Setlist
Come Home / Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) / Ring The Bells / Sound / Moving On / I Wanna Go Home / Stutter / Say Something / Curse Curse / Laid / Sometimes / TomorrowSupport
n/aMore Information & Reviews
None.
A wakeboarding festival in the middle of Wales with a predominantly teenage audience isn’t a natural fit for bands from the last century. However, James and Echo and the Bunnymen prove there’s no substitute for great tunes.
First things first, I have no idea what wakeboarding is. Still don’t. And there probably wasn’t much of it going on in the main festival site. Wakestock is a very young festival and the majority of the audience probably weren’t born at the time both James and the Bunnymen were in their prime or even bothering the lower regions of the singles charts, so it’s quite an interesting line up. The set up is unusual too, with both stages next to each other in the same tent so we go from the Bunnymen, to Wretch three two (not thirty-two, it’s important) to James to Rudimental. It’s a strange contrast, but actually what you learn is that there’s no substitute for great tunes. The difference is that the Bunnymen and James just rely on those tunes yet Wretch 32 and Rudimental have great tunes, they just choose to ruin them by having some bloke shouting “bounce bounce” or that someone “has given their all, give it up for them” over the top of them.
We’re not sure if it’s the hot weather or the dark tent fitting in well with his ubiquitous shades, but Ian McCulloch seems in a good mood. Maybe it’s the surprisingly positive response the Bunnymen get given the average age of the audience. It shouldn’t be a surprise though. Even given the rumoured fractions within the band, they still have a back catalogue that puts most bands to shame and we get a smattering of their finest moments from The Cutter to The Killing Moon and the response they get shows that they’ve either won the kids over or there’s still hope for proper guitar music and it’s the business that’s trying to put the nail in the coffin of it, not the audience.
We’re treated to Wretch Three Two (get it right) who are actually quite entertaining over on the other stage when you ignore the rubbish attempts at crowd interaction and focus on their tunes before James make it to the stage for their headline set. Headline set being an hour in Wakestock terms. It’s actually a wonderfully organised festival with some excellent food stalls, very well laid out bars and toilets, it’s just slightly misleading on what you get from a headliner and the frankly taking the piss £20 charge for parking.
Anyway, James open up with Sound. A kid next to me moans they’re not playing hits. To be fair to him he knows most of the songs; to be unfair, he doesn’t realise this is their second most successful single. James are at that awkward moment where they’ve not released anything for nearly three years and therefore don’t have “current” material that people know so there’s an expectation of the hits and they deliver on that without this just being a roll out of the obvious songs. Ring The Bells is a fierce fiery call to arms that has the kids singing back the chorus even though it was recorded before most of them were born.
Next up is the first of two new songs called Curse Curse. It was premiered at Thetford a month ago and this is its second outing. It has all the hallmarks of a great James song, but it does demonstrate the risks that James take in showing songs to their public before they’re laid down and finished. They’re in the middle of recording a new album for release early next year and this already feels like one of the key songs. The chorus is done and will become a classic singalong, however the verses still sound like a work in progress lyrically as they’re very different from the version at Thetford (which actually sounded pretty much done). You can’t imagine, and they haven’t, The Stone Roses braving a new song live before it’s been fully nailed down in the studio. The great thing is though that there’s still bands out there not afraid to take risks with new material rather than just resting back on their laurels.
However, you can’t not go back to the back catalogue, especially at festival shows like this. Come Home has Tim out in the crowd on the barrier and the outstretched arms trying to grab him are those of kids younger than his own – showing how great music can break down those barriers of what you’re supposed to like and what’s cool to like.
They do then go a little self-indulgent in that we don’t get a run of hits, but the as-yet-unreleased-in-studio-form-but-over-thirty-years-old Stutter, which ends with a three drum onslaught and Tim singing whilst playing keyboards as Saul smashes Larry’s guitar with drumsticks as strobes flash around the tent. It drops into the more gentle soothing Out To Get You which finishes with a magnificent violin solo from Saul.
They finish with a run of four singles (or future singles). Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) has sort of become a James anthem and encapsulates the ethos of the band. It only hit the mid-twenties in the charts when Universal half-heartedly promoted the final pre-split album Pleased To Meet You, but it became a fan favourite. Moving On is likely to be the next single early next year and is the most accessible thing they’ve written since the reunion, if only radio, other than a few long-term supporters like Geoff Lloyd and Pete Mitchell, would actually play a new James song.
They finish with two songs that get the crowd bouncing as much as they do for Wretch 32 and the surprisingly good (when you discount the bloke shouting bounce bounce) Rudimental. Sit Down is a call to arms and a song of unity that crosses the generation gap – there’s a point where two young girls on the shoulders of their friends hug each other as Tim sings “those who find themselves ridiculous” that feels like age and being cool no longer matters. Laid, with Tim bouncing up and down on a monitor, has the whole place singing along to the first verse before Tim starts singing it.
You have to hope that the rather surreal line-up actually serves its purpose and someone somewhere had a master plan to introduce the youth of today to bands that are still as relevant today as they were years ago if only they were given the respect and coverage they deserve. James and the Bunnymen are a perfect introduction.
James headline a Forestry Commission show at Thetford Forest High Lodge supported by the magnificent Frazer King. The show saw them debut Curse Curse and Let Us Die.
They support The Killers at Wembley Stadium but their performance in Riga, Latvia is cancelled as there were significant concerns about the venue’s safety that delayed The Killers’ set for hours and meant James were unable to play.
Wembley Stadium. Not many bands get to play there, and even fewer at the specific invitation of one of the biggest bands in the world. But that’s the unspoken whispered respect that James have from some of them, not that the music press would ever print that.
On just over an hour after doors, the standing area of the stadium is fairly full but the seats haven’t filled up when James start. They open with Sound, an interesting choice as although it was a top ten single, it’s not the most immediately recognisable songs in their back catalogue. The sound takes a few minutes to tweak as well before it starts to sound great on the floor. Necessity of time constraints mean it doesn’t get the extended sections where they can improvise. They go straight into Ring The Bells and you can see they still feel at home on the bigger stages, Tim prowling the stage urging the others on. The reaction so far is mixed, there’s pockets of people dancing, there’s some people in Killers shirts who start to remember who they are and some even start singing along, but, as with all big music crowds, there’s some there just for the main act.
Sometimes is as vivid and evocative as ever and there’s no attempt to start a sing-along. The mood is taken down a bit for Out To Get You, which hasn’t been played a lot recently and has benefited from the rest. They can’t resist some improvisation on this one and Saul’s violin takes centre stage as they lose themselves in the music. The improvisation sadly means they are running out of time already and they have to drop Moving On, which is a shame as it would have been a fantastic opportunity to show new people that they’re still making great music. They go into Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), which feels strangely flat for some reason, but they go into a raucous bouncing Sit Down and suddenly there’s more of a reaction. Tim tells us he wanted to come down into the crowd but wasn’t allowed because of Health and Safety. They finish off with a crazily ragged version of Laid.
It’s way too short a set for a band of James’ calibre and back catalogue and never an easy one to judge. The sensible approach is that they need to play songs people know or may recall on hearing them yet that goes against their natural instincts as a band. They were gutted at having to drop Moving On and there were so many other songs they could have crammed in, but for what they had to play with they did a great job and hopefully gained some new fans or reclaimed some older ones in the process.
James fans have long demanded a forest gig. Thoughts of a triumphant sort of homecoming at Delamere afforded to some of the city’s other favourite sons would rank up there with their other live highlights. Instead we’re afforded a damp Thursday evening in a beautiful forest in the middle of Norfolk (or is it Suffolk, I can never work out where Thetford is). This is reflected in a disappointing poor turnout, particularly as the rain clouds hit the area early evening when wavering punters would have been making last minute decisions.
Such things have never worried James though. They start off with a trio of more familiar hits – Waltzing Along, Ring The Bells and a drawn-out elongated version of Sound. Tim states they want to mix it up a bit from the recent April tour, hence the reappearance of Ring The Bells and Tomorrow later on in the set. Waltzing Along benefitted from a rebirth in April and it still sounds revitalised from the more tired versions of previous years. Sound stops and then starts again at the end with the band going into a free-form improvisation that takes the song to over ten minutes. The magical thing about James is that they resist the urge to just regurgitate their best-known material and rest on their laurels.
Tim’s on good form, joking that there’s no violin for the next song which is Five-O from the Laid album. Saul Davies’ violin is a much underused weapon in James’ armoury, but not on this song. It drifts through the night air as the beautiful extended intro builds into the main body of the song. Laid is twenty years old in October, but you’d never get tired of hearing songs like this especially when they breeze such new life into them with regularity. Next up is the equally wonderful Of Monsters And Heroes And Men from their 2008 Hey Ma album.
We then get the first new song of the evening called Let Us Die, which seems to be continuing the theme of the new songs about death, loss and changing situations with lyrics enquiring about how to “put this vehicle in reverse” and talking of “all we used to know”. It’s still a work in progress, but it sounds extremely promising for the first time it has been played to an audience.
They go back to the more familiar for How Was It For You? which gets people dancing, but rather than settle into a row of hits, they go back to another track from Hey Ma. I Wanna Go Home is almost them showing off. What’s a relative simple plaintive song on the album is transformed into a monster live. It starts off all unassuming with Tim half singing half whispering before kicking into an extended end section where Tim holds a note for over a minute whilst the other six create an ascending cacophony of noise before descending back into almost quiet reflection.
Speaking of cacophony, Stutter is the song that should define it. This song appeared on their first demo tape in 1982 and was the first aborted mix of the Strip-Mine album five years later, but as yet it hasn’t made a release in studio form. They’d be foolish to think of recreating it in that environment. It finishes with three of them playing drums, Tim on keyboards and Saul playing Larry’s white guitar with a drumstick whilst strobe lights fly around the arena.
Back to the more familiar. Seven, which was ignored pretty much after Alton Towers in 1992, has found its way back into favour, even opening up their first show back in 2007. Similarly, Just Like Fred Astaire, like most of Millionaires, went through a phase of being excluded from set-lists despite it being a fan favourite. Tim goes out to the barrier and sings most of the song perched on it with only the strong arm of one of the crowd for support.
The second new song Curse Curse is a bit more immediate. Tim has his lyrics on his Ipad, Saul jokes that he has a distinct advantage over the rest of them and that they may end up looking like dickheads. It’s a typically brave James move unveiling new songs in venues like this. The song itself is driven by a pounding drumbeat with flourishes of trumpet and has a hook line of “praise the lord and kiss me on the mouth” and, like the best of James’ back catalogue, it feels like there’s three or four songs all fighting to burst out of one. At the end Tim tells us that it’ll be amazing once we get to know it. It already feels like it could be a special song, even amongst the seven they’ve now previewed from the album they start recording on Monday.
The final new song is Moving On. It’s the most immediate obvious radio song that they’ve done since they got back together in 2007. It’s ostensibly about the death of Tim’s mother, but it could be interpreted as a song about someone making drastic changes of any sort in their life with lyrics such as “now my bags are packed and my sails are tied and my course is marked by stars”.
Johnny Yen is James in one song. It endures because it’s forever changing. It’s transformed from a simple four minute song from their debut album into a sprawling nine-minute partly improvised beast. It never sounds the same twice as well.
The set is completed by a trio of their best known and most popular hits. Tomorrow is one of those three-and-a-bit minute nuggets of indie-guitar perfection that they knocked out with alarming regularity in the 1990s. Sit Down has been reclaimed from daytime radio as an anthem to be proud of rather than to hide away in the cupboard. It joins everyone in unison singing along bringing a sense of community into the forest. It also has a wonderful piece of improvisation by Mark on where he brings the song back up unexpectedly with his keyboards and the others join in. They finish the main set with a lop-sided elastic Come Home, a song that doesn’t ever feel like it’s aged despite being older than some of the crowd around me.
The encore is in similar vein. Saul jokes that the first one is another new one, but it’s Getting Away With It (All Messed Up). The song has almost become their anthem despite it only being a minor hit on release in 2001. It’s the one song that you couldn’t imagine them not playing now. The evening is brought to a conclusion by Sometimes and Laid. I’d bemoaned the fact that this has finished their set for the past few years and had become a bit predictable, but they’ve ditched the insistence on trying to get the audience to sing along with Sometimes, letting it happen naturally when the crowd takes it, and it feels alive and vibrant again and a fitting way to finish a two-hour set of the hits, the obscure and the new.
Whilst this wasn’t the best gig they’ve done this year and the crowd was disappointing in size, they’re still streets ahead of their more critically acclaimed contemporaries that are milking the reformation cow dry without delivering anything tangible in terms of either new material or fresh takes on their classic back catalogues.
The evening is opened up by the magnificent Frazer King. They appear, although I didn’t get it confirmed when Nathan jumped me half way through James’ set, to have undergone a line-up change. They’d been invited by James to support them and Larry has been involved with the production of their forthcoming album. As ever, they come across as fairly shambolic and controversial, but that, in its own perverse way, is their charm. Nathan chides people for getting offended by their lyrics before a song questioning the roots of religion. I’m not quite sure what the seated visitors to the forest made of them as this isn’t their natural environment, but they’re progressing to sounding like a damn fine band.
Tim Booth – would-be actor, spiritualist, husband, father, though you probably know him (if at all) as that crazy dancing hippy who fronts the band James. You’ve heard of them, right? No..? They sing ‘Sit Down’. That’s the one, you can stop singing the chorus like a pissed-up football hooligan now.
“One of the curious things about James is how we’ve attracted such football blokes, and look at me”, he smiles. Booth is an unlikely idol to the masses of burly men who flock to experience the euphoric live performances of James – he cuts a lean figure, has dance moves to shame your mother, and would rather meditate than get pissed up at an awards show. “A&M were gonna sign us at one point years ago; eventually they declined and when we asked them why they said ‘well, look at Tim, he’s not going to be the kind of person that’s gonna appeal to a redneck in the Deep South’”, a quote he tells me he’s particularly proud of.
James are somewhat a curious case in general. Tipped in the early 80s as the ‘next big thing’, it wasn’t until the 90s with songs like ‘Sit Down’ and ‘Born of Frustration’ that the band gained any real attention. Gold Mother, released in 1990, came fifth in NME’s Albums of the Year and follow-up Seven reached Number 2 in the UK charts in 1992. Five albums and nine years later, Tim made the decision to leave, but not because they’d outstayed their welcome. “I did it really – and I’ve been more and more honest about this over the last few years – because there was so much addiction going on in the band and I just didn’t want to be a part of it anymore. We were still making good music, but there was a lot of addiction and that’s why I left, simple.”
The band bowed out to a sold out arena tour eleven years after people had started to take notice; six years passed before Tim returned, and in the five years since then, three albums have been released and a dedicated and growing fan base continues to sell out tours all over the world. And yet, there’s an underlying feeling that James were never quite as successful as they should have been.
The media it seems didn’t quite ‘get it’. The NME lauded them as ‘the most original and exciting band in years’ in the early 90s, only to paint them as musical garbage a few years later. Why the turned backs when the door stayed wide open for bands like The Smiths? “I think it’s a number of things, and I think it’s something we survived. Familiarity breeds contempt… You know, The Smiths went like a firework and came and went and were appreciated, but you never got to see them grow old” – he pauses – “though you get to see Morrisey grow old”, he points out, with a glint in his eye.
“We also didn’t have much of a story for them – we kept our addictions to ourselves and we weren’t gonna sell them to the press”. This is something, I imagine, he’s quite happy with looking back? “We wouldn’t be back together now the way we are, I mean we genuinely love each other. You look at the Stone Roses and you go ‘hmmm, okay, how long is that going to last? How long are they going to stay in the same room?’ We actually love each other more now than we ever have done, which is shocking. The late 90s were bad. We had a lot of things going on and it looked like it was irreparable”.
As candid in person as he is lyrically, Booth exudes an honesty which seems something of a rarity in an industry where most are merely concerned with how they’re going to make the headlines. And it’s this nature and comfort with being so self-revealing, along with a sound which remains euphoric even in its darkest moments, which has enabled James to turn into a vehicle of comfort and self-discovery for those who jump on for the ride.
“We were doing a gig for Greenpeace on the White House lawns years ago and these young kids came up to us afterwards, about 5 of them, really shy, and they said ‘your album was the soundtrack for our escape. We were born into a religious cult and Seven was our soundtrack – we escaped about two years ago, all of us, and he’ (pointing at one little kid) ‘had to punch his father in the face as he was escaping through the toilet window – and the song that did it for us was Ring the Bells.’ And we just go “thank you, thank you God”. Music can work in mysterious ways, that much is certain.
And then there’s the incredible impact had on a boy who, autistic and locked in with no real way to communicate, only calms down upon hearing James, an effect which has carried over to other children at the autistic centre he goes to with his mother – a story she shared, confiding in, thanking, and congratulating them at a recent Q&A session. “I was in tears – I couldn’t talk for three minutes… None of us could speak. It was like, what a thing to say, what a use of your music. It was probably the most beautiful thing that anyone has ever said to us”. These stories and anecdotes come a-plenty, each serving not to massage an ego – of this, I feel certain – instead giving a sense of value to words put down on paper, which have gone on to find new meaning in unlikely and life-affirming places.
Gold Mother, an album filled with self-hatred, somehow managed to have this exact effect on the lyricist himself. Driving to the first gig of a tour in Blackpool, a request came from guitar player Larry’s step-daughter to listen to the album. What followed was something he likens to alchemy, metal into gold, pain into celebration. “We put on these songs at their request and they sang along joyously to all these painful lyrics representing the most painful moments in my life. It was just so shocking somehow, but fantastic. And then we went and did the first gig in Blackpool and it was the first time we’d played ‘Born of Frustration’ and 400 men were screaming – they knew what I was singing about and they knew how it felt.” Like therapy both ways? “Therapy both ways, yes”.
And such is the power of James, it would seem. I wonder if this kind of story makes up for never quite reaching the dizzying heights of stardom that has always seemed just out of their reach. “Yes and no. You know, I can see really shitty bands doing really well and I go ‘Fuck! Why the fuck isn’t that us?’ Every so often I’ll have that, but less and less.”
It seems somewhat of a blessing that the kind of fame which has paparazzi hiding in your bushes has never quite dug its claws in to Booth, it almost wouldn’t suit him. A distinct lack of arrogance exudes this front man, yet an alarming charisma and serenity seasons his words in a way which is both mesmerizing and enchanting. Opinionated and self-assured, but minus the sense that the world owes him a favour, it’s no wonder the media circus isn’t interested. And even when they are, he isn’t.
“You can see the public’s completely mixed reaction to celebrity with I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here”, he muses. “On one level, they’re like ‘oh, I love that person’ and on another level they want to tear them apart and make them eat maggots”. Not too far from how James have been treated, then. He tells me he’s received their call about three times. Was it a straight up no, I ask? “A straight up no”, though he ponders for a second. “There was one moment actually where I was quite curious” he admits, “I’m very interested in survival techniques and I was like ‘I wonder if you could go and live off that fish in that pond or catch some wild animals and live off them, and fuck doing the bloody bushtucker trials because you’ve just provided an elk that you’ve brought down with your homemade knife.’” I ask how he’d feel about living with other celebrities. “Oh, fuck!” – I start to think of a few names – “Shut up, don’t go there, I’m not going there.”
I’m A Celebrity… seem to have been punching above their weight with Booth, though one can only assume that the producers of such a show would be hard-pressed to believe that a band who formed in the 80s are still going, bloody love each other, and are not just touring their greatest hits to make a bit of money and satisfy a middle-aged audience. Sounds familiar though, doesn’t it?
But that’s not the name of the game here. Mobbed at Peru airport by fans they didn’t know they had and of the age that would most typically be expected to lose their shit over the latest buzz band, the audience is growing, and it’s not just the 40/50 year olds who come out for the James experience. “You get this all around the world, different people cottoning onto us in strange ways. We know there’s a huge audience waiting for us in South Africa, and we’ve never been to South Africa, and there’s one in Australia and we’ve never been there either. It just keeps going.”
It seems somewhat of a vindication for a band who refused to play the game that the kind of longevity most crave has come to them, and not for the price of compromising their integrity and pandering to the media. “We’ve always wanted longevity, you want the respect, you want the long-term, and it’s always been about live, and we have it. We took seven years to make any money out of this, 30 quid a week we were making for the first seven years. We knew what we had would eventually get through, and there’s also some part of us that feels it’s not finished yet”.
30 years down the line and there’s no time for being complacent. A youthful grin plays across the corners of his mouth when I ask about the future, as he declares: “There’s nothing like virgins, you know? People who come to a gig and think it’s going to be an ordinary experience with a band and go ‘what the fuck is this’?”
Well then, what the hell are you waiting for?
James hit the road with Echo And The Bunnymen on The Gathering Sound tour which takes in Glasgow, Newcastle, Sheffield, Bristol, Brixton, Bournemouth, Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester. They precede it with a secret 200-capacity warm-up show at Stirling’s Tolbooth where they had been rehearsing for the tour.
Five songs that would make up half of La Petite Mort – Moving On, Interrogation, Quicken The Dead, All In The Mind and All I’m Saying – are revealed on the tour.
James announce they’ve been invited to support The Killers at two shows in June – at Wembley Stadium and in Riga, Latvia.
Andy Diagram’s band Spaceheads release their Sun Radar EP.
James completed a sold-out ten date tour of the UK with a show at Manchester’s MEN Arena last night. We were there to witness a triumphant homecoming of a band looking backwards to move on with old favourites and future classics.
James are a band that don’t play by traditional rules. Dismissed ridiculously in some quarters as one-hit wonders (nineteen top forty singles), they can still achieve top 10 albums (Hey Ma) that elude most of what the industry horribly describe as “heritage” bands without any substantial record company support and play to 15,000 crowds in their hometown and sell out a tour in the rest of the UK.
They could take the easy route tonight and just play hit after hit and Manchester on a Friday night would melt in their arms. But, as when they toyed with the precipice of mega-stardom when they were the biggest band in the UK for twelve short months between the success of Sit Down and their 30,000 capacity live on Radio One show at Alton Towers in 1991/2, tonight they take the long winding route of musical integrity, improvisation, songs so new that Tim needed lyric sheets for one that makes them simply the most thrilling and unpredictable live band in the country.
Of the 21 songs they played, 12 were hit singles, enough for the casual fan and with some inspirational sing-alongs in there, but there’s two new songs, Interrogation and Moving On, which with familiarity will rank alongside those hits when they get released in 2014, the as yet unreleased in studio form Stutter which dates back to 1981, Fire So Close from their debut EP, two songs from Hey Ma (Of Monsters And Heroes And Men and I Wanna Go Home) which show that they can still write music that moves the body and the soul and other choice album tracks from their phenomenal back catalogue. Songs like Ring The Bells, Tomorrow and Say Something, which would form a career highpoint for the majority of the hip-and-trendy indie-by-numbers pedalled by the NME aren’t needed.
Tim Booth is the obvious star in the band and the focus of most of the adulation of the crowd. His boundless energy, shamanic trance-like dancing, starting Lose Control up in the level one seats, his engagement with the audience to the point tonight of walking on the shoulders of the front few rows during Just Like Fred Astaire, his continued look of genuine amazement at the response from the audience and his voice, which like fine wine has matured with age allowing him to hold notes longer than some bands’ songs, all make him one of the most unique, unmissable frontmen in the business.
James always have, and always will be, about more than Tim though. Larry Gott’s guitar work, so missed during his absence in the late 90s, simply takes the breath away as he improvises sections of songs, even those from the period when he was absent. Saul Davies, on violin and guitar, is the agitator in the band, that unpredictable spark that drives the band and his violin playing, in particular, takes songs like Laid’s Five-O into places you wouldn’t go at a rock concert. He laughs and jokes with Tim and the audience throughout. Andy Diagram prowls the stage with his trumpet adding flourishes and breathing new life into songs from across the back catalogue. The whole thing is underpinned, without playing down their contributions, by Jim Glennie on bass, Dave Baynton-Power on drums and Mark Hunter on keyboards, all essential parts of creating that framework for the others to paint on.
There’s points in the set where you see the chemistry that makes them so exciting on stage. Tim playfully prods Larry at one point when he’s in an improvised section of a song, at various points two, three or four of the band will come together, look each other direct in the eyes and drive each other on to do something out of character, something different which will make that version of that particular song different tonight from any other night. Manchester loves the hits obviously. Sit Down ends up as a ten-minute communal sing-along when the band stop playing – the Comic Relief sketch that used it appears to have convinced them that it’s not a song to be ashamed of but to love, celebrate and cherish. And that’s exactly what it is. There’s not a more engaging group call to arms and celebration of togetherness in the annals of the musical history of this great city
Sometimes has a crowd versus choir sing-off, Come Home has 15,000 people hollering Tim’s tale of self-loathing back at him as a form of catharsis and Laid starts off with the song played slowed right down with Tim being drowned out before descending into a riot with stage invasions including Peter Kay with a guitar as they start again hell for leather.
James are a one-off. Bands don’t sound like them or get compared to them, basically because they’re incomparable. Criminally, they’ve never had that critical acclaim reserved for the likes of many of their peers, because they refuse to play by those traditional rules that the industry dictates and because, in a world where fame and money is king, they’re all about the music and that connection it makes between band and audience. The only way they can be sure of challenging their audience is by challenging themselves. This wasn’t a gig, this was a life experience to a soundtrack of love and fear and hate and tears.
The penultimate show of the tour and you have to wonder how James will surprise us tonight. After eight hot shows on the run, it’s a challenge to keep it fresh and exciting, both for band and audience, but as you know James are no ordinary band.
They start with a trumpet and guitar led version of Lose Control, making its first appearance of the tour proper. Stripped back and shorn of its keyboard underpinnings, it’s the perfect start, the crowd singing along to a dark tale of love and despair. Waltzing Along is as vibrant and fresh as it’s ever sounded before, the rockier treatment lifting it out of that “James by numbers” accusation that you could possibly level at some of those 97/8 singles. How Was It For You starts with that calling card riff that announced James to the world of the pop charts and finishes with Tim bellyflopping onto the audience after singing most of the song on the barrier. Birmingham has surrendered faster than their football teams on a Saturday afternoon.
Sound is dark, moody, brooding and threatening. Tim prowls the stage like a demented banshee, challenging his bandmates to do something out of character. Interrogation is showing signs of developing into something that can have that impact on the set, Tim going into a trance-like dance half way through as the instruments drop before the end section which you could imagine being put to a dubstep background and still making perfect sense. There’s not enough superlatives to describe just how good that violin then violin/trumpet opening to Five-O is for a ten-date tour, nor for Larry’s guitar work in the main body of the song.
Say Something is another song that makes its first appearance of the tour proper and it’s the one disappointment. It’s a great singalong single, but either it doesn’t have the structure that allows them to do something too different with it or it’s suffered from familiarity or overplay. The crowd love it, but it feels like it needs to be rested or reborn.
Sit Down is as wild and crazy as it’s been every night. The crowd at one point are singing two different parts of the song, which is quite bizarre but actually sums up everything this tour is about – never the same, always changing, never predictable. Top Of The World, thrown in mid-set is a case in point. After the excitement of Sit Down, there’s a lot of chatter as the song starts, but by the time Saul picks up his violin and plays the most incredible solo, noone’s talking. Tim stops them going into the next song to tell the audience that this is why he loves the band so much, not knowing who’s going to improvise what next and that anyone can take control of a song and take the others with them. This was the 200th time I’ve seen them and he summarised exactly what makes this band so great in a couple of sentences.
English Beefcake and She’s A Star are challenging songs for Tim’s voice, which is slightly croaky after two weeks of two hours a night, but you don’t notice him missing any of the high notes of each of the songs. Beefcake, like Five-O before it, demolishes the myth that James are a band with one massive hit single and a back-up canon of not quite so singalong singles and not a lot else. They can afford to leave songs like Ring The Bells and Tomorrow out of the set and they not be missed by all those, except the idiot who the other night determined the gig was worth only two stars because they didn’t play his favourite song.
Moving On is the ultimate proof that James are not a heritage band, as is the current vogue phrase, they’re making exciting new music that stands comparison with the whole of their back catalogue. You know in another world it’d be a massive hit, in the current environment it’ll hopefully reawaken people to James in a way the radio singles off Hey Ma and the mini albums, great as they are, never quite managed.
The end section sees James get their big guns out. We’re Going To Miss You is dedicated to a gentleman in the audience who wrote to Tim about how the song was a spell against his cancer. Born Of Frustration turns the heat up in the venue even further as total strangers unite in yodelling the opening section. Come Home is as wild as ever, lurching, prancing from section to section. Sometimes seals the deal, but as it stops there’s no singalong, there’s no attempt by the band to start one, but as they leave the stage the crowd do start to sing the refrain back and continue to do so whilst the band do what they do backstage and when they come back on, they pick up where they left and improvise an end section. What had become so predictable with that song since 2008 became something different, and again different from what had happened elsewhere on the tour.
As Johnny Yen starts up, the young couple that had pushed their through to stand next to me (obviously there was a gap, they didn’t push just to stand next to me) sing along to every word of a song that was written before both of them were born and that noone would ever have told them was cool. I’d noted before Getting Away With It has been struggled to have that same vibrant effect as it usually has and tonight it’s slightly flatter too. This isn’t a criticism of the song though, just how much everything around it has been raised. Laid to finish proves this, there’s the first two verses played slowly with Larry’s acoustic leading, the audience singing back every word before all hell is let loose and we get the whole song at breakneck speed.
It’s hard to compare these gigs to each other, but this was up there with Newcastle as my favourite of the tour so far. Onto Manchester tonight and the hometown gigs are always a conundrum given the size of the venue and the expectations of that number of people.
After the ridiculously long journey to Leeds (not sure why we couldn’t have stopped off in Birmingham tonight and done Leeds on Thursday) from Bournemouth, the Academy is absolutely rammed to the point where there’s actually no room to get a decent spot to see and dance unless you got in at doors.
The upside to this is that there’s a massive expectant atmosphere when the band make it to the stage at nine. Tim’s almost drowned out by the crowd on Waltzing Along as the pit ends up as one heaving mass which continues through Seven, How Was It For You and Sound. Tim comes out and stands on the barrier in a couple of places during How Was It For You and you think at one point he’s going to dance full-on whilst perched precariously over the crowd. Tim’s thrown a St George’s Cross which he places near Saul’s monitor
Where we’re stood, Interrogation and Five-O are affected by chatter and gutteral tribal football chants. Interrogation is going to be fascinating recorded, they’re still tweeking it and it goes into sonic areas they’ve never been in before in the end section. Even the weareleeds brigade are silenced though by Larry’s breathtaking guitar work on Five-O, which follows the now familiar but never astonishing violin and trumpet extended intro. Just Like Fred Astaire is shorn of the drama of Tim going down into the crowd, but is sung back by almost every one of the 2,000 devotees in the building.
Whiteboy has a new opening section and gets a great reception. It’s the first of three Hey Ma songs tonight and it’s pleasing to see how much of the crowd know them.
There’s so much already been said about Sit Down on this tour, but again tonight it’s hard not to talk about it. Rather than a tired runthrough with the obligatory singalong at the end or an unusual take on it to throw it in and get it out of the way, there’s no shame in exactly what it is, one of the defining songs of the early 1990s. It goes up and down, Tim stood on the monitors conducting the audience who need no encouragement to turn it into seven minutes of delirium as the band improvise their way through the last half of it.
Then we get the first performance of a new song. From what Tim says it’s about the death of Gabrielle Roth. It starts slowly and builds with a beautiful “I’m talking to noone” under a very understated keyboard backing into a chorus which talks of births and graves, a theme that runs through a lot of records. It ends with some effects on Tim’s voice as he finishes with “see you next time”. It feels like it’s still work in progress, but there’s the seeds of a great song in there on first listen.
The duo of Of Monsters And Heroes And Men and I Wanna Go Home that finish off Hey Ma make a potent combination together live in the set and you have to have no soul not to be impacted by them. Monsters has that beautiful haunting opening and build into a dark brooding story and I Wanna Go Home has that James knack of turning a dark song into a celebration, Tim holding that high note for longer than any man should be able to.
It’s then hits all the way to the end of the set. She’s A Star has been revisited since it was last played on the tour and has lost the slow keyboard build up and has been rocked-up and sounds quite fierce. Moving On, although unreleased, will be a single, Saul tells us probably in 2014, and sounds every bit a potential surprise hit, should the industry get its cards in line and actually promote it. It has that immediate singalong chorus you won’t get out of your head and a tune that won’t let your feet stand still.
There’s some confusion at the start of We’re Going To Miss You as to when to start so Tim takes time to tell the story of the song whilst taking the mickey out his bandmates. It’s good to see that on-stage relationships seem so strong at the moment as they approach the recording of the album and a potentially big year next year.
Born Of Frustration and Come Home close the main set. Tim ends up on the barrier again for the former whilst half the crowd try (badly) to imitate the yodel. Come Home sees Larry improvising new guitar parts that add an even more fierce furious flourish to it. Leeds hardly notice as they’re too busy bouncing, flailing their arms and hollering it back to Tim.
Johnny Yen, again not a hit single but should have been, starts the encore and is welcomed like a long lost friend. It’s middle breakdown section is again different from how it has been on previous nights, a sign that this is a band operating at the peak of its powers.
Sometimes again is revitalised. It’s had three years of holding up the set with a predictable singalong section before jumping into Laid. It still has the singalong section, and by god Leeds SING it back at them, but it feels like anyone can pick up an instrument and lead it. There’s a point where five of them are in a line, almost ignorant of the existence of the other four, but in perfect time with them.
And Laid, well they start it slow, go through two verses of it as a communal singalong, before Tim gets the men in the crowd to sing the high-pitched part, before Larry triggers pandemonium by starting the song again, but this time as the raucous three minute bundle of fun that it is.
Monday night in the imposing surroundings of Bournemouth’s old opera house, now an O2 academy, and it’s the first of the not sold out shows (other than a few seats in Glasgow), but you can’t tell as the standing area is so packed, it’s impossible to get a decent spot even ten minutes into the Bunnymen’s set. So I ascend to “the Gods” as it’s called, to watch from the balcony and get a different perspective on the gig.
The band start off with a trio of slower numbers, Top Of The World sounding as haunting and eerie as ever as it makes its first appearance of the tour proper. It has one idiot singing the opening words to Sit Down at the start, but other than that the audience stand and listen to its funereal beauty. Dust Motes is equally stunning, Tim keeps making references to foreplay as if these slower numbers are there to tease the audience. I’ve never been a huge fan of Dream Thrum and there is still some issue with the bass sound on it that makes it boom in parts of the song, but it fits the building mood well.
You feel it’s getting to a point where the crowd want to explode, but it doesn’t quite happen with Seven and Waltzing Along, which sound fantastic, but aren’t quite the big hit that people want to bounce around to although there are pockets dancing along merrily to it. How Was It For You brings the house down though, Tim jumps down onto the barrier, then into the crowd, where he proceeds to sing half the song and then finishes it firstly sat on the barrier then dancing in the pit.
Sound has been shorn of its extended middle sections and outro on most of the tour so far, but tonight it’s allowed out in all its glory. Andy ends up in a box by the side of the stage, leaning out over the audience playing trumpet and the song gets taken down and back up a couple of times, and it ends with Tim asking all the men in the audience to sing “mah bah ooh” back to him. Stunning.
The two new tracks that follow, All In The Mind and Interrogation, are both well-received, the first bass and drum driven and the latter has a new end section and you can see Tim losing himself in the music half-way through. Five-O has its wonderful violin / trumpet dual/duel opening and then has Larry’s stunning slide guitar running through it.
Andy’s trumpet calling card marks a glorious ragged Waterfall, one of those Hey Ma singles that never really was, whilst Fred Astaire prompts more dancing out in the crowd. Tim jokes that Sit Down was written by Peter Kay and tonight it has a much harder edge to it, the crowd, as in other nights, taking the song from the band by the end and making it their own.
Rather than go hits all the way to the end, it’s taken back down again for an eerie, haunted Of Monsters And Heroes And Men and the crowd are won over by this point and allow what would be for other bands an indulgence, but for James is just how they roll. I’ve waxed lyrical about Moving On, but you feel that if there’s a James revival and resurgence next year and they get the recognition that the music press has given their inferior peers then this is the song that will drive it.
We finish with a trio of We’re Going To Miss You, Come Home and Laid, proof that whilst they know how to pace a set and blow the crowd away at the end, they’re no longer resting on that Sometimes/Laid duo at the end to do it. Come Home is as spectacularly wild as it’s ever been, the band unafraid to take risks and try something slightly different with it so you never get two versions the same.
Johnny Yen hadn’t quite worked for me so far on its couple of appearance but tonight the improvised middle section is brilliant, slow, then building, Larry’s guitar taking the lead as Tim namechecks dead stars such as Winehouse, Joplin and Hendrix. The only real disappointment after this is that Getting Away With It, for the first time I can ever remember, feels a little flat – perhaps as it was a late add back in instead of Born Of Frustration, or maybe just compared to how good the rest of.
James send Bournemouth home with a massive inspired Sometimes. The singalong doesn’t need to be prompted, it seems to go on forever and is a fitting way to conclude an evening that’s different from the others on the tour so far, but no less successful.
James London gigs are always odd for me. There never appears to be the same love and passion in the crowd that you get at the Northern and Scottish shows. This show was an exception. Right from the start of Waltzing Along there’s an expectant buzz and people are dancing from the front right to the very back of the hall. There’s none of the chatter that could be heard over the quieter or less well known songs from the previous night. The set as well is probably the best of the tour so far – never too far away from a hit but with enough curveballs for the hardcore fan, a set of songs that work perfectly with the choir and some moments of true ecstatic connection between the audience and the band, no more so than when Tim walks out into the crowd on the shoulders of some of the fans during Just Like Fred Astaire. When Tim conducts the audience singing Sit Down, it feels like five thousand people have become one. It also feels like the band have decided that it’s something they should celebrate and let live, rather than be a bit reticent to play it. There’s a sing-off between audience and choir on We’re Going To Miss You as well.
All the elements that have made sets so far this tour so special are in there – the welcome return of a fiery How Was It For You, the two new songs that bode so well for the next album with Moving On already guaranteed classic status and Interrogation going into new sonic areas for the band with Tim’s vocals leading the end section, a beautiful, dreamy Five-O with its extended violin and trumpet intro, tracks like Why So Close and Johnny Yen dating back nearly thirty years but sounding as fresh as ever and the choir, even more so than the previous night and in Glasgow, adding so much to the songs they sing on and Larry nailing those Millionaires and Pleased To Meet You songs that he was not involved in.
The crowd reaction is astonishing and you can see how touched the band are. Bands of the age of James shouldn’t be creating this type of energy and passion, there’s no resting on their laurels, playing the hits, which would the easy route. Another great night.