Tag Archives: 2014

“You’re having breakfast with me,” says James frontman Tim Booth from his home in Los Angeles. “Give me one second while I just grab some water. Actually, fire away with the questions. It’ll be fine. I can multitask on a good day.”

James has just released La Petite Mort, an album that was recorded in the months following Booth’s mother’s passing and a work that is imbued by the spirit of loved ones lost. The album’s lead single, “Moving On,” whose Ainslie Henderson-created video is one of the most moving pieces of short film you’ll see this year, is a tribute to Booth’s mother, and the rest of the album vibrates with both a love of life and a remembrance of those lost. For a band that’s been around for 34 years, La Petite Mort does not find James resting on laurels. With songs such as the seven-minute opener “Walk Like You,” the throbbing bass-led, electronic jam “Gone Baby Gone,” and the piano ballad “All In My Mind,” the album stands well against the band’s best work.

Booth took a few minutes to talk with Under the Radar about life, death, and La Petite Mort.

Frank Valish (Under the Radar): I understand that the new album was written in the months following your mother’s passing. I know when we spoke a few years ago, she was ill. I just wanted to first extend my condolences.

Tim Booth: Oh, do you know what? Yeah, thank you. But I think it’s almost like, they’re unnecessary. That’s part of what I discovered. It was a timely passing. She was ready to go. She had been ready to go for a number of years, and it was a beautiful experience. So condolences aren’t necessary in this circumstance. I did have another. The album is infused by her death but also by a friend’s death. And that one I will accept condolences for. That one hurt like hell. So I had those two opposite extreme experiences, which I think made it so interesting. It’s such a paradox, that death can be really a beautiful experience. It’s not something anyone had ever told me was possible. So I refuse your condolences for my mother. It was actually more of a celebration. But I’ll accept them for my friend. That’s one of the things I learned. Another thing was to just not wait anymore. I waited to say goodbye to my friend. I waited to tell her I loved her and didn’t make it in time, and that was really part of the problem. So I don’t wait any more.

How much of the writing of the album was done after the passings? Was it all written after them?

Yeah, just about. Some of the jams were done before, and I might even have got “Moving On” started; I think I even got the chorus. Time is very hard to pin down when you’re writing lyrics, especially when you write them from your unconscious. You can write a lyric before an event happens, or you can start a lyric before an event happens. It’s always quite shocking to me how that can happen. It can be quite prescient. I wrote a lyric once called “Blue Pastures,” which was about a man committing suicide, going off into the mountains, laying down in the snow. It wasn’t necessarily a negative thing, it was just he had come to the end of where he was at. And I wrote this lyric and was like, “What the hell is this? I hope this doesn’t happen to anyone around me or me.” Because often they happen to me, the lyrics, or they happen to friends around me. And literally two weeks before we released the song, my friend who I was living with at the time, her mentor went and did that, went and walked out into the snow in the mountains in the lake district, laid down and allowed himself to die. And they used that song at his funeral. His wife rang me to ask how I knew about him, psychologically, because I’d really written about him apparently in this song. I feel that if you can write from your unconscious, the unconscious doesn’t have a sense of time and can pick up on all kinds of things, and so often you surprise yourself with what you’ve written about. Often I don’t know what I’ve written about until about a year later. It’s a real process of discovery, the more unconscious you can write the songs.

On the other end of it, does writing songs help you process thoughts, emotions, events? Is it an unconscious processing of those things?

I think it is. A lot of the lyrics come when I’m asleep and I wake up with some of them. Or they’ll come in improvisation, when I don’t have time to think. I never write a lyric consciously, sit down like, I’m going to write about Robin Williams’ death, say. I can’t do that kind of song, because that’s too of a conscious idea. My lyrics come in a different way. Whatever’s percolating in my psyche at the time comes out. So when it’s strong emotions around two deaths, that actually gives me quite a lot of fuel and drive in my lyrics and allows me to write from a deep place without even thinking about it.

As your unconscious is working through things, it’s coming out.

I think so. The conscious mind now, scientifically, is known to be the tip of the iceberg. It’s our unconscious that tends to make a lot of the decisions, or preconscious decisions, where we see someone and we’re immediately attracted to them, and our mind only catches up later. We might be attracted to someone through smell, or the first millisecond that we see somebody, and these things are not conscious. They are under our radar. And I think our unconscious is operating like that the whole time and has a much bigger view of what our life experiences are likely to be or are going to be. And it’s a bit less stuck in time. Because you get stuff from the future and the past and weave them in ways we don’t understand.

How much of a learning curve has there been in your writing, this working with the unconscious and letting things speak through you? Has that been something that’s become easier for you as your career has progressed? Did you always write like that?

To some degree I’ve always written like that. But you get to trust it more. I can improvise lyrics to a song pretty quickly. Every so often you’re missing a verse and that can take a long time. Or you do a song like “Curse Curse,” and that’s different. That needed a lot of technical writing. I did that over months. Because once I got the first bit, which probably came some of it in the jams, the weight of the first bit determined what the rest of the song had to be like, and the rest of the song had to be as eloquent and witty, in my mind. That wasn’t an unconscious song, but the rest of the songs on that record, I think nearly all of them, are like that. But just trusting in how I write has got easier. It’s how I do most things. I dance like that too. I dance for hours, a lot, and it’s all about moving, whatever comes up into your consciousness. If you’re sad you dance sad. If you’re angry you dance angry. And I dance for hours. My kind of life is geared toward bringing out that stuff, to mining the unconscious. I think as an artist, you should live your life mining your unconscious, and going into places in the psyche that sometimes people try to avoid. Because that’s where the gold is hidden.

I wanted to ask about “Walk Like You.” It sounds like an incredible tribute to your mother. Was it intended as such?

No, not that one. “Moving On” was really. “Walk Like You,” if it’s a tribute to anyone it’s a tribute to my friend Gabrielle who died, because she used to be this great teacher of ecstatic dance. When people would come to her with their wounds, she didn’t go into pity or sympathy. She would look at them coldly and strongly, through their stories of abuse or other appalling stories that some people would come with, and say, “Well, I’ll be expecting great art from you. Or great dance. Or great writing.” It was like the deeper the wound, the greater the art she expected from people. So when you get to that section in “Walk Like You,” “Let’s inspire/Let’s inflame/Create art from our pain/Find a love that’s as deep as it’s holy,” that’s her philosophy in many ways. And the song is really a warning to children not necessarily to follow in their parents’ footsteps. Basically we are all brought up to follow in our parents’ footsteps, whether it’s consciously or unconsciously. It’s what we do, and it’s around teenage and just afterwards that we start to question which values of our parents we want to walk on with and which ones we don’t. It’s very much a song of teenage discrimination, of hopefully having a choice, not to be necessarily like your parents and make the same mistakes as your parents. So the song is really about that, and the solution is creating. Creativity is the answer. Creating dance. Creating song. Creating art. From the pain you experiences. Because everybody does to some degree have cracks in their childhood. And if they don’t from this life, they seem to come in with stuff from somewhere else that needs working on. My solution tends to be more creativity rather than say therapy. I’m also trained in a therapy, but the therapies I’m interested in is close to being creative anyway.

I really appreciated the complexities in that song, how you talk about the parent-child relationship.

Thank you. Because we live in a universe of birth and death, love and neglect. Those are the paradoxes that all of us at some point will experience. We’re made of stars and we’re made of dirt. I was trying to get that all in that song. We can be these great philosophical beings, and we can be reactive assholes too. And it’s kind of like, yep, they’re all true. Another paradox.

You mentioned “Moving On.” Can you tell me about the video for the song? Is that something that you had a lot of input into from the start in terms of concept?

Ainslie [Henderson (animator/director)]. We loved his work. And we had a load of video scripts come in, one from him, more from others, and none of them were that good, including his. But we knew his work, so we were like, “Oh shit, why has Ainslie sent this script in?” So I rang him up and talked to him about my mother dying and what the song was about. And the key that he got from that hour of intense phone conversation, where I think I was crying on the phone in the backyard in London, because it was a bit fresher then, was my saying that my mother’s death felt like a birth. I asked him, “Would you write another script, because we love your work and we still want to work with you.” The next day he was out and he passed a shop where there was a ball of wool. And he was listening to the song on loop on his iPhone and he heard the “Time always unwinding” lyric as he looked in the shop window and saw this ball of wool, and he thought, “Ah.” He wrote the script the next day and sent it to us, within two days of me having that phone conversation with him. At that moment actually, I was having a meeting with my manager, where the band okayed that if Ainslie’s video was going to cost more money, which it would, because it would take him three weeks, the poor bugger, of working 14 hours a day, that we as a band would pay the extra for the video, which we’d never done in James’ history. And as I was talking to my manager, this incredible script came through, which is exactly as you see it. Which is one of the best videos I’ve ever seen. And I wept, trying to read it to my manager. My manager read it and he couldn’t finish it. And that was it. We were sold. Everybody in the band went, “Holy cow, this is amazing.” It just got nominated for Best Video of the Year award in the AIM Independent Music Awards. It will be nominated for other awards. I’m convinced he’s going to win something for this.

I imagine it tapped into your feelings pretty well.

Yes. Absolutely. Death isn’t a death. There’s no ending. There’s got to be a recycling of some sort. And for me, it felt like a birth. That was what the gut feeling was.

I don’t know why I share this and I know we are running low on time, but a few years ago my grandmother passed, and I was with her at the end as I understand you were with your mother, and it strangely for me felt like a gift.

It’s profound isn’t it?

And I wasn’t expecting that.

That’s amazing. And I’m so glad for you. I would advise anyone to move heaven and earth to get to their parents, to people who they’re close to’s bedside. Because it’s like being at a birth. You know you’re watching a profound experience that we all are going to go through, and it’s remarkable if you can let go and love them. And let go of your loss. Your loss is that they aren’t going to be in your life anymore, which of course usually overwhelms people, but they can’t actually see what is going on. The person doesn’t have that problem when they go, most of the time. I died when I was 21 of a liver disease. I stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated, and my memory of it was how peaceful it was.

On a bit of a lighter note, I feel the need to ask about the album title, because certainly it has other connotations. What was behind your choosing that as the album title, such a serious piece of work and then this phrase that has these other connotations that might not be quite so serious?

We were aware that the album, if you talk about it, sounds like it’s going to be a heavy album, like it might be a depressing album, because death in the West is seen in that way. And we needed to find a title and artwork that put it in a different bracket. So the artwork is very Day of the Dead. It’s psychedelic Day of the Dead. It’s a skull in amazing colors. I think it’s great artwork. Day of the Dead is much more about celebration of life than it is about death in many ways, in terms of how we see it in the West, that loss. For the album title, we wanted something that had a reference to death in it, but we wanted it to be uplifting or playful. The tone of the album, if you put the lyrics and the music together, it’s a very life affirming album. So to call the album Death: a) It won’t sell, and b) It would be misleading. We went through a lot of titles. But Le Petit Mor, it’s got death in the title, but it’s playful. It suggests something else. It’s curious. It makes people go, “What the heck is that?” And la petite mort: Is death a little thing? Is it just a change transition to something else? But also la petite mort means orgasm; it means the state after an orgasm where hopefully your egos dissolve momentarily. A song like “Curse Curse” is definitely about sexuality. So is “Frozen Britain.” So we kind of went “Oh okay, let’s take this title and get people asking questions.”

I do have to say that I’m kind of obsessed with “Frozen Britain” and that line, “Make a boy out of me.” It seems imbued with a lot.

Tell me. What?

Just the idea of innocence and, to me, going back and turning the phrase “make a man out of me,” flipping that on its head.

I also put that in because I figured I’m too old to be made a man out of. And what I see, my image of that song, is an older man who is really dead, dead to his life, and falls in love with somebody, and it wakes him up. She’s kind of saving him in some way. But actually what he wants from that is not to be made a man of. He wants to be made a boy of again. He wants that sense of wonderment and excitement and innocence.

Rebirth.

Rebirth.

Death is all over James’ new album, La Petite Mort (out Sept. 16 in North America), but you wouldn’t know it from a cursory listen. It’s a triumphant experience, one that manages to support a billowing, seven-minute opening track and bloom into the sort of album where it seems a gospel choir could be around every corner. This never quite materializes, but for an album partially inspired by the death of frontman Tim Booth’s mother and another close friend, La Petite Mort teems with life. Then again, the French phrase traditionally refers to a fleeting, post-orgasmic state of unconsciousness, so this “little death” isn’t so bad, either.

The generation-old British act certainly comes correct when frontman Tim Booth proclaims, “We are not a heritage band.” If this means deleting “Laid” or “Sit Down” from the set list for a year, then so be it. Visiting Billboard’s office, Booth and bassist Jim Glennie make it clear that James is much more concerned about the present.

You’re in New York City, with a show at Brooklyn’s Rough Trade planned. You’ve worked with the label before — how did this performance come about?

Tim Booth: I don’t really know. We do have a longstanding connection with them, with Geoff Travis in particular, ‘cause he signed us. We were working with Sire, we were working with Geoff Travis… He’s reputed to have the best ears in England for years. I mean he signed Arcade Fire and Antony and the Johnsons…

Jim Glennie: The Libertines, it goes back… His judgment calls on bands are amazing, even stuff that’s not been successful, Geoff’s incredible. But he’s just — I hate to say this — he’s a terrible businessperson.

TB: Don’t say that! Well, he’s had his brushes with bankruptcy, let’s put it that way, cause he’s a passionate music man, basically…

JG: And he constantly invests the money that he gets from things which are successful into things which he absolutely passionately loves and thinks should exist, to the point where financially, it becomes risky. He doesn’t get that balance right, and if you get that balance wrong over a period of time, then things are going to go wrong. And they have done for Geoff, unfortunately.

TB: Obviously we were on Factory for a little while, and they wanted us to be there longer so we were there with the Tony Wilsons and the mavericks who come into all this for passionate music and then business is the afterthought and signing a contract is, “Oh! We haven’t signed a contract.”

JG: I mean, very incredibly idealistic. Factually, I’m not quite sure where Geoff’s head’s at… you don’t get that balance right, then you just can’t sustain it, like Factory didn’t.

4AD, Rough Trade, that whole group of labels (the Beggars Group) has done a lot better than Factory did as far as finding the balance. They’re still around and putting up a beautiful store in Brooklyn that I can walk to from where I live…

JG: A record store, still selling actual vinyl!

TB: Obscure music, too. The one in London is like a library. It’s like going to an old fashioned, Harry Potter-type magical library. You think you’re gonna find a wizard around every corner.

I read heard that album opener “Walk Like You” originated from an hour-plus jam session. What role does improvisation have in the band?

TB: We improvise our songs; everything we do is improvisation. And then what we do live is pretty improvisational. We have about 90 songs that we can just kind of pull up. We might write notes that are scattered all over the stage to remind us what we’re doing. But we essentially change the set every night. We’re not one of these bands who treat it as a theater performance. We’re not a heritage band. We’re not living off our heritage; we’re living off our future and creating a future. Springsteen I think showed the way — really with Wrecking Ball — that you can make an album as good as anything you’ve ever made at any age you want. We come up against that kind of glass ceiling attitude of age which you just have to smash through, which we do when we play live. That’s why we’re still vital and dangerous.

In a recent interview with Spotify, you say you found yourself approaching “Laid territory” on “Curse Curse.” Do you try to avoid these things or just go where the writing takes you?

TB: I met them when they were 16 and they’d stolen their equipment, a poor Manchester band. None of us could play; we go in a room, five hours a day, four or five days a week, and jam. Make a racket. We did this for seven years. That is training, it was an apprenticeship. We had a rule in the band for the first few years that no one in the band was allowed to take lessons. Because if you take music lessons, you’ll end up playing like everybody else plays. So we learned very primitively how to play. We weren’t even trying to make songs — I mean we were very slow at making songs in the beginning. We had one year rehearsing that amount of time where we made one song in a year. We threw out any song that sounded like anyone else’s song. We were very rigorous. We were like, “Nope that sounds too like them. Chuck it out.” So one year we made one song. And then we didn’t give a shit. We were living off nothing for seven years before we became famous, and we didn’t care — we were having a great time. We saw from our live gigs which were building and building. That kept us going, that made us go, “Oh we’re on to something here.” Wait, I’ve forgotten your question?

So everything we do is from jamming. And weird songs get thrown up in jamming, things you couldn’t consciously think about. No one comes in with chords or ideas. I never sit down to write about anything. You start jamming and we start bouncing off each other. It could be one note and we’re off… “Curse Curse” is the only song since “Laid” that’s come out where it was kind of playful and a bit witty. I got some of the lyrics while I was singing it in that jam and it was like, “Oh, this has to be, I have to now write the rest of the lyrics.” Cause you can’t write a funny lyric or a comedy lyric ‘cause you can only hear that three or four times and then you’re done with it. Wit is a different thing, only a few people can pull that off, you know, [Pulp’s] “Common People” — that great song — a few other people… Leonard Cohen pulls of wit all the time, but that’s fucking work. “Curse Curse” I had to work quite hard on, ‘cause I tried to have humor in it, but not make it a one-trick pony. And it’s the first time probably since “Laid” where it had that mischievous, playful sexual edge, you know? Where I’m comparing sex and desire with also this sport, the sexual congress people get when someone scores a goal or has a touchdown in sport you know? Where everyone gets like in ecstasy [laughs] and its like “Yeeeeeeaaahh!”

So how did death impact the new music?

TB: We’ve got this new album where my mom died while we were writing it. One of the people I love the most in the world died, so there’s a lot of death in the record, death and birth. ‘Cause my mom died in my arms, age 90, and it was beautiful. And nobody tells you that that’s possible. It was actually a beautiful experience that felt like a birth. Check out the “Moving On” video. This animator made it — I told him the story of my mom dying and he did this animation that now they’re taking in hospitals in the U.K. to show to dying children. ‘Cause children ask, “What is death?” This animation has captured something so universal and beautiful about death and birth. Check it out.

JG: It’s the best visual thing that we’ve ever been involved in by a country mile.

TB: Rigor mortis can set in at 30. It can set in at 20. And it’s like how do you stay alive? And the song on this album — what I got from these deaths (and I lost a couple of other people, too) — was in “Quicken the Dead.” And the lyric is, “Don’t let me choose an easy life with death once removed, aneathatize the blues, domesticated.” And it’s an uplifting chorus, “Don’t you know we’re already dead,” and it’s like, live your fucking life as if death is on your shoulder. Because you don’t fucking know. And so kiss the people you want to kiss, tell the people who are around you you love them… ‘Cause I didn’t get to say it to my friend… and that’s what this is about for us. It’s like an affirmation of life, an affirmation of being present, but allowing death to be there because it can help you live.

Just before heading off to play New York & his native U.K., Tim Booth of James talked to QRO. In the conversation, the singer discussed the band’s new album, La Petit Mort (QRO review), improvisation, the paradoxes of life & death, touring from Peru to Portugal, changing set lists every night, fans old & young, getting younger, shaving his head (again), their caped, crusading fan, and more…

QRO: Why just the one-off in New York (Tuesday, October 21st at Webster Hall), and no further U.S. dates?

Tim Booth: Financially, I don’t think we felt could do it. We’ve got a pretty tight schedule, promoting. The next chance comes next year, to tour next year, but, at the moment, this is all we’ve got.

QRO: You’re going to be touring the U.K. in November – and then two dates in Portugal. Why those two Portuguese dates, and not a larger continental tour?

TB: I live in the States; I live in California. So when we get together to tour, we tend to try to keep it to three-week blocks. Some people have families to get back to. So we do everything in blocks, in general. We’re coming back to Europe in March. We try to do it to fit with our lives.

QRO: Is it hard to get everyone together? There’s seven band members plus support staff…

TB: It depends who’s organizing. It kind of suits us to do it in these blocks, ‘cause you never get too tired, the more you do it in these little blocks. You use every little bit of our energy, and then collapse at the end, as opposed to doing two-to-three months, and pace yourself according.

QRO: Your last time playing in the Western Hemisphere was in Peru at the end of August – how was that?

TB: That was great. We were playing a festival – it was an old festival; it had been going for twenty-thirty years. It was like a farmer’s festival, by the sea.

Peru’s a great country. It’s always great to go to South America, I think, because it really takes us out of ourselves, culturally, in a positive way.

QRO: La Petite Mort is named after death, concerns the subject – yet it seems pretty bright. Was that intentional, or just where the songwriting led?

TB: The lyrics are light. I had two people who passed that were close to me – one was my mum, and one was Gabrielle [Roth], one of my closest friends in New York. My mum was dead at age nineties, in my arms for her last breath, which was a really good experience – unexpectedly ecstatic experience. And then Gabrielle was just the opposite, which is probably the more usual death, where you don’t quite get to say goodbye, get there in time – much more devastating, in many ways.

So I had these two big experiences that infiltrated a lot of the lyrics in the record, whether it infiltrated in more subtle ways than just death, it infiltrated in new beginnings, people waking up thinking that their dead; just stories around that. Generally, I think we have a very positive attitude about these things – you can see in the video for “Moving On”; it illustrates the story behind the lyrics. Watch that video, you really get– we’re really happy with it, really proud of that piece. Our best video to-date.

The other side is that generally we love contradictions, need to complete knotted-up lyrics, often being introspective. We’ve always liked that paradox – I think paradoxes are the best ways to approach life, any kind of obsessions or weird-isms; whatever statement you make about life, the opposite tends to be true equally. We kind of like to put in paradoxes – ‘La Petit Mort’, it means ‘a little death’, but it also means an orgasm.

QRO: Is there an ‘Emily’ of “Emily come to bed” chorus line to “Frozen Britain”?

TB: I haven’t met her yet. I hope there is. I’m sure she’s out there, waiting…

QRO: How did making Mort compare with making The Morning After and The Night Before (QRO review)?

TB: For this one, we got the backing of a major, BMG, and Cooking Vinyl, who are an independent, and it was the best of both worlds, really. They really got behind us, financially, and we got to work in a grown-up studio in London. We got to record with all the sort of technology at our disposal, whereas the other albums – Hey Ma, we built a studio, D.I.Y.

The others were much more how most people do it nowadays – do it in your bedroom, with computers, sharing files. But this was very much like an old fashioned record, where we get to work with a producer, work on the songs up on our own, and then record with more technology at our disposal.

I think paradoxes are the best ways to approach life, any kind of obsessions or weird-isms; whatever statement you make about life, the opposite tends to be true equally.
QRO: Do you prefer doing it the ‘old fashioned’ way, with a recording studio and a producer?

TB: It really varies, to be honest. Sometimes making an album can be like pulling teeth. In a professional way, not quite realizing the songs you wanted. That can happen.

But this record, we really enjoyed it. Generally, we had a great time, living in London for five month. Max Dingel was a really patient, wonderful producer, who took our sound and really mixed around our sounds in a positive way; took us on a lot of little adventures.

So we were very happy with the outcome of this record. But I wouldn’t say that it was down to the method we did it, because sometimes we’ve made records as a band in posh studios and it was a horrible experience. It just worked out that way – you just can’t quite tell.

QRO: Why did you do two ‘mini-albums’ previously, The Night Before and The Morning After?

TB: Well, in the past, we’d come up with these really mellow tracks that didn’t fit on an album. Because we like albums to take them on tour; we can’t have too many mellow songs, when you’re known as a live band.

So we separated two albums into a kind of more mellow record, The Morning After – The Night Before would be a slightly more upbeat kind of thing. But it didn’t work out like that, because the minute we started working on some of songs for The Morning After, they kind of ‘uplifted themselves’, just by the structure. So it didn’t work out quite the way we’d had it – we’d had it like a hangover record, and it didn’t quite turn out like that.

QRO: In some earlier records, you would often add lyrics after much of a song was already made. Do you still do that, are you in earlier in the process, or is it a mixture of the two?

TB: When we improvise, I often get some lyrics in the improvisation. And then when we rehearse something to record, I’ll have lyrics by the time we record. But, sometimes I’ll go back and change a pronoun, but usually the lyrics are pretty set by the time we finish it.

QRO: With decades worth of material, how do you all pick songs for the set list?

TB: We probably have about eighty or ninety songs a soundcheck away from being ready for a gig. So we’ll pick a song that evening, or during soundcheck, and see how it flies, and if it flies, okay, we’ll play it in the concert.

And then we, as a group, we’ve got rehearsal schedule, schedule for the next tour, we all put forward songs that we’d like to, about eighty or ninety, and we learn them. So that gives us extra capability.

And then on the night – we literally change it every night, depending on how we’re feeling, what the idea the audience has, what day of the week it is; playing on a Monday night is totally different than on a Friday or Saturday; Friday or Saturday, people want to celebrate, Monday, they kind of want to hear music, they might take longer to fire up. So we change the set list every night, with that in mind.

I think that’s why people come to see us many, many times – they know they’re gonna get a different concert every night; they know they gonna get to see something they can’t expect every night.
We’re communicating with a group of people who we’ve never met before, musically, through a new set, and that’s our guiding principle. We don’t go with these bands who play the same set every night – our thing is to keep it fresh and open with life.

QRO: I suppose the NYC show & U.K. tour will focus on La Petit Mort…

TB: Well, we want to. When you’ve got new songs, the most exciting thing is playing new songs. So yes, of course, we’ll be playing eight off the new album, and a lot of the songs were purposely made to be played live; we think of them as very much ‘live songs’. Yes, we’re definitely looking forward to doing that.

QRO: You all release more and more material, but I suppose the set times don’t get much longer – does it become harder with each new album, as you’ve got more material but not necessarily more time?

TB: In a perfect world, we’d be playing four hours a night, but unfortunately my voice wouldn’t hold out like that. I sing across about two full ranges, which means I can’t sing for about two hours without the voice getting damaged, being unable to hit the high notes.

So yes, it’s a problem, but it’s a great problem. I think that’s why people come to see us many, many times – they know they’re gonna get a different concert every night; they know they gonna get to see something they can’t expect every night.

QRO: At shows, do you notice fans that you suspect are from different ‘eras’ of James, like those from the early Manchester days in the eighties, the ‘Madchester’ nineties, and/or since the reunion?

TB: Yes, I notice that. It’s really exciting – especially when you see new fans come. You know, it’s great to play to old fans, but this record is definitely been getting more attention from a younger audience.

The last time we played Manchester, we played to the youngest audience we’ve ever played to in Manchester in twenty years. And in different countries, we get different age of audience in each country we go to. And we love that – we love that we’re crossing over, and it isn’t ‘age-ist’…

Music is music. If you put your music out, and you love it, and you’re passionate, and you work your ass off on it – you will get more people later.

We’ve got some really good videos out, “Moving On” and “Curse Curse”, and they’re probably two of the best two videos that we’ve ever had made for us. And we know that those videos are doing well around the world, when you see the young people turn up and go, “Who is this band?”

We are confident enough in our abilities and our arrogance that we know that we’re a live band. Generally, once people come see us, they come back. So it’s fantastic when we get that experience.

QRO: The ‘reunion’ has now lasted longer than the ‘break-up’/‘hiatus’ – does that feel like something that happened forever ago, or does it still feel like you all just got back together?

TB: Forever ago. It feels like a long time ago now.

And it was totally necessary. It was a finish – it wasn’t a hiatus, which was great, because it mentally allowed us to feel like we’d stopped. Which was really good for us, I think. And then when we came back, it was like we could appreciate it more than we ever had done.

QRO: Are you already thinking about the next album?

TB: Mmm-hmm. When you first rang, we were in the middle of writing a song, and we couldn’t stop. It was one of those songs that was growing and growing, which is why we’re a bit late, sorry. When we start jamming, we just have to see it through. So yeah, we started writing for the next album.

When you first rang, we were in the middle of writing a song, and we couldn’t stop.
QRO: James stared over thirty years ago – does that fact ever amaze you, maybe make you feel old?

TB: It does amaze me. I realize it’s like a marriage, really, in some ways.

Does it make me feel old? I like the quote, not Bernard Shaw quote, but the quote about age, where, “Everybody has to grow old, but you don’t have to be old.” I kind of think we’re pretty used to our energy to life, and that’s the important thing. That keeps us fresh. So I don’t really feel old in that way – in some ways I feel younger.

When I was younger, when James started out I was celibate, meditating every day, two hours a day, sixteen hours every weekend. I think for the first seven years of James – no alcohol, no drugs – I felt older then than I do now, in my attitude to life. Now I’m a little bit freer, a little bit wilder. So I feel it in reversal. I’m very lucky.

I had very bad health when I was a kid. I had an undiagnosed liver disease. My health got better and better as I get older. So I think I’m aging in reverse in some ways.

QRO: When did you go for the shaved head & goatee?…

TB: For the first time, probably around twenty. And then around twenty-eight, and then I finally committed to it around thirty-eight. I was an early adopter.

QRO: Do you at least wish you had a more Google-able band name?…

TB: I never think of it, but I see your point. That’s probably a very good marketing question – I never think of marketing…

QRO: Finally, as someone who appeared in one of the Christian Bale Batman movies, what you think Ben Affleck wearing the cowl?

There’s your headline, “BATMAN LOVES JAMES”…
TB: [laughs] That’s weird. I’ll choose it when I see it.

I did like the Christian Bale ones, they were fantastic – I doubt whether they’ll be topped. That will be quite a hard number to follow, I think.

My third day of filming, they scar me up for about two hours every day. The third day, Batman was in there, Christian Bale. And he stays in character. He gets dressed up, in his make-up, and walks over and stands over me, rather threatening, and he goes, “Are you Tim Booth?” And I go, “Yes.” “Of the band James?” “Yes.” “Your music really changed my life.”

I was sitting there thinking, ‘Wow – Batman loves our music!’ That was really nice.

There’s your headline, “BATMAN LOVES JAMES”…

As you might expect with a band that’s 32 years-old, James have experienced line-up changes, drug addictions, in-fighting, break-ups, reunions and almost every other rock ‘n’ roll cliché you could care to think of. But what separates James from their peers is that this is a band that has never lost its relevance (a remarkable feat when you consider they’ve survived such un-timeless trends as Madchester, baggy, Britpop and beyond).

So while their peers are currently rolling out nostalgia tours playing “the hits” to anyone that’s still willing to listen, James are back with their thirteenth studio album La Petite Mort (French for “the little death”).

I caught up with frontman Tim Booth ahead of the band’s sold-out Webster Hall show to talk life, death and football.

FT: One common theme on La Petite Mort is death and I know this is something you’ve sadly had to deal with recently…

Booth: It’s not “sadly” though, because it’s a fact of life. There’s birth and there’s death and they’re two different windows. Being at my mum’s death was actually an amazing revelation for me because I realized it was a birth. And that’s not even a spiritual idea; when it happened it really just felt like a birth.

FT: I know you’ve said that your mother’s death was just about the nicest way that anyone could go, pain free and surrounded by love.

Booth: She was ninety and she really wanted to go about six years earlier. You know, we’ve got this whole thing about prolonging life, but we’re prolonging life at the wrong end. I’d like to live long, but I wouldn’t like to live long in those last fifteen years, they don’t look so exciting to me [Laughs]. But if we could extend life when we’re in our twenties, that’d be nice.

FT: It would. So was writing the lyrics for this record therapeutic for you or was it difficult to confront your thoughts and emotions?

Booth: It wasn’t difficult. The words wrote themselves. Most of the lyrics I write write themselves and it was indeed therapeutic writing them. I don’t tend to think ahead so I just kind of threw myself into them and I’m very happy with them. But then of course when it came to having to sing them every night I went, “Oh shit.”

FT: Because you’re sharing very personal feelings with strangers?

Booth: No, I don’t mind that. It’s because some nights I’ll burst into tears and you can’t sing when you’re crying. Some nights I get the balance right with being really emotionally challenged and stirred up that it goes into the song, but you can’t control it because grief is a very strange thing. It comes in waves. Sometimes you can laugh about your mother dying and other moments you’re in tears. It’s very odd.

FT: I think that juxtaposition really comes across in the album, too. You’re dealing with a subject that many people would find morbid, yet the album doesn’t feel melancholy. I think “Moving On” must be one of the most uplifting songs about death ever written. Lyrically and musically.

Booth: We’ve always done that, where the band purposely play uplifting music to a heavy lyric. Take “Come Home” for example, “After thirty years I’ve become my fears/I’ve become the kind of man I’ve always hated” and yet that was in a pop song. So we’ve always worked with contrasts and contradictions. I believe paradoxes are the most fascinating statements about life. You can make a statement about life and the opposite can be equally true and that’s about as close as we can get to a real truth, when the opposite is also true. Our whole approach to this album was about celebrating life and not mourning death. It’s not a Western approach. It’s more of a South American one. That’s why we had the Day of the Dead imagery as artwork. Down there they talk to the dead, they take the piss out of them, they leave food out for them. It’s a much more tangible relationship.

FT: That’s a healthier way of dealing with death, I think.

Booth: I think so too. In the West it’s so hidden from us. When my dad died I was in New York and they promised me they’d keep the casket open until I got there and they didn’t. I really wanted to see him because I needed to say goodbye to him, not a box. I watched an amazing documentary years ago that’s stuck with me. It was filmed in a village in Bali and there was this old man that they thought was aged somewhere between 105-115, they didn’t know exactly, and he’d been a famous artist who worked according to the moon cycles. One day he called the village together and told them that, according to the moon, it was time for him to go and he lay down and died. And then the village passed his body around and they kissed him and they cried and they said goodbye. I thought to myself, “Holy fuck, that’s the way to go, that’s what we should be doing.”

FT: I think the video for “Moving On” profoundly captures what we’re talking about here. Was it a collaborative effort between the band and the director, Ainslie Henderson?

Booth: Yes and no. We’ve known Ainslie since he was about 19, and he’s been making these amazingly beautiful animations for a few years now. We’ve really wanted to work with him for a while and so we asked him to pitch a script for “Moving On.” The first one he sent over was crap so I rang him up and we talked about the song and I told him the story of my mum dying and the story of Gabrielle dying who was my mate that lived in New York and was one of the people I loved the most in the world. So Ainslie went away and thought about it and one day he was listening to the song on his headphones and he passed by a store with a ball of wool in the window just as the line “Time always unwinding” was playing. Two days later he sent me the fully formed storyboard.

FT: It deals with a difficult topic beautifully.

Booth: They’ve started showing it to kids who are dying in hospitals in England. Kids with terminal illnesses want to know about death because they’re dying, but the parents don’t want to talk about it because they don’t know what to say.

FT: Okay, let’s leave the topic of death for now because otherwise that’s going to be all we talked about. Do you have a favorite track on the record?

Booth: “Walk Like You.”

FT: And is there one that’s your favourite to perform live?

Booth: “Curse Curse.”

FT: There’s a lyric on “Curse Curse” that goes, “Turn the TV up/Copa del Rey/Messi shoots and scores/A hundred thousand came.” I think that line really captures the religious-like quality of football. What’s the story behind the lyric? Were you watching a Barcelona game when it came to you?

Booth: I’m very aware of the ecstasy that men get from a goal being scored. I love watching Barcelona, so Messi was easy, and also because sex is messy so the metaphor worked on all levels as I was comparing the goal to the sex happening in the hotel room next door. They’ve done a study on men that shows if your team wins your testosterone goes up at least twenty percent, but they’ve found it hard to study what happens when your team loses because most of the men are so depressed after a loss that they don’t even come back for the study.

FT: On the new record the band worked with a producer they’d never collaborated with before, Max Dingel. How was the process and what did Max bring to the table?

Booth: It was great. Max is a German who speaks great English. He’s very precise and he’s very patient, which you have to be to work with this band because everybody has different ideas and everyone’s very passionate about the music. Max is a real sonic maestro. He filled up the studio with all this old equipment from the sixties, seventies and eighties that he’s collected. It was great.

FT: Speaking of the eighties, in the early days it took James a few years to find mainstream success…

Booth: Seven years.

FT: …Was there ever a point where you thought of giving music up and doing something else?

Booth: Not really. There was one day when our drummer suggested it and we all looked at him and went, “Fuck off.” We were sure that what we were doing had value and that it would eventually be recognized. Our live audiences were growing in a very encouraging way, but the problem was we couldn’t get played on the radio or television. This was a long time ago when there weren’t many TV and radio stations. Even when we were playing to 5000 a night in Manchester, we still couldn’t get played. But then one day, Radio One suddenly decided to start playing us.

FT: Every album James has released since what would generally be considered the band’s heyday, the nineties, has charted in the top twenty in the UK Albums Chart. In your opinion, how has the band managed to stay so relevant?

Booth: Actually, we’re bigger now than we were in the nineties, just not in the U.K. In places like Peru and Mexico we play to 15,000 people, and these are territories we’d never been to before about five years ago.

FT: How about in the U.S.? How would you summarize James’ career here?

Booth: There was that moment where we nearly broke, but then we took three years to release an album and in that time the head of the record company changed and the new guy hated us. And that was the end of that.

FT: Getting back to my question about how James has managed to stay so relevant, what do you think your secret is?

Booth: We’re still hungry and we were never too successful. I think if you get really fucking successful it’s hard to motivate yourself. We’ve been successful, but we’re still a working band, you know, we still have to work our arses off. I think we’re very proud of what we’ve done and we want to maintain that and push it further. We’re not finished. I left in 2001, but that was different. The band was a mess because of addictions and various other things, but now we’re back and we’re the strongest we’ve ever been. We’re getting on better than we ever have done and musically we’re a force. So as long as that continues, we’ll continue.

FT: Do you still enjoy touring?

Booth: Oh yeah. I love touring, love it. Especially with a new record. But it’s scary as well because we only just about know the songs. We’re not a band that rehearses a lot, but we like the energy that that brings. It’s better than being over-rehearsed.

FT: You’ve often said that because of the liver disease you suffered as a young man you’ve had to be careful around the drink and drugs lifestyle that many rock and roll bands traditionally indulge in and, as a consequence, seek your highs elsewhere. Is one of those highs dancing?

Booth: Yes, dancing is my drug. I dance a lot and it brings up altered states. I drink once every three months and I take drugs once every two years, so I get high from dancing and meditating. Both of these things allow you to go deep into your psyche and find parts of yourself that are buried.

FT: I read somewhere recently that you’re currently writing a novel. How’s it going?

Booth: I am writing a novel but I haven’t touched it for about six months because of the new record. I’m not a natural writer and I have to fight a lot of procrastination. I can’t write on the road because I need silence to work.

FT: What’s the book about?

Booth: It’s kind of a ghost love story.

FT: What’s next in your burgeoning acting career? Any forthcoming roles we should be aware of?

Booth: I haven’t even got an agent. It’s weird, I moved to L.A. and I had this agent and I never really got put up for anything. If something comes my way I’ll take it, but I’m not looking for it because James has become pretty all-consuming.

FT: Before we finish, let’s talk football. Like me, you’re a Leeds fan. What do you make of Massimo Cellino?

Booth: [Laughs.] He seems very honest, but paradoxically, obviously dishonest simultaneously… probably… according to a judge anyway. I love his outbursts. They’re hysterical because he says and does things that nobody else would or could. Stuff like, “He’s fired!” and then a few days later, “No, he’s not fired and I should really fire myself” and then a week later, “No, he is actually fired.” Sadly, I think the Football League will try and get rid of him, which would be awful for Leeds. But if he stays it’ll be a roller coaster ride and we’ll see a lot of managers come and go. He’s passionate and who knows, maybe he’ll get us back into the Premier League.

FT: Do you think Leeds have any chance of going up this season?

Booth: I don’t think so. I also think not letting Neil Redfearn carry on was a mistake. The players seem to play for him. And what’s more, it’s hard for a new manger to come in after the team has won a few on the trot and then the new guy doesn’t get the results. It puts a lot of pressure on the new manager.

James new album, La Petite Mort, is out now.

AFTER 13 years apart, Sit Down rockers James have survived estrangement and grief to create La Petite Mort, an album Booth calls a ‘celebration of life’

To watch James on stage, firing on all cylinders and in the form of their lives, you’d never guess that the long-running Manchester band went six years without speaking to each other.

The unique history of the much-travelled modern rockers began before most of their current competitors were even a twinkle. The first compact disc was just being released when James formed in 1982, and they laboured in the cool indie margins for the better part of a decade before payday really arrived in the form of such ‘90s anthems as Sit Down and Sometimes, and albums that took them into the nation’s living rooms, like Seven and Laid.

“When our hearts get broken, if we don’t go into self-pity and get destroyed by it, your heart actually enlarges. It comes back bigger” – Tim Booth

But when they decided to call time on what was already an epic story in 2001 — quitting while they were ahead, or at least not as far behind as they had been when they were close to imploding two years earlier — the James collective dispersed in no uncertain terms.

They had almost no contact with each other until 2007, reuniting for the following year’s Hey Ma album. Ever since, they’ve been sparking like never before. Like their new album La Petite Mort (the 13th of their extraordinary shelf life), their live performance for BBC 6 Music at Maida Vale Studios last week showed a band making some of their best music and, guess what, liking each other a lot too.

“For me, it feels the best it’s ever been,” says lead singer Tim Booth. “We’ve had great periods, but our communication was never great. We had a lot of love, but we wouldn’t know how to express it. Now it’s like that, plus a maturity and an ability to communicate. Creatively, we can’t judge, but I think if this record had been released by a new band, we’d be hailed as the new Messiah.”

The new album also happens to be one of the most uplifting you will ever hear to be inspired by death. Booth wrote its lyrics in a state of surprisingly beneficial bereavement, after the death of first his mother, and then his close friend Gabrielle. Both on record and in conversation, he has the emotional depth to deconstruct the experiences.

At 32-year-old, most men and women are expected to have a realistic sense of their lives, their future as it matches up against their past, and their own mortality. But what about a band of that age? For more than three decades, Manchester’s James have weaved in and out of the trends, from Madchester to baggie to Britpop to whatever just happened in the 2000s, enduring at a time when most of their age are currently on nostalgia tours.

But somehow, perhaps inexplicably, James marked 2014 (and band age 32) with one of their finest musical efforts of their long career. La Petite Mort, out September 16 in North America, is a complex, layered, and emotive record that finds the band exploring modern electronic sounds and fresh compositions with great results. Frontman Tim Booth has juxtaposed the band’s jubilant vibe against some of the most personal lyrics of his storied tenure, touching on the death of his mother and best friend during the writing process to shape a sound and mood that is quintessential James without being a rehash of former successes.

Vanyaland reached Booth by phone at his Los Angeles home last month, right as news of the death of Robin Williams dominated global headlines. Taking the record’s theme of death and applying it to current events, we touched on a variety of topics, including Booth’s personal struggles and the band’s apparent rebirth. The interview is long, so we’ll keep our intro concise. We will say this: James La Petite Mort is one of the best records of the year, a very heavy and gravitational album that’s also uplifting and mobile. And it’s further proof of James’ enduring legacy as one of Britain most celebrated rock bands.

Michael Marotta: Hey Tim, congratulations on the new record, which is fantastic. But it’s also interesting to talk to you right now, as the record deals with many themes of death and personal loss, and the world is reeling from the death of two celebrities, Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall. Not to start this off on a morose topic, but what is it about death that is personal but also public at the same time…

Tim Booth: I think in the west, death is something that we often — and I’m speaking from experience in Europe and England the colder climates — sweep under the carpet. Death is removed from us all, it’s something that’s not really lived with in the way that tribal communities would have lived with it in the past. Maybe hot-blooded cultures live with it a bit more in the present. I’m thinking of Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations, they are a bit more embracing of the life and a direct reaction to the dead — they laugh with the dead, they play with the dead, they believe the dead are more present.

So for me, the two major experiences of death are when your parents die. When my father died, I was in America touring and had to get back to him. His casket closed by the time I got back, and I had asked them to keep it open, and I was really upset. I was unable to see his body, and I think that’s important for a young man or boy and anyone when you lose someone and how do you come to terms with this, when this person is no longer going to be in your life anymore.

So there’s so many aspects to this, I don’t know where to start. With Williams the celebrity death becomes public. Especially Robin Williams, I mean, of anyone who has died over the last number of years, he’s had a huge impact on a few generations, in many forms. The Fisher King is definitely in my Top 5 films of all time, but other people have Mork & Mindy, and other people have others–

Here in Boston it’s Goodwill Hunting.

He brought improvisation into people households, it wasn’t a well-known form of comedy before he came along. And then he’s this figure with a big heart, that’s how I always saw him, as very big-hearted kind of comic figure. But you could see the clown is there and the tears of the clown and all those type of archetype images of the sad clown with him and his having such a big impact people.

But celebrity deaths are weird, the whole celebrity thing is strange in itself the way our culture wants to live through other people or become close to other people without even really knowing who they are. It’s a strange relationship in itself, and when someone like that dies it’s even stranger.

Listening to La Petite Mort, it related to what was going on. But I wanted to trace it back to experiences with your mother. Dealing with death can breathe live into creativity as well as perspective. People see death as being final but in many ways it’s the opposite.

My experience with my mother dying — and she died during the writing of this album — and the big impact she had on the lyrics was that it felt like a birth. She was 90, she was ready to go, and I got back to her from America to England and comforted her and sang to her and she died in my arms. And it was incredible. And it felt like a relief. She had been in a home for a number of years and was not happy. And that whole experience changed my whole attitude, even with assisted suicide. She’d have wished to have gone about six years earlier, and I don’t see any reason why people don’t have the ability to choose when they want to go — if it’s an informed opinion.

It’s a hangover from religions where they try to control our bodies. We’re told this is a sin, and you get circumcised when you’re born and it’s a religious thing — religions have generally tied to control our bodies.

My mother dying like that and it being a really beautiful experience, like a birth, was shocking to me. I had no idea this was possible. People don’t talk about death as a beautiful experience or feeling like a birth and that what it was. When we came to make the video for “Moving On” with this animator [Ainslie Henderson], I talked to him about an hour about my mother dying and my best friend dying, and said you know, my mom’s death was like a birth. And he did this incredible animation video… I think it was one of the best videos I’d ever seen and I think he’ll win a BAFTA for it. I hope he does… I urge anyone to see this, especially anyone who is dealing with death — he just captured it.

After my mom died, about six months later one of my best friend’s died and it was a really different circumstance. I didn’t get to say goodbye and I flew to New York and didn’t get there in time and it was devastating. And it was probably what most people experience when they lose someone they love. So it was really interesting, I got the two experiences. But I tend to go towards naturally the more positive approach, celebrating life. Even with my friend who passed, she was an amazing teacher of this ecstatic dance work that I am trained in by her, and we her whole philosophy was “Whatever pain you experience, you turn into art, into dance, into song.”

You’d get these people who worked with her with these incredible wounds — you know, “I was abused as a child” — and she would look at them very squarely and say “Well, I’ll be expecting great art from you.” And I always found that amazing. Instead of feeding the sense of victimhood that would come up in those situations very keenly she would say I’m looking forward to what great songs and dances you’ll be bringing to my community. And I loved that about her.

So even with her passing I can go to that; I’ve created this album and a lot of the pain of this album came from losing her, less from my mom which was more the celebratory aspects of the record. The album is about death but it’s really about life and rebirth, and wanting to live with a more positive attitude. A song on the album, “Quicken The Dead,” starts with “Don’t let me choose/An easy life with death once removed/Anaesthetize the blues/Domesticated” — it’s like it makes me go “Right, live with passion, take every moment because you don’t know when its going to come.” I’m a person of age, I have a friend who had a stroke 3 weeks ago.

Oh wow…

And that’s like — that could be me. So just live with passion, live every moment. And that’s what I got from these experiences and that’s the passion behind the album. We called the album La Petite Mort, because we wanted a reference to death, and mort in French is death but Le Petite Mort is kind of an allusion to an orgasm; that post orgasmic state when you lose your ego and your ego dies for a moment. That’s why we chose that album title, it had a sense of humor to it; it wasn’t depressing. We chose the artwork because of its Day of the Dead imagery, the skull with incredibly bright colors. To indicate that were not looking at death from another morbid or depressed point of view, it’s a more positive point of view within the circle of life that we have no choice of living. We’re all going to die so you have to come to terms with it.

We had a friend of ours whose mother [was told she has] cancer just this morning. But now we have science that alerts us to cancer. Fifty years ago we didn’t have these markers; it’s a flag to remind you of your own mortality and you don’t know how much longer its going to be but it’s a definitely a flag that says your end is coming

And to appreciate it.

It gives people time to prepare. We all have cancer, we all have something. In “Quicken The Dead,” the chorus goes “Don’t you know we’re already dead!” And it’s sung in a really enthusiastic chorus [sings] and it’s like, this means this record is about embracing that and of course we fail. I’m grieving, as well, and it’s me trying to come to terms with all this.

Sorry that was an intense 15 minutes.

How different would the record have been had you not gone through these experiences?

Any record I write tends to reflect different aspects of my life or my friend’s lives. It’s just the way I write, I write fairly unconsciously and from the heart. So I get lyrics at 4 in the morning, I wake up almost dreaming them and then I try to continue in that state, semi-unconsciousness because I find the best lyrics come from that place. And I never sit down to write purposely about something, it just pours out. Obviously with very powerful experiences in that time period the lyrics poured out; the more intense experience, the easier it is to write about. I try to not censor or think about it. You just write about it and see what happens. Of course, it’d be a completely different record had those experiences not happened — God knows what I’d be singing about.

Was there a concerted effort to combat the lyrical theme with an uplifting sound, like heard on “Curse Curse”?

No, it tends to be what happens when we get into a room together. I am an introspective lyricist and some of our biggest hits had some pretty dark lyrics hidden in there — or not hidden, they’re just there. Someone said to me the other day “That ‘Sit Down,’ that’s a really sad lyric.” And I said yeah but it’s a huge celebratory anthem and that’s often how we… for me the most truthful statements about life are usually paradoxes, they are usually statements where, if you made a statement that was the opposite, that would also be true. That’s the nature of the world we live in, it’s the duality, and one of the things I love about James is that I’ll often be singing quite a dark introspective lyric and the band may be pumping, completely going in the opposite direction. And we love those kinds of conflicts and clashes because that feels quite true to life.

Is the band aware of what you’re singing about?

It varies. Sometimes I don’t think at all, sometimes I don’t know what I’m singing about! And I can literally discover it a year later – “Oh, that was about that! I never got it…”

It was so deep inside you, the real meaning.

Yeah. Literally if I’m writing from the unconscious. I’m sometimes going, “Fuck, what have I written this for? I hope this isn’t going to happen to me.” I once wrote a song [“Blue Pastures,” off 1997’s Whiplash] about somebody going off into the mountains in the snow, and he was lying down and committed suicide, and it came really quickly, the lyric, in came in one 20-minute jam, and then another 20-minute jam, I got the whole lyric. And I was sitting there going, well, I wouldn’t have chosen to have written this one but this is what has come out. And it sounded great to me, the song, and literally the week before we released it, my friend who I was living with, her mentor went out into the mountains and laid down in the snow and committed suicide.

And she took that song to the wife, who said “How did he know about my husband’s character?” I had written about his psychology and they played that song at his funeral, and literally it wasn’t released, I had to have it sent to them. She wanted to ring me and talk to me about how I knew her husband’s state of mind. Because I had got it and I had got it a year earlier.

So, I’ve had a couple to that point, where you go “holy wow.” Or you name an album Whiplash and two weeks into the first tour you get whiplash! I’m careful with words now, because I know their power for me, I’m singing them every day, they are mantras, and you can really create things. I really don’t censor at this level, but I once wrote a song about me getting killed and I decided that I wasn’t going to sing that.

So the obvious question is, you got Laid quite a bit in the early ’90s then, right?

Speaking of Laid and Whiplash and Seven,some of the reviews for La Petite Mort call it a “return to form,” or “classic James.” Does that feel weird, where people want to connect it to a previous period of the band even though you’ve been releasing new music [since 2008’s Hey Ma]? Compliments are nice, but this isn’t a “comeback record.”

It is always weird. We’ve gotten used to it over time. What you see is that a certain period of your music gets accepted in a certain country. It’s often being the peak, usually when you break. In England, they usually think “Sit Down” is our big song, in America they’ve never heard of “Sit Down” and they think “Laid” is our big song. And in Portugal they think “Sometimes” is our big song and in Greece it’s “Getting Away With It” and in South America they think they album Hey Ma is our big record, and it’s like, go figure.

It’s great for us because we can go to different countries and play different songs. And we have a setlist of 80 or 90 possible songs that we can get together in the state of one soundcheck, and the setlist changes every night and it keeps things fresh. We know that Hey Ma has some amazing tracks on it, six or seven we can play live in any concert because they stand up to anything else, but Hey Ma never got any attention in America so of course people are going to write that.

I accept that praise, it happens with most bands, but of course we don’t neglect our other babies. It’s great that people are responding to this record is such a positive way; it clearly has a sound that is fresh and breaking through. The “Moving On” video is really getting us attention, and the “Curse Curse” video .

That’s an incredible track. I wanted to ask… this sounds like a James record, and your voice is what a lot of people relate to. Listening to the record, in opener “Walk Like You,” there’s a part at about 1:15, where you sing “Whine like you,” and to me that’s when it first feels like a James record. And you know it’s seven minutes of “Walk Like You,” but the last 90 seconds is some of the greatest music James ever created, it’s so organic. Then “Curse Curse” come on and hits you with this EDM sound, which for a band that’s been around for decades to sound that fresh — was there any nervousness or hesitation. to approach that kind of electronic sound after such a long legacy of modern rock?

Uh, no.

Sorry I just threw a lot at you there.

Your description gave me chills, thank you, because that’s exactly how we see it. We insisted on “Walk Like You” being the opening track, seven minutes long, probably one of our favorite tracks. And we did that running order very purposely, to really kind of, you know, get in people’s faces. Most bands want to stick on their first single as the first track and we went with a seven-minute, pretty tough track.

Right!

You’re going to have to come to terms with James in that seven minutes and then also to hit people who think “Oh OK, it’s got a familiar James thing” then to also pull the rug under people’s feet with the second track, and go “Well hang on!” I’m really loving that you got to listen to it in that way, because that’s exactly how it was meant.

The lyric “Let’s inspire/Let’s inflame/Create art from our pain/Find a love that’s as deep as it’s holy,” that whole section, it’s inspired by my friend who died. As I said earlier in the interview, her thing was saying “Ok show us your wound, now show me great art, or a great dance, or great sculpture or song.” And that whole section is really based on her philosophy there. So that’s great that you brought that up.

And “Curse Curse,” well first of all remember that we have a song like “Come Home” which was a dance track, really. It’s got that groove beat, James Brown, baggie thing, and it’s got that keyboard riff. And that was when our keyboard player [Mark Hunter] arrived in James, and you can hear a song like “Sometimes,” if it’s tweaked a little bit it can become a dance song.

Absolutely.

What happened on this record is, our keyboard player is a genius, from our point of view, and he’s always the shyest, quiet, retiring man, and his keyboard is too fucking quiet, and every time, we are in the room we can’t hear him. And so in the past we haven’t been able to build songs around him. And this time every single rehearsal we insisted he turn up so we can hear him. So the record has more piano, keyboard, than probably any other James record because we outed him. We dragged him kicking and screaming out of the closet. And he’s got those riffs, he’s got that dance aspect to him, and it was really great to go “C’mon run with this, Mark!” And that’s where “Curse Curse” came from.

Lyrically, it’s different from anything on the record. I got the opening bit “In my hotel room/Sounds from next door/Someone’s getting laid/God’s name’s proclaimed/The end is on its way.” And once you get a lyric like that you know the rest of it will have to be funny, and stand up to that, and gonna have to be sexually perverse and playful.

“Messi shoots and scores/A hundred thousand came!” That’s a different type of sexual peak.

Thank you I’m really proud of that lyric. I took a long time writing that lyric, it’s a different kind. Some of it just came unconsciously like “time to wake the floor boards.” I probably sang that in the first jam, and people in the band went “That’s a great lyric!” And I went “It’s okay isn’t it, OK I’ll leave it in.” I don’t know what it means, but it’s appropriate for that song. And we have all those parts in that song, too many parts, really, because that song screams to be a hit single, but typically James we had too many interesting moments in it to really streamline it into a blander song, what a single would need to be. We released it as a single but it’s got so many parts, it’s a bit ridiculous.

Same as “Walk Like You,” which can go on for seven minutes because it’s got several different sections. It came from an hour-and-20-minute improvisation, where I went through that one and marked all the sections of vocals I loved, and somewhere in the first three minutes, and somewhere in the last hour-ten-minutes, said how can we get from this to this to this to this in an eight minute song? And literally we bolted these pieces together and created “Walk Like You” and the structure took us a long time, but we managed to make it sound organic which is not an easy thing. We create every song from improvised jams.

You can hear it in that track. It’s seven minutes long but there’s a real payoff in the last two. First thing I thought was “I need to hear this live.” And it segues into an electronic song, but there’s a real electronic rhythm to “Walk Like You.” It’s organic and there’s a trumpet and it has these James-isms, but it has the energy of a live performance.

I went to the producer and said “I want this song to be nine-minutes long.”

Can you imagine in 2014 with everyone’s ADD wishing a song was longer? I wish the last two minutes went on for another two.

Thank you.

Maybe that’ll be the remix.

Live, we’re up to 10 or 11 minutes, it has a life of its own.

That’s incredible.

The thing is, we improvise in creating the songs and when we’re playing live there’s room to improvise, there’s room for the intro, that piano riff, and it doesn’t come back into the bloody song, but to me it’s the hook and its like, I’d actually would like to hear a single version of it because I think there’s potential in that.

The trouble there is that people get lazy. You have to find the right person to edit it. Suede released a radio edit of “Stay Together” in 1994 and it just cut the song off at the fade out after three minutes. It a song is cut in half just for an edit it won’t have the same impact.

That’s the thing with those edits, it’s really hard to let go of the one you fell in love with. You have to listen to it for days to forget the one you fell in love with originally, or you’re just clinging to it. Now playing live we’re up to 12 minutes and we’ve fallen in love with the live version. But that’s how music should be; it keeps evolving. If a song really had life and connection it should continue to keep evolving and travel across time, and that’s what great about music when you know your songs have been doing work in different cultures over time. That’s amazing… when you go to a country you’ve never been to, like Peru, and you have people turning up to the gig and you haven’t got a clue how it’s going to go. Mexico — 12,000 people at the gig the first time we went, and we booked 2,000 seat venue and we had to keep changing the venue. Nobody told us we had an audience in Mexico.

Those are the great surprises of a band that’s been around 30-odd years. You go “Oh great, the music’s been doing the work in different cultures and we don’t even know about it! We keep getting requests for South Africa and Australia and we are huge there and we don’t even know it, we’ve never been to Australia; we’ve been once to South Africa and we did have a big audience turn up. It’s crazy how this works. It’s exciting how this works.

Earlier we touched on themes of death, but do you see an end to James on the horizon? It seems like you’re full-functioning after 32 years.

We’re in the best place of James that I’ve ever been in, since we came back [in 2008] this has been the most enjoyable time in James for me. Everyone’s much more on same page, appreciating it, so that’s been wonderful. My fear for me is how long can I keep performing the way I I’m performing, like dancing or jumping into the audience, that to me makes me nervous.

In terms of, I don’t want James to go out when I can’t do that stuff, from this point of view, when you see the “Curse Curse” video, it really captured an amazing moment in a live gig that you won’t get from another live band. We really caught something about what we do live. As long as physically, I can still do that, James will continue for me. When we get to the point that I can’t, I’m not sure. I know what our performances are and I know how we break down barriers between the audience and the band in a way that most bands that won’t and can’t. There aren’t many people who do the same thing.

That’s my only real fear. I’m a dancer, I’m somebody very much into the physical, its part of our show and what we do.

And it’s another example of coming to terms with our limitations and mortality.

Yeah, which at the moment I am not.

Manchester alt/indie band James is set to release their fantastic new album La Petite Mort in the US on September 16th. We love the album and wanted to get insight into everything that went into it. Tim Booth was nice enough to chat with us and give us the stories and inspiration for every song on the album. Check out our interview below, as well as the video for “Moving On,” and be sure to pre-order the album HERE.

Walk Like You

I think I wanted this one to be longer. [laughs] We were thinking about making this super long – when we play it live now we play for about 9-10 minutes. This was originally a long jam that had so many good parts that we had to make a long song out of, with all the vocal parts and pieces. We set about trying to piece it together and make it sound organic and flow.

Overall, when I write lyrics, I write unconsciously. I never sit down to write about an issue. I will wake up with lyrics often at 4:00 in the morning and start to write down what I get. Or when I’m jamming the song I’ll get some lines that just have to be in the song. I feel like I’m a conscious ego listening to unconscious babblings when I write lyrics. What the lyrics are about I don’t always know. Sometimes lyrics become clear to me a year later, sometimes they bubble up in my subconscious and need to be expressed. “Walk Like You,” if I’m asked consciously what it’s about, is written from a point of view of a teenager or child looking at their parents wondering “are we just some stamped out, plastic mold of our parents? What individuality do we have? I don’t really want to walk like you. I want to have my own voice.”

There are a few specific lines, like when my baby was born, his eyes closed and he was taken to the prem ward (pre-mature baby ward). He was stuck on all these drips and he was in quite a lot of distress. He turned his head to me as I sang to him. He calmed down and opened his eyes for the first time, and when I looked in his eyes, I could see the night sky, I could see the universe in his eyes. So that opening line “This universe is in your eyes, inside the galaxies collide,” came from that moment. Looking in my son’s eyes and going “Holy shit, where did you come from?” As kids and people in general, we know much more than we think we know. It’s all in the unconscious, connected to intuition and instinct.

Curse Curse

Very different type of song – very playful song. When I got that opening line “sounds from next door, someone’s getting laid,” I immediately knew I had to continue with that slightly ‘witchy’ theme. Those are tough songs to write, they can get tedious. Only a few can write them well, Leonard Cohen, Jarvis Cocker, a couple of others. I was like “oh shit, this one’s going to need a lot of work.” That was much more consciously written than the other ones, because I knew I had to tell a story of this person in a hotel room, listening to the couple next door having sex. He’s trying to create something, but he’s very sexually frustrated and very curious about what’s going on next door. I wanted to get that ‘frustrated artist’ who wants to lose himself to abandon but is actually trying to create something. It’s about someone that wants to lose himself to lust and instincts but at the same time is trying to keep his shit together – it’s a playful song.

Moving On

“Moving On” was about the passing of my mom and my best friend. My mom was 90 and had been wanting to die for a long time, so it actually ended up being a beautiful experience, holding her for a few days and singing to her. It was an incredible moment when she passed. It felt like a birth. That was what I conveyed to the animator of the video. He took that and ran with it. I’m so proud of that video, we think he (Ainslie Henderson) should win awards for that video.

It really is. I never knew I could care so much about a piece of string!

Yes, and in three and a half minutes! It’s crazy. That video captured something universal in that video. Nobody had told me that you could experience death in a beautiful way. It was actually uplifting as well as sad of course. Then my friend died about 6 months later and it was devastating. I flew to New York and was too late to say goodbye, and hadn’t said all I needed to say to her. Her death is in there as well in the song. I wrote more directly about her in the song “All I’m Saying.”

Gone Baby Gone

In retrospect, and I didn’t realize it at the time, the song is about a couple who are friends of mine that split up. The whole theme of the album is “ending but beginning.” On many different levels, death, or the end of a relationship in this case. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have said “5 year relationship” in the song, I should have said in the song 10 or 15 year relationship, but not that many people make it that far and can relate!

Frozen Britain

It’s about a man who thinks his life to be dead, then falls in love and has a passion that wakes him up and gets him out of his coffin. The line “make a boy out of me” hints that this guy is obviously older, maybe a mid-life crisis situation. I was thinking about American Beauty as a perfect template for that story. That was very unconscious with the lyrics. I like the song, but I look at the lyrics sometimes for that song and go “What was that?” [laughs]

That’s interesting though that so much of your lyrical work is unconscious.

Yeah, for me it’s like “we know everything, somewhere inside of us.” Getting to that knowledge and wisdom is very hard.

Interrogation

This was directly dealing with a revelation I had, where I was judging someone very harshly. I realized to some degree, I was judging myself. It was one of those “Ah, shit moments,” or “A-ha!” moments, depending on how you want to look at it. It was a painful revelation that I put into song about my judge and my critic and how when I criticize other people the most it’s usually that they carry something that I’ve discerned in myself.

Bitter Virtue

I think it was inspired (and God knows if I’m right), but some of my thinking was watching people like Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga get slagged off for expressing their sexuality. When do you see men getting slagged off for their sexuality? Why is it always women? It’s the usual religious patriarchy values that are still filtering through the culture, even if we’re not religious. We somehow seem to have absorbed this idea that there’s something wrong with women expressing their sexuality. In probably half the world, women still probably get beaten, stoned, or exiled for expressing their sexuality.

All the papers in our country slam it and call it “adultery.” For all you know, that person fell in love with somebody. We’re so uptight about it. All the studies about marriage show that it is not a natural phenomenon. It’s a pretty difficult thing to maintain. We have a 46% divorce rate in England. 60% of women in England said they would leave their husbands if they could afford to. So we’re not talking about a huge happiness success rate with marriage. We are pretty polygamous as beings, as monkeys, which we are. Darwin said we descended from apes, but really we are apes, and we tend to forget that.

“Bitter Virtue” has that religious intolerance aspect to it – dealing with the boundaries of sexuality that men have imposed. Six women were recently stoned in Iran for adultery, it’s just ridiculous when you take a look at how women are treated all over the world.

All In My Mind

As you can see, there’s a lot going on in my mind [laughs]. The song is about bringing about the dead wood in a relationship in order for it to thrive. So again the theme of death, but this time in a very positive way, it’s like clearing the dead wood, the stuff that needs to be moved or shifted. The conflict between thinking you have to keep secrets or the things you think you can’t show your beloved, but the things you have to be able to show them in order for the relationship to thrive.

Quicken The Dead

I’m beginning to see this one as the overall thing I got from losing two people that I loved. I actually lost someone else that year as well, but they weren’t as close. It’s really about how in Western culture we try to sweep death under the carpet, especially when we’re younger. Death is a thing that’s really removed from our lives. “Quicken The Dead” is about saying “I want to live with death on my shoulder, because that will make me live life more passionately, more fully, more in the present.”

There’s something about mortality being already within us. We’re already dead. It was kind of a thing soldiers would say to themselves before they went into battle to garner courage. They’d say “don’t you know we’re already dead?” That would enable them to act heroically.

All I’m Saying

This was a week after my friend Gabrielle died. I dreamt of her, and of course in the dream she was well, strong, proud and brilliant. Then I woke up and realized she was dead and I was devastated. The song is what I wished to say to her before she passed and I didn’t get to say to her.

I’m always curious as to how albums end. When did you decide to close the album with this song? Did you know right after you wrote it or was it a decision that came later?

It was later on in the process. We work really hard on the running order, we’re old school. Rather than just writing good songs, we make albums and we want to tell a story. There was a definite narrative in the order we chose and “All I’m Saying” made a fitting ending.