Tag Archives: Whiplash

In an interview with The Michigan Daily after their set, Booth, Davies and bassist Jim Glennie were partially saddened that the majority of the people in the crowd were ignoring them. “We’re the only tuneful band out there,” Booth said. Still, in addition to spending a great deal of time hanging out with fellow Brits Orbital, who were headlining the first part of the tour, the group does feel thankful that it is playing to a larger audience than if it just played to its fans in clubs.

Furthermore, the band is lucky to be playing at all, given what happened to Booth earlier in the year. Following the second date of James’ U.S. tour, Booth felt tremendous pain in his neck. He was diagnosed with a lateral disc protrusion in his neck and right shoulder, which produced pressure on his nerve root. He remained “on (his) back for three weeks” in San Francisco, and the band had to cancel the rest of its tour, including a May date at Clutch Cargo’s in Pontiac.

Once Booth was in suitable condition to tour, James promptly decided to sign on to do Lollapalooza, a move that, it was hoped, would help the band crack America. Unfortunately, James has had to miss a prime slot at last month’s venerable Glastonbury Festival in England. “It was hard (missing Glastonbury),” said Booth, “but there was a terrible deluge and they almost had to cancel it, so we weren’t so upset.” But by doing Lollapalooza, the band is essentially nixing the chance that it will honor its club dates in the near future. “No, this is it,” laments Booth.

James fans shouldn’t fret, though, for the group is going back into the studio in the fall (after playing at the United Kingdom’s Reading Festival in late August). Glennie said the album should be ready “by the early part of next year” and that the band wants to “keep movin'” to make up for lost time this year.

It is imperative that James rebuilds its momentum, for the group has encountered numerous stumbling blocks in addition to Booth’s severe injury. First, founding James member and slide guitarist Larry Gott told the remaining band members that he was leaving the group prior to the making of “Whiplash.” Gott “had to choose between staying with his wife or us and chose her,” Glennie said.

The same “black” day that James was informed of Gott’s decision, the band found out it owed hundreds of thousands of pounds in back taxes. In addition, Booth had decided that he needed to go off on his own for a little while, which resulted in his collaboration with “Twin Peaks” composer Angelo Badalamenti, “Booth and the Bad Angel.”

Nevertheless, James got back together and recorded the excellent “Whiplash,” which you wouldn’t know about if you listened to radio or watched MTV. Neither “Tomorrow” nor the album’s first single, “She’s A Star,” has received much airtime or video spins. As such, it seems quite apparent why the band is itching to get back in the studio and come up with an even better album.

And despite the fact that “She’s A Star” is quite possibly the most catchy song on “Whiplash,” James didn’t play it at Pine Knob. When asked why the song wasn’t performed, given that one would think the band would try to promote its latest album as much as possible, Booth said, “We’re trying out different setlists (at every show), and this is what we played today.”

Booth did note a change, however, in James’ approach to determining what to play before each concert. “We used to always change (the setlist), but now we try to get more stable for our sound guys and ourselves.” Part of this newfound stability can be witnessed in Booth’s ritual of leaving the stage (he no longer needs a neck brace or a wheelchair) and wandering into the audience on the “grassy knoll.” “We’ve done it about twice before (and we plan to keep the tradition),” Booth said. “It breaks the ice.”

The bandmembers had plenty of interesting insight into some of their British musical contemporaries. When asked if fellow Mancunians the Stone Roses could’ve been as big as Oasis in America if the band put more effort into touring – the Roses had sold-out gigs at Madison Square Garden in New York City and another in L.A. before pulling out at the last minute and never fulfilling them – Booth said, “No. Ian Brown (lead singer of the now-disbanded Stone Roses) can’t sing in tune and Liam (Gallagher of Oasis) can. You can’t tour the States with an F-you attitude.”

Davies also has a critical opinion of a current U.K. music giant, Radiohead. Despite the fact that Oxford’s Radiohead has garnered critical adulation for its third record, “OK Computer,” Davies feels it is “self-indulgent shite.”

Booth, on the other hand, was impressed with the success of the Prodigy, a techno band whose new album, “The Fat of the Land,” debuted at No. 1 in the U.S. two weeks ago. “By number of first-week sales, Prodigy is bigger than Oasis and will (eventually) be bigger than the Spice Girls,” Booth said.

As for James, perhaps it is not realistic that the group will sell as many albums as the aforementioned artists, but its members have a positive attitude and are putting lots of effort into expanding the band’s popularity in the States. Don’t count them out, for a year or two down the line, James may well be headlining shows at venues like Pine Knob.

Tim Booth, lyricist and vocalist of Manchester, England, songcrafters James, professes to know not a whole lot about the state of pop music.

In fact, he was rather shocked when “Laid,” the title track of the band’s 1993 Brian Eno-produced masterstroke, went on to become one of the most heavily rotated singles of that year. “I hadn’t really seen it’s potential,” claims Booth. “I thought it would wind up a B-side to some single.”

“Laid,” a rousing, 2-1/2-minute nugget of acoustic pop perfection, explored the histrionic, comic nature of sexual politics (as well as the strength of Booth’s lilting falsetto) and earmarked a disc loaded with a fair share of soulfully intimate ballads (“Out to Get You”) as well as emotional folk anthems (“Sometimes”). “Laid” went on to sell 600,000 copies in America, and put James on the map once and for all after the release of a decade’s worth of solid recordings.

But if Booth is going to plead ignorance to the success of that disc, which Eno pushed to be christened after the track “Laid,” then he’ll claim the naming of the band’s eighth and latest disc, this year’s techno, drum and bass-laden “Whiplash,” to be somewhat prophetic on his part: During the commencement of a world tour in support of “Whiplash” earlier this year, Booth injured nerves in his neck, bringing the entire tour — including a scheduled appearance in last month’s Y-100 Summer Festival at the Blockbuster-Sony Music Entertainment Centre in Camden, N.J. — to a grinding halt.

“That’s the irony,” said Booth. “I suppose we should name the next album ‘Health, Wealth And Happiness,’ or something very positive.”

No matter — James will be surfacing at the E-Centre on Saturday as part of Lollapalooza ’97.

Booth’s neck sometimes smarts if he turns it a certain way (which, he reports, is impeding his trademark whirls and spins), but now that James is touting a harder-edged disc utilizing those jungle rhythms that are all the rage, a Lollapalooza tour may be the best outlet to show it off. Or is it?

“No, actually,” explained Booth last week over the telephone from Toronto, where Perry Farrell’s annual traveling marriage of outrageousness and political correctness was stopping. “We go on right before Korn, and (‘Whiplash’) just wouldn’t suit the bill, so we play some more mellow stuff, we slow things down, pull the audiences back a bit. We’re the antidote, I suppose.”

Booth takes pride in adding variety to Lollapalooza by deliberately inhibiting moshing and crowd-surfing. However, there is some disappointment in not being able to showcase the fierce “Whiplash.”

” ‘Laid’ was difficult to tour because it was so low-key,” explained Booth. “We deliberately set out to record a more aggressive album (in ‘Whiplash’) so that we could do a heavier tour. Ah, well, I guess we have to say goodbye to that one.”

Booth was a drama student at Manchester University when he first met his future band mates in the early 1980s. The fledgling group named itself after Irish novelist James Joyce and signed with the legendary Manchester label Factory Records in 1983, around the same time fellow Mancunians The Smiths were originating and New Order was hitting it big “Blue Monday.”

James made its contribution to the “Madchester” scene of 1989 with both the oddball anthem “Sit Down” and the baggy flower-print shirts that became a fashion staple of the rave movement. And while The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays may now be things of the past, James is still kicking with “Whiplash,” as the band crosses over into the realm of electronica and beyond.

“Whiplash” was produced by onetime New Order knob twirler Stephen Hague, with some input from Eno. “They worked together, yet they work very differently,” said Booth. “Brian moves in a big, bold sweep, and Stephen works step-by-step.”

Booth noted he and his band mates often record “way too many songs” for each record. And so, in 1994, the double-disc set “Wah Wah,” a collection of Eno-produced outtakes of experiments and improvisations from the “Laid” sessions, was released.

Booth temporarily jumped ship last year to record “Booth And The Bad Angel” with film composer and David Lynch crony Angelo Badalamenti. “That was a necessary thing,” explained Booth. “I needed to take the weight (of James) off my shoulders and shuffle the deck a bit and leave them to carry on. And I’m pleased. ‘Whiplash’ is a good album.”

But was the title a harbinger of bad things to come?

“I think every songwriter has psychic powers,” says Booth. “It can have magical effects but can work negatively as well as positively. I don’t quite think some of these bands out there realize what they’re writing and singing. I mean, something like ‘Kill your mother and (rape) your father’ can be an awfully negative mantra, don’t you think?”

It’s the kind of thing I’d do: spend an entire interview talking about what a freaked-out genius my producer is and forget that my record company would like me to add that I too am evidently some sort of minor deity.

Actually, my chatter would probably lean toward sharing the merits of Murray’s hairdressing and the wisdom of doing one job at a time, the real secret of success which I learned from my mom.

For James bassist Jim Glennie, I think it’s an overdeveloped sense of awe (as opposed to an underdeveloped ego) that had him gushing earlier this spring about the arrogant genius and meticulous masterwork of Brian Eno and Stephen Hague, both producers for James’ latest record, Whiplash (Mercury/PolyGram).

Eno first worked with James on 1993’s Laid (and thus inspired the soundtrack to my days working as an east-end sandwich maker). Since then he’s produced 1994’s art-romp Wah Wah and Whiplash, and when Glennie talks Eno, his enthusiastic, racing conversation shifts into overdrive. Oh, he’ll joke about the oddly intimating little man — gold teeth and a bald head and a smashing suit — but will leave you every time with a quick reminder that “the man’s a genius.” Or by enumerating some of the little projects Eno had on the go while working with James (designing an art gallery interior in Cologne and a park in Barcelona, thinking in a tank for Sony for future music technologies).

Seems that Eno started off by stripping the lads of everything they held dear. “He came in when we were recording Laid and said, ‘You don’t need to do that. You don’t need to approach it like that at all,’ ” Glennie explains, gaining momentum.

” ‘You can take the rough seeds of a jam or an improvisation and take that into a studio. One person, two people, however many you want, and completely smash it up. You can take away what you don’t want, put in what you do want, speed it up, slow it down, sample bits, throw them in wherever you want and stick the whole track through distortion pedal if you want. You can totally abuse your songs if you really, really want to.’ ”

As it turns out, trashing stuff for art’s sake was good training for other imminent changes: founding member Larry Gott ditched the band; cute-as a-button singer Tim Booth took a sabbatical to record with Angelo Badalamenti; other members took the time to grow up and presumably um, fill out and, for the first time, as Glennie tells it, became a real band. “Things fell apart. And looking back on it, it was brilliant, because it shattered what we had. Now at the time it was totally disastrous, but what came out of that was a lot stronger, different and fresher.”

Abounding in freshness, the band’s next move was to meet with what Glennie calls the ‘chalk and cheese’ combo of producers. Hague, who is “incredibly meticulous… oooh” and famed for his twiddling for New Order and the Pet Shop Boys, agreed to work with Eno, to a certain extent relieving Herr Deconstructive-Vibe-Meister of duties which were just “not Eno.” “We thought Stephen would be sort of upset because he’d sit there slaving over the desk 24 hours a day and Eno would march in and go, ‘Change this and don’t do that,’ ” Glennie says, forgetting that reaction is reserved for mere mortals, “But he was brilliant. Hague was like, ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to work with Brian Eno.’ ”

“We just couldn’t not do it. Because the two people were too strong and they both wanted to do it. And it was like oil and water. Let’s put oil and water to produce the album. Wonderful. Wonderful.”

Wonderful for you, dude. For me, all this experimentin’ Brian Eno talk finds me mixing my metaphors and all the Whiplash description words in my head could equally well describe a Happy Meal: fast, fun, meaty and icy.

Glennie, still digging the trash-stuff-for-art’s-sake mode (listen to the man describe performing) will no doubt know I mean to say Whiplash kicks. “Yeah, you can go there and go, ‘I’ll just play all the songs I know.’ Or you go, ‘Oh, God, let’s put ourselves on the edge. Let’s throw ourselves into a song we’ve not played for two years. I can just about remember the chords. And weird mishmashes, collisions of people changing in the wrong place and you’ve got, WHOAH, I’ve just about made it through this weird collision. It’s brilliant and it’s scary, but you know… What’s the other option? Pretend you’re not up there. Why bother going up then?”

The land around here looks like nothing much at all, which is why it can be made to look like almost anything you like. The rugged red hillocks and dull yellow plains around the Andalusian town of Guadix are where you come when you need desert footage, and your budget won’t stretch to Arizona, Jordan or Australia. Sergio Leone came here to film his great spaghetti westerns; the sets for Once Upon a Time in the West are still collecting dust next to a nearby railway crossing. This weekend, a pop group called James are making a video here for their new single, a song called “Waltzing Along”.

“I hope this all works out,” says James’s singer, Tim Booth. “It’s my favourite song on the record. But you should have been here yesterday. We did some filming at the local brothel.”

The idea for the video is a vague narrative about a battered old convertible being driven across the badlands of mid-west America and picking up various odd characters as it goes. These will be played by the six members of James, a model called Rachel and two immense Turkish brothers, who are taking a couple of days off from their London chip shop. The role of the car’s driver was, at one stage, going to be offered to James’s favourite celebrity fan, the Formula One driver Jacques Villeneuve. Then it was to go to James’s semi-celebrity sometime producer, Brian Eno. They have eventually settled on an actress with an unnerving resemblance to Bet Lynch.

As video shoots go, it’s a relatively tolerable experience. Video shoots are usually terrifyingly boring ordeals for all concerned, long hours of sitting about doing nothing occasionally punctuated by being screamed at by agitated young men with megaphones and clipboards. Today, however, the sun’s out, there’s plenty to eat, the mood is genial, and everyone seems to be having something that looks startlingly like a good time. If James look, today, like a band that are enjoying the things that bands aren’t supposed to enjoy, it’s possibly because they know that they nearly didn’t make it this far at all.

James formed in Manchester in 1982, released a couple of winsome EPs for hip local label Factory, toured with The Smiths, and were regarded as fellow-travellers in Morrissey’s conspiracy of ascetic withdrawal – though you wouldn’t guess that from the now from the enthusiasm with which a few of the band demolish the contents of the hotel’s drinks cabinet after dinner. Two albums, Stutter (1986) and Stripmine (1988) came next on the American label Sire, from which the band departed rather acrimoniously. A live album, One Man Clapping (1989), which the band financed by volunteering for medical experiments, followed, and just about saved their career, landing them a deal with Fontana.

A hit single, “Sit Down”, and a bigger hit album, Gold Mother (1990) made James one of the biggest bands in Britain, and their T-shirts an era-defining fashion accessory. After that, James were widely perceived to have sold their souls to Simple Minds on the epic-sounding Seven (1992), bottled out of becoming vastly successful with the acoustic-oriented Laid (1993), and finally wandered altogether off the reservation with the experimental and largely incomprehensible Wah Wah (1994).

“We have always,” says Booth, “been about doing the last thing everyone expected, including ourselves.”

It got worse. Shortly after James appeared at the ghastly, mud-covered fiasco that was Woodstock II, founding member Larry Gott decided he’d had enough. So did James’s long-term manager, and mother of Booth’s son, Martine McDonagh. It seemed, as 1994 drew to a close, that the only people who hadn’t had enough of James were the Inland Revenue, who chose the moment to send in a bill for five years’ back taxes that the band thought they’d already paid. With the Grim Reaper knocking loudly on their door, James reacted with typical bloodymindedness. They vanished from sight for a few years, restructured their working methods to allow Booth the freedom he wanted to pursue other projects (he has since recorded an album with Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti under the name Booth & The Bad Angel), before emerging with Whiplash, arguably their best album yet.

Then, with credits due to roll after this happy ending, it all went wrong again. Tim Booth’s unique dancing style – think of a man with one foot in a bucket of water sticking a knife into a toaster – finally caught up with him. Earlier this year, Booth ruptured a vertebral disc in his neck, an incredibly painful injury that immobilised him in San Francisco for a month, and forced the abrupt cancellation of a major US tour. Booth is still under instructions to take it easy. Most of the interview proper takes place in a taxi between Guadix and Malaga airport the day after the shoot, hired at some considerable expense (it’s a 220km trip) so that Booth can lie down on the back seat.

The irony of the new album’s title is not lost on him.

“Also,” he elaborates, “the day we decided to call it that, our product manager at the label got whiplash as well. We should have titled it Great Wealth & Happiness.”

Booth, now 37 and a resident of both New York (where his fiancee lives) and Brighton (where his son lives) doesn’t seem much like the credulous new age mooncalf he’s often been painted as. (He is almost certainly the only Leeds United fan on earth who’s ever been called a hippy.) He does, granted, talk of his involvement with a group in California who teach a method of dialogue that is something to do with the boundary between creativity and therapy, and he also admits to training in movement intended to induce trance states, but he does all this very self-effacingly. He has, by the sound of it, been on a bit of a mission of self-discovery since fame came calling a few years ago.

“It was lovely, in lots of ways,” he remembers. “We’d been going seven years and nobody bought any of our records. While we always knew it would happen, when it did, it was a bit of a shock.”

It feels like a long time ago now, but James were massive. Sought after as festival headliners, able to comfortably fill Alton Towers in their own right, and fronted by a man who looked very much like he fancied Bono’s job.

“I’m glad to have experienced it,” Booth says now. “There are some really nice sides to it, like free tickets to gigs and football matches, and getting to meet people you wouldn’t have got to meet otherwise. And then there’s a side where you realise that you are in some sense public property, and I didn’t like that at all.”

That said, Booth denies that their decision to tour America for years and retreat from the bombast of Seven was a deliberate refusal of massive success.

“It was less conscious than that,” he says. “We just didn’t know what to do. We didn’t want to just play stadiums, and we realised we’d never really been to America, so we did that, and had to start playing to 200 people a night again. We didn’t think it through as far as how it would alienate people in Britain, and that was a bit distressing. I’ve been amazed, really, how quickly people have taken to the new record. I thought it would be much harder than it has been.”

Whiplash was Top 10 in Britain, and the first two singles both made the Top 20. Whether Booth likes it or not, the success he evaded the first time may not have given up its pursuit of him.

“I wouldn’t object,” he decides, eventually. “But I’d want to do it differently. And our fans are good for us like that. They’ve always been involved. I mean, there’s a James fanzine that’s been going for many years, and they didn’t like Whiplash at all, and they ran a big editorial lambasting us. Our own fanzine! But that’s absolutely as it should be.”

`Waltzing Along’ is out now on Fontana

Q. Would you lie on the ground if a bank robber told you to?

TB. Instantly. If he was just taking money, i would have no problem complying with his demands. If he was injuring somebody, it would be different, although I wouldn’t do anything that would be like committing suicide.

Q. Have you ever come a cropper while showing off in a car?

TB. I don’t know if I was showing off, but when I was 18 I was driving along with two passengers when we skidded on some black ice and ended up in a ditch. My mum’s car was a write-off. I think I’d had a drink beforehand.

Q. Have you ever fired a gun indoors?

TB. Yes. I fired a 2.2 air rifle at some birds outside when i was about eleven. But when i went out and saw the results i was so devastated that i threw them over the wall and hoped next door’s Alsatian would dispose of the evidence.

Q. Could you eat a raw egg?

TB. Yes I’ve had them in drinks. Thats a bit of a spit or swallow question. I don’t have that many odd foods in my diet. I ate crocodile a couple of years ago in America. It was like very chewy chicken – not very pleasant.

Q. Have you ever set yourself on fire when lighting a barbecue?

TB. No, but I have been set on fire. It was a Tibetan purification ritual. I was covered in alcohol and, then set alight for about ten seconds. I got burned, but the shock was the hardest part to deal with.

Q. Have you ever ended up in bed with someone whose name you didn’t know?

TB. No, but sometimes I’ve forgotten names of people I’ve slept with then been phoned up and reminded of the fact. Although I tend to be very conscious when I go to bed with someone, I do have a very bad memory.

Q. Have you ever been bitten by anything poisonous?

TB. About a month ago I was bitten by a spider in Glasgow. I’ve no idea what type it was but I found the spider on my bed in the morning and I had these five bites on my head. One of them still hasn’t gone down.

Q. Would you climb an 80 ft tree to rescue a kitten?

TB. No. I’d call the fire brigade – they get paid for it. I’d probably manage if it was 30 ft but I would get a bit shaky after that and start thinking that my life was more valuable than the kitten’s.

Q. Have you ever been out in the snow wearing just a T-shirt?

TB. No, but I’d do it if I was coming straight out of a sauna, like they do in Sweden. I like those extremes of heat and cold.

Q. Can you remember the last time you were rude to a policeman?

TB. I resisted arrest in Greece once. We’d gone naked on one of the beaches and the locals didn’t like it. The policemen said they were going to take us to prison, then deport us. So we legged it and jumped on a bus out of town.