Tag Archives: The Night Before

“What’s with all you English guys coming in today?” the coffee shop guy asked Jim Glennie, bassist and founding member of the band James, as we waited to purchase some drinks.

“I’m in a band called James,” he said. “We’re playing down the street tonight.”

“Did you guys have a hit in the ’90s?”

“Yeah, ‘Laid,’” I said, jumping in.

“Right on,” the guy said. “I’m going to check it out on my iPhone while you drink your coffee.”

James is a band I never thought I would see live. A fan since the early ’90s, I followed the band up to its demise following 2002’s Pleased to Meet You when infighting derailed the group. After reforming seven years later with Hey Ma (with guitarist Larry Gott in tow, he quit the band in 1995), James is now touring behind the excellent mini-albums The Night Before/The Morning After. Before a triumphant show at Portland’s Wonder Ballroom, I got to catch up with Glennie and Gott during a lively chat where we talked about setlists, androgynous album covers and politics. I’m very proud to present the Spectrum Culture interview with Jim Glennie and Larry Gott of James.

I’m sure a lot of people have said to you guys, “I never thought I would get the chance to see James in concert.” Is that something you guys hear a lot?

LG: Um… yeah! I think that was the overwhelming feeling here. Especially since a lot of people seemed to have discovered us since we last came here through the advent of YouTube and Spotify and things like that. The American audience has gotten to know James quite well and they’re like, “Oh shit! We get to see that lot again!” When we came back two years ago, there was a real resurgence, if you like. We heard it a lot on that tour because it was the first time we’d been here in a long time.

The group had also been broken up for six years. But you were gone for longer, Larry.

LG: Yeah, I was gone a lot longer. A lot longer. I’ve got a doctor’s note (laughs).

Jim, you and I just had that experience at the bar with the guy who asked if you guys do that song “Laid.” Does that happy a lot here in America?

JG: That’s common for over here, which is absolutely fine. The great thing about us is that every country we’ve had success in has a different song that is connected with the people. In the UK, “Sit Down” is a big tune and “Sometimes” is number one in Portugal. In Greece, it’s “Say Something.”

LG: In South America, it’s “Getting Away with It.”

JG: Yeah, very, very different songs. Which is great because you don’t have this weighty albatross around you. I think coming back to this tour – and hopefully we’ll be coming back around relatively quickly next year – we know that we would be rounding up a lot of people who knew James from the Laid period. Although we did a lot of stuff after that, it’s still a favorite for people. People are reconnecting with that and we are pulling them in and they are learning about the stuff we’re doing now. That’s fine.

You guys have 30 years of material to draw on when writing up a setlist. Do you tailor it to the location that you’re in?

LG: Yeah, we do to some degree. Like “Señorita” is a song that’s not often in the setlist, but if we’re playing in either Greece or South America…

JG: Spain…

LG: Yeah, Spain. That’s a really well-known song there, so we will put it in. So yeah, we do tailor the setlist. Things like “Sit Down” are an ace card to play at a particular point in the game. Depending on where you put it in the set, you can play with it in different ways because it has such a high expectation. Let’s say, in England for example, we might start the set with it. Me and Tim [Booth] walk through the audience playing acoustic guitar and voice. Then it becomes a big sing-along type of it. It’s an unexpected beginning to the show. If you save it for the end of the set, it becomes the big hit at the end of the set. Or you can put it right in the middle of the set. You can play a really slow, new song and then you give them the most well-known song. So, you can play with it. It becomes a juxtaposition. So in different countries, there are different songs that suit that same purpose.

So if you try that with “Sit Down” here is that akin to Iggy Pop jumping off the stage and the audience stepping away?

LG: (laughs) Not quite as disastrous but I get the connection.

JG: We’ve changed the set a lot on this tour. We’ve introduced loads and loads of songs like historical old ones that we haven’t played for thousands of years. Obviously lots off the new record. We’re playing about two hours. The main set is 17 songs with some encores. We added up yesterday how many different songs we’ve played on this tour. So far, we’ve played 46 different songs.

LG: In concert, so not including the soundcheck ones we haven’t played live yet.

JG: We’re probably at 50 then.

Who determines that?

JG: It depends on who writes the setlist. Me and Saul [Davies] did last night. Tim does it quite often, but he seems to have drifted out in the last few gigs at least. But then other members of the band start asking why certain songs are omitted the minute the list is written.

LG: I can’t be bothered (laughs).

JG: Last night was painful because there was at least six songs that people, both individually and collectively, were saying, “Oh, why is that not in there?” You just can’t play them all!

So who advocates what song the most?

JG: It just depends.

On your mood?

JG: Well, you just get fed up with stuff and that is why you change the setlist. Because when you play something and it starts to get a little bit stale, you rest it. Also, we like to put spikes in the set where we don’t normally do it. Spikes where you really, really have to work to make it work. If you play two big hits or two well know songs, you do know if you make some mistakes people will sing along and you will get away with it. You stick a new song in and it has 100 percent to compete with those. Or if you put in a song people don’t know, you’ve really gotta work. Because you reach a certain point in the set and you’ve gotta dig in and you gotta find all of your resources and all your focused attention to make that as good as the things to come alongside of it. And we like that challenge. We like keeping ourselves on our toes like that.

LG: Other variables can come into it, as well. Last night, we played in Vancouver. The set that Jimmy and Saul wrote turned out to be quite a challenging set for the audience. For the first two-thirds, there weren’t many well-known songs in there. Some great stuff and the crowd was with us all the way. They listened to the quiet songs. You could hear a pin drop at some points and they really responded. But when we played a song they knew really well, they really cheered whether they knew it or not. They won us over, do you know what I mean? With a challenging set. Then at the end there was a couple of well-known songs. Then for the encore, we had three songs we were going to do. The first one was another not-so-well-known song, but it’s a brilliant live song and we love to play it. But we went, “Nah, we won’t do that one.” But we put in something that they know. It’s like we treated them.

JG: It’s like, “We’ll let them enjoy this little bit. We won’t make them work any harder. Instead of them sitting there listening, we’ll just let them party now.”

LG: Let’s just have a party.

JG: We’re flexible still. When we’re up there, we’ll just stop and change things.

LG: We’ve changed things halfway through the set. We’d get halfway through the set and…

JG: It was just another dip, wasn’t it?

LG: We don’t want to go down that road. So we just pulled that out.

JG: Sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it will be changed right before we go on stage and it makes it a real pain in the arse. It sets a really unpleasant tone before we go on the stage (laughs).

At this specific junction of the tour, which songs are you guys really excited about playing live?

LG: Of the new songs, “Dust Motes.” It’s just beautiful and fragile. It sounds wonderful. I just love playing that one. Of the old songs? “Laid.” I just love playing “Laid.” In America, I just love playing “Laid.” When you hit those opening chords, crowd just… You know, I don’t even realize I’ve played it, by the time we get to the end of it because I’m just feeding off what the crowd is doing. I’m looking around and see happy faces, arms held aloft, heads just thrown back.

JG: We get stage invasions as well, so we just have to go along with that. It adds chaos and mayhem to it.

Tim doesn’t do the adulterated lyrics on the stage here?

Both: No.

I remember when that song came out you had to change the lyrics for the radio.

LG: That was so stupid. That was really…

If you were singing about shooting someone, it would have been all right.

LG: Of course, it would.

JG: Yeah, sex: no. (laughs) Women having an orgasm? No! Enjoying yourself? No, definitely not!

LG: I do wish he changed it to “hums” instead of “sings.” She’s on top.

JG: He did once, didn’t he?

LG: (sings) “She only hums when she’s on top.” Everybody would have not gotten the joke.

JG: He did a few different ones when we did TV shows, changed it around a little bit.

LG: Yeah, but for the video, it was “sings.”

JG: Was it?

How about songs for you, Jim?

JG: The new stuff. The new stuff is exciting and a bit scary. It’s good fun. Plus some of the old stuff we’ve rarely played before.

LG: “Bring a Gun” off of Seven has come back.

JG: Yeah, we’ve played that twice on the tour, haven’t we? We haven’t played that for thousands of years. But yeah, stuff like that.

LG: You rediscover an old song. It says, “Play me! Play me!” But you never do. But then you play it.

JG: We played “God Only Knows” the other day. We played that once on this tour.

LG: Yeah, we played that in Salt Lake City. It’s one of the most religious cities. And there was a Christian rock band playing next door. It was that kind of vibe. There’s a Christian rock band next door, we’re in Salt Lake City, so we did “God Only Knows.”

So you have the lineup back that played on Laid. Can you briefly describe to me what you were wearing on the album cover?

LG: A banana. I was wearing a banana.

JG: I was wearing a stretchy miniskirt that was my girlfriend’s. Because it was stretchy I could get into it. And a fairly tight, chiffon, long-sleeved black top which was a bit of trouble to get into but it looked okay in the photo. That was about it really.

LG: He wussed out because what he wore was essentially a pair of black shorts and a black T-shirt.

JG: My girlfriend only ever wore black, so I was lucky! So I didn’t get all the bright, garish, old duncey look. I got the cute and sexy and sleek. I was quite happy with that.

LG: I wasn’t taking the thing very seriously at all so I set it up a little bit by wearing the ridiculous, flowery frock. I wore a straw hat as well.

JG: The thing is, the idea wasn’t to get an album sleeve at the photo shoot. That was just one idea at a three-day photo shoot. That was the steps of the Marseilles cathedral opposite a police station. So the fact that a bunch of English guys wearing dresses on the steps of the Marseilles cathedral. I’m amazed we didn’t get arrested. The reason we’re eating bananas is because we were starving. We had been taking photos for most of the day and our manager went out to get food and came back with bananas. That’s all he could find. So, it wasn’t a set-up photo shoot for the cover, at all. The idea was we’d put on our girlfriends’ clothes, we’d have a bit of a laugh and see what comes out of it. So it wasn’t like, “Let’s do the album sleeve. Now, what are you going to wear and how is that going to look here?” It was much more casual than that.

Now that you’re all back together again, has anyone floated the idea of revisiting that?

JG: The dresses?

LG: Andy [Diagram], the trumpet player, he always wears dresses.

JG: He was the only one not in that photo.

I meant recreating the album cover.

JG: Recreating the album cover? NO! No one has suggested that yet, funnily enough. Thank the Lord (laughs).

LG: Oooh, ooooh, I just involuntarily shivered.

JG: Did you?

LG: Who brought you? Who invited you to show up with these stupid, fucking ideas?

Do you think that anyone would want to see that?

JG: Us wearing the dresses again?

Yes.

JG: I’m not quite sure. I’m not quite sure. It might look slightly creepy now with age.

(Larry Gott begins rolling a cigarette)

Does the cigarette rolling mean that we have to wrap this up?

LG: No, it’s just preparation. In this country, you never know when your smaaaaaall window of opportunity to have a cigarette shows itself. Usually by the time you roll your cigarette, that opportunity is gone. So I roll them ahead of time.

I’ve noticed in a lot of Tim’s lyrics, I’ve noticed a lot of references to movie stars that aren’t alive anymore. Debonair types like Yul Brynner, Richard Burton, Ava Gardner. Are you guys film buffs?

LG: Well, yes. Tim is probably a bigger film buff than we are.

JG: He’s done acting. There’s that side of him and he’d love to do more acting. So, I suppose to some degree, I think he is.

Love and politics seem like two big themes but they have become more explicit. For example, “One of the Three” is about a hostage situation but it also serves as a metaphor for the Holy Trinity. But now, the lyrics in “Hey Ma” are pretty overt. Does the situation in the world now dictate more overt messages?

LG: I don’t know. It’s always a tricky one, the idea of a protest song. If you do it poorly, it can be a death knell in some respects. It’s like using your art to ram your message down people’s throats. We have enough of that already. But on the flip side, the vacuity of modern pop music may make you say something serious. Not necessarily shocking, but at least something thought-provoking. And “Hey Ma/ The boys in body bags are coming home in pieces,” is thought-provoking and it’s shocking. I’m glad that he made that song. He feels a little uncomfortable with that song because he thinks it’s political, meaning he wrote it as a reaction to the Bush and Blair machinated hell and what they forced unwilling voters and the population into. I know in England, there was a massive demonstration that said, “Not in my name, Mr. Blair.” It was his reaction to that. But for me, it’s just a love song from a mother to her dead son. Whoever that may be. Whether he’s American, an English person or an Iraqi or an Afghani who’s lost her child.

It’s pretty fucked that your country waited so long for a Labour Party PM to get into power but then you get this guy who puts people into harm’s way.

LG: Yeah, that was a little bit shocking.

JG: Thatcher was so far right that you could be Tony Blair and still appear left wing.

Same thing here with Obama.

LG: Exactly.

I guess Blair did help broker the peace in Northern Ireland.

JG: Ed Miliband. That’s a great left wing move. He was up against his brother David to become Labour Party leader. David was the clear favorite and he’s very centrist, very much a Blairite. His brother Ed isn’t. Ed is from the far left wing and Ed won. It’s a good start.

Another lyrical question. I notice in James songs there are a lot of interesting phrases that sound like colloquialisms but they’re not. Like “Cut the Herman free from the Hesse” and “Knuckle too far.” Things like that that people don’t normally say, but somehow you guys are able to pull them off and make it sound like they are part of the idiom. Does Tim use strange phrases like that?

LG: No, in everyday language he doesn’t tend to. But you’re right. When he is faced with the challenge of writing a lyric, he’s driven by stealing away from colloquialisms, clichés, normal rhyming couplets. He looks at his lyric and re-writes his lyric until he finds the more left-field or the more esoteric way of saying what he wants to say. He does tend to come up with these phrases. But they sound familiar, yeah. You’re right. Like “Dust Motes.” It’s not something in everyday language yet it is all the day around us. You get little floaters in your eyes, little things that you see when the sunlight streams through the window. It’s all those little dust motes.

As they prepared for their Los Angeles gig at the Music Box on Hollywood Boulevard, veteran Mancunian outfit James, as they frequently do, allowed for a group of fans to purchase a VIP package that allowed them to watch the band’s soundcheck. As the rehearsal session ended and the fans dispersed, singer Tim Booth and company headed downstairs to their dressing room. Booth and Jim Glennie were readying to rap with FILTER about theIr unusual set selection, the highlights of their current tour and favorite English football team, when a female fan who had traveled from Eastern Europe to see the show was ushered into Booth’s dressing room. She gave him a book of art she drew, dedicated to the band. “We have the most thoughtful and considerate fans,” said Booth emotionally, as he flipped through the book. “They are have the biggest hearts and that’s why we love them so much.” With fans who travel as far Peru and Brazil to see them, James’ understanding of its fan base and how to put on a great rock show is what differentiates the band from many of its peers.

Having played music for so many years, do you guys find it tough to mix it things up each night? If so, do you do it for your own sanity and for the sake of entertaining the die-hard fans?

Tim Booth: I remember in ’74 there was a great article by Martin Amis that reviewed the Rolling Stones and he talked about how the set was the same and each song was played nearly identical. And he said, “There’s no life in there. Where’s the communication with the audience? This is not a living thing, it’s a machine.” I thought that was a fucking amazing statement and I was really young and it stuck in my head. The founder of James, besides Jim, was called Paul [Gilbertson] and Paul loved taking risks. We named the band James because we wanted to confuse people because there was no band named after a human then. So for the first gig, they put “James” on the posters, “not a poet” in brackets. I said, “Wouldn’t it be a joke if I went out and read a poem to the audience?” and they’d be like, “Oh shit, it is a poet!” [laughs] Paul said, “Great idea,” so I had 40 minutes before the gig to write the poem. I went on and read the poem and then the guys came on and rescued me. Then after that, we’d do dares to open every show in order keep each other on our toes as a gag. We’d be in the wings pissing ourselves…

Jim Glennie: We’d be looking at each other, thinking that the audience must be like, “What the hell is going on? We have to sit through these two guys for the next half hour!”

Booth: So it came from that. It would give us such a rush of adrenaline and the audience would see it and get that something really fucking unusual was going on and there’s no safety net. Most importantly, they’d love it! It would drag everyone into the moment, and the moment is where the power is. A band going through the same fucking set every night… There’s no moment there. Even Leonard Cohen—God bless him—who is one of my heroes. I saw him for the first time at the Manchester Opera House and I cried through nearly half the set and it was a religious experience. But by the third time I saw him in L.A., it was the same songs and I felt really, really cheated. I can’t knock him because he’s Leonard Cohen and he’s earned everything he gets, but its criticism with love to the master.

That being said, what’s the dare or special surprise for the audience tonight?

Booth: As we showed some fans during the soundcheck, we dragged a choir in. I went to them and asked, “Do you mind if we drag a choir in?” And they went, “Oh, shit.” But we’ve been on fire as a band and they asked, “Are you sure it’s not going to disrupt what we’re doing?” So we had an hour rehearsal at soundcheck and they’re in.

Are you going to be playing a lot of the new stuff tonight or do you think you’ll mix it up from songs across your catalog?

Booth: Three of the new songs, but there are going to be a lot of unexpected things that are going to happen. Usually, I’m left to write the set and I get really crazy and the guys are like, “That’s not okay. And then they have the balls to write even crazier sets!”

Glennie: Well, twisting it around is what makes it fun, c’mon now! We like putting the fear of God into ourselves. We can’t play through all the songs everyone knows, what’s the fun in that?

Booth: Last night [in Anaheim] we encored with a song from Wah Wah with a song called “Jam J,” and another from Laid called “Lullaby.” And it was storming and totally worked but that’s pretty much the weirdest encore we’ve ever played.

How did the crowd react to the unusualness of these selections?

Booth: That’s the great thing about American crowds: they give us permission to experiment because we came in with Laid, but the album is very mellow, which is different because in England we came up with these huge rock songs. The American audience is happy to let us show off our musicality, which is something we really appreciate.

What’s been the most memorable night of the tour?

Glennie: New York was incredible. It was a Tuesday night and we tore the roof off the place. The crowd wouldn’t let us leave, but we couldn’t go back on because of the curfew and we put the lights on and they were just shouting and were angry we didn’t go back on. We couldn’t go because they were taking the equipment down, but they were so rabid—in a good way, of course.

Who does the band support: Manchester United or Manchester City?

Glennie: City! It’s not even a question in my eyes. Though, regretfully, we do have two Arsenal fans in the band, but nobody’s perfect.

Manchester’s James have to have one of the worst band names out there as far as SEO goes, but you’ll have to forgive them for that: when they first started in 1980, Walter Cronkite was still on the air. And besides, it’s better than the band’s original name, Venereal and the Diseases. Tim Booth joined the band in early 1982, and later that year they would open for New Order at the Hacienda. Since then, the band have had a career filled with ups and downs that culminated with Booth’s departure in 2001.

After a much needed cooling-off period (more on that in a moment), the band reunited in 2007 and began working on new music. In 2008, the band released one of the strongest albums of their career and began touring abroad again, including a stop at the 9:30 Club which was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen at the storied venue.

Armed with a new double album, The Morning After The Night Before, James are back on these shores yet again and playing the 9:30 Club tonight. We spoke to a very talkative Booth ahead of the show and discussed a wide range of topics including touring with The Smiths, opening for KoRn at Lollapalooza and a range of other topics.

How did the whole reunion come about?

I left in 2001. Jim and Larry had started working together and rang me in 2005 and I just said no, I wasn’t interested. Then in 2006, Larry was really persuasive that time. He kind of said things had changed. I left really because there were lots of addiction problems within James. So communication got really bad. The last few years had really gotten fraught with internal, dysfunctional family strife. Basically, it was like, if we can work through the stuff we need to work through and our communication can get better and we can relate to each other…I knew the music was not going to be a problem.

That’s interesting that you turned them down the first time. I’ve always wondered what those calls are like. “Remember all those bad things I said about you, I take that all back.”

Larry called as the arbitrator because he had left the band in 1995 or ’96 before the shit had really hit the fan. Jim and I had actually made up just before I left. We had had a few really rough years. But Jim and I have been together since 1981, so if you have a few bad years in such a long relationship, you’ve got to look at the big picture.

Your last album, Hey Ma, might be your best album.

We were very happy with it, worked very hard on it. We wanted to make a record where, if we were coming back, we wanted to make a really good record that stood up to our, what we considered to be our legacy. We had a blast making it. Most of the time. You know, records are always fraught with some tension.

Hey Ma is such a positive record — you can hear the energy in the songs, whereas your new double album is a little darker.

It is fairly dark, but the music doesn’t tend to be dark. There is some contrast going on. “Tell Her I Said So” is a song with a disco beat against a lyric about my mum dying in a [nursing] home. I hope the record isn’t so dark that it’s depressing. I think it’s an uplifting record.

I love this line in the band bio that says “James has always written uplifting songs about insecurity, disaffection and mental illness.” I think that is spot on.

Yes! [laughs] That’s great. Springing from the manic depressive.

But yes, there are definitely some heavy themes on these two albums. Are they double albums or double E.P.’s?

Well, they were meant to be E.P.’s, but in typical James fashion, we had so many songs that we didn’t want to leave them off and we wanted to give people value for their money. So we kept putting songs on the record and they became mini-albums. I don’t know what you call them. They are 30 minute pieces of work. Two of them put together. And they’ve been really put together over here. One album runs in its entirety and then the next one starts. I don’t even know how the running order sounds, I haven’t heard them like that yet. I’m sure the record takes on a different color.

I generally listen to it on my iPod and just press shuffle. That’s quite the conundrum these days. You bands spend all this time on artwork and running orders and then people just throw the music on their iPods and cut it all up.

I was just talking about this with someone. We used to spend two weeks working on the running order, because we feel like the running order is incredibly important. A great book, usually the narrative will not be in linear order. A good book will cut things up, cut perspective up. And we felt like running orders were like that. It can really change the way people hear a whole album by the way we do the running order. That’s partly why we split these into two mini albums. We felt attention spans are not tuned to albums right now. So we released two shorter pieces.

You’re close to 30 years into your career since the first incarnation of the band started playing together. You can’t have thought you’d still be doing this at this point.

No, not at all. Give it two years. I always gave it two years.

And the press has always painted you as underdogs or even underachievers. But now in 2010, it seems like you’re in a pretty good place in your career.

Yes. I think people expected us to have gotten bigger. And on one level I think we had the potential musically to be bigger. I don’t know if psychologically we could have held it. When people become as big as as Nirvana, or as big as Oasis, I don’t think human personalities [are] really equipped to deal with that level of pressure or fame and all the contradictions that come with that. I don’t think psychologically I would have done very well with that. I have a feeling we had exactly what we could stand. We walked away from a lot of big choices. Like the first time the record company begged us to release “Sit Down” in America as a single, and we refused. Yet it was the song that opened doors for us everywhere else in the world. We made a few choices like that where we made the choice to step back. Also, we came from a punk ethos, we were skeptical of fame. All the bands that we loved started to produce shit music when they achieved that fame. Most people lose touch at that point. They get so bogged down with promotion that they don’t have any time to write songs.

Way back in the day you guys opened for The Smiths, right?

We started before The Smiths.

Really? Wow.

Our bio on iTunes says we were influenced by The Smiths, but actually it’s the other way around. We called ourselves James and they called themselves The Smiths. They covered one of our songs and Morrissey said we were the best band in the world. They took us on tour with them when they got famous and they were so sweet and loving to us. But if there was any influences, it was the other way around. I’m sorry, I just want to put the record straight. I never say this because I don’t want to appear churlish because Morrissey was just a sweetheart to us, all the Smiths were. They tried their best to drag us on their coat tails and we did our best to not go. [laughs] They were just wonderful.

That’s mind-boggling for me.

It is pretty weird isn’t it? We were influenced by Joy Division and The Fall. I was influenced by Iggy Pop and Patti Smith. They were the two spirits that really affected me.

I also wanted to ask you about Lollapalooza 1997. That was the first time I had seen the band and it was such a strange scene with you on before KoRn. Obviously that wasn’t the right audience for you guys, which is putting it mildly. What do remember about that tour?

Oh yeah, the neck brace!

I was in a neck brace. We called the album Whiplash and then I gave myself Whiplash. Go figure. We were having lots of internal problems and that tour became the tour from hell for most of the band members. Everybody was completely fucked on that tour except for me, I was lying on my back with a nurse looking after me. I remember the first gig they [the crowd] were heckling us and shouting “faggot.” By the third gig, I had managed to find these sparkling tops and a little sparkly skirt, so if we were going to be faggots, we were going to be faggots. So we dressed up completely in matching mirrorball tops. So they [the crowd] would shout “faggot,” and I would say “I appreciate the fact that you are attracted to me enough to inquire about the nature of my sexuality.” We would take them on and we had quite a good time playing with the KoRn audience. I would go walkabout in my neck brace, my cowboy hat and sparkly top and go sing to the people hurling abuse. And I didn’t go with anger, and they didn’t know what to do with me. The cameras would be on them and I never got punched out. I always expected to get flattened by one of these tattooed, muscle bound guys and I never did. They’d offer me drugs or give me a drink. One guy asked me for a hug. And what happened was KoRn started watching our sets from the side of the stage to see how we would deal with their audience and at the end of the tour they came up to us and said “You’re our favorite band, will you come on tour with us for the American tour we are about to do.” We said thanks, but we’d had enough. [laughs]

James play the 9:30 Club tonight with opener Ed Harcourt. Tickets are available for $27.50. Doors are at 7 p.m. See you there.

On James’ first U.S. tour in two years, the English pop band plans to feature a different setlist each night.

“Expect the unexpected,” singer Tim Booth told SoundSpike via telephone from California, where he also has a home. “We’ll have some old stuff, but we’ll have a lot of new stuff as well. We change out the set every night. We like to keep things fresh and unpredictable. We have a massive pool of songs from which we can choose every night.”

The “new stuff” to which he is referring is songs from the two-CD collection “The Morning After the Night Before.” The set started as separate mini-albums: “The Night Before” was released in the U.K. in April and “The Morning After” is set for stores there this September. “The Night Before” features James’ strangely uplifting songs about dealing with insecurity, disaffection and mental illness, while “The Morning After” is a low-key affair with sad, dark lyrics.
“We recorded it as two mini-albums and released it as such in England,” Booth said. “They’ve been put together in America as one. Certainly, the album that’s the more mellow album is ‘The Morning After.’ Those were songs that we haven’t been able to release for awhile. We wanted to release up-tempo songs to do on stage. ‘The Morning After’ allows ourselves to do some darker pieces that won’t necessarily work live. But when we got in the studio, they changed character anyway. Quite a few of them will work live now.”

The two mini-albums not only have different feels, but they were recorded dissimilarly as well.

“‘The Night Before’ was recorded using the Internet,” said Booth, whose band is best known for its hits “Laid” and “Sit Down.” “We improvised the songs — me, Jim [Glennie, bass] and Larry [Gott, guitars] — and put them on the Internet on an FTP website. The band members downloaded them, messed around with them, chopped them up, put their parts on, put them back on the website, and then another band member would do the same thing.

“Eventually, Lee Baker, our producer, would take and pull them together and see if we had a song. That album was done without us playing in a room together.”

Coming together directly after their U.K. tour in early 2010, James recorded “The Morning After” in five days in a big room with no overdubs and with a view to capturing “something spontaneous.”

“The second album, ‘The Morning After,’ was done in a studio with everyone together, with a tight deadline of about five days to make a record,” Booth said. “We’re very fast. They were done in very different styles on purpose, just to see what they brought out of us.”

The band — which also includes Saul Davies (guitar, violin), Mark Hunter (keyboards), David Baynton-Power (drums) and Andy Diagram (trumpet) — came up with more than 120 ideas for the mini-albums.

“Then we whittled it down to the ones that we wanted to be worked on at this time,” Booth said. “If we don’t want the songs, we give them back to the universe. Most of them, we’ll let them go and we’ll write another 100 for the next album.

“We don’t write them fully though. We improvise them. It’s very easy. It’s something we’ve always done and love doing. Certain songs jump out and want to be worked on, and certain songs stay back. It’s quite surprising how, if you pick them at random, they always work out quite well. I think potentially they’re good songs. I think at a certain given time, you have to make a decision about which ones you want to work with.”

The band figures out each night’s setlist during soundcheck.

“We do long soundchecks where we work on new songs or old songs that everyone’s forgotten, then we throw them in the set that evening,” Booth said. “We’ve got a great new record coming out and quite a few of the songs work really well live. A few of those will get used. We’ll be mixing it up each night.”

Virgin Music interviews Tim Booth from James about ‘The Morning After’, ‘The Night Before’, ecstatic dance and why Simon Cowell has a lot to answer for.

Bob Fear: We’re here in the Fish Factory and you’re holed up here to record part 2 of the new album. How’s it been going?

Tim Booth: It’s going great actually, quite surprisingly. We gave ourselves five days to mainly improvise song arrangements and lyrics. We came crawling off a tour so we were pretty exhausted. But it’s gone great – I think we’re almost too exhausted to argue with each other, which is a definite plus and it’s helped with the process. We’re surprising ourselves, coming up with some really unusual takes on songs. One sounds a bit like Blondie, as we all went disco in the middle of the song, which is pretty unusual for James.

BF: You’re famous for your improvisations, working with producers like Brian Eno and trying things out. Is this process the same as that – finding mad, new sounds and going with them?

TB: Yeah, this is fairly similar to how we did “Laid’ with Brian. We did about four albums with Brian so each one was very different though. It’s quite acoustic, we want it to be quite low key. We are not wanting to make songs peak in the obvious places, which we are rather good at. So it is like trying to resist the chocolate cake, holding us back from peaks and troughs. It’s just looking for different ways to emphasize things, elongating parts we wouldn’t normally elongate and shortening bits you would normally lengthen, playing with our own expectations of ourselves. We’re doing it in a really calm way. This can be the most fraught part of James because everyone has a lot of ideas of how the song should go and can get very passionate about it – to the point of coming to blows. This time that isn’t happening, which is quite a relief.

BF: So it is a democracy in the James camp?

TB: Yes, that might be fair to say. Democracy is a bit too idealistic a word in this situation, but people are working together really well. People have certain jobs to do and they know what they are and everyone seems to be accepting their own roles.

BF: That massively contrasts the first mini-album, where there was a virtual recording process?

TB: The first mini-album was called ‘The Night Before’ – this one is called ‘The Morning After’. ‘The Night Before’, we wanted mainly uplifting songs. We improvised a load of tracks, stuck them on the internet. Any member of the band could download the song, do what they wanted, mess around with it, put it back on the internet. Then another band member could take it and run with it. We did it across continents and across cyberspace, essentially. Then there was this guy Lee ‘Muddy’ Baker who was our producer on ‘Hey Ma’. He’s a lovely man and a great mediator. He took all that and kind of made it into a presentable shape at the end of it. It was done in quite an Eno-esque, challenging way in order to bring something else put of us that we hadn’t had before.

BF: So the first time you heard each other’s contributions when Lee put them all together, or were you more involved in the production side of it?

TB: I would hear different stages from different people. Mark might have a version going and Larry might have a version going. You would just hope Lee would get the best out of both worlds, which he did, because he is very good at balancing. I was always optimistic about the process. Some people were quite freaked out within our band and management. The band has a lot of talent within it, it always has, really unrecognized talent. Mark, our keyboard player, is a very modest fellow. He is immensely gifted and he shone on ‘The Night Before’. That method of working in cyberspace really allowed him to come to the fore. Each member of the band could have his own band. We seem to be settling into a good place right now.

BF: The album is out now, I was just listening to it on the way over, naturally I love it. ‘Crazy’ is one of the standout tracks, what’s the story there?

TB: I had an undiagnosed liver disease all through my teens, it was inherited. I was bright yellow but nobody diagnosed it. So I just got on with it, even though I was a quite sickly child. It had interesting states of mind that went with it, a lot of insomnia, sometimes hallucinations. Definitely delusions, probably of grandeur, but more often than not mood swings and panic attacks. Also thinking you could hear people’s voices. I had that for ten years or so. So I assumed I was mad and I would one day be certified. When I got to 30 and wasn’t certified crazy I had a party. When it got diagnosed around 21 it got easier, as I knew what food to avoid, what drugs to avoid, what alcohol to avoid and it just became much easier after that.

BF: And now you live a much healthier lifestyle?

TB: Yeah, that’s what really led me into alternative health and that kind of world, it was purely necessity. I nearly died in hospital, I stopped breathing. The doctors said they had no cure for this and I didn’t believe that. I went out and got acupuncture and many more extreme holistic health systems than I would care to admit to. Some worked and some didn’t. It refueled an interest in meditation and that world.

BF: Is that where the ecstatic dancing comes from as well?

TB: Kind of. When I was sick dancing was the thing. I could express my rage and sadness and whatever I wanted through my dance. I always danced in a very strange way, even before I labeled it ecstatic dance. I had knives drawn on me twice by people who didn’t like the way I dance. This was before rave and people danced in a very conservative way and I didn’t. I used to throw myself around – that’s how I got in the band. They asked me to dance for them because they thought that would look interesting onstage.

BF: Do you still go to that space onstage now?

TB: Absolutely. That’s the real pleasure of it, if you can get there. When I was late in my twenties I found a system of Shamanic dance where you can go into altered states quite easily and come out of them. I learnt that, and learnt to teach that and it made life easier. I was staggering around in the dark before, it was very hit and miss and I’d often damage myself in the process.

BF: How was playing the Royal Albert Hall recently?

TB: It was amazing. It was phenomenal, but don’t tell anyone – we didn’t. We played the Albery Hall with The Smiths in about 1984 and I remember we couldn’t reach beyond the first 20 rows, or project to the back of the hall. It was out of our league at the time. It has only taken us about 25 years to get back there. The building totally adds to the whole experience, it’s like being in a coliseum. It was a great gig.

BF: And you’re looking forward to a summer of festival action?

TB: Yeah, summer festivals. We’ve got a secret thing happening as well that is going to be unusual, but I can’t tell you about it yet. And we’ve got a US tour, which I’ve been pushing for two years and finally we’ve got it. Then a Christmas tour as well.

BF: I wanted to ask, predictably, about your take on the current British political scene. Your songs have lots of political references, what is your take now?

TB: I was in America for the whole of the Barack Obama election and that was thrilling cinema, captivating. You can see in England they are trying to captivate the same excitement. Of course they can’t, it wasn’t going to be such a landmark election. We don’t have democracy in this country, it’s a complete sham. Unless you have proportional representation, it’s outrageous. America don’t have democracy either, they have lobbying, which is bribery by any other name. All the politicians are controlled by how much they are paid by the armaments industry, the medical industry, the oil companies. They are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by those companies so they do what they are told. Where the hell is a real democracy I don’t know – it certainly isn’t in America and it isn’t in England. I’ve been living away from England for the last few years. It is a country of opinion and the newspapers just stoke up people’s discontent the whole time. I’ve been in cabs recently and asked ‘what newspaper do you read?’ I’ve written down The Daily Mail and when they answer The Daily Mail I hold what I’ve written up. They moan the whole time – moan. The Daily Mail works on the basis that the past was somehow better than the present, which generally I don’t think is true at all. I wish England would stop moaning. I think it really comes from losing the empire, essentially, this time when we were the top dog, now we’re back to being a small island in Europe. It’s a bit hard for those egos who were brought up with visions of the empire to adjust. Anyway, I rambled!

BF: Does any of this inform you in the studio, or does it just bore you?

TB: I did enjoy the debate last night, but it’s such theatre. It’s all a movie, life’s a movie. With Rupert Murdoch’s control of the media and Simon Cowell’s control of creativity, it’s all a show and all a sham. They have the control. That enrages me sometimes, that whole X Factor thing where everything you do is about becoming famous. If your record sells a lot of copies it’s a good record – it’s the capitalization of art. Even Damien Hurst goes on about how much money he makes; that isn’t my idea of art. Not that he doesn’t have moments of artistic inspiration, but it just is breeding this idea that art is valued in money. It isn’t – art is one letter away from the word ‘hart’. For me the best art comes from the heart, not from the head. It moves people and that’s why you do it, it has to come out. We are dinosaurs in that sense, in this particular culture we are in at the moment. We are quite happy to be dinosaurs, we have a good audience of people that appreciate what we do and we’re happy with that.

BF: I very much appreciate it myself, your music is inspirational.

TB: We feel very much out of touch with the mainstream and out of touch with the cool NME London press. We know that we have nothing to do with that and don’t fit in that world. We just do our thing. We do our thing with belief and heart and integrity. And we have faith. I watched Leonard Cohen for 20 years when he was in the wilderness, nobody could give him the time of day and every critic slagged him off. Now those same critics say he’s the great god of lyrics. Brian Eno had the same thing when he invented ambient music. He told me he left for America because he was so fed up with the critics telling him ambient music was like watching paint dry. So he left for America where he met Talking Heads, and the rest is history. We just do our thing. Time may come back to us, the culture may cross our path again, we might suddenly become interesting to the culture. Or we may just be writing for the people who discover us. And that’s all we can do.

James new mini-album ‘The Night Before’ is out now, while volume two ‘The Morning After’ will be released on Monday 2nd August.

The band play the following UK dates this Christmas:

Thursday 9th December London – Hammersmith Apollo
Friday 10th December London – Brixton Academy
Sunday 12th December Birmingham Academy
Tuesday 14th December Leeds Academy
Wednesday 15th December Leicester – De Montfort Hall
Friday 17th December Glasgow – SECC
Saturday 18th December Manchester Evening News Arena

James frontman TIM BOOTH struggled with a debilitating liver condition and metal illness throughout his early life – and spent years fearing he would lose his mind.

The She’s a Star singer was born with an “inherited liver disease” which turned his skin yellow and led to mental health problems while he was growing up.

Booth admits doctors failed to diagnose the psychological side of his condition, and he struggled with the symptoms for many years.

He has now opened up about his problems, even writing a song about his battle with mental health, called Crazy, for the band’s new album The Night Before.

Booth explains, “I was born with an inherited liver disease which meant I looked bright yellow all through my teens. Nobody diagnosed it as an illness. It had a whole mental set (of symptoms) which went with it so for a 10-year period I just assumed I was going insane. I feared they were going to cart me off, lock me up and throw away the key. By the time I got to 30 and had not been carted off, I thought, ‘Nobody is going to catch me out.’ But it was difficult to grow up with something like that. I think it helped me develop a lot of mental toughness.”

James’ Mirrorball Tour kicked off in Edinburgh last week and The Blue Walrus sent off one of our new roaming reporters off to meet the band and talk about their new mini album, The Night Before, and have a small glimpse in to their incredible career. Here’s what Ben had to say…

I have loved James since I first rummaged through my older sister’s scratched CD collection ten years ago and realised that there was a lot more to the band than ‘Sit Down’. When Tim (aka The Blue Warus) asked if I wanted to interview the band it is fair to say that I pretty much wet my pants.

But it was important that I remained cool when entering the swanky Edinburgh hotel to interview the band so I took an old friend with me for moral support, I also gave him simple tasks to warrant his presence; he was to record the interview on his iPhone and take photos with a disposable camera because the SLR had stopped working – he failed miserably at both;

Not only did I keep on having to ask the interviewees to huddle up closer to the iphone but it stopped working 35minutes in, so the juicy story about setting fireworks off from a Beverley Hills hotel window and setting a hillside alight is now lost forever, oh, and my esteemed colleague didn’t take one single photo until the after the show when I heard the tinny sound of a disposable camera click and a bright light flash on Tim Booth’s face… smooth.

So, as you can imagine, James may not thought we were the most professional outfit, just as well it turned out they were some of the most down to earth & friendly people I’ve met…

It was clear their was genuine excitement from the band about the new mini album, Jim (the Jim behind the name James) beamed “it has been an opportunity for us to move the music on from the Hey Ma album and develop our sound” The Night Before has retained what we love about James albums – powerful, emotive and well written lyrics, great production, the classic seven piece James sound but more synths and electronics than Hey Ma and less brass.

The Night Before is James’ 11th studio album. The band has so far spanned three decades, seeing a record deal with Factory in the 80s, commercial success with ‘Sit Down’, ‘Laid’ & ‘She’s a Star’ in the 90s and disbandment and reformation in the 00s.

James began in a Manchester bar, where Jim (bass) would hang out with his pals in order to pinch pints from unsuspecting middle class students… enter Tim Booth, an intelligent middle class student with a talent for wild dancing who was about to get his pint stolen and an invite to dance for a embryo of a band that would soon become James.

28 years and 11 studio albums later, the band have grown together, the sharp differing edges of seven band members have blunted and the young angry lads have become experienced musicians, grateful of their careers and respectful of each others different approaches to life.

I asked Jim Glennie if they would have preferred to have had more widespread commercial success in the past three decades, his reaction was “I think we think we deserve it but I’ve gone past worrying or bothering about that – what always used to drive us is the feeling that we were bigger than we were. It was years of virtually no success in which we had to stand up and say come on we’re better than this.” James had commercial success in the 90s but it was never at the level of some the bands that originally supported James, such as Nirvana, Radiohead and Coldplay. Despite this Jim considers himself “one of the luckiest bastards on earth…so to sit here and complain would be ridiculous”.

James currently have a deal with Mercury, which is they say is far from the relaxed type of deals they were used to in the past – “now we have to pay for recording ourselves. In the past we would be able to be as gratuitous, stupid and silly as we liked and know that somebody else was paying. But when it’s your own money, you have to get the job done in the minimum amount of time and work really hard.”

With a repertoire of crowd pleasing hits, James are conscious of not acting as a “jukebox” at live gigs and playing the songs that the crowd are desperate to sing along to. “If we keep writing and playing new songs it means that we can’t cruise through a gig in third gear, which is the wonderful thing because the focus and concentration has to kick in.”

The Edinburgh gig was an opportunity for James to test some of the new songs from the album as well as “challenging people a bit and throwing the odd curve ball in there.” That is exactly what James did, putting a host of new songs and some old ones that only the dedicated fans knew. The Edinburgh crowd was as suspected, hungry for hits but Booth used his effortless and distinctive soaring voice to get the crowd behind him and soon everyone was singing along to the chorus of new song, Ten Below – “When’s the holidays? Holidays? Holidays?”

‘Crazy’ is a dark tale of ongoing paranoia and suffering from hallucinations that Tim Booth recently lived through when he was hospitalised with liver disease. As with the best James songs, there is a dichotomy of sad and painful lyrics juxtaposed with the sound of 6 other band members driving an energetic musical feel that keeps the song upbeat.

I brought up this dichotomy to the band and Larry told a story of driving to a gig with two girls in the back seat who were listening to Government Walls from the Goldmother album, as they sung their hearts out jumping with joy Tim was sat in the front seat with a blank expression on his face as the lyrics played “In Ireland they may shoot to kill without warning”

‘Porcupine’ begins with a great polyphony between Larry on lead guitar and Jim on bass, it is typical of the band’s 80s roots but also has a contemporary awareness that is relevant and fashionable now. The lyric ‘porcupine’ is derived from James’ approach to the development of songs – which is basically Tim, Larry & Jim meeting up and jamming. “we work on melodies and tunes with Tim singing phonetics only, sometimes one random word that works phonetically will bolt down the lyrics for a whole song – there was no getting rid of porcupine so we developed a lyric around love affairs and attrition developed that somehow involved porcupine…I’m a skunk you’re a porcupine”

They may well be some of the luckiest bastards on earth, they have tasted commercial success but more importantly James have stayed dedicated to their music and able to provide incredible live music to their fans for over 28 years, always being slightly eccentric, exciting and different. Loving James is knowing that most people won’t agree with you and that means that live gigs remain intimate and every unrehearsed cock up on stage makes the band seem more human.

After the gig, we saw Tim Booth and he asked what our favourite song was, I replied “Dr Hellier”, he seemed pensive, it is after all probably a very dark take on his recovery from illness. Out of nowhere a flash of light from a disposable camera lit Booth’s face, my esteemed assistant struck again and before we knew it the band were already on the tour bus.

I’d love to show you the photo, but the assistant hasn’t had it developed yet… (we might add that later -ed)

James have got two dates left of this tour so get yourselves down to:
Friday 16 April – London Royal Albert Hall
Saturday 17 April – Liverpool University

MENTION James and many people only know the big hit Sit Down, an anthem of the student disco that was hijacked nightly by heavily imbibed young men.

But with a career that includes ten studio albums, 20 UK Top 40 singles and 12 million albums sales, James, who formed in 1982 when 16-year-old bass player Jim Glennie found singer Tim Booth dancing wildly at a club, have clearly achieved a lot more besides.

Indeed, James have always been a thinking man’s band, something that wasn’t lost on Tony Wilson, the music mogul behind some of Manchester’s most successful bands, who offered them a deal with the legendary Factory label.

“It has been weird, the media’s attitude over the years,” singer Booth says when asked why they never got the credit – or the credibility – they deserved. “I think it’s partly because we never went in for public car crashes. Even when we had our differences, we tried to keep them private, so there was never a story there.

“Also,” he continues, “with a lot of cool bands, part of their being cool is this attitude of not giving a f***, whereas James have never been about that. We’ve always really cared about what we do, about making it as good as we possibly can.”

Before they drop new mini-album The Night Before on 19 April, the band step out on a UK tour that kicks off at the Corn Exchange, a venue they have played several storming gigs at down the years.

“We are getting to re-visit some venues for the first time in ages,” enthuses James guitarist Larry Gott, adding that the tour will serve as a warm-up for a summer spent playing some of the world’s biggest music festivals, including Isle of Wight and Latitude.

James have always been a force to be reckoned with on the live stage, and their comeback gigs a few years back went a long way to silencing those who had them marked as indie’s great underachievers.

The seven-piece have played some storming gigs in the Capital over the years, too, their show at the Corn Exchange in 2007 being among the most memorable.

Just 15 minutes before going on stage that night, the band were told that Tony Wilson had lost his battle with cancer, and dedicated the song Bubbles, with its defiant chorus of ‘I’m Alive’, to his memory.

“We’ll never play that song again so well,” said Booth in the aftermath. “Tony was Manchester. There’s no one to replace him. It’s the end of a chapter.”

interview by Mark Evans

Almost 30 years from formation and now 3 years re-formed, JAMES are back on tour. Delighting their ‘loony following’ with early e.p tracks, sating the classics thirsty ‘Sit Downers’ and promoting their new mini-album release ‘The Night Before’.

Day 4 of the ‘Mirrorball tour’ and straight from sound check Music-News.com spoke with Jim Glennie , the bands longest serving member and bassist, finding out about how the tours going , forthcoming plans, the Greek resurrection and about losing an important route into the business for new music.

MN: How was sound check Jim?

Jim: We’ve just finished in Preston. There’s a bunch of seats as well as standing so quite a mixed crowd tonight in that respect. We’ve played here before, it’s a nice place, should be good I’m looking forward to it.

MN: So, three of four nights into the tour now Jim. How’s it going so far?

Jim – Yeah, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Sheffield so far. It’s going well, there’s a mixture of songs in there. We’re doing the new record, most of which we haven’t played apart from one song Porcupine, so that’s totally scary. It’s (the new stuff) working really well. You reach the point of the set, people don’t know the songs , the records not out yet, you’re asking something from people, we’ve streamed the songs but even so you reach the point where you’re asking people to stop going bananas and listen. So that demands something from us and the audience. It’s always challenging putting in songs that people don’t really know yet , but we like the fact we have to make them 100% because they’re fighting against songs that people have known and loved for years. We like that challenge, it keeps you on your toes.

MN: You’ve put some of the old stuff in there as well, from the early ep’s?

Jim: Really old stuff, we have indeed yeah. So we’re not just going out playing the same songs. We had a silly list of songs to run through when we were in rehearsals, trying things we’ve not done for thousands of years. A bunch of them kind of fell into place really, simple and easy. We thought this isn’t gonna be as difficult as we thought, let’s have some fun. Let’s stick ’em in there. It’s always a surprise getting great reactions from fans who’ve not heard something for ten or fifteen years.

MN: How is it having the seven of you back on tour together from the Laid period?

Jim: Exactly yeah the Laid seven as it’s come to be known. Good yeah, it is, everyone’s getting on well, there’s a lot of variety in what we can do musically, Andy playing Trumpet, Saul on Violin, there’s a lot of different tones and colours we can get into songs which we’re having lots of fun with that. Changing songs around a little bit that people didn’t perhaps play on originally. There’s a lot of flexibility with this line up.

MN: I’ve read there have been some interesting openings to the gigs, which have reduced fans to tears apparently, Tim and Larry being dropped from a balcony for one. Have you worked one out for tonight?

Jim: I hope in a good way. We’ve done something every show basically. Not always with the same song, where and how you do it depends on the shape of the venue so we might not be able to it every night, we need to get Tim and Larry onto to the stage sharpish you know, we can’t isolate in them a middle of bloody nowhere for ten or fifteen minutes. They’re working tonight’s out now to be honest so I won’t spoil the surprise for you because I don’t know.

MN: With the venues for this tour you’ve gone back haven’t you, to a lot of places you haven’t been to for a long time?

Jim: Yeah , I think I’m allowed to say we’re doing a big tour in December , places like the M.E.N the S.E.C.C ,so on this tour we thought we’d keep it to smaller places , academy sized , and play some places we hadn’t played in for a long while. If you’re not careful you end up in the same places all the time, so we thought lets break that up. Playing to 2000 people in a venue where everybody’s that close to you like that, it’s a different type of performance that we don’t want to leave behind.

MN: So that’s helped with the set you’ve gone for on this tour

Jim: Exactly, that’s it, you’re dead right. When you feel you’ve got a very keen enthusiastic loony James following in front of you can take more liberties, be a bit odder, throw a curve-ball in there, you know if you’re playing the M.E.N and you’re not careful someone in row 834 might drift off slightly if you get too eclectic on them. With the places on this tour everyone is in front of you, there’s a real directness about that and it’s been great so far, the crowds have been pretty mad and probably tonight will be too.

MN: You have some festivals in summer too?

Jim – We’re playing the Isle of Wight which we did a couple of years ago and was good fun, it’s a lovely festival to do. Beautiful Days in Cornwall (Devon), Solfest in Cumbria, Latitude quite a few yeah. A bunch abroad , some in Greece which’ll be nice , bit of sunshine .

MN: They got into you late over there didn’t they?

Jim: We got really big in Greece, it’s really odd, we did one gig in 2001 at a small festival, that triggered something off, then we split up and a following developed with us actually doing nothing to encourage it and when we came back we stepped into being some kind of big superstars over there, we were suddenly massive, the album went to number five, the people there are great, the sun shines, the food’s lovely, it’s wonderful it really really is. We can play to big arenas there now, we’re playing the Tae Kwon Do Arena in Athens would you believe, Patra, then later in the summer we’re doing Rhodes and Crete where were playing a castle so god knows what that’ll be like. It’s one of those places, Portugal too, for some reason they’ve really took off and really connected with us

It’s the joys of the internet (that allowed the fan base to develop whilst not together) where stuff can happen without you physically having to go there like you did in the old days. People anywhere in the world can get you’re music and I think that’s great, it’s absolutely wonderful for us. The people in Greece presumed they’d probably never get the chance to see because just as they were getting into we split up. When we did come back it was kind of like this big resurrection in a way.

MN: You have the new stuff coming out after tour then. Tell us about that and how it was recorded.

Jim: It was a weird how do you do, we did an ftp site which is basically a website where the songs were put down in skeletal form, simple an basic, everyone downloaded them at home where we’ve all got the equivalent of a home studio so we all did parts, messed about with arrangements and collected it all and decided on what was going to be used. A chunk of song writing initially was done with myself, Tim and Larry in a room with a drum machine. Once that was done it was all from a distance pretty much. For lots of reasons really ,one being everybody living in various parts of the world which makes it not that easy and secondly that part of working through songs can get quite difficult and laborious , seven people all with ideas and wanting to do different things it can take ages.

MN: Anything different with the next one?

Jim: We’ve got another mini-album coming out in the beginning of August, we finish this tour and go straight to the studio to record that, and we’re doing that all together, a completely different approach. It’s going to be very old school, setting up in big room in a studio with 5 days to record. It’s like one extreme to the other. Another seven or eight songs, the idea initially was that there were two types of songs that we’d written. The more traditional uppy ones we do which is the first record , then there’s a batch of stuff which is quite low-key and gentle which normally we don’t get to use. It’s difficult to find a way to get them released, we might usually just put one on the end of the record. So we thought lets do two, an uppy one and one that’s a bit more chilled with a very different character. That’s what the second record is supposed to sound like at the end of it all, whether it does or not I haven’t a clue, cos we’re usually not very good at keeping together with concepts. That’s the plan.

MN: How’s the media attention going, radio play etc?

Jim: I think because there’s two albums coming out that’s attracted a bit off attention which is great. Crazy is the focus, track that’s getting played, We’ve got breakfast TV soon so we’ve got to get up at the crack of dawn to be in the studio at half past six in the morning, radio sessions with Lauren Laverne on 6 music and Dermot O’Leary on Radio 2, feature in the Independent , it’s going well.

MN: You’re a fan of 6music?

Jim: I love 6music, Marc Riley’s a big friend of mine from the early days when he was in The Fall, I love his show, it’s like John Peel in a way. It’s the route that bands can use to start a career and (on the possibility on losing the station) I think taking that out of the system is awful. You need those avenues to get into the business. Boiling everything down to statistics and only playing successful music. How do you get music successful? Every successful artist started as a nobody, you need those steps. I think the BBC has a moral obligation do that, bringing new music out to people should be part of their remit and binning it because statistics aren’t as high as if they played top 40 tunes is awful.

MN: Are there any new bands that you’ve picked up on recently yourself?

Jim: There’s a band from Manchester called Frazer King, they’re brilliant, I absolutely love them I tried to get them supporting us on this tour but it didn’t come off in the end. I love their weird, odd mixture of influences, they’re good fun.

MN: You’re a big Football lover. Are you going to be busy during the World Cup?

Jim: Yeah, we’re doing Soccer AM soon actually, which’ll be a bit of a laugh. Tim’s a Leeds a fan I’m City. Looks like we’ll be busy through the World Cup, but we’ll do our best to catch bits and pieces where we can really, we usually prioritise football, as it should be.

The Night Before, the first of 2 mini-albums, is released on April 19th