, this was the why don’t you write a song about me. Sorry Kate. Jools: She’ll be pleased to hear that , that’s what I like, genuine emotion on the programme. The other thing I want to know is where the name originally came from – No, I do want to know this. Jim Glennie : It’s a long winded story but it’s basically because I am the most handsome and the most talented, that’s what I’ve been saying for the past fifteen years. (Applause) Jools: They agree, your family is with you and they agree. Jools: Now, the group goes back and it’s got a marvellous history and The Best of ; was out recently and it did very, very well, since 1982 and we’ve got early footage. No there’s nothing to be nervous about at all. Jim Glennie: Embarrassed maybe; Jools: Not there’s nothing to be embarrassed about at all. Tim Booth: He’s Jeremy Beadle isn’t he? Jim Glennie: He is, yeah. Jools: No, how can you say that. Please take that back. Thanks. Here we are. (Clip: James from ICA 1985;. Tim Booth in a particularly scary jumper) Jools: They love that. Jim Glennie: We were never that young, we were never that young. Jools: The band really loved that, I’ve never heard them cheering anybody so loud in this studio. You had that jumper on, weren’t you hot. (Jim Glennie: You were suffering for your art, were’t you?) Tim Booth: Yeah, we were starting a new fashion, it didn’t catch on though. Jools: Well you did start a lot of fashions, I mean, after all there was.. I mean you were one of the original Manchester bands, with that sound. Do you see any of those people of that time the Manchester lot. Tim Booth: The baggy scene? Jools: Well yeah, the jumper scene. Tim Booth: Well, yeah most of them toured with us. We took the Happy Mondays on tour with us and the Inspiral Carpets and the Roses played with us so we knew them quite well. We had been going about eight years before they came on the scene, they were just whipper snappers. Jools: Well now what is the next song you are going to play for us? Tim Booth: A song called “Someone’s Got it in For Me” – it’s a victim song. Jools: Right well we are looking forward to that, there’s no paranoia in there is there. Tim Booth: Totally. Jools: Excellent. Well Tim Booth, Jim Glennie thank you very much, we look forward to seeing that in a while. | Oct 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
MTV Live Aus Berlin Interview | Article, Interview | Reporter : Hello guys. This is Saul. Is that right? Like the Mexican beer. Sol? Saul : Almost. A little bit like Paul. Road to Damascus. That kind of stuff Reporter : Tim and Michael Tim : What am I like? If he’s like a Mexican beer, I’m like a good red wine Reporter : Do you know Ren and Stroppy? This comic strip Tim : No, Stroppy? Reporter : Stroppy is the little dog. And Tim, you’re the guy, the detective, the cool guy, the very tall guy Saul : It’s an insult Reporter : So, cool special effect in the video. How much are you involved in the directing process? Just a little? Tim : Yeah. About that much Reporter : So not very much Tim : No Reporter : It looks like a Missy Elliott video or something like this. Hank Williams Tim : Hank Williams? Reporter : It’s the best friend of Stroppy Tim : OK, comes from a weird planet, doesn’t he? Reporter : You are together for such a long time now, I think for over 10 to 12 years, is that right? Tim : Yeah Reporter : Can you describe your relationship? Is it a family atmosphere? Tim : I hate him Reporter : Why, what has he done? Tim : I don’t know. He reminds me of a Mexican beer. Reporter : Yeah Tim : And I hate Mexican beer Saul : Yeah, I’m a hateful little thing, I suppose. No, we’ve had like all bands who are constantly in each other’s lives, it’s very difficult to find space and sometimes we’re really nasty to each other and we hate each other and then of course we have other periods when everything is really positive. Tim : We love each other and have sex with each other. Saul : You said you wouldn’t say that. Reporter : Do you need a new member? Tim : Yeah, sure. You’ll do Saul : He’s alright, isn’t he? He’s cute. Reporter : By the way, this is your new album, it’s called Millionaires. And who’s that guy on the cover? Tim : It’s Saul. And on the backside. That’s definitely Saul. Reporter : Is it you called the album Millionaires because that’s what you want to be? Millionaires Tim : Yes, we are a product of this capitalist society and the only thoughts in our heads is to become millionaires. We made a record called Laid and our sex lives went through the roof, the next record we called Whiplash, do you know Whiplash? Reporter : Is it when you have an accident with your car? Tim : I broke my neck Reporter : You broke your neck? Tim : Just after the record came out. So this time we went OK we’ll be very careful what we call the LP. | Oct 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Just Like Fred Astaire – T4 – 9th October 1999 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsJust Like Fred Astaire performed live on T4. | Oct 1999 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Just Like Fred Astaire – Channel 4 TFI Friday – 15th October 1999 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsJust Like Fred Astaire performed live on TFI Friday on Channel 4 | Oct 1999 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Just Like Fred Astaire – BBC1 Top Of The Pops – 22nd October 1999 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsJames performing Just Like Fred Astaire live on Top Of The Pops | Oct 1999 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Later With Jools – 23rd October 1999 | Session, Video Archive |
SetlistJust Like Fred Astaire / Someone's Got it In For Me / I Know What I'm Here ForDetails
SongsShare: | Oct 1999 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Just Like Fred Astaire – CDUK – 23rd October 1999 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsJust Like Fred Astaire performed live on CDUK. | Oct 1999 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
We’re Going To Miss You Lyrics Analysis – Melody Maker | Article, News |
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Millionaires Chart Analysis – Q | Article, News |
TV promotion on TFI, Top Of The Pops, Later and Weekend Watchdog(!) for the rousing, Radio 1 A-listed single, Just Like Fred Astaire, helped to get Millionaires to Number 2, then it dropped like a stone. Mercury also spent big on adverts in stations and at bus stops, but a large number of those people who bought the Best Of have avoided Millionaires. In December, James release a new single We’re Going To Miss You and set off on a UK arena tour. | Nov 1999 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Interview at Q Awards – Q | Article, Interview |
Tim Booth – The world’s second louchest man Did you enjoy the awards? Very much. They were very succinct, very entertaining. I thought Johnny Vaughan was fantastic. You’re leaving early though, aren’t you? Yes, I’m afraid I have a dental appointment. You’re passing up a glittering party for the dentist? Well, he’s a very unusual rogue dentist. I had some back problems a few years ago, and this dentist is somehow curing both my bite and my back. I’ve waited ages to see him, so there was no way I could miss it. I’m sure you don’t want to hear about my teeth. Did you catch up with any old friends before you left? Yes. it was especially nice to see Geldof again. Do you enjoy awards ceremonies? When I win one, yes. I recently won Best Newcomer To The Stage (for the play Saved which ran in Bolton). I particularly enjoyed that one. The acting offers are flooding in now, incidentally. At the party afterwards, your fellow band members certainly knew how to enjoy themselves. I’m sure they did. When we played Lollapalooza, we were the band that set the standard for debauchery. Some of us had to consider rehab afterwards. You included? No. I almost died from a liver disease when I was 22, so I have to be careful. I much prefer natural highs, like dancing. Your particular style of dancing is very individual, isn’t it? It is, and I trust you mean that as a compliment. Naturally. In that case, thank you. | Nov 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Interview With Tim – FHM | Article, Interview |
In 1997 you were one of the acts on Lollapalooza – a famous alternative rock festival in America – but James’ music has never been full of screaming guitars solos. Did you get abuse from the metal fans? It was a struggle. We’d go on stage and the Korn and Tool fans would shout “Faggots” at us. So for the second night I found these spangly shirts, skirts and dresses for about $10 and thought, “Let’s go for it”. If anyone shouted faggot I would say, “I appreciate the fact you’re attracted to me enough to enquire about my sexuality”. After two weeks I’d walk along the stage and just sing to the barrackers. These fucked up mall kids just couldn’t handle it. When James are on tour is your bus a den of drink and drugs? Or do you just sit around playing scrabble? I hate it on the bus. There’s horrific bunkbeds and it’s like the worst camping holiday with your parents. But your parents aren’t there so nothing gets cleaned up. On the Lollapalooza we had two buses, my neck was smashed up so I had to lie down the whole time. My bus was the quiet bus, the other was like, “Wow”, none of the other bands on the tour could keep up with us. How did you injure your neck? I was dancing on a sloped stage in Portsmouth and I fell. I felt something go bang in my neck, I carried on but the next day I couldn’t move my neck. I discovered I’d ruptured two discs in my back – popped them. Your dancing has been described as, “A man with one foot in a bucket of water sticking a knife into a toaster” – where did your distinctive style come from? From pent up rage and frustration and finding a place I could put it. That’s why James asked me to join – they saw this nutter throwing himself around in a bar. Then I met a woman who taught me how to dance myself into a trance – to go into an ecstatic altered state. I can’t do it when I’m on stage but when I dance at home I can get to the stage of frothing at the mouth and seeing green men. After an hour and a half it feels as if you’ve just taken the best ecstasy you’ve ever had. James released their first record Jimone in 1983, a time when Wham! were appearing on stage in white pedal pushers. Did you feel the need for a particular style? No, it was the complete opposite. We were famous for not giving interviews and when we had our photos taken we would cover our faces. We even turned down the cover of NME when we were totally unknown. We had no idea about image – some of our early photos were horrendous knitwear demonstrations. We were huge fans of the ethnic folky jumper and woolly hats. You studied drama at Manchester University, did you master the art of “being a tree”? I lied to get into university and made a long list of plays I’d been in. I was terrible at remembering my lines. I would get parts, in Shakespeare plays, and just improvise. I once had the lead in a Machiavellian play and I learnt the first three quarters of the play but not the last quarter – each night the last part would be a mystery. I knew generally what happened. The other actors hated me. Have you trod the boards since? Yes, I appeared in a play called Saved in Bolton and was on stage for two and a half hours. I wanted to get back into acting to overcome my terror. I actually had hypnotism to help learn my lines. I’d love to do more, I’ve had offers, a lot of soaps but I’m not interested in that. I was even offered the lead role of Tommy on Broadway. Are you a health nut? I am now because I have an inherited liver disease. I was yellow all through school, I was called Chinky. When I was 22 I stopped breathing in hospital and the doctors said there was nothing they could do. That was when I turned to alternative medicine – a mixture of herbs, acupuncture and colonic irrigation. Presumably having a tube shoved up your bottom is deeply uncomfortable? It doesn’t hurt, it’s very gentle, the liquid is a mixture of water, aloe vera and herbs. Afterwards you feel as if a great burden has been lifted. It’s quite a high. I’m sure it’ll be the next unusual sexual practice performed in London but with gerbils wearing aqua lungs and wearing wet suits. Like Sting you’re an advocate of Tantric Sex – where the male is supposed to enjoy an internal orgasm rather than spilling his milk – where’s the fun in that? Basically most forms of Tantra are about retaining sperm which is seen as energy. So you have to lock, retain and have an orgasm. It’s like patting your stomach and rubbing your head at the same time. There’s a basic genetic drive to ejaculate that you have to thwart. You’re 39 now, but in your twenties you joined a religious cult – was there a lot of chanting and coloured robes? No, but you did have to meditate for 2 hours a day and 16 hours every weekend. I once did five 18 hour days of meditating. It was a fucking intense cult – it was the sore arse cult. It also advocated celibacy so I didn’t have sex for three and a half years. Did that mean no “manual self-gratification”? You sometimes had a nocturnal emission by mistake. I didn’t miss it at all for a year and a half but then I missed it big time. I obviously was meditating right. What’s been your biggest holiday disaster? About ten years ago I was stuck in Morocco for two weeks with terrible shits and my wallet stolen. Everyone was trying to rip me off. In a cafe I was approached by this snake charmer – when I refused to pay him he tried to threaten me with a poisonous snake but it slipped out of his hand and dropped around my neck. Everyone sitting near me ran – even the snake charmer. I just didn’t move. Thankfully the charmer stepped back into the cafe and removed the snake. It was only later it hit me what happened – I became a gibbering wreck. | Nov 1999 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
We’re Going To Miss You – Press Release | Article, Press Release | Just when you thought it was safe to close the book on James, music’s favourite survivors go and prove everyone wrong (again) and deliver one of the albums of the year. Millionaires was released on the 11th October and entered the charts at Number 2, quickly becoming a gold status record. James are also set to finish the year on a high… ‘We’re Going To Miss You’ is the third single to be taken from Millionaires, and it is released by Mercury Records on the 6th December 1999. The track is one of the standout moments on the album and the band went back into the studio to remix the track themselves into another anthemic James single. It retains the “helium heavenly chorus” (The Guardian) that first attracted attention in it’s album format and the track was also praised in Q (who made Millionaires Album Of The Month) as an “an intoxicatingly dark pleasure”. ‘We’re Going To Miss You’ has already received great support from Radio 1, with Simon Mayo making it his ‘Big Single’ for two weeks running and James are also performing an acoustic session for the Jo Whiley show on Wednesday 1st December. ‘We’re Going To Miss You’ is backed by the Brian Eno mix of the track, two brand new Tim Booth and Michael Kulas penned songs, ‘Pocketful Of Lemons’ and ‘Wisdom Of The Throat’ and a live version of ‘Top Of The World’ taken from their recent performance at the Embassy Rooms. December also sees James embarking on their first major tour since 1998’s sell-out arena dates. The James tour bus rolls into Brighton on the 4th December and take in all the major U.K. venues en route to Wembley Arena, where the tour concludes on the 12th December. The band are at their best when playing live as anyone who caught one of their show stealing performances at this year’s festivals, or saw either of James’ one-off specials at Blackpool Tower Ballroom and London’s Embassy Rooms, can testify. CD 1 JIMCD24 We’re Going To Miss You Wisdom Of The Throat Top Of The World (Live at the Embassy Rooms CD 2 JIMDD24 We’re Going To Miss You Pocketful of Lemons We’re Going To Miss You (Eno’s Version) MC JIMMC24 We’re Going to Miss You Wisdom Of The Throat | Nov 1999 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
We’re Going To Miss You – Video Article | Article, Press Release | Taken from Rushes Hypnotists site New James Promo Title: “We’re Going To Miss You” Band: James Commissioner: Tess Wight at Mercury Records Production Co: HLA Director: John Hardwick Producer: Derrin Schlesinger Facility Producer: Graham Bird Telecine: Gary Szabo, Simone Grattarola Fire artist: Derek Moore Edit: Andrew Wharton Air Date: week commencing 5th Dec 1999 Using the services of a hypnotist found in the local Yellow Pages, lead singer Tim Booth is first put under hypnosis and the band then performs “We’re Going to Miss You”, singing, playing instruments, and performing in a state of hypnotic reverie in what appears to be a local community centre. Director John Hardwick clarifies: “We wanted to reveal a more intimate side to a well known band and felt hypnotic trance was a way to create a vulnerable and poetic performance. We shot it with a documentary approach in a deliberately anonymous location to induce the least promo-like atmosphere possible. Two band members refused to be hypnotised so they are seen observing the process.” Posted at Rushes by colourists Gary Szabo and Simone Grattarola in Ursa Diamond, edited by Andrew Wharton, and composited by Derek Moore in Fire. | Nov 1999 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
We’re Going To Miss You – Channel 4 TFI Friday – November 1999 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsWe’re Going To Miss You performed live on TFI Friday on Channel 4 | Nov 1999 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Itinerary: 1999 November/December Tour | Tour Itinerary | This is the band itinerary from the James 1999 November/December UK and Ireland Millionaires Tour. | Nov 1999 | tour-itinerary article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: Change Of Scenery – Issue 11 | Fanzine | Change Of Scenery was a James fanzine produced by John Pude. Download this fanzine as a PDF. © copyright Change Of Scenery. | Dec 1999 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Stereophonics, Catatonia and James drummers dance with the devil – Radio 1 | Article, News | The drummers from Stereophonics, Catatonia and James are getting together to record a ‘large’ version of legendary drummer, Cozy Powell’s ‘Dance With The Devil’. Dave from James says it came about after a drunken night with Aled at the Q awards last year and later, chatting to Stuart Cable from the Stereophonics, they realised they were all influenced by Cozy, who died in a car crash last year: “Years and years ago, when I saw him on Top of the Pops as a wee, small child, you know, it was one of the things that got me into drumming, ‘coz he was at the front, not at the back like they usually are, stuck at the back”, Dave told Radio 1. So will it be a change of sound for the new track?: “Just modernise…anything can happen. But we don’t want it to sound like somebody building a shed! Three drummers, you know, can make a bit of racket! Gotta keep a cap on it! We’re all from Wales, super drummers, superdrumtastic!” It’s hoped that the track will be released early next year once the three of them have managed to get in the studio. And James singer, Tim Booth, missed meeting Bono and the Edge at their gig in Dublin the other night – Bono sent a note asking to meet the band but Tim didn’t read it until the end of the gig, by which time the U2 lads had left. | Dec 1999 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Go Under For New Vid – Radio 1 | Article, News | We’ve had Blur sleeping through their latest video and now James have taken it one step further – they’re hypnotised in their new vid for ‘We’re Going To Miss You’. Tim Booth’s been under before and says he loves the feeling of meditating. He adds that after the vid was shot he had the best night’s sleep he’s had in ages. Tim says while they were all under they knew what they were doing, they could hear and recognised the song as their single, and just enjoyed the sensation. Two of the band, though, refused to do hypnotised. Tim told Radio 1 it’s nothing like stage hypnotism where volunteers seem to want to go a bit mad: “When you have normal hypnosis or therapeutic hypnosis, real hypnosis, it’s more like being stoned”, he said. “And it’s quite internal. It isn’t that dramatic. So we have to kind of work at it to make it dramatic, we actually have to do things under instruction. I’ve been hypnotised many, many times.” “I’ve actually kind of semi-trained in it myself. That’s why we’re so popular ‘coz our audiences are just mass hypnotised by me, it’s easy. Joke, by the way!” | Dec 1999 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Programme: Millionaires Tour (1999) | Tour Programme | The 16-page programme from the 1999 Millionaires tour featured band bios, interviews and pictures. Click on an image to browse the tour programme. | Dec 1999 | tour-programme booklet article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
11 O’Clock Show – 21st December 1999 | Session, Video Archive |
SetlistJust Like Fred Astaire / CrashDetails
SongsShare: | Dec 1999 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jamestheband.com – Newsreel – 2000 | Article, News | This page lists all news item that were originally published on the James official site Jamestheband.com in 2000 that were lost when the band split in 2001 and the site was later discontinued
Tour Merchandise Now Available 21-Nov-00: The band’s official merchandise company, Blue Grape, now has merchandise from the recent tour available via their web site. Click here to order t-shirts, mugs, or the band’s official biography, ‘Folklore’. Additional Tickets for Brixton On Sale Now 08-Nov-00: An additional lot of 30 tickets for tonight’s gig at Brixton Academy have been released due to high demand. People still in need of tickets should try the venue box office or the credit card hotline on 0115 912 9000 as soon as possible as the additional tickets are sure to sell out quickly.
James to Play Radio Show in South Africa 08-Nov-00: James will be “Special Guests” at 5 FM ‘s 25th Birthday Concert in South Africa on Saturday 11 November. The band will play a one hour set to a sell out crowd of 25,000 beginning at 8:00pm, to be followed by the Smashing Pumpkins at 9:30pm. The concert will be held at Supersport Park, Centurion, situated between Pretoria and Johannesburg.
James at the Q Awards 02-Nov-00: James took time out from the current tour on Tuesday to drop by the recording of the Q Awards, where Tim presented the award for Best New Act. This year the award went to Badly Drawn Boy, who according to his acceptance speech, remembered playing pool with Tim at some studio about 10 years ago. The full awards programme will be broadcast at 11:00 PM on Channel 4 on November 4.
Grimsby Gig Cancelled 01-Nov-00: Due to damage to the venue caused by the recent storms, James’ gig at Grimsby Auditorium has been cancelled. The gig had originally been scheduled for Friday 3 November. No further information is available at this time.
Book Signing this Sunday! 20-Oct-00: James will be holding a book signing in Liverpool this Sunday, prior to their gig at the Royal Court. Advance copies of Folklore: The Official History will be available for purchase at the venue, where the band will be on hand to sign them beginning at 2:30pm. Folklore is the first official biography to be written about the band and will not be available in stores until 9 November. Advance copies are also available via the web by clicking here.
Buy James New Bio Weeks Before it Hits the Shops 05-Oct-00: Advance copies of James biography, Folklore: The Official History, are now on sale via the band’s merchandise company’s web site. The book is available exclusively via the web for fans to purchase in advance of the in-store release date of 9 November. To order your copy, for further details, or to read excerpts from the band’s first ever biography, click here.
More News on the Upcoming Tour 26-Sep-00: The band have confirmed the support for their upcoming UK tour. Opening at all dates will be American singer/songwriter Shea Seger. In London, Edinburgh and Blackpool Manchester band exit52 will take the stage before Seger. Many of you will remember exit52 as the opening act for James in Blackpool in July ’99 and because the band is made up of two of James’ bassist Jim Glennie’s brothers. Tickets for the tour are selling quickly, with Liverpool, Leeds and Norwich nearly sold out, so if you haven’t gotten tickets yet, order them soon.
On-Sale Date for Tickets 31-Aug-00: There was a problem with the credit card ticket hotline, resulting in people being told tickets for the UK Theatre Tour would not go on sale until tomorrow (1 September) and not today, as originally stated. The problem has been resolved now, and tickets for the tour are now available for purchase. As a reminder, the ticket hotline number is 0115 912 9000.
Additional Tour Date 31-Aug-00: The 12th date of of the upcoming UK tour was originally left off the list of dates posted to the web site and sent out via email. The date is at Exeter University on 26 October. For the full list of tour dates, see here.
Autumn UK Theatre Tour Dates 30-Aug-00: The band have confirmed the dates for their upcoming UK Theatre Tour. To see a full listing, check the tour dates page. Tickets will go on sale exclusively to James fans beginning at 9am on Thursday 31 August, before the tour is announced to the general public at 9am on Friday 1 September via a breakfast announcement on Virgin Radio. Tickets will be available from the 24 hour credit card hotline at 0115 912 9000 or online at www.gigsandtours.com. Tickets are £17.50 for all dates except London, which is £18.50 (all dates subject to booking fee). Buy James Merchandise Online 03-Aug-00, updated 22-Aug-00: James merchanding company Blue Grape is now selling James t-shirts via the web. Check out the James section at at http://www.bluegrape.gb.com/. Click on “Clothing” at the top of the page for a full list of available merchandise.
Vote for Your Favourite James B-sides 25-Jul-00: The band are in the process of putting together a B-sides album, tentatively scheduled for release on 6 November, to coincide with the release of the official biography. They’re in the process of choosing which songs will be included now, but before they make the final call, they’d like to see what fans would choose. So… visit the survey section of the web site and let the band know what you think!
Chat With Tim and Dave Live Tonight 19-Jul-00, updated 20-Jul-00: Tim and Dave stopped by to chat live with fans in the chat room tonight, Wednesday 19 July at 9pm BST (4pm EDT, 1pm PDT). A transcript of the chat is available here for those who missed it. Many thanks to all who joined us…
James in Beijing – The Reaction 05-Jun-00: The response to James’ set at the Heineken Beat Music Festival in Beijing, China continues to be tremendous, with the band getting lots of good press, including two half-hour documentaries, which were shown throughout China last week and the week before. More reaction to the gig will be posted here as it comes in, but for the time being, feel free to check out the following snippet from the Beijing Evening News, China’s most read newspaper. Or, for a taste of the event, you can view photos at JoyDay.com.
Official James Biography Update 17-Apr-00, updated 23-May-00: Work on James’ official Biography, Folklore: James – The Official Story, is progressing well. The book, currently being written/researched by broadcaster/journalist Stuart Maconie, has a tentative publication date of 9 November in the UK and will be priced at £14.99 for paperback. [ click to enlarge ]
MTV Five Night Stand Additional Broadcast Dates 22-May-00: For those of you who missed it the first time around, MTV UK & Ireland will be re-broadcasting James’ set from the Shephards Bush Empire on Monday 12 June at 11:30pm and again on Sunday 18 June at midnight.
Portugese Festivals – Additional Information 08-May-00: Additional information on James’ upcoming festival appearances in Portugal is now available in the tour dates section.
Win Tickets to see James at MTV’s Five Night Stand 30-Apr-00: We’re running a contest to win two tickets to see James’ upcoming appearance at the Shepperd’s Bush Empire in London on Monday 8 May. To sign up, visit the Tour section.
James to Play MTV’s Five Night Stand 21-Mar-00, updated 27-Mar-00: James will be taking part in MTV’s Five Night Stand at the Sheperds Bush Empire in London on 8 May. Tickets go on sale starting 9am on Thursday 23 March. The show will be broadcast on MTV Europe starting at 7pm on Thursday 18 May and again on Xfm at an as yet unspecified date. Further details are available in this press release. As always, you should check local listings for broadcast times and channels.
Confirmed Festival Appearances 20-Mar-00, updated 26-Mar-00: James have been confirmed for a handful of festivals in Portugal, in the days leading up to and following the band’s appearance in Beijing, China on 13 May at the Heineken Beat 2000 Summer Music Festival. More information on Heineken Beat is available here or (in Chinese only) at www.heinekenbeat.com. Also confirmed for the summer is the V2000 Festival in Chelmsford and Staffordshire, England. Further details on V2000 are available below. See the tour dates page for more information on the Portugeuse Festivals.
V2000 Details 22-Mar-00: James will be third on the bill for V2000, behind Richard Ashcroft and Paul Weller. They play Weston Park, Staffordshire on Saturday 19 August and Hylands Park, Chelmsford on Sunday 20 August. Other acts on the bill for the alternate day include Travis, Macy Gray and Ocean Colour Scene. Weekend tickets are £66, £76 with camping. Day tickets are £37.50/day. Tickets are available through the Hylands Park ticket hotline on 0207 287 0932 or the Weston Park ticket hotline on 0115 912 9115.
Unreleased Track to Feature in British TV Series 20-Mar-00: The previously unreleased track ‘Confusion’ will be featured in the British television series called Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased). The show is a comedy about two detectives — one who is killed and comes back as a ghost to help out his former partner — and stars British funnymen Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. The song, which some may remember hearing at various live gigs over the past two years, is also featured on the soundtrack for the programme, which is released in the UK on 3 April.
Latest News on James Plans for 2000 05-Mar-00: Details are close to being confirmed for a couple of live appearances for the band this spring/summer, including a festival in Bejing, China in May and V2000 in Chelmsford and Staffordshire in mid-August. The band will not be playing Glastonbury this year, but attempts are still being made to set up a handful of club dates in Europe. A UK university tour is tentatively in the works for sometime around September or October. More details on all the above will be posted as they’re confirmed. Though you may be seeing promo copies in UK shops, Crash is currently not scheduled for public release. The band’s next release is likely to be an EP of some sort, tentatively planned for release around the time of V2000. It’s likely the next release will not be a track off Millionaires, but rather “something different” — possibly a collaboration or cover of some sort.
The band have been writing material for their next album, and will spend time in the studio at various points during the spring and summer to start recording. If all goes well, a release could come as soon as January 2001.
The only bad news to report is that things are not looking good as far as the band finding a new US record label right away. It’s possible ‘Millionaires’ might not get released in the near future, so if you haven’t already, you might want to buy it on import. At the latest, the band plan to negotiate a new, global record deal once their current contract with Mercury Records is up after their next album. Ironically, MTV in the US has approached the band about the possibility of featuring the band in a spot examining why a band of James’ talent and success has been left without a US record deal. Details will be posted here if anything comes of it.
Tentative Plans for 2000 28-Jan-00: James plan on doing a handful of festivals in the UK this spring/summer, including Glastonbury and V2000. In addition, dates are tentatively being planned in Germany, France, Iceland, and possibly even China. The band hope to put out their next release sometime around May. What it’ll be is not yet known, but they do intend to “try something a bit different”. They also plan to start work on a new album over the summer. More details will be available as they’re confirmed…
James to Receive Portuguese Radio Award 27-Jan-00: Tim and Saul will be traveling to Portugal on Saturday 29th January to attend the Portugese Radio Nova Awards, where they will be picking a career award for Lifetime Achievement.
Official James Biography in the Works 10-Jan-00: James have commissioned broadcaster/journalist Stuart Maconie to write the official James biography. Initial interviews with Tim Booth and Jim Glennie will begin this month, with the book tentatively scheduled to hit the shelves around this time next year. | Jan 2000 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Oneofthethree.co.uk – Newsreel – 2000 | Article, News | This page lists all news item that were originally published on the old oneofthethree site in 2000 Update 28.11.00 According to band management, the next six months of next year will see the busiest James release schedule ever – with the new album, the b-sides album and the “Remasters” of previous Mercury albums all in the first six months of the year. However, posters seen in the MVC chain advertising a release of a James album on January 22 are incorrect as no release is scheduled for that date. Update 23.11.00 The projected b-sides album will not now be released until after the new album which means release date is unlikely to be before Autumn 2001 at the very earliest. Update 21.11.00 One Of The Three is being used as the backing music for a TV advert for a product called Tylenol in the US. Don’t ask me what it is because it sounds like a medicine for some kind of embarrassing condition, Update 15.11.00 According to James management, the video cameras recording last week’s Brixton Academy show were working for the band and the footage used will be offered to any television programmes producing features on James. It is unlikely at this stage to be used for a live video release. Update 14.11.00 James played a triumphant set last Saturday at the 5Fm Birthday Party at the Centurion Supersport Park. The set featured most of James best known tracks including Sit Down and Sound which had been ignored on the recent UK tour. Pleased To Meet You was the only new song to make an appearance. Update 9.11.00 James are playing on Saturday (November 11) at Supersport Park, Centurion near Pretoria and Johannesburg to celebrate 5 FM’s 25th Birthday Party. The band will be on stage at 8pm local time and will play an hour set before headliners Smashing Pumpkins. James are planning a tour of similar sized venues to the recent tour to coincide with the release of the album in April/May before playing festivals and possibly an arena tour in the summer and autumn. Everything is still at an early stage though. Update 5.11.00 James played another storming set at Norwich UEA last night, opening with five new songs and premiering a track called “English Beefcake” Following the tour, the band are going to South Africa for four days to perform at a radio festival headlined by Smashing Pumpkins before going back into the studio. Update 1.11.00 Friday’s Grimsby Auditorium show is cancelled due to damage to the roof caused by the storms. No details yet on a rescheduled date. Update 31.10.00 pm The latest from the Grimsby Auditorium is that they expect the gig on Friday to go ahead, but cannot be 100% certain that it will – they advised to phone back Thursday afternoon. Update 31.10.00 am Due to the storm damage overnight, there are question marks over the Grimsby Auditorium (Friday 3) and Nottingham Rock City (Tuesday 7) venues. Placebo’s gig at Rock City last night was cancelled due to damage to the roof. Embrace’s gig on Wednesday should go ahead as planned so James should be safe unless the weather deteriorates. Less certain is Friday’s gig in Grimsby, where the Auditorium suffered some damage – it is hoped that the gig will go ahead and more news will be forthcoming in the next day or so. Update 30.10.00 James continued their adventurous tour and set throughout the week, introducing another new song at Poole Arts Centre on Friday night. Sources at the aftershow party have posted on the official James site that the band are planning a US tour with other UK bands for the spring of 2001. More as and when I get it. Update 23.10.00 James have played two triumphant shows to date with 10 and 9 new songs respectively at Leeds University and Liverpool Royal Court this weekend. See our tour reviews page. The band have been in the studio writing and recording their new album with Brian Eno and will do the recording proper at the end of the tour over a two-week period in Surrey. During the break in the tour, James will attend the Q Awards where they were originally due to play, but were taken out of the schedule as the show was shortened. Tim is also due to present an award. As a compensation, Q TV are recording a special show on the recording of the new album. Update 20.10.00 James will be doing a book signing at the Liverpool Royal Court on Sunday 22nd October at 2.30. Advance copies of the book Folklore will be on sale at the venue. Update 28.9.00 Support for the James tour in October / November tour is Shea Seager. Exit 52, including two brothers of Jim, will also be appearing at Edinburgh, Blackpool and Brixton. Nepotism rules (they are actually worth checking out!) Update 12.9.00 The Norwich UEA has, according to the NME, sold out Update 28.9.00 Support for the James tour in October / November tour is Shea Seager. Exit 52, including two brothers of Jim, will also be appearing at Edinburgh, Blackpool and Brixton. Nepotism rules (they are actually worth checking out!) Update 12.9.00 The Norwich UEA has, according to the NME, sold out Update 29.8.00 THE TOUR DATES (to be confirmed) ARE : OCTOBER 21 – Leeds University OCTOBER 22 – Liverpool Royal Court OCTOBER 23 – Edinburgh Corn Exchange OCTOBER 25 – Bristol Colston Hall OCTOBER 26 – Exeter University OCTOBER 27 – Poole Arts Centre NOVEMBER 2 – Blackpool Empress Ballroom NOVEMBER 3 – Grimsby Auditorium NOVEMBER 4 – Norwich UEA NOVEMBER 6 – Sheffield City Hall NOVEMBER 7 – Nottingham Rock City NOVEMBER 8 – London Brixton Academy Update 24.8.00 James b-sides album provisionally titled “The Best B-Sides In The World Ever” has been put back to February 2001 to be followed by a new album with the working title “We Want Our Money Back” in April or May for which the band have demoed about 30 tracks. Brian Eno will assist in the pre-production stages with Stephen Street taking main production duties. Update 20.8.00 pm James Chelmsford set featured the following tracks – Laid, Sometimes, She’s A Star, Coffee and Toast, Stutter, Out To Get You. Someone’s Got It In For Me, Senorita, Johnny Yen, Tomorrow, Sound and Ring The Bells. For a more detailed review click here. Tim and Michael had earlier played a keyboard-only version of Laid to an invited audience live to air in the Virgin Radio tent. The Stafford set the previous night apparently included China Girl and two new tracks – Coffee And Toast and Everyone’s A Junkie. Update 20.8.00 am James have announced in the V2000 tour programme that they will be doing a “Theatre Tour” in “Autumn 2000” and that tickets will go on sale in the second week of September. No more than that at the moment I’m afraid. Update 18.8.00 James are broadcasting a live session and interview on Virgin Radio on Sunday afternoon from 4.35-5pm. Virgin is on 1215AM nationwide and 105.8FM in London Update 15.8.00 James are apparently taking part in the charity football at Stafford V2000 on Saturday, where they will be on stage at about 6.15 for an hour. Virgin FM are doing a special broadcast from the festival. Apparently, they are transmitting from Chelmsford so James may be on Sunday. The same applies to MTV. Update 10.8.00 The James biography “Folklore” written by Stuart Maconie is now complete and is being edited. The release of the book on November 6 will coincide with the release of a b-sides compilation album, tracks for which can be voted for at the band’s official site www.jamestheband.com Update 3.8.00 James’ merchandise company, Blue Grape, is now selling James merchandise on-line. Check my links page for the address or click here. Update 2.8.00 The proposed V festival in New York has now been cancelled for this year, so no James shows for all you guys in the US, I’m afraid. Update 20.7.00 James may be playing a US equivalent of V2000 in New York on September 8. No contracts have been signed as yet. Stay tuned for more details. It does appear that Mercury are planning to remaster and repackage the Gold Mother, Seven, Laid and Whiplash albums in the near future. In addition to this, latest rumours on the James official site and a post from Dave Baynton-Power on the message board suggest that a B-Sides compilation album is in the pipeline. Anticipated release date would be November to tie in with the Stuart Maconie authorised book “Folklore” which should now be complete. Will confirm as and when I find out more. No news on any new material as yet. First Report 12.7.00 James have recently been in the studio and have demoed about 30 songs for consideration for the new LP. Presumably, these will include the three tracks “Senorita”, “Swell” and “Everyone’s A Junkie” played at the recent Shepherds Bush Empire show. No news as yet on a rumoured EP before the end of the year. Mercury are apparently considering repackaging Gold Mother, Laid and Whiplash with extra tracks from the b-sides of singles. These releases are not confirmed as yet and no tracklist details are available. James only scheduled UK shows this year are at the twin V Festivals held in Stafford and Chelmsford over the weekend 19/20 August. A planned warm-up date in Stoke on the Friday night has been canned for some unknown reason, reportedly Tim being on holiday. The “University” tour originally scheduled for October/November this year and due to include dates in Norwich, Exeter, Blackpool, Folkestone and other towns off the traditional arena circuit has been cancelled without ever having been announced. In a Q+A reply on the official James site, Mark Hunter intimated that James may do a large city tour of the US with the release of the new album next year. Dave Baynton Power’s side project with the drummers of Catatonia and Stereophonics has been put on hold due to Stuart from the Stereophonics pulling out. No release date has been set. | Jan 2000 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dave Answers Questions To Jamestheband.com – January 2000 | Article, Interview | From: Billy Collinge What happend ie Tims neck injury he said at the Appollo in Mcr he “can’t fly any more” dose this mean he will never dance like before ie. G-mex/Blackpool ’90 and how did the injury occur. is he ok now. hes still really funky though. Thanking you Billy He’s recovered. From: James With I Know what I’m here for and Just like Fred Astaire being relative flops in the chart. Why do you thing this was? Do you blame Mercury for changing the release dates of the above singles. The single’s charts have changed alot recently. Just check out the latest Now thats what i call music compilations.Its all boy bands and dance tracks.
From: Ray Gillespie Hello. One of my favourite James songs is Lullaby off the Laid album, but I can’t understand what the lyrics are about. Anyone help? Child abuse.
From: Mike Hamad First of all, I want to say that you guys ROCK!! My question is: What inspired Tim Booth to write “Arabic Agony”? Thanks! Tim Booth didn’t write the song .he just did the ghostly scream.It was a jam that just happened in the studio one night under Brian Eno’s guidance.Check it out on the film HEAT
From: Maureen McCurley I was at the show in the SECC Glasgow and would be interested to know what the piper played. The noise from the crowd drowned him out. The show was my seventh time seeing you live and i have to say you are maturing if that’s possible as a band. Thanks for a great night. It was apparently Scotland the Brave, but to be honest, we couldn’t hear it either.
From: kisch Are you guys ever gonna tour SOUTH-EAST ASIA? I’d personally like to tour some of your Full Moon parties if you know when and where they are on.
From: Liz Ankers For Dave on drums – do you remember all the sessions at Petes studio at Gors Ave? – Glad to see one of you got there! from Petes younger sister – Liz!!! Hi Liz, I do remember those sessions. Doesn’t time fly. Do you still live in Anglesey? How is Pete? He’d still make mincemeat of me on the drums. I saw Kevin Sergent in Plymouth last year when we played there.
From: Matt Behan On the ‘cover’ album of Leonard Cohen where James covered ‘So Long Marianne’ the band are all eating bananas. Whats that all about then? Just love bananas. We are still eating them on the cover of Laid about 3 years later.
From: francis jones when are you going to do what you deserve, and sit down and agree to sell your souls and earn shit loads of money. Thankyou for surviving. FRAN. Satan doesn’t seem to be returning our calls.
From: Laura You are great ! But in my country (Italy) you aren’t very popular…will you play here ??? CIAO ! I think you have answered your question.
From: kevin park okay, got the album, got the tickets for nec concert. question: Who is supporting them? I read once that stereophonics were support, but they have a couple of dates at nec the next week. Those lovely scousers THE CAST.
From: Emma Turner Were the albums WAH WAH and James released in the UK, and if they were where can i get hold of them? These should be available in your local megastore.
From: emily collins Hey guys! I just got your new c.d. imported so that I could listen to it at college! But I didn’t recognize the new face to your group…can you tell me who he is and what he does on the album? Thanks! em I think you must mean Micheal “joey” Kulas. He’s Canadian. He plays backing vocals&guitar.
From: tony band dont suppose you can let out which songs are gonna be played at the manchester M.E.N arena gig on dec 11? We do want to play some old songs. Maybe you should all have a debate as to what that might be. I can’t promise any thing but!
From: Enric Romagosa Hi. We are a group of Jame’s fans from Barcelona. WE NEED A CONCERT OF JAMES IN BARCELONA. When are you going to come? Thanks in advanced. Would it boost demand for us in Barcelona(a beautiful city i might add)if i told you that it is Saul’s favourite football team?
From: Luke What is Basic Brian about? Brian basically.
From: col I am big newcastle united fan, can you tell me if any of the band are in the toon army. If not what teams do they support. Saul-Barcelona. Tim-Leeds. Jimmy-Man City. Mike-Arsenal.
From: Mat Horne Will there be a vinyl release of Millionaires in the near future. The fact that the format is unavailable has meant that I do not own a copy of the album, I have been forced to tape it. This has quite upset me! Cheers for a cracking album anyway. XXX If you had a vinyl copy you’d have a crackling album. Ever thought about getting a CD player? You should find one on the computer your using.
From: Pete and Al We saw you at the UEA and to be perfectly honest YOU ROCKED!!! Anyway: 1)Why the plastic screen in front of the drummer? 2) What was the support band (bloke)?!? 3)Any chance of any autographs? Cheers, P. and Al. 2/3 of the Dodgy Jammers (Drums and Bass/keyboard/vocals/drums/etc.) The plastic screen in front of me is for the rest of the bands own protection. Some of them just can’t stand the heat. | Jan 2000 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James To Play China – Music 365 | Article, News | JAMES are off to China next month to become one of the few western rock bands ever to play in Beijing. The band are set to perform at the fabulously named Altar Of The Sun in the Chinese capital over the weekend May 13-14, as part of the Heineken Beat 2000 festival. Also on the bill is Afrobeat king Femi Kuti as well as local Chinese acts. Last year’s Heineken festival was the first such outdoor event ever held in China. James’s Chinese fanbase is said to be “small but passionate.” Meanwhile the band also plays V2000 this summer and is due to start recording an early follow-up to last year’s Millionaires album | Apr 2000 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Music 365: James to Play China | Article | James are off to China next month to become one of the few western rock bands ever to play in Beijing. The band are set to perform at the fabulously named Altar Of The Sun in the Chinese capital over the weekend May 13-14, as part of the Heineken Beat 2000 festival. Also on the bill is Afrobeat king Femi Kuti as well as local Chinese acts. Last year’s Heineken festival was the first such outdoor event ever held in China. James’s Chinese fanbase is said to be “small but passionate.” Meanwhile the band also plays V2000 this summer and is due to start recording an early follow-up to last year’s Millionaires album. Source: Music 365, 13 April 2000 | Apr 2000 | article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
MTV Five Night Stand Interview | Article, Interview | Reporter : Tim and Saul from James. International zonecoasters supreme. Welcome Saul : Hello Reporter : How are you doing? Saul : Thanks very well Reporter : Excellent. Fresh from Portugal. Tim : Jaded from Portugal Reporter : Really? Tim : We played a gig from like 2.30 in the morning to about 40,000 Portuguese who should have been in bed. Reporter : Why so early? Tim : They do that in Portugal. We once played a gig, and in Spain, we did a gig in Spain at 4 in the morning, we all went to bed and someone woke us up at 2 and we all got up and played the gig. Reporter : I think your fan base expects you to push the envelope a bit when you perform live. They don’t expect you to play the Greatest Hits any more, you got that out of the way a couple of years ago. You’re free of that now, you can pretty much play new tunes and feel the freedom to expand on that a bit more. Tim : Actually, I think what happened because of the success of the Greatest Hits, we got quite addicted to playing the popular songs and getting an adulation reception and it’s really hard then to play songs suddenly where people actually listen rather than just shout and scream all the way through it. And we had that history of really being quite experimental and I think we got rather addicted to… Reporter : We’re a pop band, we’re playing the hits Tim : And now it’s like we’re going to go back and we’re going to play some really weird songs now that you’ve never heard. Reporter : And are they weird, the new tracks? Are they moving in a more experimental direction again, do you think? Tim : We always think so. I think we’re not very objective though. Reporter : How are the older tracks fitting in though, with the new stuff? There’s a few in the setlist tonight. Tim : The older ones, they’re a bit craggy Saul : A bit mopey Tim : A bit envious of the youth of the new sprightly ones. Moaning at the bar, you know Saul : They’re sitting at the bottom of the setlist holding everything up. Reporter : There’s going to be the odd encore. Here we come Saul : Aye, I think there might be. One or two, I suppose there has to be. Reporter : Do you still get nervous before you go on stage? Saul : No Tim : Yes Saul : You do? Tim : Always. Really nervous. Yeah Reporter : Is there any way you can lessen that before you go on stage? Do you have a little ritual? Tim : Yeah, huge quantities of drugs and masturbation. I find that does the trick Reporter : I was expecting new age meditation and a bit of chanting and stuff Tim : Well I figure I’d try and change our image. I do various rituals, you know that. Reporter : So what about the line up tonight? Tim : Well, we’ve got Tony Blair on bass and we’ve got Ken Livingstone on guitar. We thought variation basically. Reporter : You’ve got some string players on stage tonight, which I saw. Four very lovely looking young ladies, was that part of the prerequisite, they had to be pretty? Tim : Yes, it’s to make us look older Saul : Craggier, to make us look worse Tim : Wonderful, it works a treat. The thing was we met them on Jools Holland, they did Bryan Ferry and they gave us their card so we got this idea for strings about four days ago in Portugal and somebody said “Who should we use?” and it was the only number we had. Reporter : So, one last question, which track are you enjoying playing the most? Out in Portugal, what you were enjoying playing the most? What’s your favourite James tune? Tim : Probably, the new ones are always great because they’re fresh but they’re also tinged with fear making up some of the words, but Someone’s Got It In For Me from Millionaires is probably my favourite at the moment. Reporter : Saul? Saul : Actually, one of the new ones Everyone’s A Junkie is cool. I’m really enjoying it Reporter : In the soundcheck it sounded fantastic. Saul : I’m really enjoying it Reporter : Nice to see you guys. Always a pleasure. Thanks for dropping by and I look forward to tonight. | May 2000 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Beijing Evening News Article On Heineken Beat Festival | Article, News | For every person present in Ritan Park for the Heineken Beat Music Festival, the 90 minutes from 21:30 to 23:00 on May 13th, will be very hard to forget. The explosive atmosphere created by the UK’s James gave people a real idea of the power of popular rock and roll music. At last Beijing had the chance to experience this kind of passionate and exciting live music performance. The difference between the wild cheers and waving arms and dancing feet at Ritan and the enthusiasm of the thousands of people last year at the worker’s stadium for Zhang Huimei’s concert was fundamental. First of all, on stage was a famous band from one of the original homes of rock and roll and secondly, the music resounding in the arena was far more likely to set the blood pumping in your veins. When James was announced, the trees just outside the wall surrounding the altar of the sun were full of people. On May 13th there was an audience of more than ten thousand of people in the park, both inside and outside the arena. | May 2000 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Big In China – Radio 1 News | Article, News | James played an unusual gig this weekend because they’re big in Beijing. China’s still a relatively isolated country with credible western bands playing there on rare occasions, but this weekend saw an attempt to change that. Bands from all over the world arrived to play in the Chinese capital. Tim Booth took the opportunity on stage to criticise the country’s human rights record, saying: “This is a song about tortured artists which may have a different meaning over here.” Backstage, he said: “This is the way to break down barriers, I think. More than making big bold stands. We could be a young rock’n’roll band and get ourselves arrested, but it wouldn’t really help anybody, would it?” He explained: “Basically, what you come and do is start, hopefully, a process of communication to start and change things. This is why we do this, to reach people.” | May 2000 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
London Shepherd’s Bush Empire – 8th May 2000 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistTop Of The World / Say Something / Crash / I Know What I'm Here For / Destiny Calling / Vervaceous / Junkie / Swell / Senorita / Out To Get You / Stutter / Born of Frustration / Sometimes / Laid / Someones Got It In For Me / Come Home / Tomorrow / SoundSupportKent / ColdplayMore Information & ReviewsZoe McGeechan, Music 365Well, tonight was a game of two halves. There’s no other way of describing it. Because, even to die-hard James lovers, most of the gig was excruciatingly dull. They kick off the set – well, drift off really – with a swoony lullaby.. It is beautiful, it is serene, but it’s not the hand-clappy choral chant that the crowd are here to see. The first half of the set, mainly lifted from last year’s frankly appalling ‘Millionaires’, would be more appreciated in the confines of a well-padded lounge or boudoir. Well, somewhere comfortable, anyway, should you feel an urge to sleep. And while the music sounds milky and ineffectual, Tim slithers, pivots and raspberry ripples around his little iso-booth world – what is the Perspex for? To fend off the sweat splashes of the pretty string section, one suspects. This ‘mature’ James have left all the fun behind. There’s no whooping, yodeling or spasming in their new material, but that’s what we want. A glimpse of greatness sneaks out with ‘Destiny Calling’ but the lid is firmly pressed down to make way for more of James’ newest sound, monotony. As the night drags by, it’s gradually punctuated with hits, a rogue ‘Say Something’ here, a renegade ‘I Know What I’m Here For’ there, and its so obvious that the audience aren’t here to be wooed by smooches or serious propositions. They want to jump and clap and whoop and wail. You start to think James need a lesson or two in assembling a setlist; when you have a handful of hits, it’s always best to include them in the set, for instance. Witness the rapturous reception of the EMF-esque ‘Come Home’, or the godsend of ‘Laid’, which conjures up a huge anthemic explosion. So there’s no ‘Sit Down’ – fair enough, this isn’t a youth centre disco – but it does climax with the goods, the pure pop that James are all about. The encores burst into crescendos of strings and guitars and the audience finally get to whoop their little hearts out Beguiling us with an encore of hits so we leave feeling elated; a cheap trick, but everyone falls for it. VideoPart of MTV’s 5 Night Stand series of gigs. Support came from Coldplay. | May 2000 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Mark Answers Questions To Jamestheband.com – July 2000 | Article, Interview | On the old wearejames.com website, the band would periodically answer questions submitted by fans. The following were answered by Mark in July 2000
From: Gary Answered by: Mark A long, long time ago… the band had a wonderful song in their set which I think was called, funny enough, ‘Wonderful’. Was the track ever developed / demoed / mutated / recorded?. If so, I’d love to hear it. Cheers, Gary No idea …..might you mean ‘Waltzing Along’ from Whiplash?
From: Karla Answered by: Mark I was just curious, in the “Come Home-Live” video, Andy is wearing some sort of arm braces. What happened to him? Was he in an accident? Thank you to anyone who might be able to answer this for me. Hi Karla, those were not arm braces, they were crutches …Andy had just had an operation on his foot, so his leg was in a cast.
From: Alan Answered by: Mark Will Crash be a single, it should be, it’s amazing. Respect. Well, I doubt it Alan, but I agree with you …it should have been. Respect back.
From: Mac Answered by: Mark Q1: Were you disappointed with the chart positions of I Know… and Fred and do you blame this on Mercury? Q2: What is your reponse to criticisms that the ‘Millionaires’ is over-produced and has too ‘slick’ a sound? Erm, yes …a little, and …no really …have you seen the state of the charts here at the moment? Why do you think we’re all learning dance routines? And Q2: I disagree …I’d like it to sound slicker still …especially Vervacious ..that should be way slicker ….no, I think it’s all fine …anyway, who said that?
From: steffi Answered by: Mark is there any chance of seeing you play in germany or denmark to promote “millionaires” or on any other occasion? i’m running out of money to go to england every time,so please help me!! p.s.:love the new songs! they’re just fantastic-i didn’t expect anything else really.love,steffi We played a couple of German festivals last year and hopefully will do the same to promote the new album next year.
From: PETE BURKE Answered by: Mark Re : recent TFI performance of “Fred”. Why were Jim AND Michael both playing bass guitar ? Because there are two bass guitars on Fred Astaire. One plays a high melodic line …Mike’s, and the other a normal low bass line…Jim’s …..which is funny really ‘cos it’s usually the opposite …eh Mr.G?
From: James Answered by: Mark I’ve noticed that Millionaires is more poppy and dancey them usual James albums. Is that because of Saul and the money project taking over James? Cheers lads and I’ll see you in December. James Yep, that’s right… See you there.
From: James Answered by: Mark To all the band. Having heard Millionaires I get the feeling that it is too over produced and as a result is lascks that little something to make a classic James album. What do you have to say? I’m not sure what a ‘Classic’ James album involves exactly, nor whether we misplaced our little something. Sure, there may be elements of Millionaires that may be over-produced, but when I think of the process, the words over-produced never come to mind ha ha ha…over done it, overdose, over the hill, over to you ….
From: Graham Shearer Answered by: Mark You do a duet with Sinead O’Connor on one of the B-Sides of Fred Astaire, (can you guess what’s coming next?…that’s right) Is there anyone else you’d like to duet with? Morrissey perhaps? Also, am I gonna be able to get backstage at Wembly on Dec 12th, eh? Yeah, Stephen Hawking …we’re gonna make his voice sound like Sinead o’Connor. And …..I doubt it, but I’m speaking after the fact …you tell me.
From: Wayne Veilleux Answered by: Mark When is James going to tour the US? Will they do San Francisco? If we do, I’m sure we will.
From: Fordy Answered by: Mark More one for the record company, but with so many great videos to so many awesome songs. Why not a video greatest hits? Sure …If we could do it what would you prefer ..VHS, CD-Rom or DVD ? …Seriously.
From: anne Answered by: Mark I was listening to your fabulous new album in my car today and singing away, but on one of my favourites – we’re going to miss you, I can not make out the words to the beginning of the chorus! Please do tell! luv ya Here’s a mirror with your name on, Singing we’re gonna miss you when you’re gone.
From: Ali Awan Answered by: Mark Will you tour the US for Millionaires? If so, when? If not, why not? Doesn’t have to be huge arenas, there’s enough of a cult following for a successful club tour, and it’d be lovely to see you in an intimate setting. We US fans feel left out… I know what you’re saying …unfortunately the cost of taking our production around even small clubs can be prohibitive. We have a large band, a lot of equipment and a fairly large crew. It’s very dificult to reduce any of this without the show suffering ….Also there’s a general apathy towards British bands by record companies over there that means we can’t even justify spending money as a gamble to getting a deal over there. Mercury in the U.S. seem to lead the way in this field.
From: Wen Answered by: Mark Which is your favourite gig that you have ever performed? (I thought that the Fleece and Firkin in Bristol a couple years back was awesome…!) I thought Wembley Arena December ’98 was one of the best big indoor shows we’ve done in a while. Some of the Portugese festivals this summer have been great too, but I think the Beijing gig recently will stand out for me for a long while to come.
From: Chris Orton Answered by: Mark If the band could do a cover version of any record, which would each of the members like to do? I’d probably choose ‘Mathilde’ by Scott Walker, or ‘Rae’ by Autechre …it’s instumental but I think Tim could come up with some good vocals for that …
From: Larry Cheng Answered by: Mark Hi everyone (Tim, Saul, Mark, Adrian, David, Saul, and Michael), Just wanted to say that I’m a long time fan since the “Hymn From a Village” days. I actually have two questions: 1) Do you guys still talk to Larry Gott? 2) Will you be playing a couple of US dates for Millionaires? Thanks. 1) Occasionally. 2)Possibly …though nothing definate yet.
From: claire birtles Answered by: Mark Could you let me know when Millionnaires is likely to be out in Australia and also if the band have any plans to tour in Australia? Thanks Millionaires will probably only be out on import. We’d love to tour over there, but it’s a long, long way ….It all comes down to cost …hopefully we can arrange a tour of the far east and Australia in the near future andkeep the costs down that way …
From: Brent Lindberg Answered by: Mark I’ll keep this brief. Just curious if Larry Gott still participates with the band in any capacity, most notably the songwriting responsibility? Do the band members remain close with him? To be brief …no, and not really. We all live miles away so only catch up with him once in a while.
From: Neal Glassett Answered by: Mark If you tour here in Houston, TX and do some acoustic numbers, can I be the cellist in any of the songs? I’m afraid we already hace a cellist …his name is Adrian, but we call him Voo Voo.
From: Graham McPhail Answered by: Mark To whoever recieves this question, I as a long term James fan would love to be able to own a very nice video containing the videos for the singles as there is no programmes on terrestrial T.V. today that actually show the whole video. So is there any chance of this occuring? Thanks This is another idea we are considering at the moment …glad to hear there’s some support
From: rob Answered by: Mark Gigs–I appreciate u have to cater for folk who are seeing u for the first time, but could u play a couple of “surprise” songs in your upcoming gigs *pretty please*? A rendition of…no that wouldn’t be a surprise would it? Go on amaze us. Good luck with the new album lads 🙂 rob How about Charlie Dance? ….that would surprise you wouldn’t it ….with a full brass section and a dance routine.
From: Fernando Eiras Answered by: Mark Are JAMES planning to release a ” B sides and rarities ” album? Honestly,i think it would be a crime not to do it,specially after all the exellent B sides of Millionaires singles(Downstairs is absolutley fantastic) Cheers We’re working on it …there’s alot of stuff to go through!
From: Tom Burg Answered by: Mark Although I’m sure you have no PLANS to play in the States to support Millionaires, what would it take for you to change your mind? Record company backing ….you got $100K to spare Tom? ..we’ll hopefully be back with the new album though.
From: Piers Hampton Answered by: Mark Just one simple question… what is the likelyhood of any gigs/concert dates in europe, the likes of belgium, france or Luxembourg? Pretty unlikely …a festival or two maybe next year …
From: hector Answered by: Mark Hi. yo no se escribir en ingles y tampoco hablarlo pero si lo se leer si hay alguien que lo tradusca james es una de los mejores bandas inglesas de todos los tiempos.Si pudieran decir si visitaran algun pais de latinoamerica en especial mexico. Que tal Hector? Muchas gracias por los complementos. Yo quisiera visitar Mexico, especialmente Zacatecas (es donde son la familia de mi novia).
From: jabba Answered by: Mark Mark, Still playing with dice ??? Julie. White 99
From: Deniz Answered by: Mark Hi, Did Sinéad O’Connor contribute to some other tracks than Vervaceous on Millionaires? I keep hearing her voice in Afro Lover’s chorus and especially in Surprise (after 3.20). Regards, Deniz Yeah, she also sang on the song ‘I defeat’ which was the B-side to Fred Astaire. The backing vocal on Afrolover was not her, and the backing vocals on surprise are Mr.Michael Kulas.
From: jim hannah Answered by: Mark Surely it’s about time all the Factory, Sire, Rough Trade stuff was issued on CD? Yeah, but unfortunately, this also incurs lots of associated legal problems. We’re working on it.
From: Sven Answered by: Mark Hi! When do James come to Germany again? Haldern was great….want more! Hello Sven,…hopefully next year with the new album.
From: Jonni Zhivago Answered by: Mark Why is Saul always looking at the Canadian boy with brown hair?? I think it might be love
From: Mark Townsend Answered by: Mark In the song ‘Crash’ what is the line of lyrics thet sounds like, “Cut the hurt man from the heads”? This is obviously wrong so what is the correct line? ‘Cut the Herman free from the Hesse’. You may know the author Herman Hesse …also, Hesse in German means ‘Heart’. You can thank Mr.Eno for that one.
From: rene luja arana Answered by: Mark This is a petition from the depths of my soul, please, please come to Mexico, and let me be your guide and friend here in Mexico, James means so much to me, I fan of you since 1990, thanks for read this. James are the best band of the world. Your Mexican fan Rene. Un dia nos vamos a Mexico… en ese dia bebemos mucha tequila, y despues sacamos la pinata!
From: Francisco Answered by: Mark When will you come to Mexico city? here are a lots of fans waiting for you.remember going down to Mexico as you said in “go to the bank”. PLEASE we really want to see you soon.best regards from this side of the world. sincerely Francisco Nos vamos a Mexico solamente si tienes: 1) muchos Coronas 2) mucha Tequila 3) tostadas 4) enchiladas 5) bastantes jalapenos Gracias.
From: JORGE Answered by: Mark please, would you come to spain if i promise to give you good wine to drink? seriously, i`d never saw a james gig, and i ddon’twant to die before a historical date like that. un abrazo, jorge Cuanto buen vino tienes?
From: Ethan Answered by: Mark What’s your favourite b-side(non-uk album track)? and What songs did you have the most fun/pleasure recording? A song called still alive …I think I played about five notes … The new album has probably been about the most ‘fun’ record to make.
From: Alex Massie Answered by: Mark What has been the most satisfactory album for each of you to work on, and which albums artwork do you prefer Wah Wah,and Wah Wah. …and the Whiplash cover was OK too!
From: Steve Watson Answered by: Mark I moved from Scotland to New Orleans in 94 and haven’t seen James live since. I had tickets to the Phoenix show a in 97 but Tim’s neck injury canned that. Have you ever thought about coming to N’awlins? We have some great venues. If you ever get the whole U.S contract sorted keep us in mind. We have been to New Orleans a couple of times a few years back. It’s definitely a place I’d like to come back to next time…
From: Gillian Kenworthy Answered by: Mark Is there any possibility of you re-releasing ‘One Man Clapping’? Errrr ….yes, maybe, but not right now ….
From: Ben Lilly Answered by: Mark Are there many James songs that have been recorded but never released? If so, can you tell us about any of these tracks and if there is a chance of them ever being released in the future? There are hundreds of James songs that are recorded in some form or another and never released. This is because the recording process is expensive, and to give those songs that are not contenders the time and space to make them releasable would be counterproductive. No doubt in twenty years time we’ll all be down the record market trying to sell off our old shitty James demo cassettes to gullible fifty year old James fans. I advise you now ….don’t buy them! …when the time comes buy me a pint and I’ll do you a copy…
From: Ben Lilly Answered by: Mark Looking back over all the songs you have written together, which songs are you most proud of and why? Personally it’s probably the songs that came about the quickest and most naturally to us ….songs that happened very spontaneously out of jams ….maybe 15 minutes from start to finish. Songs like Come Home, Tomorrow, She’s a Star, Fred Astaire and many others happened like this. All of Wah Wah was created like this, but songs this strong, made in an instant tend to have quite an impact.
From: Ben Lilly Answered by: Mark Recently you performed an excellent cover of Iggy Pop’s “China Girl”. Are there any other artists/songs that you are planning to or would like to cover in the future? Yeah, we’re currently working on some kind of medley of Joy Division, Soft cell, Nancy Sinatra and Pink Floyd. Maybe with some Fleetwood Mac and The Skids thrown in. Nothing to report yet, but watch this space Ben.
From: Mattman Answered by: Mark Any plans to tour the US soon? Please!! I think this question will keep popping up …..we hope to tour the new album next year over there, but until then we’re trying to get an odd show or two together …keep a look out on these pages.
From: Tom Anderton Answered by: Mark Is this the last album by James, or will James continue into the next millenium. Thanks for an amazing album guys. We are now in the next millenium, and I can confirm we are continuing. Thank you, and goodnight.
From: Anthony De Motta Answered by: Mark If you folks do tour the US again, would you consider doing a few gigs in Hawaii? I’d really like to see you guys play here. Thanks for your time. You could twist my arm, but the man with the budgets might have something to say …..thanks for the invite though …maybe one day.
From: Anita Is there any chance to see James live in Switzerland this year.I`m waiting since 1992…. Unfortunately not …I remember the gig …Bob Dylan and Urban Dance Squad amonst others …hopefully we’ll get back there soon.
From: Tony Snape There must be many fans out there who like myself find it nearly impossible to get their hands on a copy of ‘One Man Clapping’. Would it be possible for the band to re-release the said item some time in the future. Yep.
From: Evelain I was wondering if it really is Tim singing backing vocals on House of Love’s 1990 album.. Thanks!! No.
From: Thomas I’d like to know if there will be a video of the december tour Thanks I’m afraid not, but check out some of the video footage on the site. (See the video section. – LR)
From: Tyler Would you ever consider doing covers of any of the songs from the movie James and the Giant Peach? It could be real interesting, particularly the song “My name is James.” I think that maybe Eminem would do a better version …thanks for the thought though.
From: angie calderon Will James perform in the States anytime soon? (2000) thanks! Hi Angie, To answer all of the questions posted about when we might be touring in the U.S. in the near future ….We hope to put a tour together next year to promote the new album, taking in as many places as we can around the country …but as yet there is nothing confirmed.
From: Jessica Is Millionaires ever going to be released in the US???? As I’m sure has been pointed out on this site, Millionaires has not been released in the States and will not be with the current contract with Mercury. Hopefully this might change in the future but for the moment it will only be available on import.
From: Derek Gruchy I read in one of your responses to these questions that Micheal Kulas is Canadian. I also read that he has a side project album…is it available here in Canada? And how did he hook up with you guys? Yeah, Michael is very Canadian. His album is called ‘Mosquito’ and it’s no doubt available through all your Canadian outlets. Mike was a friend of Saul’s, bought in to sing BV’s four years ago.
From: MIke Peters I heard that you recorded an acoustic version of ‘Ring the bells’.Is this true, and if so where can i get it from because I love the song. Cheers! We did. It was used on an ‘X-Files’ soundtrack, but whether it is available to buy I don’t know. Laurie on the site might be able to advise you.
From: Veggie I’ve heard that you all are vegans…true or not? Not.
From: Chris Duffy Why does Tim have the headphones in his ear whenever they perform? This enables him to monitor himself and the band from wherever he is on stage …so he can dance about like a loon and still sing, even if he isn’t stood in the middle in front of his speakers.
From: Matt Walinski This is for all the guitar players who are frustrated figuring out James’ great songs. Can someone please tell me the chords to “Sometimes”? Thanks Basically, the guitar just plays ‘A’ modal all the way through …..that’s ‘A’ without a third note. The bass meanwhile plays …’A’, ‘F#’, ‘D’ and ‘A’ ….around and around and around ……
From: Tyler Allen I’m one of the fans stuck in the U.S. where it looks like no U.S. tour will happen. I will be in China for a few months, though. In response to the rumor of some shows in China, is there any possibility of a show happening between now and May? Let’s hope so; I’m dying to see you live. Sorry I missed your question ….i hope you made it to the Beijing Show…It was great, you would’ve enjoyed it.
From: JAMES WINFIELD WHATS THE SONG ‘God only knows’ about? Erm …Gods …apparently knowing stuff.
From: Nicola Redwood You have lost a lot of money on tours in the past, especially in the USA. What exactly does all the money get spent on for a concert? Exactly …I’m not sure, but roughly: personnel, hotels, flights, buses, trucking, PA equipment, lights, catering, wages, agents, promotion, food, insurance…
From: Sarah Robson Was Tim Booth’s hair naturally curly or was it a perm? That curly do’ has haunted my waking dreams since I was 8, when you were performing Sit Down at the Megabowl for ITV’s Ghost Train(Oooooooaaaaahhhhhh.) See ya! PS Dave, are you feeling alright? Jesus, are you feeling alright?
From: lloydy Do you have a side project that does dance music, possibly under a different name? Yeah, it’s called ‘Money’ but we’ve neglected to release anything as yet.
From: lil Is it true that the violinist saul is a transvestite! Of course …he’s a bender of insurmountable bounds.
From: james A while back there was someone selling CD-R copies of One Man C. on a web sites. This person was making a profit, but it was’t much for all the work put into the out of print cd. Did this upset the band? If this person was to sell the cd again would the band persue to stop him? This person was selling a product that was inferior to the original CD. People can always get hold of illegal copies of a record, but ultimately that is what makes it harder for us to come and tour all the places that you are asking us to come and play. The amount of work put into copying the CD was nothing compared to the amount of work put into creating it in the first place….
From: James Koich Are there any plans for a Uk tour soon? If so will you consider a venue in Leeds? I lived in Leeds until Christmas …hopefully we’ll play there at the Town and Country or University next year.
From: Henry Answered by: Mark To all members of James: Who have been your musical influences? For me; Simon and Garfunkel, The Sweet, Slade, The Bay City Rollers, Abba, Genesis, Blondie, Japan, King Crimson, Gary Numan, Bill Nelson, The Cocteau Twins, Gang of Four, Ausgang, The Pixies, R2D2, Scott Walker, Massive Attack, Cabaret Voltaire, the funny guy from Sparks …and many others. These are some that I’ve listened to for long periods of time at some point in my life…. ….and then sometimes you think to yourself, ‘Shit, I could be out getting drunk instead, and you discover bars and things, and some of them play music too, and it all kind of snowballs from there really ….
From: Bernd Answered by: Kulas Do you have plannings about Concerts in Germany??? Last year we managed to play a few festivals in Germany which were quite successful. At the moment no mention has gone out about the possibility of a show but that doesn’t mean it wont happen. As we are in the middle of writing new material for the next album, we might not have the time to return. Hopefully some good news will come in the months ahead and who knows?…………..
From: Peter Harris Answered by: Kulas Who do James feel are the best band at the moment (obviously apart from themselves!)? All members of the band have a wide variety of musical tastes which is what I believe makes us so strong. The music I’ve been listening to lately includes The Dust Brothers The Bluetones, Travis, Supergrass, Eminem, and a large amount of ambient techno, hip hop, and break beat music including the Chemical Brothers. But to narrow it down to who is the best would be too difficult as I like to enjoy as much as possible. Anyhow, that’s how I see it, I hope that’s of some help. Ciao for now. Kulas
From: Ray Gillespie Answered by: Mark Hey, I remember an awesome song at the NEC 1998, that went wrong half-way through. It’s title was Real World Jam. Are there any plans to release this brilliant song at all either as a B-side, or on the new EP. Thanks, you’re great. It certainly was called Real World Jam, and it certainly went wrong. It’s now called Shooting My Mouth Off, and it’s on Millionaires.
From: Leah Wislocki Answered by: Mark Are any of the band members vegetarian? Simply curious. Once upon a time there was a bunch of Buddist, vegan folk-rockers called ‘Ye Olde James’. And it came to pass that while browsing the local felafel merchants their eye was taken by a juicy sausage, but, as was their nature at that time, they did shoo the sausage away and couscous was aplenty. As time passed by, folk-rockers came and went and soon there were seven. Seven folking vegies…! And as the power in their music grew, so grew the power of the Sausage, and in only seven short years they were all transformed into Ye Stadium Folk Whores, and Tabouleh was banished thence from their kingdom. And they all lived happily ever after.
From: Bill Ding` Answered by: Mrs. Kulas What’s with that new back-up singer, Mike Kulas…doesn’t he realize he’s doing a chick’s job? Please retract your neck Bill Ding.
From: Shellie Answered by: Mark I notice that some James tracks mention God in the lyrics. Are any of the members religious? Well, I know Jim likes to wear a dog collar from time to time…
From: Lou Answered by: Mark BOYS: There’s a lot of unconditional devotion out there – does it ever get just a WEE bit freaky? Or create a cosy warm glow inside? I’m curious. Wee bit freaky.
From: Holly Answered by: Mark What was the logic used to determine the cover of “Whiplash?” We thought it was a strong image which, incidentally, was a man dressed up in a mask …as were most of the masks in the artwork in that series.
From: David Godfrey Answered by: Mark Is there any plans to release any recent live performances on video or DVD? The recent MTV show was excellent and needs to be seen in full. Hopefully there’ll be some footage of the recent Beijing gig on the website in the near future.
From: Tom Answered by: Mark I want to name my first son james (he’s due in September) but my girlfriend rejects the name out of hand, claiming that it’s “wet”. Do any of you have a better suggestion? How about Jim, of maybe Big Jim. Failing that, what about Mark?
From: NIX Answered by: Mark how tall is Tim? and when are the questions being answered? 178cm …around about now
From: Kate Answered by: Mark My friend James once heard a track possibly called ‘Maria’s Party’ and has been trying to track it down ever since. It’s not on Stutter, Gold Mother, Stripmine, Laid, Whiplash, Wah Wah or Millionnaires. Where is it? I would love to get hold of a copy for him if possible. That’s a track that hasn’t been released on any CD Kate….You might be able to download a dodgy live version from http://james.wattyco.com/.
| Jul 2000 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
“We Take More Risks Than Anybody At This Festival” – Melody Maker | Article, News | BETWEEN FOUR LETTER OUTBURSTS, JAMES TELL US ABOUT THEIR NEW NO SELL-OUT STYLE “Remember this when you read the reviews slagging us off” Tim Booth yells at the end of James set, as hordes of happy fans walk slowly away from the stage. Remember, we think he means, that in this particular set on Staffordshire’s V Stage they played none of their best-known hits and none of the singles from last year’s “Millionaires” album and it was still a minor bombshell of a performance. And, after this outburst, when we go backstage to try and find out what’s eating James, we find them in defiant mood. Tim is calm and friendly, but prepared to state his case. Bassist Jim Glennie wants to explain exactly why James get a raw deal. But guitarist/violinist Saul Davies, eyes bulging, swearing for Britain, is just about ready to explode. “I just feel like James gets f**king hammered,” he snaps. “We take far more risks than Paul Weller would, or Cypress Hill would take or f**king anybody at this festival. We’ll play new songs that nobody’s even heard of that we don’t even know! Then people go ‘You’re bollocks because you didn’t play Sit Down'” “There are all these c**ts who are playing around us on the bill – and we’re always the ones who get shit for being corporate f**kers,” he gasps. “We’re here with our f**king balls in our hands going ‘Come on then! Let’s f**king do it!’ We’re not corporate whores, we like to challenge our audience.” From this you might assume that James new direction involves art-concept Sonic Youthery. At least one new single previewed at V2000 – a frothy pop tune called “Coffee And Toast” – suggests not. “It’s what I call a scientific love song,” Tim laughs. “It’s about this guy who tries to impress a girl with all this scientific stuff about black holes, when he just wants to get her back home. He wants her to come back home and have coffee and toast, but you know what he’s really after! I find the scientific chat up line works every time, but only with a certain type of girl. There’s another new song called “Everyone’s A Junkie” which is much darker. You know, we’re James, we don’t have one direction. We fire a shotgun and maybe some of the pellets will hit.” So far, the band have taken this scattergun approach to recording, having demoed 25 tracks, from which they’ll compile their new album in March (working title “We Want Our Money Back”). They’ll also be going back to their roots touring University venues in October. But don’t expect them to play “Sit Down.” Unless it includes a 30-minute jazz odyssey mid-section. Nice. | Aug 2000 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
V2000 Acoustic Tent – dotmusic | Article, News | dotmusic has been treated to an exclusive unplugged James performance at the Virgin Radio tent at V2000. A handful of delighted revellers were so surprised to see Tim Booth and his keyboard player take to the stage an hour before hitting the main stage that they forgot to applaud, until Tim told them otherwise. Tim, wearing obilgatory hat and shades as well as headphones, treated us to a sublime rendition of ‘Laid’ as two fans in James t-shirts almost choked on their free lager. Tim looked relaxed and ready for the main action and revealed to dotmusic that he’d mistakenly said ‘Thankyou Chelmsford’ at the end of last night’s set in Staffordshire. | Aug 2000 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Radio 1 Music News – B Sides Album | Article, News | James have told Radio 1 that they’re bringing out an album of b-sides. It’ll be released next February – and two months later, there will be a new album from the band with a tour planned for the end of the year. They’ve just got back from China where they played an historic gig in Beijing. It was the first time the audience were allowed to stand up and dance! Saul and Jim told Radio 1, the B sides album is one of the best things they’ve ever done: “We’re going to call it ‘The Best B-side in the World Ever: Volume 1’! We’ve got tonnes of stuff, the sound’s fantastic! We’ve got about forty songs.” Making the album is bringing back memories for the band. They told us: “There are all the associated events that come with listening to those things, going through puberty – things dropping, things falling out – aghhhh!” | Aug 2000 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: Change Of Scenery – Issue 12 / A Sound Investment – Issue 4½ | Fanzine | Change Of Scenery was a James fanzine produced by John Pude. Download this fanzine as a PDF. © copyright Change Of Scenery. | Sep 2000 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James To Play For British Fans in October – Live Daily News | Article, News | LONDON–James has announced an 11-date U.K. tour to kick off in October. The pop group, who released its last album “Millionaires” in 1999, will start the outing in Leeds, England, on Oct. 21 and finish up in London on Nov. 8. According to its official website, tickets will go on sale “exclusively to James fans” beginning at 9 a.m. on Thursday (8/31) and to the general public at 9 a.m. on Friday (9/1). The next studio album, for which “30 new songs have been sketched out,” is tipped to be released in May, 2001. The group reports that it will work on the album with Brian Eno (U2, David Bowie) and Stephen Street (The Smiths, Blur). Led by Tim Booth, James formed in 1982 in Manchester, England, which was also the breeding ground for other “Madchester” acts from the ’80s, including the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses. October 21 – Leeds, England – Leeds University 22 – Liverpool, England – Royal Court 23 – Edinburgh, Scotland – Corn Exchange 25 – Bristol, England – Colston Hall 27 – Poole, England – Arts Centre November 2 – Blackpool, England – Empress Ballroom 3 – Grimbsy, England – Grimsby Auditorium 4 – Norwich, England – University of East Angland 6 – Sheffield, England – City Hall 7 – Nottingham, England – Rock City 8 – London, England – Brixton Academy | Sep 2000 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Come Home – Ananova News | Article, News | You may have to Sit Down after the following announcement. Indie stalwarts James have announced a 12-date national tour. You can see the student faves play their vast collection of memorable hits in Leeds, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Bristol, Exeter, Poole, Blackpool, Exeter, Norwich, Sheffield, Nottingham and London throughout October and early November. James formed in Manchester in 1982, and have successfully outlasted most of their peers to release a plethora of memorable anthems. Early material such as Come Home and How Was It For You? soundtracked many students’ lives in the late 80s and early 90s, and the hits have continued to flow with She’s a Star, Sometimes and Destiny Calling. In a barren period for indie-pop, where chart rock music has become increasingly anodyne and few bands survive the expectations of the masses, reliable tunesmiths James prove a welcome respite. 1998’s compilation The Best of constituted a timely reminder of the outfit’s rock pedigree, while 1999’s offering Millionaires is probably their most adventurous and rewarding album to date. The tour will also showcase songs from their next album tentatively titled We Want Our Money Back, which is currently being recorded by their long-time producer Brian Eno. In a roller-coaster career spanning 18 years, there’s never been a better time to catch them. | Sep 2000 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Hit The Road – Music 365 | Article, News | JAMES have announced a UK tour in October/November. Currently working on a new studio album, the group, who attracted much praise for their sets at the recent V2000 festival, are to play 12 dates to coincide with the release of their forthcoming biography Folklore: James – The Official Story. The full dates for the tour are as follows: Leeds University Union (October 21) Liverpool Royal Court (22) Edinburgh Corn Exchange (23) Bristol Colston Hall (25) Exeter University (26) Poole Arts Centre (27) Blackpool Empress Ballroom (November 2) Grimsby Auditorium (3) Norwich U.E.A. (4) Sheffield City Hall (6) Nottingham Rock City (7) London Brixton Academy (8) Having postponed the scheduled release of their forthcoming B-sides album until 2001, James will now be releasing two albums next year. Fans are still being invited to vote for their favourite B-sides on the band’s official website before the final track listing for the that album is finalised, while the band themselves are sifting through the 30 “sketched out” songs they’ve demoed for their next studio album, which they’re hoping to begin with producer Stephen Street following the tour. The band previewed three new songs – ‘Coffee And Toast’, ‘Everyone’s A Junkie’ and ‘Senorita’ at V2000. Finally, the band’s official biography is to be released on November 9. Fans who’re gagging to read about the Manchester band’s long and winding road to international stardom however, can obtain advance copies of Folklore&ldots; from the band’s website before it officially hits book shelves. Is James’ ‘Sit Down’ the greatest student anthem of all time? Have the Manchester band really got the acclaim they deserve over the years? And what’s your favourite James’ B-side and why? Email us with your views. | Sep 2000 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Bond With Fans – NME | Article, News |
September 2000, © NME The band are currently recording the album, due out in April, with their long-time producer Brian Eno and former Blur producer Stephen Street. Regarding the tour, Guitarist Saul Davies told nme.com: “It’s a deliberate move on our part. Basically it’s come out of the fact that we started work on our next album and we decided we should do something we haven’t done since we did ‘Laid’, which is play the songs out on the road before we record them. “I’m really looking forward to it cos’ they could potentially be quite special shows. I think a band like us that’s been going on so long, it’s really necessary to invent a way of performing on [a special] occasion. It’s very easy for us to play big venues and take the cash and go away. ” He added: “Being on top of people where the communication with audience is intense I think will [make it] much easier to play these tunes and dig in and find out what they’re about really.” James have written 25 new songs for their forthcoming album including ‘Coffee On Toast’, ‘Please To Meet You’, ‘Gaudi’, ‘Senorita’, and ‘Nicola Louder’. | Sep 2000 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Melody Maker – Tim Booth Straight Down The Line | Article, Era: Millionaires, Interview |
WHAT ARE YOU UP TO AT THE MOMENT? “We’re recording in a studio in Surrey called The House In The Woods – foxes and their cubs come up to it every night to get food! We’ve hit the best patch of our relationship and communication, getting on as musicians, that we’ve ever had. We had Brian Eno in last week and it was intensive – 12 hour days with half-hour lunches. The concentration levels are incredible. He’s the world’s best producer. All the engineers were gobsmacked. We love the challenge of working with him.” YOU RECENTLY SAID YOU STILL WANT TO CHALLENGE YOUR AUDIENCE – HOW? “We’re going on this tour we booked ages ago – it’s a brave tour for us. It’s a small tour and it’s not going to be greatest hits. Finally, it’s like we’re doing a tour that will scare us witless! Cos we’re going to be trying out eight or nine new songs. We haven’t played Sit Down this year at all. We’re not going to shoot ourselves in the foot, but we love the new songs. We’re gonna record them as soon as we come off the tour.” ARE YOU GOING TO INCLUDE YOUR VERSION OF “CHINA GIRL” IN THE SET? “We’ve been putting together a greatest b-sides compilation and we stuck it on there. I just used to love that song – I must have seen Iggy Pop play it 15 times. I hate Bowie’s version, I think it’s crap. When you hear Iggy’s version and you know it’s probably about his relationship with heroin, it gives it a completely different bite and edge. It’s easy to improve on Bowie’s, but not on Iggy’s version. It didn’t go down that well though, so I don’t know if we’ll do it again.” ARE YOU STILL PERTURBED ABOUT THE PRESS YOU GET? “I think we got paranoid in a certain period. I didn’t realise we had so many front covers – now we’re not seen as new, so we don’t get that attention. We’re probably a bit pissed off about that, because we’re still making great music and that should be the criteria. I don’t read reviews now, I haven’t for four or five years – I don’t have an opinion. People have got that attitude ‘Oh, it’s just James’ which is frustrating. WHAT’S THE SECRET OF YOUR CONTINUING POPULARITY? “I think people just get the music – the celebratory nature of our concerts is not something many other bands can pull off. We’re perfectionists – we don’t let the crap go out, and we work hard to make sure the stuff is good and get good people to work with. And sometimes we’re paranoid – you just have to forgive us for that! Musicians get like that – they’re tetchy creatures, sensitive souls. It’s not nice when people don’t like you. | Oct 2000 | article era-millionaires interview era | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James New Sound – NME.com | Article, Interview | JAMES unveiled at least seven brand new songs at EDINBURGH CORN EXCHANGE last night (23 October) on the third date of their UK tour. Lead singer Tim Booth told the crowd that most of the tunes – fairly slow, thoughtful numbers – had been written last week and hadn’t even been given titles yet. He explained that more new material would be added every day as the tour progressed. Tim continued: “I saw Talking Heads play a set which was all new material once and it was one of the best gigs ever… so I hope you enjoy tonight”. However, two of the new tracks not only had titles – ‘Everyone’s A Junkie’ and ‘Saving Grace’ – but were more uptempo and got the audience moving for the first time. The packed Edinburgh auditorium had to wait until the sixth song of the gig for the first hit ‘Say Something’, and the ecstatic reaction prompted Booth to joke: “So I suppose the first five songs meant nothing to you?” Another new track later in the set was so new that Booth had the lyrics dotted around the stage. A ‘best of’ mini-set only appeared towards the end of the gig when ‘Laid’, ‘Born of Frustration’ and ‘She’s A Star’ were aired – ‘Destiny Calling’ had appeared earlier but was halted abruptly when, according to Booth, “someone spilled a beer over the desk”. Yet another new untitled track was premiered during a four-song encore as the band tried out material on their audience. Booth explained later that although their new studio album wouldn’t be out until April next year, the band had over 30 songs to choose from. Judging by the crowd reaction throughout the show it should have the fans’ seal of approval. | Oct 2000 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
A Day In The Life – Jamestheband.com – October 2000 | Article, Feature | This piece was originally published on the James official site Jamestheband.com that was lost when the band split in 2001 A Day in the Life Autumn Theatre Tour 2000 by Jim Glennie
I’m awakened by a knock on the door, it’s very dark in the room and I don’t know where I am. I pull myself out of bed, open the curtains slightly; the bright light makes seeing harder rather than easier. With each step towards the door I remember, breakfast, hotel, tour, and city, in that order. I open the door to a cheery youth who has obviously been up too long. “Morning, sir”. I mumble an attempt at a reply. He marches in with a large tray held high, and I’m glad I cleared a space for it last night and left some change handy. He puts it down, I scrawl on a piece of paper for him, he rather tactlessly counts the tip I’ve handed him, then smiles, thanks me and leaves.
I look at the antiquated late 70’s red-digit clock by the bed, 10:05am. We’re not leaving until 12:00, and I kind of regret not skipping breakfast and sleeping in instead. I went to bed late last night, or early this morning, after staying up all night talking shite with Mark, Mike, Adrian and Saul, finishing off bottles of malt given to us by the Scottish promoter washed down with overpriced room service Heineken.
I start breakfast with a couple of Advil and a third of a bottle of Volvic. I examine the tray: a too small glass of syrupy orange juice, lukewarm tea, a tiny pack of Alpen, and a chrome basket covered by a starched white napkin revealing the bakery selection. As always, it contains a greasy croissant, underdone cold white toast, overdone cold brown toast, and a Danish pastry. Who wants Danish pastry for breakfast?
I eat, then shower and shave, and finally the ibuprofen clears the worst of the night before and I look convincing enough to face the day. My clothes, enjoying their freedom, are reluctant to go back into my suitcase, but I’m soon down in reception arguing over the extras and denying having had anything from the mini-bar.
And so to the bus, our big, rambling, trundling home. We hire them for every tour, and they’re all pretty much the same. Downstairs there’s a small lounge and kitchen, although making tea while we’re moving can be precarious. Upstairs bunks, lounge and toilet. Every bunk on this bus has it’s own little cupboard in it, which sounds handy, only it takes up half of the room for your feet, forcing obscure sleeping positions for everyone except Saul who could actually sleep in the cupboard if he chose to. We don’t use the bus for a full night’s sleep as we always have hotels after gigs, but they come in handy for getting emergency naps. Each bunk also has a window with a curtain, which usually only shows the other lanes of the motorway, and occasionally the welcome winding of the services slip road. That’s our chance to scurry for food, newspapers, toilets, etc. As I mentioned, there is a toilet on the bus, but it smells of piss and chemicals and is not nice to use. Signs try to encourage males to sit to pee, but I’d rather contribute my splashes to the growing mess than stick my arse in there. God knows what I’d catch. Bus happiness really depends on trying not to think of all the other scummy bands with poor hygiene and disgusting habits that have slept in your bed, used the cups, etc. But when it comes to the toilet this isn’t possible. When we’re not sleeping, we sit in the back lounge and say stupid things, watch Father Ted, or argue. The bus journeys in the U. K. are all relatively short and we’re soon there. We nearly always go straight to the venue. We pile into catering and have soup, provided by our tour caterers.
This is one of the many points in the day where you feel fortunate as you remember back to the old days. Trundling to gigs in the back of a transit with no such niceties as hot food waiting for you, just a surly local crew tutting impatiently as you hurriedly set up your gear perched perilously in front of the main band’s equipment. Waiting to play ten minutes after the doors open to a few disinterested early birds, before shifting your gear off and heading home, and for this you don’t get even paid. You cover your expenses, so in effect you pay to play. In the luxurious cotton wool world of success, it’s all too easy to forget this.
We don’t enjoy soundchecks. The sound you get bares little resemblance to that which you suffer later on when two thousand fans soak up the P.A. and we all play twice as loud. But it’s a timeworn ritual, and a place to work on new songs if nothing else. The best soundchecks are short and sweet, the worst, long and bitter, and again we argue.
After soundcheck we either stay at the venue for our evening meal or go to the hotel. I usually go to the hotel. There isn’t much to do there but I like getting a break from the venue. I usually watch TV for a bit, surfing the limited selection of channels always interrupted halfway by an unnecessary block of radio stations. Sometimes I’ll sleep, then coffee and a shower to shock me back into the day.
Eventually we all dribble into reception. The first bubbles of anticipation surface as the banter picks up as we wait for the missing members. Someone mentions the need to do a set list, but there seems little enthusiasm yet. The last of us arrives and we leave for the gig, as always, fifteen minutes late. | Oct 2000 | article feature | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James And Placebo Can’t Stop The Rain – Yahoo | Article, News | Everyone knows that it rains a great deal in England, but after recent watery events, bands like James and Placebo might be ready to move to Florida. This weekend James was forced to cancel its show in Grimsby due to stormy weather conditions. Slated to take place at the Grimsby Auditorium, James’ show was postponed because prior wind and rain damaged the roof of the auditorium itself. A spokesman for the Grimsby Auditorium explained that the damage that the roof sustained in earlier storms rendered it an unsafe arena for a live show. Although the show will be rescheduled, James is not alone in being a band that has to find a drier date and locale to play. U.K. favorites Placebo was forced to cancel its show earlier this week in Nottingham Rock City due to extensive water damage to the venue. | Nov 2000 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Prepares To Get Its Money Back – Yahoo | Article, News | Although the length of James’ career certainly qualifies its members to be considered the Elder Statesmen of britpop, the band has always managed to sound fresh with every consecutive album it makes. And speaking of making albums, James is currently hard at work on its new effort, which is said to be titled We Want Our Money Back. The band, led by singer Tim Booth, whose enigmatic spinning and furious dervish revolutions remain some of the most arresting and captivating moves in music today, is said to be sifting through twenty-five new songs for the planned disc. James will be touring this autumn before it heads to the studio to record the album. Although nothing is official yet, both Brian Eno and Stephen Street are said to be handling production duties. We Want Our Money Back is being planned for an April release. | Nov 2000 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: Change Of Scenery – Issue 13 | Fanzine | Change Of Scenery was a James fanzine produced by John Pude. Download this fanzine as a PDF. © copyright Change Of Scenery. | Dec 2000 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Chris Martin (Coldplay) on Gold Mother – NME | Article, News | part of NME’s feature on bands that have influenced others careers James – Gold Mother That was the first record I ever really got into. That was quite a big moment cos I was quite sheltered up until then musically. When I got to big school, all the sixth form were listening to that sort of thing. I tried getting into loads of what the sixth form were into, but that was the only one that really hit me. I could never really get into The Wedding Present and Curve. I worked on a strawberry farm for a week and I earned about £50, which I spent on that record. I was heavily into James. I had two or three T-shirts! Come Home and How Was It For You? especially. It’s just a classic album. The cover and everything was great. But it was the first issue, not the one with Sit Down on it. I liked them before Sit Down. | Dec 2000 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
One Of The Three Interview With Andy Diagram | Article, Interview | exclusive interview by Dave Brown (One Of The Three Webmaster) 1ofthe3 : Andy, thank you for agreeing to speak to us. Most of the people reading this will only know you from your time with James. However, before you joined in 1989, you’d be in several other groups. Can you tell us a little bit about them? Andy : The main bands I was part of before James were DIAGRAM BROTHERS from 1980 to 1982. Me and my brothers formed this guitar band, in Manchester. I played bass guitar. We called the music “Discordo”. The music was made to a strict formula or set of rules. All the guitar chords were based on discordant notes, all the beats were very simple rock or disco, and all the words were very very straightforward and down to earth. Let me give you an example : “Bricks, lay them down in a straight line. Bricks, build them into a wall. Bricks, very useful objects, They’re not expensive at all.” The Diagram Brothers were big favourites on the John Peel show, we recorded three sessions for him that he played many times. The Diagram brothers recorded 2 singles, an album and an EP for New Hormones label ( the Buzzcocks label). They are not available any more, although me and my brothers are looking into getting them re-released on CD. DISLOCATION DANCE from 1980 to1986. I played trumpet and wrote songs with Dislocation Dance. we played a sort of jazzy pop, influenced by film themes. I played jazz and did session work for many bands, but with Dislocation Dance I developed my style of playing, which used the trumpet as a lone instrument (not part of a brass section). I started using echoes and effects with the trumpet. We recorded 2 albums and many singles and EPs for New Hormones and Rough Trade (same label as the Smiths). Dislocation Dance’s records and Peel sessions have recently been re-released on the Vinyl Japan label (based in London and Tokyo). PALE FOUNTAINS from 1982 to1984. The Pale Fountains were a Liverpool band that supported Dislocation Dance at a gig in London. We discovered that we liked the same sort of music (Burt Bacharach, and West Coast 60s band, Love ). They asked me to jam with them on stage and then to help record their first single. We became friends and I used to travel from Manchester to Liverpool to hang out with them. They were very much part of the early 80s Liverpool scene with people like Echo and the Bunnymen. At the end of 1982 they signed a big record deal with Virgin Records. We recorded 2 albums, lots of singles and made pop videos. They reached the lower reaches of the charts and gave me experience of the music business, how it works, what record companies expect. this was invaluable when later James hit the charts. I also did lots of session work and was involved in the Manchester music scene, playing with bands like A Certain Ratio, Durrutti Column, and touring with Nico (from Velvet Underground) in the last years before she died. 1ofthe3 : Had you heard very much of James when you joined and what was your opinion of them? Andy : I had heard a lot about James, and had the first factory single. I thought they had a unique sound and attitude and liked the fluffy jumpers and vegetarianism. I was a vegetarian, but dumped the fluffy jumpers after a bad photo shoot with the Pale Fountains. James managed to make fluffy jumpers look cool. I met Jim and a friend of his in 1981 or 82 (can’t remember the exact date). Dislocation Dance were on tour with Orange Juice and we played in Sheffield. We gave Jim and his friend a lift back in our van to Manchester. They were very shy but told us about a band they had formed, and asked us what we thought of the name “James”. I remember it very clearly because i thought James was such a strange name for a band. 1ofthe3 : So how did you come to join James and how was your role described to you when you joined? Andy : In the summer of 1989 I was living with a guy who played Sax had a business printing T shirts. He was doing well. T shirts were all the rage and he was doing all the James T shirts and Inspiral Carpets. James asked him to play his Sax, but he was too busy and suggested they contact me and the Sax player from the Jazz Defectors. We were invited to the recording studio, where the band were set up and jammed a song which later became Gold Mother. Those were the first notes I played with James. They were developing the band at the time and Mark, Saul and Dave had just joined. They were looking for people that they felt good with, and although trumpet and violin was an unusual instrumentation, they wanted us to be in the band. I liked their attitude and the fact that we jammed and improvised all the time. It wasn’t just someone sat down writing songs and handing out parts. 1ofthe3 : What was the highlight of your time with James – both personally and musically? Andy : The first tour we did of the UK as a seven piece band at the end of 1989, finishing with a gig at Manchester Apollo, was my favourite time. The gigs were wild. Me and Saul used to throw each other around the stage. The audience used to rush the stage at the end and we’d end up with 50 or 60 people jumping around on stage to “Come Home’ 1ofthe3 : And the lowest point? Andy : After the success of Sit Down, we tried to record the follow up to Gold Mother. We wasted many days in expensive studios, until we met Youth who re-established our self belief and helped us record Seven. 1ofthe3 : Very little has been said about the reasons for your departure – what was the main reason you left? Andy : Before joining James, I was establishing myself as a jazz musician on the experimental free jazz circuit. This was where my interest lied and I had a band called The Honkies, which played around Europe at free music festivals and euro-squats. I kept playing with The Honkies throughout my time with James, and went from gigs in front of thousands one night, to little gigs of 50 or so people. As James got more popular I felt the excitement went from it and the management wanted James to break America, which would have meant lots of endless touring around the States. I would have had to give everything up apart from James, and I didnt feel I could do it. I told James before Seven was released that I would promote Seven and then leave when they did the next album. For the whole of the year promoting Seven, they kept asking me not to leave, and didnt believe I would do it. 1ofthe3 : Do you have any regrets looking back about leaving when you did? Andy : I would have loved to have worked with Brian Eno in the studio, but that would have been unfair to the band as i wasnt prepared to go on tour anymore with them to promote it. 1ofthe3 : So after you left James, what bands have you been involved in? Andy : I started my own duo Spaceheads. We actualy supported James just after I left on their “Acoustic tour” at the end of 1992. In 1994 I started playing with David Thomas (the singer from Pere Ubu) in a band called The Pale Boys. 1ofthe3 : How would you describe the music to the uninitiated? Andy : Spaceheads are best described as a loopy electronic jazz band. It is always hard to describe your own music as you always try and make it new and fresh. Basically i play trumpet through echo machines creating layers of sounds and loops and my friend Richard (from Dislocation Dance) plays drums. It is sometimes very dancey and melodic, sometimes very strange and electronic. With David Thomas we have David on accordion, singing and wailing and telling stories, accompanied by me on trumpet and electronics, and a guitarist who triggers samples and other sounds with his guitar. It is mostly improvised and we call it instant song creation. 1ofthe3 : What are you doing at the present time – release and tour wise? Andy : You can check our website at www.spaceheads.demon.co.uk. Basically we are recording a new Spaceheads album at the moment. A new David Thomas and two pale boys album is out in January called “Surfs Up’ and i am playing in Russia, USA Europe and around the UK over the next few months to promote the David Thomas album – check the david thomas / pere ubu website www.projex.demon.co.uk for details 1ofthe3 : Which of your records across your entire career are you most proud of? Andy : All of the Spaceheads records were played written and produced by me with help from Richard the drummer. We have done all the artwork ourselves. This total control is hard work and we have spent many years getting to that point. The first Spaceheads CD released in 1995, was the turning point and established it all. I have to say that would be the one i was most proud of. It is just called Spaceheads and has a great mixture of melody and experiment 1ofthe3 : And a final question, when the musical encyclopedias are written, how would you like your entry to read? Andy : I like to think I have a unique and recognisable trumpet sound. I wouldn’t know how to describe it, and I dont think I am the best person to do it. But I would like to think that I can carry on playing for the rest of my life, and keep coming up with ever more new and exciting music. 1ofthe3 : Thank you again, Andy, for taking time out to talk to us. Good luck with both the Spaceheads and the David Thomas albums. | Dec 2000 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Gott To Succeed – Manchester Evening News | Article, Interview |
December 2000, by Catherine Ashcroft, © Manchester Evening News Sit Down was a smash hit for James … now a former member of the Manchester band is taking the song title to heart, aiming to be a big hit again – as a furniture designer. CATHERINE ASHCROFT investigates In the early nineties, rock band James were on top of the Manchester scene, supporting The Smiths and hanging out with the Stone Roses. Classic anthems like Sit Down and Come Home made the group huge stars and they packed out venues wherever they played. But after 14 years, songwriter and lead guitarist, James Gott, turned his back on fame and fortune and decided to quit at the height of their success. Now, four years on, the 42 year old has just graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University with a degree in 3D design, and his original style of furniture is taking the design world by storm. What made him leave the heady world of pop superstardom to go back to school and embark on a whole new career? First, to clear up any confusion for die-hard fans of the group, while in the band, James was called Larry, which is his middle name. He decided to go back to his first name for his design work to avoid people thinking he was relying on the band to succeed. “Staying in the band would have meant a steady income but I just felt it had run its course and the thrill had gone,” he says. “At first, it was like a fairground ride, but eventually I wanted to get off the rollercoaster.” White knuckle rides are something Gott knows more about than most people, as he left school at 14 to join a travelling fair. “I hated school. It just didn’t interest me.” he admits. His inspiration for the guitar came from Jimi Hendrix in the film of the Woodstock festival. Gott taught himself how to play and spent a year busking around Europe with a mate. A series of dead end bands followed and days on the dole seemed endless. Then James, the band, was born and battled for years to break into the mainstream market, eventually being rewarded with a massive American recording contract. But it was before the big time that Gott developed an interest in design. “In the early days we would buy furniture from junk shops and do it up to save money,” he says. His decision to leave after the success of James’ Greatest Hits album was an uncertain time. “I quit the band with no idea of what I was going to do next, which was quite scary. I had a lot to prove and had to validate the reason I left the band,” he says. Finally, he decided on the 3D design degree at Manchester, which, was according to him, the best move he ever made. “It was like being let loose in an artistic sweet shop, expressing myself in any medium I wanted. Design allowed me to reveal parts of myself which I never really got to do before.” So far, though, it appears he doesn’t need luck or the kudos of being an ex-member of James to succeed. His talent has already won him the prestigious FX/Allemuir Furniture for Manufacture Award and his work has been snapped up by the Design Initiative, a charity which promotes designers in the North West. On top of this, he has been in discussion with high street stores. One of Gott’s more stunning pieces is described in publicity as “a softwood reclining chair” but when you see it close up, it becomes clear what an innovative idea it is. The chair looks like a sleek and sexy sun-lounger but alters its shape to suit the way you are sitting. Relax and it relaxes with you, sit up and it will modify itself accordingly. Gott explains proudly how every aspect of his design is there for a reason not just for the look. “The plywood covers the foam-like card so you don’t sink into the upholstery and it doesn’t get dirty while the charcoal laminate of the foam acts as a protection against UV rays to prevent colour loss. “I designed it to react to moods by adapting to personal movement.” Gott has no plans to leave his Manchester home. Currently using studio space at the city’s prestigious Ferrious showrooms, he is planning a design cooperative with other students. “I was stunned by the amount of talent these young people have and a lot of them want to stay in the city to work.” But if the design business didn’t work out would he consider going back into music? “Not on a professional level. Although I did miss the music at first, I don’t anymore,” Gott admits. “It was a bigger buzz rising from our humble beginnings than the fame itself.” | Dec 2000 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jamestheband.com – Newsreel – 2001 | Article, News | This page lists all news item that were originally published on the James official site Jamestheband.com in 2001 that were lost when the band split in 2001 and the site was later discontinued A Big Merry Christmas from Chunny Lad 24-Dec-01: James’ keyboard player Mark Hunter has done a special remix of the track Fine as a little Christmas present for James fans. To download the track, click here. Happy Holidays! Jim’s Statement Regarding the Future of James 06-Dec-01: Jim has issued a statement to fans regarding Tim’s departure and the future of James. You can read it here.
Manchester Gig to be Filmed for DVD Release 06-Dec-01: James upcoming gig in Manchester, which is scheduled to include special appearances by former James members Larry Gott and Andy Diagram, will be filmed for a DVD to be released sometime next year. Details on the release have not been finialised yet, but will be posted here as soon as they are.
James B-Sides Album Details 14-Nov-01, updated 03-Dec-01: James’ new b-sides album, titled “B-Sides Ultra”, is released today in the UK. The 18-track collection is taken from various singles released since 1990. See below for a full track list. Also released today are re-issued versions of the classic James albums “Gold Mother”, “Seven”, “Laid”, and “Whiplash”. The re-issued albums contain bonus tracks and new sleeve notes. For more details scroll down. James B-Sides Ultra Track List:
Before chosing the final set of tracks for the album, the band asked fans for their suggestions in an online survey. To see what fans chose, check out the survey results.
Tim Booth Answers Fans Questions 11-Nov-01, updated 03-Dec-01: Tim agreed to answer some questions from fans regarding his decision to leave James after the December tour and his plans for the future. Fans were given a week during which to submit their questions, and the top questions were sent on to Tim for his answers. His responses can be found in the Q and A section.
Submit Your Questions to Jim Glennie 19-Nov-01, updated 30-Nov-01: Jim has agreed to answer some questions from fans regarding the band’s plans for after their upcoming UK tour. Questions have been sent to Jim and his answers will be posted here shortly.
Mercury to Re-Issue James Albums 16-Nov-01: Mercury Records will release new editions of classic James albums “Gold Mother”, “Seven”, “Laid”, and “Whiplash”, in adition to the new b-sides collection “B-Sides Ultra” in the UK on 3-Dec-2001. All albums have been digitally re-mastered, contain bonus tracks, new sleeve notes, and extra photographs. Additional tracks for each album are as follows: Gold Mother Inlcudes 5 additional tracks – Lose Control (Live at GLR), Sit Down (Live at G-Mex), Come Home (Skunk Weed Skank Mix), plus original songs Crescendo and Hang On.
Seven Includes 4 additional tracks – Protect Me (Live at KROQ), Sound (Live), Heavens (Live), and Don’t Wait That Long (Live).
Laid Includes 4 additional tracks – Laid (Live at GLR), Sometimes (Live), Five-O (Live), and Say Something (Remix).
Whiplash Includes 4 additional tracks – Lost a Friend (Live), Greenpeace (Live at S.B.E.), Homeboy (Live at S.B.E.), and Waltzing Along (Flytronix Mix).
James’ Last Tour With Current Line-Up 29-Oct-01: Tim Booth has announced that James’ upcoming tour will be his last with the band. Tim has provided a statement to fans explaining his decision. The official press release announcing Tim’s departure is available here. The remaining members of James plan to continue making music together, and will make an announcement regarding their plans at a later date.
Tim and Saul to Present Q Award 27-Oct-01: Tim and Saul will present a lifetime acheivement award to Brian Eno at the 12th Annual Q Awards on Monday, 29-Oct-2001. The show starts at 12 noon UK time and can be seen live on the web at Q4Music.com. Visit Q4Music.com for more info and a listing of award categories and nominees.
Additional Date Added to December Tour 17-Oct-01: James have added an extra date to their December UK tour. The band will play Leeds University on Monday 3-Dec-2001. In tour other tour-related news, Ben Folds has pulled out of the opening slot on the tour and will be replaced by UK duo Turin Brakes.
Dates in Spain and Portugal Confirmed 27-Sep-01, updated 30-Sep-01: James have confirmed three shows in Spain and Portugal for the end of November. See the tour dates section for details.
December Tour, Possible European Dates, B-Sides Album 26-Sep-01: James’ UK arena tour is still set to go on as planned in December, with special guest Ben Folds opening. In addition, a few European dates in Spain and Portugal are currently pencilled in for the end of November. Dates and locations will be posted here as soon as they are confirmed. The band’s previously planned b-sides album, Now That’s What I Call B-Sides Vol. 1 is still planned for release sometime later this year. An exactly release date has not yet been scheduled. Thus far there is no news to report regarding possible future singles from Pleased To Meet You or the band’s efforts to find a new record contract.
James Amicably Part Company With Fontana/Mercury 06-Sep-01: James have announced their departure from Fontana/Mercury Records, a decision which was agreed upon prior to the release of their final album for the label. Read the full press release here.
Festival Date Added in Portugal 21-Aug-01: James have confirmed an additional festival appearance at the Annual Youth Music Festival on Madeira Island, Portugal. The two-day festival, featuring primarily portuguese bands, takes place on 31-Aug-2001 and 1-Sep-2001 on the Funchal pier. James will headline on Saturday 1-Sep-2001.
James Wrap Up Busy Weekend, Next Up: Nottingham 07-Aug-01, updated 08-Aug-01: James topped off a busy weekend with an appearance at Dublin’s Witness Festival on Sunday, where they played a surprise 5-song acoustic set in addition to their main stage performance. After their set an interview with Tim, Jim and Saul was recorded for a special to be broadcast on RTE at a later date (we’ll let you know when as we find out!) Their sets at Witnness followed a performance in the wee hours of Saturday in Spain at the Bencassim Festival, where they played a celebratory 3am set to a packed crowd. Then it was back to the UK for a rousing headlining performance at Guildford Live, where, because of curfew restrictions, they were forced to disappoint fans who begged for an encore. Photos from Guildford are available here.
Next up for the band is a trip to Nottingham where they’ll play the City in the Park festival on 25-Aug-2001, their last appearance in the UK until their December tour. Tickets are priced £27.50 and can still be ordered at the City In the Park website or by calling the box office at 01159 588484 or 01159 412544.
Official James Merchandise – now at a new web site! 29-Jul-01: James merchandise is now available from Bandmad. Current merchandise includes a wide range of t-shirts, including six brand new designs unveiled earlier this summer, plus the band’s first ever official biography, ‘Folklore’. Prices start as low as £5 and pricing is available in multiple currencies, including British Pounds Sterling, US Dollars, Euros, and Irish Punts. Visa, Mastercard, Switch and Solo and Delta Card are accepted for payment, and a variety of shipping options are available. To browse the current selection of James merchandise, click here. For more info about Bandmad, payment options, shipping rates, multi-currency support, or security, click on the “?” icon at the top of that screen.
‘Pleased To Meet You’ Enters VH1 Charts at Number 9 15-Jul-01: James’ new album, ‘Pleased To Meet You’ entered the VH1 (UK) charts at number 9 this weekend. VH1 are currently showing the video for ‘Getting Away With It (All Messed Up)’ on spot rotation, so let VH1 know people are watching, and that you want to see James! Call, email, or fax VH1 to request the video. And don’t stop at VH1, keep James on the airwaves by calling or emailing your local radio station and stations like Virgin Radio and Xfm to request ‘Getting Away With It’.
European Festival Dates Confirmed 09-Jul-01: The band have confirmed two festival appearances in Europe: The first takes place on Friday, 3-Aug-2001 in Spain, where the band will headline the Bencassim Festival. For more information on the festival, visit the festival web site. The second confirmed European festival will take place in Greece at the Electron Festival, where the band will headline Friday, 21-Sep-2001. More information to follow. Additional appearances are being planned in Spain and Portugal, but no dates have been confirmed as yet.
Chat Live With Tim This Thursday 08-Jul-01: James’ lead singer Tim Booth will be online to chat live with fans at Dotmusic.com this Thursday, 12-Jul-2001 at 7pm BDT (2pm EDT). To submit a question in advance of the chat, go here. For more information, see this news release from Dotmusic.
‘Pleased To Meet You’ International Release Dates 07-Jul-01: The complete list of international release dates has been confirmed by James’ record company, Mercury Records. All international releases will feature 11 tracks, with the same track listing as previously announced, but excluding ‘Gaudi’ and ‘What Is It Good For’. Fans outside the UK wishing to buy the special edition with bonus CDROM and full tracklisting can do so at AudioStreet.co.uk. For more information on the album, see the Pleased To Meet You section of this site. World-Wide Release Dates United Kingdom 2-July-2001 Australia 23-July-2001 Austria 2-July-2001 Belgium 2-July-2001 Canada 10-July-2001 Denmark 9-July-2001 Germany 2-July-2001 Greece 9-July-2001 Holland 2-July-2001 Ireland 2-July-2001 Italy 12-July-2001 Japan 3-July-2001 New Zealand 9-July-2001 Norway 9-July-2001 Portugal 2-July-2001 South Africa 13-July-2001 Spain 2-July-2001 Sweden 2-July-2001 Switzerland 2-July-2001 Please note, the Canadian release has only just been negotiated and is subject to change. No commercial release of the single is planned in Canada.
Purchase Info for US Fans 05-Jul-01: Due to the band’s continuing difficulties releasing albums in the states, US James fans will need to buy ‘Pleased To Meet You’ on import. To purchase the album online, visit AudioStreet.co.uk. The version listed is the “special edition” with bonus CDROM (see below for details). All purchases from AudioStreet will count towards the UK charts. While you’re there, don’t forget to enter AudioStreet’s competition to win signed copies of ‘Pleased To Meet You’.
Pleased To Meet You Midweek Chart Position 04-Jul-01: ‘Pleased To Meet You’ is ranked number 11 in the UK midweek charts. If you plan on buying the album, please do it this week to help the band’s chart debut on Sunday. Virgin stores are giving away limited edition posters with the purchase of the album, but the offer’s only good while supplies last, so hurry up and get your copy soon!
Free Poster With Album Purchase 03-Jul-01: Virgin Megastores in the UK are giving away a free James poster with each purchase of ‘Pleased To Meet You’. The offer is good while stocks last, so hurry up and get your copy now!
James on Top of the Pops 03-Jul-01: James will appear on Top of the Pops this Friday, 6-Jul-2001. The show airs on BBC1 at 7:30pm.
Pleased To Meet You Released Today! 02-Jul-01: James new studio album, ‘Pleased To Meet You’, hits shops today. For everything you need to know about the album, see the Pleased To Meet You section of this site. For the latest news, reviews and interviews, don’t forget to check out the press section.
Discounted Weekend Tickets for Guildford Live 2001 29-Jun-01: Fans planning on seeing the band’s headlining performance at Guildford Live 2001 can purchase weekend tickets at a £5 discount by calling 01483 454 159. The discount applies for purchases paid for by cheque only, and is only valid until 4-Jul-2001. Weekend tickets with the discount are £59. James headline Guildford on Saturday 4-Aug-2001. Visit the Guildford Live 2001 web site for a complete lineup and more information
James’ Gig at Sound to be Broadcast on Xfm 29-Jun-01: An hour’s worth of tracks from James’ set at Sound on June 18th will be broadcast on Xfm this Saturday, 30-Jun-2001 at 7pm. Those outside the London area or who don’t have Sky Digital can hear the broadcast via the web at xfm.co.uk.
December Arena Tour Dates Announced 26-Jun-01, updated 28-Jun-01: James have announced a UK arena tour to take place in December. Tickets for the tour go on sale this Friday, 29-Jun-2001 at 9am. Check the tour section for information on where to get tickets. The dates are as follows: 02-Dec-01 Brighton Centre 04-Dec-01 Newcastle Arena 06-Dec-01 Birmingham NEC 07-Dec-01 Manchester Evening News Arena 09-Dec-01 Glasgow SECC 10-Dec-01 Wembley Arena
Getting Away With It Mid-Week Chart Position 27-Jun-01: ‘Getting Away With It (All Messed Up)’ has been listed in the UK mid-week charts at number 17.
Pleased To Meet You Special Edition 27-Jun-01: A special edition of James forthcoming album, ‘Pleased To Meet You’ will be released in the UK. The special edition will include a bonus enhanced CD-ROM which contains an exclusive screensaver, a ‘Mix the Clone’ game, and a link to an exclusive web download. The special edition will be released at the same time as the regular version, next Monday, 2-Jul-2001. The first single off the album, ‘Getting Away With It (All Messed Up)’, was released this Monday, so go get it!
Getting Away With It Released Today! 18-Jun-01, updated 25-Jun-01: ‘Getting Away With It (All Messed Up)’, the first single off James’ forthcoming album Pleased To Meet You is released today, 25-Jun-2001. The single is being released in two parts, with the following track listing: CD 1:
CD 2:
Fans who caught the band’s Autumn 2000 UK tour may recognize a couple of the b-sides, which were premiered during the tour, but didn’t make it on the album. Read what Tim had to say about the b-sides in his exclusive web site interview.
James on VH1 Tonight 24-Jun-01: The band will be appearing on VH1 as part of the Ray Cokes: Still Wanted?… Live Extravaganza. The show airs in the UK from 5:30pm to 7:00pm tonight and will include three live tracks from the band.
Chat Live With Tim Booth 24-Jun-01: James’ vocalist Tim Booth will answer fans’ questions in a live chat hosted by CompuServe on Thursday 28-Jun-2001 at 8pm GMT (3pm EDT). For information on how to access the chat, click here.
Exclusive Interview with Tim Booth Now Online! 23-Jun-01: Earlier this week Tim sat down to talk about the new album, the music industry, working with Brian Eno, and the strange marriage that is James, in an interview done exclusively for the web site. Read it all right here.
James Perform on CD:UK 16-Jun-01: James performance on CD:UK this morning was a great success, with the band discovering some fans amongst the other guests on the show: while walking past James’ dressing room, Wheatus’ singer, songwriter and guitarist Brendan B. Brown strummed the opening bars of the song Laid. Later, when Tim went over to say hello, he discovered another bandmember had a copy of the album. Watch the CD:UK website in the coming days for an interview with Tim, done at the studio this morning. Those who missed show can catch it when it’s rebroadcast on Thursday at 12:35am on ITV.
James to Play Exclusive Set for Xfm 11-Jun-01, updated 12-Jun-01: The band will play an exclusive set for Xfm at Sound in Leicester Square, London, on Monday 18-Jun-2001. The approximately 1-hour long set will start at 8pm, with doors opening at 7pm. If you’re in the London area, and wish to attend, enter here to win a pair of tickets, or visit Xfm.co.uk for even more chances to win. Can’t make it to the gig? Check out James this weekend on cd:uk on ITV this Saturday, 16-Jun-2001 at 11:30am.
Additional Summer Gigs Confirmed 11-Jun-01: James have confirmed three additional shows for the summer, including a T in the Park warmup at the Grimsby Auditorium on Friday, 6-Jul-2001. Tickets are available from Way Ahead on 0871-22-00-260 or at wayahead.com. Following Saturday’s set at T in the Park, the band head to Liverpool for the Summer Pops Festival at King’s Dock, on Sunday, 08-Jul-2001. Tickets are available by calling 0870 120 0721 or online from the Way Ahead Box Office.
Finally, the band head to Dublin, Ireland for the Witnness Festival on Sunday, 5-Aug-2001. Tickets are available by calling 1890 30 WITNNESS (Republic of Ireland) or 0845 30 WITNNESS (UK and Northern Ireland) or at Ticketmaster.
For a full list of summer gigs and festival appearences, check the tour dates section.
Pleased To Meet You Micro-Site Launches Today! 08-Jun-01: A new James micro-site launches today at www.jamesonline.co.uk. The site is chock-full of exclusive soundbytes and full-length tracks from the band’s forthcoming album, ‘Please To Meet You’, plus the best collection of past James videos available online. In addition, fans can enter an exclusive competition to see James on tour or win copies of the new album. More tracks from the album will be added to the site in the lead up to its release on 2-Jul-2001, so be sure to check back often!
International Release Dates 07-Jun-01: In addition to the UK, James new album, ‘Pleased To Meet You’ is confirmed for release on 2-July-2001 in Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Additional international release dates will be posted as they are confirmed.
Getting Away With It Gets Airplay 04-Jun-01: James’ new single, ‘Getting Away With It (All Messed Up)’ has been getting regular airplay on Virgin Radio, and has been added to the station’s playlist. The track was also voted on to the virginradio.20, an interactive chart voted on by listeners and broadcast on Saturday evenings. To cast your vote for next week’s chart click here. Fans all over the world can listen to Virgin Radio via the internet at virginradio.co.uk. The single is scheduled for release in the UK on 25-Jun-2001. To preview the lyrics, click here. For a larger version of the image to the right, click here.
James on Later with Jools Holland 05-May-01, updated 18-May-01: James have been confirmed as the featured musical guests on the BBC’s Later with Jools Holland. The show was taped live on Tuesday, 15-May-2001 with James playing three tracks: Falling Down, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), and Born of Frustration.
Other musical guests included Buju Banton, Nelly Furtado, Matthew Jay, The Tiger Lilies, and Eddy Grant. Dom Jolly of Trigger Happy TV was a member of the audience and expressed his love of James, mentioning that James were the only band to have the honour of having not one, but two of their songs included on the Trigger Happy soundtrack.
The show airs this Friday, 18-May-2001 at 11:35pm on BBC2. To see an interview with Tim Booth from the taping, visit the Later Web Site.
Exclusive ‘Fine’ Remix Now Online 11-May-01: The full-length track ‘Finer’ is now available for fans to listen to online. The song is a remix of ‘Fine’, from the band’s forthcoming album, Pleased To Meet You (see below for details). The remix was done by James’ drummer Dave Baynton-Power. To check out the track, choose the appropriate link below: Windows Media Player [Download Player] Real Player [Download Player]
Pleased To Meet You 06-May-01: James have confirmed the title and running order for their upcoming studio album. The album, titled Pleased To Meet You will be released on 2-Jul-2001 and feature the following tracks:
The album is preceeded by a single, ‘Getting Away With It (All Messed Up)’, set for release on 18-Jun-2001.
First Round of Summer Festivals Announced 26-Apr-01, updated 27-Apr-01: James have been confirmed for a handful of UK festivals this summer, beginning with T in the Park on Saturday 7-Jul-01. Tickets for the event, to be held at Balado Airfield, Scotland, are already on sale. Single day tickets are £35.00 and weekend tickets are £59.00 if booked before the end of May (£64 after). Camping tickets are an additional £11. Check the T in the Park website for more details. Next up on the festival list is the Guildford Live festival on Saturday 4-Aug-01. The band will headline the second day of the three-day festival, held in Guildford, Surrey. Tickets are not yet on sale, and ticket prices haven’t been confirmed. Check the Guildford Live 2001 website for the latest.
Finally, the band will appear as special guests to Bryan Adams at the City In The Park festival on Saturday 25-Aug-01. Tickets for festival, held in Wollaton Park, Nottingham, are £27.50 advance and can be ordered at the City In the Park website or by calling the box office at 01159 588484 or 01159 412544.
Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) 26-Apr-01: The band have confirmed the first single off their upcoming, and as yet, untitled studio album. The track, titled “Gettting Away With It (All Messed Up)”, will be released to radio stations in the UK on 7-May-2001, and appear in shops on 18-Jun-2001. Fans who attended some of the band’s autumn 2000 tour dates may recognize the track, which was originally titled “Saving Grace” on set lists for the autumn tour.
New Album and Single Release Dates Set 11-Apr-01: The release date for James’ new studio album has been set for 2-Jul-2001. The title, tracklisting and running order for the album are still being decided upon, and should be finalised shortly. The album will be preceeded by a single, tentatively set for release on 18-Jun-2001. The title of the single has not yet been confirmed.
James Finish Work on New Album 07-Mar-01: James have completed work on their upcoming studio album, which is still untitled. The album, which is comprised of 14 tracks, will be presented to the band’s record company, Mercury Records, by Brian Eno on March 14th at a special playback session at an un-disclosed London studio. Once the album has been presented to the record company, the band will choose a title, finalise the track listing, and choose singles. Release dates for the album and first single will be set shortly after that. More information will be posted here as soon as it is confirmed.
Chat Live with Tim Booth 24-Jan-01, updated 02-Feb-01: Tim Booth was online for about an hour and a half to chat with fans on Wednesday, January 31 at 8:00PM GMT (3:00PM EST). If you missed it, you can read the transcript here.
Now That’s What I Call B-Sides! 30-Jan-01: Details on James’ upcoming b-sides album, titled Now That’s What I Call B-Sides Vol. 1, are almost finalized. The album is scheduled to come out later this year and will be comprised of 20 tracks, including ‘Gone Too Far’, ‘China Girl’, and ‘Van Gogh’s Dog’. The full track listing should be available in a few weeks, at which time we will also announce the results from last summer’s b-side survey. Meanwhile, the band’s new studio album is being mixed in London. Details are not yet finalized, but more information should be available by mid-February. The new album is provisionally scheduled for release later this spring, prior to the release of the b-side album.
James to Play Charity Date in Geneva 04-Jan-01: James will appear as special guests at the GP 24 heures of Villars benefit in Geneva, Switzerland on Saturday 13 January. The event is in aid of Formula Charity, an organization created by driver Jacques Villeneuve and Craig Pollack, the director of British American Racing. GP 24 heures of Villars is a 24 hour ski race held the weekend of 13-14 January and the band will perform a full electric set at the party on Saturday night. Last year the proceeds from the event went to the Notwill Centre for Paraplegics. | Jan 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Oneofthethree.co.uk – Newsreel – 2001 | Article, News | This page lists all news item that were originally published on the old oneofthethree site in 2001. Links and images have either been removed or pointed to the new site where internal. Update 26.12.01 The official James website has an exclusive download of a remix of Fine from the Pleased To Meet You album by Mark Hunter (Chunney Lad). The file is in mp3 format. Tim Booth’s own website – www.timbooth.net – will now not be up and running until the New Year as opposed to December as was announced in his departure statement. Update 21.12.01 T-shirts and other merchandise from James recent tour should be available on the official merchandise site www.bandmad.com early in the New Year. It was originally scheduled to be available from last Monday, but was delayed. Update 14.12.01 Website Ananova has reported that the DVD of the Manchester show is due for a February release. As yet there has however been no official release date publicised. Update 12.12.01 The two solo albums – Mosquito and Another Small Machine – are now available again to buy from Opal Music for £10.95 each. Andy Diagram’s band The Spaceheads are on tour in Europe over the next couple of months. Dates confirmed so far are : December 14 – Nijmegen Extrapol, Netherlands December 15 – Brussels Action Against Euro Summit – contact novacinema@village.uunet.be for further info December 16th – Louvain Le Neuve, Belgium January 12th – Micro Music Theatre, Athens, Greece February 1st – Espace Julien, Marseille, France February 20th – Nouveau Casino, Paris, France February 21st – Lune des Pirates, Amiens, France Click here for the Spaceheads website Update 11.12.01 James played an emotional final show with Tim Booth at Wembley Arena last night to a crowd of about 10,000 people. The set included guest appearances by Andy Diagram, Larry Gott and Brian Eno. The setlist was as follows : Laid, Waltzing Along, Tomorrow, She’s A Star, I Know What I’m Here For, God Only Knows, Protect Me, Out To Get You, Hymn From A Village, Someone’s Got It In For Me, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), English Beefcake, Sometimes, Johnny Yen, Born of Frustration, Ring The Bells / Top Of The World, Sound / Come Home, Sit Down For a review click here Update 9.12.01 The b-sides compilation Ultra failed to reach this week’s Top 75 album chart. Update 8.12.01 Jim Glennie has announced in a statement that James intend to continue following Tim’s departure. James played Thursday night at Birmingham NEC to a crowd of about 6,000 people. The setlist ran as follows: Say Something, Waltzing Along, Laid, I Know What I’m Here For, English Beefcake, God Only Knows, Protect Me (acoustic), Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Stutter, Vervaceous, She’s A Star, Born of Frustration, Come Home, Tomorrow / Top Of The World, Sound / Out To Get You, Sit Down For a review click here The following night, James played a triumphant homecoming show in Manchester in front of a sell-out crowd of 16,000. Ex-band members Larry Gott and Andy Diagram made guest appearances. The show was filmed for a DVD release early in the new year. The setlist ran as follows : Say Something, Waltzing Along, Sometimes, Laid, I Know What I’m Here For, God Only Knows, Someone’s Got It In For Me, Vervaceous, Protect Me (acoustic), Out To Get You, Hymn From A Village, Johnny Yen, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Tomorrow, Born of Frustration, Ring The Bells / Top Of The World, Sound / Space, She’s A Star, Come Home, Sit Down For a review click here. Update 5.12.01 pm James setlist at Newcastle last night ran as follows : Say Something, Waltzing Along, Sometimes, Laid, I Know What I’m Here For, God Only Knows, Protect Me (acoustic), Walking The Ghost, Hymn From A Village, Tomorrow, Space, Born of Frustration, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Destiny Calling, Ring The Bells / Someone’s Got It In For Me, Sound / Out To Get You, Sit Down. Andy Diagram did not perform at the show, but is reported to be appearing at all the remaining shows on the tour. Update 5.12.01 am Tim has answered some fan questions on the official James website James played their third date of their tour last night at the Telewest Arena in Newcastle. The setlist included Hymn From A Village, not played since 1994 at least if my memory serves me correctly, and Someone’s Got It In For Me. Full setlist to come. Did you go? If so, we’re looking for reviews – email to oneofthethree@hotmail.com – there’s a prize for the best review on the tour. Below are a couple of pictures of shirts available on the tour – prices for both are £15 and there’s a skinny version of the “face” shirt Musicroom are selling a new Best Of James songbook featuring chords and lyrics to 29 classic James tracks from the Best Of, Millionaires and Pleased To Meet You. The tracks are : Born of Frustration, Come Home, Crash, Destiny Calling, English Beefcake, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Homeboy, How Was It For You?, Hymn From A Village, I Know What I’m Here For, Just Like Fred Astaire, Lose Control, Out To Get You, Pleased To Meet You, Ring The Bells, Runaground, Say Something, Senorita, Seven, She’s A Star, The Shining, Sit Down, Sometimes, Sound, Strangers, Tomorrow, Waltzing Along, We’re Going To Miss You Update 4.12.01 am Early reports from James gig last night at Leeds University show that James played a very similar setlist to the Brighton show, without any guest appearances, but including I Defeat (which Tim said they’d never played before – Hereford and Glasgow in 1998 spring to mind), Waltzing Along and Top Of The World. Click here for reviews of the show – if you were there, send me a review to oneofthethree@hotmail.com. There’s a prize for the best review. Update 3.12.01 pm Today saw the release of the James B-Sides Ultra and the re-release of remastered versions of the Gold Mother, Seven, Laid and Whiplash. The stand out track of the extra tracks has to be the previously unreleased Mark Hunter remixed Say Something (The Saying Nothing Remix). Early reports suggest many people are having difficulty getting hold of them. Update 3.12.01 am James opened their final UK tour with Tim Booth at the Brighton Centre last night. The setlist consisted of : Say Something, Sometimes, Laid, Senorita, English Beefcake, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), She’s A Star, Space, Vervaceous, Johnny Yen, Come Home, God Only Knows, Born of Frustration, Ring The Bells / Protect Me (acoustic), Tomorrow, Sound / Out To Get You, Sit Down Click here for a review of the show The show also saw a new tour programme featuring new pictures, a gigography, fans reminiscing about James and the sleevenotes to the remastered albums. There was also an extensive selection of new t-shirts including James written in the shape of a face, the classic JA-M-ES shirts, a University of Manchester shirt with the James flower in place of the logo, a 3D style flower logo, a sweatshirt with a small daisy on the front and several vests / skinny tops based around the flower. Mugs and the Folklore book were also available. Update 26.11.01 James have just completed three dates on their Iberian tour in Madrid, Lisbon and Porto. For fan reviews as submitted, please check the tour section. Rumours on the official James chatboard suggest that ex-band members Larry Gott and Andy Diagram WILL be appearing at certain shows on the upcoming UK tour – Larry in Manchester only and Andy at all shows except Leeds and Birmingham, although there has been no official confirmation. Michael Kulas has just completed a recording session for his first post-James album at Lendalfoot in Scotland. The official Kulas website has thirty-second samples of four songs from these session. Update 16.11.01 A James aftershow party has been arranged by the website www.aftershow.co.uk for immediately after the Manchester Arena show on Friday December 7. The party is at the Quay Bar in Castlefields – advance tickets are £6 plus booking fee from Piccadilly Box Office on 0161-832-111 or www.ticketline.co.uk. The party also includes a DJ set by Dave Haslam. Click here to see more details from the press release Update 13.11.01 James B-sides album called Ultra will be released on Monday December 3 in the UK on Fontana. The tracklisting for the album is Gone Too Far, Honest Pleasure, Sunday Morning, China Girl, Still Alive, The Lake, I Defeat, Goalies Ball, Chunney Chops, Tonight, Dreaming Up Tomorrow, William Burroughs, Assassin, Stolen Horse, Undertaker, Egoiste, Van Gogh’s Dog, Where You Gonna Run? This album is in addition to the four remastered albums with extra tracks due for release on the same day Click here to view/order at Amazon : Ultra £9.99 ex postage Gold Mother £7.99 ex postage – bonus tracks : Hang On, Crescendo, Come Home (Skunk Weed Skank Mix), Lose Control (live), Sit Down (live) Seven £7.99 ex postage – bonus tracks : Protect Me (Acoustic Live), Sound (live), Heavens (live), Don’t Wait That Long (live) Laid £7.99 ex postage – bonus tracks : Laid (live), Sometimes (live), Five-O (live), Say Something (remix) Whiplash £7.99 ex postage – bonus tracks : Lost A Friend (live), Greenpeace (live), Homeboy (live), Waltzing Along (Flytronix Mix) Update 11.11.01 According to Kulas Online, Michael is presently writing songs for his next album, due out next year. He will not be replacing Tim in James and will not be part of any post-Tim incarnation of James. Update 7.11.01 Several people have asked about how to get tickets for November’s Portuguese shows – Lisbon Coliseum on November 23, Porto Coliseum on November 24. Taking a look at the web, there’s a phone line for a company called SIC.24 that has the Lisbon show on their website – http://ondaticket.siconline.pt/. Their telephone number is 00351 21 417 3111. I hope someone there speaks English because the site’s totally in Portuguese! There seem to be another number as well : Ticketline (Lisbon) 00351 21 712 03 00 I presume one of these would give you a number for Porto as well. For the Madrid show at La Riviera on November 22, this site gives you details of the show and allows you to order on-line for collection on the day from the venue. It even allows you to do this in English if you click the button in the top left hand corner. To phone for tickets, use the number 0034 902 15 00 25 from the site to reserve your tickets. In Tim’s interview with Channel 4 teletext he revealed he hopes to have some music out in April 2002 – watch this space for more details. Turin Brakes, previously announced as support for James UK tour, will now not be appearing at the Leeds University show on December 3rd. They will still appear at all other shows. Replacements have not yet been announced. A Portuguese band called Plastica, who Tim met during James festival performances in Portugal in May 2000, will be supporting James on their two Portuguese dates in Lisbon and Portugal. Update 5.11.01 According to US website www.sirencd.com, Mercury are re-issuing four classic James albums with extra tracks on December 3. The albums with the extra tracks are as follows: Gold Mother – plus Come Home (Skunk Weed Skank Mix), Lose Control (live), Sit Down (live), Gold Mother (Warp Remix) Seven – plus Protect Me (Acoustic Live), Sound (live), Heavens (live), Don’t Wait That Long (live) Laid – plus Laid (live), Sometimes (live), Five-O (live), Say Something (remix) Whiplash – plus Lost A Friend (live), Greenpeace (live), Homeboy (live), Waltzing Along (Flytronix Mix) I assume that the live tracks on Gold Mother are from the G-Mex 1990 show, the Seven tracks are from the Seven live video, the Laid tracks from the Radio 1 James Day and the Whiplash tracks from the Radio 1 Mark Radcliffe session (Lost A Friend) and the Shepherds Bush Empire Radio 1 show from March 1997. Not very inspired choices for extra tracks when we have a surfeit of b-sides and acoustic radio session tracks…. More as it gets confirmed. Update 30.10.01 Tim Booth will be doing an interview with Channel 4 teletext – index page 450 tomorrow, 31st October Update 29.10.01 Tim Booth has announced his intention to leave James at the end of their UK December tour. More details including a full statement to the fans and press release here. He also indicated that Larry Gott and Andy Diagram will be joining the band at some point during the tour. Update 28.10.01 Tim and Saul will be presenting an award at tomorrow’s Q Awards in London. Watch out for Channel 4’s broadcast next week to catch a glimpse of the boys. Update 18.10.01 An extra date has been added to James December UK tour – they will now be playing Leeds University on Monday December 3rd. Update 13.10.01 With Ben Folds cancelling his support slots on the December UK tour, Turin Brakes have stepped into the breach. Update 27.9.01 James have announced three Iberian dates for late November ahead of their UK arena tour November 22 – Madrid La Riviera November 23 – Lisbon Coliseum November 24 – Oporto Coliseum Update 26.9.01 Despite James and Mercury going their separate ways at the end of their contract, there are still plans to release the b-sides album Now That’s What I Call B Sides Vol 1 through Mercury before the end of the year. Tracklisting and a release date are still not finalised. There is still no news on any progress in James attempts at getting a new contract with a new label. Update 6.9.01 James have announced their amicable departure from Mercury Records following the completion of their contract with the album Pleased To Meet You. No news yet as to what happens next….. Click here for the press release. Update 21.8.01 According to Playlouder.com, James have been “released from their contract” by Mercury. Actually, Pleased to Meet You was James’ last album on their present contract, but as usual, the press never let the truth get in the way of an excuse to diss the band. More to come, no doubt….. Update 7.8.01 James headlined the Benicassim Festival in Spain on Friday night with the show broadcast live on Spanish radio. They then flew back to the UK to headline the Guildford Festival – click here for reviews – on Saturday, before an early evening slot at Dublin’s Witness Festival on Sunday where they also performed in the acoustic tent. Tim hinted at the Witnness Festival that English Beefcake may be the next single off the Pleased To Meet You album. Update 1.8.01 Pleased To Meet You has dropped out of the Top 75 albums after only three weeks on the chart. Update 31.7.01 Band-Mad, the new James merchandising company has increased its range of James merchandise, including some shirts on special offer at £5 and a jacket at £15, along with all the new Pleased To Meet You merchandise. James On Line, Mercury’s James site has a new section with an eight minute video of studio footage of the recording of the Pleased To Meet You album, including an exclusive version of English Beefcake. Update 26.7.01 Pleased To Meet You slumped to number 47 in the album charts in its third week of release. Strange Dancing – The Early Years, the Warner compilation of early James material, is now due for release on August 20. Regular readers will no doubt take this with a pinch of salt and see it when they believe it! Rumour has it that Orbital have been approached to remix Falling Down for a potential future release. Update 23.7.01 Strange Dancing appears to have been deleted from the catalogue at HMV which would suggest the release has been delayed or cancelled. No word from Warners on this (turn the clock back fourteen years or so and it’s a case of deja vu) Update 18.7.01 James on line merchandise is now on sale at www.bandmad.com. Only new t-shirts debuted at the recent shows (don’t get too excited, they’re not that great or cheap) are available at present. Click here to see One Of The Three’s archive of James t-shirts Update 16.7.01 James have parted company with Blue Grape, their merchandising company, and are presently in negotiation with an as yet unnamed company to take over the manufacture and sale of James merchandise. Pleased To Meet You dropped out of the Top 20 album chart this week, plummeting to Number 29. Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) dropped to number 69 in the singles charts Update 13.7.01 Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) dropped to number 48 in the UK single charts last week after entering at 22 the week before despite the band’s appearance on Top of the Pops. Update 12.7.01 Tim held a forty-minute webchat at Dotmusic.com this evening – click here to see a transcript According to Tim at Sunday’s Liverpool show, Falling Down will be the next single from the album Pleased To Meet You. A promotional condom was issued to promote the Pleased To Meet You album. A picture of the box can be found below. A case of poor old Johnny yen? Update 8.7.01 Pleased To Meet You reached a disappointing number 11 in the album charts. Virgin Megastores in the UK are offering a free poster with all purchases of Pleased To Meet You whilst stocks last. V Shop / Our Price are offering Laid for £4.99 with CD purchases of the album. James are to play the Electron Festival in Athens, Greece on September 21. The international release dates for Pleased To Meet You have been confirmed as follows : 2 July : UK, Ireland (13 track limited edition) 2 July : Austria, Belgium, Germany, Holland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland 3 July : Japan 9 July : Denmark, Greece, New Zealand, Norway 12 July : Italy 13 July : South Africa 17 July : Canada 23 July : Australia All international versions are 11 track albums which exclude the tracks Gaudi and What Is It Good For? Buyers outside the UK can purchase the album online at Audiostreet and get the full UK version with the two missing tracks and bonus CD material. The single Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) was released on June 25th and reached number 22 in the Top 40, after peaking in the midweek charts. The single’s showing was enough to merit an appearance on Top of the Pops on Friday 6 July. James have announced a December UK arena tour with support from “special guests” Ben Folds December 2 – Brighton Centre December 4 – Newcastle Telewest Arena December 6 – Birmingham NEC December 7 – Manchester Arena December 9 – Glasgow SECC December 10 – Wembley Arena Update 20.6.01 James compilation album of material from their Sire and Factory days “Strange Dancing – The Early Years” is now scheduled for release on Monday 23rd July. The album artwork has finally been revealed – see the picture above. The “man” on the cover is a computer generated image from pictures of all seven band members – click here to read Tim’s explanation to Q of the concept behind the cover. Update 19.6.01 Last night James played an exclusive “Sessions” set for XFM at the Sound nightclub in Leicester Square. The 20 song set featured Alaskan Pipeline, Space, Stand, Senorita, Junkie, Waltzing Along, Sometimes, Just Like Fred Astaire, Pleased To Meet You, The Shining, Falling Down, I Know What I’m Here For, Destiny Calling, Fine, English Beefcake, Born of Frustration and Ring The Bells with an encore of What Is It Good For?, She’s A Star and Getting Away With It (All Messed Up). For a review of the gig, click here James have been confirmed to play the Benicassim Festival in Spain on Friday August 3rd, according to the festival’s site www.fiberfim.com Update 15.6.01 According to Siren CD, the two CD singles of the Getting Away With It single are as follows: CD1 : Getting Away With It, Make It Alright, So Swell (Ambient Version) CD2 : Getting Away With It, Stand, The Shining (Live At Ridge Farm) More details as I get it…… Update 12.6.01 The James official website is running a competition for five pairs of tickets to the XFM gig. The competition winners will be notified on Thursday 14th so don’t delay with your entry. Update 11.6.01 James will be appearing on CDUK this Saturday 16th June, starting at 11.30am on ITV. James are playing an exclusive gig for XFM at Sound in Leicester Square next Monday 18th June. Tickets can only be obtained by entering a competition at the XFM website. Mercury have just released a new press biography for the album, which takes a look back at James career from an interesting viewpoint. Click here to read it. Update 7.6.01 Mercury have updated their James site – www.jamesonline.co.uk – with a news section, audio streams of samples of English Beefcake, Pleased To Meet You and Fine plus a full version of the track Pleased To Meet You. There is the promise that all tracks will be available on stream before the album release. There is also the chance to watch the videos for Waltzing Along, Born of Frustration, Destiny Calling, an electronic Press Kit, Laid, Runaground, Sit Down, Say Something, Sometimes, She’s A Star and Tomorrow. There’s also a competition that you have to enter numerous times to get the various bits of the site and the navigation can be a bit tricky, but go and have a look, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Pleased To Meet You will also be released in Spain, Portugal and Greece on July 2nd, the same day as the UK. No other international releases have been confirmed. For those outside these countries, CD-WOW are selling the album for £8.99 including free worldwide delivery. Update 2.6.01 Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) has been added to Virgin Radio’s playlist and was also voted number 14 in this week’s listener charts at www.virginradio.co.uk where you can still vote for it. Update 30.5.01 The line-up for the Guildford Festival has now been confirmed. James headline on Saturday 4th August supported by Cast, Saw Doctors, Bert Jansch and Bernard Butler, Chumbawamba, The Chameleons and Bjorn Again. Pulp and Catatonia headline the other two nights. Tickets are now on sale. Click here for more details Update 29.5.01 The attached picture shows the promo one-track single on sale at E-bay for the forthcoming single Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) due for release on Monday 25th June. Radio airplay for the single is reported to be slow so far with no Radio 1 playlisting to date. The single artwork for Getting Away With It is rumoured to be based around the picture to the left taken from the official Mercury James site. The site www.jamesonline.co.uk now features a new front page and would appear to be being prepared for relaunch. A full album promo has appeared as well (and no, I don’t have a copy) James have announced a warm-up gig at the Grimsby Auditorium on Friday 6th July as a warm-up for their performance at T In The Park the following day and Liverpool Summer Pops Festival two days later. More details in the Tour Dates section. The gig replaces the show cancelled in November due to storm damage to the venue. The Warner Brothers compilation double album Strange Dancing – The Early Years covering James career with Factory and Sire Records between 1983 and 1988 is now scheduled for release on Monday 25 June, according to HMV. Update 24.5.01 CD-WOW will sell the new album Pleased To Meet You worldwide for £8.99 including postage and packing, including the US. Click here to go to their site Update 22.5.01 James are one of the bands with memorabilia featured in the new Manchester branch of the Doc Marten’s store in Manchester Triangle (formerly Corn Exchange) – also featured are The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Buzzcocks and Oasis. The exhibition runs until August. Update 21.5.01 Tim gave an interview at Later during the recording sessions for the show, to see and read it, click here Update 20.5.01 The new single Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) has been delayed by one week and will now be released on Monday 25th June, one week before the album Pleased To Meet You. Update 17.5.01 James played the three songs – Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Falling Down and Born of Frustration at Tuesday night’s recording of the Later With Jools program. The band were reportedly very pleased with the way the recording went. In the chatroom last night, Mike indicated that plans are afoot for festival dates in Greece, Mexico, the US and Canada and that there are still plans for a UK tour in December as reported exclusively here about a month ago. San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Toronto were mentioned in the conversation. Nothing has however been confirmed……. Mike also appeared to rule out any additional festival dates to those already announced, which are : July 7 T In The Park, July 8 Liverpool Kings Dock, August 4 Guildford Festival, August 5 Witnness Festival, Ireland and August 25 Nottingham Wollaton Park. For more details of these, see the tour dates section. Fans favourite track Scratchcard is also likely to appear as a b-side after being left off the album’s final tracklisting. Update 15.5.01 James rehearsed three tracks for tonight’s Later With Jools performance – new single Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Falling Down from the new album Pleased To Meet You and the classic 1992 hit Born of Frustration. CD-WOW now have Pleased To Meet You available on pre-order for £8.99 with shipping to the UK, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. I’m trying to find out if they ship to the US and save you paying exorbitant import prices. Click here to go to CD-WOW. Update 13.5.01 Another promo of the new album has appeared, this time a five-track promo in a red sleeve and featuring the as yet unheard track Alaskan Pipeline. For more on the new album, click here
Contrary to rumours on the official site messageboard Alaskan Pipeline is not Scratchcard which was played on the Autumn 2000 tour – it is a totally new track. Laid is being used in the trailers to promote the new movie American Pie 2 in the US. The song also appeared in the theatrical trailer for the original movie, although it didn’t actually appear in the movie. Update 11.5.01 The official James site now has an exclusive remix of the album track Fine by David Baynton-Power called Finer. Click here to go the site. Update 10.5.01 James will be playing the Witnness Festival at the Fairyhouse Racecourse near Dublin on Sunday August 5th, the day after their headlining performance at the Guildford Festival. See the live page for more details Update 6.5.01 James new studio album, due for release on July 2nd will be called Pleased To Meet You. Tracklisting is as follows:
Update 6.5.01 James are confirmed as guests on Jools Holland’s BBC2 Later programme to be recorded on Tuesday 15th May and transmitted at 11.30pm on Friday 18th May and repeated on Sunday 20th May. Update 27.4.01 James are headlining the Liverpool Echo’s Summer Pops festival at Liverpool’s Kings Dock on Sunday July 8th. The venue will apparently be all seated and in a marquee. Tickets are available from Liverpool Philharmonic, Piccadilly Box Office and other outlets, see the live page for more details Update 26.4.01 James are headlining the second night of the Guildford Festival on Saturday 4 August. Tickets are not yet on sale. More details can be found at www.guildford-live.co.uk. James are also to appear as special guests to Bryan Adams at City In The Park in Wollaston Park, Nottingham on Saturday August 25. More details at www.cityinthepark.com James first single from the new album will be entitled Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), which was formerly known as Daniel’s Saving Grace. The track will be released to UK radio stations on Monday 7 May. It will be released on Monday June 18th. Update 22.4.01 James have been confirmed as “Special Guests” at T in the Park on Saturday 7 July. The Sunday Mail has run an advert today with James on the bill. Rumour – I’ve had a tip-off that James are planning an arena tour for December. A nine-track untitled promo of tracks from the new album has appeared recently at Action Records and also on E-bay. The promo CD features Space, Falling Down, Saving Grace, Give It Away, Coffee And Toast, Fine, Gaudi, Junkie and The Shining. The present price (as at 8am, 22/4) is £31 at Ebay. Update 18.4.01 Michael Kulas has released his second solo album “Another Small Machine” in Canada on 28th March. The catalogue number is INTER001 and can be ordered from www.hmv.com. A special feature on the album will follow as soon as I have more details. According to Michael, there will be no promotion of the album due to his commitments with James. I would imagine that this will mean no UK release at the present time, if at all. Update 17.4.01 According to their playlist and the reports of James fans in the US, KCRW’s Morning Become Eclectic Show played a demo of a track called “Fine” from the new LP. More if I can find it out….. Update 11.4.01 According to the official James website, the new as yet untitled James album will be released in the UK on Monday 2 July. A single, also as yet undecided, will precede it on Monday 18th June. Update 31.3.01 HMV’s release schedules show a yet untitled James single due for release on June 4th. Update 16.3.01 James new album, provisionally entitled Space, was presented to the record company by Brian Eno on Wednesday evening. The proposed tracklisting for the album included the tracks included ‘Space’, ‘Falling Down’, ‘Saving Grace’, ‘Give It Away’, ‘Coffee And Toast’, ‘Fine’, ‘Gaudi’, ‘Junkie’ and ‘The Shining’. The album should contain 11 or 12 tracks and was described by Eno to the NME as “the best they’ve ever made.” For more, take a look at Oneofthethree’s special Space feature Update 7.3.01 According to the official James site, James have actually now finished their new album, contradicting what was posted yesterday. The album, containing 14 tracks, will be presented by Brian Eno to the record company at an unnamed London studio next Wednesday, 14 March. Following that, a decision will be made on the first single and a release schedule, as revealed here two days ago. Update 6.3.01 According to the band’s press office, there are no plans to release a single on April 16, as previously reported here and advertised in HMV. The album is now almost completed and the band have just finished a break following the completion of most of the sessions and mixing, leaving one track to finish in the studio over the course of this week – according to the official website. The press office added that the band will present the album to the record company, who have not heard the final work yet, over the next couple of weeks. Any first single from the album would not be released until May at the earliest and no song has been yet identified as the first single. The album should follow “in the summer”, probably late June. It will feature as expected most of the songs previewed on the autumn UK tour. No title has yet been decided on. Read more on the songs here. The Warner Brothers compilation “Strange Dancing – The Early Years” is now likely to be released in May or June. Legal clearance is presently being sought for some of the tracks that will appear on the double album. With Warner taking over the rights to the London/Factory catalogue, the album will include the five tracks from Jimone and James II EPs (Village Fire EP) and should also include the b-sides from the Sire singles (Chain Mail, So Many Ways, What For and Ya Ho) although the tracklisting has not yet been finalised. It is unlikely that there will be any unreleased material on the compilation as a search of the Sire/WEA archives did not pick up any new tracks. As previously reported, the band have finalised the tracklisting for the b-sides album which compromises of tracks from “early in their career” (which I take to mean How Was It For You? onwards) right through to the Millionaires b-sides. The tracklisting has yet to be presented to the record company and the release strategy (how it fits in with the new album) will be discussed at the aforementioned presentation, but it is still scheduled for this year. The “Remasters” series is still in the planning stage. Gold Mother, Seven, Laid and Whiplash will get the treatment with new sleeve notes and possibly extra tracks. Gold Mother may feature the two tracks deleted from the original release back in 1991 – Hang On and Crescendo. There are presently no confirmations of festival appearances – James had hoped to play Glastonbury, but it is probable that they will make an appearance at at least one of the summer festivals. Update 5.3.01 According to a release schedule in HMV Romford, James have a new, as yet untitled, single due for release on April 16. Update 23.2.01 Strange Dancing – The Early Years, the Sire/WEA compilation has been put back until April 16th. Tracklisting and artwork are being finalised as we speak and I should have more details for you at the back end of next week A tour of the UK is presently “under consideration” but nothing definite has been agreed as yet. It will be 2-3 weeks at the very least before there is any more news. News update on James ex-manager and mother of Tim’s son Ben : she is now running a management company in Brighton representing Polak and the comedian Rob Newman. Update 2.2.01 Tim Booth was online in the chatroom at the official James site – www.jamestheband.com on Wednesday night and gave the following information: – the album and a UK tour are pencilled in for May / June – the album is now being mixed in London – a US release and tour is planned for September. A new record label boss in the US is said to be more favourably inclined to James than the previous one. – Tim is presently teaching dance in Brighton and is about to jet off to the Canary Islands to teach dance there for 10 days – he was unaware of WEA’s plans for the “Strange Dancing” collection Update 30.1.01 The new James album, tentatively scheduled for release in April / May is presently being mixed at an unnamed London studio. Due to be released later in the year, the James b-side album is to be titled “Now That’s What I Call B-Sides Volume 1”. The album will contain 20 tracks including Van Gogh’s Dog, The Lake, Sunday Morning, China Girl and Gone Too Far. The full tracklisting will be confirmed soon. Larry Gott’s design career is taking off in a big way. One of his designs will be available in Conran stores in London, Paris and New York in the next couple of months and Habitat are currently prototyping one of his designs. More on Larry in this exclusive interview. Update 29.1.01 More information on the “Strange Dancing” album – this is scheduled for release on March 12 as a two-CD Anthology-type package. Tracklisting and catalogue numbers have not been finalised. I will hopefully get more information on this in the next day or so. Update 27.1.01 February’s edition of Record Collector features the following “Among the new millenium’s first reissues are ‘Strange Dancing – The Early Years’ covering the pre-fame noodlings of indie popsters James. This was in an article on Warners record label (which Sire is now part of) More as I get it…. Update 24.1.01 Tim Booth will be taking part in a live chat session on the official James website at 8pm UK time on Wednesday 31st January – www.jamestheband.com Update 4.1.01 James are appearing as special guests at the Villars 24 Heures Grand Prix benefit in Geneva, Switzerland on Saturday 13 January. The event raises funds for Formula Charity, an organization created by racing driver and long-term James fan Jacques Villeneuve and Craig Pollack, the director of British American Racing. James will perform a full electric set at the party surrounding the two-day event on Saturday night. The event however is press, sponsors and race entrants only according to the official James site. So if you turn up you may well not get it. No other shows are planned whilst the band are in Switzerland. | Jan 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fanzine: Black Hole Zine – Issue 1 | Fanzine | A Black Hole Zine was a James fanzine produced by Stephanie Harrison, Lucie Hodges, lshbel Whitehead and Merinne Whitton. Download this fanzine as a PDF. © copyright 2001 Black Hole Zine. | Jan 2001 | fanzine article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Exclusive Larry Gott Interview With One Of The Three | Article, Interview | Very special thanks to Larry for agreeing to do this – once a gent, always a gent. Larry, since leaving James in 1995, your activities have been subject to various rumours and speculation such as that you’d retired to Ireland to become a carpenter, that you were still writing material for the band and were simply taking a break, that you were teaching guitar in Manchester – what have you been doing? All of these have a basis in truth but none of them tell the true story. I worked on the Whiplash album up until the final mixes, both writing and playing. The last track I worked on was ‘She’s a Star’, which was a nice note to end on because its such a cracking track and because I’m particularly proud of the slide intro. Both during and after this time I spent a lot of time in my Irish house. It’s fairly remote, no TV, no phone. I used to go there to get away from the madness of James after endless touring. I thought of moving there, but, whilst good for relaxing, it couldn’t have sustained my new life fully. The carpenter thing was a reference to my desire to design and make furniture, which is what I intended to do either here or eventually in Ireland. To achieve this desire I decided I needed to study Art and Design in a formal context. This was something I had never done as I had left school at 14 and was self-taught on the guitar. This turned out to be the right path; the course and tutors were a great inspiration to me. They challenged my rather romantic idea of furniture making and made me look at the wider issue of design as an intellectual, creative, practical and philosophical discipline. It’s as a direct result of this that I have met with such success as a designer. I had considered the possibility of teaching as a supplement to my songwriting income if times got hard. Thanks to the success of the ‘Best Of’ album and remix of Sit Down that necessity never arose. How much of a culture shock was there going from touring and playing to four-figure crowds to going back into education? There were a couple of years between my last gig at Woodstock 2 (damn site more than 4 figures!) and entering education so the shock wasn’t that great. Education is diverse and stimulating, I kept my own timetable and pretty much pleased myself so it wasn’t like work in that respect. Were your fellow students aware of your past – there must have been one of two James fans on your course? Do you still get recognised when you are out and about in Manchester? It was important to me that people got to know me as just another student first so I kept my past hidden as best I could. When people know about the “ex pop star” bit they tend to prejudge you and you have to work hard to fit in. This was hard enough anyway, being 20 years older than most. Slowly the students became aware of it, some heard rumours, some recognised me or heard from friends. On the whole they were all pretty cool about it I’m glad to say. Surprisingly some didn’t find out until the very end. The James fans on the course respected my wish for this casual anonymity for which I am grateful. One, I have discovered, even defended me in a discussion on a James bulletin board, thanks Si. You use your first name James rather than Larry now in your design work. Was this a conscious decision in order to distance yourself from being known as “Larry Gott, ex-James”? Yes it was, I suppose it goes back to what I said earlier about peoples pre-conceptions. When I first exhibited my designs in London I wanted the work to stand alone, to be judged entirely on its own merits and that is exactly what happened. The design awards that I have won have been for the work, not because of my past. However when the press etc got to know of my past success as a result of the present success, then things got really interesting. The emphasis had changed from ‘pop star becomes designer’ to ‘award winning designer was a pop star’ the tense is important here. I realised that this was a newsworthy story that could help me promote my designs and myself as a designer. Has the band connection helped, been a hindrance or had no effect at all? The band connection obviously has an effect on how people view me and my work whether it has a positive or negative effect, who knows? As someone whose knowledge of furniture extends to assembling IKEA prepacks, could you describe your furniture designs to the uninitiated? It’s interesting that you should use IKEA as the benchmark for your knowledge of design and your making skills, it’s a good one to use. (Most people think that design is lawrence swelling bowel and his pals changing rooms). The fact that virtually anyone with a little patience and a few simple tools can build a piece of furniture is a testament to the designer’s skill within IKEA’s philosophy. Design is not simply a matter of producing a nice looking piece of furniture. It is more akin to a three-dimensional chess game where one small move or change affects the whole outcome. You chose a piece from IKEA because you liked it and it was cheap. It was cheap because you assembled it, yes, but it was also cheap because it came in a flatpack which takes up no room at all in a warehouse or on a truck or on a boat so the transport costs are low. Less transport means less pollution and road congestion. It will probably be made from chipboard which is a recycled waste product saving trees. All these things enrich our lives not just the nice piece of furniture we buy at the end. All of these elements are considered important to the designer who seeks out new ways, better ways of say, making a chair. By employing my skill,experience, improvisation, research, creativity and lateral thinking I hope to find interesting solutions to the problems of modern living. The pieces i have designed so far go some way to addressing this but I have a long way to go yet. It’s been reported that you have won several awards for your design work to date. What awards have you won and where have you exhibited and sold your designs to date? I have been given two major awards so far. The first was at an exhibition held in june 2000 at the Business Design Centre in Islington. It was called ‘New Designers’ which basically is the pick of the design graduates from that year. The award given was the ‘Allermuir Furniture for Manufacture Award’ The second was the ‘100% Design/Blueprint judges special award for creativity’. This was at the 100% Design Show held at Earls Court in October 2000. This is a major international furniture show and so the award was all the more unexpected as the competition consisted of the world’s leading designers and manufacturers. My design was made by me in the college workshop, so you can imagine my surprise when it was announced. Although I have exhibited my work around the country I haven’t really been concentrating on that or on selling my work to individuals. I prefer to sell my designs to manufacturers etc as I believe that good design should be available to all & not be the preserve of the rich. What are your plans for the future of your work and are we likely to see your designs available in the shops? At present I am working with a wire manufacturer who is producing some of my designs for sale in the Conran shops in London, Paris and New York, available in the next month or so. We are also trying to get the design into other stores worldwide and also into the cafe bar market. I want to see it on the streets of the world’s cities, but first Manchester. One of my other designs is being prototyped in Poland for Habitat and should be in their autumn/winter range. You were spotted handing a CDR to Saul at the Nynex gig aftershow in December 1999 – are you still writing material and playing locally around Manchester? Ah yes the cd I gave to Saul!! I’ve seen references to this before and laughed. Sorry to disappoint you all but it was just a bootleg copy of one of our mutual faves that he had lost. Just a cheapskate xmas pressie I’m afraid. With regard to playing locally I think that this is rather a loaded question. I am aware of the questions raised on the band website about this. I can’t fart without you lot getting to hear about it can I? Yes I have sat in at a handful of gigs with a kind of anarchic scratch/jam band who already had a regular gig in a cellar bar in Manchester. My first gigs since leaving James. The band doesn’t have a strict line-up or set songs, very much like early James in that respect. They are a combination of bass/drums/scratch dj /dijeridoo/human beat-box/haunting blues vox and myself and another on guitars and effects, a very eclectic mix of styles & musical cultures that the audience loved and, I have to admit, so did I. Are you still in regular contact with the other members of James? No not really. On the whole they are an ignorant set of bastards who don’t even invite me to gigs. We haven’t fallen out or anything it’s just that James have always been like that. Just ask Andy. You were acknowledged by Tim at the comeback gig at the Leadmill in January 1997. How did it feel that night watching the band you’d been at the heart of for 12 years playing songs that you’d written? Awful!! Very nervous and anxious about everything. Couldn’t really concentrate, all I could do was pick holes in it. I really felt for Adrian, I wouldn’t have liked Paul to have been in the audience when I first replaced him. I nearly died when Tim invited me onstage for the encore, as if the situation wasn’t Spinal Tap enough without that old showbiz crap. Then he asked me again because Adrian didn’t know the chords to Johnny Yen, poor lad, how embarrassing for both of us. And now? 2002 will be James 20th anniversary – if there are shows planned to celebrate this, would you consider rejoining the band on a one-off basis for these? I think that all of the ex members should do a gig together, there’s enough of us now. That would be far more interesting. When the history of rock music is being written in future, how would like the entry for James Lawrence Gott to read? Your comment “a red in an ocean of blue” would be nice although I think Mark Ribot already has that entry. | Jan 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NME News : Space, The Final Frontier | Article, Interview | BRIAN ENO has granted NME.COM an exclusive preview of the new JAMES album, provisionally entitled ‘SPACE’. Due out in the summer, the album, which ENO describes as “the best they’ve made”, will feature 11 or 12 tracks, many of which were recorded virtually live. “They’re all complete takes,” said Eno, “there’s very few repairs done, hardly any overdubs. The whole idea was to try to make an album in what is actually a rather old-fashioned way: start with the songs written and properly structured, play them live and record them. It’s very regressive in a way, saying, ‘Let’s go back to making a record that records a band at its peak.'” More subtle than previous outings, but no less tuneful, tracks previewed to NME.COM included ‘Space’, ‘Falling Down’, ‘Saving Grace’, ‘Give It Away’, ‘Coffee And Toast’, ‘Fine’, ‘Gaudi’, ‘Junkie’ and ‘The Shining’, many of which were previewed on James’ 2000 winter tour. The album, which had a previous working title of ‘We Want Our Money Back’, is expected to also feature a number of slower songs. “They’re like a band reborn somehow,” said Eno. “It’s like when people make their first album they’re full of enthusiasm and excitement and they know what they’re doing and it’s a pleasure. This was like making a first album. I think it’s the best record they’ve made. The standard is so high on every song. There’s nothing where you think it could’ve been better. We’ve got too many good songs, more good songs than we can put on the record.” Eno also gave the thumbs up to his ex-Roxy Music bandmates, as they prepare to reform the band without Eno. He said: “I’m jubilant. I think it’s fine that they’re doing it, but I don’t like the idea of doing something again. How can it not be compared to the past? It’s not my thing. I’m happy that they’re doing it and good for them, but it’s not my thing.” | Mar 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ananova News : James New Album Is Their Best Yet | Article, Interview | Brian Eno claims the new James album is the best the group has made. The producer says many of the tracks were recorded virtually live, with few overdubs. Space is due out in the summer, and will feature some of the songs previewed on the last James tour. Eno told NME.COM: “The whole idea was to try to make an album in what is actually a rather old-fashioned way – start with the songs written and properly structured, play them live and record them. “It’s very regressive in a way, saying, ‘Let’s go back to making a record that records a band at its peak’.” He added: “I think it’s the best record they’ve made. The standard is so high on every song. There’s nothing where you think it could’ve been better. We’ve got too many good songs, more good songs than we can put on the record.” | Mar 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Added To City In The Park Bill – City In The Park Website | Article, News | Daybrook House Promotions (DHP) is proud to announce James to play at this years City in the Park. They will be supporting international rock star Bryan Adams. The show will take place on Saturday 25th August Bank Holiday weekend (subject to license). They have joined the list of stars who have played Nottingham’s annual rock and pop festival. Last year saw pop stars All Saints and Ronan Keating performing to over 20,000 fans on the hottest day of the year and over 30,000 saw the Irish phenomenon The Corrs in 1999. Musical history is littered with bands who have briefly blazed brightly, to sink prematurely into depressing mediocrity as they repeat themselves with ever-diminishing effect. The path James have forged has taken the band in exactly the opposite direction. Endlessly inventive and always taking risks, James have never been satisfied with the easy option. Digging deep into the wellspring of their creativity they released last years Millionaires – the most adventurous and rewarding album of their roller-coaster 16 year career. The summer’s day long event organised by DHP will include several other high profile artists, as well as other attractions such as street theatre and funfairs to make this a day out for the whole family. Wollaton Park is the perfect setting for such an event, with the backdrop of the historical 16th century hall, within the grounds of its natural amphitheatre. The location makes for a breathtaking setting with perfect views from all areas of the ten-acre enclosure. Says Director Andy Copping “We are in discussions with some big name acts to join the bill, it will be an all-day event and we plan to make the entertainment second to none.” DHP who own several Nottingham venues, including the award winning Rock City, have staged numerous events at Wollaton Park. City in the Park is now on the maib calendar of UK summer festivals and will see many more fantastic acts brought to Nottingham over future years. This event is subject to license being granted. | Apr 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Mojo Interview With Brian Eno – Excerpt | Article, Interview | Mojo : On early recordings, production was largely a matter of microphone placement and room ambience. What are the factors you consider most important in recording today? Eno : Well, funnily enough, exactly those same factors! On the new James record, we decided to try something which nobody’s done for many years – which is, write all the songs, rehearse them, get the structures right, then play them live in front of people, and only then record them. When did you last hear of a band doing that, other than on their first album? I chose a brilliant old-school engineer, Gary Langan, who’s fabulous. The result was that we got a recording where you can just sit at the desk and push the faders up in a straight line, and it sounds fucking great! I suppose that’s the reason why we had all those new songs being played live on the last tour. The reasons bands generally don’t do it is because of bootlegging. Pink Floyd did that before Dark Side of the Moon, and it was bootlegged to the last. | Apr 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Keeping Up With James – Channel 4 Teletext | Article, News | James return on July 2 with new album Pleased To Meet You, produced by Brian Eno. It’s preceded a week earlier by the Getting Away With It single. The band previewed songs on last year’s theatre tour, recording the 13 tracks as a live band rather than their usual method of letting songs grow from studio jams. They play T In The Park in July, then with Bryan Adams and Johnathan Wilkes at Nottingham Woolaton on August 25. | May 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Later With Jools Interview | Article, Interview | Tim Booth was interviewed by Jools Holland during the recording session for Later. You can view the interview in Real Video at the Later website. But for those who don’t have that facility, here is a transcription. Can you talk about the inspiration behind the song Falling Down? The first song I think we’re now doing is Falling Down, which was a jam we did with Brian Eno, just messing around and we gave it to an engineer we had with us called KK, who’s a whizz and is going to be a very famous producer I think one day and he just chopped it up and none of us thought much about it for about a week and then he handed me a CD and it just sounded fantastic. He’d chopped up the jam and put it back together again. So I resang a vocal and eventually we presented it to the rest of the band and people were a bit slow to catch on that it was a really great song. But eventually it came through. That’s its history. Lyrically, I’m not sure what it’s about, it’s about some mad, strange, eccentric woman who’s coming into her power. “Baby’s on the lamb tonight”, on the lamb means on the run, prison jargon, “her sky’s all full of stars and love’s just something that always goes wrong, it looks and smokes like Eva Gardner” And it’s kind of this woman, you can see her, she’s almost like that, what’s that hitchhiker , the girl from Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, that kind of free spirit. That was the only idea I got when I was writing the lyrics. It kept on coming like that. Are there times when you express yourself better through music than in everyday life? I try and keep them as unconscious as possible. And often they’ll tell me lots of things, either about what’s just gone on or what’s to come. I wrote a very strange lyric, improvised a lyric a number of years ago, didn’t touch it, came back to it, improvised the second half of it, put the two pieces together and it was a song about a guy going off into the mountains and committing suicide in the snow, lying down in the snow, very clear and very peaceful decision on his part. And two days after we recorded and cut the record, the person I was living with, her mentor went and killed himself in that way. And they played the song at his funeral. And things like that happen quite a lot with lyrics I find. Tell us about singing (or not) for Joan Baez? I do a lot of workshops. I teach ecstastic dance, taking people into trance states without drugs and I was at a workshop of a woman who trained me, she’s kind of a New York shaman and Joan Baez was at the workshop. This was in California. It was about a ten day workshop and Gabrielle had said to me, the leader of the workshop, that she wanted me to sing some songs. I got a few people together to do some music and each day we’d come in and say “Do you want us to do it now?” but the workshop was really theraputic and intense and never suitable. People were actually in too deep powerful states to sing a song. And so this went on for a week, where we got ready to do a song and it never happened. The last day, the last morning of the workshop, the musicians had given up bringing their instruments in and Gabrielle told us this huge spiel honouring Joan Baez to the hundreds of people in the workshop saying “Before Dylan, before God, before Jesus, before Buddha, was Joan Baez” and she does this fantastic thing honouring her for what she did in the sixties and her protest movement and at the end of it she said “And the only gift I can think to offer you is that Tim will sing you a song” I kind of like died on the spot. It was like “oh my God” It was the worst kind of drumroll for a singer to take the stand that I’d ever had. I pulled it off, magnificently of course. What’s it like to play with other musicians (and the audience) so close to you, watching your every move? When there’s an audience, I sing to a group of people. I can’t remember the cameras and it’s not always best on camera. You know, you want to look a little bit more minimal, and cool and edgy. And where there’s people, it’s great, there’s people. And it’s just very different. But it’s like I tend to use people at our concerts. If I’m like getting insecure and having a bad gig, I’ll look for someone who’s really enjoying it and sing to them and they tend to give me the lift and save me from my voices, the critic voices that plague any creative person and that’s been a technique that I’ve used for years. | May 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ananova News | Article, News | James are set to release their 11th studio album, Pleased To Meet You, on July 2. It will be preceded by the single, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), on June 25. The band have also announced two live gigs in addition to their summer festival schedule. They will play the Grimsby Auditorium on July 6, and Liverpool King’s Dock on July 8. James will also appear at the T In The Park festival on Scotland on July 7, the Guildford Live festival on August 4, and as special guests of Bryan Adams at the City In The Park festival at Wollaton Park, Nottingham, on August 25. | May 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Spin Website News | Article, News | My excitement here is genuine. I promise you that, sweet reader. A super band, James, is finally going to release a new studio album, Pleased To Meet You, July 2 in the U.K. And yes, once again, Brian Eno is behind the boards. There is no U.S. release date planned at present. The band’s last album, Millionaires, never came out here either. Criminal. This new record will be the 11th studio album to come from these crazy Brits. According to all kinds of fun messages on the band’s website, James will first release a single from the record called “Getting Away with It (All Messed Up),” due out in the U.K. only on June 25. You can visit the band’s website to hear another new track, “Finer,” which is actually a remix of the new album track, “Fine” (mixed by James drummer Dave Baynton-Power). In related news, back in January there was talk of a forthcoming James b-sides album, which the site said was to be called Now That’s What I Call B-Sides Vol. 1. At the time, we were told that the details were nearly finalized and that the album was to come out later this year, and feature 20 tracks, including, “Gone Too Far,” “China Girl,” and “Van Gogh’s Dog.” We have heard nothing about it since. In other related news, James is scheduled to play a handful of U.K. festivals this summer, including T in the Park this July in Scotland, the Guildford Live festival in August in Nottingham, and the City in the Park festival in August, also in Nottingham (with Bryan Adams!). Here’s the tracklisting to Pleased To Meet You. 1. Space 2. Falling Down 3. English Beefcake 4. Junky 5. Pleased To Meet You 6. The Shining 7. Senorita 8. Gaudi 9. What Is It Good For 10. Give It Away 11. Fine 12. Getting Away With It 13. Alaskan Pipeline | May 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Later With Jools – 18th May 2001 | Session, Video Archive |
SetlistFalling Down / Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) / Born Of FrustrationDetails
SongsShare: | May 2001 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
VH1 Ray Cokes Show – June 2001 | Session, Video Archive |
SetlistGetting Away With It (All Messed Up) / Falling Down / She's A StarDetails
SongsShare: | Jun 2001 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Come Home – Boyztown Magazine | Article, News | If you’re a bit worried that the Mardi Gras weekend is already beginning to look rather more like a bankruptcy weekend, fear not, as you can always rely on POPSTARZ to give you a good deal, and at no time is that more true than this Friday (29 Jun), when the crew will be holding another of their infamous giveaways. This time around, the goodies will be to celebrate the launch of James’ new album, Pleased To Meet You, which we’ve heard is pretty top-quality stuff. There’ll be a massive giveaway, including T-shirts, CD albums, singles and posters, and all you have to do is make sure you run to the stage when you hear that all-time classic James track, ‘Laid’, thundering out of the speakers. It’s as simple as that. So, make sure you get there early, as you don’t want to miss it! | Jun 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth : Lost In Music – Q | Article, Interview | Life’s big moments all come with strings attached; tracks that beam you back in time whenever they’re replayed. We all have them. Even pop stars. This month : Tim Booth of James. Nick Cave – The Boatman’s Call I first heard this around the time of one relationship ending and it’s just one of those records that’s great for feeling sorry for yourself and maudlin. Then I fell in love with someone in LA and had a Trans-Atlantic relationship, with long periods of not being able to see each other, and it worked just as well then. I’ve recommended it to other brokenhearted people since and it seemed to work for them too. I used to feel Nick Cave very strongly. I used to have a lot of dreams about him. I wanted to know how to tap into that self-destructive aspect of performance, but without hurting myself. He hates James, at least he hated James ten years ago. He said he thought we were shit. But I’ve found his work to be magnificent. Brian Eno – Music For Airports Many orgasms have been had to that piece of music. I was about 21 when I discovered this – during University sex, when I was trying a lor of, erm, (laughs) different experiences. It has that oceanic feeling, of a much more … kind … of tantric sexuality. It wasn’t the usual boy method of Wham Bam thank you ma’am. Did it go down well? Unfallingly. Actually, Brian Eno is a very sexy man, I’ve yet to introduce him to a woman who hasn’t found him very beddable. He’s got the sexiest mind, very curious, playful. He’s also very sensual, very into dancing, movement and play. I went round with my partner a few weeks ago – we were all going out for dinner – and he put some music on and we were all just throwing ourselves round the room dancing. People don’t know that side of Brian. Val Doonican – Paddy McGinty’s Goat This was a song that I learned as a child. I remember my Mum making me perform it to my auntie and I was so shy I would hide behind the sofa and sing it from there. Do you know Paddy McGinty’s Goat? (sings) “Oh Patrick McGinty / An Irishman of note / Fell in for a fortune so he bought himself a goat / To be sure of goat’s milk I’m going to have my fill . But when he brought the nanny home he found it was a bill” Fantastic! Val Doonican’s a storyteller to rival Nick Cave. He just sings about goats instead of death. Patti Smith – Birdland (from 1975 album Horses) I cite this song as why I became a singer. When I was about 16 or 17 I was at boarding school and got a phone call from my Mum. She told me my Dad was going to hospital that night and may die, he was having some surgery and was in his 80s. I wanted to go home and she said, no I had to stay there and this place was like a prison camp. I went back to my room, but there was no way I was going to sleep cos I was pretty devastated. So I sneaked out down the corridor and made it to a study. I put on some headphones and there was a tape already in the tape recorder. I pressed play and it was just “His father died / Left him along on a New England farm” (opening lines of Birdland). Now I’d vaguely heard Patti Smith the week before and thought she was shit but this was completely different. Was it cathartic? It completely wiped me out. Talking Heads – Psycho Killer (from 1977 album Talking Heads : 77) We were hardly ever allowed to watch TV at school, we were supposed to be in our studies. I used to sneak the TV out. I’d watch (70’s rock show) Whistle Test and see The Pistols, The Clash, Talking Heads doing Psycho Killer. I arranged a school trip to see the (Clash’s) White Riot tour. It was at Wolverhampton Civic Hall. The bill was The Clash, Buzzcocks, Slits. We all had to go in uniform, but some punks wore that sort of sthing so we didn’t look complete dicks. All this became equated with rebellion and breaking the rules. So music became a very important thing to me, to do with individuality and independence. Birthday Party – King Ink (from 1981 album Prayers On Fire) This was from my student period. We were picking magic mushrooms, but we’d never tried them before. We were picking anything. There was this Jesus lookalike there so we asked him, Are these mushrooms? He threw them on the floor saying, Those’ll make you sick. So we said, How do you find them? And he said, Look and thou shalt see. And they were all around us. It was a real X-files moment. And then we went back and took the mushrooms and listened to King Ink by The Birthday Party. Which was a big mistake as it took us to a pretty dark place – and I would not advise anyone to copy us. | Jun 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Big Blue Spot Interview with Saul | Article, Interview | James are one of UK’s biggest bands with 12 albums under their belt and a new album, ‘Pleased To Meet You’, released later on this year. Luckily I was able to catch up with Saul Davies, guitarist and violinist with James, during a busy schedule. Interviewer: I understand you took a different approach to the creative process with the new album? Saul: Well, we spent some time getting songs together early last year, working at someone’s house near London. We went there, set up our all our gear, starting writing and working through the songs again and again as a band, and then took those out on tour in October when we had a batch of about 20-25 songs to choose from. It was a very conscious decision to actually go and play the songs live and then go into the studio, rather than come from the studio and then go gigging, trying to reproduce what was there. So we did it the other way round, which is much closer to how we did things in the early days. The bigger and more successful a band becomes, the more they become stuck in their ways and it becomes more difficult to do things like that, so we thought it was a bit of a result. It meant we were able to go into the studio and make the album more quickly, whilst keeping the sound quite raw and less messed around with. Interviewer: Was it slightly unnerving at the time, going out and gigging with songs that weren’t fully completed and established? Saul: No, not really. We deliberately picked venues to play that we knew were going to be relatively comfortable for us. I mean, there was an element of fear, obviously, just in remembering how to play them all and being able to play them in a way that was convincing. Partly we were deciding which songs to continue with and which ones to discard through how we felt about playing them on stage and how people reacted to them. So there was the right amount of fear flying around for us to get the right amount of tension into what we were doing. Interviewer: And how did you feel about the smaller venues? Did you prefer the intimacy? Saul: Well really it was deliberate, I mean there was no way we could go to some of the large arenas and do, say, 12 new songs, you just can’t do that in a venue of that size. Whereas in a 1500-seater venue you can do that, I mean people are right on top of you, they’re not going anywhere, and you hold their attention by proximity as much as anything. Interviewer: Do you still enjoy playing live? It must difficult sometimes retaining the same level of enthusiasm that you had initially as a band. Saul: No, it’s not difficult at all because we don’t tour as much as we used to, so when we do there’s a really big buzz which in itself is a huge motivational factor. Sometimes you might not feel in the mood to do a particular show, but the moment you walk on stage with ten-thousand people shouting at you that all gets blown away and leaves your head completely. By the end of a show you just feel incredible, like you’ve just slept with Michelle Pfieffer. Interviewer: Is the next tour lined up, or do you take a more relaxed approach to touring? Saul: Well we know what we’re doing this summer. We’re headlining Guildford Festival, which is becoming a really cool festival, we’re doing T In The Park, City In The Park in Nottingham, then playing some gigs in Athens, Mexico and America. We’re also planning an arena tour in Britain for December. Interviewer: On the new album you worked with Brian Eno again. Is he a perfectionist in the role of producer? Saul: He can be but he’s also very able to let go of things when either it’s not working or it’s not working as he would like it. So he’s by no means a person who assumes all control in the studio, he’s really good at creating a situation within which people can do what they want to do or have to do when it comes to expressing themselves. He is by far the most creative person I’ve ever met, and it’s there in everything that he does from when he gets up in the morning at 6 o’clock till when he goes to bed at 2. He’s like the Margaret Thatcher of pop, living on 4 hours sleep. Interviewer: But he doesn’t dominate the process? Saul: Well, day by day it changes, and it changes song to song; he will have a very clear idea on some songs what the tone should be and what he has to bring to the process to make that happen, but all the way through people are throwing in ideas and making suggestions, maybe changing the way they’re playing certain things, so it’s quite amorphous. But he very seldom on this record, if at all, had to resort to shouting at us to get our finger out. It was a very seamless experience. I spoke to him the other day, and I know that he’s also made this comment in passing in the press, that he regards the way we made this record almost as the perfect process in approaching what we set out to achieve; it was relatively quick, quite free in many ways, and everybody felt they had a role to play which was pertinent to what they could do, or wanted to do or had to do. It was very positive, and you can hear it on the record. Interviewer: Where was it recorded? Saul: Some of it was recorded in a house near Gatwick, a place called “House In The Woods”, which is own by 2 wonderful Dutch people. We set up in a room and started recording, and we kept some of those recordings because they seemed to us to have a freshness about them which once we’d played the songs live quite a lot we’d lost. There was a naïveté about them that we couldn’t quite regain. And then the main body of the work was done at Ridge Farm Studios, a large plush place near Gatwick. Interviewer: Speaking personally, which is your favourite song from the album? Saul: There’s a track called “Space” which opens the album which I think is pretty close to perfect as we got for a while, and then there’s a track called “Alaskan Pipeline” which finishes the album which is gorgeous. James’ Brand new single ‘Getting Away With It (All Messed Up)’, is due out 15.6.01, preceding their new album ‘Pleased to Meet You’, 2.7.01 | Jun 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Pleased To Meet You – Press Release | Article, Press Release | Single: ‘Getting Away With It (All Messed Up)’ RELEASE DATE – 25th JUNE 2001 Album: ‘Pleased To Meet You’ RELEASE DATE – 2ND JULY 2001 This summer sees the return of James. Following on from their stunning last album ‘Millionaires’, James release a brand new album on 2nd July. ‘Pleased To Meet You’ is the band’s 11th album release and it will be preceded by the single ‘Getting Away With It (All Messed Up)’, which is set for release on 25th June. James never take the easy option and are always keen to try new approaches, this is exemplified in the band’s approach to recording the album. ‘Pleased To Meet You’, whilst bearing all the hallmarks of a classic James record, shows why they have been relevant since their inception in the early 80’s. Re-united with the legendary Brian Eno as producer, the approach this time was a change from the band’s normal process. Late in 2000 James embarked on a low key tour which gave them a chance to road test new material. The band always felt that their songs developed once they had played them live and so they made the brave decision to unleash up to 10 new songs a night. Once the tour had finished James went straight into the studio with Eno and recorded the tracks as a full band. The results are amazing and see the band going from strength to strength, producing what could well be their best album… so far. The first release from the album is ‘Getting Away With It (All Messed Up)’. The single is the perfect introduction to the sound of the album. Honed into shape live and perfected in the studio, the song builds and builds into another timeless classic James single. Never ones to repeat a formula the rest of the album sees James pushing their sound on tracks such as opener ‘Space’ through the awesome ‘Falling Down’ to the closing beauty of ‘Alaskan Pipeline’. This is not just another James album… James recently recorded 3 tracks, including the new single, for BBC2’s flagship music show ‘Later with Jools Holland’ which was transmitted on Friday 18th May. On the same day, Radio 1’s lunchtime show had the exclusive first play of ‘Getting Away With It (All Messed Up)’. | Jun 2001 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Pleased To Meet You Band Biography | Article, Biography | Throughout the history of pop, certain performers have attained the status of “enigma”, attracting respect and fascination in equal measure; Robert Johnson, Nick Drake, The Residents, Phil Spector, these are the sphinxes of pop, men and women shrouded in mystery and the unmistakable scent of greatness. Moreover, the ultimate accolade rock can bestow is that certain individuals can be known the world over by a single name; Elvis, Madonna, Prince, Lulu, Sonia, names that will live forever in the pantheon of music. Such an individual is James. For two decades, this elusive, charismatic, engaging individual has been one of the great treasures of British music, sometimes taking centre stage, sometimes on the margins, now a bona fide star, now a cult passion but always innovating, always adapting, always wrong-footing those who think they’ve got him sussed. He has been, at different times, a folkie, a stadium rocker, a guitar hero, a torch singer, a pin-up, a recluse, a “lad”, a “hippie”, a “monk” and yet none of these labels quite fits. James new album Pleased To Meet You sees him reunited with producer Brian Eno for a record that may be his most personal to date. “I think this is the real me&ldots;whoever that is” he says, cryptically. Little is known of James early life. Reports are confused and conflicting, only adding to the mystique surrounding this singular artist. Accounts vary wildly; some say that he attended public school in Shropshire, other accounts deviate almost comically from this, suggesting that James was a teenage tearaway on the streets of Moss Side and the terraces of Maine Road, Manchester City’s home ground. It’s also said that he spent time in Hull, Preston, North Wales and even Canada during his formative years. James smiles knowingly at any enquires about his origins merely conceding, “I’ve been around” It was the punk and new wave explosion of the late 70s that proved a life-changing moment for the young James, alerting him to the potential of music as a force in his life. He took his inspiration from Patti Smith’s “Horses”, Joy Division and The Fall, who took the youth under their wing, arranging many early gigs for him as a support act and via the Manchester Musicians Collective. James early gigs were inspirational, seat of the pants affairs, when he would take the stage with only the vaguest notion of what he was about to do, relying heavily on improvisation and his primitive but developing multi-instrumental skills. James soon became the most talked about and unique voice in Manchester’s fertile music scene. He found himself courted by many labels, most ardently by Tony Wilson and the late Rob Gretton for Factory Records “I went along to see him at the State Ballroom in Liverpool supporting New Order and he was wonderful” In November 1983, James released his debut single Jimone on Factory Records. Acclaim was instantaneous and music press covers soon followed as did a second single, the classic Hymn From A Village. The next year, he set out on a tour of Ireland with his friends and supporters The Smiths. Always very much his own man, James rejected the trappings of the rock life and became an adherent of meditation. This only furthered his reputation as a maverick. Leaving Factory for US label Sire, a decision he now regrets, he recorded a debut album Stutter with the legendary Lenny Kaye, released in summer 1986. Travails with Sire, with whom his relationship had soured, meant that follow up Strip Mine was much delayed. This was a bad patch for James as he readily admits and he came close to retiring from the music business “There was a second when the future hung in the balance but I sort of came through it”. But times were bad for a while. Even Simply Red’s management couldn’t give him the necessary leg-up and for while he was reduced to offering himself as a human guinea pig in drug trials to pay the rent. Then his fortunes took a sudden upsurge as did Manchester’s. James sporadic live appearances in the city had always been celebratory events but as the 80s gave way to the 90s, James’ began to enjoy his second bite at pop success. His gigs became word of mouth “events”, the hottest tickets in town and he became associated, to his amusement, with the city’s burgeoning “Madchester” scene, and found such unlikely supporters as Sean Ryder and the Happy Mondays He had borrowed money from a friendly bank manager to finance a live album One Man Clapping in 1989 and followed this the next year with a new studio album for new label Fontana Gold Mother. It was to prove a turning point. Hits like Come Home and How Was It For You took James to another level of success where he could routinely fill the GMEX Arena. In March 1991, a single version of his live anthem Sit Down reached Number Two in the charts, held off only by Chesney Hawkes The One And Only. It was a momentous phase in the artist’s career culminating in a huge outdoor gig at Alton Towers and the album Seven. The reasons for the title remain unclear, though James has hinted that it may be a reference to his multi-faceted personality. On the continent and in the States, some critics and audiences had wrongly assumed that James was a band rather than a person, something that James himself has had to politely but firmly put right in thousands of interviews. James turned his back on the epic stadium-rock sound of Seven for a warmly organic acoustic sound arrived at during the Autumn 1992 tour with Neil Young. This was showcased on the brilliant 1993 collaboration with Brian Eno, Laid which spawned college hits in the States and rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, and an experimental companion piece Wah Wah. Financial difficulties in the mid-90s almost forced retirement on James again but, ever the survivor, he bounced back. A Greatest Hits album in 1998 uncovered a huge wave of residual popular support and shot to Number One. The following year, he came back with the album Millionaires which many pundits thought was his best album to date. They may reconsider in the wake of Pleased To Meet You. From the ethereal funk of Space to the anthemic swell of English Beefcake to the glacial beauty of Alaskan Pipeline, this is an artist at the height of his powers. The sound is distinctly contemporary but James trademarks are all in evidence; impassioned vocals, taut, muscular rhythms, melancholy and joy in equal measure and the unique atmospheric washes of Eno’s production. Eno himself found James to be an artist “reborn somehow. It’s like when people make their first album they’re full of enthusiasm and excitement and they know what they’re doing and it’s a pleasure. This was like making a first album. I think it’s the best record he’s made. The standard is so high on every song. There’s nothing where you think it could’ve been better. We’ve got too many good songs, more good songs than we can put on the record.. It’s very regressive in a way, saying, ‘Let’s go back to making a record that records an artist at his peak.'” Unravelling James’ character is as difficult as teasing out his origins. He is the true chameleon of rock, making Bowie look more staid and more set in his ways than a Daily Mail editorial. At times, he can appear almost monastically serious, sipping thoughtfully on an Aqua Libra on the back of the tour bus. At other times, it’s hard to reconcile this with the party animal who once set off a rocket launcher from a hotel window on a US tour. He has a twenty year olds enthusiasm for his chosen field coupled with the maturity and wisdom of some twice that age. He is fickle in his allegiances, claiming to support Manchester City, Leeds Utd and Barcelona. But this flighty nature also works to his advantage; he was proficient, at the last count, on drums, bass, guitar, violin, cello, keyboards, accordion and vocals. He is also a really great dancer. After many years of covering his tracks, sidestepping and double-talking, he seems ready to step frankly into the spotlight. He lights up a cigarette – though I was sure he didn’t smoke – and sighs “I think for a long time I’ve been leading a double life&ldots;at least. I think it’s time people finally met the real me” | Jun 2001 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Pleased To Meet You Cover Story – Q | Article, News |
June 2001, © Q Magazine Q : Who The Hell Is This Guy? A : His name’s James and, bizarrely, he’s a composite of the band of the same name “This is about finding a way to represent our collective spirit,” says James frontman Tim Booth, discussing the band’s curious new figurehead. “It deals with the old, Are you James questions, which, yeah, you still get – I still get called James. I suppose people in Travis get called Travis too.” In order to solve these public image problems, James have cooked up an entirely new public face. Last month, each of the seven members posed for separate portraits, which were subsequently morphed together, with the aid of noted fashion photographer Phil Poynter, design company Blue Source and a good deal of computerised jiggery pokery, in order to create an entirely new person. He’s been christened James, obviously, and will appear on the sleeve of the forthcoming album, Pleased To Meet You. Although he doesn’t play any instruments, he’s so life-like that there’s already speculation about his “personality”. “I think he looks like he might have a knife in his back pocket.” exclaims Booth. “He has a good edge to him. He’s not idealised.” As for intra-band arguments over whose bits were used where – did they take place? “Of course,” acknowledges Booth. “He’s got my knob, and it’s fantastic, obviously.” | Jun 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Become James – Dotmusic | Article, News | James have morphed all seven of their faces together to form the decidedly bizarre image that will adorn their new album, dotmusic can exclusively reveal. The picture, above, is a computer-generated photograph, taking certain characteristics from the members of the band. The ‘person’ created is called ‘James’. The decision has been prompted by the constant misunderstanding surrounding the band’s name, as a spokeswoman for the band explained to us today. It’s all come about because the band/Tim are always asked if they are James. They decided to create an eighth member that they would call James and use that image for the album cover. The band’s new album, entitled ‘Pleased To Meet You’, is released next month and has once again been produced by electro-ambient pioneer and general legend Brian Eno. Eno explained how the album had come together: It’s like when people make their first album, they’re full of enthusiasm and excitement and they know what they’re doing and it’s a pleasure. This was like making a first album. | Jun 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Compuserve Chat With Tim | Article, Interview | Carl: Welcome to our on-line chat with Tim Booth from James. This conference is moderated, which means that you can’t join in with the chat. However you can ask Tim questions at any time during the event. To ask a question look towards the top of the chat window, then click the ‘ASK QUESTION’ button, type in your question and click ASK; your question will then be entered into the queue. Welcome, Tim, to CompuServe’s Music Forum. We have got lots of questions from the members today. I’ll kick off by asking: are you an Internet fan? Tim Booth: Sounds like ‘are you a football fan?’. Yes, I am as long as it remains fairly free and I’m not referring to the dark side. I mean as long as the corporations don’t strangle it. Carl: Do you know how the new single, ‘Getting Away With It’, has been doing this week? Tim Booth: Not as badly as we thought it might, but I don’t want to count my chickens as the big bad fox might come and sweep them away. Carl: You also have a new album out called ‘Pleased To Meet You’; can you tell us what we can expect? Tim Booth: No, I haven’t heard it yet! Fishknives Girl: Tim, is it true you started off in the band as the dancer? Can you please teach me how to dance? Tim Booth: Yes I can in virtual time. I actually teach classes of ecstatic dance in Brighton and around the country. Last year we took a group to the Canary Islands with the Dolphin Connection Experience. Jimmy: What is Alaskan Pipeline about, Tim? Tim Booth: I think it’s about a boy’s relationship with his mother. It was one of those songs I wrote fairly unconsciously, which for me is always the best way. So I’m never totally sure what the songs are about, because for me it feels like I’m tuning in. James O’Carroll: How important was Manchester as a city in the formation of James? Tim Booth: I don’t know what we’d be like if you took away Manchester, but you can see in the string of bands that come from that city that there must be something in the water. We definitely got our bloody-minded arrogance from that place – believing in ourselves to ridiculous heights that you can see is in all of the other Manchester bands. Derkaryian: Hello from another countryman displaced in the States. Will you be touring the States ’roundabout September 1, so we can put back a couple while watching the big game? Tim Booth: Not sure… think we may be in the States in September – in Mexico and New York, but nothing is confirmed yet. Sandstorm: Tim, can you play ‘Scratchcard’ at the Liverpool gig? Tim Booth: No – ‘Scratchcard’ turned into something else and will probably end up as a B-side. You must have seen it at Christmas when we were road-testing the new songs. Some of them never left the pitstop! ‘Scratchcard’ was one of them. Kazzy: It’s clear from those present that there is an international mix of people here in UK Music; have you ever recorded in a language other than English and how difficult do you think you would find learning the lyrics? Tim Booth: Great idea. No, I’ve only muttered a few words in French and Spanish. Once, when we were improvising a song, I put on a fake German accent and pretended I was singing in German because I hadn’t got any lyrics. It worked well in Liverpool. Guest 23: On tour last year, the current single was called ‘Saving Grace’; why did you change the name? Tim Booth: Record company pressure – they figured that ‘you lot’ would never buy the single if we called it that. I love ‘Saving Grace’, but it does connect it too strongly to the film of the same name. Guest 55: Hi Tim, just booked my tickets for the Brighton concert – can’t wait. Just wanted to ask: I was at Exeter concert last year and there were some real ****holes in the crowd – how do you cope when people are like that? Tim Booth: We’re not playing Brighton, you’ve been ripped off! I tend to like arseholes – they make a concert more interesting. On the Lollapalooza tour, I would walk off stage into the audience to hecklers and sing to them. They would invariably offer me drugs or crack up in front of the cameras projecting the scene onto the screen. Fishknives Girl: What are you talking about in “Fishknives”? Tim Booth: Someone else asked me about this rare, obscure B-side already today. Is it you again?! I can hardly remember the lyrics. I think it was about finding out who you are and not just repeating the past that your ancestors relate to, but that sounds like pretentious selective memory. Matt: Why is James having such trouble releasing material in the US when they are the greatest band around? Tim Booth: Let’s say that after the ‘Laid’ album did very well in the States a new head of the American company took over, who hated James and that was it really. There’s a longer story but I might get sued! Hippy Home: What made you opt for Manchester to study drama? Tim Booth: I’d seen Iggy Pop and Patti Smith play at the Manchester Apollo and they burned a big crater in my soul and made me believe the place to be hip and happening. I chose drama simply because I didn’t know who I was, so learning how to control when you were acting and when you were being real, seemed like a good idea at the time. Guest 60: Tim, when are James next performing in Wales or nearest please? Tim Booth: I don’t know – I’d have to get a map and I’m lousy on our own tour dates. I just turn up on the day and sing. Guest 51: Do you have any plans for any more acting or solo work? Is there anybody that you would particularly like to work with, outside of James? Tim Booth: I’d love to work with Angelo again and I do have other plans, but plans are best kept secret. Acting, again, something is in the Alaskan Pipeline, but I’m counting chickens again. Guest 23: I saw you live in the late/mid 80s at Liverpool Poly, supported by the Happy Mondays. Who is the best band you have been supported by, and whom you have supported? Tim Booth: The band of Holy Joy, Radiohead and the Mondays were probably my favourite three. Neil Young was our favourite support slot across the States, playing in beautiful outdoor arenas overlooking canyons and deserts, accompanied by the sound of crickets and chicadas. Guest 29: Tim, what music are you listening to at the moment and what type of music do your dance groups dance to? Tim Booth: Right now I’m listening to the beat of the air conditioning and a projector. I love the new Grandaddy CD, Nick Cave, Travis, Coldplay. To dance to we use very different music, only rarely overlapping my own personal taste, because it’s chosen to help people go into trance states. Ben: Hi Tim! I’m not James, but i’m ‘Pleased to Meet You’. 🙂 During recent interviews, we have seen you angry at many people in the industry; how confident are you that you will find another record deal after this? Tim Booth: Heh heh. Pretty confident. I’m no longer so angry as I tend to expect the worst and I’m seldom disappointed. Laurie: First off that’s the record company’s loss!!! Do you consider yourself a spiritual person? Tim Booth: Spiritual person? That’s a loaded term. It usually infers some superiority, but I’m interested in spirit (which is another loaded term.) There’s very little language you can use to talk about this that hasn’t been bastardised by somebody’s church. Guest 53: Hi, Tim. Just wondering, can you play any musical instruments (off-stage, I mean)? Tim Booth: The kazoo. Fishknives Girl: Is December a good month for you? Everytime I have seen you live, it’s that month! Oh and do you think you can play ‘Greenpeace’ live more often please? Tim Booth: We seem to have got into this annual habit of touring in December and it’s working out great – an antidote to winter blues. Don’t think we know how to play Greenpeace anymore. We’ve moved on. Guest 34: What is ‘Senorita’ about Tim? And do you ever think you will ever have a number 1 single? I think it’s a travesty that you haven’t had one!! Tim Booth: I doubt whether we’ll ever have a number 1 – we don’t know how to write singles – it’s just a complete fluke. We write thirty songs and then ask somebody to tell us if any of them are singles as we haven’t got a clue. ‘Senorita’ is about a man who sees a woman, who he knows will be very dangerous for him. But he’s instantly shot in the wherewithals and is unable to resist. A common male malay! Guest 7: Why are you only doing a few gigs this winter? When will you be playing the smaller venues again like Southampton and Poole? Tim Booth: We like big gigs! They seem, ironically enough, more intimate to us. There are seven of us and we don’t fit on small stages. We play better when we can hear each other with great clarity and therefore on the bigger stages we play better. Derkaryian: Any plans for Southern California, or shall I plan to travel? Tim Booth: The Californian festival fell through. Pack a bag! Guest 33: Tim, any advice for someone that is too shy to dance? Tim Booth: Put a bag over your head then you won’t know anyone is looking. Just joking! Come to one of my classes, there’s a room full of shy dancers. Guest 55: Any news on who will be supporting you in this year’s tour? I loved Shea Seger last year. Tim Booth: Not confirmed yet. Only :-P): Tim, this is your number one Belfast fan – who would you be pleased to meet? Tim Booth: Nelson Mandela, Muhammed Ali, James Joyce, but he’s dead. Guest 51: Do you read much? What type of literature do you enjoy? Who are your favourite authors? Tim Booth: Doris Lessing is probably one of my favourites. I wrote ‘Sit Down’ as a thank you to her and Patti Smith. I also enjoy Robert Anton Wilson. Janet Fitch has written a fabulous book called White Oleander – too many to mention. Guest 53: Do you remember the ‘So Many Ways’ video? You looked so happy and carefree, falling over repeatedly. Anyway, why was the new single released alongside the new Hear’Say single? Surely that’s a bit stupid. Tim Booth: I don’t feel we’re in competition. We exist in completely separate realms and ne’er the twain shall meet. Guest 50: Are you planning to release any live video material over the coming months? The ‘Come Home’ Video is fantastic… pure class. Tim Booth: Thank you. That was one of the highlights of our musical life getting a great magical live concert on video. I would love to do another one. Guest 23: Have you ever written songs for other people/bands? If so, how well did they do? Tim Booth: As in a race, did they come first or second? I haven’t really. I’ve done a few incognito, which have to remain so for legal reasons, i.e. they may have come out on other record labels that I’m not allowed to write for! And they were very fine, thank you very much. Carl: Unfortunately that is all we have time for tonight. Thanks, Tim, for coming in and thanks to all the Members and guests for joining us. Tim would you like to say anything to the room? Tim Booth: We must meet like this more often. You’re much more attractive in virtual space than you are in reality. Much love, Tim Guest 18: Wow! Guest 35: That was so much fun!! Guest 62: Booth & the fellas neeeeeeeeeeeed to come to the US, Boston needs James! | Jun 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Liverpool Echo Interview | Article, Interview | FOR a decade now, fans of the band James have been happily singing along to their biggest hit – the live anthem Sit Down. But it was in Liverpool that the fans first established the now long-standing tradition of taking over from the band and doing singing duties all by themselves. Lead singer Tim Booth says: “It was during a gig at the Royal Court, and basically the guitar broke. We had a choice of stopping the song, or slowing it down, which is what we did. “We were quiet, so the crowd took over – they all chanted along and did it for us, and we picked it up with them. It happens at every gig now, but that was the first time. It was an amazingly emotional moment for all of us!” It was the start of a long-standing relationship with Liverpool, where James have a massive fanbase. It will continue this summer when they play the Summer Pops on Sunday, July 8. Tim says: “We have had some amazing times in Liverpool. The Royal Court has long been one of our favourite venues … even though it was the first time we ever saw rats while we were doing a soundcheck…” The Summer Pops gig follows up on previous dates at the Court and at L2, both of which quickly sold out. The band have also done sell-out stadium tours at venues like the Manchester Arena and at Wembley. But despite their popularity, they are still having problems getting played on the radio, with their upcoming single, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) and album, Pleased To Meet You. “It is very odd, and unpleasant,” says Tim, “even though we can sell out these massive venues, getting airplay is difficult. We simply don’t fit into a niche. We are not a young, hip band. “There seems to be a real stranglehold on the radio at the moment with manipulated, manufactured bands. “In fact, I think the record companies are trying to do away altogether with bands – we’re too expensive, we argue, and we want our creative freedom. I think we’re being phased out!” James are pretty much the opposite of a manufactured band. Their origins are in the 80s Manchester scene, where they initially signed to Factory, then Sire, and eventually Fontana. Loosely speaking, they were part of the whole Madchester era that also spawned the likes of The Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses – but, years on, they are still going, and still producing new material instead of cashing in on nostalgia. Their biggest hit came with Sit Down, but they also enjoyed great success with songs like Come Home and She’s A Star. Their Greatest Hits album in 1998 went straight to number one. Their popularity has endured throughout. Tim says: “I think our fans have stayed so loyal because of our live show. Some bands just go on to stage and do it, go through the motions, but with us it is still a celebration – every show is different, a new experience, and the fans keep coming back to enjoy the experience with us.” The new album was recorded with legendary producer Brian Eno in the space of a few weeks – but the songs were road-tested on fans on a low-key tour. Tim says: “It was like making our first album. We got the songs, we toured and played them to the fans, then worked on them some more. By the time we were ready to record, it didn’t take long. We are incredibly proud of it. “We think this is one of our best albums yet. We are on top of the world.” | Jun 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ananova News | Article, News | James are marking the release of their new album by unveiling a mystery eighth member of the band. Photographs of each band member were taken and morphed together to create a character called James. They came up with the idea after getting fed up with people repeatedly asking which one of them was called James. The band have created an entire history to the morphed James. They say he is an elusive, charismatic, engaging individual. Accounts about his background vary, with some saying he attended public school in Shropshire and others claiming he grew up in Moss Side. James got into the music industry after getting involved in the punk scene and was inspired by Patti Smith, Joy Division and The Fall. The band say he supports Manchester City, Leeds United and Barcelona. James teamed up with producer Brian Eno to make their new album Pleased To Meet You. It is released on July 2. | Jun 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Lycos Feature | Article, Interview | Kate Garratt spoke to James about the new single ‘Getting Away with It’, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer… Tim Booth, lead singer of James and not in fact James as one might suppose, is a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Actually, I’d go one further – he’s a connoisseur. When he reveals he’s a Buffy buff, he looks at me knowingly and says, ‘I’m talking Series 2 and 3, of course’. Of course. Personally I thought Series 4 a terrible let-down. By why, you may well ask, was I discussing American soaps with the man known for his ‘reedily angelic’ voice (Paul Davies)? James are poised for the release a new single, ‘Getting away with it’ on the 25th June. The song itself is razor sharp and aggressively delivered beneath Tim’s smoother tones of passionate resignation. The subject of Vampire Slayers came up when I asked Tim about some of the lines in the song. He attributes the line, ‘Are you aching for the blade?’ to the fact that ‘I was watching too much Buffy’. The guitars on the single are brilliant, gritty. Saul Davies, guitarist/violinist with James and the man responsible for the guitars agrees. ‘The guitars are gritty. The song originated in a demo session we did prior to recording the album, and that comes across’. The process of demoing songs, trying them out live and rehearsing a lot was important to the band when they wrote the album, ‘Pleased to meet you’, which is set for release on the 2nd July. They decided to ‘bash out songs’ live to perfect them. Tim states that the actual recording process that followed only took three or four weeks. The band believe they’ve got the process of making an album right. Bands’ first albums are often better, Saul reckons, ‘because the record is the end product of performance’. Such is ‘Pleased to meet you’. It promises all the energy of a first album. The six performances James have got lined up for the summer should be impressive. It’s not as if they’re out of practise at playing live… Dates can be found here. Live dates in December pretty much stitch the year up. James are feeling ‘very strong, very cavalry charge’ right now, says Tim. Their new music reflects this. The single and the album are strong, with a sonic movement that takes the listener on like the rush of horses hooves. If there are sentimental moments, they are quashed by ‘twisted punchlines’ (Tim). James, good album. No punchline. | Jun 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Band biography from James’ Pleased To Meet You | Biography, Era: Pleased To Meet You | Throughout the history of pop, certain performers have attained the status of “enigma”, attracting respect and fascination in equal measure; Robert Johnson, Nick Drake, The Residents, Phil Spector, these are the sphinxes of pop, men and women shrouded in mystery and the unmistakable scent of greatness. Moreover, the ultimate accolade rock can bestow is that certain individuals can be known the world over by a single name; Elvis, Madonna, Prince, Lulu, Sonia, names that will live forever in the pantheon of music. Such an individual is James. For two decades, this elusive, charismatic, engaging individual has been one of the great treasures of British music, sometimes taking centre stage, sometimes on the margins, now a bona fide star, now a cult passion but always innovating, always adapting, always wrong-footing those who think they’ve got him sussed. He has been, at different times, a folkie, a stadium rocker, a guitar hero, a torch singer, a pin-up, a recluse, a “lad”, a “hippie”, a “monk” and yet none of these labels quite fits. James new album Pleased To Meet You sees him reunited with producer Brian Eno for a record that may be his most personal to date. “I think this is the real me…whoever that is” he says, cryptically. Little is known of James early life. Reports are confused and conflicting, only adding to the mystique surrounding this singular artist. Accounts vary wildly; some say that he attended public school in Shropshire, other accounts deviate almost comically from this, suggesting that James was a teenage tearaway on the streets of Moss Side and the terraces of Maine Road, Manchester City’s home ground. It’s also said that he spent time in Hull, Preston, North Wales and even Canada during his formative years. James smiles knowingly at any enquires about his origins merely conceding, “I’ve been around” It was the punk and new wave explosion of the late 70s that proved a life-changing moment for the young James, alerting him to the potential of music as a force in his life. He took his inspiration from Patti Smith’s “Horses”, Joy Division and The Fall, who took the youth under their wing, arranging many early gigs for him as a support act and via the Manchester Musicians Collective. James early gigs were inspirational seat-of-the-pants affairs, when he would take the stage with only the vaguest notion of what he was about to do, relying heavily on improvisation and his primitive but developing multi-instrumental skills. James soon became the most talked about and unique voice in Manchester’s fertile music scene. He found himself courted by many labels, most ardently by Tony Wilson and the late Rob Gretton for Factory Records “I went along to see him at the State Ballroom in Liverpool supporting New Order and he was wonderful” In November 1983, James released his debut single Jimone on Factory Records. Acclaim was instantaneous and music press covers soon followed as did a second single, the classic Hymn From A Village. The next year, he set out on a tour of Ireland with his friends and supporters The Smiths. Always very much his own man, James rejected the trappings of the rock life and became an adherent of meditation. This only furthered his reputation as a maverick. Leaving Factory for US label Sire, a decision he now regrets, he recorded a debut album Stutter with the legendary Lenny Kaye, released in summer 1986. Travails with Sire, with whom his relationship had soured, meant that follow up Strip Mine was much delayed. This was a bad patch for James as he readily admits and he came close to retiring from the music business “There was a second when the future hung in the balance but I sort of came through it”. But times were bad for a while. Even Simply Red’s management couldn’t give him the necessary leg-up and for while he was reduced to offering himself as a human guinea pig in drug trials to pay the rent. Then his fortunes took a sudden upsurge as did Manchester’s. James sporadic live appearances in the city had always been celebratory events but as the 80s gave way to the 90s, James’ began to enjoy his second bite at pop success. His gigs became word of mouth “events”, the hottest tickets in town and he became associated, to his amusement, with the city’s burgeoning “Madchester” scene, and found such unlikely supporters as Sean Ryder and the Happy Mondays He had borrowed money from a friendly bank manager to finance a live album One Man Clapping in 1989 and followed this the next year with a new studio album for new label Fontana Gold Mother. It was to prove a turning point. Hits like Come Home and How Was It For You took James to another level of success where he could routinely fill the GMEX Arena. In March 1991, a single version of his live anthem Sit Down reached Number Two in the charts, held off only by Chesney Hawkes The One And Only. It was a momentous phase in the artist’s career culminating in a huge outdoor gig at Alton Towers and the album Seven. The reasons for the title remain unclear, though James has hinted that it may be a reference to his multi-faceted personality. On the continent and in the States, some critics and audiences had wrongly assumed that James was a band rather than a person, something that James himself has had to politely but firmly put right in thousands of interviews. James turned his back on the epic stadium-rock sound of Seven for a warmly organic acoustic sound arrived at during the Autumn 1992 tour with Neil Young. This was showcased on the brilliant 1993 collaboration with Brian Eno, Laid which spawned college hits in the States and rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, and an experimental companion piece Wah Wah. Financial difficulties in the mid-90s almost forced retirement on James again but, ever the survivor, he bounced back. A Greatest Hits album in 1998 uncovered a huge wave of residual popular support and shot to Number One. The following year, he came back with the album Millionaires which many pundits thought was his best album to date. They may reconsider in the wake of Pleased To Meet You. From the ethereal funk of Space to the anthemic swell of English Beefcake to the glacial beauty of Alaskan Pipeline, this is an artist at the height of his powers. The sound is distinctly contemporary but James trademarks are all in evidence; impassioned vocals, taut, muscular rhythms, melancholy and joy in equal measure and the unique atmospheric washes of Eno’s production. Eno himself found James to be an artist “reborn somehow. It’s like when people make their first album they’re full of enthusiasm and excitement and they know what they’re doing and it’s a pleasure. This was like making a first album. I think it’s the best record he’s made. The standard is so high on every song. There’s nothing where you think it could’ve been better. We’ve got too many good songs, more good songs than we can put on the record.. It’s very regressive in a way, saying, ‘Let’s go back to making a record that records an artist at his peak.'” Unravelling James’ character is as difficult as teasing out his origins. He is the true chameleon of rock, making Bowie look more staid and more set in his ways than a Daily Mail editorial. At times, he can appear almost monastically serious, sipping thoughtfully on an Aqua Libra on the back of the tour bus. At other times, it’s hard to reconcile this with the party animal who once set off a rocket launcher from a hotel window on a US tour. He has a twenty year olds enthusiasm for his chosen field coupled with the maturity and wisdom of some twice that age. He is fickle in his allegiances, claiming to support Manchester City, Leeds Utd and Barcelona. But this flighty nature also works to his advantage; he was proficient, at the last count, on drums, bass, guitar, violin, cello, keyboards, accordion and vocals. He is also a really great dancer. After many years of covering his tracks, sidestepping and double-talking, he seems ready to step frankly into the spotlight. He lights up a cigarette – though I was sure he didn’t smoke – and sighs “I think for a long time I’ve been leading a double life…at least. I think it’s time people finally met the real me.” | Jun 2001 | biography era-pleased-to-meet-you article era | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Interview – Jamestheband.com – June 2001 | Article, Interview | This interview was originally published on the James official site Jamestheband.com that was lost when the band split in 2001 Int: So Tim, it is the 19th of June and in a few days time the first single from the new James album will be released. How are you feeling at this moment and is the world ready for you?
Tim: I don’t think the world has ever been ready for James. We have perpetually felt out of time and out of step with everybody. For example when we did the Jools Holland show recently and Dom Jolly was singing our praises. He was talking to Saul afterwards and he said his favorite video of ours was “Here’s A Mirror With Your Name On”.
Int: Right.
Tim: Have you seen that video?
Int: I haven’t seen that video.
Tim: I mean it is probably one of the worst videos KNOWN TO MAN. Well, Saul said to Dom Jolly, you’re joking, that is just the most atrocious video. And Dom Jolly said, the thing is when you see that video you know that the band who made it are not being manipulated, that no one can make a video that bad and be manufactured by a record company. He loved it from that point of view, that it was so bizarrely weird. Nothing happens in that video. ONLY JAMES COULD MAKE A VIDEO LIKE THAT. I have to choose my favorite 3 James videos for VH1 next week. There arn’t 3!
Int: That is very relevant today obviously isn’t it? With manufactured pop in general with Hear’say, Boyzone, even back to The Spice Girls. They are all bands that are put together. Something so alien to James.
Tim: I addressed that in “Destiny Calling”. Every band has to compromise, with the media or record company. So at some level you do have to play the game. So Destiny calling wasn’t just me laughing at The Spice Girls or whatever, it was also acknowledging the part of us that feel like puppets sometimes. When we played the gig last night, I was singing, “Some fat cats playing roulette with lives, this game is fixed it’s all a lie.”
I mean, you can see, that in this period of music, the media and the radio stations, and the managers who are creating these bands, have a stranglehold that they have never had before. We have seen some really bad periods and some really good periods in music, but each time the bad periods come, they get a little tighter.
The industry gets tighter and tighter and the people working in it have to watch out for their jobs more and more, and the constant search for celebrity has become IT. The complete driving influence in culture right now. The thinking seems to be… If you sell bucketloads you are great—regardless of the quality.
For instance when you see The Spice Girls on the cover of Q. Q is one of the only last surviving music magazines. When you see The Spice Girls get the front cover you think IT’S OVER. It has got nothing to do with music.
It felt like in the past you could make a great album, like say the Velvets. You could make a great album, not sell and ten years later get rediscovered. Because GENIUS SHINES. But now it feels like even that kind of loophole, of the great album being rediscovered, is really tight, really hard to get round.
Int: So you think manufactured pop is almost strangling music?
Tim: I think this is the worst time. In terms of James, the single is about to be released and the single, barring Virgin and Xfm., has not really been played on the radio in this country. It’s interesting you know for the first seven years we didn’t get played on daytime radio—EVER. EVER. They only eventually played us because they had to. We built up a such a live following which has always been our support and our strength. They had to, I mean we were selling out G-MEX two nights running and causing a big stir. Now we are in this place where we are still selling out those huge gigs, we are still headlining Guildford. Even though we are a big band it’s like the media is not interested, it’s, you know, we are not a brand new, young, cute, sexy new band. Young things discovered on television. It’s really kind of strange for us to suddenly face this reality. It’s our midlife crisis!
Int: So, it’s like what you are saying is in a cycle sort of way, initially a lot of people had to take notice of you because people were out there listening to you and supporting you and those people are still there and if they still continue to support you then people will have to take notice.
Tim: Yeah, I think these things always swing around again. I think it is just a matter of us hanging around until the next period of real music turns up.
Int: So what do you think is the best way to address that situation?
Tim: There is not much we can do. I mean in a way this is the best I can do which is by telling our audience what’s going on. They can pick this up on the internet and then hopefully tell their friends what is happening. If they want to support us, and value what we are doing, buy the album and single in the first week of release. Get that album to no 1 and leave some people with egg on their faces. However, instead of fighting it, it might just be the time to listen to another piece of my own advice. “Tell us when our time’s up. Show us how to die well. Show us how to let it all go .” James are in a transition period because this is our last record with our record company, and we will either resign or sign with another company. Transition periods are always dangerous, important moments, you know, like in a relay race. You musn’t drop the baton.
Int: You still feel like you have got a hold of the baton.
Tim: (Laughter) Well I had it a minute ago! I think the next few weeks will tell us. All we can do is what we have done. Make great music which we believe in. God knows if there is going to be a James around in a years time. Seven to sixteen year olds at the moment are dictating popular culture. I don’t buy singles, and I doubt many James fans buy singles and well, that is a problem for us.
Int: Is that one of the reasons, behind this single, the fact that it is on two formats and you have actually put a lot of thought and take alot of pride in your B-sides?
Tim: James fans know this. Barring a couple of lost years, we have always tried to put a lot into our B-sides. We love B-sides. The B-sides “Greatest Hits record” (laughs), which I believe, is still coming out this year. I spent weeks compiling. We are so proud of that stuff. With B-sides the pressure is off. You get to experiment. You get to try out things and some of my favourite songs are there. Certainly “The Lake” is one of my favourite James songs. “Egoiste” is a great song. You know there’s loads of them. And so we always try and do that because, yes, if you want to have some kind of hit single, you have to do a couple of formats. There is no choice. That is the competitiveness of it. So at least you try and make it good value. Something worth collecting. My favorite song of all time is the Patti Smith B-side “Hey Joe”.
Int: Have you kept up your standards with the new B-sides?
Tim: Definately. We had recorded too many great songs for “Pleased to meet you”. Lengthy discussions took place determining which songs got left off. The song “Stand” will now only appear as a B-side yet many people believe it was the best of the new songs we played live last year. “So Swell” is probably one of my best vocals yet that only made it as a B-side.
Int: Last year was a massive creative time for the band. With the tour, airing new material and then you went into the studio with Brian Eno to record the new album and ended up recording a lot of new tracks. Can you tell us a little bit about how you put together this album?
Tim: In The last couple of years we have sorted out a lot of our problems. Communication problems. All the problems aired in the biography, we have resolved. We did it. There is hope for humanity! It was amazing, we had some very fierce meetings with each other and broke through.
Int: That was often the spark that kept the band going, wasn’t it, the tension within the band that created this wonderful music. So what has been the driving force behind this album?
Tim: I think the creative tension was healthy to a point and then it welled over into something more dangerous. The balance went sometime before Millionaires. On this record and in the last two years we just suddenly got our joy back again. And getting the songs together, taking them out live last year and challenging ourselves again. Like we used to do. Working with Brian was the best time we have ever had. I mean in terms of joy, and creativity. We were really flying making this record .
Int: Brian, himself, has been quoted as saying that was one of the best projects he ever worked on.
Tim: Yes, completely. For us too.
Int: For a man of that stature to say that is pretty impressive. Why would he say that?
Tim: Sexual favours! Well it was fast intense work. He’d just taken a year completing the U2 C.D. Ours took about 5 weeks of 18 hour days. They are mainly live takes. Some songs are the original demos pre-Brian. Others we worked on alot. We were all hugely impressed by our own ability!
Int: Lyrical themes?
Tim: I’ve only realised this since doing press. There is an underlying theme; of frustration at being tied to habits, addictions, impulses that we can’t control. Different characters expressing their particular loops. Like the guy in “Senorita”, led by his balls, to chase a dangerous woman. Or the guy in “English Beefcake” who is always the one to finish relationships and who is weary of causing such pain. “Junkie” is directly about the day to day addictions that we all have.
Int: You really study people don’t you?
Tim: I’m endlessly facinated by what makes people tick. I’m trained in one therapy and I teach movement and voice work. Taking people into altered states without using drugs. I’m passionate about the need for this. Later in the year I’m going to do some workshops in different cities. In February me and my partner are teaching together in the Canary Islands, combining the work with trips to watch dolphins. We did it last year. I think it’s called the dolphin connection experience.
So the answer to your question is yes. What made us and how can we change are the questions that really drive me on and you can find them somewhere in most of the lyrics I’ve ever written.
Int: How do the rest of the band react to your intrests? I read in the past it’s caused quite a lot of conflict.
Tim: Well they hate getting tarred with the same brush which is pretty understandable. I guess they think I’m pretty flakey. However I really think we have reached a point where (said in a fake American accent) we have come to accept our differences.
Int: I have never met seven so diverse characters that work together as a whole. I mean you really wouldn’t pair any of you up with each other.
Tim: I think so, I mean there is a weird dynamic imbalance in James that is highly unusual. It’s remarkable that we have lasted so long. It is a pretty good marriage of opposites.
Int: It is a pretty good marriage! You must have a very good counselor. What is his name?
Tim: ..Brian Eno.
(Laughter from both)
Int: Is there anything else you wanted to mention to me?
Tim: Brian Eno is our RELATE counselor.
Int: Does he sit you down and have you doing certain things?
Tim: Yes, darling, but that is not something we can talk about.
Int: Anything you want to say to website fans?
Tim: Maybe one reference. Having read on one of the websites showing me how I use references to water and the sea in my lyrics. I will promise, after this record, I will try to keep the sea out of my lyrics. Though, in mitigation, I do live in Brighton, and we are 87% water. I will endeavor to struggle to keep liquids out of my lyrics in future.
Int: What’s special for you about this record?
Tim: It feels like the first time since LAID we have got back to songs which are more exploratory, which take more risks, that aren’t just verse-chorus, verse-chorus. That go on journeys. Journey songs I call them.
Int: Yes, I mean there are tracks on the album, for example, when I first heard “Falling Down” you wouldn’t know it was a James record.
Tim: This wonderful genius engineer, KK, had a good hand in that one, which took it away from what we would normally sound like. He did the same for “Fine”. But I am thinking more of songs like “Space”, “English Beefcake”, songs with unusual structures.
Int: Are you an angry band?
Tim: No, not anymore. No, we’re an awkward band.
Int: I will vouch for that.
Tim: We’re awkward because we don’t fit in and we don’t want to fit in. We’re always judging how far we can play the game to the point where we might lose our soul. It’s like, always going, now look how much compromise can we make before you actually feel like you have really just lost everything. That assessment we do all the time so like, record companies and the media have always seemed to have a problem with that. Also, obviously our biggest drawback is lack of image or lack of consistent image. It always felt to us like we should be all about content, not image. You know, Neil Young was one of our gurus and he is hardly a snappy dresser. I’m repeating myself with some of these statements. Most of our old fans have heard all this before. But it still holds true.
Int: So you follow that line of sort of being out of step with the current. Like the Velvet Underground.
Tim: I think so.
Int: So in twenty years time the album will be a classic and selling by the bucket loads.
Tim: Um, well, if you can still find it in twenty years time. I mean, technology is moving so fast you don’t know what is going to happen. You know, we are in a very exciting period of change, where everything is exponentially accelerating and you can tell we are heading for something. Hopefully not a crash.
Int: To quote a famous song.
Tim: Yeah well, a mildly famous song.
Int: The live James experience is really something special and you can’t really put it into words what happens…
Tim: We will be back in December. We intend to do some really big dates and we look forward to seeing you at those concerts. We know what kind of celebration. We know what kind of party we create. We’re continuously blown away by the communication, between us and our audience. I mean I don’t think anyone else has that live relationship.
Int: I don’t think anyone gets near it. It just happens, I mean you can be third on a festival bill or headlining Wembley Arena and it’s incredible the atmosphere you generate.
Tim: Thank you.
Int: You are a band of survivors. I mean how many other British bands have been going for this length of time?
Tim: We feel honoured at the moment when bands like Travis and Coldplay and people like Don Jolly say such nice things about us in public.
Int: Like at the weekend, when Wheatus were strumming away “Laid” outside your dressing room at CD:UK.
Tim: I know, we feel respected by our peers right now. And we still have this amazing audience out there, who support us and who are there for us. As I have said we are hoping that they know this record is out. The feedback from the record company is that it’s not being played in Glasgow, it’s not being played in Manchester and it’s not being played in Liverpool. That is our concern here, we are finding it hard to reach the people who really love James. Hopefully this information will reach them through the internet and the web sites.
Int: It’s the way forward I suppose.
Tim: It is the way forward. I think eventually it would be great just to put music out on the website. That would be it, you know and not have to interface with any media at all. We have always had a weird relationship with the media. I have always been afraid of being famous . I have been lucky.I have kept relatively anonomyous. And with our audience, when people come up and talk they can really lift our spirit. Just by saying thanks. But when you see the projections put on people, famous people. When you see the celebrity mania in HELLO and OK and all those other magazines. It is just the weirdest thing. It just seems like another planet. It is a very strange thing to be worshipped. Especially when you meet the people who are the object of worship and you find that they are incredibly fucked up, insecure individuals who are usually deeply in need of a good hug.
Int: It’s kind of refreshing to hear someone talk about that obviously because that’s not what drives you, it’s not the cult of celebrity you want to be part of.
Tim: Celebrity has always terrified me. I mean the first lyrics i wrote are about selling your soul to the record company. That was the lyric for “What’s The World”. Losing your soul, let alone your religion.
Int: But you have never have lost your souls, have you?
Tim: I lost mine years ago. I left it on the number 6 bus in Chorlton.
| Jun 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Hartlepool Mail Story on the Album Cover | Article, News | Rock band James have spent a fortune on new photographic techniques for the cover of their new album Pleased To Meet You. All the members of the band were photographed and then a digital process was used to blend together all their features to give the image that they used as the album cover. The lads in the office recognised the face immediately – it’s our crime reporter Simon Walton. How Simon became the bloke on the album cover is not clear but we certainly know James could have saved a fortune by simply using this picture of young Walton. The effect would have been the same. If anyone has bought the new James album and would like Simon to autograph the cover they should give him a ring. | Jul 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
German Mercury Site Biography | Article, Biography | In der Geschichte der Pop-Musik gibt es immer wieder Acts, die eine ganz besondere Stellung bekleiden. Und hierzu zählt ohne Zweifel die britische Formation James, die sich im Laufe der vergangenen zwei Dekaden eine großartige Reputation erspielt hat. Angefangen hatte alles 1983. Gerade hatten James ihre ersten Aufnahmen eingespielt, als sie von keinem Geringeren als Morrissey als “die beste Band der Welt” bezeichnet wurden – und folgerichtig mit den Smiths auf Tour gingen. Schon bald darauf hatte James Kult-Status erreicht und 1986 erschien schließlich das Debüt-Album “Stutter”, gefolgt von dem ’88er Follow-up “Strip Mine”, mit dem James endgültig ihren gitarrengetriebenen Sound und Frontman Tim als provokanten Songschreiber und äußerst gefühlvollen Sänger etablierten. Nach diversen Unstimmigkeiten mit ihrem Label kamen James 1989 aus ihrem Deal raus – und waren danach beinah “mittellos”. “Nach sieben Jahren standen wir nun da, lebten auf Arbeitslosen-Level, und wurden im Radio auch nicht mehr gespielt”, erinnert sich Tim. Viele Bands hätten hier wahrscheinlich aufgegeben – doch James sind aus einem anderen Holz geschnitzt. Sie versuchten sich als menschliche Versuchskaninchen für medizinische Tests in einem örtlichen Krankenhaus – und von dem Geld, was sie dafür bekamen, produzierten sie das Livealbum “One Man Clapping” auf ihrem eigenen Label. Ihr damaliger Distributor jedoch befand das Material als “Musik für Minoritäten”, ohne kommerzielle Chancen – und schickte sie wieder fort. Es folgten personelle Umbildungen innerhalb der Formation – Saul Davies, Mark Hunter (Keyboards) und David Baynton-Power (Drums) kamen hinzu – James nahmen ein weiteres Album auf und schließlich kam “Gold Mother” auf den Markt. Ein Album, das endlich den Durchbruch markieren sollte, auf den sie schon so lange gewartet hatten: 350.000 Exemplare konnten sie allein im UK verkaufen, und der Song “Sit Down” entwickelte sich zu einer der bemerkenswertesten Hymnen der ’90er – und James wurden – zusammen mit Bands wie den Stone Roses und den Happy Mondays – plötzlich als die “Retter” der Britischen Rock Szene gehandelt… 1992 folgte das überragende Album “Seven” und übernahm die #2-Position in den Charts. Ein Jahr später kam es dann zu der äußerst innovativen Zusammenarbeit mit dem legendären Brian Eno, der dann auch das nächste Album “Laid” produzierte – inklusive der fast experimentellen Auskopplung “Wah Wah”. Mit “Laid” schafften James dann auch in den USA eine fetten Erfolg, wo das Album 600.000 Exemplare verkaufen konnte. Und das zu einer Zeit, in der andere britische Bands extreme Schwierigkeiten hatten, sich in dem “Grunge-fixierten” Markt durchzusetzen… Dann, auf dem vorläufigen Höhepunkt ihrer Laufbahn, kam es aber doch fast dazu, dass die Band auseinanderbrach. Denn eines Tages im Jahr 1995 beschloss Gitarrist Larry Gott – zusammen mit Tim und Bassist Jim Glennie längstes Bandmitglied – die Band zu verlassen. Auch Manager Martine wollte gehen und die Band hatte fette Steuerschulden auszugleichen. Von diesen Geschehnissen reichlich geschockt, nahmen sich James erstmal eine Auszeit – die sich dann allerdings auf drei Jahre ausdehnte und eigentlich schon wie das Ende aussah. Booth nahm zusammen mit Angelo Badalamenti ein Soloalbum auf, und eigentlich glaubte niemand mehr daran, jemals wieder etwas von James zu hören… Doch es sollte sich erneut bewahrheiten, dass Pech und unglückliche Umstände die Band immer wieder zu neuen Bestleistungen treibt. So auch diesmal: Mit Adrian Oxaal wurde ein neuer Gitarrist gefunden und schließlich gaben James mit dem sehr melodischen Album “Whiplash” (1997) wieder ein Lebenszeichen von sich. Ein Lebenszeichen, das mit Gold ausgezeichnet wurde! Und der Band ihren größten Singlehit mit “She’s A Star” bescherte. Das dann 1998 veröffentlichte Album “Best Of James” war dann nur noch ein weiterer Beweis dafür, dass James definitiv zurück waren: “Best Of James” wurde das erste #1-Album der Band und wurde mit Doppel-Platin ausgezeichnet. In erneuter und bewährter Zusammenarbeit mit Brian Eno (Roxy Music, Talking Heads, U2) als Producer entstand dann das Album “Millionaires”, ein weiteres künstlerisch-kreatives Highlight mit fantastischen Songs voller Licht und Schatten. Jetzt endlich kommt das brandneue James-Album “Pleased To Meet You” – nach “Laid” und “Millionaires” das dritte Album, das unter den Fittichen von Brian Eno entstand. Und Songs wie beispielsweise das funkige “Space”, das fast hymnenhafte “English Beefcake”, die großartige erste UK-Single “Getting Away With It (All Messed Up)” oder aber das kühl-schöne “Alaskan Pipeline” zeigen allerfeinste Songwriting-Kultur mit Liebe zum Detail. Belegen, dass “Pleased To Meet You” ohne Zweifel das sowohl persönlichste als auch das beste James-Werk ist, das bisher erschienen ist. Der Sound ist zeitgemäß, trägt aber unmissverständlich die Handschrift der Band – aussagekräftig, aufregend, melodiös, mit leidenschaftlichen Vocals, kompakten Songs, treibenden Rhythmen, voller Melancholie, Freude, Ernsthaftigkeit und Optimismus. Und das alles filigran abgerundet durch die einzigartige, von Brian Eno erschaffene Atmosphäre. Mit “Pleased To Meet You” belegen James einmal mehr das, was sie so besonders macht: Sie schreiben schlicht großartige Songs. | Jul 2001 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
English Beefcake – Behind The Scenes Of Pleased To Meet You | Official Video, Video Archive |
DetailsBehind the scenes look at the recording of Pleased To Meet You with a performance of English Beefcake | Jul 2001 | official-video video-archive article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) – CDUK – July 2001 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsGetting Away With It (All Messed Up) performed live on CD UK | Jul 2001 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) – BBC1 Top Of The Pops – July 2001 | Session, Video Archive |
DetailsJames perform Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) live on Top Of The Pops | Jul 2001 | session video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
T In The Park – 7th July 2001 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistSpace / Senorita / Waltzing Along / Sometimes / Laid / English Beefcake / Sit Down / Out To Get You / Junkie / Fine / Destiny Calling / Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) / Ring The BellsSupportn/aMore Information & ReviewsNo Reviews. Video | Jul 2001 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dotmusic Webchat With Tim 12.7.01 | Article, Interview | Welcome to the dotmusic chat with James dotmusic: We’re going to be kicking off in about 10 minutes. Tim is just round the corner but stuck in traffic! dotmusic: Tim in the house so we’ll get started! Dave from Stevenage, Herts asks: what was the last record u bought? Tim: The last record I bought … Grandaddy – the Software Slump or Nick Cave’s last one oneofthethree from brentwood, uk asks: what song are you most proud and most embarrassed about? Tim: Today I’m most proud of a song called “Fine” because it’s so effortless and playful which is hard for such a serious man such as myself to achieve Tim: Least proud of … ooh … thats hard … we even love our b sides and put a lot of work in them, but there was an awful b side a few years ago called Far Away that was pompous and overblown ste from london asks: whats the latest with the B-sides album Tim? and will the track ‘Your Story’ be on it????? Tim: Yeah there is a plan for a b-side album in September Tim: I’ve done the running order we have the sleeve ready jofrog16 from Connecticut, USA asks: How much time to you spend with other bandmembers when you aren’t touring or recording? Tim: As little as possible! (joke) Tim: It depends because we’re all scattered geographically across the globe Tim: We get on now better than we ever have done which is to say we’re like some dysfunctional family Jeff from Arlington, Virginia asks: Any plans to come to the States? Tim: yeah I wanna go for my holidays in August. I love California Tim: Possibly in September there is a plan to do a festival in New York but I know better than to trust things written in pencil Sean from Ireland asks: How do you put up with the constant negative press? Tim: I don’t read it Tim: I don’t read any press Dave from Stevenage, Herts asks: hey Tim, what kind of set can we expect on the next tour? more old material or new material? i love Stutter and wanna hear it live again! Tim: I don’t know, we write the set list every night and it really varies .. on who wins the punch up Tim: Theres usually a healthy balance of our more musical explorative side with the good old sing along of James favourites justhipper from manchester asks: What is the thing which has had the most influence on James’ recent work? Tim: No I think your strongest influences hit you when you’re younger. We’ve really been following our own thread for the last seven or eight years Tim: I’m sure we have unconscious influences, but by definition we are unconscious of them donald louise from isle of man asks: tim, you always go into the crowd, whats your worst experience of doing this? Tim: The time I really stopped jumping into the crowd was at brixton Academy when I ended up halfway down the hall, and the people under me collapsed and the crowds on the sides pushed in Tim: I was worried about the death rate Tim: On the Loloopaloosa (sp?!) tour where we were playing to abusive Korn fans, I for some reason would find myself 100 yards into the audience singing into their faces and that went on nearly every night for nine weeks Tim: I never got punched once! Jim from Nottingham asks: What will you do if james call it a day ? Tim: Which day Tim: Act right , teach ecstatic dance workshops and model crotchless swimwear tom from hull asks: Tim I think Falling Down is a great song. How did you achieve the sound? Tim: Fluke. A wonderful engineer called KK who I dragged into the sessions took the jam that became Falling Down and messed around with it for a few days Tim: so fluke on our part not on his Tim: The vocal is smashed through a tuning program set at extreme levels – I believe the drum is heavily phased (if you wanna go technical on me) BoSoxMick from Boston Massachusetts asks: Hey Tim, any word on a possible Booth & The Bad Angel Part II? Tim: No … my record company buried part 1 and I couldn’t find the grave Tim: … But “Pleased to meet you” is our last record under contract, so maybe … Sasha from London asks: If your entire record collection was stolen, which 3 albums would you go out and buy immediately? Tim: Patty Smith’s Horses Tim: Phew … hard question …. Tim: Velvet Underground Live …. Tim: .. (the one with the woman’s knickers on the front cover – I dunno what its called) Tim: What’s that Nick Cave’s love songs album called? I’ve forgotten it’s name Tim: But I’d give you a different answer each day you asked justhipper from manchester asks: what role do you feel james fill in the current music scene? Tim: We are the stool pigeons… um … I think you’ll find a lot of bands who cite us as a major influence and we feel a lot of respect from our peers like Coldplay, Travis, Wheatus Tim: But I don’t think we fit into the media at all at present Sarahjayne from Oxon, UK asks: which current artists do you admire, and why? Tim: Nick Cave, Eminem for their lyrics, Mercury Rev for their emotional drive, Grandaddy for their “can’t be arsed yet are brilliant” attitude Al Brown from Bristol asks: Thinking of the Eno connection: Do you like U2? Tim: U2 have managed to balance massive success with experiment and genuine creativity so even when they fuck up you’ve got to give them a break because hardly anyone is attempting to do what they succeed at Tim: They’re a shining light Dave from Stevenage, Herts asks: Do u think your live sound sounds better in an arena or club? i thought wembley had an amazing sound to it on the last arena tour. Tim: We’re better in Arenas. We need a big stage cos there’s seven of us. We play our best gigs when we can hear clarity Tim: And when we play the big gigs, we can afford to hire the best sound and lighting men in the business Stuart from Oldham asks: What question do you get tired of answering and why? Tim: That one Phil from W. Yorks asks: Do you notice the crowd when you’re on stage and do you recognise the regulars? Tim: It will be hard to miss them … I think we’re one of the few bands who love to interreact with their audience … I go into the audience cos I like breaking down the barrier between stage and auditorium Tim: Our lighting man has light on the audience that he can turn up often at our request during the gig, otherwise as a musician you can feel quite cut off Tim: I know quite a lot of the regulars Tim: … Including Dave Brown who is always centre front. When he is not there I often ask his friends during the gig where he is Gail from Tyne & Wear asks: Which song from the new album are you most looking forward to performing live in the upcoming shows, and which is your all time live favorite. Tim: out of every CD of say 13 songs there will only be probably 7 or 8 that will be really great live, and the last few concerts have shown us which they are – “Space” is killer, “pleased to Meet You”, “English Beefcake” surprisingly and there’s a few more Tim: The last gig we did in Liverpool was amazing so we reckon we are played in now donald louise from isle of man asks: tim if you wrote your autobiography, what would the first line be? Tim: er … oneofthethree from brentwood asks: How would like James to be remembered in twenty years time? Tim: As an unwelcome boil on the face of corporate pop Deano from Wolverhampton asks: Do you think Pleased to Meet You is your best work yet? Tim: I say that every time, this time it’s more true than it’s been for a long time. When you just finish a record you’re full of enthusiasm and self belief, I can truly say that apart from Laid this was the most enjoyable record to create Tim: … and I believe that like OK Computer it takes a while to get into justhipper from manchester asks: Have the band considered releasing music via the internet when their contract with Mercury finishes? Tim: Yes but it seems that the technology isn’t quite ready. Another two years should see it through Dale from Birmingham asks: Which band member do you like best Tim: Sarah Michelle Gella Tim: … (in my dreams) dotmusic: just time for a few more questions.. Dave from Stevenage, Herts asks: how much longer will u continue to dance like a madman onstage?! Tim: When I’ve trashed a few more zimmer frames. I teach ecstatic movement workshops and therefore I have to set a good example Emma Pickering from Cheshire uk asks: A couple of years ago you did some acting in Bolton, is this an angle you are going to persue? Tim: Yes … that was to test me out. And I won a medal for it. I’ve been waiting for the right TV part to come up and a decent script … stay tuned … lyndsay from fuerteventura asks: whats the most rewarding thing you get from your job Tim: When quite aggressive macho men sing along to lyrics concerning insecurity and self doubt. When people come and tell you there private stories of how certain songs have affected their lives. When you look off stage and see thousands of people unified in Tim: … pleasure. When you stumble upon a verse and chorus that make you cry or laugh. When you get to work with Brian Eno. Dallas Casey from Ogen, Utah asks: Is the power of love worth the pain of loss? Tim: mmm … mmmm … stumped … Tim: Always … I believe in Hollywood Tim: Loss seems to be an intricate part of love in that to love deeper you have to let go of so many things especially the expectation of a return for your investment Tim: Loss is also a natural part of being a human being in that it all gets stripped away as we approach death Tom from Barton asks: Where do James go next? Tim: To the bathroom …… to the bookies ….. to court …… no idea …. Tim: Fuck you very much for your kind questions. I’m going off to see Wheatus play. May your eyes be opened by the wonderful …. Tim xxx Thanks dotmusic: Tim wanted everyone who asked about the dance workshop to know he’ll will be teaching in the Canary Islands in Feb for a week for more information log on to the dolphin connection experience in about two weeks time. Also they’ll be a workshop in October at Manchester Drama Poly to be announced in a few weeks time (don’t ring yet.) | Jul 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Cover Story for James’ Pleased To Meet You album | Article, One Of The Three Feature | Who is the guy on the front over of the album? His name’s James and, bizarrely, he’s a composite of the band of the same name. “This is about finding a way to represent our collective spirit,” says James frontman Tim Booth, discussing the band’s curious new figurehead. “It deals with the old, Are you James questions, which, yeah, you still get – I still get called James. I suppose people in Travis get called Travis too.” In order to solve these public image problems, James have cooked up an entirely new public face. Last month, each of the seven members posed for separate portraits, which were subsequently morphed together, with the aid of noted fashion photographer Phil Poynter, design company Blue Source and a good deal of computerised jiggery-pokery, in order to create an entirely new person. He’s been christened James, obviously, and will appear on the sleeve of the forthcoming album, Pleased To Meet You. Although he doesn’t play any instruments, he’s so life-like that there’s already speculation about his “personality”. “I think he looks like he might have a knife in his back pocket.” exclaims Booth. “He has a good edge to him. He’s not idealised.” As for intra-band arguments over whose bits were used where – did they take place? “Of course,” acknowledges Booth. “He’s got my knob, and it’s fantastic, obviously.” | Jul 2001 | article oott-special-feature | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Official Guildford Site interview with Tim | Article, Interview | Which do you prefer playing, gigs or festivals? Probably gigs, just because of the volume. There’s something about having a wall behind so that the sound bounces off. It’s a contained space where you can generate more energy. Having said that, I love festivals, but it’s just not quite as easy. You don’t get a sound check, and we’re a very musical band so we need to hear each other. When we hear each other well we play better. So festivals sometimes can be a bit challenging, tonight was quite hard work. What’s the worst gig you’ve ever been to or played? I don’t stay at bad gigs, I walk out very quickly. The worst gig I’ve ever played? Some of our early ones weren’t that hot. We used to be terrified on stage. At some of our early gigs we used to rush off stage after 20 minutes. We were very shy. If a gig’s going badly do you get off or soldier on? Oh, always soldier on, always look for a way out of why the gig’s going badly. Tonight it was hard because we were having so many technical things going wrong. My best trick is to look out into the audience, and find someone who’s really enjoying it and just sing to them for a bit. Their enthusiasm bounces back. What was the first gig you ever went to? Steve Harley in Cockney Rebel in Leeds town hall. What’s the best piece of tat you’ve ever bought at a festival? We were playing at the Lola Poluza festival, going on before Korn, and the audience were all shouting “faggots” at us. After the second day I went out into the festival arena and found this amazing clothes stall that had sparkly mirror ball shirts and dresses and so we bought one for every member of the band. They were selling them off because no one else was going to buy them at a macho festival, so they were about 5 or 10 dollars each. So we decked the whole band up in these mirror ball outfits [laughs] so we could be “true” fags. I mean we didn’t look like “fags”, I don’t want to offend people, but we ended up looking like their idea of what “faggots” were meant to be, which is what they were screaming at us every day. We were just playing to it and we had a great time, it was wonderful. What’s the first thing James will be doing when they leave the festival? Get back to our hotels, get some sleep, because we haven’t really slept for about a day and we’re going off to play Dublin tomorrow. I think we’re all looking like zombies today. What are James drinking? James are drinking whatever they can get their greedy hands on in the other room. I drink water. That’s just me, the others are all alcoholics. They don’t know it yet, they’re not trying to come off though [laughs], they’re just enjoying it. “Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense” do you agree or disagree? They must have been tone deaf. What’s your favourite instrument? Today it’s the accordion. What’s your favourite song? Today it’s “Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong. Tomorrow it’ll be something different. What’s the first thing you do before going on stage? Try to warm up my voice; I take some Chinese herbs for my throat. The other thing is dance, backstage. What’s the first thing you do after you’ve been on stage? Take of my earpieces and pull off bits of Sellotape from out of my ears, and off my body. What’s you’re favourite place in the world? San Francisco, or thereabouts. “Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom, if you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn” Charlie Parker – do you agree? [laughs] It won’t come out of your horn? [laughs more] I like the quote. Yeah, I mean that’s more my experience, and I definitely sing from my horn. | Aug 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Rock City Website interview with Saul Davies | Article, Interview | James has been together for an unbelievable 16 years, and as a band and with Tim’s solo outings you have a reputation for working with diverse artists and producers such as Angelo Badalementi and Brian Eno. Do you think this attitude has contributed to your long career? In some ways I don’t think we’ve had that long a career because we don’t think about it we just keep playing and we wont go away. We’ve now made four records with Eno and we’ve become very close to him and feel very comfortable so I think we’re probably stuck with each other. In the 16 years James have been together or in the 12 years you have been in the band, what have been the highlights? Well we played at Woodstock and that was amazing just because the size of the crowd was amazing. And the first Glastonbury that we played was a really memorable event, We were on in the middle of the afternoon, and this was before ‘Sit Down’ had come out, and I remember being ignored for the first 3 or 4 songs by loads of hippies and by the end of it having the whole of Glastonbury on its feet. I think at that moment we know that something good was going to happen! How do you think James have changed over the years? Well some people have got fat, I got thinner. It hasn’t really changed that much. We’ve still got pretty much the same attitude to everything we do, i.e. we’re probably quite rude! It’s difficult when you’re involved to notice any change. A lot of what we do, we aren’t conscious of, we just do it. It’s in no way contrived or particularly planned. So I don’t know if we’ve changed at all, or we may have changed massively! One thing that has changed is that for the last record “Millionaires” we came together through a very dysfunctional time for us as a band, there were lots of fighting and stuff going on, but we’re now all on the same pace as each other, so changes have taken place over the last couple of years so that we all get on with each other again. It’s widely believed that Millionaires is your best album to date, do the problems that you overcame have any bearing on this? I don’t know. I certainly thought it was our best record and I was very closely involved in the making of it. At the time I loved it, but I listen to any of our music very infrequently, all I can hear now are massive flaws in it. At the time I really enjoyed it and I was really proud of it, and I am still, but now I think we’ve moved on a lot. It’s the same with this record, no doubt two years from now I’ll say I thought “Pleased to Meet You” was the best thing we’d done, but now I think it’s bollocks! I think that’s a natural process because you become less attached to it. Everybody thinks that their newborn baby is gorgeous even though everyone knows it’s the ugliest thing on the planet! Are we going to hear any of your new music previewed at City in the Park? Yeah. Probably half of the songs we’ll play will be from the new record. We did a tour in October last year playing smaller venues, we played what was the beginning of this record at that point, and then went into the studio and recorded the album. The songs grew and grew through being played live and then in the studio, now I can’t wait to play some of these songs live, they’re perfect to be played with loads of people listening. What is the difference playing to a large crowd at an outside event, rather than playing at a venue like Rock City? To go back to playing smaller venues like Rock City is actually quite strange, and wonderful! You’re penned in, there’s nowhere for the music to go and it’s a great atmosphere. Rock City is a great little venue, it’s such a dive it’s wonderful! When you’re up onstage and you’re having a good one, and you know you’re doing a good show, it doesn’t really matter where you are. Each venue has a different thing about it, you tend to play differently, if you’re playing in front of 40000 people and you’re outside you have to perform in a different way so that people at the back appreciate it, you have to get the audience more involved. A lot is reflected in what you actually play, in small venues people are right on top of you, they can’t go anywhere, they have to listen to you so you can play loads of new songs; when you are in a big field there are lots of other distractions, at City in the Park we will have to play some of the older songs so that people recognise them and know they’re watching James. It’s not ideal in a way, I’d like to go and play 10 songs of the new album and let people listen to them and say “Oh that was Great, they’ve got some balls!”, but if we did that half the crowd would leave because they didn’t know what it was. In that way big festivals can be like a compromise, but if we play for an hour that’s long enough to put a mixture in, maybe some dodgy old B sides nobody’s heard of! What are your experiences of being at a festival? I live in Portugal and to be honest the festivals over here are much more exciting than the ones you have in England. There’s one festival here, it has a 60000 capacity, and they’ve got Neil Young and Beck playing, with a massively eclectic bill; and it’s next to a river and surrounded by mountains. In England T in the Park is great, it’s slightly less corporate than some of the others, and it’s in Scotland so people are slightly more pissed and they know the weather is going to be bad, so they don’t care they just go and have a great time! In Britain there’s this arrogance that what we do is better, because it’s Britain, but it’s not true! We (James) are good at festivals, I think it’s because we just get really pissed and when we get up there something just clicks and we get really intense. What do you think of Nottingham? I actually know Nottingham quite well because I’ve got two great friends who live just outside Nottingham, so I’ve been going there for many years, it’s a nice city. | Aug 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Benicassim Festival – 3rd August 2001 | Live Performance, Video Archive |
SetlistLaid / Sometimes / Waltzing Along / She's a Star / Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) / Ring the Bells / Lost a Friend / Johnny Yen / Sit Down/ Born of Frustration / Out to Get You / Space / Falling Down / Senorita / Tomorrow (partial setlist)Supportn/aReviewby Jesse Without so much a courtesy as letting the public know, James’ slot was swapped with the Divine Comedy’s, so instead of showing up at 12:40, as scheduled, they appeared on stage at about 2:00 am. They seemed to be in good spirits, and started out with, if my memory doesn’t fail me, “Laid”, initiated with the now usual “ándale, ándale, arriba!” Speedy González cries (which would be more appropriate in a Mexican environment rather than a Spanish one, and even that is debatable). From there on the night was a zig-zag of crowd-pleasers and lesser-knowns, particularly those from Pleased To Meet You, where as far as I´m concerned, seems to have never been released in Spain at all. The band was cheery, although I couldn’t avoid feeling Tim was acting a bit mechanically, but that may be just because I saw them 3 times in like 2 weeks last year. Saul was, as usual, trying to grab a little attention, both by his appearance on stage (showing up with an open shirt and completely getting rid of it later on) and by appropriating the microphone once in a while. It was funny, though, when, after they had said goodbye, he ran back to say something and discovered the mics had already been switched off. Their setlist was quite long, or at least it seemed that way, considering it was a festival. My estimate is that it lasted about an hour and a half. I was beginning to conclude the resceduling was to let them perform longer, but when Hooverphonic came on stage after them I realised they were not the last band of the night. The crowd was surprisingly participative, singing along and jumping and dancing with the band, which was a nice surprise. My guess is that there were around 10,000 people there, maybe a bit more. The camerawork, displayed on two screens beside the stage, was also a welcome novelty to the previous occasions I had seen them, and very well managed, as well as the sound quality. The songs I remember they played were: Laid, Lost a Friend, Johnny Yen, Sit Down, Born of Frustration, Ring the Bells, Out to Get You, She’s a Star, Space, Falling Down, Getting Away With It and Señorita (dedicated to the Spanish ladies). I´m ashamed to admit I don’t clearly recall if they played Lose Control, Say Something, Just Like Fred Astaire or maybe some other song off Pleased to Meet You. I´ll add a bit of value to this attempt of review by mentioning that El Pais, Spain’s most important newspaper, threw in a very cool, almost page-size picture of Tim the next day in their report of the first day of the Festival. They mentioned James, despite being a band whose glory days were behind them, whose last album was “dense” and who were not quite fancied by the majority of the attendees, were the stars of the night, albeit out of sheer musical craftmanship. “Tim Booth is convinced his music still has a purpose, and applied his skill and veteranship to round off a concert that pleased his followers but probably earned him no new ones”. I´ll finish with a little personal appreciation on the execution of the new songs. In posts to the James mailing list, I have mentioned I am very fond of the first and last 3 songs on the new album, all but one of which were never performed live in last year’s fall tour. All of the songs in the middle were, and I had already developed a strong appreciation for them (Junkie, Señorita, What Is It Good For, Pleased to Meet You, The Shining…). Listening to them on the album they sound weak and cheaply recorded, unlike the openers and closers. I can now add assuringly that I prefer the studio versions of Space and Falling Down over the live versions. | Aug 2001 | live-performance video-archive gig gigography article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dublin Witnness Festival – 5th August 2001 | Audio Archive, Live Performance |
SetlistJohnny Yen / Sometimes / English Beefcake / Senorita / Laid / Space / She's a Star / Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) / Sit Down / Ring the BellsSupportn/aMore Information & ReviewsNone. Audio | Aug 2001 | audio-archive live-performance article gig gigography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Mercury Split – Press Release | Article, Press Release | JAMES AMICABLY PART COMPANY WITH FONTANA/MERCURY LABEL AFTER FULFILLING CONTRACTUAL OBLIGATIONS James would like to announce their departure from Fontana/Mercury Records, a decision which was agreed upon prior to the release of their final album for the label. Contrary to recent rumours, the band have successfully completed their contractual obligations to the label, and through mutual consent, have amicably parted company after more than a decade. Following previous independent single and album releases during the Eighties through Factory, Sire and Rough Trade, James were signed to Fontana Records, part of the Polygram Group, in 1990, and were contracted to deliver six albums, in addition to a greatest hits package. It was to be a formidable partnership. After building up a sizeable underground following, their third album, and Fontana debut, ‘Gold Mother’, was released in 1990, and brought James the crossover recognition they deserved, reaching platinum selling status, and containing arguably their greatest anthem on record, ‘Sit Down’. Their second Fontana album ‘Seven’ reached No.2 in the UK album charts on it’s release in 1992, and featured hit singles ‘Sound’ and ‘Born Of Frustration’. With the legendary Brian Eno producing, their third Fontana album, ‘Laid’, was released in 1993 and received critical acclaim, not just in the UK, but also the States, where it sold in excess of 600,000 copies and the band became a headline act throughout the country. On a more ambient tip, during the recording of ‘Laid’, James had recorded another album with Eno, entitled ‘Wah Wah’, which was released on Fontana in 1994. During a three year break, after the completion of ‘Wah Wah’, there was a brief interlude where singer Tim Booth recorded an album with movie composer Angelo Badalamenti entitled ‘Booth And The Bad Angel’. James regrouped to record the ‘Whiplash’ album which included ‘She’s A Star’, a track which saw the band back in the U.K. Top Ten. Following on from that album the band recorded two new tracks for a greatest hits package ‘James: The Best Of’. The resulting singles ‘Destiny Calling’ and ‘Runaground’, again saw James in the upper echelons of the charts and on it’s release, ‘James: The Best Of’ sold just under a million copies worldwide. The album was supported by a sell-out UK arena tour. Their fifth studio album ‘Millionaires’, released on Mercury, is widely regarded as their best album to date. Featuring the hit singles, ‘I Know What I’m Here For’ and ‘Just Like Fred Astaire’, the album received unanimous rave reviews in the UK press. Their final studio album for the label, ‘ Pleased To Meet You’ has just been released and with another major arena tour lined up for later this year (dates listed below), James are looking forward to the future. Howard Berman, M.D. of Mercury Records, comments, “In an era often obsessed with instant gratification and substantial taste shifts, it’s been very rewarding to have seen James through to the conclusion of their original commitment to this label. I genuinely wish them every success in the future” James Tour Dates – December 2001: 2nd – Brighton Centre 4th – Newcastle Arena 6th – Birmingham NEC 7th – Manchester Arena 9th – Glasgow SECC 10th – Wembley Arena | Sep 2001 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Regressam A Portugal – Portuguese news article on tour (in Portuguese) | Article, News | JAMES REGRESSAM A PORTUGAL 21 de Setembro de 2001 Tal como se esperava, os James vão regressar a Portugal no mês de Novembro, para dois concertos ao vivo nos Coliseus de Lisboa e Porto. Consigo trazem o novo álbum “Pleased To Meet You” – que contou com a produção de Brian Eno – naqueles que serão os espectáculos anteriores à digressão dos James no Reino Unido, cujas datas se encontram praticamente esgotadas. É assim que o grupo liderado pelo vocalista Tim Booth irá subir mais uma vez a palcos portugueses, depois do guitarrista da banda, Saul Davis, ter escolhido o nosso país para estabelecer residência. O músico está a viver em Caminha, no Minho e casou (ou está a planear casar) com uma portuguesa. Entretanto, os bilhetes para estes dois espectáculos – dia 23 de Novembro em Lisboa e dia 24 de Novembro no Porto – vão ser colocados à venda no próximo dia 26 de Setembro, pelos seguintes preços: Lisboa: 4000 escudos; Porto: Plateia Plateia de pé/Tribuna – 4.000$00; Galeria/Geral – 3.900$0 Locais de venda: Lisboa – Coliseu, Fnac Colombo, Fnac Chiado, Fnac Cascais Shopping, Ticketline no Vasco da Gama, ABEP e agência Alvalade Porto – Coliseu, Fnac Sta. Catarina e Fnac Norte Shopping Internet – www.ondaticket.com | Sep 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Biografia – Interproducciones Argentina (in Spanish) | Article, Biography | Origen Manchester, Inglaterra (1982) Discografía (84) Strip Mine, (89) Sit Down, One Man Clapping (en vivo), (90) Gold Mother, Seven, Wah Wah, (84) Humn From A Village, (97) Whiplash, (99) Millonaire, (01) Pleased To Meet You. Integrantes Larry Gott (guitarra), Jim Glennie (bajo), David Baynton-Powell (batería), Tim Booth (vocalista) Mark Hunter (teclados), Saul Davies (vilin), Andy Diagram (trompeta). Biografía Como uno de los grupos catalogados como los nuevos Smith, James, proveniente de Manchester, se convirtió en una institución en la escena de la música alternativa inglesa durante los ochenta por medio de un estilo de pop-folk agradable. En la actualidad y luego de que Best Of Collection sorprendiera convirtiéndose en un disco doble platino, vuelven confiados a presentar un simple titulado Just Like Fred Astaire. El simple se extrajo de Millonaires, el nuevo CD del grupo, y su productor fue Brian Eno. James se formó en Manchester en 1982, cuando Paul Gilbertson (guitarra), Jim Glennie (bajo) y Gavan Whelan (batería) conocieron a Tim Booth en la Universidad de Manchester y lo invitaron a incorporarse a su banda. Dos años después cuando tenían un número importante de seguidores en los clubs locales y habían lanzado dos EP’s, empezaron a actuar de apertura para The Smiths. El álbum Strip Mine, lanzado por Sire, no pudo capitalizar el éxito que habían tenido, pero saltaron a la fama en 1989 con un lanzamiento a través de un sello independiente llamado Rough Trade. Con este nuevo sello James lanzó Sit Down y un álbum en vivo titulado One Man Clapping que alcanzó el puesto Número Uno de los charts de música indie. Larry Gott remplazó a Gilbertson, y en 1990 Whelan fue reemplazado por David Baynton-Powell. James se convirtió en un septeto luego de la incorporación del tecladista Mark Hunter, el violinista Saul Davies y el trompetista Andy Diagram. La nueva formación firmó contrato con Fontana Records y lanzó Gold Mother. Gold Mother se convirtió finalmente en hit a principios de 1991, cuando una nueva versión de Sit Down que tenía un ritmo baggy más contemporáneo que la anterior, ascendió hasta el puesto Número Dos de los charts ingleses y se hizo muy popular en las radios estadounidenses. El éxito de Sit Down fue tanto una bendición como una maldición ya que se convirtió en el único tema a través del cual el público identificaba a James. La banda se reveló en los recitales, tocando prácticamente sólo material nuevo y Seven, su siguiente álbum se interpretó como un intento fallido de hacer rock masivo. Para la grabación que siguió a Seven, James se deshizo de Diagram y Davies y trabajó con el productor Brian Eno. Laid, el álbum resultante, era más tranquilo y ambicioso, recibió algunas de las mejores críticas y tuvo mucho éxito en Estados Unidos. Wah Wah, el siguiente álbum, de música experimental, y también producido por Eno, no tuvo tanto éxito y en 1985 el grupo se tomó un largo descanso. James regresó a principios de 1997 con Whiplash, una grabación mucho más directa que tuvo críticas variadas, y ahora en el 99 presentan Millionaire. | Sep 2001 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Newcastle Telewest Arena Biography | Article, Biography | Telewest Arena Newcastle is delighted to announce the return of JAMES to the venue on Tuesday 4th December 2001. For two decades, this elusive, charismatic, engaging individual has been one of the great treasures of British music, sometimes taking centre stage, sometimes on the margins. Taking his inspiration from the punk and new wave explosion of the late 70’s, JAMES arrived into the early 80’s Manchester music scene along with groups such as the Smiths and Joy Division. JAMES dazzled everyone, appearing on stage sporting bright colours, with his popular T-shirts becoming the most visible on the music scene. The debut album ‘Stutter’ was released in 1986 followed by the highly praised 1988’s ‘Strip Mine’. ‘Gold Mother’ in 1989 proved to be the turning point with hits like ‘Come Home’ and ‘How Was It For You’ which took James to another level of success where he could routinely fill the GMEX Arena. In March 1991, a single version of his live anthem ‘Sit Down’ reached Number Two in the charts and saw the release of the album ‘Seven’, yet another step forward in the quest for international popularity proving to be a million seller. A greatest hit’s album released in 1998 uncovered a huge wave of residual popular support and shot into the Number one slot. The new album ‘Pleased To Meet You’ is said to be his most personal to date. Telewest Arena Newcastle’s Marketing Executive Jackie Marston said:- “With Ben Folds as support, I am sure James will re-create the atmosphere that Arena patrons enjoyed in 1999 making the show a great success”. | Oct 2001 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Hole In My Head Biography | Article, Biography | Most famous for their classic anthem Sit Down, James have now been around for 19 years, and they were known as ‘Model Team International’ until 1983. So who are the present members? Tim Booth – lead vocals (since 1982) Jim Glennie bass, backing vocals (since 1982) Dave Baynton-Power – drums (since 1989) Saul Davies – guitar, violin, backing vocals, percussion (since 1989) Mark Hunter – keyboards (since 1989) Adrian Oxxal guitar, cello (since 1996) Michael Kulas – backing vocals, guitar, percussion (since 1997) And past? Larry Gott – guitar, keyboard, flute, backing vocals (1985-1996) Andy Diagram – trumpet, backing vocals (1990-1993) Gavan Whelan – drums, piano, vocals (1982-1990) Paul Gilbertson – guitar (1982-1985) James signed with Manchester label, Factory Records in 1983. Their early singles, “What”s The World?” and “Hymn From A Village”, and the EPs “JimOne” and “James II”, were acclaimed for their unusual mixture of folk and new wave textures. In 1985, James began an unhappy 3 years with Sire Records, releasing the albums ‘Stutter’ and ‘Strip-Mine’. No singles from these albums were included on 1998s Best Of, perhaps due to the poor relationship between the band and Sire Records during their 3 years together. At the end of 1988, James were looking for a new record deal, but no-one seemed to want them. They approached their bank manager for a £2000 loan to help finance the recording and release of a live album. The bank manager said no. But that wasn’t the end, the band convinced the bank manager to go and see James at a gig in Manchester. He did, and came away very impressed, offering James £3000 to fund their album. With this, One Man Clapping was released in March 1989. This live album gained favourable reviews and caught the attention of the record label Fontana, to whom James signed. At this time, Gavin Whelan left the band and was replaced by Dave Baynton-Power, while three new members also joined the band: Saul Davies, Mark Hunter and Andy Diagram. The singles Come Home and Sit Down were re-released by Fontana, Sit Down becoming James’ biggest hit to date, reaching number 2 in the UK charts. Gold Mother was the first album to be released under the new label, the title track, drawn from the experience of the birth of Tim Booth’s child, was about the extreme physical pain mothers go through during child birth. During the early 90s, the media attention that was focused on upcoming Manchester bands made it easier for James to go from independent to major league status. Seven was an album of more unconventional song structures than featured on Gold Mother, so saw a lowering in James’ commercial viability, although they still retained a loyal fan-base. 1993s Laid single was the first James release to make an impression in the USA. Laid, the album, also went Gold in America, selling 600,000 copies in its first year, James being one of the few successful British bands in America during 1994. Wah Wah was released in 1994, an experimental album of jams recorded during the sessions of Laid. This saw a 3 year break for James, during which time Tim Booth recorded an album with the American composer Angelo Badalamenti under the alias Booth And The Bad Angel. The Top 10 single, She’s A Star, saw the return of James in 1997, followed by their Whiplash album (also Top 10). The recordings of Whiplash featured a new guitarist, Adrian Oxaal, who had replaced James’ founder member, Larry Gott. Ironically, during James’ US tour of Whiplash, Tim Booth suffered a recurring neck and shoulder injury and was bedridden for 6 weeks, meaning the majority of the tour had to be cancelled. It took 1998s “Best Of” for many people to realise the strength of James’ music over the years. The Best Of was very successful commercially, reaching the top spot of the UK chart. On the back of this success, an Apollo 440 remix of Sit Down was released in November 1998 and made the UK number 7. Brian Eno was back to produce James’ next album, Millionaires, which received many very favourable reviews, but just failed to reach number 1 on the album chart. The last album with James’ current record label, Mercury, was released on 2nd July of this year, preceded by a single, “Getting Away With It (All Messed Up)”. It seemed many people had no idea that James were back, Radio 1 refused to play the single after its initial first play ‘exclusive’, but it still managed to chart respectabely at 22 on the singles chart. The album “Pleased To Meet You” failed to make the album Top 10 though, which was very disappointing. The cover features ‘James’, a fictional character made up of facial features from each of the seven member of James. There was also confusion over this, “…who is that on the front cover!?” INTERESTING FACT?: The woman featured on the cover of ‘Whiplash’ and the inlay is not a woman. It’s a man wearing a mask. | Oct 2001 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Leave Mercury – NME News | Article, News | JAMES have left their label MERCURY RECORDS. A spokesperson for the band has told NME.COM that the group have decided not to renew their contract with the label after futhfilling their obligation of six albums and a Greatest Hits compilation. Describing the departure from the label as “perfectly amicable”, the spokesperson maintained that the group plan to release a B-sides album via Mercury later this year, and work is also in the pipeline to reissue the group’s studio albums in the future. The band are set to tour their current album, ‘Pleased To Meet You’, in December. | Oct 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Leaves James – Tim’s Statement | Article, News | Dear friends, After much deliberation I have decided it’s time for me to leave JAMES. When we started the band we always said we’d give it a year and see how it went. If you had told me we’d last nearly 20 years I’d have asked you what drugs you were on. I am leaving on a high. The tour is selling well and will be a great farewell party. For the last two years we have been getting on better with each other than ever before. We have made a C.D that I believe to be our best since Laid; yes I have heard that reviews state otherwise but by not reading them I keep myself in a blissful bubble of ignorance. Although some of the Summer gigs were a bit hit and miss the last gig we did, in Athens was one of the best we have ever done. So why am I leaving? Well because I want to stop while we are on top. To leave great memories knowing that I feel proud of just about everything we have done. And I am leaving because it feels like THE RIGHT TIME. This is an intuitive decision enabling me to let go of a huge commitment and make space for something new to come in. I am sure the press will try and find all kinds of smaller reasons and many of them may be factually true. But this is the greater truth. I am mid-way through a screen play – which may just be for an audience of one. I am looking forward to teaching creativity workshops, to act and create some new music. If you want to keep in touch, my own web-site should be running by December at timbooth.net. I don’t know what the rest of the guys are going to do but I want to thank them for an amazing ride and for taking my departure so well. For those of you who hate award acceptance thank you’s turn away now. I want to thank all the musicians who have ever played in James throughout our various incarnations. Also massive thanks to Peter Rudge, Brian Eno, Traci, Geoff, Simon, Louise, Laurie, Nicola, Neil, Richard, Marsha, Martine, Michael, Joyce, Martin, Angelo and other allies too numerous to mention or remember. I’ve also got to thank my own personal crew of Kate, Ben, Mepps and Avril. And finally you. The quality of your listening has enabled us to produce quality. Your faith in us has lifted us to higher levels. It seems like you have managed to always see us through the smokescreen of hipness and cool that the music industry is drowning in. Thank you for listening. Much love. Tim | Oct 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Leaves James – Press Release | Article, Press Release | This December will be the last chance to catch the current line-up of James perform together in a nationwide tour. After 10 studio albums, a million-selling Best Of and 20 Top Forty singles in the UK as well as considerable success in the USA, James can rightly claim to be one of Britain’s most successful bands. Although this will be Tim Booth’s final tour with the band, the remaining members of James will continue making music together, and will make an announcement regarding their plans at a later date. Statement from Tim Booth: “Dear Friends, enemies and anyone else who is listening. After 11 albums it’s time for me to leave James. The timing feels right – 20 years and still peaking. I am deeply proud of just about everything we’ve done. The gigs at Christmas will (I believe) be my last with James and will enable us to have a massive farewell celebration. I’d like to thank my co-conspirators in James for the great adventure. I am looking to act, teach trance dance, write and make some music next year.” James’ arena tour will commence on Sunday 2nd December at the Brighton Centre. Support will come from acclaimed Mercury Music Prize nominee, Turin Brakes. In addition the band have invited former members Andy Diagram and Larry Gott to appear with them on selected dates. November Thu. 22nd La Riveria – Spain Fri. 23rd Lisbon Coliseum Sat. 24th Oporto Coliseum December Sun. 2nd Brighton Centre 0870 900 9100 Mon. 3rd Leeds University Tue. 4th Newcastle Arena 0191 263 5000 Thu. 6th Birmingham NEC 0870 909 4133 Fri. 7th Manchester Arena 0161 930 8000/832 1111 Sun. 9th Glasgow SECC 0870 040 4000 Mon. 10th Wembley Arena 0870 739 9444 24 hour credit card hotline: 0115 912 9000 or online: www.gigsandtours.com. | Oct 2001 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
We’re Going To Miss You, Tim – NME News | Article, News | JAMES vocalist TIM BOOTH has announced he is to quit the band. In a posting on the group’s official website, www.jamestheband.com, it is claimed that the group’s current UK tour in December will be the “last chance to catch the current line-up”. The remaining members of the group are set to continue recording together, with an announcement on the group to follow. A statement from Tim Booth reads: “After much deliberation I have decided it’s time for me to leave James. When we started the band we always said we’d give it a year and see how it went. If you had told me we’d last nearly 20 years I’d have asked you what drugs you were on. I am leaving on a high. The tour is selling well and will be a great farewell party. For the last two years we have been getting on better with each other than ever before. We have made a CD that I believe to be our best since ‘Laid’; yes I have heard that reviews state otherwise but by not reading them I keep myself in a blissful bubble of ignorance. Although some of the summer gigs were a bit hit and miss the last gig we did, in Athens, was one of the best we have ever done. “So why am I leaving? Well because I want to stop while we are on top. To leave great memories knowing that I feel proud of just about everything we have done. And I am leaving because it feels like THE RIGHT TIME. This is an intuitive decision enabling me to let go of a huge commitment and make space for something new to come in. I am sure the press will try and find all kinds of smaller reasons and many of them may be factually true. But this is the greater truth. “I am midway through a screen play – which may just be for an audience of one. I am looking forward to teaching creativity workshops, to act and create some new music. If you want to keep in touch, my own web-site should be running by December at timbooth.net. “I don’t know what the rest of the guys are going to do but I want to thank them for an amazing ride and for taking my departure so well. For those of you who hate award acceptance thank you’s turn away now. I want to thank all the musicians who have ever played in James throughout our various incarnations…and finally you. The quality of your listening has enabled us to produce quality. Your faith in us has lifted us to higher levels. It seems like you have managed to always see us through the smokescreen of hipness and cool that the music industry is drowning in. Thank you for listening. Much love.” A UK spokesperson for the group is currently unable to confirm Booth’s departure from the group. | Oct 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Leaves – Teletext News Article | Article, News | James singer Tim Booth has left the band – but is happy for the band to continue without him. After presenting their producer Brian Eno with a Q Special Award, Tim told PS: “I came to a decision over the summer that I wanted to leave on a high, I’ll be doing our December tour and that’s it.” Insisting the split was amicable, Tim added: “The rest of the band can use the name James if they wish.” | Oct 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Teletext Interview | Article, Interview | When James singer Tim Booth presented their producer Brian Eno with a Special Award (don’t ask) at the Q Awards, there was no hint that he had any big announcement to make. Yet, when PS spotted Tim at the buffet afterwards, he casually announced that – after 20 years and one of the best-selling Hits albums ever – he had quit. Why is Tim calling it a day? And why does he see himself with a future in James Bond movies? Tim Booth says he decided to leave James over the summer but denies the band being dropped by Mercury Records influenced his decision. “I’d already made my mind up by then” says Tim. “When I finished our last album, I had time to reflect. “I wanted to go out on a high. I didn’t want to carry on if I wasn’t enjoying it, getting bitter about young bands taking our place. We’ve had 20 years, that’s a wonderful milestone.” Pleased To Meet You got quite a few pannings, but Tim Booth was unaware of the critics response when he decided to leave James. “I don’t read reviews, so it certainly couldn’t have influenced me,” he grins. “I’d like to reassure people that I was 100% committed to the album when I made it. I stand by Pleased To Meet You, I think it’s a fantastic record. I can’t envisage a stronger album for me to call it a day on, to be honest.” Although he’s walked out on his bandmates, Tim Booth says the departure was entirely amicable. “The decision is about me, not them” says Tim. “They’re talking about what to do, but if they want to carry on as James – then they have my complete blessing. “I’ll be doing our farewell tour over Christmas. We’re getting a lot of old bandmates back for that, so I’ll be extremely emotional by the end.” Tim Booth hopes to have some new music out in April, and is keen to again work with Angelo Badalamenti – the Twin Peaks and Pet Shop Boys composer – with whom he made the Booth and the Bad Angel album. “I’m also involved in music workshops, I’m keen to help people get into performing music who otherwise might not get the chance,” says Tim. “Leaving James has freed me up to do those things I’ve always wanted – I’m halfway through writing a screenplay.” Along with writing a screenplay, Tim Booth is using his extra time since leaving James to try and get an acting career off the ground. “I’ve a few things on the go, but I can’t say what in case they go wrong and people call me a liar,” he laughs. “But my ideal role would be a villain, someone horrible, dark and downright twisted, I can see myself stroking a cat, planning world domination and cackling at the hero. I can’t wait!” | Oct 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth Deixa Os James – Music Net Portugal (in Portuguese) | Article, News | TIM BOOTH DEIXA OS JAMES 30 de Outubro de 2001 O vocalista dos James, Tim Booth, anunciou que vai deixar o grupo depois da digressão em promoção ao álbum “Pleased To Meet You”, que irá passar por Portugal no próximo mês de Novembro, nos dias 23 e 24. Numa declaração à imprensa, Booth justificou-se, despediu-se, fez agradecimentos e adiantou que irá dedicar-se a projectos de outras áreas de entertenimento, embora não pense deixar a música. “Caros amigos, inimigos, e todos os que estiverem a ouvir”, disse, “Depois de 11 álbuns é tempo de deixar os James. A altura parece certa – 20 anos e ainda cá estamos. Eu sinto-me orgulhoso de praticamente tudo o que fizémos. Os concertos no Natal serão (creio) os meus últimos com os James e eu vou fazer com que seja uma enorme celebração de despedida. Eu quero agradecer aos meus co-conspiradores nos James pela linda aventura. Eu estou ansioso por representar, ensinar dança, escrever e fazer alguma música no próximo ano”. Também no site oficial do grupo, www.jamestheband.com, o músico publicou uma carta de despedida mais extensa, onde diz que “sai em alta”, numa altura em que os James fizeram “o melhor CD desde ‘Laid'” – “apesar de as críticas dizerem o contrário, mas ao não lê-las mantenho-me num estado de ignorância”, acrescentou. Tim diz ainda que sai agora do grupo porque estão no topo e quer partir com excelentes memórias, acrescentando que é esta altura certa. Apesar de Tim Booth sair, os restantes elementos vão continuar a fazer música juntos, esperando-se a qualquer momento uma declaração em relação aos seus planos de futuro. “Eu não sei o que é que o resto da banda vai fazer”, diz ainda Booth na carta de despedida, “mas eu quero agradecer-lhes pela viagem espectacular e por aceitaram tão bem a minha saída”. | Oct 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Nos Coliseus Em Novembro – Netparque (in Portuguese) | Article, News | Os britânicos James, que em Portugal já tocaram numerosas vezes, regressam em Novembro para dois espectáculos. Nos dias 23 e 24 de Novembro, o grupo liderado por Tim Booth, que abandonou a Universal, apresenta-se ao vivo, respectivamente, no Coliseu dos Recreios, em Lisboa, e no Coliseu do Porto. Naturalmente, o pretexto para nova passagem dos James em Portugal é o mais recente álbum do grupo, “Pleased To Meet You”, que, na opinião de alguns, devolveu às canções o brilho que há algum tempo lhes faltava. “Pleased To Meet You” foi produzido pelo respeitado músico e produtor Brian Eno. Os bilhetes para o espectáculo de Lisboa, no dia 23 de Novembro, custam 4.000$00 e estão à venda no Coliseu dos Recreios, lojas Fnac da Grande Lisboa, Ticketline no Centro Vasco da Gama, e agências ABEP e Alvalade. Para o Porto, o preço dos bilhetes oscilam entre os 3.900$00 (galeria/tribuna) e 4.000$00 (plateia/tribuna). Os ingressos podem ser adquiridos no Coliseu da cidade e lojas Fnac do Grande Porto. | Oct 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Booth Nicht Mehr Bei James – Intro.de – in German | Article, News | Ach, diese Sänger. Zu dumm, dass sie so etwas wie das Aushängeschild einer Band sind. Schlagzeuger und Bassisten springen beizeiten ab, na und?! Aber nur wenige Bands können nach dem Auswechseln des Sängers / der Sängerin ihre Fanbasis halten (siehe Dodgy). Nun steigt eklatanterweise Tim Booth aus der Band James aus. Er gab dies bekannt, bevor die Band auf Tour gehen wird. So nach dem Motto: ein letztes Mal halte ich es noch aus, aber dann ist Schluss. Ob es sich mit einem sich langsam senkenden Fallbeil entspannter auftreten lässt? In einem Statement von Tim Booth auf der James Webpage bezeichnet er das vor wenigen Monaten veröffentlichte Album “Pleased To Meet You” als ihr bestes, und auch untereinander würde man sich besser denn je verstehen. Dann heißt es: “So why am I leaving? Well because I want to stop while we are on top. To leave great memories knowing that I feel proud of just about everything we have done.” Diesen persönlichen Erfolg mag man anerkennen, es ist aber auch wahr, dass James von ihrem Label Island Records, das sie seit etlichen Jahren begleitet, schlicht gedroppt worden sind. “Pleased To Meet You” hatte einfach nicht den erhofften kommerziellen Erfolg, der einer ehemals chartversessene Band wie James zugebilligt worden war. Gerade in den für die Musikindustrie angespannten Zeiten wird eben “gedownsized”. Andererseits, wenn man sich vor Augen hält, dass die Band seit 1983 überwiegend erfolgreich auf dem Musikmarkt präsent gewesen sind, ist es Tims gutes Recht, zu sagen, dass er nicht als Pop-Opa in die Geschichte eingehen will. Im Augenblick schreibt er angeblich an einem Drehbuch und, ist “looking forward to teaching creativity workshops, to act and create some new music.” Good luck von unserer Seite. Was die restlichen Mitglieder in Zukunft tun werden, und ob sie den Namen James weiter tragen werden, ist noch völlig ungeklärt. | Oct 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Plastica Na Primeir Parte dos James – Music Net Portugal (in Portuguese) | Article, News | PLÁSTICA NA PRIMEIR PARTE DOS JAMES 7 de Novembro de 2001 As primeiras partes dos concertos dos James em Portugal vão ser conduzidas pelos portugueses Plástica, que ficaram conhecidos com o lançamento da colectânea Optimus 2000, onde participaram com o tema “Baby Gasoline”, e que já partilharam o palco com o grupo liderado por Tim Booth em Maio de 2000. De recordar que os James vão estar em concerto nos dias 23 e 24 deste mês, nos Coliseus de Lisboa e Porto, respectivamente. Os concertos estão inseridos na última digressão que reunirá os James com a actual formação, já que Booth anunciou que iria deixar o grupo assim que as correntes datas terminassem. Entretanto, noutras notícias relacionadas com os Plástica, o grupo anunciou na passada sexta-feira ter realizado um contrato com a EMI. Através do mesmo, o grupo de Almada irá editar quatro álbuns, sendo que o primeiro está já a ser gravado. A produção está a cargo do britânico Rick Pest, e o primeiro single está previsto para Fevereiro de 2002. Antes, o público poderá conhecer o novo tema através da rádio, onde irá passar já a partir do mês de Dezembro. | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Aftershow Press Release | Article, News | James Aftershow Party Press Release 7th December: Quay Bar, Manchester Gig aftershow parties are for the press, promoters and publicity merchants. Sometimes the band turn up. What about the people who make it all possible, the ones that pour their hard earned cash into the tickets, the merchandise and travelling over massive distances, the ones that excite others through word of mouth, the ones that dedicate themselves to the band – the fans? They are barred from such events. Eleven o’clock rolls around, the gig finished, the night has just begun, leave the venue in a state of ecstacy, out in to a strange city all revved up for a big night out, with no-where to go. Aftershow.co.uk is changing that by providing parties for the fans. The hugely successful Depeche Mode Aftershow parties in London, Birmingham and Manchester, have caused considerable demand for more. The NEC has even enquired about playing host to the Birmingham parties. Each party is arranged around the fans. Band merchandise is given out, classic band posters are framed on the walls, an avid fan is always in the DJ line up, photo’s of the night’s gig are printed at high speed and made available at the party, and the website displays photos of the parties for fans to download pictures of themselves and their mates having a damn fine time. Manchester’s next Aftershow party is on December 7th at the Quay Bar (Deansgate, Castlefield. Tel: 839 8803) straight after the James gig at the MEN arena. Ex-Haçienda resident, Madchester oracle and best selling author of Manchester, England, Dave Haslam, will be DJing and has agreed to sign copies of his books for a short time after his set. Tickets are £6 (plus booking fee) from Piccadilly Box office in Virgin Megastore (tel: 832 1111) or ticketline.co.uk. 50 tickets are always held back for the door in case old friends meet up and only some have bought in advance. To pay on the door, get there as soon as you can as they go very fast. | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
BBC Manchester Biography | Article, Biography | James are often accused of being underachievers, of failing to fulfil the potential they had and not becoming as big as, say, U2. The accusations are wrong, very wrong, and the success of the band’s Best Of album in 1998 is as big a signpost as any to their popularity and achievements. Contrary to popular belief, James were more than just lead singer Tim Booth. There is also David Baynton-Power on drums and percussion, Jim Glennie on bass guitar and backing vocals, Saul Davies on guitars and violin, Mark Hunter on keyboards, Adrian Oxxal on guitars, and Michael Kulas on backing vocals, guitar and percussion. The James story is one of various record labels, bad luck and brilliant songs. They began, as so many bands did, on Factory, putting out their first two singles on the label in 1983. But by 1986, they’d moved to Sire to release their debut album, Stutter. Having replaced drummer Gavan Whelan and added David, Saul, Mark and trumpeter Andy Diagram, the band released second album Strip-mine and a critically acclaimed live album, One Man Clapping and promptly signed for Phonogram. The year was 1989 and the world began to notice James with the release of their Gold Mother album, complete with the brilliant albatross that was Sit Down. The band broke through and followed the release up with the million selling Seven in 1992. They went on to recruit Brian Eno for their next album, a move that turned into a masterstroke when the subsequent product was the immense Laid (and it’s sister project Wah Wah), and album that also broke them in the USA. At the cusp of greatness, Black Thursday happened. While recording the next album, Whiplash, in America, founding member Larry Gott announced he would no longer tour with James, Tim announced his plans to record his long-stalled solo project, and the UK taxman announced the unfortunate discovery of an overlooked James debt of roughly £150,000. Despite the subsequent Greatest Hits album and two more albums, Millionaires and Pleased To Meet You, it was a blow that James never seemed to recover from. Tim Booth announced he would be leaving the band after their 2001 tour. Where that leaves the rest of the band is something we’ll just have to wait to see. Things you might not know: – James recorded a version of Ring The Bells for the X-Files series at a studio in Hollywood that was powered exclusively by solar energy. – Four months after they had left the label, James received a fax from Sire demanding to know why they’d released the self-financed One Man Clapping album. – Larry Gott doesn’t appear in the Born Of Frustration video. He was mugged the day before the shoot and sent the band manager dressed as him to take his place! | Nov 2001 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Yahoo Musique : James Revient Dans Les Bacs Le 3 Decembre (in French) | Article, News | Le groupe James a confirmé que son prochain album, B-sides Ultra , devrait sortir le 3 décembre prochain. Ce nouvel album est composé de 18 morceaux choisis parmi les faces B de singles sortis ces dix dernières années. Par ailleurs, le groupe a pour projet la sortie de nouvelles éditions des albums God Mother, Seven ainsi que Laid et Whiplash . | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth Decide Abandonar James – Ocio (in Spanish) | Article, News | El cantante de James, Tim Booth, ha anunciado su intención de abandonar la banda en cuanto finalicen su actual gira. El resto de los miembros de James continuarán trabajando juntos y darán a conocer proximamente en un comunicado sus planes de futuro. “¿Por qué me marcho? Pues simplemente porque quiero irme cuando estoy arriba, para llevarme un buen recuerdo y sentirme orgulloso de lo que he estado haciendo todos estos años”, explica Tim Booth en la página oficial de la banda. El cantante cree que éste “es el momento justo” para irse y que su decisión responde a una intuición y a sus ganas de hacer cosas nuevas, aunque ya adelanta que “la prensa tratará de encontrar otras razones”. Booth está actualmente escribiendo un guión y trabajando en nuevos temas. A partir de diciembre contará detalladamente cómo le va su nueva vida en una página web que lanzará con la dirección de “timbooth.net”. “No sé lo que hará ahora el resto de la banda, sólo quiero agradecerles todos estos años en los que hemos trabajado juntos y que se hayan tomado mi marcha tan bien”, añade el músico. “La calidad de vuestra escucha nos ha animado a producir música de calidad. Vuestra confianza en nosotros nos ha elevado a los niveles más altos. Es como si hubiéseis sido capaces de valorarnos más allá de toda la industria que rodea a la música. Gracias por escucharnos”, le dice a sus fans. A pesar de todo, James continuarán con su actual gira hasta finales de año. En noviembre serán España y Portugal los destinos de la banda. El día 22 tocarán en Madrid (La Riviera) en un concierto-maratón junto a Eels, Sexie Sadie y Cecilia Ann. El 23 y 24 de noviembre tocarán en Lisboa y en Oporto, respectivamente, mientras que durante el mes de Diciembre recorrerán siete ciudades británicas. El Wembley Arena será la última cita de James con Tim. No podría tener una mejor despedida. “Las entradas para los conciertos del tour se están vendiendo muy bien, no podría tener una mejor fiesta de despedida. En los últimos dos años nos hemos llevado cada vez mejor y hemos hecho un álbum (‘Please to meet you’) al que considero nuestro mejor trabajo desde ‘Laid’, digan lo que digan las críticas”, se despide el líder de James. Han sido 20 años en la música, 10 álbumes de estudio, un grandes éxitos que ha llegado a vender un millón de copias… y una actitud de rechazo total de la industria. Tras todo este tiempo, y a pesar de sus altibajos, sólo se han ganado la admiración y respeto de su público y del resto de las bandas. Tim, te echaremos de menos. | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth Announces Plans To Leave James – Ananova | Article, News | Tim Booth has announced James’ upcoming tour will be his last with the band. The singer says he is ‘midway through a screen play’ and is ‘looking forward to teaching creativity workshops, to act and create some new music’. The remaining band members are to continue making music together although the future of James itself is uncertain. Booth begins his statement on James’ official site saying their latest album is their ‘best since Laid’. He also states the band are ‘getting on better with each other than ever before’. “So why am I leaving? Well because I want to stop while we are on top. To leave great memories knowing that I feel proud of just about everything we have done.” He has also sent thanks to everyone connected to the band, including the fans. “The quality of your listening has enabled us to produce quality. Your faith in us has lifted us to higher levels. “It seems like you have managed to always see us through the smokescreen of hipness and cool that the music industry is drowning in.” | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth Lascia I James – Rock Star Online (in Italian) | Article, News | Un’altra brutta notizia arriva dall’Inghilterra, il cantante dei James (nella foto) ha deciso di lasciare la band a fine anno. I Coldplay non si sopportano più, i Divine Comedy si sono sciolti, Wes Borland se n’è andato dai Limp Bizkit e anche Xabier ha lasciato gli Afterhours. Negli ultimi quindici giorni solo Tom Waits e Billy Corgan ci hanno dato delle soddisfazioni. Adesso il futuro è incerto anche per i James, band non molto conosciuta in Italia ma molto apprezzata in patria; il cantante ha deciso di lasciare il carrozzone dopo quasi 20 anni di carriera: “Se mi dicevate che saremo durati tutto questo tempo vi avrei chiesto che droga usavate” spiega Tim Booth con un comunicato sul loro sito ufficiale. I motivi della dipartita non sono chiarissimi, spiega invece il momento: “Volevo lasciare i James nel momento più alto della nostra carriera, mi volevo sentire fiero per quello che ho fatto. Me ne vado perché questo è il momento giusto”. Booth ha deciso di fare l’ultimo tour con il suo gruppo e a fine Dicembre si dedicherà, molto probabilmente, alla carriera di attore. I James continueranno a fare musica. | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth vai abandonar os James – Discodigital (in Portuguese) | Article, News | O líder e vocalista dos James, Tim Booth, deverá abandonar a banda britânica após a digressão de «Pleased To Meet You», a qual vai passar por Lisboa a 23 de Novembro. Num depoimento que se pode ler no site oficial dos James, Tim Booth sublinha que deseja sair enquanto a banda está no topo da carreira: «Quero deixar boas recordações sabendo que estou orgulhoso de quase tudo o que fizemos». «Após muitas deliberações, achei que chegou o momento de abandonar os James. Quando começámos, tínhamos decidido tocar um ano e ver como corria. Se alguém me dissesse que íamos durar 20 anos ter-lhe-ia perguntado que tipo de drogas andava a tomar», explica Booth. Na mesma declaração ao site, Tim Booth adianta que está a preparar uma longa-metragem e que espera dar workshops de criatividade, sendo que as novidades da sua carreira a solo poderão ser acompanhadas em www.timbooth.net (a ser inaugurado em Dezembro). A concretizar-se a saída de Booth, a crise nos James acentua-se, uma vez que a banda está sem editora desde que a Mercury Records decidiu não renovar o contrato que unia as duas entidades. Formados em 1982 em Manchester (Inglaterra), os James são liderados desde sempre por Tim Booth e ao longo da sua carreira criaram alguns dos temas mais conhecidos da pop da última década como «Sit Down», «Laid» e «Born Of Frustration». | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Final Tour For James – Scene One Feature | Article, News | Tim Booth bows out of everyone’s favourite vegan-political-bloke band at the end of this tour… James vocalist Tim Booth has said that he will leave the band once their current tour is finished. In an announcement on the band’s website (www.jamestheband.com) Booth said: “After much deliberation I have decided it’s time for me to leave James. I am leaving on a high. The tour is selling well and will be a great farewell party. For the last two years we have been getting on better with each other than ever before. We have made a CD (current LP ‘Pleased To Meet You’) that I believe to be our best since ‘Laid’; So why am I leaving? Well because I want to stop while we are on top. And I am leaving because it feels like THE RIGHT TIME.” Booth said he was working on a screenplay and planning ‘creativity workshops’. Further details will be on his web-site timbooth.net. In September it was announced that James had split from their label Fontana after ‘Pleased To Meet You’ fulfilled the demands of their contract. The band will release one more LP on Fontana, a b-sides LP ‘Now That’s What I Call B-Sides Vol. 1’ scheduled for next year. James tour dates: Dec 2 Brighton Centre. Dec 3 Leeds University. Dec 4 Newcastle Arena. Dec 6 Birmingham NEC. Dec 7 Manchester Arena. Dec 9 Glasgow SECC. Dec 10 Wembley Arena. | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth Leaves James – Go For Music | Article, News | James singer Tim Booth will leave the group at the end of the year. The group’s UK gig in December will be their final one with the current line-up. Booth disclosed the information on a post on the group’s official Web site. “After much deliberation I have decided to leave James. I want to stop while we are on top. I feel proud of everything we have done”, Booth said. However, his departure will not lead to a dissolution because the remaining members of James plan to continue making music together. Booth is currently writing a screen play and is planning to act. The Manchester-based group released 11 albums as well as many Top Forty singles. “When we started the band, we said we’d give it a year and see how it went. Nobody would have thought that we would still be there 20 years later,” Booth said. | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Wortlaut Biography | Article, Biography | “Some … had wrongly assumed that James was a band rather than a person, something that James himself had politely but firmly put right in thousands of interviews.” Unglaublich, dass eine Band, deren Auflistung des Line-Ups und der Line-Up-Changes eine knappe Seite ausmacht, so etwas von sich behauptet! Aber nun mal von Anfang an: 1980 trafen sich vier junge Männer – Jim Glennie (Bass), Larry Gott (Gitarre), Gavan Whelan (Schlagzeug) und Paul Gilberston (Gitarre) an der Manchester University. Fehlte nur noch ein Sänger. Die ersten Gigs spielte man noch mit weiblicher Stimme und änderte für jede Show den Namen. “Model Team International” hießen sie zum Beispiel gerade Mal für die 30 Minuten, die ihr Gig dauerte. In dieser Zeit konnten sie schon The Fall für sich begeistern und diese bei einem Gig in Manchester supporten. 1982 entdeckten die Vier dann Tim Booth in einer Uni-Disko in Manchester. Ob sie dort versuchten seinen Drink zu klauen, oder ihn beim Tanzen entdeckten ist nicht geklärt. Auf jeden Fall war er von nun an Leadsänger der Band. Und auch der endgültige Name ließ nicht mehr lange auf sich warten: Für eine der Shows gaben sie sich dann den Namen “James” und als sie ihn für die nächste wieder ändern wollten, mussten sie feststellen, dass sie schon als “James” angekündigt waren. Und so blieb es dabei. Doch noch bevor sie ihre erste Platte aufnehmen konnten, verließ Paul die Band, da sowohl er als auch die Band mit seinen Drogenproblemen nicht mehr zurecht kamen. Im November 1982 bietet sich eine große Chance für James: Sie supporten New Order in ihrer Heimatstadt. Im Oktober 1983 folgt ihre erste John Peel Session für Radio One, im Dezember spielen sie noch mal als Vorband für New Order, diesmal jedoch in London. Im November 1984 und von Februar bis April 1985 fungieren sie auf der Tour ihrer Vorbilder The Smiths als Special Guests. Der Plattendeal, den sie mit “Factory Records” 1985 abschließen, hält nicht wirklich lange. Man entschließt sich, noch im selben Jahr zum Label “Sire” zu wechseln. Auf diesem veröffentlichen sie 1986 ihr Debutalbum “Sutter”. Für das zweite Album “Stripmine” braucht die Band fast ein Jahr, erst im September 1988 wird es fertig. Ihr Label “Sire” versucht unterdessen, James für weitere fünf Alben zu verpflichten, was die Band ablehnt und prompt wieder labellos ist. Nachdem man ohnehin schon Probleme mit dem Drummer hatte, treibt dieser die schlechte Stimmung auf die Spitze: Auf einem Konzert Ende 1988 versucht Gavan Sänger Tim in eine Schlägerei zu verwickeln, was das Ende seiner Karriere bei James zur Folge hatte. 1989 macht man mit Dave Baynton-Power am Schlagzeug weiter. Er ist nicht das einzige neue Mitglied in der Band, Saul Davies wird als neuer Gitarrist, der gleichzeitig auch Geige spielt (ja, Violine in einer Popband!) engagiert. “One Man Clapping” wird im März rausgebracht. Kurz darauf verstärkt man den typischen James-Sound durch die Keyboards Mark Hunters. Für ihre folgenden Singles plus ein Album unterschreiben James einen Vertrag bei “Rough Trade”. Noch vor den Aufnahmen zur nächsten CD stößt ein weiteres Mitglied zu James: Trompeter Andy Diagram macht den Sound der Band noch unverwechselbarer. Ihre Single “Sit Down” wird in England ein riesiger Hit und schafft es auf Platz zwei der Charts, auch das Album “Gold Mother” toppt. Man entscheidet sich schon vor Veröffentlichung des Albums, nicht weiter bei “Rough Trade” unter Vertrag zu bleiben und wechselt 1990 zu “Fontana Records”. Dort wird auch das Album “Seven” veröffentlicht, das wohl als erfolgreichstes James-Album (Platz zwei der englischen Charts) gelten kann. Eine Schwemme von Single-Auskopplungen folgen dem Longplayer an die Chartsspitze. Unmengen von Festival-Auftritten, sowie der erste Trip nach Amerika folgen. Man supportet David Bowie, The Cure und Neil Youngs US-Tour. Hier wird auch der Kontakt zu Brian Eno hergestellt, der sich später bereit erklärt, auch James-Alben zu produzieren. Die Alben “Wah Wah” und “Laid” werden innerhalb von nur sechs Wochen in Bath eingespielt. Danach kommen plötzlich Gerüchte auf, die Band habe sich aufgelöst. Die Wahrheit sieht so aus: Sänger Tims Nebenprojekt “Booth And The Bad Angel” mit dem Film-Komponist Angelo Badalamenti hatte Prioriät. Das war alles. Und das Folgealbum “Whiplash” beweist endgültig das Gegenteil. Doch plötzlich plagt die Band andere Sorgen: Bei einem Check der Finanzen stellt sich heraus, dass James auf einem unüberschaubaren Schuldenberg sitzen. Folgerichtig erscheint 1998 erst einmal ein “Best Of”-Album. Die folgenden Tourneen sind auch ausverkauft und James trauen sich wieder an ein neues Studio-Album heran. Ende 1999 veröffentlicht man “Millionaires”. Während die erste Single “Just Like Fred Astaire” erwartungsfroh in die Top 20 der Charts schnellt, schafft es “We’re Going To Miss You” nicht einmal in die Top 40. Ihr frischer Release “Pleased To Meet You” steht seit Sommer 2001 den Regalen. Ob das Album James den Status der “Millionaires” beschert hat, darf bezweifelt werden, denn im Oktober wird der Ausstieg des Sängers Tim Booth bekannt gegeben. Booth möchte weiterhin Musik machen, kann sich aber auch vorstellen, Workshops zu leiten oder ins Schauspielfach hinein zu schnuppern. Sein Ausstieg beziehe sich nicht auf interne Probleme. Im Gegenteil werde er die Zeit zwischen 1999 und 2001 als die freundschaftlichste der Karriere und die kreativste seit “Laid” in Erinnerung behalten. Die übrigen Mitglieder wollen in einer noch nicht geregelten Form weitermachen. Die letzte Tour im alten Line Up geht im Dezember 2001 in England über die Bühnen. | Nov 2001 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth Abandona James – Underportugal (in Portuguese) | Article, News | Tim Booth, fundador e líder dos James, tornou oficial a decisão de abandonar a banda no final da actual da digressão europeia. Os espectáculos de 23 e 24 de Novembro, nos Coliseus de Lisboa e Porto, são a última oportunidade que o público português tem de ver os James ao vivo, acompanhados pelo seu vocalista de sempre. Ao cabo de vinte anos de carreira, Tim Booth acha preferível retirar-se antes de entrar num período de possível decadência dos James. Tim vai agora entregar-se à formação criativa, através de workshops, e provavelmente vai dar início a uma carreira a solo. Quanto aos restantes membros estão ainda a reflectir sobre o futuro da banda, sendo que a vontade de compôr permanece. No entanto o futuro dos James é ainda incerto. | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth da a conocer su intención de dejar James – Plasticos Y Decibelios (in Spanish) | Article, News | El cantante quiere explorar nuevos campos dentro del mundo de la música El cantante de James, Tim Booth ha anunciado que el próximo tour de James será el último que haga con la banda. Pese al buen momento que vive la banda con su último trabajo Pleased To Meet You, Booth está interesado en explorar otros campos dentro del mundo de la música. Quiere enseñar en un taller de creatividad, actuar y crear nueva música. El resto de los miembros de la banda, seguirán haciendo música juntos, aunque el futuro de James por el momento sea incierto. Booth manifestó sus intenciones en la página oficial del grupo, afirmando que su último álbum, era “el mejor que habían hecho desde Laid”. También declaró que la banda está “consiguiendo superarse con cada nuevo trabajo”. “¿Qué por qué me voy? porque quiero parar aunque estemos en lo más alto. Quiero dejar un buen recuerdo y sentirme orgulloso de todo lo que hemos hecho.” James darán un concierto en Madrid el próximo 22 de noviembre. | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Personality Split – Juice.net | Article, News | It may be the end of the road for the current line-up of UK band James with lead singer Tim Booth announcing that he’ll be moving on after the group’s December tour. A posting on the James website confirms the split with Booth saying that the time is right. “I want to stop while we are on top,” Booth said in his message. “To leave great memories knowing that I feel proud of just about everything we have done. And I am leaving because it feels like THE RIGHT TIME. This is an intuitive decision enabling me to let go of a huge commitment and make space for something new to come in.” The six remaining members are said to be continuing with no plans mentioned as yet. James has a history which spans 20 years and gained notoriety with their 1993 single “Laid”. | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Last Tour With Current Line Up – La Cronica de Santa Eufonica (English/Spanish) | Article, News | James’ Last Tour With Current Line-Up Tim Booth has announced that James’ upcoming tour will be his last with the band. Tim has provided a statement to fans, included below, explaining his decision. The official press release announcing Tim’s departure is available at jamestheband.com. The remaining members of James plan to continue making music together, and will make an announcement regarding their plans at a later date. Ultimo Tour de James con la actual alineación Tim Booth ha anunciado que el próximo tour de James será su último con la banda. Tim ha dejado un comunicado a los fans explicando su decisión. El comunicado de prensa oficial anunciando la salida de Tim está disponible en jamestheband.com. Los restantes miembros de James planean continuar haciendo música juntos y anunciarán más tarde sus planes. | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Vocalista do James pede as contas – Yahoo Brazil (Portuguese) | Article, News | Na tarde de ontem, o vocalista do James, Tim Booth, anunciou a sua decisão de deixar o grupo. De acordo com uma nota publicada no site oficial, a turnê que eles farão no mês que vem, na Inglaterra, será “a última chance de ver a atual formação”. Depois, mesmo sem Booth, o James continua em frente. O vocalista acredita estar saindo na melhor fase da carreira e disse que os últimos shows serão uma grande festa de despedida. “Porque eu estou saindo?”, explica em um comunicado, “Porque eu quero parar enquanto estamos bem. Para deixar grandes memórias, sabendo que eu me sinto orgulhoso de tudo o que fizemos. Estou saindo porque sinto que ESTE É O MOMENTO… é a mais pura verdade”. Booth também agradeceu aos companheiros e ex-companheiros de James e adiantou alguns planos para o futuro, como atuar e continuar tocando. Além disso, as próximas novidades a seu respeito serão reveladas no site timbooth.net, que estará funcionando a partir de dezembro. | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Aufhören, wenn es am Schönsten ist – Popkomm (German) | Article, News | Und noch ein Split. Die Band James verliert ihren wichtigsten Mann. Was ist nur auf der Insel los? Catatonia, Divine Comedy, Elastica und jetzt James. Eine wahre Split-Welle greift in der ersten Britpop-Etage um sich. Sänger Tim Booth hat auf der offiziellen Website von James ein Statement hinterlassen. Er kündigt dort an, dass er nach der nächsten Tour James verlassen wird. Dieser Schritt geschehe nicht aus Unzufriedenheit, betont Booth. Ganz im Gegenteil, ihr aktuelles Album “Pleased To Meet You” sei das beste seit “Laid” und die Tour werde nun eine großartige Abschiedsparty werden. Die verbliebenen Mitglieder der Band veröffentlichten dazu eine Pressemitteilung, in der sie bekräftigen, dass sie weiterhin zusammen Musik machen werden. Was mit dem Bandnamen geschieht, ist noch nicht entschieden. Mit ihrem charismatischen Sänger und Songwriter verlieren sie allerdings das wichtigste Markenzeichen. Als letztes Gründungsmitglied aus dem Jahr 1983 bleibt ihnen nur noch Bassist Jim Glennie. | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Interview with Saul – Metropoli (in Spanish) | Article, Interview | Con casi dos décadas de historia a sus espaldas, el grupo de Manchester James sigue sorprendiendo en cada una de sus entregas discográficas, como el reciente Pleased to Meet You. Pero el último sobresalto que ha proporcionado la banda ha sido el abandono de Tim Booth, su líder, hecho público a través de un comunicado en plena gira. Ahora recala en Madrid encabezando un festival y su componente Saul Davies (ya que Booth odia las entrevistas) habla de presente y futuro. Pregunta.– Recientemente Tim Booth ha anunciado que abandona la banda. ¿Cuáles son los motivos? Respuesta.– Creo que tiene que ver con que, después de 20 años formando parte de un mismo proyecto, llega el momento de buscar nuevos caminos. Si eso ocurre con un gran disco como es Pleased to Meet You, probablemente Tim ha pensado: «éste es un buen momento para dejarlo». Creo que ésa es la razón. P.– ¿Significa esto que James desaparecerá despues de esta gira? R.– No tengo ni idea. Ahora estamos centrados en la gira y todo prosigue con normalidad. La ruptura no ha sido dolorosa y no la hemos tomado como un desastre. Lo que ocurra después, el tiempo lo dirá. Todos los componentes somos músicos y seguiremos haciendo música, lo que no sé es bajo qué nombre, ni si juntos o separados. Desde luego, no somos una banda típica de rock. P.– ¿Ha cambiado esta decisión los planes del tour en aspectos como el repertorio, los lugares o la duración, por ejemplo? R.– Los lugares en los que estamos tocando son salas de capacidad media que nos permiten saber más acerca de nuestra audiencia. Procuramos tener un contacto más directo con el público y eso, por el momento, no ha cambiado. P.– ¿Cuál es su relación actual dentro de la banda? R.– Muy buena. No ha habido ningún problema personal entre nosotros. Seguimos gastándonos las mismas bromas y conviviendo perfectamente. P.– Hablemos de su último álbum… R.– Hablemos mejor del Real Madrid y el Barcelona (risas). Soy un gran fan del Barcelona y de Rivaldo. Cuando llegue a Madrid probablemente me ponga una gorra del Barça. ¿Cree que alguien se lo tomará mal? (risas) P.– Centrémonos. Pleased to Meet You ha sido producido por Brian Eno, también productor de su álbum Laid. ¿Disfrutan trabajando con él? R.– Sí. Siempre es un placer estar en el estudio con él. Tiene una forma muy especial de entender la música. Su concepto es muy artístico y siempre se aprende algo a su lado. Es un maestro. P.– Todos los temas tienen un ambiente melancólico. ¿Por qué? R.– El proceso creativo de componer una canción comienza en tu casa, de forma íntima y supongo que en nuestra cabeza había una mayor sensación de melancolía, de repaso de lo que uno lleva vivido. P.– ¿Qué recuerdan de los años de acid house, cuando grabaron su éxito Sit Down? R.– Nos pilló en Manchester, nuestra ciudad, y aquello era una fiesta continua. Fue una época muy loca, pero a la vez muy creativa. Allí surgieron bandas como Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets o Stone Roses. | Nov 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Split – Popnews (French) | Article, News | Tim Booth le chanteur de James a décidé de mettre fin à l’aventure du groupe après la tournée qui a commencé il y a 2 semaines. Il souhaite arrêter avant la descente aux enfers que subissent tous les groupes et se consacrera à l’ecriture de scénari, ainsi qu’à son nouveau metier d’acteur. La musique refera son apparition dans sa vie plus tard. | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Biografica – Radiocommercial (Portuguese) | Article, Biography | Oriundos de Manchester, os James começaram a dar nas vistas no final dos anos 80, quando surgiram as inevitáveis comparações com Smiths. “Sit Down” foi o primeiro single de grande sucesso, a que se seguiu a edição de “Laid”, em Setembro de 1993. Do álbum foram extraídos temas como “Say Something”, “Everybody Knows” e “Out To Get You”. Era visível o “dedo” de Brian Eno, produtor com o qual ainda trabalham. Depois de várias digressões e projectos consolidados, os James editaram “Whiplash”, em 1997. Um álbum que, mais uma vez, não foi consensual entre o público. Seguiu-se “Millionaires”, em 1999, e com ele singles que voltaram a atingir as principais tabelas europeias, como “Just Like Fred Astaire” e “I Know What I´m Here For”. O regresso de Tim Booth e companhia aconteceu em Junho deste ano, com “Pleased To Meet You”. O single de avanço, “Getting Away With It (All Messed Up)” fez furor em Agosto, sendo um dos mais tocados durante os intervalos das bandas nos festivais de verão. “English Beefcake” foi a primeira aposta da Rádio Comercial para o 11º trabalho dos James. Pelo meio, a banda lançou um álbum com os grandes êxitos, a que deu o nome de “Best Of James”. Temas como “Born Of Frustration”, “Sometimes”, “Lose Control” e “Ring The Bells”. Pretextos mais que suficientes para nova passagem da banda por Portugal, com concertos que prometem, marcados para os Coliseus de Lisboa e Porto. | Nov 2001 | article biography | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Singer To Quit Band – Aversion.com | Article, News | The British alt-rock band James will lose its singer of 20 years at the conclusion of its next tour. Tim Booth announced his impending retirement from the act on the band’s official web site. Booth will play out until the end of the act’s December tour. The remaining members of the band will continue on without him, though there is no word on who will assume vocal duties. Booth plans to work on a screenplay, teach, act and work on other musical directions. “I want to stop while we are on top,” he wrote, apparently forgetting about the seven years since Laid came out. “To leave great memories knowing that I feel proud of just about everything we have done. And I am leaving because it feels like the right time. This is an intuitive decision enabling me to let go of a huge commitment and make space for something new to come in.” | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Bez Bootha – 30Ton.com (Polish) | Article, News | Frontman grupy James – Tim Booth poinformowal, ze juz wkrótce zamierza rozstac sie z zespolem Booth chce odejsc z zespolu James jeszcze przed koncem roku, zaraz po tym jak formacja zakonczy swoja trase koncertowa po Wielkiej Brytanii. Na temat przyczyn swojego odejscia, Tim zamiescil informacje na oficjalnej stronie zespolu. “Chce przestac gdy jeszcze jestesmy na szczycie. Chce pozostawic wspaniale wspomnienia, wiedzac, ze czuje sie dumny praktycznie ze wszystkiego co zrobilismy. Odchodze, bo czuje, ze to jest wlasnie ten WLASCIWY CZAS. Kiedy tworzylismy zespól, mówilismy, ze damy mu rok na to, zeby zobaczyc co z tego wyjdzie. Gdybyscie wtedy powiedzieli mi, ze przetrwamy niemal 20 lat, spytalbym na jakich jestescie prochach” – napisal Booth. Z informacji podanych na stronie wynika takze, ze pozostali czlonkowie Jamesa, nie zaprzestana dzialalnosci. Sam Booth zamierza popracowac przy nowych projektach i to nie tylko muzycznych. Artysta przyznal miedzy innymi, ze jest gdzies w polowie pracy nad wlasnym scenariuszem | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth Quits James – Q Music News | Article, News | Singer Bows Out Amicably Tim Booth has announced his decision to leave James. The singer, who presented Brian Eno with the Merit Award at this year’s Q Awards, has said that the band’s forthcoming European tour will be his last as a member of the group. In a statement, Booth said: “After much deliberation I have decided it’s time for me to leave James. When we started the band we always said we’d give it a year and see how it went. If you had told me we’d last nearly 20 years I’d have asked you what drugs you were on. I am leaving on a high. The tour will be a great farewell party. For the last two years we have been getting on better with each other than ever before. “So why am I leaving? Well because I want to stop while we are on top. To leave great memories knowing that I feel proud of just about everything we have done. And I am leaving because it feels like the right time. This is an intuitive decision enabling me to let go of a huge commitment and make space for something new to come in. I am sure the press will try and find all kinds of smaller reasons and many of them may be factually true. But this is the greater truth. I don’t know what the rest of the guys are going to do but I want to thank them for an amazing ride and for taking my departure so well.” Booth revealed that he is mid-way through a screenplay and hinted that he would be pursuing musical projects of his own. He also thanked the band’s fans for “Your faith in us [which] has lifted us to higher levels. It seems like you have managed to always see us through the smokescreen of hipness and cool that the music industry is drowning in.” James’s final tour with Booth takes in the Brighton Centre (2 December), Leeds University (3 December), Newcastle Arena (4 December), Birmingham NEC (6 December); Manchester Arena (7 December), Glasgow SECC (9 December) and London’s Wembley Arena (10 December). | Nov 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Pleased To Meet You But Ready To Leave – Glasgow Evening Times | Article, Interview |
As an example of good timing, James are hard to beat. Their Pleased To Meet You album is performing well and their current tour, which stops at the SECC next Sunday, is almost a sell out, and spirits are high. The perfect time, in other words, to leave the band, is it not? “I simply woke up one morning and thought ‘right, it’s time for me to leave James'” explains frontman Tim Booth. “I’ve been here for 20 years. I wanted to make this decision on our terms, not when it was forced, and I felt that it was inevitable. “It feels scary, but it also feels right. The rest of the guys are fine and totally behind me.” In some ways, it’s typical of Booth throwing conventional pop wisdom to the wind. When the band was crying out for publicity, the group remained shy of the press. When everyone went Britpop mad, James continued to chart their own course, paying little or no attention to passing fads. While the music industry remains a sea of hedonistic behaviour, Tim is feeling run down from being surrounded by heavy smokers at their recent Spanish gigs. He really is a bit of a contradiction in the pop world. “I think our fans have responded to that during the years,” he told me. “We worked hard, often with no money, but continued to do things our way. I think they have respected us for that.” The fans not only respect the band, but they are incredibily loyal too. When news first broke of Tim’s decision to leave, ticket sales soared, fans bombarded the record companies and tears were shed. Their shows in Athens, Portugal and Spain have resulted in tears from the crowds and from the band – it really is the end of an era. “At the end of our show in Portugal, I was in tears,” says Booth. “The crowd were carried away on the emotion of it all and it affected me. “These last few shows are about a celebration, but it’s still tinged with a beautiful sadness.” Even though the sense of loss is great, there’s an excitement about the future, from Tim as well as the remaining members of the band. For bassist Jim Glennie – along with Tim, the last of the original songwriters – the future remains bright. “We’ve been through many crises. If James couldn’t come through then Darwinism would have weeded us out by now,” explains an upbeat Glennie. “None of the band want these gigs to become a dirge. It has to remain positive, as James and Tim will continue.” What both will do remains to be seen. The remaining members of James might collaborate with a guest vocalist next year, according to Glennie, but not to do old covers. Instead, it might be very nice to try different things. What will appear, though, is a collection of James b-sides. “We wanted to release an album called The Greatest B-Sides Album Ever, but we weren’t allowed to,” says Tim. “Due to copyright reasons, we’re having to call it B-Sides Ultra. Same songs – but the name isn’t so good!” B-sides apart, Tim has his eye on a few things. Being tied to one creative entity for so long has absorbed his energy, but now he feels ready to try other projects. A screenplay has been toyed with, as have a few new songs of his own. When the time is right, he’ll consider releasing them. “Things can change, so I can’t describe them properly just now,” he admits. What he is doing is continuing to teach music workshops, something he has been working on secretly for years. “It’s one of those things that I’ve done for a few hours on a Saturday, where I’ve helped people unleash their creativity, encouraged them to sing.” In April, he’s set to take the workshops across the country. What he won’t be doing is settling down in this country, unlike other band members Saul, Jim and Michael. The three of them have settled in Scotland. Jim lives outside Inverness, while Saul is in Tillicoultry and Michael is just outside Glasgow. “I won’t be doing that!” says Booth. “The band all love it there, but I’m happy where I am. It’s ironic that we’re still perceived as a Manchester band, when not one of us has lived there for three or four years.” | Nov 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Runs Out – Birmingham Evening Mail | Article, Era: Pleased To Meet You, Interview |
November 2001, by Diane Parkes, © Birmingham Evening Mail TIM RUNS OUT! James’ singer Tim Booth is hanging up his microphone and leaving the best-selling band after 20 years. He tells Diane Parkes why James have long been the stalwarts of the Indie scene. While bands have come, gone or completely changed their image you could depend on James for a solid album, a handful of singles and a pre-Christmas tour. Their autumn album Please To Meet You has been critically acclaimed and they have a string of much-loved hits including Sit Down, Come Home, Laid and She’s A Star. But this stability has been thrown into disarray by the announcement that singer Tim Booth is to quit the band after this December’s tour, which includes a date at the NEC on Thursday. So why? “I just though 20 years was an obscene length of time to spend with a band,” he says. “I felt like it was time to move on before the band droops. We did a gig in Athens recently and it was the best one we had done and we have the latest album and I wanted to go out with a bang rather than a whimper at some point.” “It wasn’t anything I had been planning for a long time, it was a highly instinctive choice. It just came to me over the summer that I should leave. It came as a shock to me and I came over all queer. I spent a week of insecurity trying to decide what to do and then I felt it was right.” But how did the rest of the band respond? “They were pretty surprised. I don’t think any of them had suspected it at this time. Three or four years ago we were having a harder time and then they would not have been so surprised. It was really hard telling them. But they were all really good about it and have been supportive. We are ending on very good terms and will keep in touch.” So have we heard the last of Tim Booth? Not at all, he says. “I have been working on a screenplay and am on the second draft. I have had this outline for four years but couldn’t get started with it. But I had a blast for about five weeks and wrote it. Actually I dictated it as I am an oral person rather than a writer.” “It was effortless but I haven’t given it out to other people yet and they may say it is rubbish. I am sending it to a few people I trust to have a look at. It is a film and not based in the music industry but it is based on some of the experiences in my life. It features an assassin though and it has yet to happen to me.” And Tim’s music will also be central in his post-James existence. “I am organising some creativity workshops around the country,” says Tim. “There aren’t any planned for Birmingham yet but there will be. And I have started to make some music. It is all things I wanted to do, but without being part of a corporation.” What can we expect of the Birmingham concert? “Well it will be a party. We will have a big celebration, as all James gigs are. We will have some special guests so it should be fun. There have been times when we got fed up of playing certain songs and I am on record of saying so. We rested Sit Down for a year to give us the chance to play other things but at this concert we will be playing all the songs that people want. We will be bringing a few of the older songs out of the cupboard.” And what of James without Tim Booth? “I don’t think it is impossible for them to continue if they find a young, great singer. But they are all such great musicians they could go on to do other things. In some ways it would be harder to try to continue with James than to try new things, But it is totally up to them.” “I don’t have any immediate plans to work with them again. But if we were invited to play Glastonbury then we would certainly consider it because that has always been great fun.” | Nov 2001 | article era-pleased-to-meet-you interview era | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Rock’s Underdogs Reach The End Of The Line – The Guardian | Article, News | Tim Booth’s recent decision to walk away from fronting James after 19 years should be viewed as a rare example of a rock star behaving with true dignity. Despite their 1998 Best of album selling 1m copies, the band’s last two studio albums – 1999’s Millionaires (arguably the best of their career) and this year’s Pleased To Meet You – fared inexplicably badly. When Mercury Records dropped them after a 10 year relationship, the writing was on the wall, but the number of “classic” groups that are lingering on or reuniting still throws Booth’s decision to quit into stark perspective. Fans of many different ages are crammed into this warm-up for the final arena shows. James boast one of rock’s most loyal fan bases, and could still have made a very comfortable living as a touring band. As we line up to hear the songs for one last time, the gig has a surreal atmosphere: part funeral, part wake. But James were never straightforward and the set list reflects their strange trajectory from oddball New Order support act to 1990s stadium giants. Curiously though, there are no songs from their early Factory Records period. Come Home blasts us back to 1990s Madchester; Say Something and Sometimes to the Eno-produced days of chart ubiquity. These songs tug at the heartstrings, and make James success seem all the more remarkable – this is a band that took mental illness on to Top of the Pops. There was always something of the underdog about James though. They battled industy shenanigans, line-up upheavals, physical problems and personal turmoil, their determination reflected in the hopeful song Tomorrow. The crowd sing along, eyes closed. For years, James provided a precious rock to cling to for the multitudes who felt similarly distressed and alienated by the world. Booth used to resent the way the press depicted him as a vegan and meditating Buddhist, but now, in vest and skull cap, he looks very much the part, which must afford him some wry amusement. He is subdued for the first half, but grows exuberant as the power of the songs carries him away. James close with the colossus Sit Down and then the seven-piece band walk to the front of the stage and wave goodbye, History will remember them kindly, a uniquely spirited rock band that never knew disgrace. | Dec 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Home James – Manchester Evening News | Article, News |
December 2001, by Robert Meakin, © Manchester Evening News Frontman bows out recalling his days as a “nerdy wimp” As singer Tim Booth prepares for a final appearance with his bandmates in Manchester, the James frontman has been recalling his rather less glamorous debut in the group’s home city. Booth, due to quit the Manchester band after almost 20 years at the end of their current UK tour, performs an emotional swansong in front of thousands at the Manchester Evening News Arena tonight, before pursuing solo material, writing and acting projects. And the setting is certainly a far cry from the more humble Princess Street venue where he first cut his teeth with the group in 1982 as their new vocalist. He tells me : “My first gig with James in Manchester was at the Cyprus Tavern to a load of hardcore James fans who didn’t know what to make of this nerdy wimp who’d become their new singer. It was very intimidating!” The star admits tonight will prove to be a poignant occasion, adding: “It’s highly emotional. It’s really hard not to start crying actually. But at the same time it feels really good, it should be a celebration. Manchester has been our base.” Nostalgia has been rife in recent days, with the group filming around their home city for a forthcoming DVD release, which will include footage from tonight’s show. Booth will also be embarking on a rather different tour from next year when he travels around the UK, fronting “creativity workshops” with a system of dance and meditation designed to encourage a flow of ideas. | Dec 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Quirky Pop That Won Legions Of Fans – Manchester Evening News | Article, Era: Pleased To Meet You, News |
December 2001, © Manchester Evening News LOCAL HEROES MADE IT BIG Unaware that he could sing, original members Jim Glennie, Paul Gilbertson and Gavan Whelan asked the then drama student if he’d reproduce his rubber man antics to accompany their act. It wasn’t long before he took over the microphone and the rest, as they say, is history. So far James 19 years have taken them from the folky eccentricity of Hymn From A Village to the forthright jungle pop of What For and through the baggy-feel of Come Home and on to stadium anthems like Born of Frustration and the heartfelt acoustic pop of Sometimes. By the early nineties, their quirky brand of guitar pop had won them legions of fans worldwide. Their real breakthrough came in 1989 with the release of Gold Mother, which spawned the hits Come Home, How Was It For You? and Sit Down. Sit Down was only held off the UK number one slot by Chesney Hawkes’ The One And Only. James released Seven, which became a million seller, peaking at number 2 in the UK album charts. The band were getting stronger with every release and they recruited Brian Eno for their next album Laid in 1993. Laid broke the band in the States, selling 600,000 copies. However, just as the band appeared to have world domination in their grasp it all started to come apart at the seams. Guitarist Larry Gott and manager Martine departed followed by a massive back-tax demand. And it wasn’t until 1998 that the band returned the album Whiplash, containing the hits She’s A Star and Tomorrow. A year later their Best Of compilation bumped the Titanic soundtrack off the top of the album charts. Millionaires was released last year and Pleased To Meet You in June this year, both to mixed reviews. Then in October, Tim Booth announced this was to be his final tour with the band. Jim and the rest of James have vowed to carry on and Tim Booth says he might be back to play Glastonbury if he’s asked. | Dec 2001 | article era-pleased-to-meet-you news era | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Seven Remaster – Sleeve Notes by Stuart Maconie | Article, Press Release | And then they were seven. and pop stars to boot. James the group were ten years old by the time they came to record Seven in the sumptuous surroundings of The Manor in Shipton-on-Cherwell, Oxfordshire; ten years of high hopes and heartache, wonderful music and offstage chaos. Having burst onto the fertile early 80s indie scene and entranced many with their refreshing, unorthndox, gripping elision of pastoral levity and post-punk energy, they’d lost their founder and guiding light Paul Gilberston to a drug-related breakdown and, having produced two fabulous singles with Factory Records, had thrown their lot in, disastrously, with Seymour Stein’s Sire Records. This move had effectively put their career on hold and seen two erratically entertaining albums – Stutter and Strip-mine – released to widespread indifference. Surviving on bank loans and the proceeds from offering themselves as human guinea pigs in drug trials, they’d extricated themselves from Sire’s deathly embrace and financed a live album, One Man Clapping, which had at least reminded the world they still existed. Then they acrimoniously parted from drummer Gavan Whelan and again the future looked uncertain. But the turn of the 90s brought solace and support from unexpected quarters. Their live shows were rapidly attaining a religious fervour; cult gatherings where growing legions of devotees in their characteristic daisy-logo’d tee-shirts came to see and hear electrifying performances from a band now incrementally expanded from the long-standing nucleus of Larry Gott, Jim Glennie and Tim Booth to include four “new boys”. Dave Baynton-Power had served his apprenticeships in various indie outfits in North Wales, Cheshire and Merseyside and been reluctantly persuaded to take his chances with James afrer a clairvoyant friend of Tim Booth’s had predicted the arrival of a Dave from Wales. Guitarist/violinist Saul Davies, a sparky bohemian, was throwing pots in rural Hampshire before Larry Gott spotted him at a blues amateur night. Mark Hunter was recruited via mutual mend Mick Armistead who’d contributed keyboards to One Man Clapping. Lastly, former Diagram Brothers, Dislocation Dance and Pale Fountains trumpeter Andy Diagram was absorbed into the band. This loose collective recorded the watershed Gold Mother album that, with the happy coincidence of the Madchester craze, re-ignited their career and saw them relocate to Fontana Records. Fontana installed them in the Manor for the recording of what was destined to be their major league breakthrough, the album you’re holding now. The cover features a foetus hanging suspended in its mothers amnionic fluid. but the birth of the record was far from easy. After years of breadline subsistence, the band found The Manor distractingly well equipped and appointed. And then as well as the Manor’s gorgeous grounds, pool tables, tennis courts and local country pubs, came another distraction. With James’ star very much in the ascendant a re-issued version of 1991 ‘s Sit Down became a huge hit. Jim Glennie recalls taking a break at the Manor to listen to Radio One’s chart run-down “I know it was in there somewhere and the excitement rose as thc rundown went on and it wasn’t mentioned, because it had to be higher At 17, another now entry and that wasn’t us so it was higher than that. It went in at 7. Funnily enough I thought, I thought, well, I could kick it in the head now. I’ve achieved something”. But, as Larry Gott recalls, the tremendous success of Sit Down complicated the Seven sessions. “We were trying to get a new album done and then there’s all this mayhem surrounding Sit Down. It doesn’t happen to bands very often that a song from the past comes back to life like that. It became a real distraction We had to put the recording on hold; we did Top Of The Pops, we had the press coming down to the Manor all the time. Every day started with 3 or 4 phone interviews. We spent our lives talking about this thing we’d done ages ago.” To kick-start the new record, Fontana suggested a new tack. Producer Youth, once of cult band Killing Joke, was installed and the sessions reconvened in London. As Mark Hunter remarks “Youth got us back in a room and playing like a band together”. The room was Olympic Studios in London, which Youth, famed for his eccentricity, filled with candles, oil wheels, strobes and incense in order to create a “vibe”. Creatively back on course, the band completed the album at Christmas time When Seven appeared in Spring 1992, purist critics were suspicious of its expansive gestures and big sound. But they were ignoring, perhaps deliberately, the fact that James music had always sought to reach out from beyond the confines of the indie ghetto. Those critics who sneered “stadium rock” and “Simple Minds” chose to ignore Seven’s diversity and mistake its self-belieffor self-importance. There are moments of high drama such as Sound, Ring The Bells and Born Of Frustration. But elsewhere, there’s the taut abrasiveness of Bring A Gun, the plaintive Mother, the infectious Live A Love Of Life and the ethereally graceful Next Lover, proof of the group’s peerless control at minimal volumes and slow tempo. Seven is a big record by a big band, the high watermark of the band’s arena-filling phase, along with their performance to 30,000 people at Alton Towers, Cheshire. And then just when the media had them tagged them as a huge corporate rock band, their next move, acoustic work with Neil Young and Brian Eno, was to wrong foot everyone again. But Seven is where James were at in the flowering spring of 1992; confident, mature and punching at their full weight. | Dec 2001 | article press-release | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ananova News Article On DVD / Jim’s Statement | Article, News | James are to release a DVD of the Manchester gig from their latest tour. The tour was the band’s last with vocalist Tim Booth. The DVD is expected to be released in February. Booth has left the group to concentrate on other musical projects, NME.COM reports. James were joined onstage at the Manchester gig by former band members Larry Gott and Andy Diagram. James bassist Jim Glennie says the remaining members of the group plan to continue with the band. He said: “I’m sure you’ve all heard the news that Tim is leaving, and I know this will have had all of us reaching for our Kleenex and wondering what is going to happen next. “There’s no need for me to state the importance of Tim’s contribution to James over the past twenty years, and I don’t want to downplay the effect of his leaving, but in our true bloody-minded style, James will continue. “The history of this band has been a battlefield of near-disasters overcome by a passion and self-belief bordering on arrogance, and an unstoppable determination that’s pulled us through the very worst of times…and here we go again! “It’s difficult for me to give exact details as there is a lot we’ve not decided yet, but rest assured, you haven’t seen the last of James, and I think we’ve got one or two surprises in store for you. “This just leaves me to thank Tim, and wish him all the very best for the future. Enjoy the rest of the tour and see you in the new year.” | Dec 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
NME News Article | Article, News | JAMES have filmed their final hometown show with TIM BOOTH and plan to release it as a DVD in 2002. James have just completed their final tour with vocalist Booth, who walked out on the group to concentrate on other musical projects. On the Manchester date on the tour (December 7), the group were joined onstage by former members Larry Gott and Andy Diagram. A film of the show is likely to be released in 2002, according to a posting on the band’s official website, www.jamestheband.com. In related news, James bassist Jim Glennie has issued a statement confirming that the remaining members of James plan to continue with the band. He wrote: “I’m sure you’ve all heard the news that Tim is leaving, and I know this will have had all of us reaching for our Kleenex and wondering what is going to happen next. “There’s no need for me to state the importance of Tim’s contribution to James over the past twenty years, and I don’t want to downplay the effect of his leaving, but in our true bloody-minded style, James will continue. The history of this band has been a battlefield of near-disasters overcome by a passion and self-belief bordering on arrogance, and an unstoppable determination that’s pulled us through the very worst of times… and here we go again! “It’s difficult for me to give exact details as there is a lot we’ve not decided yet, but rest assured, you haven’t seen the last of James, and I think we’ve got one or two surprises in store for you. “This just leaves me to thank Tim, and wish him all the very best for the future. Enjoy the rest of the tour and see you in the new year.” | Dec 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jim’s Statement On The Future Of James | Article, News | Dear James People, I’m sure you’ve all heard the news that Timothy is leaving, and I know this will have had all of us reaching for our Kleenex and wondering what is going to happen next. There’s no need for me to state the importance of Tim’s contribution to James over the past twenty years, and I don’t want to downplay the effect of his leaving, but in our true bloody-minded style, James will continue. The history of this band has been a battlefield of near disasters overcome by a passion and self belief bordering on arrogance, and an unstoppable determination that’s pulled us through the very worst of times…and here we go again! It’s difficult for me to give exact details as there is a lot we’ve not decided yet, but rest assured, you haven’t seen the last of James, and I think we’ve got one or two surprises in store for you. This just leaves me to thank Tim, and wish him all the very best for the future. Enjoy the rest of the tour and see you in the new year, Jim | Dec 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Calls It Quits – Virginmega.com | Article, News | British pop rockers James have officially split. The band parted from their UK Mercury label Fontana Records in September this year. This was followed by vocalist Tim Booth’s announcement at the end of October that after nearly two decades James’ December tour dates would be his last with the band. That tour ended last night (12/10) at London’s Wembley Arena. The band were best known in America for their 1993 Gold record Laid, a collaboration with Brian Eno. “We’ll never say never [re-form], but we’re going to wait until the dust has settled,” says drummer David Baynton-Power. | Dec 2001 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Pleased To Meet You – interview with Kulas in The Informer | Article, Interview | Not many bands can fill a venue the size of a small town. With round about 18,000 people turning up at Manchester Evening News Arena to see the last concert with band JAMES it is really the best send off a group can have. As Tim Booth announced that he is leaving the band as the singer, many now assume that the band James is to end their 19-year career. In conversation with MICHAEL KULAS, guitarist and backing vocalist of the band, he does not rule out that the band might still go on. We meet after the gig, which was recorded for a live CD and DVD/video to be released next year. Despite some technical glitches with guitarist/violinist Saul Davies’ equipment, the show was a real success. After two call-backs and a six songs encore, this was the band’s way of saying goodbye. Even if Michael is a late-comer in the band, he didn’t feel pushed out by the re-appearances of former members Larry Gott and Andy Diagram. “It felt good to see the band still making great music together and it also felt good to be a part of that. Obviously, to be five guitarists up on stage, that was a bit strange, but this gig wasn’t about the present James, it was James’ past as well” said Kulas after the gig. It is hard not to talk about the eminent split up of the band. Kulas has some things planned, but as he is wrapped up in playing with James, he is uncertain what he will do in the future. Canadian-born Michael Kulas, joined the band in 1997 after having met Saul Davies in Toronto some years earlier. Davies produced Kulas’ first solo album “Mosquito” in 1994. Now living in Scotland, Kulas has plans for a third album with most of the songs already written . “ The songs have been written whilst I was recording with James for the “Pleased to meet you” album”, Kulas says, ”but it is going to be different than the other two albums I’ve done. My second album “Another Small Machine” was recorded in a small cottage during a short space of time, but this one will probably not be done that way. I think it is important to find a producer that you trust and someone whose opinions you value. Working with Brian Eno was like that.” While writing songs, Kulas often finds that it is easy to get your mind into a certain “headspace” as he calls it. “That is why it is vital for me to get away a bit from what I am doing at the time. I must admit that I sometimes feel like my creativity has been drained a bit since I joined James. But as I will take some time off until February, I will be able to figure out what I want to do. I’ll probably put a band together here in the UK. Who with? Well, let’s say I’m not ruling out any former James members.” As the subject of musical moulds and set ideas comes up, Kulas has a lot to say. “I do feel that it’s time for the music industry to get shook up a bit like when Nirvana first came out. The sound that followed that has had a major impact on so many people. Now, with the likes of S Club 7 and Steps, there is a risk of that not happening. But at the moment there is just such a big back catalogue of great music, it’s a shame that a band such as The Strokes isn’t capable of doing something original with it. There is really no excuse for a band nowadays to sound exactly as something thirty years ago.” | Dec 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Answers Questions To Jamestheband.com – December 2001 | Article, Interview | On the old wearejames.com website, the band would periodically answer questions submitted by fans. The following were answered by Tim in December 2001. From: Ian Price Can you give any indications of the songs in the setlist for the December tour? Will it be an extended set, as it’s your last tour? We are at present rejuvenating some old favourites but i don’t want to spoil the surprise or indeed surprises we have in store. We are aiming to make this a generous completion but most people are going to be pissed off that we didn’t play a particular song or other. I just ask you to enjoy the moment and not drown the gigs in expectations. As to the length of set that’s dictated by the limitations of throat. A lot of our songs require vocal gymnastics and my voice ( or body for that matter ) can’t take much more than 2 hrs without impacting negatively on the proceeding gig. Damn those pesky human limitations! From: Jimmy As a lyricist, there must be pages of lyrics and prose that you have yet to use in a song. Will they ever be published in some sort of form? No. if they’ve been good lyrics i’ve used them and my prose has mainly been private diaries. From: Katie Start Which part of being with ‘James’ will be the most difficult to leave behind? The satisfaction of a great gig. That feeling of becoming one with a large body of strangers. Creating great songs is, i believe, continuing, though it may take people a while getting used to a different style. From: Dean Love (Deano) Tim, can you tell us anything about the screenplay you’re writing? A summary of the plot or the genre you’re working in? (assuming, of course, it’s not a genre-defying as the music of James!) You see i’m an Aquarian and i like surprises . I’m also superstitious and don’t want to talk about it until it’s finished. It might just be for me. A private piece of creativity that i am irrationally proud of. If there is a genre i would hope it has the feel and depth of American Beauty. But that really is no genre at all. From: Ed Jordan Tim, looking back over the 20 years, can you choose a James song that captures what the band is to you? If i could it would be a poor reflection of just one segment of the creature named James. Hopefully our musical journey has been too diverse for such a polaroid to make any sense. But if you insist, “Sometimes.” From: Michael O’Brian Dear Tim, Do you already have musicians lined up to work with, if so, who are they; and can you ever see yourself performing james songs in the future as part of a gig? I just started writing with a young engineer called K.K who had a large input on the songs “Fine” and “Falling Down “. We will be looking for unknown collaborators at a later date. From: Kim Leeson If you could choose one treasured moment in your James career, when and where was it? Ahhhh (that’s a scream not a sigh ) . It must be a gig high. Athens last month was up there. Most Manchester or Glasgow gigs of the last 15 years. A particular Chicago TORONTO and liverpool gig spring to mind (followed by the acoustic Neil Young tour). I honestly tend not to look back. From: Mary Tim – I always wonder what on earth it must feel like when you’re standing up there on stage, having just played your encore and the fans are going wild. Do you think you’ll get the same adrenaline rush from your new projects? If the gig has been great then that is a very satisfying part of the evening. Up until then I am usually filled with a sense of responsibility to guide the gig in the right direction. It’s fun, but scary fun. Will it be the same? I hope not. I hope it will be different. That the sense of satisfaction and achievement will be even higher. From: Alex If you could have an input towards the choice of a new vocalist for James, would you like to suggest someone and is there anyone you would have in mind? Mary Margaret O’Hara, Iggy Pop. They could both do with a great band. From: Paul Fennesy Do you think you have taken ‘James’ as far as you can? I think this is probably true for me. I’m sure we could continue to make great music but I think it would be hard to reach as high as Pleased to Meet You. From: Jonathan Matthews What are your feelings when you consider that James probably be remembered as a band that was misunderstood by the music press and the masses alike and didn’t achieve huge success’s in the U2 sense of the word? It wasn’t our path. I believe we will be more appreciated when we have gone. From: Kevin O’Shea Why not do a final tour of the world, in particular North America, before leaving the band? Thats a hard one. We loved touring America and would have preferred a completion there. But the last C.D wasn’t even released there and therefore it would be hard to organize and promote. We basically got sunk in America when Danny Goldburg replaced Ed Eckstein as Mercury’s boss. Ed had totally supported us. Goldburg never even bothered to turn up to a gig. His number two in the states took me in a private room and apologised to me for how Goldburg had “promoted” Whiplash. This is the kind of weather change that happens all the time in musical politics. A similar thing has happened with the change in boss at Radio 1 in this country ….So all I can say to our American and Canadian cousins is Sorry, Farewell and I hope our music touched you. From: Paul Douglas Is your decision to leave the band a direct result of the lack of recognition shown by the music public to the quality of the bands music, in terms of album and singles positions? I don’t know. We haven’t done too badly and these present cycles always change. The other thing you should notice is that bands who have massive hits ( barring a few worthy exceptions ) seem to find it hard to maintain motivation or their motivation becomes that of attaining a similar “Success”. So maybe if we had had that recognition we would never have made so many great albums. | Dec 2001 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
How Was It For You – City Life | Article, Era: Pleased To Meet You, Interview |
December 2001, by PJ Anderson, © City Life AS JAMES PREPARE FOR THE LAST EVER HOMETOWN GIG WITH LEAD SINGER TIM BOOTH, PJ ANDERSON TALKS TO THE FRONTMAN ABOUT 20 YEARS OF JAMES, THE PROBLEMS WITH CELEBRITY CULTURE, AND WHAT TIME DOES NEXT, It’s not unusual for James to come home. It’s even the title for one of their biggest hits from the height of Madchester. But this Christmas, their almost annual date at the M.E.N. Arena will feel different. Because it’s their last. At least their last with Tim Booth and there’s not many who can imagine James without Tim Booth. Frontman of James since they formed in Manchester in 1982, Tim released a statement last month saying he had decided to leave the band ‘after much deliberation’ having realised it was the ‘right time’ and he was leaving ‘on a high’. James originally signed to Factory Records in 1983 and following their debut ‘Jimone EP’, their second release ‘Hymn from a Village’ topped the indie chart early in ’85. They then moved to US label Sire and released their debut album Stutter in ’86, including the live favourite ‘Johnny Yen’. But the more to Sire proved a mistake, the second album Strip-mine was delayed and the relationship between band and label soured. The band released a live album One Man Clapping on their own label in early ’89 before signing to Fontana. Their first album for the new label, Goldmother, shot the band to a new level of fame, spawning hits like ‘Come Home’, ‘How Was It For You?’ and their biggest hit in a re-release (and it has to be said, a watered down version) of their 1989 single ‘Sit Down’. This party-time classic eventually reached number 2 in March ’91, held off the top spot by Chesney Hawkes. Subsequent albums, the trumpet heavy Seven, the Brian end Laid (arguably their best) and Whiplash, saw the band reach lofty heights and super stadium stardom. All of them went top ten with singles bouncing around the top 40, before a Best of compilation and Millionaires raised their profile once more. The band settled into a routine of short arena tours each December, coupled with a couple of festival dates, and released their last album Pleased to Meet You, in July this year. So Tim, why quit now? “Because it felt the right time. I honestly feel as if we’ve just made our memorable album ever. And Brian Eno says it’s the best album he’s ever worked on…” Did you get that in writing? “He said it in a Japanese magazine…” Tim claims that he nearly left four years ago, and even alluded to the fact in a song. It’s true that James have never had it particularly easy. Some of their financial disasters were legendary, even at the height of their stardom. But when I put it to Tim that he actually enjoyed being a rockstar – he sidetracks slightly with his response; “In 1989, after reading Colin Wilson – who I no longer like incidentally – he said that the only regret he ever had was not taking full advantage of all the sexual opportunities offered to him. And I thought – why wasn’t I doing the same? And so for three or four years that’s exactly what I did…” What I was alluding to was that James, and Tim especially, seemed to revel rather than repel the limelight and rock’n’roll superstar status – behaviour that seemed to equally repel and attract potential fans, making James more likely to inspire a passionate ‘love em or hate ‘em’ response than most other Manchester bands. “Rockstar is a dirty word where I come from, so it’s difficult,” is Tim’s explanation of his sensitivity with regard to the whole subject. But there were, undoubtedly, moments when Tim would bask in the adoration. This he does concede; “When I’m looking at the audience,” he breathes, “I’m just in… ecstasy at some points. It’s because what happens is, you play your songs to people and their appreciation and enthusiasm lifts you to another level. The audience is like your battery. It can look like a rockstar thing, but when you become one with them, it’s a state of bliss.” No-one can deny that James’ gigs almost seem like rallies, even worship. “For me that’s a mistake that an audience can make; in associating that feeling with that individual or with the band. That’s the problem with idolisation in pop music, or in celebrity. You know – we live in a culture where celebrity is probably the highest aim of the culture, and it’s got worse and worse over the last 20 years. Actually, it doesn’t matter how cheap what you’re peddling is, if you’re famous, you have an immense currency in this culture. It’s bullshit.” And Tim’s keen to remind us that the audience was far from one homogenous mass: “I wouldn’t have the same judgement because I used to love the fact that hard men could come and watch this skinny guy who, in their world, probably looked like a faggot, singing pretty sensitive songs about self-doubt and self-condemnation and they would sing along with the lyrics. I am not an obvious candidate for them to accept in their world. Tim as known for his infamous electrocuted-whole-body-wave dancing, not that he’s the first to feel Shamanic on stage. Now he’s even teaching ‘Creativity’ at Manchester Met, a system where dance and meditation lead to a trance state. It’s a reminder of Tim’s intense creative mind, which some might say borders on genius, and others, self-destructive extremes, “I wrote ‘Johnny Yen’, as part of me had swallowed the myth,” he agrees in part. “Some of me still can be a sucker for that myth.” “I was convinced I’d go mad before I got to 30,” he continues. “I was convinced of it. When I got to 30, and realised I hadn’t, I was very surprised. I had some very strange psychotic states, but now I know how to ride them.” So how scared are you of riding this one out? “I was scared about telling the guys,” he concedes. “But I was more scared about what the hell I was going to do; I had nothing to jump into – no other safety net. It was really… Oh my God!’” Many would assume that the world is Tim’s proverbial oyster after the success James have enjoyed, but the order for the Lear jet hasn’t been processed just yet. “It’s easy,” he says, “for people to look at the history of James and say we should have been as big as U2… as if we somehow failed. I don’t see it like that. We’ve had a 20-year-career. We’ve made not one album I’m not proud of.” So then, is Mr. Booth looking back fondly, or in anger? “Some bands get one or two good albums, and then they burn out with drugs or alcohol,” he finishes. “… or too much money. I don’t think we’ve done that and nor do I live in some projected bliss bubble – that’s how I see it.” | Dec 2001 | article era-pleased-to-meet-you interview era | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Programme: UK Arena Tour (2001) | Tour Programme | The programme from the 2001 UK Arena Tour features band bios, interviews and pictures. Click on an image to browse the tour programme. | Dec 2001 | tour-programme booklet article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
B-Sides Ultra – Where Did They Come From? | One Of The Three Feature | Which singles did the tracks on on the B-Sides Ultra originally appear on?
| Dec 2001 | oott-special-feature article | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Biography – Jamestheband.com – December 2001 | Article, Feature | This piece was originally published on the James official site Jamestheband.com that was lost when the band split in 2001 James Musical history is littered with those who have briefly blazed brightly, to sink prematurely into depressing mediocrity as they repeat themselves with ever-diminishing effect. The path JAMES have forged has taken the band in exactly the opposite direction. Endlessly inventive, always taking risks and never satisfied with the easy option. Since they began recording for the Manchester-based Factory records back in 1983, James have never been a band to follow the predictable path. They toured with The Smiths, became Hacienda favourites and cult heroes and signed to Sire Records. Their debut album ‘Stutter’ in 1986 and ‘Strip Mine’ two years later established the basic guitar-driven James sound and marked Tim out as a provocative lyricist and an emotive singer, but they found the label unsympathetic and unsupportive. By 1989 they were delighted to escape Sire’s clutches, even though it left them skint. “After seven years we were living on dole-level wages and radio wouldn’t play us”, Tim recalls. Many bands would have folded, instead James volunteered as human guinea pigs in medical tests at a local hospital and used the cash to release ‘One Man Clapping’, a rather fine live album on their own label, which included an early version of ‘Sit Down’. They then re-grouped later and added new members Saul Davies (violin, guitar), Mark Hunter (keyboards) and David Baynton-Power (drums). They recorded an album of songs for Rough Trade who sold the record on to Fontana. It was released as ‘Gold Mother’ and was the breakthrough they had waited so long for, selling 350,000 in Britain alone while a reworked ‘Sit Down’ became one of the most memorable anthems of the nineties. The Manchester scene was in full swing and, together with the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays, James suddenly found themselves at its apex, hailed as the saviours of British rock music. The sweepingly epic ‘Seven’ followed in 1992 and was only kept from the number one spot by Simply Red. The following year they secured the services of Brian Eno to produce the extraordinary ‘Laid’ and it’s experimental offshoot ‘Wah Wah’. Spending increasing amounts of time in America (including playing Woodstock Two), ‘Laid’ took off there as well, selling 600,000 copies at a time when British bands were finding it particularly difficult to penetrate a grunge-fixated market. Then, at the highest point of their career, James almost fell apart. One day in 1995 guitarist Larry Gott, one of the longest serving members after bassist Jim Glennie and Tim and a third of the Booth/Gott/Glennie songwriting partnership, decided to quit. So did manager Martine, and for good measure, the band learned that they owed a huge sum in back tax. Shell-shocked, they took a break that, as it stretched into its third year, looked like becoming terminal. Booth went off to make a solo album with Angelo Badalamenti and no one seriously ever expected to hear from James again. Yet adversity has always brought the best out of the band. With the addition of new guitarist Adrian Oxaal they eventually re-emerged in 1997 with the boldly melodic ‘Whiplash’. Brimming with rejuvenated confidence it went gold and gave the band one of their biggest singles, ‘She’s a Star’. The following year’s release of ‘Best Of James’ only served to confirm their resurgence and gave them their first number one album, keeping ‘Titanic’ off the top slot in Oscar week, going on to be the band’s first double platinum album, followed by a sell out tour. Although the collection contained 14 of their top forty hits, significantly it was the to new songs ‘Destiny Calling’ and ‘Run Aground’ which caught the attention and suggested a band running to peak form; both of course became hit singles in their own right and heightened the anticipation for the next album. 1999’s ‘Millionaires’ found Brian Eno back as co-producer and the band at a new creative peak. “We were aware that last year’s success had created an expectation of this record”, said guitarist Saul Davies at the time. “The songs were written just as that was all kicking off and it generated a lot of energy. I think we struck a really good balance between being commercial and being interesting and different. The optimism of the previous year had given the band a real lift. But there were a lot of conflicts and tensions at the same time, which hadn’t been resolved. Those tensions are all there in the songs as well.” “I think this is the best album we have ever made”, added Tim Booth. Following the success of ‘Millionaires’, James returned to the studio to write the follow-up album “Pleased To Meet You”. The band embarked, at the end of 2000, on a series of college dates across the UK, testing the newly demoed tracks with a live audience, before returning to the studio, again with Brian Eno, to record the album which was released in 2001. Later that year saw the release of “B-Sides Ultra”, a collection of some of the bands, and fans favourite rare tracks, as voted for on their website. In December 2001, after 10 studio albums, a million-selling Best Of and 20 Top Forty singles in the UK as well as considerable success in the USA, James announced that Tim Booth would be leaving the band. They embarked on a tour of the UK, which also served as a farewell party for Tim, and invited former members Andy Diagram and Larry Gott to appear with them on selected dates. Statement from Tim Booth: Statement from Jim Glennie: 2002 sees Warner Music Vision is set to release the momentous JAMES Getting Away with It…Live to buy on VHS and DVD on 10th June 2002. This is James’ homecoming gig recorded at the Manchester Arena on December 7th 2001 and marked James’ last ever homecoming gig with front man Tim Booth and the current line-up. The track listing offers both stadium thrills and hushed introspection across their greatest hits including Say Something, Sometimes, Laid, God Only Knows and ending on the anthemic high of Sit Down. Ex band members, guitarist Larry Gott and trumpet player Andy Diagram also drew big cheers as they took to the stage for this poignant, emotional occasion. | Dec 2001 | article feature | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Oneofthethree.co.uk – Newsreel – 2002 | Article, News | This page lists all news item that were originally published on the old oneofthethree site in 2002. Links and images have either been removed or pointed to the new site where internal. Update 23.12.02 Kulas has announced a final gig of the year at Toronto’s Rivoli Club on December 28th – check out the official Kulas site for more details. Update 4.12.02 Gavan Whelan is set to make a rare public appearance, next Wednesday December 11, as he will be performing Sit Down live at the Band Of The Wall in Manchester with upcoming band Alive!. Gavan produced Alive’s recently released album All Frequencies Covered, which the headline gig is aimed at promoting. Tickets are £4 in advance or £5 on the door – they can be purchased from the Way Ahead Box Office (0161-237-5554), Polar Bear Records (123 Deansgate – 0161-834-1230) or Fat Cat Records (20 Oldham Street – 0161-237-1181) in Manchester. Update 3.12.02 Antena 3, a Portuguese radio station, is holding a Nirvana tribute concert on December 9. Saul is taking part in this concert along with many other famous Portuguese musicians at the Antena 3 Auditorium in Lisbon. The radio station, as far as my Portuguese can make out, are giving away free tickets to the event. More Fame Academy news articles here. I highly recommend watching the video clip for this one. The kids will wonder why he’s getting so excited and who the hell James are. Saul and Mark wrote a song with Ainslie called Look But Don’t Touch (Take My Time). To listen to it, go to this link and select Watch. There’s also a second version of it – to listen to that, click here and select Watch. Interestingly another article refers to Saul as the ex-guitarist of James, seemingly confirming what Saul told the Portuguese magazine Blitz earlier this year. Click here to read a translation of that article. Update 1.12.02 Saul and Mark appeared over the weekend on the BBC TV programme “Fame Academy”. Their role was to assist one of the contestants, Ainslie, a self-professed James fan who has already sang Laid once on the show, to write a song in the next day or so as part of one of the tasks the four remaining contestants have been set. For the article from the BBC News site, please click here. You can listen and watch Saul, Mark and Ainslie playing Laid (you’d have thought he’d have learnt the words if he was that big a fan but never mind) Oneofthethree found a promo 12 track James CD entitled Space at a London record fair at the weekend. This would confirm that the original title for the album was indeed Space despite strenuous denials at the time. The tracklisting is different from the final album. It runs Space, Falling Down, Getting Away With It, Senorita, Fine, Beefcake, What Is It Good For, Junkie, Pleased To Meet You, Give It Away, The Shining and Alaskan Pipeline. Apart from the English being dropped from the title of Beefcake, there are a couple of other changes. Whilst still clocking in at 4.49, Space has the intro from the 4.31 version off the 9 Tracks promo issued earlier in 2002. Give It Away clocks in at 3.37, half a minute longer than the album version and fifteen seconds longer than the 9 Tracks version. Pleased To Meet You is also about 10 seconds longer. Update 1.11.02 Adrian Oxaal is playing a solo gig at Brighton’s Evening Star pub in Surrey Street at 8pm on Sunday 24th November. More details at www.eveningstarbrighton.co.uk Update 21.10.02 Getting Away With It Live has been awarded Platinum status in Portugal due to its phenomenal sales success. Saul collected the award on behalf of the band last week. The latest Guinness Book Of Hit Singles lists James as the 357th most successful chart singles band in terms of weeks on the chart with 89 weeks. Update 16.10.02 Michael Kulas is presently in the studio recording a new album with his new band which should be finished by Christmas in time for an early 2003 release. He plans to come back to the UK early next year and will hopefully play a gig while he’s here. He is also producing an album by Toronto actress / singer / songwriter Katie Griffin. Update 6.10.02 According to US online sites Bestbuy and CDNow, the US release of the Getting Away With It Live DVD has been put back until October 22. There’s been no official confirmation as yet – but these sites listed the DVD well before the release was confirmed so are likely to be accurate. Update 3.10.02 Getting Away With It Live is now at number 4 in the Portuguese album charts, down from its recent peak of number 2. Saul performed live on violin on a track entitled Blue Song with the band Ez Special at a concert in Matosinhos near Porto in Portugal last week. The concert was to promote the forthcoming Ez Special which Saul is reportedly co-producing. Blitz, the major Portuguese music paper, criticised Ez Special for sounding too much like James live. The debut album by upcoming band Alive, entitled All Frequencies Covered and produced by ex-James drummer Gavan Whelan, is now available – it can be ordered online through HMV and will be also available in selected HMV stores. Samples of the album can be downloaded from the revamped official Alive website. Update 26.9.02 The release of the DVD Getting Away With It Live has now been officially confirmed for Tuesday October 8 for North America in Region 1 NTSC format. In a statement to the official James site, the band confirmed that they are still going as an entity and that they will be looking for a replacement soon. No specific comment was made on Saul, Dave and Mark’s album and Saul’s future plans which Saul revealed to the Portuguese magazine Blitz in July Update 20.9.02 Listings on CD Now and BestBuy.com have an October 8 release date for the Getting Away With It Live DVD in the United States, one week later than the Canadian release. Update 19.9.02 pm The Portuguese music paper Blitz is giving away a 2 track cd single featuring EZ Special produced by our very own Saul Davies who also performs backing vocals and plays guitar on the track Daisy. Archambault.ca an online store in Quebec, Canada now have the James DVD Getting Away With It Live on sale for CAD 30.98 with a release date of October 1, seemingly confirming the growing evidence of a region 1 NTSC release. Update 19.9.02 am Getting Away With It Live has risen to number 2 in the Portuguese charts this week. Jam Music, a Canadian website, is listing a release of the DVD Getting Away With It Live in Canada on October 1. This would be Region 1 and NTSC and should therefore play in all standard US DVD players and televisions. Siren Disc are taking pre-orders for the DVD (under Future Releases), but it hasn’t as yet been listed on Amazon Canada. Update 10.9.02 Ez Special, the Portuguese band that Saul is producing and helping promote, have a track called Daisy available to listen to on Radio Comercial, a leading Portuguese radio station. Update 9.9.02 Almost three months after its release, the live album Getting Away With It Live is sitting at number 3 in the Portuguese album charts, up two places from last week. The film Jade Love with the soundtrack provided by Michael Kulas has been chosen for the Vancouver Film Festival. Samples from the album can be heard on the official Kulas Online site. Gavan Whelan has produced the forthcoming 13 track album by upcoming North West band Alive. The album entitled All Frequencies Covered will be released on Effin Records on October 7th. Gavan is credited with “Special Thanks to Gavan Whelan whose inspired production has not only succeeded in capturing the sound but also the personality of Alive”. More information can be found by visiting the Alive site. Update 2.9.02 Siren CD, a US online record store is advertising a region 1 NTSC Canadian release of the Getting Away With It Live DVD for September 30. To find more details on their site, click on Future Releases and then scroll down to James. Price is $25.49. There’s been no official confirmation to date. Update 27.8.02 Kulas played another Toronto show at the weekend at the Reverb Club. Click here for a review. It now appears that his second album Another Small Machine will not be repressed on his own Interloper label. Negotiations are still ongoing with several labels about the release of his forthcoming third album. Update 30.7.02 Beatle City, manufacturer of unofficial merchandise for many indie bands have produced a set of four James coasters depicting the covers for Sit Down, Gold Mother, Millionaires and Seven. The coasters cost £8 per set of four plus postage. They can be ordered by contacting Beatle City at beatle-city@blueyonder.co.uk. (One Of The Three is not affiliated in any way with Beatle City) Update 29.7.02 Kulas has announced another live show in Toronto, this time at the Reverb Club in Toronto on Friday August 23rd. The Red Light Music night which he hopes will become an annual event will also feature Mommy and Round 2. Kulas will be on stage at about 10.30pm. Although there are no news yet on any musical activity, Tim reportedly ran an Intimacy Workshop at Hampstead Town Hall in London over the weekend with fiancee Kate as part of his ongoing dance teaching. Update 10.7.02 Tim has given an interview with the Greek magazine Pop And Rock. Click here for a translation. It would appear likely his solo album will not now be released until next year as he is still negotiating a record contract. The album is almost complete and most of it has been recorded with KK, the engineer who worked on some of the tracks off Pleased To Meet You. Saul’s program N Sons on Portuguese TV station NTV goes out on Saturdays between 4.08 and 4.30pm. The channel is only available on cable apparently and broadcasts out of Porto. Update 6.7.02 James on Big Brother shocker! The housemates were talking about their record collections early this morning and there was a long discussion about James with housemate Johnny singing We’re Going To Miss You (from “the album with the big pig on”) and Tim singing Sit Down. Recognition and fame at last!!! Update 5.7.02 Kulas has announced another live show at the Mermaid Lounge in Hamilton, Ontario on Friday 2nd August. He will be onstage at about 10pm. Update 1.7.02 The live video / DVD Getting Away With It Live dropped from number 5 to number 7 in this week’s UK video chart. The album dropped out of the Indie Top 20 albums chart. Update 27.6.02 Saul Davies is presenting a music program called N Sons on the Portuguese television channel NTV which broadcasts out of Porto. The program is described as “A space dedicated to music where Alvaro Costa and Saul Davies present biographies of well known bands, through videoclips” Click here to go to the NTV site. There’s also an article here on EZ Special (in Portuguese), the band Saul is producing. Update 26.6.02 Andy Diagram will be performing in Hat, described as “four new legends about knitting” at Islington Union Chapel in London on Friday October 11. Read more about this at the official site www.knit.co.uk – it sounds intriguing and very unusual. The press release reads “From the avant garde to the W.I. – a performance of words, music and knitting. A child’s woollen hat is knit and placed on the head of a new born world; four monologues written and performed by Ian McMillan with music composed and performed by Billy Jenkins. Featuring Andy Diagram(ex James) on cornet, loops and samples and Angie Harrison (ex Hallé) on viola and knitting needles.” Update 24.6.02 The live video / DVD dropped from number 3 to number 5 in the official UK music video charts on its second week of release. The album dropped from 10 to 17 on the independent album chart. Kulas played an acoustic set on Saturday evening at Toronto’s Rancho Relaxo club supporting Mommy. Click here for a review. Update 19.6.02 BBC Choice are broadcasting a one-hour special on Saturday night, 22 June, from 11.30 – 12.30 entitled “James Getting Away With It” featuring live tracks from the DVD and video and interviews. Kulas is playing a solo acoustic support slot for Mommy at Toronto’s Rancho Relaxo on Saturday 22nd June at about 9.30pm. He’s still in negotiation with record companies in Canada over a new deal. According to Warner Music Vision, the DVD Getting Away With It Live sold 1,949 copies in its first week and the video 465 making a total sales of 2,414. Update 18.6.02 The new James video/DVD made number 3 in the official UK music video charts on Sunday behind Iron Maiden and Eminem. The album fared less well failing to enter the official Top 75 although it made number 10 in the official indie chart – nine places lower than One Man Clapping, James previous live album from 1989. Tim was interviewed by BBC Teletext over the weekend. Click here to read the interview. Q magazine has named the Getting Away With It Live DVD the “Music DVD of the Quarter” in its latest issue. Click here to read the review. The CD also received a four-star rating. Click here to read the cd reviews to date. Update 14.6.02 Kulas played an acoustic set at Healey’s in Toronto on Wednesday night – click here for a review Update 13.6.02 BBC Liquid News are running a competition to win a signed copy of the Getting Away With It live DVD. Click here to enter. The competition closes next Monday, June 17th. Update 12.6.02 Tim has been interviewed for this month’s What DVD (with Cate Blanchett on the cover). Click here to read the interview and here to read the DVD review. The Canadian release of Getting Away With It Live (cd version) appears to have been delayed until next Monday June 18. This also explains why some Play.com customers are getting a June 18 release date for their cd. As yet, there is no confirmation of a Region 1 DVD release. If you’re considering buying One Man Clapping on CD off ebay, beware the seller bass2971. He is selling cdr copies of the album, usually starting with a £10 bid price. Ebay have been informed but refuse to do anything about it as the listing doesn’t actually say it’s a cdr. Don’t get ripped off! Andy Diagram will be playing live with David Thomas and The Two Pale Boys on Saturday June 22 at Exeter Phoenix Arts Centre. They are still performing in Shockheaded Peter at London’s Albany Theatre until this Sunday June 16. Update 12.6.02 A second “hidden bit” has been found on the DVD. Go to the “promos” section, move down to Laid and then press the “left” button on the DVD to find out all about Adrian’s nocturnal habits. Click here for all the extras found to date. There are also brief “track introductions” for God Only Knows, Out To Get You, Johnny Yen, Born Of Frustration and Sit Down. To access these go to the “Setlist” section and scroll down to each track. When you do, a series of dots should appear by the track, click “select” and the intro will play before the song. The DVD is positioned at no7 in the HMV and MVC DVD charts and at no16 in the HMV video chart. Click here for the feature on the DVD Update 10.6.02 Tim Booth has cancelled today’s Radio 6 interview. They are presently trying to reschedule for later in the week. Update 10.6.02 To find the “hidden bits” on the DVD, go to the “Songs” from the main menu, then onto setlist B (via “Next”), scroll down to the bottom and across right to “Main” menu and then left again to “Back” and a flower will appear. Click on “Select” (or the equivalent key on your DVD) and you get extra backstage footage about the band’s nicknames. Thanks to Deano for this information. Update 10.6.02 Just a reminder that the UK release of the CD, video and DVD Getting Away With It Live is today. If you want to send me your review, please send it to oneofthethree@hotmail.com. Or check out the dedicated DVD section here. Scroll down this page to link to competitions to win copies. The CD will be out in the US on Tuesday. As yet there is no word of a US (Region 1) release of the DVD. Update 9.6.02 Following his performance to close the NXNE Music Festival in Toronto last night, Kulas has scheduled another show at Healey’s in Toronto for Wednesday 12th June. Kulas will also be interviewed by MuchMore music later this week. Kulas has also written the soundtrack for a new UK movie called Jade Love. Samples will be available on the official Kulas site very soon. Update 8.6.02 Tim Booth will be appearing next Monday between 4pm and 7pm UK time on Andrew Collins show on BBC Radio 6 which is available to listen to online. It’s unclear as present as to whether Tim will just be interviewed or whether there will be any musical content. I will attempt to get a transcription of the interview up here on Monday evening. The website – www.timbooth.net – now appears to have been registered for a client, rather than giving an error message, which suggests that something may be in the pipeline soon. Update 7.6.02 There are a number of competitions to win copies of the Getting Away With It Live DVD, follow these links This Is Local London Bucks Free Press Harrow Times Kulas has given an interview with the Toronto Star, one of Canada’s largest circulation daily newspapers. Click here to read it. Update 4.6.02 Andy Diagram’s band The Spaceheads have just released their seventh album Low Pressure on Merge Records, a US-based label. The ten track album features 10 tracks – Low Pressure, On A Clear Day, The Lugano Affair, Astro Temple, Pressure Front, Fog, The Hut, Storm Force 8, Red Shift and Over The Moon. The album can be ordered for $13 plus postage from www.mergerecords.com where you can also buy the Angel Station album and Spaceheads t-shirts from the site. The Merge Records site describes the album in the following press release : “LOW PRESSURE is the much anticipated new album from the UK’s one and only SPACEHEADS. On this their 7th LP, Andy Diagram (trumpet) and Richard Harrison (drums/percussion) take their unique sound to even greater sonic extremes. Based on live trumpet loops, drums, and assorted electronics, the Spaceheads reside in their own musical realm; not quite jazz, not quite electronica, and not quite rock, but deftly hovering somewhere between the three. Low Pressure hangs on lazy grooves and thick harmonized trumpet chords, sleazy deep beat bass and crushed-up metallic drumbeats. Spaceheads mix the raw emotional sound of breath with the banging of wood on skin, pushing both through the blips, crackle and distortion of pixelated electronic noise. Dig in.” Andy is still performing with David Thomas and The Two Pale Boys in Shockheaded Peter at London’s Albany Theatre until June 16th. Performances are at 8pm om Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, 6.30pm and 10pm on Thursday and there are matinee performances at 3pm on Saturday and 4pm on Sundays. Ticket prices range from £7.50 to £32.50. Tickets can be booked direct from the theatre on 0207 369 1730. Update 3.6.02 The esteemed music paper, the NME has given the Getting Away With It Live cd 0/10. Click here to read the review. Unfortunately, I don’t have their circulation figures to hand to give you all a real laugh. Update 1.6.02 The Greek website www.flash.gr has the whole of the Getting Away With It live cd available through streaming audio. Click here to go to the index page and scroll down to the tracklistings. The album and the accompanying DVD are released in the UK on Monday June 10th, the album in the US on June 11th. Click here for more details on the DVD and here for the album. Update 31.5.02 Confirmation of the article in the Portuguese magazine Blitz that Saul, Dave and Mark have formed a new band can be found in the (rough) translation of the article below : After the end of a career spanning 20 years, the various elements of James are now working on different projects. Now living in Portugal, violinist Saul Davies spoke to Blitz about the last days of his old band and his new band, still in its infancy, with other ex-members of James. The authors of Sometimes, James finished its activities in December last year with a concert at Wembley Arena, where Brian Eno, producer of many James albums, was present on stage. “He hadn’t been on stage with a band since 1979 Someone said “he dances like your Dad”. That was the end of James as an identifiable entity. There was very much good about the band, but also things that were wrong and that’s what motivated the end.” That doesn’t exclude, admits Saul, some kind of future version of James. “Bassist Jim Glennie, who formed the group 20 years ago, decided to try and continue James in some form, but that doesn’t interest me.” Saul Davies joined James in 1989 and was part of the band that produced Gold Mother, the album that launched James internationally with Sit Down. Still without a name, Saul’s new project includes Mark Hunter on keyboards and Dave Baynton-Power on drums. They’ve done half an album so far and plan to complete it soon for a late 2002 or early 2003 release. “I love what I’m doing, it’s going to be something completely different from James,” says Saul. “There are lots of points of contact, as I did co-produce the last two James albums with Eno. But there’s a different type of approach, it’s much more studio-based.” Is there any reference point? “It could be described as similar to the Beta Band. That sort of area” The recordings so far have been made with Saul and Mark on vocals. Saul recognises that they need a singer for live performances. “We’ve asked people to come in and sing on one or more songs” Some of these people are Portuguese, reflecting Saul now living permanently in Porto. “Miguel Guedes of Blind Zero, has done some wonderful vocals on one song, in the style of Roy Orbison, it’s fantastic. Another one was Orlando Pona, vocalist with Feed. He did sing some songs but the styles didn’t really match. It’ll be people like that who will be singing at any future concerts in Portugal.” To see the Portuguese version of the interview, click here It seems clear from Saul’s comments that Jim will continue with James with a new line-up. Adrian’s comments to a fan in Brighton that he is “getting used to life outside the band” suggest he has left James as well. Rumours that have surfaced in Manchester suggest that he has been writing with Larry again and that Jim’s brothers David and Peter Glennie from Exit 52 will join the new line-up. This is, as I said, rumour but the news on Saul’s departure (and presumably Dave and Mark’s) mean this rumour may not be wide of the mark. The Exit 52 website appears to be out of action at present. There is as present no official confirmation of any of this. Update 28.5.02 I’ve been informed from a source in Portugal that Saul gave an interview to the Portuguese music paper Blitz this week in which he said James was “over” for him and that he had formed a new band with Dave and Mark and they had completed half an album for release late this or early next year. They’re still looking for a vocalist, although Saul and Mark had been sharing vocal duties. The music is apparently in the vein of the Beta Band. Saul has produced the debut album by a Portuguese band called Ezpecial. I’m trying to get a transcription and a translation of the interview to put up here to confirm this.. Update 27.5.02 Kulas is headlining the final night of the NXNE Festival at Toronto’s Rancho Relaxo on June 8th. Update 8.5.02 The live album Getting Away With It Live has been confirmed for a June 11 release in the US through Sanctuary Records. The album is released in the UK the previous day. Update 29.4.02 For a review of Kulas’ Saturday night gig at Clinton’s in Toronto, click here. Check out this interview with Kulas (and honorary mention for this site!) Update 28.4.02 The live double CD Getting Away With It, due for release on June 10, will feature all of the tracks recorded at the Manchester Arena last December, including I Know What I’m Here For and Hymn From A Village which are absent from the DVD. Kulas played a triumphant set at Toronto’s Clintons last night including an impromptu run through Sit Down – the full tracklisting was Glasgow Rain, Anyone Else, Beautiful Day Part Two, She’s All The Rage, The Only One, Sleep, Pavement, Thanks To Fast Eddie / Sit Down, Burning Down Hollywood, Beginning Of The End, Hallellujah (solo electric), Clever Mess (solo acoustic), Starland, Lust For Love Update 26.4.02 Amazon.co.uk have listed for a June 10 release a double album entitled James – Getting Away With It on Sanctuary Records – cat no SANDD119. More details soon. Update 23.4.02 Gavan Whelan has produced the 12-track debut album for the up-and-coming North West band Alive. The as-yet-untitled album is scheduled for a September 23 release on Effin’ Records. Update 21.4.02 For more on Shockheaded Peter, click here for a Time Out preview Update 19.4.02 Kulas has announced a solo acoustic show next Tuesday, March 23, as part of a Musicians Benefit for Musicians evening at Toronto’s Rivoli Club. As part of David Thomas and the Two Pale Boys, Andy Diagram is providing musical backing to a play called Shockheaded Peter at the Albany Theatre in London. Performances are at 8pm om Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, 6.30pm and 10pm on Thursday and there are matinee performances at 3pm on Saturday and 4pm on Sundays. Ticket prices range from £7.50 to £32.50. The play runs until June 15th and the tickets can be booked direct from the theatre on 0207 369 1730. www.play.com have advertised the DVD Getting Away With It Live for £14.99 delivered to the UK, the cheapest price online to date. Beware though you may not get the DVD on the release date as they ship from Jersey and it takes 3-7 days from them getting stock in. Update 14.4.02 The liner notes for the upcoming DVD have now been released – click here for the special section on the DVD Update 4.4.02 James have unveiled the cover for the DVD and VHS – Getting Away With It Live- due for release on June 10th. The DVD features tracks recorded at last December’s Manchester Arena show, two documentaries – Individual Stories featuring the band’s stories of how they came into James and Single Piece featuring the band’s unique songwriting methods. It also includes the Laid, Say Something and She’s A Star promo videos and other surprises are promised. One Of The Three has set up a special section devoted to the DVD – click here to view Tim has co-written a track called Ghosts, with Jaime Catto of Faithless and Duncan Bridgeman for their 1 Giant Leap project – www.1giantleap.com – which aims to “capture and share with others, the unique fusion of sound, image and spoken word from some of the world’s most influential artists and musicians” The track is performed by Eddie Reader, ex of Fairground Attraction. To listen to the track in Windows Media Player, click on this link. The album entitled also features contributions from Michael Stipe, Robbie Williams, Grant Lee Buffalo, Baaba Maal, Michael Franti and many more artists from around the world. It was released in Europe in February and there will be an accompanying DVD in May. The album can be bought from the website. Tim also makes an appearance in the film. Rumours still abound that Tim has distributed a demo cd that is very different to James to record companies in the hope of securing a deal. More as and when news is available. Update 2.4.02 The forthcoming release of Getting Away With It… Live on June 10th will also see a VHS video release. Jim Glennie has answered a series of questions on Tim’s departure, the history of James and what happens next for the band. Click here to go to the official site Update 1.4.02 According to the DVD website www.r2-dvd.org, Warner Music will be releasing the long-awaited James live DVD on June 10th entitled “James Getting Away With It…. Live” The site contains the following press release: “Warner Music Vision have announced “JAMES Getting Away with It… Live” for release on the 10th of June priced at £19.99.This is James’ homecoming gig recorded at the Manchester Arena on 7th December 2001 and marked not only frontman Tim Booth’s but also James’ last ever live performance ending a 19 year association and making it a must see event for fans. The disk features both a DD 5.1 sound track and a L-PCM stereo soundtrack. The picture uses various ratios. Extras will be: Documentary – ‘Single Piece’ – (25 mins) Individual Stories – (20 mins) Laid, Say Something & She’s a Star Promo Videos – (10 mins) Track Intros – (7 mins) Hidden Bits – (9 mins) The Track list is : Say Something, Waltzing Along, Sometimes, Laid, God Only Knows, Someone’s Got it in For Me, Vervaceous, Protect Me, Out To Get You – False Start, Johnny Yen, Getting Away with It, Tomorrow, Born of Frustration, Ring the Bells, Top of the World, Sound, Space, She’s A Star, Come Home, Sit Down” More as it gets confirmed….. Update 25.3.02 Tim Booth held his first Creativity Workshop based on the Five Rhythms system of movement at Manchester Metropolitan University last Saturday March 23. He also spoke with Manchester’s City Life magazine about the workshop – click here to see the interview Update 22.3.02 Kulas has announced another Toronto date, this time at Clinton’s on April 27. He is also in talks about touring the UK at the end of June / beginning of July. Update 21.3.02 Kulas played the last of his scheduled Toronto dates at the Horseshoe Tavern – click here for a review Update 16.3.02 Kulas played a full band set at Toronto’s Rancho Relaxo last Thursday – click here for a review Update 7.3.02 Kulas will also be playing at the Rancho Relaxo in Toronto on March 14th. Both this show and the Horseshoe show on the 19th will be full band sets. Update 6.3.02 Kulas has announced another show at The Horseshoe in Toronto on March 19th as part of CFNY’s Dave Bookman’s New Music Night. Michael will be on stage at 10.35pm. Michael will be returning to the UK in April “to begin a new recording project.” Update 17.2.02 Kulas played another small acoustic set at Toronto’s Rancho Relaxo last night – for a review click here Update 16.2.02 Allen James will be appearing as Tim Booth performing Sit Down on Stars In Your Eyes on ITV in the UK tonight at 6.20pm. Better than Pop Idol anyday. Update 7.2.02 Kulas played a short acoustic set at Toronto’s Kathedral last night previewing some new songs from his forthcoming third LP as well as tracks from Mosquito and Another Small Machine and a cover of Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah – click here for a review Update 3.2.02 Michael Kulas has added another Toronto date to his touring schedule at the Rancho Relaxo on February 16th. For full tour dates, click here or visit Kulasonline Andy Diagram’s band The Spaceheads have just completed recording sessions for their new album, entitled Low Pressure, scheduled at present for an April release. They have also announced a series of tour dates in France – click here or visit the official Spaceheads site Update 30.1.02 More on the Alive single, Gavan also plays drums on one of the tracks on the single called Do You Love Me. Gavan has also recently signed a new publishing deal. Details soon on how to get hold of the single. The Warner Brothers compilation of early James material is now scheduled for a September release but as before, this date is probably subject to change. Update 29.1.02 Gavan Whelan, James drummer up to 1988, has produced the new single by Alive, due for release very soon. More details about the single as I get them. Or visit Alive’s website at www.alive.org.uk Update 27.1.02 Bandmad, the band’s official merchandisers, are now selling James mugs and programmes as sold on last month’s tour. Mugs are priced at £5 and the programmes at £8. Other t-shirts from the tour have also been added. Andy Diagram will be playing with David Thomas and the Two Pale Boys (picture left) at three UK dates in February 8th York Fibbers, 9th London – Barnet Arts Centre, 28th London – Hackney Ocean More details can be found at http://www.projex.demon.co.uk/calendar.html Update 19.1.02 Ex-James guitarist and backing vocalist Michael Kulas has announced some additional dates in Canada. These are as follows : 24.01 The Rivoli, Toronto, Ontario (Jeff Buckley tribute) 06.02 The Kathedral, Toronto 19.02 The Gordon Best Theater, Peterborough, Ontario 21.02 The Rivoli, Toronto, Ontario 24.02 Zaphod Beeblebrox, Ottawa, Ontario Check out Kulasonline for more information. Update 9.1.02 Merchandise from the recent James tour is now available on the internet at Bandmad Michael Kulas is playing his first solo show for almost five years at Toronto’s on January 24th as part of a Tim Buckley tribute evening. He will also be playing the same venue on February 21st. More dates and radio promotion to support the Canadian release of his Another Small Machine album are presently under discussion and will be announced when confirmed. Check out Kulasonline for more information. The Rivoli Club is a 150 capacity venue at 332-334 Queen St West. The telephone number for the venue is +1 416 596 1908.
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Jamestheband.com – Newsreel – 2002 | Article, Feature | This page lists all news item that were originally published on the James official site Jamestheband.com in 2002 that were lost when the band split in 2001 and the site was later discontinued Live Video To Be Released in the U.S. and Canada! 25-Sep-02: At long last, a release date for ‘Getting Away With It…Live’, the live video of James’ concert at the Manchester Evening News Arena in December 2001, has been confirmed for the U.S. and Canada!. The video will be released on region 1 DVD and NTSC-format VHS in both countries on Tuesday, 8-Oct-2002, marking the first time a James live video has been released in North America. The DVD and VHS will contain the same content as the versions released in the U.K. and Europe earlier this year. For more information, see below or click here. The band would also like to reiterate that regardless of anything you may read in the publicity or packaging for the DVD and live album, although Tim Booth has left the band, James is still going strong, and will be looking to find a replacement for him in the not too distant future. For further information, please see Jim Glennie’s statement from December and the Q&A session from April.
Release Date Delay in Canada 13-Jun-02, updated 14-Jun-02: Due to manufacturing troubles, the Canadian release date of ‘Getting Away With It…Live’ has been pushed back one week, to 18-Jun-2002. Fans in the Toronto area should listen for competitions to win copies of the album and various other on-air support and promotion from EDGE 102.
Getting Away With It…Live Released Today 11-Jun-02, updated 12-Jun-02: ‘Getting Away With It…Live’, James first stateside release since 1998’s ‘The Best Of’ hits shops today in the US and Canada. The two-CD set is a recording of the band’s 7-Dec-2001 hometown gig in Manchester, the band’s last with lead singer Tim Booth. For more information on the CD, including a full track listing, see below. You can pick a copy up at your local record shop, or order it online from Amazon.com. Once you’ve got a copy, why not visit the message board and let everyone know what you think!
Live Video and CD Out Today in the UK 10-Jun-02: “Getting Away With It…Live”, a recording of the band’s final hometown gig with lead singer Tim Booth is released on CD, DVD and VHS TODAY in the UK. For more information on the live CD, see below. For more info on the DVD/VHS, click here. We’re still awaiting final confirmation and a North American release date for the video of the same show and will post more information as soon as it’s available. The UK version of the DVD is region formatted for regions 2,3,4,5 & 6 so will not work in standard North American DVD players. The UK VHS is in PAL format (European video format) so will not play properly on a standard North American VCR.
Getting Away With It…Live — North American Release Date 08-May-02, updated 17-May-02: James’ forthcoming live album, Getting Away With It…Live, a live recording of their December 7th hometown show in Manchester, will be released in the U.S. and Canada on Tuesday 11-Jun-2002. The album, released by Sanctuary Records, is the first James release stateside since 1998’s “James: The Best Of…”. For more info on the album, including a track listing, see below.
Getting Away With It: The Live CD 26-Apr-02, updated 01-May-02: James will release a 2-CD live recording of their December 2001 Manchester gig in conjunction with the video release of the same show. The album, titled “Getting Away With It”, will be released on the same day as the DVD and VHS: 10-Jun-2002. The album will be released on Sanctuary Records and contain all the tracks on the DVD/VHS, plus ‘I Know What I’m Here For’ and ‘Hymn From A Village’. The full tracklisting is as follows:
CD1
Say Something Waltzing Along Sometimes Laid I Know What I’m Here For (Bonus track) God Only Knows Someone’s Got It In For Me Vervacous Protect Me Out To Get You Hymn From A Village (Bonus track) Johnny Yen CD2
Getting Away With It Tomorrow Born of Frustration Ring The Bells Top Of The World Sound Space She’s a Star Come Home Sit Down For more info on the live video, see below, or click here.
Getting Away With It… Live 02-Apr-02, updated 04-Apr-02: James will release the video of their December 2001 Manchester Evening News Arena gig on 10-Jun-2002 in the UK. The concert footage, titled Getting Away With It… Live will be released on VHS and DVD. Click here for all the latest details!
Jim Glennie Answers Fan’s Questions 01-Apr-02: Just prior to last year’s tour fans were asked to submit their questions to James’ bassist Jim Glennie. Following the tour, the holidays, and some computer difficulties, Jim’s answers are now available. To view them, visit the Q&A section.
DVD Update 10-Jan-02: The band spent the time following the December tour on holiday and have returned to work this week to mix the audio for the DVD. Mixing and editing are going well, and a release date and further details should be announced in the coming weeks.
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D.I.V.O.R.C.E : All Good Things Come To An End – Q Article and Review | Article, Interview | Brighton Centre, 2 December 2001 “I’m very tense. I nearly started crying a few times on a few songs tonight. Suddenly you can feel all this emotion coming at you. It’s lovely, it’s really beautiful,” states Tim Booth, now a model of quiet, centred calm. It’s midnight, backstage on a dank Sunday by the sea and there’s a good reason for Booth getting moisty-eyed. After the best part of 20 years being loosely joined at the hip, he and the band he has fronted through lean times and prosperity will soon be going their separate ways. Before they do, however, there’s the small matter of one final UK arena tour to be negotiated, starting here in Sussex. The intent seems plain – to turn this final curtain call into a joyful valediction of this most dogged, cussed, and yes, underrated of British musical institutions; one whose Best Of collection rather unexpectedly found its way into 800,000 homes just three years back. “I don’t have any regrets. I really feel fulfilled,” says Booth when asked about what he’ll miss. “It’s been an amazing ride, but I don’t know about missing things. I don’t want to sound like I’m putting the whole thing down. I’m not. It just feels like I’ve done it. “Who knows, in a year from now I might well be thinking, Shit I really miss it. I love a great gig, even if I do get fucking terrified before nearly every concert. I go through the wringer. Don’t know why I do it. Can’t seem to stop it, even after 20 years. I love it when I’m onstage, hate it before. There’s such a huge responsibility to make it work.” As to the future, Booth says he has completed his first screenplay (“I’ve always been terrified of writing more than a three-minute song. It felt like a journey across a desert”), fancies doing a bit more acting and reckons there will be “some different” music out next year. More than anything, it seems, he wants to try some other stuff: “It just feels like I had to make that break. The other guys have known that for the past couple of years. They’ve always been very patient and supportive. Like when I made the Badalamenti record. It kind of kicked up some of James timing in the States. I felt bad about asking people to wait for me to go off and do other things. So part of it was, Well, I think it’s fair to do a clean break.” Somehow, fully in keeping with the underdog spirit that has kept them going when others would have chucked in the towel, the band’s six remaining members appear determined to carry on without their prized asset, the one who some folk think of as actually being James. Publically, at least, bass-playing Jim Glennie, who’s been there right from day one – is putting on a bullish face. “I’ve got to be diplomatic here,” he explains. “There’s still a lot of indecision in the James camp. This was thrust upon us and we’re still juggling with what we want to do, what the options are. We don’t need to rush into anything, but there will be a James beyond this point. Speaking for myself, I feel really enthused by this. It feels exciting. It feels like a challenge. It was scary initially and mildly depressing. Now I feel like it’s what I need to do, what I should be doing. “For me, James will go away and it will change into something else and it will reappear. And when it does, it will be great.” The Brighton Centre is packed out with those wanting to say their fond farewells, and, for a couple of hours, take shelter in the warm nostalgic glow of the past. “Let’s see what we can do,” announces Booth coyly to huge cheers before launching into Say Something with its janglesome guitars and glorious chorus filling every corner of the hall. With the crowd expertly joining in, the sense of joy and release, both onstage and off, is undeniable; the urgent Sometimes and Laid’s up-front amatory declaration – “This bed is on fire with passionate love” – further confirming that, live, James have rarely sounded better. A band capable of both power and the most delicate of touches, it’s not hard to figure why Glennie is reluctant just to let things go. It’s Booth, though, who’s the focus for everything, the possessor of that slippery thing – star quality. One moment he’s doing his snake-dance routine around an unsuspecting mic stand. The next he’s being crucified on an invisible cross or whirling dervishly. And when he’s not having his limbs yanked in all directions by a malicious, unseen puppeteer, he’s still rather partial to going surfing on a sea of raised arms. There’s even a fair bit of singing too, sometimes with all the purity of an apple-cheeked schoolboy. The spell is briefly broken by Senorita and English Beefcake from the most recent album, Pleased To Meet You. But seeing how few have bought the record, maybe it’s no real surprise that nobody cares about them too much. Still, the equally fresh Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) motors along mightily in a way that Giorgio Moroder would recognise and the ever-fabulous She’s A Star puts them right back on track. After that it’s a doddle. Vervaceous (“Another musical one,” according to Booth) builds incessantly into a mesmerising psychedelic swirl; Johnny Yen proudly flaunts its indie birth-right with one-time member Andy Diagram having fun with his trumpet, and Born of Frustration has just about everything anyone could ever wish for in a humble pop song. To nobody’s great surprise, the square peg’s favourite anthem, Sit Down, signals goodnight and thanks for the memories. “I’m really glad that we’re ending it like this – with grace and as a celebration, not in some bitter way,” says Tim Booth afterwards. But for Glennie and the others it’s a case of picking themselves up, dusting off and starting again with another vocalist. Probably. “I know how some people identify with Tim,” he admits. “But if we’re ever going to play live again we need a permanent singer. When the right person turns up and they start flying across the improvisation we’re doing and you know the song is complete at that point, then they’ve got the job. Then we take it to the world. And if nobody likes it (shrugs shoulders), then nobody fucking likes it. That’s life. “This band has never sold as many records as it should have. That’s why I’m so excited, why I want to do this. I want to have a go. I might fail. It might be shit. It might be bollocks. I might be talking out of me arse. I don’t know.” Well, we’ll find out, won’t we? “Exactly.” Ladies and Gentlemen, James are still inside the building. | Jan 2002 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James guitarist Michael Kulas returns to Canada seeking solo career – National Post Online | Article, Interview | Michael Kulas is one of Canada’s least-known musical artists on the international stage. Not that he has been trying to stay quiet – Kulas has been playing guitar for the last five years with the British supergroup James and has only recently decided to bring his talents back home. “It’s been very interesting seeing people’s reactions here when they find out I play with James,” Kulas said recently. “Because the band itself is sort of on the fringe, not in the mainstream. When I was playing here before James I was never a household name, either, I was always sort of on the fringe too, so the two things went together well.” James never really broke through in North America, though the seven-piece band had several major hits in Europe since its inception in 1983. As a measure of its success, the band’s 1998 Best Of. . . album entered U.K. sales charts at No. 1 and stayed in the Top 10 for eight weeks. “A lot of times people have that reaction of hearing of James from somewhere, the name is in their vocabulary they just can’t quite peg what song it is they remember the band by,” says Kulas, an amiable, soft-spoken guy, who has clearly picked up just a hint of English accent in his time away. “A lot of the lack of North American exposure has to do with us not playing here a lot. I’ve been with the band five years and in that time we’ve played one show in Toronto.” One the reasons that Kulas is back home in Toronto is the decision by James frontman Tim Booth late last year to leave the band and move on to acting and screenwriting. “We’ve just finished another sold out arena tour, and his feeling was that he wants to leave it now on a high while the band is still seen in really good light,” says Kulas, 32. The remaining six members of James are considering staying together, though no final decision has yet been made, Kulas says. In the meantime, he’s shopping his independently produced solo album Another Small Machine to record labels in Canada and Britain. Kulas was absorbed into James in 1997, though the Peterborough, Ont.-born guitarist’s relationship with some of its members started earlier. He first met James member Saul Davies, who produced Mosquito in 1994. Two years later he played on Booth’s solo album, Booth & The Bad Angel (a collaboration with Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti). He was then signed on as a tour guitarist with the band – a week later he was playing with them on Late Night with David Letterman. Having established himself with a well-known European outfit, it’s somewhat surprising that Kulas has returned to his native land. He admits he did learn “a lot of really valuable lessons” touring and writing with James and Kulas can really name drop after hanging out in such elite company, though he does so with some reluctance. “Brian Eno, Noel and Liam (the Gallagher brothers of Oasis), yeah, I’ve met a few of the big guys,” he says. “It’s a different world on tour in the U.K. It’s pretty bloody amazing when you think about it.” Even with the James name behind him and the valuable experience of arena tours and festivals in Europe, Kulas felt he had to come home. “Everyone says that to me, why are you bothering? It just feels like something I have to do,” he says. “Even though I’ve been away and all over the world, it’s still a very important place to me. I’m a Torontonian and my family and very good friends are all here. It’s been five years since I’ve done a show in Canada and released my last record (the independently recorded Mosquito). It’s something that I have to do, I have to come home.” Kulas will return to his home near Glasgow this spring and summer to finish up several projects. But once that’s done he’ll be back to plug his solo recording and to play on much smaller Canadian stages. “I don’t know if (having been in James) makes it easier or harder as a solo artist,” he says. “For me it’s still the same kind of thing its always been – you have to get out and perform you have to get your music out there. You have to do a lot of hard work.” Some facts about Michael Kulas: Born: Peterborough, Ont., 1969 Albums with James: Whiplash (Fontana) 1997, Best Of . . . (Fontana)1998, Millionaires (Mercury1999, Pleased to Meet You (Mercury) 2001 Solo albums: Mosquito (Independent) 1996, Another Small Machine (Independent) 2001 On the Web: www.kulasonline.co.uk, www.jamestheband.com, www.oneofthethree.co.uk | Jan 2002 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Kulas – The Peterborough Examiner | Article, Interview | interview by Werner Bergen You’re part of a popular rock band that has toured the world and the lead singer has quit to become an actor. What do you do? If you’re Michael Kulas you release a solo album you’ve worked on for years and try and set up a new band complete with tour dates while awaiting the developments at big band level. Kulas, originally from Lakefield, has released Kulas, Another Small Machine. it will be officially launched Feb. 23 at the Rivoli club in Toronto. He also hopes to set up a Peterborough concert date prior to the launch as a sort of warm up concert. Kulas joined the British band James in 1997. He has been pivotal in adding his unique sound to songs from the albums Whiplash, Millionaires, Pleased to Meet You, and the multi-platinum selling Best Of album. He co-wrote the b-sides Wisdom of the Throat and Pocketful of Lemons with lead singer Tim Booth. Kulas said he last played Peterborough in 1989 as part of the local band The Sea. He played with a variety of local bands, including a band created while attending Lakefield College School, which included a singer who would be known as Sebastian Bach, who went on to fame with Skid Row and playing Broadway in Jekyll & Hyde. Kulas grew up in Lakefield and took up the guitar at the age of 11. His first band was The Crowd. He had been accepted at the Berklee College of Music in Boston but fell in with a group of musicians that formed The Sea that toured Ontario. He moved on to speak and put out a video called If I Was In Love With You Both. He met musicians from the James band in 1993 and approached James band member Saul Davies. The collaboration ended up with the album Mosquito recorded in Vancouver. Chart magazine called it one of the top 20 independent albums of 1995. Impact magazine called in an “extraordinary album”. Kulas joined James frontman Tim Booth and Davies and helped with the band’s preceding Horse With No Name. Six months later he was asked to do background vocals in support of the Whiplash album. He successfully auditioned for the band in 1997, in time for shows in Washington, Atlanta, New York and a performance of She’s a Star on Late Night with David Letterman. He was asked to join the band in Britain about the same time he was runner-up for Q107’s Scott Liddle songwriting contest. “James has a very loyal fan base all over the world,” said Kulas in an interview. “In many ways it may be called a fringe band but it’s stayed around while many bands haven’t.” James never really broke through in North America, though the seven-piece band has several major hits in Europe since it’s inception in 1981. As a measure of it’s success, the band’s 1998 Best Of… album entered the u.k. sales charts at no. 1 and stayed in the top 10 for eight weeks. “A lot of times people have that reaction of hearing of James from somewhere, the name is in their vocabulary they just can’t quite peg what song it is they are remembered the band by.” said Kulas. With booth off pursuing an acting career and the band not sure what it is going to do – get a new lead singer, re-arrange in a new format or disband. “With the band not sure what the future is it was a good time to release my solo material,” said Kulas. “Everyone says that to me, why are you bothering (coming home)? it just feels like something i have to do,” he says. “Even though i’ve been away and all over the world, it’s still a very important place to me. I’m Torontian and my family and very good friends are all here. It’s been five years since I’ve done a show in Canada and released my last record (the independently released Mosquito). It’s something that I have to do, I have to come home.” Kulas wrote the material, played most of the instruments (except for the drums) while living in a small sea-side cottage in Scotland. “I just think it’s pop rock and roll,” said Kulas. “It has traditional elements in it.” While he calls it pop, it doesn’t mean the music is “bubble gum or lightweight.” It’s not folk, it’s not blues, it’s not country and it’s not blue grass, he said. it could be called “transient rock and roll or atmospheric rock and roll.” The sound and style was developed in the recording process, he said. “The pop sensibilities come from experiences in the British pop music scene. in Britain there really is a pop culture.” Right now he is assembling a band that already has drummer John Oberian (the original drummer in his new album) and bass player Tom Arliss, both of whom play in Sarah Horner’s band. Kulas will return to his home near Glasgow this spring and summer to finish up several projects. but once that’s done he’ll be back to plug his solo recording and to play on much smaller Canadian stages.
| Jan 2002 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
FAQ – Jamestheband.com – January 2002 | Article, Feature | This piece was originally published on the James official site Jamestheband.com that was lost when the band split in 2001
Below is a collection of some of the most frequently asked questions about James. If there are others you’d like to see answered, please send them to info@jamestheband.com. Why are James called James? What other names has the band gone by? Who are James? Who else has been in the band? Why did they leave, and what are they doing now? When were the members of James born? What’s the story behind the daisy? Why is One Man Clapping so rare, and where can I get it? When are James going to tour again? When will ‘Millionaires’ or ‘Pleased To Meet You’ be released in the U.S.? What is Black Thursday? Who are Booth and the Bad Angel? What’s this I hear about a James side project? Why is “Sometimes” called “Sometimes (Lester Piggot)”? What’s unusual about the “Born of Frustration” video? What’s unusual about the “Destiny Calling” video? What songs have James covered? What bands have covered James songs? Where can I find the version of “Ring the Bells” that is heard on the X-Files?
Why are James called James? From the Melody Maker feature on James in 1990: “Paul Gilbertson originally thought of the name James, apparently because of his love for Orange Juice guitarist James Kirk, or perhaps admiration for his own bass player Jim Glennie, or simply a fetish for first names. Other first names were tried, but no one liked the sound of Paul; Tim sounded too weak; and Gavan sounded too heavy metal. In the end, they settled on James because it was amorphous enough to encompass what the band were – amorphous. James were determined to not pigeonholed themselves and to be a constant surprise. Back in 1982, their newfound name had no connotations.” “They played as James once and were going to dump it, but changed their minds when they discovered their next gig was at the Hacienda and the Manchester club had already advertised the name.
What other names has the band gone by? From the Melody Maker special on James, 1990: “they got drunk before every gig to numb their fear, and for every gig, they´d use another name. Volume Distortion lasted 24 hours, Model Team International lasted the 30 minutes they were on stage.”
Who are James? Jim Glennie bass guitar (1982-present) Adrian Oxaal lead guitar (1996-present) Saul Davies guitar, violin (1989-present) Mark Hunter keyboards (1989-present) David Baynton-Power drums (1989-present)
Who else has been in the band? Tim Booth vocals (1982-2001) Michael Kulas backing vocals (1997-2001) Larry Gott lead guitar (1985-1996) Andy Diagram trumpet (1990-1993) Gavan Whelan drums (1982-1988) Paul Gilbertson lead guitar (1982-1985)
Why did they leave, and what are they doing now? Tim Booth left to persue other creative endevors. Read Tim’s statement on his decision to leave here. With Tim’s departure, Michael Kulas’ services as backing vocalist were no longer needed. He has since returned to Canada where he is persuing his solo career. For more information visit www.kulasonline.co.uk. Larry Gott left to spend more time with his family and go to university. He completed a degree in 3D design in 2000 and nowadays plys his craft as a furniture designer, having already won the prestigious FX/Allemuir Furniture for Manufacture Award. Andy Diagram left the band to pursue other musical interests. He went on to form the band Spaceheads, who tour regularly and have put out 3 cds. See http://www.spaceheads.demon.co.uk for more information. Gavan Whelan was asked to leave the band in 1988 after he attacked Tim during a set at a college ball gig. After the incident, “Whelan wanted to stay with them, but all three other members had already had separate run-ins with the drummer and they decided they couldn’t give him one more chance.” He went on to become a drum roadie for Primal Scream, and eventually went on to join another band (name unknown). Paul Gilberston left because of drug-related problems. The song “Not There” from Strip-mine is dedicated to him. He entered a detox program after leaving the band, but what happened to him after that is unknown.
When were the members of James born? Jim Glennie October 10, 1963 David Baynton Power January 29, 1961 Saul Davies June 28, 1965 Mark Hunter November 5, 1968 Adrian Oxxal March 20, 1965
What’s the story behind the daisy? According to Martine McDonagh, James’ former manager, in an interview in the James newsletter Chain Mail, the answer is quite simple: they were designing an ad for Come Home and had put in the word “james” in the usual font, but decided that it just looked too boring, resulting in the decision to put a daisy over the “j”.
Why is One Man Clapping so rare, and where can I get it? From the Melody Maker special on James, 1990: One Man Clapping was financed through a loan from their bank, who at first wasn’t too impressed with the idea of funding a pop venture, but “after the band took their bank manager to a gig (in one week in Leeds, over £2000-worth of james-merchandise was sold), he agreed on the spot. One Man Clapping was distributed by Rough Trade and went straight to number one on the indie charts. The band was quite surprised when they received a fax from Sire records demanding to know why they’d released an album without informing the company.” This was four months after they had officially parted from Sire. Because it was released independently, it received only limited distribution. Although it was distributed on CD and vinyl format, both are extremely difficult to find. Occasionally a copy will turn up in small record shops in the UK or online mail order shops — you just need to be patient and persistant. Be prepared, however, because very often when a copy is found, it can command a high price.
When are James going to tour again? With Tim’s departure and no new lead singer yet chosen to take his place, the band are unable to tour at this time. Once a new lead singer is found, they will be about to start thinking about touring again. As soon as dates are confirmed, they’ll be posted to the tour dates section of this web site.
When Will ‘Millionaires’ or ‘Pleased To Meet You’ be Released in the U.S.? Following the release of ‘James: The Best Of…’, the band was dropped from their U.S. record contract with Mercury Records. Thus far, they have been unable to find a new U.S. distribution deal with either Mercury or another label. Until they do, the album can not be released in the states, and its release is on hold in Canada. In the summer of 2001, after completing the requirements of their contract James and their U.K. record label, Mercury Records, London parted ways. The band have signed with Sanctuary Records to release a live CD of their December 2001 gig in Manchester in both the U.S. and U.K., but do not have a contract covering future new releases, so it’s unlikely ‘Millionaires’ or ‘Pleased To Meet You’ will be released in the U.S. anytime in the near future. Fans anxious to hear the albums should consider buying it on import. A number of online shops have both albums available. For a list of possible shops see the Where To Buy section. As a word of advice, shop around and check prices — prices for imports vary greatly from one shop to the next.
What is Black Thursday? From Pulse!, April 1997: “We went into the studio to start writing material for the next album, which would end up being Whiplash,” recalls (Saul) Davies. “And suddenly, everything collapsed around us, and it happened to be a Thursday.” Slide guitarist, key songwriter and founding member Larry Gott announced he would no longer tour with James. Tim Booth announced his plans to go to New York and record his long-stalled solo project with film composer Angelo Badalamenti (the lush Booth and the Bad Angel, released last year on Mercury). And the U.K. tax man announced the unfortunate discovery of an overlooked James debt of roughly £150,000. “We realized that everything we’d taken for granted, even the existence of the band, was now in doubt and required serious re-evaluation,” Davies adds.
Who are Booth and the Bad Angel? Booth and the Bad Angel is the result of a collaboration between James lead singer Tim Booth and film score composer Angelo Badalamenti (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks). The album of the same name was the result of Tim’s long-time desire to work with Angelo, which Tim developed after hearing Badalamenti’s work with Julie Cruise on Floating Into The Night. Mercury Records’ Booth and the Bad Angel site explained: “Tim was told by a clairvoyant that his career would leap creatively skyward if he collaborated with ‘a man with the name of an angel'”. Here’s how it happened: In the early 1990’s a late-night British music show called Friday Night At The Dome had a running theme of bringing together musicians from disparate genres and cultures (i.e. Richard Thompson and David Byrne) and letting them play together. The producers asked Tim Booth if there was anybody in the world with whom he would love to collaborate, to which he replied “Angelo Badalamenti.” In New Jersey, the fifty-something Badalamenti had never heard of Tim Booth or James. Contacted by phone, he agreed in theory to a collaboration, provided somebody sent him all the James albums and Tim was free to travel to New York. Tim said yes. The producers of Friday Night At The Dome would film the project, whatever it might be. Everyone was excited, not least Tim. Then Tim got the flu and was advised not to fly. The producers went to see a David Byrne concert without him, and had a serious car crash resulting in hospitalizations. Tim would have been in that car… …Not wishing to let the collaboration flicker out before it had even started, Angelo told Tim to fax some poems and he’d see if they sparked off any musical ideas. “I sent him some poems and heard nothing back from him,” Tim recalls. Over in New Jersey, Angelo read the poems and wondered what the hell they were all about. “He’d leave these strange, lyric messages on my answering machine,” Angelo says. “It was like having a stalker.” Then in 1993, as a Booth and Badalamenti collaboration was looking somewhat optimistic, Paul McCartney telephoned Angelo and asked him to come to London to orchestrate a song, which he did. Meanwhile James’s ground-breaking acoustic tour had just reached London. This put Tim and Angelo in the same city at last. Angelo saw James play at the Town and Country (now the Forum), found Tim’s performance to be ‘appealing’ and went backstage, where they met up for the first time. “He said, ‘Anything you want to do,'” Tim remembers. Angelo returned to America while Tim went off to do the Eno sessions that would comprise the two James albums Laid and Wah Wah. In the spring of 1994, Tim took a holiday in New York where he and Angelo met for the second time. In the interim, Angelo had put Tim’s poem to music. They immediately recorded it (although it didn’t make it on to the album in the end) in a New York studio and Tim took the tape back to Mercury Records, who gave the project the green light. When Tim returned to New York later that summer, they began work for real, recording most of the songs for Booth And The Bad Angel in a six day improvisational period with Tim singing, Angelo playing keyboards, and American session men playing bass and drums (backing vocalists include Brian Eno; Angelo on “Life Gets Better” and, on “Dance Of The Bad Angels” Tim’s vocal coach in England, Chloe Goodchild). Booth and the Bad Angel was released by Mercury in 1996, and was accompanied by a single for the song “I Believe”. In June 1998 a second single, for the song “Fall In Love With Me”, was released in the UK, and the same song features on the soundtrack for the movie Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel & Lawrence.
What’s this I hear about a James side project? In 1997 James drummer, David Baynton-Power, keyboardist Mark Hunter, and guitarist/violinist Saul Davies began work on a side project under the name of Money. On June 12th, 1997, Money made it’s debut live performance to a small crowd in Toronto, as part of the NXNE Music Festival and Conference. A release was originally considered for early 1998, but was delayed because of the release of James: The Best Of… and the press/promo/tour events related to it. No work is currently being done as Money at this time.
Why is “Sometimes” called “Sometimes (Lester Piggot)”? Lester Piggot is a famous British horse jockey. According to Tim in an interview on MTV’s 120 Minutes around the time Laid was released, the band referred to the song as “Lester Piggot” while they were writing it because of its “racing beat”.
What’s unusual about the “Born of Frustration” video? Guitarist Larry Gott doesn’t appear in it. According to drummer David Baynton Power, in an interview with Leaking E-zine: Basically it was our first trip to America. We’d run over to L.A. to shoot the video there, up in the “Troner Pinnacles.” Out in Nevada somewhere, that’s where it was shot. Well, the night we got into L.A., Larry got mugged. He was so shaken up he just buggered off home the next day. So he sent our tour manager out to take his place. He was wearing glasses and he wore Larry’s hat and all; but no one ever noticed.
What’s unusual about the “Destiny Calling” video? Bassist Jim Glennie doesn’t appear in it. Evidently, a night of partying took its toll on Jim, and he wasn’t able to make it to the video shoot the next morning. Backing vocalist/guitarist Michael Kulas made his James video debut in Glennie’s place.
What songs have James covered? Morrissey – “We Hate it When Our Friends Become Successful” (live at Glastonbury 1992) Leonard Cohen – “So Long Marianne” (I’m Your Fan – The Songs of Leonard Cohen) Velvet Underground – “Sunday Morning” (Heaven And Hell – A Tribute To The Velvet Underground) Iggy Pop/David Bowie – “China Girl” (Radio One “Iggy Pop Tribute”)
What bands have covered James songs? The Smiths – “What’s the World” Unrest – “Folklore” Voice of the Beehive – “Sit Down” Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine – “Sit Down” Kulas – “Laid” (live, NXNE Music Festival, June 1997) Better Than Ezra – “Laid” (regularly while on tour in 1999)
Where can I find the version of “Ring the Bells” that is heard on the X-Files? The slow, acoustic version of “Ring the Bells” from the X-files episode entitled “D.P.O.” is featured on the Greenpeace compilation titled “Alternative NRG”. The song was recorded at “The Palace” in Hollywood, CA with equipment run exclusively by solar power. | Jan 2002 | article feature | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Toronto Sun Interview with Kulas | Article, Interview | Hitting the big time can be a bummer.That’s what Michael Kulas is discovering. Five years ago the Peterborough native’s well-received debut, Mosquito, had just dropped and was climbing the indie charts. Then Kulas fell in with a gang of young Brits better known as college-rock faves James. He signed on as one of the boys in the band and bid farewell to his home and native land. After half a decade of beer-fogged success, Kulas is back on this side of the pond with a lovely new solo record and a stiff upper lip. In a country notorious for eating its own artists, he’s finding it tough to come home again. “You’d think that, in some sense, a Canadian joining James would’ve been pretty big news,” he chuckles. “But it’s been like reappearing after an absence and finding that nobody knew you’d been gone.” When James frontman Tim Booth announced he was leaving during their December tour, most folks — including Kulas — assumed the band was folding. Now nobody knows what’s up. Kulas is happy about his decision to leave, but won’t say much more. Evidently, being in a seven-piece band teaches you diplomacy. Still, Kulas is having a hard time letting go of his other life. In person, he’s more hunky English gentleman than scruffy Canuck indie dude. He has a mongrel British accent and sips red wine and Perrier during our late-afternoon interview. And though you’d assume he’d be set on plugging his new solo work, the conversation keeps turning to his phenomenal experiences as a member of James. You believe him when, during stories about singin’ with Sinead and shooting the shit with Brian Eno, he effuses about his amazing luck. “Unfortunately,” he laughs, “a lot of my experience working with James is hazy. Too many pints of lager. It’s sometimes very hard to recollect the fine nuances of my time with them.” Still, he says, he’s brought that experience to his new disc, Another Small Machine. Written mostly in a “small hut in Scotland, 10 feet from the sea,” the album bears few traces of the generic mid-90s Canadian alterna-rock sound of Kulas’s earlier work. He dubs it “transatlantic.” It’s reflective and elegiac, with some echoes of James’s jangly guitar rock, but the sound leans more toward stripped-down Coldplay. The disc was in the can before Kulas parted ways with his former band, so it seems quite prescient. “It was written in that headspace of feeling quite small, quite alone,” he offers, “not knowing what was going to come next in my own life, my own career.” Who knows what’s next for Kulas? He thinks the local scene is ready for a much-needed transfusion — and after being away for five years, Kulas qualifies as new blood. “There’s a big difference from three years ago, when there was this connection being made between local musicians and new styles of writing songs with different grooves, techno beats, breakbeats, new technology. It was so exciting. Now it just seems like the city needs a kick in the ass” | Feb 2002 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Eye Interview with Kulas | Article, Interview | Sometimes there’s a price to be paid for returning to your roots. From playing 15,000-seat arenas to 150-capacity clubs, Michael Kulas has seen his audience become “more selective” since he returned from a five-year stint playing with Britpop heroes James in the U.K. and around the world. There is, however, an important difference — he’s now in charge of his own music. Sipping on a vodka ‘n’ cranberry at the Rivoli, Kulas recalls the trauma of his first ever gig, a high school performance in Lakefield (near Peterborough) that featured aspiring vocalist Sebastian Bach. “At the end of the night, he stole my girlfriend. He was the singer, and I was the rhythm guitarist — not even the lead. It taught me a very, very valuable lesson at a very young age: the flashy people at the front, they’re the ones who always get the women. And if they don’t have the women, they’ll steal the women!” Kulas is out to solve that problem: after playing rhythm guitar and singing backup for Tim Booth’s recently disbanded crew, the Oakville native is back home with his own CD, Another Small Machine, on which he sings — and plays — lead. Of course, Toronto isn’t exactly skid row, but many have wondered why he would brave our notoriously fickle club scene rather than playing to the converted in Britain. “If there’s nothing really happening,” he affirms, “you should try to get something happening. Create an environment. If everybody feels a bit down and continually going on about, ‘Well, there’s nothing going on here, the music scene’s shit,’ to me, that’s an open licence to actually start going fucking mental here. “If nothing’s going on, no one should give a shit if a bunch of musicians get a collective together, start banging out some cool songs, start playing some great shows — all of a sudden, that makes it exciting again. Looking at this –” he points to the snowdrifts outside “– I just see it as another example of an environment that is open to being indulged in.” Much of Kulas’ new CD, Another Small Machine, he recorded himself in a less hospitable environment in Scotland’s Ayrshire. “We’re talking about a place with no phone, no television, no central heating, one propane stove — it’s a 90-year-old cottage with a great view of the sea,” he says. “It’s eight miles from the nearest town, and there’s only one bus that will get you in there per day. “You have to be able to stand your own company. All you’ve got to do, really, is sit and drink a lot of wine and see what comes out. And that can be inspiring. There are days when you just think, ‘What am I doing here?’ The rain is lashing down outside, and the waves are splashing around, and the only way to get warm is by doing something — making music, turning stuff up really loud — it’s all you’ve really got.” Thankfully, Another Small Machine isn’t as stark an album as its setting would suggest — it’s got some undeniably catchy, anthemic pop tunes. And while they’re not as sonically filled out as James’ seven-piece jams, Kulas includes the occasional eerie synth pad in a nod to James producer (and fellow backing vocalist) Brian Eno. Not only did the godfather of ambient help develop Kulas’ production skills, he also ensured the star power he mingled with would be greater even than what he encountered in rock ‘n’ roll high school. Kulas recalls a day a few years back when Eno sent the band off to the pub for the afternoon; when they returned, Eno got Kulas, Tim Booth and Sinéad O’Connor to join arms with him under dim lights and sing a quartet. “Of course, I’d just had about seven pints,” Kulas recounts, “and we’re all squished up. We start singing, and I’ve got my hands behind my back, and I’m squeezing them so tightly because I’m so nervous thinking about the fact that I’m surrounded by Sinéad O’Connor and Brian Eno on the other side of me, and I’m just some hick from fucking Ontario! I’m like, ‘What are you actually doing here? Bugger off back to Lakefield!'” He may be leading his own band now, and proving to be an engaging performer to boot, but you can’t take the self-deprecation from the rhythm guitarist — or the Canadian. “It was a really wonderful moment,” Kulas admits. “It only helped to give me more confidence about so many other things from that point on. I’ll always remember thinking, ‘You are so out of your league!'” | Feb 2002 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
City Life – Creativity Workshop Tim Booth | Article, News | article on Tim’s Creativity Workshop at Manchester Metropolitan Uni 23.3.02 Tim Booth the frontman, the pop star, the manc muso-ego apparently won’t be in attendance today, the flyer for the event goes as far to forewarn us of this. “These workshops are not for James fans who want to hang out with Tim.” (!) Instead Tim Booth the Five Rhythms facilitator / mediator will. That’s not to say Tim’s better known talents will be entirely off the menu, in his own words, “This is, if you like, a more rock n roll method to achieve altered states.” The Creativity Workshop is based on a system of movement, ‘The Five Rhythms’ and is about ‘finding your own dance, getting beyond ego to something bigger,’ Those tempted to leave their cosy inhibitions at the door might be encouraged by the knowledge that the rock biog thankfully comes complete with Tim’s training in Psychotherapy and long-term study of alternative healing techniques. “The workshop is about achieving ecstatic creative states without damage.” Tim continues, “to access full potential, it releases your fears and terrors, your raw spirit.” The idea of uninhibited dance is perhaps terrifying enough for some, but as Tim counters, “It’s nothing new, people in Manchester were doing it in the 80s and in New York before then. Everyone is encouraged to express however they feel even if it’s shyness.” If the rock n roll route to self development still sounds a bit too much like cheap thrills, Tim is keen to make clear that these techniques are simply up to date. “The 5 Rhythms is almost a modern experience of ancient systems, like meditation and yoga. We live in a fast, funky society with constant action and distraction, these forms share the ultimate goal through different methods, the last of the Five Rhythms for example is stillness.” | Mar 2002 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Jim Answers Questions To Jamestheband.com – March 2002 | Article, Interview | On the old wearejames.com website, the band would periodically answer questions submitted by fans. The following were answered by Jim in March 2002
From: Zac Steger Since you have no label and no singer, what’s the first step for James following the tour? Will you be taking things at a slow pace, or do you already have an idea of what you wanna do? Any chance Kulas will be the singer? Well in true James style, the first thing to do is take a break. Then when we all start getting bored, we’ll begin writing new material, and take things from there. No, Michael Kulas will not be the singer, he is no longer in James and is pursuing his solo career.
From: Chris Orton Hi Jim, What would you like to do if you stopped being in a band? All the best, Chris Oh you know – the usual stuff, astronaut, formula 1 driver, playing for Man City… Seriously though, probably nothing for awhile, then start another band.
From: Tim Allan Will your future releases have the James ‘guitar based’ direction or will Tim’s departure give you the chance to try different styles, as you did with Money? I don’t expect there to be any conscious change in style, but we are notoriously bad at controlling our musical direction, so who knows. I don’t think we’ll go down the “Money” path, though. That was fun while it lasted, but not really appropriate for James I don’t think.
From: Chris Brown Jim, is there any particular moment, occasion or song that has made being in James for nearly 20 years such a worthwhile experience? Ones that stand out: first getting Single of the Week, first gold disc (Gold Mother), first time on TOTP, selling out the Manchester Apollo where I’d seen my fave bands as a kid, Alton Towers, I could go on and on. Songs are harder, as my favourites change according to how well we are playing them at the moment. On the last tour it was Vervacious, but if I had to choose it would probably be Out to Get You, Sit Down, and Stutter, just for diversity’s sake really.
From: Augie Who would your short-list of dream lead singers include? Jim Morrison from the Doors, but until cloning is perfected that could be difficult. No one else really, just the lucky individual out there with the golden ticket awaiting his/her true calling. Please note: the term ‘golden ticket’ is meant figuratively and is not a legally binding offer of employment for anyone having or ever having had a ‘golden ticket’.
From: Andy Leitch Jim, are you cross with Tim for leaving the band, and are the two of you going to keep in touch? No I’m not cross with Tim. We’ve had too long a relationship for me not to respect his wishes on this one. Plus he’s handled it very graciously and has been as helpful and supportive as he could. Will we keep in touch? We’re both going to be pretty busy, but I imagine we will.
From: timeblind Jim, have you ever considered fronting your own band? [sound of me laughing out loud] Oh no, no, no! For one thing, my vocal abilities only stretch to shouting and telling jokes, plus I prefer to be the power-behind-the-throne Hillary Clinton type figure!
From: Martin Holden What’s the best bass ever made, what amp do you use, and how did you get so good? Well, that’s a taste call really. There are lots of incredibly expensive planks of wood out there all loved for very different reasons. I’ve got five I think, including an old Fender Precision that sounds great but is horrible to play (strictly studio). At home I play a Hohner acoustic bass that I picked up in NYC for $280 and sounds surprisingly good; and unlike most acoustic basses it doesn’t require forearms like Popeye to play it. But my bestest one is my Musicman Sterling, which is really light, very easy to play, and the tone controls go from woolly glove to metal plectrum. I’m not really much of a ‘gear-head’, and my set up is pretty simple: Ampeg valve amp and Ampeg 8×10 cab, I have been known to use a little distortion every now and again but never on a Sunday. How did I get so good? Well it’s very nice of you to say so. I think as with every instrument, the thing is not to get bogged down in the search for technical proficiency, but to use your ear, don’t be afraid to keep things simple if it sounds good it is good.
From: Allen James Hi Jim, Will the departure of Tim mean a whole new look and sound? or will you strive to keep the current fan base content? Whatever the future holds for you all, I wish you success! See you in manchester, Allen James No, I think we’ll be keeping our usual shambolic look, more’s the pity – why, have you any suggestions? As regards the sound, I imagine in theory at least there won’t be a huge departure, but considering the differences stylistically between, say, Top of the World and Jam J, we do have quite a lot of scope.
From: Paul Crabtree Will you buy any of Tim Booth’s Solo albums? And will you keep in touch? Well I should hope I’ll be given a copy! As for keeping in touch, see above.
From: Karla What are the bands thoughts on reprising the Money project, how do you think your music will change w/o Tim’s influence, and do you have any plans on touring America? I have faith that whatever you guys do will rock! I wouldn’t hold your breath for the next Money release if I were you, I think James is going to be pretty all consuming for a while at least. It’s kind of hard to say what will happen musically now, I feel confident in our ability to keep on writing great music, but exactly how this is going to turn out, who knows. We nearly came to the States last year to do a small acoustic tour, but nearly doesn’t really count does it. As soon as we’re fully functional we’d love to come, I think the acoustic path sounds fun, so maybe we’ll look in | Mar 2002 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Time Out – Shockheaded Peter (Andy Diagram) | Article, News | It is one of the joys of Shockheaded Peter that the musicians who sing with such relish of naughty children reaching grisly ends are so unorthodox themselves. Martyn Jacques and the Tiger Lillies, the cult cabaret combo who composed the junk opera’s songs, have been replaced for this production by avant-garde veteran David Thomas and his improvising Two Pale Boys. Thomas voice defies convention, rumbling and swooping as trumpeter Andy Diagram and guitarist Keith Moline employ a series of effects to warp and enhance each melody. These idiosyncrasies transform the texture of the songs in fascinating ways. Harriet’s dress burns to flickers of trumpet and beautifully glowing guitar, while Flying Robert soars on the otherworldly sound of Diagram singing through his trumpet’s distorting microphone. Thomas doesn’t screech ‘dead’ with Jacques maniacal relish, and occasionally he renders the lyrics unintelligible, but his macabre wail and lovely baroque flourishes have a variety that Jacques never attained. And, unlike Jacques, he is a huge presence, dominating the toy box set and contrasting comically with wiry Julian Bleach, with whom Thomas appears to be curiously furious throughout. There are some terrifying volatile moments, particularly during Johnny Head-in-Air, when it seems Thomas will actually attack Bleach. This crackling tension, Thomas’ dark intonations and the Two Pale Boys’ creepy creaks and chords render the show far scarier than in previous productions, the scenes between songs, following Struwwelpeter’s parents, seem lethargic by comparison. | Apr 2002 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Chart Attack – Kulas Makes New Machines After James | Article, Interview | There’s no question that now is not the brightest time commercially for Brit-pop. Back at the end of 2001, English heroes James, wanting to go out on top, laid their career to rest. They’ve threatened to return one day in some form, but they’ll be without vocalist Tim Booth or, for that matter, Michael Kulas. After five years with James, the Canadian singer and guitarist has decided to devote his time to conquering North America, and the world, with his own material. He’s starting by promoting his second solo album, titled — ironically — Another Small Machine. Recently, Kulas took some time out to sit down at the Rivoli in Toronto and discuss the death of James and the rebirth of his solo career, which was put on hold after his 1995 debut, Mosquito (named by Chart, at the time, as one of the “top 20 independent albums of the year”). “I started thinking about my role within James,” Kulas recounts. “Within the big structure of it, you are another part of the whole. You’re instrumental only as far as your role demands. And also on another level, when you release an album into the great big world of music, it’s just another small machine in the larger machine that is pop culture… It was a record that I felt was really necessary to make, because it had been five years since I’d really done anything. I’d been within the James circle of music, and I felt like [this album] was one area where I was going to be able to at least get something out, or express something of my own, when everything I’d been doing was part of their machine.” Of course, there are worse machines to be part of. In their last U.K. tour, the band was still pulling in large, enthusiastic crowds and supporting their last album, Pleased To Meet Me. While fairly patchy, the disc contains some great, epic tunes with production by Brian Eno. Commercially, however, James had been on something of a downhill slope. “I came into the band just as Whiplash [1997] was being released,” recalls Kulas, “and that record was received fairly well overall and had a few hits in Britain, but a lot of people had such an expectation of James, after Laid [1993], that somehow the album should be of that [same] nature, or of that sound, or maybe set that kind of tone. Anything the band was doing might have been met with some kind of criticism just because everybody looked so highly upon Laid as a piece of work, which I think is really unfair. “For instance, Millionaires [1999] is an absolutely fabulous record, and it got some of the best write-ups of any James album ever, especially in Britain, and in typical James fashion, that was the one record that was pulled off the shelf by Universal back here. It was only on import… so there’s a real injustice there. Conversely, Pleased To Meet You just came out last year and it was picked up by MCA. It’s a very strong record in a lot of respects, but maybe wasn’t as fully realized as a record like Millionaires for various reasons — time constraints or budgets or what not.” Record companies have rarely been accused of being driven by a concern for quality. But even though Pleased To Meet You may have been less impressive than Millionaires it was still received with something less than general enthusiasm. “I think it’s a really strong record,” reflects Kulas, “and when you see that happen, you really don’t know what to think. Is it the industry? Is it the buying public? Is it the music that’s making people react the way they do? Tim [Booth] is exactly right. He was saying, ‘I think we made an amazing record.’ And when you think you’ve made a real contribution and it’s met with so little fanfare, it makes you question what it’s all about. I think in a lot of ways his decision to leave was based on that: At least we’ll leave on a high in a sense, before it moves into some level of chaos where you just don’t care about the music you’re making any more, where you’re just doing it for contractual obligations. At least making that last record, everybody was passionate about it, no matter what the fucking critics said, and that’s something I think James has always done: make music for music’s sake, and not to fulfill some fucking obligation.” Kulas’ experience with James evidently left him with a lot of good memories, and — just as important — a fanbase within the fanbase. On the James fansite, oneofthethree.co.uk, for instance, you can find a concert review written by a fan who arrived early just to be able to stand in front of him. “Yeah, you see!” Kulas laughs. “That’s right! They did get the best spot! …A lot of people in the aftershow would come up and thank me for the records that they had: ‘Thanks for the great music. When are you making the next album?’ and ‘We’ve been following you since you joined the band.’ I’ve always thought that was really heartening, so I’ve been interested in keeping in touch with these people, and you definitely get that at some of these shows: A pocket of people who are screaming in front of you and that’s just lovely.” While there may be fewer people screaming in front of him in Toronto, you can chalk it up to the staid nature of audiences here rather than the quality of his music, Another Small Machine is made up of memorable tunes that take up serious real estate in your cranium. And while they’re inspired to some degree by Brit-pop and they’re more intelligent than run-of-the-mill alterno-rock, it’s easy to imagine Michael Kulas’ last name occupying the same charts once scaled by James’ one and only moniker. And beware to any executives who tell him otherwise: “There’s a way to be getting out and playing, making something happen in your own right. [Whereas] actually going to the record companies and asking them, ‘What do you think?'” He shakes his head. “I know what I think. I know I’ve got a frigging great record here.” Kulas and his band play a live recording performance at Clinton’s in Toronto on Saturday, April 27. —Mike Doherty | Apr 2002 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Blitz Interview with Saul (Portuguese) | Article, Interview | May 2002 | article interview | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Kulas Turns Onto Pop – Toronto Star | Article, Interview | Ex-James singer and songwriter returns to T.O. with second solo album Betsy Powell – Entertainment Reporter Five years ago, Michael Kulas left Toronto to join U.K. rock outfit James, touring the world and mixing with some of his biggest rock ‘n’ roll heroes including Brian Eno, Sinead O’Connor, and Elvis Costello. And then, late last year, James’ singer Tim Booth bowed out, preferring to leave on a high note rather than let the seven-piece outfit “degenerate into an act that’s alive to maintain contractual obligations,” explains Kulas. Now, on the heels of a sold-out farewell arena tour in the U.K., the guitarist, singer/songwriter resurfaces in Toronto with his second solo record, Another Small Machine, a self-produced collection of tuneful pop recorded in a seaside cabin in Scotland and released on his own imprint, Interloper. The title came to him “sitting in the middle of nowhere recording,” begins Kulas, who plays Rancho Relaxo (1:00 a.m.) on Saturday night as one of NXNE’s closing acts. “I started thinking about my little project, a tiny little machine within the bigger structure which is James and the pop music industry.” Wait a minute. Where’s the rock-star attitude one might expect from someone who has played to tens of thousands of people — even if it’s true, as he suggests, that a raging ego (“if you catch me on the right day”) lurks. Perhaps, but he still laughs at the uncertainty the “breather” has presented. “Returning to Canada meant leaving a large part of my life in Britain,” he says. “But it was also, after five years, important to return and reconnect with the city I know best in the world.” Clearly, Kulas has a practical side. “Once I knew that James was finished for me, I also knew I’ve got an album in the can so while I’m home, why don’t I just pick up where I left off five years prior?” ——————————————————————————– Kulas tends to stick to his own music rather than to reheat James’ repertoire ——————————————————————————– His debut solo CD, 1994’s Mosquito — produced by fellow James member Saul Davies — was released when guys with guitars ruled the roost. Now, despite the teen bubble bursting, the industry, the majors anyway, shows a dismaying reluctance to get behind a male solo artist not peddling saccharin, r ‘n’ b-flavoured pop. Despite this, Kulas remains undeterred and pleased with the reception he’s received, both with a press and public curious about his transatlantic association. “The crowds have been wonderful in Toronto. I think the James connection has something to do with that. I think the connection from doing Mosquito before I went to the U.K. has a lot to do with that.” With the James association comes expectations. Kulas, however, tends to stick to his own music rather than to reheat James’ repertoire, though he did recently play an impromptu, punk version of James’ anthem “Sit Down.” For Saturday’s show, Kulas has brought some new players on board, because “the original bass player and guitar player were on loan from another band.” For now, he’s put the uncertainty aside. “It’s becoming clear now the best thing is to continue performing and writing and see where the next path leads.” | Jun 2002 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Very Nice And Not So Dim Tim – What DVD | Article, Era: Hiatus, Interview |
June 2002, by Jonathan Morris, © What DVD Magazine We sit down with James frontman Tim Booth, who tells us their live DVD was not a project born of frustration… James former lead singer Tim Booth had not been idle in the months since the band’s final concerts. He’s completed a third draft of his screenplay, he’s written an album worth of songs and he’s been pursuing acting roles. He’s been taking people off to the Canary Islands, for “mad shamanic” dance workshops in the mornings and trips to see dolphins and whales in the afternoon. And he’s also been working away on the new James DVD Getting Away With It Live. “I had a problem,” admits the now shaven-headed singer. “Before we’d edited it, the only music DVD I’d bought was of a Bruce Springsteen gig and it was phenomenal. It haunted me. It was all long, held close-ups and our footage didn’t have that – it was all ‘Pow! Pow!’. So we had an intense four 14-hour days re-editing it, as I wanted more held shots, but there weren’t many to choose from.” However, Tim is unreserved in his enthusiasm for the result of their labours in the edit suite. “I believe that James were one of the great live bands. Sometimes our records suffered in peoples’ opinion because they were being compared against the live versions, which is an impossible comparison because hearing a song on record is always going to seem flatter, it’s like a two-dimensional version. With the DVD, you get the full three-dimensional version. “In the last five years, it’s been hard for James to get out of a certain ghetto, and so a lot of new audiences hadn’t come to see us play live,” he adds. “So I think this DVD is probably the best way to experience James, to get the power of the songs live. And to see what you missed.” The concert was obviously emotionally charged, for both the audience and the band – and for Booth in particular. “We felt that nothing could go wrong,” he says. “For me, performing is about trying to get as high as possible on your music, on generating, well, love, and taking that to the audience, then feeding their reaction back into the music. It’s like an energy loop; the energy from the audience boosts us, so we can go higher on the next song.” “That’s what you’re witnessing on the DVD. The whole thing escalates as it goes along – a lot of the audience has been with us for ten, maybe 12, some of them nearer 18 years – and they were there to say goodbye,” he adds. It’s quite difficult to imagine what it must be like for someone sitting down to watch footage of themselves performing in concert. “It will be amazing for me,” enthuses Tim, “because it’s something I’ve let go of. I think I’ll watch it with a mixture of sadness and pride and appreciation and love. Then I probably won’t watch it again for two or three years. But in general, I’m proud of everything we did in James, including the b-sides, so I know that I’m going to be really proud of this DVD.” Is he not even embarrassed by memories of students doing the special sitting-down dance to Sit Down? “Not at all. Not in the least.” | Jun 2002 | article era-hiatus interview era | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tim Booth – Teletext Interview | Article, Interview | Tim Booth fronted Manchester band James for almost 20 years before announcing that he was leaving the group late last year. A farewell tour followed – giving fans a final chance to see him perform indie rock anthems such as Sit Down and She’s A Star – songs that established the band as firm festival favourites during the 1990s. Six months on from his departure, Booth has no regrets about leaving – and is relishing the opportunity to push himself in new directions. James was a very democratic band but it could be an unwieldy beast “I love writing music, but not only music,” says the singer – who has been working on a screenplay during his time away from the band. “It’s been optioned by a couple of young film producers, but I don’t want to talk about it too much as that would be tempting fate. “Let’s just say the plot is somewhere between American Beauty and Grosse Point Blank.” Back on more familiar territory, he is also working on material for a new album with a young musician called KK. “I’ve been listening to lots of ambient and experimental music lately,” says Booth, who previously worked independently of the band on the 1996 album Booth And The Bad Angel – recorded with Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti. “James was a very democratic band but it could be an unwieldy beast,” he says. “It’s more straightforward working with just one or two people.” Looking back on his career with James, he is proud of albums such as Laid – where they worked with producer Brian Eno for the first time – and much of the band¿s later work. But he has reservations about some of their earlier efforts from the 80s. “I’m still really proud of some early songs – like Hymn From A Village,” he says. “But recently I heard some early John Peel sessions where I tried to improvise lyrics. They were pretty naff.” The tradition in Manchester is for bands to be incredibly bloody-minded James was among a host of successful indie bands to emerge from Manchester in the 1980s and 90s – from The Smiths and the Stone Roses to the Inspiral Carpets and the Happy Mondays – yet Booth says he never felt part of any musical movement. “Movements tend to burn out quickly,” he said. “This was more like a group of independent-minded bands which respected each other. “The tradition in Manchester is for bands to be incredibly bloody-minded. “Joy Division and The Fall inspired us in the early days with this approach, and later the Mondays were very much in that mould.” During his years with James, Booth established a reputation as an intense and charismatic live performer, but what emotions does he go through on stage? “Everything at once,” he says. “I’m usually terrified beforehand and love it once I’m there. It can be incredibly exciting. “For the first seven years we were together I hated what I did on stage. It took a long while for me to learn to take that energy from the people watching us and turn it into gold. “Over the past 10 years it just got better and better.” Booth felt added pressure on his farewell tour with the band, which included a show in their home city that was recorded for a new DVD release. “There were loads of technical problems before we played – everything kept breaking down. “But it was a beautiful show and we felt that it captured the true spirit of the band for posterity. “It’s great to leave a record like that, because the live shows were central to what James was about. Until we got the live performances sorted out we never felt we were a real band.” | Jun 2002 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
James Keep Getting Away With It – Belfast Newsletter | Article, Interview | Frontman Tim Booth may have decided to hang up his vocal chords after two decades with James, one of Manchester’s most enduring acts, but having delivered an appropriate farewell to fans in the form of a live double CD, the remaining members promise the band still has plenty to offer. Emerging from Manchester’s now infamous Factory Records in the 1980s, James have morphed from indie darlings with the baggy era anthem Sit Down to strong, classic writers thanks to the lusting folk of Laid, the longing Out to Get You and the life-affirming Tomorrow and made more comebacks from bruisings than Rocky Balboa. With this in mind, says bassist Jim Gleenie, James as an entity will progress to new heights yet again. “We’re having a break now but we will look for a new singer. Tim’s left but we will carry on. It was an easy decision to make for us. “The live album and DVD put a line in the sand. It’s the end of a chapter for James. We don’t want a Tim-a-like and become a parody of ourselves. We will pick someone relevant for the next phase of what we do. “It sounds exciting to be doing this, finding a new person, but there’s no pressure on us to do it at the moment.” The latest release is an emotional farewell to Tim. A live performance of the line-up’s final Manchester Arena gig, recorded in December 2001, it captures the exuberance and poignancy of a James show, especially as the group are rejoined by former members Andy Diagram and guitarist Larry Gott for the night. “It wasn’t a surprise when Tim wanted to go,” says Jim. “He had been distracted by other things he wants to do like acting and screenplay writing and saw it wouldn’t be fair on the rest of the band. It was an amicable parting.” And, although capturing James live seems like putting the ideal full stop on this era of the band, Jim wasn’t so sure to begin with. “We were wary of recording a live album because it might have been miserable even though we wanted it to be a party and a celebration but I think we’ve pulled it off – it is celebratory,” he says. In fact, you could say, as the title of the live album suggests, they are Getting Away With It, and, having ridden the wave of changing line-ups and record labels for 15 years, this institution of the British alternative music scene are more than adept to dealing with what the future holds, possibly, according to Jim, trying out new ideas with several low-key shows in Manchester when they decide the time is right. “We’ve always felt we had something to prove musically and we would keep challenging and pushing ourselves,” he adds. “Tim leaving was when I realised how much this band means to me and the history of the band deserves another chapter. There’s a legacy to continue and it’s invigorating. “When we come back and present people with something new they’ll see it works. “We’re in no rush or panic. It’s about moving forward.” Getting Away With It… Live by James is out now. | Jun 2002 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Pop And Rock Interview with Tim | Article, Interview | interview with Petros Antonakis Perhaps the story’s not over yet! Tim Booth representing the remnants of James talks to us about their new album. At least there’s still life in the old beast!! Yes, it’s one of the last. Tim Booth is on the other end of the line alternating between the live scene of James (the album Getting Away With It..Live) and the start of a solo career. Yes it’s one of his last interviews as James singer. At the end of their British tour in December 2001 he announced his departure from the band which for 20 years had led him down the road littered with pop hymns and many outpourings of emotion. The bassist of the band Jim Glennie has let the press know that the group will continue as James although it is unclear which members will follow this new order. “He has every right to do it” says Tim as we remind him of the special words at the unforgettable gig at the Athens Electron Festival 2001 (“you are fucking amazing” and “it’s one of those nights” – he repeated them over and over) his voice flooded with enthusiasm. “It was one of the best James nights. We hardly knew if we ever sold one record in Greece and we went through this overwhelming experience”. Almost as good as that night he describes their live “goodbye” to all their fans, the double album “Getting Away With It..Live”. Recorded at Manchester in front of thousands of fans, a huge chapter of James is closed in front of its audience, the one that all these years followed the instructions of the ideal single for the Heavenly Jukebox “Sit Down”. They sat next to James feeling “the death of sadness “as they were “touched by madness” How painful yet beautiful it is to say goodbye to the people from the group? Was this the ideal break for you? We were thinking about it for a long time and we agreed at once to do it. It was a terribly touching moment. We weren’t a band which would break up through fights and with one person not talking to the other. Personally I wanted to stop from the band at its peak, go out on a high. Just like you want Lennox Lewis to leave the ring at the top of his sport. Were you ever afraid of the band failing?? Yes sometimes I felt that fear Do you believe that you took risks as musicians? Have you challenged yourselves enough? I believe we experimented a lot. Sometimes so much we confused our fans, making it hard for them to connect with us. It took us a long time until we made our first good album. We tried experimenting so we wouldn’t repeat ourselves. If you do it once it’s OK but if you keep on doing it you lose the magic of it. You have to keep on looking for a new language to express yourself in case you turn into a cold politician. Is there anything in the back catalogue or an album of James that you regret? Oh! I don’t know. Maybe some moments of Stutter which today I would feel very uncomfortable to define. It’s not so much of a regret as it is for the thoughts that cross your mind now. And then like what would have happened if we had gone to America sooner even though we were successful there. How do you explain that the British press never entirely accept you while in America you had a better reception? I grew up with the British press and I have learnt to live with it. One minute you’re God and the next you’re nobody. That’s how they work. There is no middle ground, it’s all on the edge. Even the days they worshipped us I knew that someday we’d have to fight them. That has nothing to do with the music. They want you to be on the edge all the time out on the town or punching photographers. It’s similar to what the readers of “Hello” and “OK!” want. When you were writing songs, was the procedure painful or easy? It was pretty hard at the start but things naturally got better with time. In the beginning we used to rehearse four to five hours a day for five days a week and we ended up writing one song in a year. Then we were trying to learn as many things as we could about music. Gradually the whole procedure became less painful. We could write three to four songs a day making out the 80% of the song very quickly. It was heaven, I think we were blessed. Many people must have been attached to your songs There are many stories, many many stories. I used to write music so I wouldn’t feel alone, I wanted to communicate. People get attached to it and let me know that. I remember this working woman from a factory came and told me that they were listening to James all day long. People of all ages and classes have told me in confidence that their lives changed once and for all. Would you write a song like Johnny Yen today? Sure,why not? Because it referred to tortured artists? By that time I was enthralled by artists like Iggy Pop and Nick Cave. They attracted me like a car crash does. By that time I was in the same self-destructing condition (laughs). I was young. I didn’t had the necessary spiritual depth. Now I have reasons to live (laughs). I guess today I’m feeling sad for the two I mentioned above (laughs). You wanted your songs always to be attractive to people but without losing your identity. Didn’t you play music for yourselves? That was the music we played. Not calculated but the music we specificaly liked. The first years there was no radio playing James, nowhere especially England except some very late night programs. Our music was too radical for its time. It was after seven years that we became centre of attention. But we hadn’t changed, the music culture slowly moved towards us. We were expressing ourselves in the same way always. It was them who didn’t understand us. As if we were talking Swahili. There were times when you give the impression that you didn’t fit anywhere&ldots; Even the time they praised us we didn’t fit in anywhere. Deep down I was pleased. I never wanted to be famous and I was very pleased that I could hide behind the general image of James. If I was a little more exposed, I wouldn’t have been able to survive. I was very shy and sensitive. But by the years I managed to get out of my corner. But now you are alone. I’m much stronger now, it took me 20 years to do that. Now I have become much more confident, too confident I’d say. Mainly from the process of creation in my other activities. I’m a trained healer and actor, I’ve been meditating for years, I keep myself busy with thousands of things like the workshops where we teach trance music. I’m leading people to feel free, sing, scream to let every pressure out of them. During the Getting Away With It Live you say the phrase” we thrive on chaos “. Was it always like that? It’s imposible to spend 20 years of your life with a band without experiencing misadventures, finanical desasters and huge conflicts. Though I’m very happy because in the end we kept our integrity and I believe our working level wass very high. We did the best we could. Have you already started your personal plans?? I have almost finished the material for my first solo album. I’m collaborating with a 24 year old composer named KK and we just clicked and communicated right from the very start. I believe the result is pretty good. He is now working on some new pieces with Bjork. Now I’m negotiating signing a record contract. A slow procedure as always, and that’s why I think that the album won’t be released until next year. | Jul 2002 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
One Man Clapping – BBC Fame Academy | Article, News | Ainslie couldn’t believe his luck this morning when he discovered he’ll team up with Mark and Saul from indie band James in a mammoth songwriting session later today. Stamping his feet with joy, Ainslie clapped his hands and danced around the lounge sporting a grin like a Cheshire cat and repeatedly shouting “Yes!” Four pairs of professional songwriters will enter The Academy today at 3pm for a three-hour composition session. James’ Mark and Saul will team up with the excited Scot. Other songwriters joining the students later today include Steve Duberry (credits include Liberty X and Heather Small) and John Mclaughlin (Billie and Five). Ainslie bounded into the dining room to join Sinead and Lemar at breakfast and treated them to another triumphant yell. “I thought you would be happy,” Lemar commented, before adding, “Didn’t they do Sit Down?” “That was the worst song they did,” said the jubilant Scot. “When we get out of here, I will play you some of their albums.” Referring to his girlfriend’s love of the Manchester band, Ainslie proclaimed “Bern’s gonna love me for this!” “You know you have a band that you fall in love with?” Ainslie asked with a glint of nostalgia in his eyes. “Well, James was that band for me.” With that, a more than happy Ainslie got back to the task at hand of devouring breakfast. | Nov 2002 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ainslie Sits Down with James – BBC Fame Academy | Article, News | Ainslie couldn’t believe his luck when he sat down to sing James’s hit song, Laid, with two members of the band. The remaining four students were given a couple of song writing masters to work with individually this afternoon, as they split off into groups of four. And Ainslie, always vocal about his love of the band James, got to show off his song writing skills with members Mark Hunter and Saul Davies. Sitting in the lounge during a tea break, the three suddenly burst into song, playing the band’s hit Laid with Ainslie providing the vocals. And the 23-year-old’s face said it all… He was beaming from ear to ear! The students’ task is to come up with four individual songs for an acoustic session tonight with Pam. And Ainslie looked like he could have died and gone to heaven as he got to sing with his idols. James front man, Tim Booth, was absent from the proceedings, so there may be hope for the ambitious Scottish songwriter yet… | Nov 2002 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Oneofthethree.co.uk – Newsreel – 2003 | Article, News | This page lists all news item that were originally published on the old oneofthethree site in 2003. Links and images have either been removed or pointed to the new site where internal. Update 27.12.03 Universal (Mercury’s parent company) are planning a mid-price James release in 2004 comprising singles, stand out album tracks and rarities. The album is tentatively entitled The Collection although an alternative is being sought. More details as they come available. It is rumoured that Dave Baynton-Power is to join The Alarm as their live drummer on their forthcoming UK tour. Oneofthethree is trying to get official confirmation of this. Apologies to all those trying to download the mp3s. Not sure what the problem is – the server is up and I can upload and download via ftp. Trying to resolve this as soon as possible. Update 9.12.03 Tim Booth has cancelled his support slot for The Lovegods at Brighton’s Komedia club this Friday. No reason has yet been given. Update 27.11.03 Tim Booth is playing a support slot to the award-winning and Tim favourite The Lovegods at Brighton’s Komedia Club on Friday 12th December. Doors are at 8pm and tickets cost £7 and £5 for concessions and can be obtained from the Komedia website or box office on 01273 647100. The Brighton date is the last date of the Lovegods “Big Mamma Is The Daddy” UK tour which starts this Sunday in Manchester and takes in Liverpool (Dec 2), Preston (Dec 3), Nottingham (Dec 5), Leeds (Dec 8) and Norwich (Dec 9) – check their website for more details. They are also currently in second place in the Radio 1 Unsigned Bands poll – follow this link to listen to, support and vote for them. Kulas’ show at Toronto Tequila Lounge tonight has been cancelled. He has however scheduled more gigs for the new year. He plays Toronto Rivoli on Friday 20th February 2004 and the Toronto Reverb on Thursday March 25th. Music chain FOPP are selling the single CD edition of the Best Of for a remarkably cheap and David Dickenson bargainesque £5. Get down there and stock up for Christmas presents. Update 1.11.03 James are the headlining act on BBC’s digital radio station Radio 6’s Dream Ticket programme on Wednesday night (November 5) between 10 and 12pm. The program is dedicated to classic live performances from the BBC’s archives. The 1993 Brixton Academy show has featured on previous shows, but there is no indication as to which show is being broadcast this time (Belfast 91, Alton Towers 92, London acoustic 92, Brixton 93, Shepherds Bush 97, Manchester 98 or Heaton Park 99 are the contenders). Follow this link for the Dream Ticket website – you can listen to the show online as well. Update 30.10.03 Tim’s performance in Brighton supporting The Lovegods on September 26th can be confirmed by this rather bizarre review / story. Update 27.10.03 Tim Booth played another solo show on Saturday evening at New York’s Fez Club – to read a review of the show, click here Update 24.10.03 Kulas has re-released Another Small Machine in Canada. Talks are still ongoing about a European release in the near future and at the moment the release is planned for 17 countries through United One Records. Warrior, from Katie Griffin’s Kulas-produced debut album Kiss Me Chaos, with Kulas playing all the instruments, has been featuring in the opening titles of American TV movie “Hollywood Wives” this week. He has also announced a new show at Toronto’s Tequila Lounge on November 27th. Update 23.10.03 Tim Booth is playing a show at New York’s Fez Club this Saturday evening as part of a CMJ Music Marathon festival. The venue is situated at 380 Lafayette Street at Great Jones. The doors open at 7.30pm and admission is $12. More details can be found at the Fez’s venue website. Tim also apparently played a solo slot supporting The Lovegods at their show at Brighton’s Sussex Arts Centre on September 26th. Follow this link for another review of Tim’s solo slot at the ICA on October 15th. Update 17.10.03 Pictures have now been added from Tim’s performance at the ICA on Wednesday night. Click here to view them – they’re a bit grainy. Update 16.10.03 Last night, Tim Booth performed a forty-five minute nine-song acoustic set at the London ICA as part of Tony Wilson’s Last Night A DJ Saved My Life concert for Amnesty International. The setlist included two James classics Laid and Sometimes and the Booth and the Bad Angel track Fall In Love With Me, plus six songs he has co-written for his new solo album with guitarist Lee. For a full review and setlist of the show, follow this link. We will hopefully have some pictures from the show later today. Did you go? We’d love to post your review of the show? Email to oneofthethreewebsite@yahoo.co.uk. There’s also a rumour that Tim might also be doing a show in Brighton as part of Radio One’s One Live festival there later this month. I have no details or any confirmation of this and it could well be someone putting together the fact the festival’s on and Tim lives there and is playing unannounced gigs and coming to their own conclusion. But if anyone lives in the area, keep an eye out in the local press and let us know if anything is advertised. Update 7.10.03 pm As at lunchtime today, the ICA box office did have a few tickets left for the Tim Booth performance supporting The Music next Wednesday. Click here to go to the ICA website. For confirmation of Tim’s performance, check out this Amnesty International website. Update 7.10.03 am Tim Booth is playing a gig at London ICA next Wednesday October 15 as first on the bill as part of Amnesty International’s Last Night A DJ Saved My Life week of events. He is supporting The Music and Crank. Tickets are sold out as the venue only holds about 350 people and they went on sale at the beginning of September. Trust me on this one, I’ve tried! But if anyone has a spare, think of all the lovely mp3s and mpegs you’ve got off this site over the past three years 🙂 Update 6.10.03 Tim Booth has now updated his website with latest news. He is presently putting together a band and playing unannounced secret gigs. He will be co-teaching a weekend workshop called “In.To.Me.See” in Manchester on 21-23 November 2003. Friday 21st is an open evening before the full weekend. As usual, the workshops will not be simply for people to “hang out” with Tim. Tim Booth’s official website is www.timbooth.net Update 28.9.03 Time to get your early Christmas presents in. Both HMV and Virgin in the UK are selling the single disc version of the Best Of for £6.99. At that price it could even propel it back into the charts. So get buying and tell all your friends. Also suitable for birthdays, weddings, barmitzvahs and divorces. Update 23.9.03 More details on Tim’s live performance on Sunday 14th September at Manchester’s One Central Street. Tim played eight songs acoustically, seven new compositions and a piano-led rendition of the James classic Sometimes. He was accompanied by Moody Baker on guitar, with whom he has written several tracks for his album, and Lisa aka Xan (www.xanmusic.com) on piano. Speaking to fans after the gig Tim revealed that his album is now about three-quarters finished and that Moody Baker plays all instruments on the album. Both he and Xan are likely to form part of Tim’s live band when he tours in future. It is presently planned to release the album and to tour next year but no firm timing for either were forthcoming. He claimed that the album is more “funk and groove” than James and will be an album of “proper pop songs”, even though this couldn’t be put across in the intimate acoustic environment of the performance. Included in the set was Down To The Sea, which was previewed back in March on Dom Joly and two other tracks possibly called Bones and Fear Of Commitment. Obviously if anyone who went picked up a setlist, please share it with us. Update 23.9.03 Tim Booth has been providing advice and support to Brighton-based band The Lovegods who have just completed their UK tour supporting The Fun Loving Criminals. The band play their own headlining gig at London’s Kabaret Club next Tuesday. For more details, to listen to their track Broken Tongue and buy their debut EP “Give Me A New God Because This One Is Broken” check out their official website.
Update 22.9.03 In line with rumours that had been floating round James messageboards, it appears Tim Booth did play an acoustic showcase during the recent In The City festival in Manchester. The event was a joint showcase and took place at the One Central Street venue on Sunday 14th September. We hope to get more details soon from someone fortunate enough to attend the event and speak to Tim. Update 18.9.03 Band Mad appear to be selling three James t-shirts not available on the final tour. Prices range from £15-£17. Update 16.9.03 Speaking exclusively to fan-site Ainslieonline, Ainslie Henderson spoke of working with Mark and Saul on his new album and the suggestion that he might replace Tim in James. Here are excerpts : “I continued by asking if he has at any point felt in awe of working with Mark and Saul, whose music he’d grown up with “I was at first, it took about five or six meetings to get over. They’re two of the best people, lovely supportive guys, two heroes, and to have them respect me as a singer songwriter is a real ego boost, heroes absolutely.” With Tim having left James, did the question of Ainslie potentially replacing him ever come up? “No! Can you imagine what the James fans would think of me?” he laughed, adding: “I’ve met Tim a couple of times, he’s a lovely man, a lovely brilliant man.” He also revealed that he had asked Mark and Saul about the possibility of them playing in his live band, most likely a tour early next year. No indication was given as to their response. For the full interview, click here. Thanks to Dave at Ainslieonline for the information. Update 12.9.03 Play.com are selling the Getting Away With Live DVD for £9.99 including free delivery as part of their music sale. Ideal for those of you who haven’t taken the plunge yet. Update 29.8.03 Kulas played a night of shows at Toronto’s El Mocombo club last Thursday 23 August. He played guitar with Katie Griffin and Robbie Roth’s bands then performed his own solo set featuring Anyone Else, Star Land, Instamatic Camera, Glasgow Rain, Having and Losing It All (solo acoustic), Beautiful Day, Pavement, All The Rage, Beginning of the End and Hallelujah (solo acoustic) Adrian Oxaal is scheduled to play another solo gig at Brighton’s Evening Star pub on Sunday October 5th. Update 16.8.03 Tim has written the foreword for a book entitled “Vodou Shaman” by Ross Heaven which covers the subject of Haitian healing and power methods. Amazon.co.uk has a January 2004 publication date for the book. According to Heaven’s website “In his foreword, Tim will concentrate on one of the key themes in The Way of the Houngan: the need for healing and community in the West in order to avert the sort of negativity that leads to breakdown and conflict on a personal and global scale. He will also reveal something of his own spiritual path.” Tim has also contributed to a book called Generations where famous people “reveal the strange and beautiful truth about themselves and their grandparents” to support two charities Railway Children and Age Concern. Click here to find out more. Update 15.8.03 The James original version of Laid is being used on UK TV trailers for the American Wedding film that is released in the cinemas here today. The film itself features a cover by new US artist Matt Nathanson. If you want to hear it follow the link to this Matt Nathanson messageboard for a radio capture of the track. Kulas has renamed his new band The Vinyl Dolls. It appears the Dead City Radio monicker was already taken. He will continue to perform under the Kulas name until the forthcoming album is ready for release. Update 2.8.03 James classic tune Sit Down features as the opening track on the Friends Reunited 2cd set of classic 90s songs to remember your school or university days by. Update 31.7.03 Kulas will be performing 2 acoustic songs as part of a night of George Harrison music to raise money for The Princess Margaret Hospital and Cancer research in Toronto at the Rivoli, Friday August 8th. Update 11.7.03 Kulas’ second album Another Small Machine is going to be released by Berlin’s United One Records and distributed in 15 countries including the UK in September He will also be playing in Katie Griffin’s band at C’est What in Toronto on Wednesday, July 23rd and also doing a few tracks of his own. He will then be playing in Robbie Roth’s band at The Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto on Thursday, July 31st He will then be playing a KULAS show at The Elmocambo (again in Toronto) on August 23rd. He has also written a few original songs for director Park Bench’s new film “The Death Of Alice Blue” which will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September. The songs are “Sweet Lips”, “You Only Come Out At Night” and “Gothdance”. Update 3.7.03 Mark and Saul have been confirmed as producers of Ainslie’s debut album, which he has just completed recording in France. Mixing will take place next week and the album is due for release shortly before Christmas. They have also co-written several songs on the album. Update 2.7.03 James video for Sit Down appears on the “We Could Be Kings” DVD compilation. The DVD also features The Charlatans, The Las, The Wonder Stuff, Ocean Colour Scene, Shed Seven and more. Play.com are selling the DVD for £11.99 including delivery – simply follow this link. Update 30.6.03 Despite the song being covered by American singer/songwriter Matt Nathanson for the soundtrack of the movie, James’ original and, of course, vastly superior version of Laid is being used for the trailer of the movie American Wedding, the third in the American Pie series of films. To watch the trailer, follow this link. Follow the link below to hear the cover. Update 22.6.03 Kulas played a set at Toronto’s Free Times Cafe on Friday evening. He played the following tracks : Starland, Pavement, Having & Losing It All, Sleep, The Only One, Shine, Glasgow Rain, A Clever Mess, Anyone Out There, In My Life. Click here for a full review. Update 15.6.03 Singer / songwriter Matt Nathanson is covering Laid for the soundtrack to the third instalment of the American Pie series “An American Wedding” which is released in US cinemas on August 1. The cover version will also feature on the film soundtrack out on July 15. His official site is running a campaign to get as much radio play as possible for the song in the US as it is also being released as a single. If you want to hear it follow the link to this Matt Nathanson messageboard for a radio capture of the track. Hopefully people will hear this version and then go away and track down the original. Laid did appear in trailers for the first two films so why they’ve brought this guy in I don’t know. According to an article in the Southern Press, Mark and Saul have been spending time in France working with Ainslie Henderson on his debut album due out in September. The next single from the Fame Academy star is expected to be Pretty Boys and Pretty Girls which was co-written with Mark and Saul. It’s due out in late August on Mercury Records. Update 14.6.03 Kulas is performing at a Songwriters Series at the Free Times Cafe Club on College Street in Toronto this Friday, June 20. Doors open at 8pm and these events usually sell out pretty quickly. Admission is six Canadian dollars. Adrian Oxaal is playing another gig on Sunday 27th July at the Evening Star pub in Brighton. Update 29.5.03 Kulas played a show at the Rivoli Club in Toronto on May 16 as part of the launch evening for the Katie Griffin CD produced by Kulas. The setlist was Anyone Else, Star Land, Instamatic Camera, Glasgow Rain, Having and Losing It All (solo acoustic), Shine (solo acoustic), Beautiful Day, Pavement, All The Rage, There’s Nothing Wrong, Beginning of the End, Sit Down. For a full review, click here. Update 23.5.03 After the success of their nation-wide t.v. appearance on the Mike Bullard Show performing the Echo and The Bunnymen song “Killing Moon”, Kulas and Katie Griffin have been asked back tonight (Friday, live to air 7:00 p.m. and again at midnight on CTV) to perform the song with Echo and The Bunnymen frontman Ian McCulloch who will also be performing his new single with his band to promote his upcoming Toronto show. Update 16.5.03 Tim Booth has made a statement via the James official messageboard on his current activity. He is still writing his album with KK and Lee Baker who are assisting with the production. His film script has now been optioned by two producers and he is seeking funding for the project. For a full transcription click here. One Of The Three has conducted an exclusive interview with Michael Kulas where he talks about the highlights and lowlights of his time with James, his heros in the music business, his two solo albums, his work as a producer and his plans for his new band. Click here to read the interview in full. Update 9.5.03 Kulas played live with Katie Griffin on the track Killing Moon on Canadian TV’s Mike Bullard Show (apparently similar to David Letterman). Update 2.5.03 Getting Away With It featured for the second time in a matter of weeks in the Queen Vic pub in the BBC soap Eastenders. It must be the only pub in the world with Pleased To Meet You on the jukebox! Tim Booth’s official website www.timbooth.net has been updated with the following rather curious message: “Tim Booth’s website is not ready yet, as he hasn’t a clue what to say. He should have rediscovered the art of communication in a few months time.” Update 22.4.03 Jade Love, the film for which Michael Kulas composed the soundtrack, recently won Best Short Film at the Toronto Film Festival. Update 21.4.03 Kulas played an acoustic show at the Elmocambo Toronto last Thursday on April 17. The setlist was A Clever Mess, The Only One, Pavement, Starland, Having and Losing It All, Shine, Anyone Out There (featuring Katie Griffin), Laid, Hallelujah. For a full review, click here. Kulas will be played a full band set with his new band Dead City Radio at Toronto’s Rivoli Club on May 16 as part of the launch night for Katie Griffin’s album “Kiss Me Chaos” which was produced by Kulas. Update 13.4.03 Kulas played a show at the Oasis Lounge Toronto on April 10. The setlist was A Clever Mess, The Only One, Pavement, Starland, Anyone Out There, Shine, Eating Beets in Madoc (truncated), Having and Losing It All, Laid, Hallelujah, Glasgow Rain. For a full review, click here. Update 9.4.03 Adrian Oxaal is playing another solo show at the Evening Star in Brighton on Sunday April 27th. For more details, click on the Evening Star website. Update 31.3.03 Kulas is playing two solo acoustic shows in Toronto in April. April 10 – Oasis, College Street April 17 – Elmocambo, Spaldina Both shows start at 9.15pm He will also be playing a full live set at Toronto’s Rivoli on Friday May 16 as part of the launch night for Katie Griffin’s album “Kiss Me Chaos” which was produced by Kulas. He is also continuing writing and recording with what will be a new band release this year. The band is called Dead City Radio. The album titled “American Cheerleader” will include the songs Glasgow Rain, Pavement and Starland as well as the new songs Instamatic Camera, Ghost, Something About You, Dead Rock Star, The Man That Nobody Wanted, Day and Night, Night and Day and Twenty Two. Update 21.3.03 Larry Gott played at a local acoustic unsigned musician’s night at the Blue Cat Cafe in Heaton Moor, Stockport near Manchester last night. Since leaving James, Larry has played in several bars and clubs around Manchester either solo or with friends. Earlier this year he also played a concert in Crosby near Liverpool with one-time James associate Ed Barton. Update 16.3.03 For those of you who haven’t bought the DVD Getting Away With It Live yet, CD-WOW are selling the Region 2 version for the bargain price of £10.99 including postage. Click here to go direct to the site. The Ainslie Henderson version of Laid has been added to the MP3 section. His next single, due out in May, is called Pretty Boys and Pretty Girls and is co-written with Mark and Saul and described as “having a crunchy Jeff Buckley-esque guitar riff, a big groovy beat and a big shouty chorus” Update 15.3.03 Ainslie Henderson, the James fan who Saul and Mark performed with on BBC’s Fame Academy and whose album they have been co-writing tracks for, has been performing Laid acoustically at promotional events around the country. I will try and get an mp3 uploaded in the next few days for those interested in hearing it. Update 12.3.03 Saul and Mark produced and play on an acoustic version of Ainslie Henderson’s Keep Me A Secret on the cassette single of the same name. They have also been recently working on Ainslie’s forthcoming album. James are actually in this week’s NME. Or at least one of their t-shirts is. Olly Knights of Turin Brakes is pictured in the review section wearing a JA-M-ES style shirt. Update 10.3.03 pm The MP3s of Racing Away and Down To The Sea have been added to the mp3 section of the site. I’ve also added the lyrics to Down To The Sea. The March edition of Record Collector claims in its “In The Pipeline” section that Sanctuary Records are planning the release of a live James Best Of in the near future. There is no official word on this to date. Update 10.3.03 am Tim Booth appeared on the This Is Dom Joly show on the UK digital channel BBC Three last night. He sang a track called Racing Away with Horace Andy (who performed the track on the 1 Giant Leap album with Grant Lee Buffalo) with backing music by 1 Giant Leap and then a self-penned track, which Dom said was written last week, called Down To The Sea. The program will be repeated next Friday night / Saturday morning, 15 March, at midnight for those of you in the UK with Sky, cable or Freeview. It’s well worth watching just to see Tim’s disdain for the guys in animal suits who are dancing at the end. One Of The Three hopes to bring you mp3s of the performances very soon. The One Giant Leap DVD which features Tim on one track is now being sold for £5.99 at CD-WOW. Update 24.2.03 Kulas played a set at the Hershey Arena in Mississauga near Toronto on Saturday evening. Click here for a review of the show. Update 21.2.03 Speaking to Designer Magazine, Ainsile Henderson has discussed working with Mark and Saul: “It’s f**king amazing. They were one of my favourite bands and they’re still one of my favourite bands and the three of us are still writing together for my album. It took me a couple of days to get over the F**K factor and stop asking them about how they wrote “Sit Down” and where were you when you recorded “Made” (sic) and stop asking all these silly questions. But they’re brilliant and it’s great working with them because it’s made me feel like I’m in a band again.” Click here to see the whole interview. Update 17.2.03 Mark and Saul recently spent a week writing songs with Ainslie Henderson, one of the contestants in BBC’s recent Fame Academy program. The sessions are likely to have produced many of the tracks off Ainslie’s forthcoming debut album. Take Out Time, the track Ainslie, Saul and Mark wrote during Saul and Mark’s appearance on the Fame Academy program, is featured on Ainslie’s debut single Keep Me A Secret which is released on February 24. To watch the performance on Fame Academy, click here. Ironically, Ainslie is signed to Mercury Records. Update 4.2.03 Today is Tim Booth’s 43rd birthday. Many Happy Returns! Update 29.1.03 A very bald Tim Booth and “James” (Jim and Larry) feature in two interviews on the DVD release of the Factory Records film Twenty Four Hour Party People in the Pills Thrills and Bellyaches section of the extra features on disc 1. Click here to read a transcription of the interview with Tim and here for the interview with Jim and Larry. Update 19.1.03 Tim Booth’s June 1999 interview for ITV’s Faith and Music show is repeated in the early hours of Sunday night / Monday morning (20 Jan) at 12.20am. To read a transcript of the interview click here. The interview is interspersed with clips of James and Booth and the Bad Angel promo videos. Update 15.1.03 Ex-James trumpeter Andy Diagram features on two tracks of Lemon Jelly’s acclaimed album Lost Horizons. He is credited with “Train sound effects” on Return To Patagonia and trumpet on Experiment Number Six. Update 12.1.03 Larry Gott last week played a gig with vocalist Mark Curtis and James associate Edward Barton at the launch of a new bar called SixtySouth in Waterloo near Crosby. In an interview with the Crosby Herald, Larry described the music thus “our style fuses tribal, folk, jazz, classical and R + B music to create a totally unique genre”. Larry and Edward are planning to write more songs with a view to releasing an album. Kulas has announced that he is to play again at this year’s For The Love Of Jeff Buckley tribute show on January 25 at Toronto’s Rivoli Club. He will also be opening for two well-known Canadian bands 54-40 and The Pursuit of Happiness at the 4,000-capacity Hershey Centre Arena on Saturday February 22. He has also completed the recording session for the Katie Griffin album and will be involved in the mixing process over the next few weeks before recommencing sessions for his own forthcoming album. The British chain store Argos have at present an in-store tape featuring a female singer covering the James single Waltzing Along amongst other songs. One Of The Three has no details as to who the vocalist and band are, but if anyone knows, please tell us. Update 10.1.03 www.timbooth.net, Tim’s long-awaited and thirteen months late website, is now up and running. There’s very little in the way of news other than he is running a dance workshop in Manchester on the 1st and 2nd of February and two Dolphin Connection experience weeks in La Gomera in the Canary Islands between the 7th and 21st of February. As has been mentioned before by Tim, please don’t get interested in these because it’s Tim Booth of James, these are non-James activities and not for James fans to hang around with Tim and you’re likely to piss Tim off if you go for that reason. The site promises to be operational in February so hopefully there will be more news on his long-awaited solo stuff.
Update 6.1.03 Adrian Oxaal is playing another solo gig at the Evening Star pub in Brighton on Sunday 26th January. For more details check out the Evening Star website.
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Interview with Jim and Larry – Twenty Four Hour Party People DVD | Article, Interview | Jim : Tony Larry : A Maverick Jim : Yeah yeah, a big personality Larry : A Manchester maverick Jim : You know, did a lot for us. Could be a pain in the arse. I’d hate to work with the bloke full-time. I mean he’d drive you round the bleeding bend. So over the top, I mean completely over the top. But a heart of gold. And loved James and said some great fantastic things in the press, I mean he compared us to the 1974 Dutch football team. In that they had this kind of natural grace in the way they played football and he compared us musically to them and it was the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to us. Larry : An unforced natural grace. Jim : Yeah yeah. Jim : We were just pains in the arse. We wanted to design the sleeves, don’t like your sleeves, don’t like all this cool stuff, we’re going to design it. So we did, I did, this horrible kind of felt-tipped cover and we took it in and Tony was like “Oh, you want something like this” and we were like “No, we want that” And he was interviewed for the James book, Tony Wilson was, and his interpretation of the events was that he thought it was a great idea but at the time he didn’t. He’s lying, he was lying. He didn’t. He hated it. Jim : They were so nice. They really were. We should have stayed with Factory, that’s one thing we all regretted, that we didn’t do an album with them. We just thought, we did bump into problems with them that were justified I think. They didn’t promote anything, because they didn’t need to initially. There was all the cool image with it that sold itself, with Factory. Loads of people would go out and buy the new releases regardless and that kind of shifted, that emphasis moved slightly and we suffered. We got to this point where we were in this sort of no man’s land where our records weren’t getting in the stores but they weren’t promoting them, they were “we don’t do adverts, we don’t do blah blah blah” so we were like “Yeah, but come on” Larry : They thought that if a record was good, it would sell itself and their argument for that was New Order. You know, the New Order records, they didn’t have to take out massive advertising campaigns or do loads of massive promotion. It just had its own natural momentum which was fine if you’d come from Joy Division and the lead singer had died and you’d built up this entire cult, but for a new band, that noone had ever heard of, they didn’t see they had any commitment to undertake any kind of commitment to advertising and we had to argue with them about that and their distribution wasn’t very good at the time so that’s why we started to have these reservations. Larry : Their ethos and their idea was a little too generous and a little shortsighted, that they didn’t get business savvy until it was too late. That, as in their idea that if the music is good enough, it will sell itself. If the idea is true enough and substantial, if it’s substantial and it’s true, it will work. Then it’ll work almost without any looking after, without any guidance, because it’s a good idea and it’s fair and it’s not what everyone else is doing. It’s different, it’s unique, so it’ll have its own momentum. And I think they found out too late, as they were sinking, as they owed more and more money. I mean the biggest debtor really was New Order. That’s where the twist came – New Order were the most successful band therefore they owed New Order money whereas all the other bands never actually reached that point of breaking even so that they owed them money. And they didn’t have the cash to pay their debt to New Order so New Order became bigger and bigger owners of the Hacienda, they got bigger and bigger shares. They should have seen it then, but I don’t think they did and they couldn’t, by the end they couldn’t turn it round. Jim : Why Manchester? Why is Manchester special in that respect? No other city in the world could you give a list of bands from it. I don’t know why that is. I think it’s easy to look at like second cities and go, you know, you have the capital and the second city, and this is where everyone is trying a little bit harder and pushing a bit and left to their own devices as well to some degree. I think that’s probably why things happened like what happened in the 80s when Manchester was left, well the bands were left, to find their own sound and develop. The A+R were just too lazy to come here so bands arrived on the scene that had played a lot that had got a lot of songs, that were good and the spotlight was shone on them all at the same time and you got what was called a scene even though the bands hadn’t just arrived at the same time, they’d been playing around for a lot of years. Larry : We didn’t go there that much, did we? Jim : No, no Larry : We weren’t the 24 hour party people Jim : We’d hit that monastic streak by then hadn’t we really? Larry : Yeah, yeah. Jim : It was hilarious Larry : No they supported us. Jim : That was hilarious. Larry : They missed the first gig. Jim : It was cartoon. We played the Ritz in Manchester, they played the first night, we played the Ritz and they were there all right and the next morning they couldn’t find Shaun and we were supposed to be, we were playing Newcastle and they were meant to be supporting us and they couldn’t find Shaun and they had to drive around for like three hours until they eventually found him and dragged him in the van and sped off and of course they were late, they crashed the van on the way to the gig. Turns up at Newcastle, starts unloading the gear out of the van and this bloke says “Oh, what you’re doing.” “We’re the Happy Mondays, supporting James.” He said “This is a Simply Red gig, you’re at the wrong venue.” So they got back in the van, turned up at our gig, they’d missed their slot and we were just about to go on stage at this point and they piled out of the van and they were backstage, effing and jeffing, and blaming each other for it, and this, that and the other. And it was just like “Oh God, what have we done, what have we done” Larry : They were a complete and utter shambles weren’t they? Jim : They were. Larry : But they were so apologetic. Jim : They were lovely. They really were lovely. They were cartoons. They were It was “What’s happened today with the Mondays. Is everybody here? Just about. It really was” They were funny. Larry : It really was, it was like having your own daily copy of Viz. Jim : Yes it was. Larry : It really was. You didn’t know Jim : They lost the tour support didn’t they? They “lost” the tour support. Larry : One night we came off stage, got backstage and went to the dressing room and went in the dressing room, no beer, everything had gone. All our clothes and money were still there and everything, but the entire rider, all the food. Jim : We knew they had a party in Manchester and we were wondering (rubs chin) ” I wonder who’s done this then.” There were security on the door, they must have got in through the window, the door was locked and they had no idea what was going on. Larry : They completely cleaned us out and the next day they were really sweet and apologetic. Jim : Didn’t give it us back like. Larry : They had this really banging party so they left as soon as they got off stage, nicked all our beer, and sodded off back to Manchester for the party. Jim : But they were great as well as a band. They were brilliant, we used to go out and watch them every night and they were wonderful. | Jan 2003 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Interview with Tim – Twenty Four Hour Party People DVD | Article, Interview | I don’t have a bad word to say about Tony Wilson. I think he’s got a lot of balls and a lot of time. He’ll let his mouth go first, but you need people like that. You need people to put their neck on the line, and Tony that, he did that for Factory. One of the things we hated about Factory was how cool the image was. So we were like “Nope, not gonna let anyone do our sleeve, we’re gonna do it.” And then I think the night before the deadline, we kind of rang each other in a panic because we hadn’t got a sleeve together and Jimmy did it with felt-tips, and scrawled JIMONE, couldn’t even fit it all the writing with felt-tips and they had to put out this sleeve that looked like it had been done by an autistic child. And they prided themselves and every sleeve had been so cool and I hear Tony ranted at us for that one for a long time, he was well pissed with us for that. We toured with New Order, and, as I said, we took the Mondays on tour and gave them their first kind of big… We went to see them. I remember, Nathan, their manager, went “Tim, come and see..”, he was quite friendly with us, me and Martine, “Come and see this great band I’m managing, great band” and he took us to Wigan to see them in this little club and Shaun was so out of it that he came off after twenty minutes, he was so far gone, he thought he’d been on for hours. So they played literally about four songs. And the rest of the band were like “Shaun” and he was like “We’ve been on for hours man, we’ve been on for hours.” He was obviously off his head. But they were brilliant for about twenty minutes and we were like “Yeah, fine, we’ll take you on tour, great.” | Jan 2003 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Oneofthethree.co.uk – Newsreel – 2004 | Article, News | This page lists all news item that were originally published on the old oneofthethree site in 2004. Links and images have either been removed or pointed to the new site where internal. Update 26.11.04 Reviews of Tim’s UK shows and some pictures from Porto have been added to the special section on the tour. We still would love to print your reviews and pictures if you want to share them. Tim’s gigography has also been updated with setlists where available. James are now on Itunes in the Music Store. You can download the Best Of, Laid, Ultra and Getting Away With It Live plus selected tracks from Millionaires and Pleased To Meet You. Update 11.11.04 Tim Booth’s gig in Thessaloniki, Greece, this Saturday (November 13) has been moved from the Fix venue to the Principal venue. Tickets are still valid and there are apparently free buses laid on to the venue from the White Tower in the city as Principal is close to the city’s airport. Tim and the Individuals complete their UK tour at the ICA in London tonight. A full UK tour report will be published in the next few days. Update 1.11.04 Andy Diagram, ex trumpeter with James, plays on Black Francis from the Pixies latest album “Frank Black Francis”. The two-disc set features Black’s demos from 1987 on disc 1 plus a set of recordings of Pixies classics with Andy and Keith Moline on disc 2 and is out now. The sleevenotes read “I first met the Two Pale Boys, Andy and Keith, at a gig some years ago in West Hollywood, the trumpet and guitar members of that trio formed with David Thomas. When David asked me to perform at UCLA as part of his Mirror Man improv-opera in early 2003, Andy and Keith were in the band again. The two pale fellows from England offered their studio and input on some undefined project in the undefined future. In the hot summer of 2003, July I think, I went down to the Hackney section of London and belted out the numbers and let the boys do their things. I enjoy their work with me or with others. I like these guys a lot. Sure, we’ve messed with the gospel, but I am satisfied with it.” Tim Booth starts his European tour in Portugal tomorrow night (2) at Lisbon’s Aula Magna before continuing at Porto Hard Club (3), Madrid Moby Dick (4), Barcelona Razzmatazz (5), Glasgow Cottier Theatre (7). Leeds City Varieties (8), Manchester Royal Northern College of Music (9), London ICA (11). Athens Gagarin (12), Thessaloniki Fix (13) and Istanbul Venue Meslak (14). According to reports, the Portuguese and Glasgow shows have now sold out. Update 20.10.04 According to a post on their messageboard, Trap 2 are supporting Tim Booth on his forthcoming tour dates at the Glasgow Cottier Theatre on November 7, Leeds City Varieties on November 8 and the Manchester Royal Northern College Of Music on November 9. Tickets for all three venues are selling fast. They can be bought from Ticketmaster for Glasgow and Seetickets for Leeds and Manchester. There are a small number of London tickets left for the ICA gig at the venue, but they are only available to ICA members. Update 14.10.04 The loveGods have been announced as the support band for Tim Booth’s show at the London ICA on November 11. The Brighton band, who are friends of Tim and who he supported on his first live shows late last year, are promoting their debut mini-LP “Between Dogs and Wolves” with the support slot and three other London shows at the Water Rats on October 21, the Camden Barfly on November 17 and the Islington Bar Academy on December 10. For more information on the loveGods, to hear samples of and purchase “Between Dogs and Wolves”, visit their website www.thelovegods.com. Don’t go to just lovegods or you’ll get porn. The ICA gig now appears to be sold out with the venue, Seetickets, Gigsandtours and Stargreen all out of tickets. Update 11.10.04 James – The Collection is released today. The compilation of James tracks from the Mercury years features two songs only available on compilation cds – a cover of Leonard Cohen’s So Long Marianne and Confusion from the Randall and Hopkirk Deceased Soundtrack – two previously vinyl-only tracks Lazy and Once A Friend and the download-only Coffee And Toast. Sadly the album doesn’t include the single versions of Seven and Lost A Friend nor the original version of Out To Get You or the Live At The Lighthouse version of I Know What I’m Here For but is extremely good value at £4.99 (HMV stores or online). Full tracklisting is Sit Down, English Beefcake, Seven, Lazy, So Long Marianne, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Lost A Friend, Once A Friend, Coffee And Toast, Laid, Confusion, Heavens, She’s A Star, Five-O, Out To Get You, I Know What I’m Here For, Lose Control (McGuire Mix) and Gold Mother. Update 5.10.04 Tim Booth has announced a series of UK dates for November November 7 – Glasgow Cottier Theatre November 8 – Leeds City Varieties November 9 – Manchester Northern College Of Music November 11 – London ICA Update 28.9.04 Tim Booth has announced a series of European dates for November November 2 – Lisbon Aula Magna November 3 – Porto Hard Club November 4 – Madrid Moby Dick November 5 – Barcelona Razzmatazz 3 November 12 – Athens Gagarin 204 November 13 – Thessaloniki Fix November 14 – Istanbul Venue Meslak The Bristol show advertised on Gigsandtours has been removed from sale. Update 21.9.04 Gigsandtours are selling tickets for a Tim Booth concert at Bristol St Georges on 17 November. There has been no official confirmation from Tim’s management but an announcement ius expected in the next day or so. Update 20.9.04 James release a new album called “The Collection” on Spectrum Music on Monday 11th October. To order in the UK, click here to order from Amazon or in the US here to order from Siren Disc (search under Future Releases). The album tracklisting was compiled by me with the instruction to have singles, album tracks and rarities. The tracklisting below is my final submission although this may have changed since. I’ll get confirmation in the next day or so. The provisional tracklisting for the album is as follows : Sit Down English Beefcake Seven (single version) Lazy (vinyl-only b-side) So Long Marianne (from Leonard Cohen tribute album I’m Your Fan) Getting Away With It (single version) Lost A Friend Once A Friend (vinyl only b-side) Coffee and Toast (only available as download on the enhanced section of Pleased To Meet You) Laid Confusion (from the Randall and Hopkirk Deceased soundtrack) God Only Knows Heavens She’s A Star Five-O Out To Get You (original version) I Know What I’m Here For (live at the lighthouse) Lose Control (McGuire Mix) Gold Mother (Warp Remix) According to post on the Tim Booth forum, Tim is scheduled to play two shows in Greece at the Gagarin 205 Club on November 12 and Thessaloniki Fix Club on November 13. Neither date has been confirmed by Tim’s management. Update 5.9.04 First of all, apologies for the lack of activity here over the past two months. It started off as being off on Tim’s tour and then things got a bit heavy at work. Add to that, the worst kept secret in the world – that I am also running Tim’s official site – which meant a lot of additional work and of the three, this sadly gets lowest priority. However, there are some updates and I will try and chase down some news of other band members. Obviously running Tim’s site means there won’t be too much exclusive news here, but when there are tours and stuff, we will review them here. And your contributions are always welcome – whether they be gig reviews, photos, interviews or just links to material not referenced on here. That includes anything I may have missed in the past month or two. And if anyone has some free space they can provide to us free-of-charge to host mp3s, it would be greatly appreciated. The following sections have been updated : News Archive, Tim Gigography, details of Tim’s singles. Down To The Sea was released on June 28 and reached number 68. The single was released on 7″ featuring Bring It On and CD featuring Remember Me. Wave Hello was released on August 16 on CD single only featuring an exclusive b-side Si Tu Veux recorded with the band’s live monitors man Stuart Smith. However, the single never appeared in the shops and only appears to be available through Amazon and Pinnacle on-line stores. Tim and the band performed an XFM session earlier in the year which can be heard through this link. Dave Baynton-Power played with The Alarm at the Guilfest on July 17. Oneofthethree spoke to Dave and can reveal he’s well and has been spending time with his family as well as standing in at various gigs and tours for The Alarm’s regular drummer when he has commitments with other bands. Update 24.6.04 Tim Booth played a fantastic concert last night at Bedford’s Esquires Club. The setlist was Discover, Down To The Sea, Five-O, Wave Hello, Eh Mamma, Sometimes, Dance Of The Bad Angel, Bone, What Goes On, Butterfly’s Dream, Monkey God, What’s Goes On (second version) and Fall In Love. Drummer Milo also did an impromptu stand up routine between the main set and the encore. Click here for a review. Update 22.6.04 James are playing a gig in London at the Betsey Trotwood pub on July 14th. Unfortunately it’s not the rebirth of THE James, it’s an Icelandic band that appears to have taken James name. Tim Booth has been confirmed as playing the Music Choice Stage at the V Festival on Saturday 21st August at Chelmsford and Sunday 22nd August at Stafford. He appears to be clashing with UK chart-toppers Keane’s appearance on the NME Stage. Tim’s debut solo album Bone charted at number 98 this week. Update 11.6.04 Tim Booth is playing a session tomorrow morning – 12 June – on London’s LBC radio station (97.3FM) during Paul Ross’ show from 10am to 1pm. He is also appearing on Simon Mayo’s BBC Radio 5 show on Monday afternoon between 1 and 4. Tim and the band will also be performing live on BBC3’s Glastonbury Calling programme between 8pm and 9pm on Monday 14 June. Tim is also going to be doing radio promotion in Spain on the 15th and 16th of June and in Portugal on the 21st to 23rd June. Lee and Lisa are travelling as well so there will be radio sessions involved, not just interviews. During an interview on Andrew Collins Radio 6 show (see mp3 section for more), Tim ruled out the possibility of a James reunion in the near future, mentioning that they had been approached to reform for last year’s Isle of Wight Festival, but he turned it down. Update 3.6.04 Tim Booth is playing a warm-up for his Glastonbury Festival appearance at Bedford Esquires on Wednesday 23rd June. Tim’s official site – www.timbooth.co.uk – now has links to samples of the album Bone and the whole video for the single Down To The Sea. Update 1.6.04 Tim Booth is playing the New Stage at the Glastonbury Festival on Saturday 26th June. He is second headliner behind Zero 7. Tim is also playing “Thug” in the Batman Returns film due out in 2005. Update 31.5.04 Down To The Sea has now been delayed until 28 June. Bone is still being released on 14 June. Update 25.5.04 Tim Booth is confirmed as playing the AV Festival in Malaga between 1-4 July. There are also unconfirmed rumours of a Glastonbury warm-up show although date and venue are unknown. Update 6.5.04 Online store Esprit are advertising Down To The Sea as the first single off the forthcoming Tim Booth album “Bone” with the artwork on the left. They report there is a two-track cd single – SANXS279 – featuring the exclusive b-side “Remember Me” and a 7-inch single – SANSE279 – another exclusive track “Bring It On”, both which come from the sessions for Bone. Tim is playing the following new shows : Monday July 12 : Bristol Fleece And Firkin Tuesday July 13 : Oxford Zodiac Wednesday July 14 : London Piccadilly St James Friday July 16 : Birmingham Carling Academy 2 Sunday July 18 : Norwich Waterfront Monday July 19 : Brighton Concorde 2 Update 5.5.04 Gigsandtours are selling tickets for two Tim Booth shows at London’s Piccadilly St James Theatre on Wednesday 14th July and Birmingham Carling Academy 2 on Friday 16th July. Neither gig has been officially confirmed yet. Ents 24 are also listing a gig at Norwich’s Waterfront on Sunday 18th July. Their listing for the Bristol Fleece And Firkin show is however incorrect. Update 2.5.04 Michael Kulas played an acoustic set at Toronto Healy’s last Thursday. Click here for a review. Update 30.4.04 Tim Booth has been confirmed for the Move Festival at Manchester’s Old Trafford Cricket Ground on Saturday 10th July. He will be appearing on a bill that also features Stereophonics, Pixies, Goldfrapp, The Stands and 22-20s. Tickets are available from most ticket agencies. Tim has also been confirmed as playing at the V Festival in Chelmsford and Stafford on 21-22 August. However, no details are available yet of which site on which date. Update 29.4.04 Pictures from Tim Booth’s gig at Liverpool Academy have been added to the site here. Update 28.4.04 Tim Booth is playing the Guilfest on Saturday 17th July. He is also heavily rumoured to be playing at Glastonbury as well, although there is as yet no official confirmation of this yet. Update 26.4.04 Tim Booth is playing the King Tut’s Wah Wah Tent at this year’s T In The Park festival on Sunday July 11th. Reviews of the Cardiff and London shows have been added to the Tim Booth tour dates section. Update 22.4.04 Tim Booth and his new band completed their four-date UK tour with a sold out show at London King’s Cross Water Rats last night. The set included Careful What You Say, Discover, Down To The Sea, Five-O, Wave Hello, Eh Mamma, Sometimes, Love Hard, Dance Of The Bad Angel, Bone, Butterfly’s Dream, In The Darkness, Monkey God and Fall In Love. A review will follow shortly. Tim Booth’s own website www.timbooth.co.uk is now up and running. Update 20.4.04 Shootingmymouthoff has reviewed Tim’s gig in Liverpool last night. Follow this link to read it. Update 19.4.04 Tonight’s gig at Liverpool Academy was by all accounts a resounding success with a much larger crowd than the Portsmouth gig. Five-O and Butterfly’s Dream made appearances again. More to come. Tim Booth and his band played the opening night of their minitour at Portsmouth’s Wedgewood Rooms last night. The set included Careful What You Say, Discover, Down To The Sea, Five-O, Wave Hello, Eh Mamma, Sometimes, Love Hard, Dance Of The Bad Angel, Bone, Butterfly’s Dream, In The Darkness, Monkey God and Fall In Love. Click here for a full review. Update 14.4.04 Next Wednesday’s gig at the Water Rats in London has now sold out. Tickets are still available for gigs in Portsmouth on Sunday, Liverpool on Monday and Cardiff on Tuesday. Update 12.4.04 One Of The Three has an exclusive first review of Tim’s forthcoming album Bone. Follow this link. Update 8.4.04 The date at Bristol’s Fleece and Firkin mentioned below for July 6th is NOT taking place. The listing is wrong and no gig is being planned for that date, in Bristol or anywhere else. Kulas has announced a solo acoustic show at Healey’s in Toronto for Wednesday 28th April at 9pm.
Update 7.4.04 Ents 24 are advertising a Tim Booth show at Bristol’s Fleece And Firkin on Tuesday 6 July – tickets are priced £13 plus booking fee. There’s no official confirmation of this however. Update 6.4.04 Tim Booth’s London show on April 21st is at the Water Rats Theatre near Kings Cross station. Tickets are £10 plus booking fee. Follow this link to order. Remember they are extremely limited – less than 100 on sale to the public. Update 5.4.04 It appears that promo copies of Tim Booth’s solo album “Bone” have been released in the past week or so. The artwork for the promo cd is pictured on the left. The album’s tracklisting is Wave Hello, Bone, Monkey God, Redneck, Love Hard, Discover, Fall In Love, Falling Down, Down To The Sea, In The Darkness, Eh Mamma and Careful What You Say. Fall In Love is a reworking of the Booth and the Bad Angel track. As soon as we get a copy, there will be a One Of The Three exclusive review of the album. Unfortunately, there has been a delay in announcing details of ticket sales for Tim Booth’s London show on Wednesday 21st April. I’ll get an update tomorrow and keep people posted here and on the official James board. According to Channel 4 teletext’s Planet Sound, Tim Booth’s debut solo album Bone will be released on Monday June 14th. Update 1.4.04 According to the Sanctuary Records website, Tim Booth will be releasing Down To The Sea as his debut solo single on Monday 7 June. More details as they become available. Tim will be playing an extremely intimate show in London on Wednesday 21st April. Less than 100 tickets will be made available to the general public. Details of how to get tickets will be announced on Monday here, on the official James messageboard and on the Stutter yahoo group only, they will not be advertised anywhere else. Update 29.3.04 Kulas played a hometown show at Toronto Reverb Club on Thursday night. The set included an impromptu encore medley of Laid and Sit Down. For a full review, click here. Update 27.3.04 Another Tim tour date announced, this time at Liverpool Academy on Monday 19th April. Tickets are available from www.seetickets.com Update 24.3.04 Whilst browsing record stores in London, I came across a single called Playing With The Nu by Xan, aka Lisa, the keyboard player in Tim’s band. The four-track EP features Chrysalis, My Child, Tried So Hard and Age and is released on Lai Lay Recordings. No details are available on whether this is a promo or official release I’m afraid, but it doesn’t appear to be available to buy online anywhere. Some not very bright photos of Tim’s performance at Sussex Arts Centre on 6th March have been added to this page. Update 23.3.04 Another Tim Booth show has appeared on www.ticketweb.co.uk This show takes place on Tuesday 20th April at Cardiff’s Engine Room (formerly MS1). Tim Booth is playing at Portsmouth’s Wedgewood Rooms on Sunday 18th April. Tickets are available from www.seetickets.com. More gigs are likely to be announced soon. Update 12.3.04 Ainslie Henderson, who has worked with Saul and Mark in the past year on his debut solo album, has spoken exclusively here about his experience of working with the two. Thanks to Secret for the scoop on this. The remainder of the interview can be found here Kulas is playing another show in Toronto at the Reverb Club on Thursday March 25. Support comes from Sister Someone and Salt Peter. Doors are at 9pm. Update 8.3.04 A review of Saturday night’s show has been added to the site here. Update 7.3.04 Tim Booth played another triumphant show at Brighton’s Sussex Arts Centre last night. Tracks played were : Words, Laid, Discover, Wave Hello, Into Darkness, Redneck, Hard Love (Love Is Addiction), Sometimes, Falling Down Again, Dance Of The Bad Angel, Mama, Monkey God, Bone, Down To The Sea, Fall In Love With Me. Tim’s “silent partner” on the forthcoming album “Bone” – Lee “Muddy” Baker played a seven-song solo set. The evening was attended by Scottish football legend Gordon Strachan. A review will follow later. Update 3.3.04 Another review of Tim Booth’s show in Brighton has been added here. Tim has now removed most of the content from his website www.timbooth.co.uk and now just has a simple announcement that he has an album out in June. Update 29.2.04 Tim Booth was an onlooker last night at the launch party and gig last night for the new nine-track mini-album “Between Dogs and Wolves” (pictured left) by The Lovegods at Brighton’s Komedia club, returning the compliment as Deah and Art attended Wednesday’s launch of Tim new’s band at the Arts Centre. Tim and The Lovegods presently share the same soundman as well. The mini-album is available for the bargain price of £7 including postage through The Lovegods website at www.thelovegods.com. They are also about to embark on a short UK tour in support of the mini-album. Update 28.2.04 The review of Tim’s gig on Wednesday is now up here. No apologies for how positive it is either. Sanctuary Records official website is listing Tim’s as yet untitled debut solo single for release on April 26. Update 26.2.04 Tim Booth played a successful first show with his new band at Brighton’s Sussex Arts Centre last night. The tracklisting was as follows : Words (acoustic), Laid (acoustic), Discover, Into Darkness, Wave Hello, Monkey God, Redneck, Love Is Addiction, Mama, Sometimes, Falling Down Again, Bone, Down To The Sea and Fall In Love With Me. A full review will appear here in the next day or so. Tim’s new band consists of Lee (Muddy) on guitar, Robin on bass and occassional sax, Lisa (Xan or “Sid to her friends”) on keyboards and Milo on drums. The album Bone is now scheduled for a release in June on Monkey God Records, Tim’s own label through Sanctuary Records. There may be more gigs scheduled before the album release, although there are no definite plans at this point in time. Update 24.2.04 Kulas played another live show at Toronto’s Rivoli Club at the weekend. Click here for a review. The set included two new songs. Update 13.2.04 Tim Booth has launched his website – www.timbooth.co.uk – and has updated this with news on the recording process for his new record, details of his inspirations, his dance workshops and a gallery section. More is promised in the near future. Update 12.2.04 Tim Booth’s solo album “Bone” is due for UK release on May 3, 2004. The album is co-written with KK, who had production credits on Pleased To Meet You, and Muddy Baker. Keyboardist Xan, aka Lisa, who played on the acoustic shows Tim did last year, is also in his band. No tracklisting is yet available, but Tim unveiled six tracks at acoustic shows last year – Discover, Shame, Hold You To Your Words, One, Down To The Sea and Falling Down. Update 9.2.04 Tim Booth is playing two shows at Brighton’s Sussex Arts Centre on Wednesday 25th February and Saturday 6th March. Follow this link to buy tickets. More details to follow. Update 7.2.04 Tim Booth was due to play a free show in Doncaster on 29th January at the Lakeside Village to support a new film called Kiss And Tell by Squillion Films. In true Tim tradition, the gig was cancelled late in the day and Tim was replaced by Lisa Scott-Lee, ex of Steps. Update 1.2.04 Bandmad, suppliers of official James merchandise, are presently reducing prices on all James merchandise. T-shirts are down to £12, jackets to £18, tea-towels to £6 and the rather lovely flower jumper from the last tour to £22. Update 29.1.04 At the first show of The Alarm’s UK tour at Bristol Bierkeller last night, the band, including Dave Baynton-Power, played a cover of the James classic Tomorrow. Dave is presently touring with The Alarm – see below for the dates. Update 28.1.04 Dave Baynton-Power has been confirmed as the drummer for The Alarm on their forthcoming tour of the UK and Europe. The dates are below. For tickets, either call the Alarm’s MPO Hotline on 01745 571571 between 11am and 4pm on weekdays or online through www.thealarm.com. 28th January – Bristol Bierkeller 29th January – Norwich Waterfront 30th January – Portsmouth Wedgewood Rooms 1st February – Nottingham Rescue Rooms 4th February – Caerphilly Castle 5th February – Leeds Cockpit 6th February – Scarborough Kazbah 7th February – Wolverhampton Wulfrun Hall 8th February – Liverpool Academy 11th February – Haarlem Patronaat (Netherlands) 12th February – Hilversum Tagrijn (Netherlands) 13th February – Sneet Bolwerk (Netherlands) 14th February – Helmond Plato (Netherlands) 15th February – Verviers Spirit of 66 (Belgium) 17th February – Aschaffenburg Colos-Saal (Germany) 18th February – Bielefeld Elfenbein (Germany) 19th February – Hildesheim Vier Linden (Germany) 22nd February – Bochum Matrix (Germany) 23th February – Stuttgart Rohre (Germany) 24th February – Hamburg Logo (Germany) 25th February – Newtown Mid Wales Theatre 26th February – Pontypridd Muni Arts Centre 27th February – Narberth West Wales Queens Hall 28th February – Stoke Sugarmill 1st March – London King’s Cross Scala 4th March – Cleethorpes Winter Gardens 5th March – Blackburn King George’s Hall 6th March – Middlesbrough Town Hall 7th March – Glasgow Garage Update 27.1.04 James track Laid is being used on UK television adverts for Tesco and the American Wedding DVD / video that was released yesterday in the UK. The film itself features a rather ropey cover of the track by Californian Matt Nathanson over the opening and closing credits. Sit Down is also being used currently in a Sky Sports advert in the UK for its forthcoming programming. Update 24.1.04 Adrian Oxaal is playing another solo gig at Brighton’s Evening Star pub on Sunday February 29th (the day after the Lovegods play the Komedia in town). For more details check out the Evening Star website. Update 15.1.04 James are the headline act on 6 Music’s Dream Ticket tonight at 11pm UK time. The show can be heard on digital radio and also on the 6 Music website where the shows are usually archived for a few days afterwards. Update 3.1.04 Kulas has announced the following live dates for the first few months of 2004 : January 24 – Toronto C’Est What (third annual Jeff Buckley tribute) February 20 – Toronto Rivoli March 11 – Ottawa Zaphod’s March 25 – Toronto Reverb April 28 – Toronto Healy’s Michael will also be performing on Mike Bullard’s TV show Feb 16th as part of Katie Griffin’s band. | Jan 2004 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ainslie Henderson talks about working with Mark and Saul | Article, Interview | “It was brilliant working with Mark and Saul. It worked perfectly because with spending so long in Suburbia, I was really used to working with a band, and writing vocals along with a band that are writing music and working like that. So, me, Mark and Saul worked in the same way. That was the way James did it as well and that’s the way Suburbia did it. We worked in similar ways so we meshed really easily. “Mark and Saul are just two of the loveliest people, they’re the loveliest, loveliest guys, they’re really, really nice. We got on brilliantly as well, the same mentality and they work really hard and they’re positive about it and really intelligent and inventive. “Saul is quite possibly the funniest person I’ve ever met. He’s genuinely hilarious. He’s crazy, absolutely crazy. He’s tiny and he’s got like a wee wiry body and when he tells jokes and stuff and when he does funny things, he does it with his whole body, you know what I mean? “And Chunny, Mark, he’s a bit quieter than Saul. He’s a bit more dry and sombre, but equally funny at times. They’re a great pair to work with, I really, really enjoyed it.” | Mar 2004 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
From A Happy Accident Comes Beauty – Virtual Brighton | Article, Article (Solo/Side Project), Interview | Virtual Brighton | Feature | 1st June 2004 | Related:Bone
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Interview with Tim Booth -Daily Record | Article, Article (Solo/Side Project), Interview | Daily Record | Interview | 1st June 2004 | Related:Bone
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TIM BOOTH: Profound superficiality – Westzeit.de | Article, Article (Solo/Side Project), Interview | westzeit.de | Interview | Carsten Wohlfeld | 1st June 2004 | Related:Bone
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Interview with Tim Booth – Metro | Article, Article (Solo/Side Project), Interview | Metro | Interview | 1st June 2004 | Related:Bone
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Interview with Tim Booth -Sunday Mail | Article, Article (Solo/Side Project), Interview | Sunday Mail (Scotland) | Interview | 1st June 2004 | Related:Bone
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Press Release: Tim Booth releases new solo album “Bone” | Article (Solo/Side Project), Press Release | Sanctuary Records | Press Release | 14th June 2004 | Related:Bone
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From James frontman to serial killer -Gaesteliste.de | Article, Article (Solo/Side Project), Interview | Gaesteliste.de | Interview | Simon Mahler | 14th June 2004 | Related:Bone
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Tim Booth “I’m Still Standing” – The Independent | Article, Article (Solo/Side Project), Interview | The Independent | Interview | Fiona Sturges | 25th June 2004 | Related:Bone
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Oneofthethree.co.uk – Newsreel – 2005 | Article, News | This page lists all news item that were originally published on the old oneofthethree site in 2005. Links and images have either been removed or pointed to the new site where internal. Update 13.10.05 The final two Kulas tracks have been added to the mp3 section. Michael also played his first show for ages in Toronto last week, click here for a review. Update 24.9.05 As promised, the mp3 section now includes two tracks from the Kulas four-track sampler. Instamatic Camera and Starland are now available and the other two tracks will be available in a couple of weeks time. James song Laid has been covered by Better Than Ezra as a new track on their recent Best Of album. The band had regularly included the song as part of their live set, but decided last year to record the song for their Best Of. You can listen to a 30 second sample and buy the US version of the album here or buy it on import in the UK here. Meanwhile, Final Fantasy played a short section of Hymn From A Village while supporting Arcade Fire in Liverpool at the end of August. Click on this link to hear it. (note with yousendit.com, files are only valid for 1 week or a certain number of downloads) Update 9.9.05 Michael Kulas has announced his first live show of the year at Toronto’s Rivoli Club on Friday October 7. He will be supported by Katie Griffin. Tickets are C$7. Michael will be debuting new material at this show. Michael has recently been in the UK talking to record companies about his forthcoming album which he is in the process of writing and recording. In a couple of weeks time, oneofthethree will exclusively have some tracks from that album available for download. Michael has spent the last year working on the new album plus has contributed to the soundtrack of the Park Bench film The Death Of Alice Blue including a track entitled You Only Come Out At Night. He’s now also working on the soundtrack for a new Japanese anime-style TV series called Team Galaxy. Update 8.8.05 Oneofthethree has uncovered the earliest known article about James from the October 23 1983 NME magazine. A transcription can be found in the Article Archive. For messageboard members, there’s a little present in the Members Only section too. Update 18.6.05 Tim performed 2 tracks at tonight’s Meltdown show at London’s Royal Festival Hall. He performed Lullaby, a sign about child abuse to tie in with the theme of the evening, and Sit Down for the first time since leaving James. Performing with him for the first time since Tim left James was Saul Davies on violin. He was also accompanied by Lisa Lindley-Jones from The Individuals and members of John Cale’s band. The songs were slightly marred by one member of the audience singing incorrect lyrics over wrong parts of the song but the audience reception was excellent considering Tim had only been confirmed this week so would have had very little Tim/James crowd there. Update 14.6.05 Tim is playing a couple of songs this Saturday at the Songs Of Innocence – Protest Songs and Lullabies performance at London’s Royal Festival Hall as part of the Meltdown Festival. Also appearing are Patti Smith, Kristin Hersh, Beth Orton, Tori Amos, Marianne Faithful amongst others. The event is unfortunately sold out and Tim’s appearance has only just been confirmed. There may be returns on the day according to the Royal Festival Hall website. Update 2.6.05 HMV.co.uk are now listing the Seven live DVD for release on June 20. It’s still labelled as NTSC though which would be incompatible with some UK players and TVs. Price is £12.99 Meanwhile, Play.com are listing the DVD with the cover picture on the left for £9.99 with a release date of June 27. There appears to be inconsistencies still as it’s an NTSC DVD (ie US TV system), yet Region 2 disc (ie won’t play in North America). Additional features are the Born Of Frustration, Sound, Seven, Come Home and Sit Down (Remix) videos. Sadly it doesn’t appear the extra tracks broadcast on Granada TV – Lose Control (acoustic) or Johnny Yen will appear on the release. Update 31.5.05 According to US music site Sirendisc, James are releasing an NTSC version of the Seven live video with five extra videos, wallpapers and a gallery on June 20. Update 27.4.05 Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) is to be used as the credits music and be played during the forthcoming film The Big White featuring Robin Williams, Holly Hunter and Woody Harrelson. Update 31.1.05 Tim Booth is visiting the US with Lee and Lisa to promote the release of the album Bone. Most of the dates below are radio sessions, performed acoustically. All times are local in the cities where they will be. Details of the radio stations and broadcasts will be added shortly. Feb 7 – New York Sirius Satellite Radio Station – David Mac – 12 noon Feb 8 – Boston WBOS – 12 noon Feb 8 – Boston WRNX – Donnie Moorhouse – 3.30pm Feb 9 – Chicago WXRT Showcase – 7.30pm – 30 minute set opening for Low Millions – a free concert at Martyrs (3855 N Lincoln Ave) Feb 11 – Philadelphia WXPN – David Dye – 2.30pm | Jan 2005 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
iJamming – Interview with Tim | Article, Interview | I have an instinctive aversion to conducting phone interviews. The medium is fine for quick research, or immediate answers to pressing questions, but when it comes to a proper conversation, it’s a poor substitute for a face-to-face meeting. On the telephone, you can’t look into each other’s eyes, you can’t read each other’s body language, you can’t be seen smiling or nodding along, you can’t tell whether someone has finished a point or is merely pausing between thoughts. You can’t offer to get the drinks in, pour a cup of tea, share some biscuits, touch each other’s arm for emphasis – or point to something or someone in the background either for emphasis or good-natured diversion. All of which is why, when I felt so motivated by Tim Booth’s solo album Bone as to request an interview – only to discover he was not coming to the States for publicity – I initially suggested conducting an e-mail Q&A. I thought that, being such a poetic type, Tim would be sure to give good copy. In my usual manner, however, my questions turned into essays, and after those essays made it to Booth himself, word came back to me that we should conduct the conversation by telephone after all. Looking again at those overly elaborate questions, it was obviously the only logical process. It did make for an unusual situation, however – possibly the very first time one of my subjects has known, down to commas, full stops and parentheses, exactly what I intended to ask them. Still, though it prevented me coming up with any surprises, it also meant that Tim knew where I was coming from, and we established a rapport so quickly I even forgot my dislike of the phone format. We talked for well over an hour; unfortunately, the more we talked, and the more relaxed Tim became, the quieter his voice dipped, and there were several words and phrases from the later part of our chat that I simply could not make out during the transcribing process. Given what Tim says about his lyrics, their multiple meanings and how open he is to their (mis)interpretation, I was tempted to just guess at those particular missing words… but that wouldn’t be fair. And as you can see, it’s hardly as if there was much dead air between us. As for an introduction to the man himself, well, I could fill several pages with my love for Tim Booth’s work, as front man with James for almost twenty years, and now as a solo artist. I initially viewed James as a poor man’s Smiths (especially so when seeing the two bands together in early 1985) – and I lost the group for a while towards the end of their lifespan, which I now regret. And though I remember a show of staggering intensity at Irving Plaza around 1993, I also recall that they were such a familiar presence on the British festival circuit that even Campbell got to see them twice before he could walk! Still, many of their albums – Gold Mother, Seven, Laid and Millionaires, in purely chronological order – mean so much to me that rarely a month goes by when I’m not inspired to play one or all of them. It’s easy to fall in love with Tim’s voice, and James knew how to pen a good tune or two, and they were masters of the emotive arrangement too. But it’s Booth’s lyrics that have most engaged me over the years. Tim sings about God, Nature and Sex with the poet’s love of words, the mystic’s desire for peace and the seeker’s quest for answers. There are times when he describes our existence with such joyous beauty that I’m happy to be alive; there are other moments when he questions our human morals with such intensity that I wonder if we shouldn’t all be struck by lightning. And while he continually calls upon the existence of a higher being – “I believe” may be the most common refrain in his canon – he’s equally fascinated by our uncontrollable hormones. ‘How Was It For You?’ and ‘Laid’ must be two of the most honestly horny singles ever to make it to daytime radio. On these lyrical levels, it’s no stretch to call Bone Booth’s finest work to date, especially as it seems to have more of an overriding theme than any James album. It was the words to Bone that inspired me to ask for the ‘face’ time in the first place. If you haven’t heard Bone, it might make sense to read my review before diving into the interview. It should at least help set the scene. Tim Booth: Is this Tony ‘Trojan Horse’ Fletcher? He who asks a question within a question? -Tony Fletcher: Ah, that means you’ve seen the original written questions I sent. Well, it means you can probably see where I’m coming from on a few things, particularly about the new album. I don’t know how it’s been received but I haven’t been able to stop playing it. Fantastic. That’s what we thought would happen. In England, we couldn’t get arrested. But the press hasn’t reviewed us – we haven’t had any press come to our gigs, and our gigs have been amazing too. And then we go to Portugal and Greece and it’s like the second coming. It’s fantastic. -Do you have a thought on that? Is it just the British obsession with the latest trend? Yes. There’s a timing to all these things. It’s like Morrissey, he did seven solo albums I think and got less and less attention and then suddenly there’s a wave and it’s his turn again. The English press is very cyclical. James just finished and James weren’t very popular with the press. They hated us really – we were still selling out stadiums and they couldn’t do anything about it. And so for a while it will be the same for Tim Booth until it comes round again. -I was reading one of your online interviews, and this whole notion that (the James album) Seven was slaughtered at the time. I remember reviewing that album for a daily paper here in America, and raving about it, not realizing that James were meant to be unfashionable at that point. I thought it was you finest moment to date. Because we went on so long, I really got the cyclical thing of it and I never took it personally after a while. I knew Seven was going to get panned, because Gold Mother had been received so well and we’d broken through on it in Britain. And you know in England you’re not allowed two in a row. And I just knew it. And then I did walk into that dumb thing on ‘Born Of Frustration’ where I did those ‘la-la-las.’ And I hadn’t heard Simple Minds. We recorded it, and Mark and Saul from James took me into a room before we mixed it and played me Simple Minds, and I went ‘Oh, fuck.’ They said ‘Do you want to change it?’ And I said, ‘Well, I honestly came on this unconsciously.’ And Iggy Pop did la-la-las, which I’m much more likely to have been influenced by. So I left it in, because I figured, James had a rule – no conscious influences are allowed, but you’re allowed unconscious ones. And I think that’s where we suddenly got hit on that record, that ‘James are trying to be Simple Minds’ – in that one moment on that one song. And it was like, ‘Aren’t you even listening to the record?’ -And there was so much else on there. So much else. -You were able to win it back over a period of time. But though I hope you’re not looking at my questions, so that there’s still an element of surprise here, you’ll see that I asked: For all the commercial success James had over the course of almost twenty years, did you come away at the end of the band feeling, We didn’t quite get that respect? Or was it enough that you got that respect from the fans? It depends on what day you catch me with that question. Most of the time I’m… I really don’t know. I literally stopped reading the press for the last seven years. And every so often band members would stick something in my face and say, You’ve got to read this. But I actually refused to read stuff, it didn’t help and it was a mindfuck and it seemed irrelevant to what we were doing. To me, there’s one intention: you make the best record you can possibly make in that time, at that time, with the people who are around you. And that’s it. The more expectation you have on that, the more you’re likely to fuck it up. No critic’s going to say something to me that makes me go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s it.’ If it hadn’t happened for 13 years beforehand, I figured it wasn’t gong to happen (with Bone). I mean, my manager… -Pete Rudge… (who once managed The Who) …He said to me recently, and I think he was trying to guide me for the next record, he said, “The press didn’t like your lyrics again, Tim. They don’t like the way you keep having to write these songs about God.” [We both laugh, knowing that many of my questions are about how much I like Tim writing songs about God.]And I know what that means, it also means Peter doesn’t writing these songs about God. Members of James didn’t like me writing these songs about God. I don’t write songs about God in any religious sense, because I’m not a member of any religion. I write about God in terms of the biggest question: is there any intelligence or meaning behind life? And I use that word very liberally. And that fascinates me as a question and I can’t put it down. If that’s a real pain for you Peter, go manage someone else. I write about the stuff that’s bugging me at the time I’m writing. Whether I’m in love with someone or something, or some idea, or some way of life, or whether I’m repulsed or discovered some part of myself that I’m really having a hard time with, I’ll stick it in a song in some way. Whatever’s big in my life ends up in my songs. -And usually it comes back to a few themes. Yeah, you had me down (laughing). But I do have to say: you said this one thing [in your written questions], ‘I can divide your songs into three. There’s the personal and then the social and then God.’ And it’s like, Hang on, what other categories are there in life but from those three? You’ve just described the whole spectrum of human existence! -I guess so. (What I wrote was: Along with God and Nature, your other pet theme has been sex.) And I don’t mind jumping right in on the deep end on those… I didn’t know the British press didn’t like Bone, I came to it from the perspective that here’s someone whose lyrics have always fascinated me and I think they’re stronger now than ever. I think artists are fully entitled to cover the subjects they cover best. It seems that your questions and potential answers and philosophizing are stronger than ever. That was my visceral reaction without knowing whether that was meant to be the critical reaction to the album or not. When you say I’ve written about them before, I cringe a bit. As an artist I would love to not be writing in some of the areas that I’ve obviously gone back to, but I can’t escape my own biology. And clearly those are the things with which I’m still wrestling. I look at a lyric and if a lyric has got energy, and if the energy is a truth … you can feel when a lyric’s dead and when a lyric’s alive. So if I’m still writing about the same thing but I look at a lyric and say, ‘it’s still alive,’ I can’t then go off and start again and try and write a completely different lyric for the song. It just doesn’t work like that for me. That somehow would not be true to my unconscious. My unconscious writes the best lyrics I write, and I have a weird relation with it where I feel I have a duty to be as truthful and as accurate as possible. And feeling that if I betrayed that, I would lose that communication. -When you’re talking about the subconscious there, are you talking about the lyrics writing themselves? Are you saying that sometimes you’re not aware of what you’re writing until it’s written? Absolutely, nearly always. The turning point was probably round Laid. Until then I’d had great trouble, with some songs taking a couple of years. I was a real perfectionist about lyrics. But when we did Laid and Wah Wah together in that same six-week session with Brian Eno, I would improvise on tape and Brian would say ‘That’s great, you’re not touching that.’ On some songs I fought back and said, ‘No way, you’ve got to tell me that beforehand, so at least I can try and improvise decent lyrics.’ And on other songs I went with it. I knew I had to come up with this new method of writing lyrics in order to do it in that kind of time span. And I remember we were doing ‘Lullaby’ and I stood in front of the mike. They had a piece of music, I had no melody, no words, I improvised I think six takes. I asked them to burn it onto cassette, went into another room, and wrote down from the cassette what I thought I might be singing. We made sure that the vocals were quite quiet, so some times I could hear what I was singing and got some great lines and other times I got some great sounds that suggested lines. I wrote out the words, I had maybe five pages of words. I went through each one, just underlining the ones that stood out, I stuck them together – and they were a complete, homogeneous, whole lyric about somebody I knew, and I had had no intention of writing about them. It completely made sense about their lives, and they’d been abused, it was like, Fucking hell, It was one of the best lyrics I think I’d written. I always knew stuff came from the unconscious, and I can be very quick. But this was like a new way of writing, that whenever I got blocked, I improvised it, did 4 or 5 takes, wrote out what I thought I was singing, and almost always in those 4 or 5 takes I can get a whole lyric. -Is an experience like that part of what fuels the belief that something is watching over you, to coin a phrase of yours? Yeah. I remember I wrote one lyric about a guy going to commit suicide by going on his favorite walk and lying down in the snow and allowing himself to die. I forget what album this is on. This was in two takes, which was really unusual. That was really odd, that was quick. All of a sudden I looked at it that – gone out on his favorite walk, laid down in the snow. She took the CD to his widow who played it at the wake. She wanted to talk to me because there were lines in there that were so about him. That to me is like, I’m really moved, I obviously had a purpose… -What was the song? I’m terrible with names, the last track on Whiplash maybe? [Yes: it’s ‘Blue Pastures.’] -That’s quite an extreme situation. I had other weird ones when I was younger, but they’re too whacky. You read any lyricist, like the Beatles or whatever, they say they didn’t write their lyrics. The whole muse thing in Greek mythology, that’s a myth with a power behind it, and the power behind it is because there’s a truth in it. -Getting to this God stuff, I never got the sense with these dozens of James records that you were ever preaching – to anyone. I’ve always had the sense that you have a certain, let me get the word right, satisfaction that you may have got a belief system that’s further down the line than others, but you’ve never tried to put that to someone. So you could sing ‘I believe that someone is watching over me’ but I never get the feeling, Oh Tim Booth is trying to convert me, because I never know what you’re trying to convert me to. (He chuckles.) I’ve heard Tim Booth is a Buddhist, I know he went through the Life wave thing when he was younger, he’s always searching, but I’ve never seen it written down that you are this, or you are that. I’m not a member of anything. I’ve got nothing to sell you. I have things to me which I guess to me are vague answers. But they usually throw out more questions than I had when I started. And I guess what I’d be selling is, Don’t take a wholesale belief off the peg, because I think everybody’s spiritual path or understanding is every one individual’s spiritual path or understanding. If it’s going to have a genuine root, it’s got to come from your own life, your own passion, your own bliss. Caroline Myss said your biology is your biography (she’s a medical clairvoyant), and she said it’s all in your body. It dictates your whole life, how you see the world, everything. -Healthy body, healthy mind? More than that; she actually looks at the body and can see the energy entering it, and see where it gets dissipated. For example that energy should be going towards your liver but you’ve never forgiven that sixth grade teacher for slapping you round the face for doing art in the back of the geography class. You’ve got to forgive him because it’s actually damaging your kidneys. It’s really specific. -On a very basic level, I’d have thought we’ve come far enough as humans to acknowledge that stress will cause back pain. Even allopathic medicine acknowledges that. Ten years ago, they weren’t acknowledging that. They’re so fucking slow. -It is incredibly slow. People can get cancers from emotional pain. They can allow their negativity to make themselves sick. Some of that to me is proven, so when you’re saying that your biology is your biography, you would need to have your body in a healthy state to move forward. And the only reason I would jump in on that is because I think her meaning of biology is a little bigger than just ‘healthy body.’ Because there’s energetic components to the body that are outside our normal understanding. -You’re talking about things like auras. I hate to put those words on it. But I do believe. Like this week I’m doing an acting course, and the course is done by a woman who works on the premise that the body stores body amour. Basically as kids we’re born as wild little creatures and we have to be civilized by our parents and that process is very painful and we develop body amour to hide our fears and our anger and our rage, and she’s teaching us to go into that body amour, get really raw and then do a speech. It’s an amazing process. It’s a healing process… You see, I’ve been doing this kind of thing for twenty years… -When you put it like that, there is a danger of coming across as the suffering artist, i.e. ‘I need to go to scream therapy to produce lyrics that make me a worthwhile artist.’ I assume that’s not your intention. No. And you can hear from talking to me on the phone that that’s not how I live. I’ve dealt with the tortured artist myth in the past. And in England you have to deal with it. This kid Pete Doherty from the Libertines, he’s about to be crucified in this country. And he’s walking towards it with arms open. It’s a route favored by many great rock’n’rollers, God bless you Kurt Cobain, and I don’t swallow that myth. I’m furious at that myth actually, and furious at the people that support it. -Embracing the drugginess? Yeah, embracing the self-destructiveness. I met Kurt Cobain a couple of times. He was a fragile, sweet man, very scared. -People get their vicarious thrills through someone else’s pain. And then people worship that, which is equally bullshit. -The thing I was getting from Bone, maybe more so than any James album that preceded it, was the line that comes up in ‘Monkey God,’ that “Everything’s connected.” It seems like the whole album is about how nature and man are connected… Am I correct to see that as an overall theme on the album? Yeah. I’m probably more happy with that song than any thing on the album. Yeah, and that song is – that’s a definite question song. What the fuck are we? We could be these complete animals, we could be this divine creature, and there in lies the amazing choice of man. You know, we’ve had Auschwitz – it may not be going on as much in America but we’ve had programme after programme on Auschwitz from the 60th Anniversary. I remember hearing about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. I don’t know how old I was. But it was the moment I lost an innocence…And the first time I shaved my head I was about 22 and I’d watched something on the Holocaust. -I feel like there was someone who said, famously, “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz.” I haven’t heard that one. And I would disagree. I think there’s more need for poetry than ever. [It was Theodore Adorno, who is commonly perceived to have said exactly what I quoted to Tim, that “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz”. With some further research on the web, I came across a more precise account of his words. According to this Jewish literary site, ‘Theodor Adorno, who wrote that “After Auschwitz writing poetry is barbaric,” subsequently admitted that “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream.'”]-So you are saying that this is your strongest guise, and you’re still asking the same question: are we biological accidents or divine creatures, or something in-between? You’ve got that line “God’s pitch shift way out of time created an ape…” and I couldn’t figure out if it was trying to be Creationist or Darwinist! Yeah. In my own personal belief system, I would say there has to be some intelligence behind evolution. I look at life and I’m gob-smacked that people can believe that there isn’t intelligence behind it. There’s just too many patterns, too much beauty and too much structure in a snowdrop to not imagine there has to be, and I’m quoting myself, “Who put brown owl eyes on the butterfly’s wings?” It’s like, fuck. To me there just has to be. What the nature of that intelligence is may be a little bit more than a question. Because it doesn’t seem to be always as nice and cuddly as some of the images of God that we like to comfort ourselves with, and it doesn’t seem to be as human as many of the images we comfort ourselves with. (Chuckles as he says it.) But there’s something going on, as far as I can see. -I’ve never got beyond my own perspective – and I’m comfortable with this – of God being nature and nature being God. To a large degree I think that’s probably about as… I don’t think the mind can do it. Joseph Campbell says, ‘If you can say it, it’s not true.’ If the closest you can get is a metaphor, that’s fine. I also think you can get a state of bliss by following your passion. If your passion is gardening or having babies or your relationship with your partner, if you love someone very much, that’s your spiritual path. That’s as close as we get to God. -I’m not making my statement purely from the idea “who put brown owl eyes on a butterfly’s wing.” I’m saying that if I could worship anything that I felt was divining our future, it would be the planet. I.e. if we mistreat the planet, put it out of whack, it will and come back on us. Nature itself has given us all this beauty and if we don’t respect it will punish us: that’s scientifically proven to me, it’s not even a spiritual belief. If we destroy the planet, it will speed up the process by which it destroys us. I’m just saying that’s as far as I’ve been able to get and I’m comfortable with that. But anyway… with your music, you can sing “Who put the brown owl eyes on the butterfly’s wing?” and then you can take it some steps further and I always appreciate that you’re not trying to put it on someone. I’ve always sensed that you’re saying to people “Your path is whatever you choose, I’m just making observations.” Yes. -Within that, I love that line on ‘Monkey God’, “Houston there’s a problem here: someone’s cut a hole in the sky.” It amazed me that no one had come up with that line before. You could read layers into that, Houston is the oil capital, and we’ve put a hole in the sky through pollution. I’m not reading too much into that, am I? No. But that is often how unconscious lyrics work. Some of the best lyrics I’ve written usually have about three layers in them, and I don’t know where they’re coming from. But you aren’t reading too much into them – at the end of them, when I’ve written them, I read them and say ‘Fucking hell that’s good, how did that happen?’ -So you can be as surprised as the listener? Yes. -I was enjoying ‘Down To The Sea’ as a back to nature song, and then at the end of the year, the massive Tsunami disaster happened. And I’ve been listening to Bone, thinking, well we can be trying to worship nature, or we can be campaigning against them cutting a hole in the sky, and yet this can still happen. And it’s not the result of any of that. (Of mankind.) And suddenly a song like ‘Down To The Sea’ took on a whole new meaning, I found myself listened to that thinking of hundreds of thousands of people being swallowed up by the sea. Yeah. I’ve been listening to… Bill Bryson, A Short History Of Nearly Everything. I got it on tape, just this amazing, great book, about how this planet has been created by a series of impacts, volcanic eruptions, wipeouts in various forms. One eruption would have an impact that would wipe out 75% of all species, and then there would be another impact that would wipe out 90% of species. We’re due one. -But none of that makes you question that there has to be an intelligence because there’s too much beauty in a snowflake? Oh yeah. And I don’t think it’s personal. If I get wiped out, I don’t think it’s personal. To me, that’s the other side of it. We’re part of a cycle. We take it personally. Some days I think we’re divine, transcendent, and then other days I think we’re some kind of virus that is fucking up the planet and the earth will shake us off, have an eruption. Like when you get ill, your body will try and throw off this virus. What might that be that the planet throws off this virus that is destroying us? According to Bill Bryson, I think it’s that 99% of all creatures that have lived on this planet are now extinct. -You were saying that unfortunately you couldn’t get arrested with this album… Yeah. -Is any of this that you’re going over peoples heads? Musically I don’t know why that would be the case. No. To be honest, people didn’t know we had a record out. The record company were, I’m thinking of a word – frugal – and also the press didn’t really give it time. The record company should have gone with ‘Wave Hello’ and they instead went for ‘Down To The Sea’ in the belief that they would get Radio 2. And the head of Radio 2 is a Jehovah’s Witness and objected to the lines “Find God shoot him up, learn how to die.” And that was the end of the record. You only get one bullet. -You ended up doing this independently. It was your label. Right. -Was that out of choice, rather than that no one else at a big label would take you on. Well, we didn’t look too far. We waited till we had the record finished and then it was like, Who wants it? Sanctuary are very hot right now, so we thought we were doing the right thing. It’s always a lottery. -And at this point you haven’t come round on the cycle. There’s this frustrating thing in music that sometimes if you stay out there and stay creative and keep making music it can work against you. Yeah, familiarity breeds contempt. -And you think there’s some of that at work here? Yeah. But I’m not really interested in talking about it or trying to second guess it. I’d much rather defend myself against some of your other accusations! -That’s fine. What I would ask though is, are these people providing a barrier between you and a public that I’m sure is out there? To a degree, except that the time we played and you came to see us, at the V Festival, and you couldn’t get in the tent… That happened at Glastonbury, that happened in Scotland. Then when we went on tour we sold out. People were starting to go ‘Hang on a minute.’ It was spreading by word of mouth. James took seven years, it was all word of mouth. We never got played on the radio during that time. We just slogged away. I’m too old for that now, I’m not going to do that again. But I’ve got an amazing band and a fantastic live show, I can say that and I will say that, and what happened was word of mouth started taking over and we were selling out the gigs. And that was what James did. By the time we got our first daytime radio play, we were selling out 10,000 seater venues. I mean, fucking hell, what do you have to do to break the door down? So I’ve never taken anything for granted. I’ve got that siege mentality. For me I just make the best music I can make. When I do a gig, I do the best performance I can try and do for the people in the room at the time. For me, that’s all I can do.
-It’s unusual for me to be in this situation where someone has seen the questions… But which of these ones about the lyrics did you most want to respond to? A quick one, the thing in ‘Bone’ about bombers. [My original question started: “On ‘Bone,’ you have the line, “One makes bombs in Palestine, nothing to lose except his life.” This to me plays into a popular cliché that certain people with a claim to political independence have the right to kill innocent civilians, that somehow it’s justified if he takes his own life in the process.” I elaborated quite a lot further.] That song (‘Bone’) is an attempt to see life through the impersonal nature of something like a redwood tree, which has a 2000 year life span. And the human life span is very unimportant from that perspective. So there’s loads of descriptions of different human life, absorbing the various emotions, making it quite emotive. “One gets high upon the cross,” the idea where that came from is that a redwood tree has been around since the time Christ was crucified. So it was an attempt at looking for that impersonal thing, it wasn’t a particular comment upon, it wasn’t romanticizing people blowing themselves up with a bomb. The only aspect of it I guess is that I give a reason: people who blow themselves up with bombs, the two things that they have is either, one, a ridiculous religious faith that they think they’re going to be born again with 44 virgins, or a complete hopelessness that nothing else is going to get anyone’s attention. -Although I think there’s a third aspect, that a lot of them are convinced by people who won’t give up their own lives… Some religious fucker who convinces them that is the case. -Yeah. Yeah, I’ll go with that. It wasn’t glorifying that. But at the same time I think it has to be understood … not the religious response – that’s a good piece of brainwashing – but the other aspect of hopelessness… -To me, you have the right to take your own life, if you’re that unhappy with it and you want to make your point. I don’t agree with taking other people with you. So you’d be a Martin Luther King follower rather than a Malcolm X follower. [Perhaps I needed to clarify: I don’t believe in taking innocent ciivlians with you. I’m not a pacifist; in fact I have a violent hatred, which I have to constantly keep in check, for those who believe others peoples’ lives are disposable.] Obviously, Martin Luther King or Ghandi are closer to my own beliefs, but I still can’t judge that. I don’t know what it’s like just to feel that there is no change or hope open to you. -That’s working on the premise that there are no other avenues open to you. I.e. there is no other way to make a point other than blowing yourself up. Which to me is a belief system of itself. And my take on that is that most of that comes from religious-quasi-military zealots who say, ‘You do this and you will get your reward… And by the way I’m not going to do it because I’m needed here on earth to conduct this battle and take it to the next level.’ Which I see as an act of cowardice. It’s the same as history’s Generals sending troops into the Somme. ‘It’s not my job to go in there, it’s your job to go in there as cannon fodder.’
I probably agree with you personally where you’re coming from. But I guess that brings us to the other question, about the line (in ‘Discover’), “I’ve been the Nazi, and I’ve been the Jew.” I believe if I was born into the wrong family at the wrong time in the wrong country in a different period of history that I could have been the Nazi in a concentration camp. And likewise, I could have been the Jew in the ghetto. To me, it’s … I mean, personally, in my own life, I’ve gone back to past lives. I don’t write about that or preach that, I don’t even know if they’re true. And the guy who I’ve worked with, who I think is the best, when I’ve asked him straight, ‘Do these have to be past lives? Could they be just some kind of insane imaginative stories coming out of my unconscious… ” he’s said ‘Yes, I don’t know… I can’t say that.’ What I do know is if they do come out of your imagination… they come out so strong either you might vomit or you might be absolutely broken and astounded by something. And it’s so physical, so in your body, you can’t help but feel it’s real. It’s like, How could this not have happened? I couldn’t make this up. I would say, You couldn’t act it. As an actor, I would say you couldn’t act it. -Who is that person? Roger Wolger. -I don’t know if I was so clear on those notes. I didn’t have a problem with that line. It was more the shock factor: it was more the fact that that word (‘Nazi’ – especially when juxtaposed with ‘Jew’) still has that incredible ability – as it should do – to put your hair on edge. The irony is that right now there’s a program about Auschwitz on TV. And I want to go off and watch it. My wife is a Jew. My baby is therefore a Jew. My partner went to Poland a few years ago, to Auschwitz and came back and coughed for three months, a terrible deathly cough. You know what I mean? It’s very close to home. So those issues come up. -Did you have other people say… You should have heard the German reviews! They wanted to know what I meant by that line. But often when I explained it, they’d really think about it. -That’s why I enjoy this process. Because there’s other lines I feel like I’ve got the right intent. And then suddenly it’s like, oops, this one has come at me left of center. I also love the fact that… I don’t care if you get your own thing from that lyric and it stirs up a whole hornet’s nest in you. And you can project that on me: I don’t care! I don’t really know where that lyric came from anyway. It was a good piece of writing. And a good piece of passion inside. I’ve had a lyric like that for about 14 years, looking for a home. It’s a line that went “the horror of experiments on animals that bruise, reminds me of how clinically they massacred the Jews” and I looked for a home for that lyric for years. Because it overbalanced every song. And maybe that line (“I’ve been the Nazi and I’ve been the Jew”) over-balances that song too. Maybe it’s one of those lines that’s just too big for a song (laughs), but what the fuck! -On a much more joyous level, my wife and I had a baby over Christmas, and ‘Eh Mamma’ took on a completely new meaning over the last few weeks. Because I was initially listening to that thinking, Okay, it’s an Oedipal love song [“Heaven knows there is no God above like Mamma”] which I guess it still is, but then it became, oh hang on, it’s a baby love song. Originally it was totally a baby love song. And then I got these lines that were just too perverse (laughs), it had to get twisted a little bit, and I’ve still left, obviously, the whole Oedipal thing in there. “I’ve been working out all day I’m a skin and bone man…” And the lyric used to be “I can’t really work my body, I can’t really work my mind, Heaven is a breast, the one on the left,” and something else. It was really about a baby not being able to use its body. And being absolutely in love with its mum. -You’ve got what, two kids from over the years? Yeah. And both live with me. I’ve got an 8 month old. -But the album was out… …Yeah, I wrote that before the baby came along. It (the lyric) was obviously out there somewhere! I wrote the song ‘Gold Mother’ about the first baby, and that was written about four months before she gave birth! I don’t think time is important in those situations. There are certain events that take place in your life that are like a nuclear bomb and they have a fallout both backwards and forwards in time. You can feel them coming. -That’s a really interesting observation. And I would prefer that you write a song like that beforehand as opposed to trying to be the umpteenth pop star/rock musician who says “I want to write about what it’s like to have a baby.” ‘Gold Mother’ ain’t your traditional rock star’s baby song. It’s a series of contractions, that was the musical idea. -Well that gets us into that other lyrical theme. I have to say I’ve followed James in and out over the years, the point being to say I’m not an obsessive fan. What I know of you is that you have been in stable relationships but you seem to write these incredibly sexually powerful carnal songs that are always looking outside that relationship. They’re looking at one night stands at people across the underground train, that kind of thing. Is that your outlet for sexual energy that you have to otherwise contain in a stable personal relationship? (Laughs) The way you phrased this as a written question, I was going to tell you to mind your own fucking business. But you’ve phrased it in a more polite manner here, or a less dubious manner… I’m almost happy to leave you not knowing. The way that Bill Hicks was best when you didn’t know where he stood, that was why he was so dangerously exciting. Because one minute he would seem a really spot on liberal intellectual and the next moment he would be a nasty fucker who was just a barbarian. And he really wanted you to not know. And I like the unsafety of that. And that may be my comeback way of saying that – I don’t feel the need to sell that part of my life. I don’t feel the need to sell ANY part of my life to sell records. But obviously the nature and the quality of your questioning is such that as an individual that if I met you I would tell you, but this is going to get published and that’s different. Also I’ve got nothing to hide. Which of course sounds that I haven’t… So I’ll leave it there. There’s no way out of this one is there? (Laughs.) -I think what I was probably getting at is that I’ve been continually blown away over the years by the sexual power of these lyrics. There’s also something here about sometimes people put me on a spiritual pedestal. And I fucking hate it. -Which is why I wanted to say that I haven’t been obsessive and that there’s periods where I haven’t really listened to James. …But they also hear that I’m a spiritual person, that I’m a Buddhist – and I’m not a Buddhist – and there was a documentary called Face The Music in which I got about half an hour to talk about spirituality. And I made clear that this is all bullshit, I’m still a human being, I’m struggling with all the same things that everybody is struggling with. And it shocks ME to find that the person I’m with, that I’m still madly in love with after nine years – that I still want to fuck other people. It was such a shock, like, shouldn’t these feelings have gone away now? And then finding that they haven’t. And they probably won’t till my dick falls off. And that that’s part of the human condition – the male human condition, I can’t speak for the females – and I can be fascinated by that. -Part of what I’m getting at then is that you have the ability to write about that whereas other people might suppress it. Other people might suppress it because their woman might find that hard. I have the most amazing woman and she totally gets that. It’s a big issue, and I think also I’ve never been really monogamous until now. My God, part of me believes that monogamy is totally natural to men – I can’t speak for women – but I have a lot of gay friends, and the stories they tell me about men’s sex with men, sounds a lot of the times like male-on-male sex is sex at its most direct, and it’s pretty impersonal. Sometimes they just want to fuck. And I know that feeling, and part of me misses that. I’ve kind of answered your question here. I’ll probably stop there! But I’m fascinated by that. And they tell me that with gay women it isn’t the same. That the voraciousness is not there. And I wasn’t totally aware of that. But the gay men I know, even the ones who are in stable long-term relationships, every so often they go off to a fuck club. And I sit there being a little bit jealous about that, going, ‘Fuck, that sounds good, having sex with complete strangers, how exciting! Jesus. God! That would scare the life out of me, it would be wonderful.’ And I like having the life scared out of me. -So how long have you been living in Brighton? Eight years. -I think I put in those questions that I always go there when I’m back in England. It’s as good as anywhere in England. -It is, isn’t it? Almost frighteningly so. Almost every other musician I meet these days lives in Brighton. It’s actually the transport meeting point for the next launch off across the sea to the States, to the west coast. -To the west coast? Yeah. You move down and down England and end up in Brighton and the next step is to California. -Are any of them making it? Yeah, I am. -That’s far enough along that that’s a firm statement? Yep. It’s a migratory trail. -So are you leading the way? I know others who are doing it too. I think it’s an unconscious thing. I think it’s like that thing in Close Encounters, where you’re drawn there, you don’t know why. It might not be California for other people, but I think once you get to Brighton there’s no where back within England you can go. You have to leave the country.
| Jan 2005 | article interview | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Oneofthethree.co.uk – Newsreel – 2006 | Article, News | This page lists all news item that were originally published on the old oneofthethree site in 2006. Links and images have either been removed or pointed to the new site where internal. Update 27.6.06 The 20th Century Masters album is now released by Universal Music in Canada. The album features short sleeve notes by Dan Winkley and two photographs from the Seven album era. More information about this release in the next few days. The album is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US The early James track Folklore appears on cd on the North By North West compilation which celebrates the music of Manchester and Liverpool between 1976 and 1984. Make sure you buy the 3 disc version rather than the 2 disc as James feature on the bonus disc only. Other artists featured are Buzzcocks, The Fall, Joy Division, Durutti Column, Blue Orchids, ACR, New Order, The Smiths, OMD, Echo And The Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Update 15.5.06 Universal International are releasing a 13 track “20th Century Masters” album on May 29 according to online store Sirendisc. Amazon UK and US are listing this as an import release on June 6. Tracklisting is How Was It For You?, Sit Down, Laid, Sometimes, Crash, Say Something, Born Of Frustration, I Know What I’m Here For, Lose Control, Come Home, She’s A Star, Just Like Fred Astaire and Tomorrow. FOPP in the UK are also selling a low-price version of the Best Of as part of a series of reissues. This comes in a slipcase sleeve and doesn’t feature any of the booklet from the standard version. Update 16.3.06 Mark Hunter has been playing keyboards for legendary band The Bluetones on their current tour to support their upcoming 3cd compilation of A-sides and B-sides entitled A Rough Outline. The remaining dates on the tour are : 17 March – Sunderland Ku Club 18 March – Sheffield Leadmill 19 March – Manchester Academy | Jan 2006 | article news | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Oneofthethree.co.uk – Newsreel – 2007 | Article, News | This page lists all news item that were originally published on the old oneofthethree site in 2007. Links and images have either been removed or pointed to the new site where internal. Update 13.12.07 James have announced an additional date for the tour that was announced earlier this week. They will play Oxford New Theatre on Saturday 19 April. Tickets go on general sale tomorrow at 10am. Update 11.12.07 James have announced a theatre tour to support the release of the as yet untitled new album due out on April 7. Tickets go on sale from the numbers below, www.gigsandtours.com and other outlets from 10am on Friday December 14. There is an exclusive presale for members of the wearejames.com mailing list from Thursday, but I’ve been asked to keep this private and exclusive, so please don’t post it on this forum or others. Thursday 10th – Derby, Assembly Rooms – 01332 255 800 Friday 11th – Lincoln, Engine Shed – 0871 4244 555 Saturday 12th – Liverpool, University – 0151 256 5555 Monday 14th – Newcastle, Academy – 0844 477 2000 Tuesday 15th – Sheffield, Academy – 0844 477 2000 Thursday 17th – London, Shepherds Bush Empire – 0844 477 2000 Friday 18th – Norwich UEA – 01603 508 050 Monday 21st – Bristol, Colston Hall – 0117 922 3686 Tuesday 22nd – Blackpool, Empress Ballroom – 0871 2200 260 Thursday 24th – Edinburgh, Corn Exchange – 0870 169 0100 Friday 25th – Aberdeen, AECC – 0870 169 0100 It was also confirmed that James slot at the Isle of Wight Festival is on the Sunday night, June 15. Headliners that night are The Police. Update 10.12.07 According the official festival website and the Naively Moronic Editor, James have been confirmed to play the Isle Of Wight Festival between Friday 13 and Sunday 15 June. No night or slot has yet been announced and there has been no official confirmation from the band of their appearance. Other acts appearing include headliners Kaiser Chiefs, Sex Pistols and The Police with appearances from Lily Allen, KT Tunstall, The Enemy and Kate Nash. Ticket details can be found here. Update 27.9.07 Tim has responded to a number of complaints about the recent secret gigs all being performed in London. “Just want you to understand the reason why the secret gigs were at Hoxton and not in Scotland or Manchester etc. We were working on the songs at a studio round the corner. We chose London because Saul and Mark have the toddlers . We have always tried to cater to the fathers in the band. Being so close, it hardly disrupts our rehearsals and allows us to keep prices down. Hoxton is a great little venue that puts us on at short notice. Most small venues don’t have big enough stages for us to hear ourselves properly or sound as good as Hoxton.. The tickets go on at short notice because we like spontaneity and we don’t want to encourage people to disrupt their lives and travel half- way round the world to be at a non-performance (though we are touched when they do so !). We want it to be a ” No shit, this just falls into place for me” kinda thing. And, hopefully it catches the touts relatively off guard. Thanks for your support and feedback. Just starting to build a studio and record in France. Tim” Update 15.9.07 The Twang performed a cover of Say Something on Radio 2 this afternoon. Update 12.9.07 James played their second secret gig last night, performing a 16 song set of unreleased material. They dropped Pure Beauty and Fear from the previous night and replaced it with previously unheard track Start A Fire and two “old” new songs Not So Strong and Upside Downside. The full set read Child To Burn, Good Mood Sunday, Out Of Our Heads, Hey Ma, Waterfall, I Wanna Go Home, A/B, Mother’s A Clown, Better In Black, Start A Fire, Oh My Heart, White Boy, Bubbles, Boom Boom, Not So Strong, Upside Downside. Review here. Update 11.9.07 James played a rather wonderful 15 song set comprised entirely of new material, of which only 2 songs had been played live before – Bubbles at Edinburgh and Belladrum and Hey Ma at Edinburgh. The crowd were handed out setlists before the show to ensure they were aware of what to expect. The full set read Child To Burn, Good Mood Sunday, Out Of Our Heads, Hey Ma, Waterfall, Pure Beauty, I Wanna Go Home, A/B, Mother’s A Clown, Better In Black, Oh My Heart, Fear?, White Boy, Bubbles, Boom Boom. A mini review can be found here. James play a second night at Hoxton tonight. Update 6.9.07 James are playing two very low-key shows at Hoxton Bar And Grill in London, next Monday and Tuesday 10 and 11 September. The following announcement was made on the official James site. “You are cordially invited to an intimate non-performance at the Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen in London next week. A non-performance because the band will be attempting to play you new songs they are preparing to record. Expect chaos, re-started songs and read rough lyrics. No hits. The band have respectfully asked you do not record the event in any medium…or it will be difficult for them to undertake such gigs again. Experience the moment. Tickets for James at the Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen on the 10th and 11th of September will go on sale via the following links. Limit 4 tickets per person. Doors open 8:30pm. Monday 10th September http://www.ticketweb.co.uk/user/?region=gb_london&query=detail&event=236295&interface=pr1v8t3 Tuesday 11th September http://www.ticketweb.co.uk/user/?region=gb_london&query=detail&event=236297&interface=pr1v8t3” Update 21.8.07 NME have added pictures from the signing tent in Stafford and an NME TV interview. In the interview, Tim says that the new album will be “tender, insecure, ecstatic, triumphant, cocky – all those qualities that we embody” and confirmed that Andy will likely perform on the record due out, hopefully, early next year. A transcript is available here. Key 103 are broadcasting the Cloud 23 gig from Manchester’s Hilton Hotel in May on Sunday 26 August at 8pm. Update 20.8.07 James played the Stafford and Chelmsford V Festivals over the weekend to complete their festival appearances for the summer.. The Saturday set in Stafford featured the following songs : Born Of Frustration, Tomorrow, Sit Down, Out To Get You, Bubbles, Upside Downside, Ring The Bells, Gold Mother, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Laid, Sometimes, Come Home. For fan reviews click here. The NME reviewed the show with their usual appalling level of journalistic integrity and factual inaccuracies, getting the set wrong in both reviews and reusing bad anomalies from their last review. The Sunday set in Chelmsford featured : Born Of Frustration, Tomorrow, Come Home, Out To Get You, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Say Something, Upside Downside, Ring The Bells, Gold Mother, Sit Down, Sometimes and Laid. Tim finished the set by coming down to sing on the barrier, breaking the rather draconian Health and Safety edict that had prevented them inviting members of the crowd on stage for Gold Mother. For oneofthethree’s review, click here. The NME, bless them, however have pictures from the signing tent in Chelmsford. At both shows, Tim dedicated songs to Tony Wilson, whose memorial service was held on Saturday and whose funeral took place today. Update 16.8.07 James will be onstage at 6.10pm at the V Festival in Stafford on Saturday and Chelmsford on Sunday. The set should last an hour. Update 15.8.07 James will appear in the NME signing tent at both V Festivals in Stafford on Saturday and Chelmsford on Sunday at 3.30pm. Update 12.8.07 In a quick chat at Inverness Airport, Tim revealed that ahead of recording for the new album, James have jammed over 100 Wah Wah style pieces from which they hope to distil 20-25 songs for consideration for the album which they plan to record in September and October with a view to an early 2008 release. It is hoped that Andy can play a full part in the recording process. The two new songs on Friday were only first played by the full band during the soundcheck. There are currently no plans to tour the UK in December as had been rumoured on message boards recently. With the work on the new album, Tim’s solo work has been put on the back burner for now although he still hopes to complete his second solo album at some point. James played a rain-sodden headlining set at the Belladrum Festival in Scotland last night. The set mainly compromised of singles but included two new songs – Bubbles and Upside Downside. The full set read : Born Of Frustration, Tomorrow, Sit Down, Chain Mail, Play Dead, Out To Get You, Bubbles, Upside Downside, Say Something, Laid, Gold Mother, Ring The Bells, Sometimes, She’s A Star, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) and Come Home. Click here for a review Update 10.8.07 James played a stunning sold out show at Edinburgh’s Corn Exchange including two first plays of new songs – Bubbles and a second which could be called Hey Mom. The first was dedicated to Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records and long-term supporter of the band, who sadly passed away yesterday. The second is based around the events and aftermath of September 11. The full set was Born Of Frustration, Tomorrow, Sit Down, Chain Mail, Play Dead, Out To Get You, Bubbles, Not So Strong, Hey Mom, Say Something, Laid, Gold Mother, Ring The Bells, Sometimes, Upside Downside, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) and She’s A Star. Click here for a review. Update 6.8.07 Sudoeste TV have a online interview with Larry and Jim, pictures of a meet and greet session and a brief excerpt of Tomorrow from last night’s headline slot at the Sudoeste Festival online for viewing. The Sudoeste set was as follows : Born of Frustration, Tomorrow, Sit Down, Chain Mail, Play Dead, Out To Get You, Not So Strong, Johnny Yen, Say Something, Upside Downside, Laid, Gold Mother, Ring The Bells, Sometimes, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) and She’s a Star Update 5.8.07 According to his blog, Lee Muddy Baker of My Federation will be producing the new James album which is scheduled to be recorded in Wales in September and October this year. Lee was heavily involved in writing, playing on and producing Tim Booth’s solo album Bone released in 2004 and produced Who Are You and Chameleon from the Fresh As A Daisy compilation released earlier this year.
My Federation will be supporting James at the Edinburgh Corn Exchange gig this coming Friday and are being lined up to support James on tour next year. Update 15.7.07 Last night James played the Barcelona leg of the Summercase Festival. Their set included Born Of Frustration, Tomorrow, Sit Down, Out To Get You, English Beefcake, Say Something, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Ring The Bells, Upside Downside, Laid, Sometimes, Gold Mother and She’s A Star. Not So Strong had to be dropped after the band had started the intro as Tim didn’t have his customary lyrics sheet. Update 13.7.07 James have just come off stage in Madrid after a set strewn with technical problems. They played Born Of Frustration, Tomorrow, Sit Down, Chain Mail, Out To Get You, Play Dead, Say Something, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Ring The Bells, Upside Downside, Laid, Sometimes and She’s A Star. Update 11.7.07 James set at Oxegen Festival in Ireland on Sunday was Born Of Frustration, Tomorrow, Sit Down, Chainmail, Out To Get You, Not So Strong, Ring The Bells, Upside Downside, Laid, Honest Joe, Sometimes, Gold Mother. Update 9.7.07 The reviews of the Oran Mor and T In The Park gigs have now been posted. The BBC have a video of the performance of Sometimes on their T In The Park site. A new James website, Egoiste, was launched over the weekend. Aimed at creating an on-line community, it features “forum, chat, member-submitted articles, private messaging, individual user profiles, image gallery, event calendar, comments, community blog and more.” Update 7.7.07 James performed a triumphant set at a quagmire T In The Park. The set was Born Of Frustration, Tomorrow, Sit Down, She’s A Star, Out To Get You, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Upside Downside, Laid, Ring The Bells, Sometimes, Gold Mother. Gold Mother saw the band invite crowd members and people from their entourage onto stage. Reviews of both shows will follow tomorrow. James played a stunning T In The Park warm-up last night at Glasgow’s Oran Mor. The set was Born Of Frustration, Tomorrow, Sit Down, She’s A Star, Out To Get You, Johnny Yen, Upside Downside, Sometimes, Gold Mother, Sound, Laid, Ring The Bells with an encore of Traffic, Not So Strong and Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) Update 3.7.07 James are playing a warm-up gig for Saturday’s T In The Park performance at Glasgow’s Oran Mor on Friday 6 July. Tickets are £15 plus booking fee. To purchase tickets, log in to the official website forum and follow the link in the Top Secret forum. Update 29.6.07 James are in Turkey for tomorrow night’s Radar Festival at Solar Beach. They will be on stage at 11.35pm for approximately 1 1/2 hours. Also playing on the same night are The Magic Numbers (8.45). Update 27.6.07 Further clarification on the Andy situation. He will be appearing at some, but not all shows this summer. At the moment, it’s not planned for him to play at any of the festivals outside the UK, but it’s a moving situation as things develop. Update 26.6.07 James played a rather mad festival warm-up at Hoxton Bar And Grill last night featuring two new songs – Traffic and Not So Strong – in a set featuring a guest appearance by Andy Diagram and the reintroduction of Sound and Born Of Frustration into the set. Full set was Say Something, Seven, Play Dead, Traffic, Chameleon, Born Of Frustration, Chain Mail, Out To Get You, Not So Strong, Upside, Sometimes, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Ring The Bells, Sound, She’s A Star, Gold Mother and Laid. Reviews and photos can be found here. Tim also revealed that the band will go into the studio in September to record the new album for an early 2008 release. Andy Diagram will be playing the festivals through the summer, but there are no plans for him to remain in James past then as things stand. Update 21.6.07 James are playing an intimate warm-up gig for the festival season at London’s Hoxton Bar and Grill next Monday, 25th June. Tickets are sold out. Update 7.6.07 James are playing Edinburgh Corn Exchange as part of T on the Fringe on Friday August 10, the day before their appearance at the Belladrum Festival. Ticket details to follow. Update 28.5.07 Fresh As A Daisy – The Singles has dropped to number 63 in its fourth week on the UK album chart. Update 26.5.07 James have been confirmed as headliners at the Positivus Festival in Salacriva, Latvia on Saturday 28th July. Tickets can be purchased by following this link. Update 21.5.07 Fresh As A Daisy – The Singles has dropped to number 44 in its third week on the UK album chart. The download only single Who Are You unsurprisingly failed to make the Top 75. Update 20.5.07 According to Portuguese newspaper Correio da Manha, James are playing the Sudoeste Festival in Zambujeira on Sunday August 5. Update 16.5.07 Who Are You is now available as a digital download one track single. To purchase from 7 Digital for 77p, follow this link. Update 13.5.07 Fresh As A Daisy – The Singles had dropped to number 25 on the second week in the charts from number 12. James will be interviewed and perform an acoustic session on XFM Manchester from 7pm tomorrow night, Monday 14. Pictures are now available from the Key 103 show at Manchester Hilton Hotel. Update 12.5.07 James performed an intimate acoustic set as a four-piece (minus Dave and Saul) to 20 competition winners and guests of Key 103 at Manchester Hilton Hotel’s Cloud 23 Bar yesterday evening. The set included Just Like Fred Astaire, Chain Mail, Who Are You, Really Hard, Upside Downside, She’s a Star, Out To Get You, Laid, Top Of The World and Sit Down. The show was recorded and should be broadcast and available on Key 103’s website some point next week. Update 9.5.07 James will be playing a special set for 20 competition winners on Friday in the Cloud 23 bar at Manchester’s Hilton Hotel. Details can be found in the following excerpt from Key 103’s website. It’s unclear as to whether the performance will be broadcast. “In 1991, when Key 103 lived in Piccadilly Plaza at the heart of Manchester, James played a gig live from our roof top. They played five songs including ‘Ring the Bells’. 5,000 people turned up and the Manchester traffic was brought to a standstill, as all the people waiting for the 85 to Chorlton got sore necks as they performed atop the City skyline. Now, 16 years on, the boys are back. Last month Tim Booth and the rest of James filled the MEN Arena and Toolan exclusively revealed that Key 103 is about to trump the roof gig of ’91! This Friday at 5pm the band will be live, high above the City Centre once more, as they perform in the clouds. Cloud 23 at the Hilton, to be exact, with Manchester’s No 1 Hit Music Station – Key 103. The performance will feature their new single ‘Who Are You?’ and they’ll play all of your favourite James classics from the new ‘Fresh As A Daisy’ singles collection too. We want true James fans to witness this amazing gig, so all day tomorrow we’re giving you the chance every hour to bag a pair of tickets to this close and intimate gig. Tomorrow is ‘James Day’ on Key 103. There will be only 20 people in the audience and the only way to get on the guest list is to listen to Key 103 all day tomorrow. Please be advised, this event is strictly for winners only – don’t think queuing outside will get you in. James live and intimate at Cloud 23 at the Hilton exclusively with Key 103.” Update 6.5.07 Fresh As A Daisy – The Singles has entered the UK album charts at number 12, the fourth highest new entry. Channel M’s City Life program has a feature on James aired at 5.30pm tonight. Channel M can be found on Sky channel 203 in this area. Issue 14 of the Change of Scenery fanzine is now available by post for £2 plus postage. For more details contact the fanzine at changeofsceneryfanzine@yahoo.co.uk. The fanzine also has a myspace site at www.myspace.com/changeofsceneryfanzine. The fanzine features a guide to James studio albums, reviews of the warm-up shows for the recent tour, a discography including chart positions and pictures taken at the Hoxton Bar And Grill show. Update 4.5.07 James performed a two-track session for BBC Radio 6’s The Hub today. Minus drummer Dave, on sick leave, they played She’s A Star and Laid. Photos can be viewed here. James have also confirmed the rumoured headline date at the Radar Festival in Istanbul on Saturday 30 June. Also appearing on James’ night are The Magic Numbers. Tickets are on sale from Biletix for YTL 65 (approximately 36 euro). Tickets for the headline slot at Athens Fly Beeyond Festival on Wednesday 18 July will be onsale on Monday 7 May from ticketnet. Prices are 63 euro for a day ticket, 94.50 euro for two day ticket and 115.50 euro for a three day ticket.James and HMV have combined to advertise the Fresh As A Daisy singles collection as part of a series of adverts where bands quote one of their musical inspirations. The series also includes Noel Gallagher and Amy Winehouse. James quote Iggy Pop’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog” in the poster to the left which was photographed earlier this week in Manchester. Update 1.5.07 To celebrate the release of Fresh As A Daisy – The Singles, James played two shows in Manchester last night. At a 5pm show in Market Street HMV, they played a short set featuring Out To Get You, Really Hard, Chain Mail, Just Like Fred Astaire, She’s A Star and Laid. For a review click here. This was followed by a rather unique and unusual set, devoid of most of their major hit singles, to 400 competition winners and guests at Manchester’s Club Academy, where Tim first met Jim way back in 1981. The set featured Seven, Heavens, Chain Mail, Riders, Don’t Wait That Long, Really Hard, Top Of The World, Stripmining, If Things Were Perfect, Fine, 5-0, Chameleon, Upside Downside, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Out To Get You and Laid. For a review click here. First day reports from Manchester HMV suggest that the store alone sold over 1,000 copies of the cd and dvd versions of Fresh As A Daisy, making it their best first day sales of the year so far. Who Are You’s single release on 14 May will be download only. More details to follow. Update 30.4.07 James – Fresh As A Daisy – The Singles is released today in the UK on cd, 2cd and DVD format. Update 29.4.07 James closed their first UK tour since the reunion of the band in front of 16,000 people at Manchester MEN Arena last night. Coming on stage accompanied by flag wavers, drummers and band, they played a set that touched on all areas of their career from Hymn From A Village to new song Upside Downside. The full set read as follows : Come Home, Waltzing Along, Ring The Bells, Hymn From A Village, Destiny Calling, Who Are You, Chameleon, Play Dead, Chain Mail, Out To Get You, Riders, Upside Downside, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Sometimes, Johnny Yen, Tomorrow, Sit Down, Say Something, Gold Mother, Laid, She’s A Star, How Was It For You? For a full review, click here. Update 28.4.07 James played the second of two sold out nights at London’s Brixton Academy with a different setlist to the previous night. The set ran as follows : Come Home, Destiny Calling, Ring the Bells, Seven, Who Are You, Chameleon, Honest Joe, Lullaby, Riders, Out To Get You, Don’t Wait That Long, Upside Downside, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Sometimes, Tomorrow, Sit Down, Gold Mother, Waltzing Along, Laid, She’s A Star Update 27.4.07 Last night, James played the first of two sold out nights at London’s Brixton Academy. The setlist was Come Home, Waltzing Along, Ring The Bells, Hymn From A Village, Who Are You?, Chameleon, Play Dead, Chain Mail, Five-O, Upside / Downside, Out To Get You, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Say Something, Johnny Yen, Tomorrow, Sit Down, Gold Mother, Laid, Sometimes, She’s A Star. For a full review, click here. Monday’s secret Amazon / XFM gig is rumoured to be taking place at Manchester Club Academy. The gig is competition winners only and there will be no tickets available between now and the show or on the door. Update 25.4.07 Continuing in the vein of successful but unexpected setlists, James performed to a sellout crowd at Birmingham Carling Academy last night. The set featured Come Home, Destiny Calling, Ring The Bells, Seven, Who Are You, Chameleon, Honest Joe, Really Hard, Out To Get You, She’s A Star, Five-O, Upside Downside, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Say Something, Tomorrow, Sit Down, Hymn From A Village, Gold Mother, Laid and Sometimes. A full review can be found here. Update 24.4.07 James played yet another varied set, drawing from most periods of their career, with stunning effect at Newcastle’s Carling Academy last night. The setlist read Come Home, Waltzing Along, Ring The Bells, Play Dead, If Things Were Perfect, Who Are You, Chain Mail, Out To Get You, Don’t Wait That Long, Upside Downside, Johnny Yen, English Beefcake, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Destiny Calling, Tomorrow, Sit Down, Gold Mother, Laid, Sometimes, She’s A Star, Say Something. A review of the gig can be found here. The rather controversial review of the Friday night show in Glasgow has been updated with a section putting the show in context following the last two shows and talking to the band last night (who hadn’t read the review). There’s also another review been posted of the show. STAT ALERT : To date, James have played 133 songs in their seven comeback shows to date : 78 of the songs (59%) have been released as singles (including Who Are You) 26 of the songs (20%) were originally released during the 1980s (including Sit Down and Come Home) 79 of the songs (59%) were originally released during the 1990s 28 of the songs (21%) were released since 2000 or are yet unreleased. Sometimes, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) and Who Are You are the only songs to have been played at all seven shows. Seven, She’s A Star, Play Dead, Say Something, Ring The Bells, Laid and Gold Mother have all been played six times. More interesting stats to follow as the tour progresses. James are playing on Gideon Coe’s The Hub show between 10am and 1pm next week. There seems to be some confusion as to which date as emails say Friday May 4, but the website says Tuesday May 1. For those that miss it, Radio 6 do have an online listen-back facility. Update 23.4.07 XFM Manchester are giving away 10 pairs a ticket per day this week for the Amazon secret gig in Manchester next Monday, April 30. Update 22.4.07 James played a barnstorming varied set on the second night of two at Glasgow Academy. In contrast with the previous night, they played a career-spanning set mixing b-sides, album tracks, new songs and an array of singles to a rapturous reception from the crowd. The setlist ran Come Home, Ring The Bells, Waltzing Along, Seven, Who Are You, Play Dead, Heavens, Riders, Chain Mail, Upside Downside, Out To Get You, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Chameleon, Honest Joe Tomorrow, Sit Down, Gold Mother, Laid, Sometimes, She’s A Star and Say Something. For a full review of the night’s events, follow this link. Update 21.4.07 James played the first night of two at the Glasgow Academy last night. In a set shorn of the older, rare and new songs played at previous gigs and marred by the senseless violence of seven men attacking one in the audience to the oblivion of the band, they played Come Home, Destiny Calling, Waltzing Along, Seven, Fine, Who Are You?, Chameleon, Lullaby, Five-O, Johnny Yen, Say Something, Honest Joe, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Ring The Bells, Sit Down, Gold Mother, Laid, Sometimes, She’s A Star. Follow this link for a full review and critique of the show. New James merchandise is now available on the band’s official webstore. Update 20.4.07 James have confirmed that they will headline the Belladrum Festival in Scotland on Saturday August 11. T ickets are available from the 24-hour box office on 0870 169 0100, or online via Ticketmaster or The Booth. You can also purchase tickets in person at Mania (Inverness), One Up (Aberdeen) or Tickets Scotland (Edinburgh & Glasgow). Full details on the festival, its location and history can be found on the festival’s official website. James have also been confirmed to headline the Fly Beyond Festival in Athens Olympic Stadium on Wednesday 18 July. No ticket details are available yet. The Daily Mirror yesterday reported that a new site called Londonticketmarket has been set up that bears a very uncanny resemblance to tickettout.com that ripped off thousands of customers with promises of non-existent tickets and taking their money. DO NOT BUY TICKETS FROM THESE PEOPLE. If you are looking for spare tickets, try the messageboard here or at www.wearejames.com – don’t send money to websites with no credentials like these, you’ll lose your money and you won’t see the gig. Update 19.4.07 James played the first UK date of their tour at Carlisle Sands Centre last night. A full review of the show can be found here. The setlist was Destiny Calling, Come Home, Seven, Who Are You, Play Dead, Chain Mail, Lullaby, Really Hard, Five-O, Upside Downside, Honest Joe, Chameleon, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Ring The Bells, How Was It For You, Sit Down, She’s A Star, Gold Mother, Laid, Sometimes. James are appearing at the Summercase Festival in Spain, playing across 2 cities – Madrid on the 13th July and Barcelona on the 14th July. Tickets are now available from www.ticktackticket.com or via phone on 902150025. To buy tickets from the rest of Europe, call +34 934 450 660. The Scottish Sun is reporting today that James will headline the Tartan Heart Festival at Belladrum outside Inverness over the weekend of 10-11 August. No details as yet of which night. The festival website is here. Update 18.4.07 James played a triumphant gig last night at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre. A full review can be found here. Further reviews would be appreciated if you attended the show. The setlist was Seven, Destiny Calling, Who Are You, Five-O, Play Dead, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Say Something, Heavens, Chain Mail, Riders, Honest Joe, Upside Downside, Come Home, Ring The Bells, Sit Down, Gold Mother, Laid, Sometimes, She’s A Star. Tim also announced on stage last night that James would be playing the Oxegen Festival. This takes place on Sunday 8 July at Punchestown Racecourse just outside Dublin. Update 13.4.07pm HMV are running a competition to win a James tent for the summer festivals. Larry confirmed last night that the HMV and Amazon gigs in Manchester on 30 April are separate events at different venues. Update 13.4.07am James performed a wonderful intimate show at London’s Nambucca last night with a set mixed from album tracks from throughout their career with a mix of the less popular singles and some interesting takes on them. A new song Upside was debuted with Tim singing the lyrics from handwritten sheets. How Was It For You was curtailed by a power failure which cut off all sound for a few minutes, which everyone took in good humour. Setlist in full was : Seven, Play Dead, Who Are You, Fine, Say Something, Chain Mail, Really Hard, She’s A Star, Riders, Upside, Heavens, Chameleon, Don’t Wait That Long, How Was It For You, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Gold Mother, Tomorrow and Sometimes. Tim was restricted in his movement and didn’t really dance during the show, but didn’t appear in major pain throughout. For a review, please follow this link. Jim has conducted an extensive interview with BBC Manchester talking about the reformation and the upcoming tour. Update 11.4.07 Last night’s cancelled James show has been rescheduled for tomorrow night, April 12, at Nambucca on Holloway Road, London. Specific instructions from Ticketweb and Plum Music include : “Due to short notice and to safeguard against touting, there are no physical tickets for this show. We have a list of everyone’s names, and entry is made via identification using the card with which you bought the tickets, or by the reference number. So the reference number or card you bought the tickets with for Hoxton will be accepted at Nambucca. – If you can’t make the show, you are entitled to a refund, which can be claimed via ticketweb on 08700 600 100. Please try to organise this by 2pm tomorrow, as any tickets that are refunded may be made available via the James website for other fans. – Unless there are a lot of returns, it is unlikely that any tickets will be available for sale on the door. – Doors are at 7.30pm. The band will be on approximately an hour later. There is no support act.” Last FM are advertising James as playing at the Radar Festival in Istanbul between 29 June and 2 July. This has not been confirmed by the band or their management at this time. In addition, the Greek newspaper Ta Nea has run a story saying James would be playing in Greece in 17 July. No further details were mentioned, and as with the Turkish show, nothing is confirmed. Update 10.4.07 The official James site now carries the following message relating to tonight’s cancelled show : “We’re very sorry to announce that tonight’s intimate warm up gig at The Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen has had to be postponed. Tim has been nursing a ligament injury to his shoulder and has been advised to rest for the next few days so that he is ready for the tour next week. A full announcement will be forthcoming in terms of a postponed date or refund process. The tour is still certainly set to go ahead as planned!” Update 9.4.07 Tomorrow’s gig at Hoxton Bar And Grill has been cancelled. Tim has been advised to rest his shoulder for the next few days so that he is ready for the tour next week. A full announcement should be forthcoming from the mailing list and ticketweb tomorrow. The tour is still set to go ahead as planned. Update 6.4.07 Tim spoke to Shaun Keaveny on BBC Radio 6’s breakfast show this morning. A transcription can be found in the Article Archive. Last night on Clint Boon’s XFM Manchester show, Jim Glennie revealed that Who Are You will be released as a single on May 14. No format details are yet available. Update 5.4.07 A very busy day for James news. First of all, James announced another warm-up show at London’s Hoxton Bar And Grill next Tuesday 10 April. Tickets sold out in about half an hour on ticketweb. The release formats for the upcoming James – Fresh As A Daisy compilation were confirmed. There will be a 1 cd, a 2 cd and a dvd format. CD tracklistings are as already announced. The mailing list also appeared to confirm Who Are You would be released as a single although no date and formatting was announced. More will no doubt follow on this. The DVD format will also be released on April 30. It will feature 24 promo videos – Laid, She’s A Star, Come Home, I Know What I’m Here For, Born Of Frustration, Waltzing Along, Just Like Fred Astaire, Say Something, Seven, Lose Control, Tomorrow, What For, Runaground, We’re Going To Miss You, Ring The Bells, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), So Many Ways, Sound, How Was It For You?, Destiny Calling, Sometimes, Sit Down, Say Something (Original Version) and Sit Down 98. Extras include a series of television appearances : The Old Grey Whistle Test 1985 – If Things Were Perfect Top Of The Pops – Sit Down (25/12/91), Sound (28/11/91), Sometimes (9/9/93) and Say Something (31/03/94) Later With Jools Holland – Runaground, She’s A Star, Sit Down (24/04/98), Just Like Fred Astaire, Someone’s Got It In For Me, I Know What I’m Here For (16/10/99) There will also be a full interactive UK discography. The HMV gig and signing in Manchester Market Street has been confirmed for 30 April, starting at 5pm. A limited number of entry wristbands will be given away on the morning of the show when the store opens. It’s still unclear whether this and the Amazon show are the same thing. A range of classic James shirts have been reprinted and available at the band’s new online merchandise store. New designs will be available for the forthcoming tour incorporating the new daisy logo. Tim Booth will be appearing on Shaun Keaveny’s breakfast show on BBC Radio 6 tomorrow between 7 and 10am. Jim appeared on Clint Boon’s show on XFM Manchester tonight and revealed the band had approached Andy Diagram about performing with the band at their festival appearances later this summer. Apparently he hasn’t responded yet. Update 4.4.07 Seetickets and Ticketweb appear to have upstairs standing tickets for Brixton available for both nights. I’d imagine supply will be very limited. Seetickets also have side view seats available for Manchester. Update 3.4.07 Amazon are advertising a top-secret gig in Manchester on Monday April 30 for which they are giving away 100 pairs of tickets to competition winners. Update 2.4.07 HMV are advertising an in-store James gig and signing session in Manchester’s Market Street store on Monday 30 April to coincide with the release of Fresh As A Daisy. According to their website, the gig will be wristband-only attendance with them being given away free on the morning to the first customers in the store. This gig has not been confirmed officially by the band. Who Are You received it’s first airplay this morning on Shaun Keaveny’s show on BBC Radio 6. The show is archived for about a week by following this link. The song is about 2 hours and 17 minutes in. Update 1.4.07 Itunes in the UK now have eight James videos for download at £1.89 each – Just Like Fred Astaire, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Destiny Calling (Director’s Cut), I Know What I’m Here For, Say Something (New York version), We’re Going To Miss You, Runaground and Born Of Frustration. Tim Booth appears in this month’s Q Magazine in a section entitled “Last Requests” which talks about how people would like to die and how their funeral would be run. Songs for his funeral would include Birdland by Patti Smith, Rain by Margaret Mary O’Hara, #9 Dream by John Lennon and Across The Universe by The Beatles. Update 31.3.07 James have a three page article in this month’s Uncut magazine, talking about the past and reasons for the reunion. Tim describes the reunion as “Everything seemed to line up to this being the right thing to do, after so many years of it not being the right thing to do.” They reveal plans are laid that stretch into 2008 for the band including a brand new album of James songs. Update 30.3.07 HMV are offering a free James sunhat for online orders of the two-disc version of Fresh As A Daisy – The Singles whilst stocks last. Update 24.3.07 Play.com are advertising a 3cd set entitled Lost Innocence for release on August 20. No further details are available, but Lost Innocence was the original title of the Stutter album, but was changed just before release. Update 17.3.07 James played their first show since December 2001 last night in the intimate Hoxton Bar And Grill before around 250 fans. The rather unusual setlist spanned James whole career and steered clear of many of the bigger hits. They played Seven, Destiny Calling, Who Are You?, Play Dead, Fine, Stripmining, Really Hard, Five-O, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Chameleon, Say Something, Sometimes, If Things Were Perfect, Protect Me, Ring The Bells, Laid. Full reviews and pictures will appear here. Play are now advertising the two disc James Fresh As A Daisy album with the following tracklisting : disc one What’s The World , Folklore, Fire So Close, If Things Were Perfect, Hymn From A Village, Chain Mail, So Many Ways, What For, Ya Ho, Johnny Yen ‘Should’ve Been’, Sit Down, Come Home, How Was It For You?, Lose Control, Sound, Born Of Frustration disc two Ring The Bells, Seven, Sometimes, Laid, Jam J, Say Something, She’s A Star, Tomorrow, Waltzing Along, Destiny Calling, Runaground, I Know What Im Here For, Just Like Fred Astaire, We’re Going To Miss You, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Who Are You?, Chameleon Update 16.3.07 pm Tim has posted a message on the official James board regarding the upcoming Fresh As A Daisy release. “Dear Lovers of James, There is a single cd of our Mercury singles about to be released. Don’t buy it. This is the supermarket version (they won’t stock the double) for new and casual listeners. The band’s cut, to be released simultaneously, is a double cd of all our singles in chronological order. It’s only about £1.50 more, and contains rare and deleted material. We fought hard for this one, which we believe is good value. Both cd’s contain two new tracks.” HMV have posted a corrected setlist too. The second new song is entitled Chameleon. The full list is Ring The Bells, Sometimes, How Was It For You, Come Home, Destiny Calling, Laid, Born Of Frustration, Chameleon, I Know What I’m Here For, Seven, Just Like Fred Astaire, Waltzing Along, Say Something, Who Are You?, Lose Control, Sound, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Tomorrow, She’s A Star, Sit Down. They are still advertising it with a DVD which would seem to contradict the messages from the band and the standalone DVD advertised elsewhere. James official mailing list has confirmed the rumoured rehearsal secret gig at London Hoxton Bar And Grill tonight. Tickets had briefly gone on sale on Wednesday without the band’s permission, but were taken off sale and the remainder put on following a mailing list announcement. The gig is now sold out. The band are scheduled to appear on stage at 8.30pm. Tim will be performing in a sling because of a shoulder problem. Update 16.3.07 am Play and HMV are listing a DVD version of “James Fresh As A Daisy” for release on April 30. No mention so far of tracklisting. James have added an extra date at Carlisle Sands Centre on Wednesday April 18 as part of their UK tour. Presale link is here. The official mailing list has also mentioned a secret fan only gig to be announced very soon. More details as they come in. Update 15.3.07 “James Fresh As A Daisy – The Singles” will be released digitally on April 16 and a physical version on April 30. The physical version will have two formats, a single disc edition and a double disc career encompassing second disc. According to HMV, the tracklisting for the single disc is : Ring The Bells, Sometimes, Come Home, Destiny Calling, Laid, Born Of Frustration, I Know What I’m Here For, Seven, Just Like Fred Astaire, Waltzing Along, Say Something, Who Are You?, Lose Control, Sound, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Tomorrow, She’s A Star, Sit Down The second disc tracklisting has not yet been finalised. However, it should include tracks from the Factory and Sire periods if licensing permission is received. More details as I get them. Update 7.3.07 James will be releasing a new Best Of collection in April 2007 entitled “James : Fresh As A Daisy – The Singles”. Formats are as yet unclear with HMV advertising a bonus DVD and Play.com two versions, a single disc and a two cd version. The album will contain at least one new song, entitled “Who Are You?” described to me by someone who has heard it as “distinctly James, but unlike anything they’ve done before”. More news will be posted as and when I get it. Update 27.2.07 HMV are advertising a Best Of with DVD for the rather bargain price of £8.99 with the release date of 16 April on Mercury. There is no tracklisting or official confirmation of this although we can reveal a Best Of reissue was planned even without the James reformation. Play are advertising James New Album TBA for release on 30 April. James have been announced as playing at this year’s V Festival at Chelmsford and Stafford over the weekend of 18-19 August. James are third on the bill on the V Stage in Stafford on the Saturday and Chelmsford on the Sunday. Tickets are already on sale exclusively to Virgin Mobile customers. You can buy up to four by calling 0870 166 043 or visiting www.seetickets.com/vmobile When you get in touch, you’ll be asked to confirm your Virgin Mobile phone number. If you don’t have a Virgin Mobile, tickets go on sale on Thursday 1 March at 9am on 0870 120 2224 or www.seetickets.com/vfestival Prices, excluding booking fee and “special” delivery are Weekend ticket (with camping) – £130 Weekend ticket (without camping) – £110 Day ticket (Saturday or Sunday) – £63.50 Update 22.2.07 James have been announced as fourth band on the Saturday main stage at this year’s T In The Park festival. They are due, according to reports on XFM and NME, to play on Saturday 7 July. Tickets for the festival go on sale on Saturday (24) at 9am, priced £62.50 plus fees for a day ticket, £120 plus fees for a Saturday / Sunday ticket and £140 plus fees for a weekend ticket which includes bands on the Friday night. Above James on the bill are Arcade Fire, Razorlight and The Killers. Update 10.2.07 Tim Booth has made an exclusive statement to www.oneofthethree.co.uk on behalf of the band regarding the sold-out tour, the reasons for the reformation and what the future might hold. Update 31.1.07 Tim Booth has confirmed to www.timbooth.co.uk that he is half way through recording the follow-up to his debut solo album Bone (buy from HMV) which he aims to complete during the course of the year between James commitments. He has been working with KK and Lee Muddy Baker as well as Phillip Shepherd, who worked on the Manchester Passion that Tim appeared in at Easter 2006. A new website will be launched to coincide with the release of that album. Lee and Robin from Tim’s band The Individuals are now playing with My Federation. They are appearing at shows at Brighton Komedia on 1 February, London Borderline on 21 February and Brighton Hope on 23 February. LTM Records have released The Diagram Brothers album from 1981 entitled “Some Marvels Of Modern Science” which also includes an additional 10 tracks from the singles the band released in the early eighties. The Diagram Brothers feature no other than ex-James member Andy Diagram. The album can be ordered on Amazon by following this link. Update 27.1.07 Due to the extraordinary demand for tickets, James are likely to add a second night in Manchester on Sunday April 29 according to their manager Peter Rudge on a post on the official messageboard. Update 31/1 – no confirmation has yet been made though. Update 26.1.07 James UK tour sold out on the first day of sale. The rumoured extra dates at Glasgow Academy on the 20th April and London Brixton Academy on 26th April went on sale and sold out. The 27th Brixton night sold out in 10 minutes. In true James style, the new opening night for the tour will be in Dublin at The Olympia on Tuesday 17th April. Tickets go on sale with ticketmaster next Friday at 9am. Update 25.1.07 Scottish radio station Q96 has announced that James will play a second date at Glasgow Academy on Friday 20 April, which will be the first night of the tour. There’s no official confirmation as yet. The first night is not sold out as we speak, just the Ticketmaster pre-sale allocation. We also have on good authority from a venue employee that a second night at Brixton is pencilled in for Thursday 26 April. Again, this has not been officially confirmed and will probably depend on demand for tickets. Just a reminder, tickets for the tour go on sale tomorrow morning. Ticketmaster are doing a presale however for the Glasgow show. The official site www.wearejames.com has now established a mailing list, and has added a message from Jim detailing the background to the reformation and his hopes for the future. Update 23.1.07 James have announced five live dates for 2007. Venues are : Saturday April 21 – Glasgow Academy Monday April 23 – Newcastle Academy Tuesday April 24 – Birmingham Academy Friday April 27 – London Brixton Academy Saturday April 28 – Manchester Arena Tickets go on sale at 9am on Friday from all usual ticket outlets. Various sites have confirmed the reformation including NME, XFM and Playlouder, plus this was also in The Sun today. Tim spoke to XFM and said the following regarding the reunion and its background : “I don’t really know. If you had asked me in the summer would James get back together I would have said absolutely not, not a chance. It was kind of a load of synchronistic events that took place over about a month. And finally I ended up in Manchester and Larry [Gott] the guitarist who left in about ’93, had been ringing me up saying let’s meet. He’d been one of the initial founders with me and Jimmy [Glennie] and somehow I found myself in a room with with instruments and microphones and we just started jamming. We jammed for a few days and found that it was really fantastic, so we said ‘Alright let’s see how this goes’. We didn’t tell anyone, we didn’t even tell our manager. But it went so well musically that we felt we had to see how far it could go. And then the rest of it sprung from there really”. The official James site has announced the dates with the proclamation “James are back. Still fresh as a daisy. Ready to be the bride not the bridesmaid. With a back catalogue to die for and a bunch of new songs.” Update 21.1.07 It appears that the James line-up for the reunion will be the Laid line-up of the band : Tim, Jim, Larry, Saul, Mark and Dave. Update 20.1.07 The official James website www.jamestheband.com has now been taken off-line and replaced by a placeholder for a brand new site at www.wearejames.com. No date has yet been announced for the launch of the new site. The new James logo appears on the left. All content from the old official site, including the messageboard, has been removed. Some of it may reappear on the new site or I will try and host it here. For those of you who still want to interact there is a messageboard on this site until the new site is up and functional. Update 16.1.07 Oneofthethree has it on very good authority that there will be a James reformation later in the Spring and through the remainder of the year. Rumours from Manchester suggest that some members have been working on new material as well as negotiating a new version of the Greatest Hits album. Expect an announcement regarding some very special live shows in the next week or two. More as and when it is available. Please also check the messageboard or myspace as updates may be posted there if I don’t have access to update the site because of work commitments. There will also be some updates and stuff to this site over the next few weeks. Please join the messageboard and post any contributions such as news articles and the like and we’ll get them uploaded to the main site as soon as we can. Thanks.
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Fanzine: Change Of Scenery – Issue 14 | Fanzine | Change Of Scenery was a James fanzine produced until 2007. |