One-track radio promo CD
Sometimes (advance radio edit)
| Release Name: | Sometimes CD promo |
| Artist Name: | James |
| Release Date: | 1st August 1993 |
| Format: | Promo Single |
| Catalogue: | JIM DJ13 |
One-track radio promo CD
One-track promo cassette tape.
Sometimes (advance radio edit)
| Release Name: | Sometimes CD promo |
| Artist Name: | James |
| Release Date: | 1st August 1993 |
| Format: | Promo Single |
| Catalogue: | JIM DJ13 |
One-track promo cassette tape.
James support Neil Young on three European outdoor dates in London, Milan and Bad Mergentheim (Germany).
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Five-O is track six on the 1993 James album Laid.
A live version recorded for Radio 1 on the day of album release appeared on the b-side of the Laid single in November 1993, the 2001 album reissue and the 2015 deluxe and super deluxe versions of the album.
Five-O was developed from a twenty second snatch of improvisation identified to the band by Brian Eno. It is about finding true love and then worrying when it might all end and its sentiments saw it become a massive favourite with fans in the US.
BBC Session 1993
Live In Extraordinary Times
| Song: | Five-O |
| Released: | 27th September 1993 |
| Main Associated Album (or Single): | Laid |
| First Heard Live: | London Finsbury Park – 11th July 1993 |
Festival headlined by the Neil Young, and also featuring James, Pearl Jam, Van Morrison, Saw Doctors, 4 Non Blondes, The Blue Angels.
A warm-up date for James’ support slots with Neil Young.
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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
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.
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.