Tag Archives: Whiplash

Tim Booth of James tells us about the records that make him feel like a star

1 LOUIS ARMSTRONG : ‘Wonderful World’ (HMV Single)

“I have childhood memories of this. I hated it when I was younger. It was too positive. I love it now because it’s so generous and rich and, his voice, it’s so &ldots;. ridiculously big. It’s a heart song.”

2 JOY DIVISION : ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ (Factory single)

“I love this even without its poignant history. I love it for the haunting keyboards and the scratchy, crappy recording of this beautiful love song, and its beautiful chorus – you can’t really tell what he’s singing in the verses. I like that. I was in Manchester when he died. People were just devastated. Friends I knew just sat on a bus all day and went round and round Manchester.”

3 DOLLY PARTON : ‘I Will Always Love You’ (from the RCA LP ‘Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits’)

“I only got into this in the last year. I was in a clothing shop and they were playing ‘Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits’, and I left the shop and bought the cassette. She’s written some great songs: ‘Jolene’ and ‘I Will Always Love You’. Whitney Houston’s version is atrocious. Awful. Theatrical laryngitis. Dolly Parton’s version is heartfelt and moving.”

4 JAMES : ‘Sometimes’ (from the Fontana LP ‘Laid’)

“All these songs aren’t so much influential as my faves. And, if I’m saying my faves, I would say a load of James songs. When you write a song, you’re so much connected to it. Even if it isn’t as good as some of the other songs, to you, it is.”

“‘Sometimes’ was the song that got Brian Eno to make the record ‘Laid’ and Brian said it was one of the greatest musical moments of his life when we recorded that, which is the highest honour we’ve probably ever had paid to us. We just used to get high playing this song. That’s the best thing – getting high when you’re playing your own songs. That happens with ….”

5 TIM BOOTH AND ANGELO BADALAMENTI : ‘Fall In Love With Me’ (from the Fontana LP ‘Booth and the Bad Angel’)

“I love singing this. I sing it at parties. People can’t stop me singing in. It’s like a spell to me, a love charm. And it’s quite sneaky really, cos people fall in love with me when I play it. It doesn’t always work, though. It failed badly for me last weekend.”

6 AMERICA : ‘Horse With No Name’ (Warner Brothers single)

“I love the scarcity of this song. It’s like a narrative – and I’m a sucker for narratives. It’s also got a double meaning – ‘A Horse With No Name’ is a phrase for heroin – but you don’t even need to know that because there’s a whole separate narrative about going through the desert on a horse with no name. In fact, Angelo and I did a cover of it when we were mucking around doing radio stations in America. Also, it was produced by George Martin. Now there’s a real genius.”

7 ROLF HARRIS : ‘Sunrise’ (Columbia single)

“When we first formed James it was the only cover version we ever did. We used to do it on radio with toilet rolls pretending to be didgeridoos. I changed the lyrics to something corny about the last sunrise, a nuclear sunrise. ‘The sunrise too early in the morning.’ That was our version of Rolf’s masterpiece. I think I went for it because it was the first time I’d heard a didgeridoo, which is such a magical instrument. But you can really only hear it on the one song. It doesn’t have much variation in itself.”

8 VAL DOONICAN : ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’ (Decca single)

“One of my favourite songs ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’ was probably the first song I ever sung to anyone. My mother used to make me sing it to my auntie. I was so shy – I used to sing it from behind the sofa.

‘Oh Paddy Mc Ginty’s an Irishman of note / Fell in for a fortune so he bought himself a goat / Said he ‘I’m sure of goats milk I’m going to have my fill / Till he got the nanny home and found it was a bill.'”

9 PATTI SMITH : ‘Hey Joe’ (Mer single)

“A Hendrix cover. Astonishing . She interweaves in the myth of Patty Hearst robbing the banks – you know the little rich girl in the Seventies who got kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and four months later she was on videos robbing banks. So, Patti Smith interweaved that story with Hendrix’s ‘Hey Joe’ and Tom Verlaine’s playing guitar &ldots; and, it’s just amazing. It starts out with her reading a poem : ‘Honey, the way you feel guitar makes me feel masochistic / And you standing beneath the Symbionese Liberation Army flat with your legs spread / I wondered whether you were dead, or whether you were getting it every night from some black revolutionary and his women / You know what your Daddy said / He said ; he said ; he said; Sixty days ago she was my little child and now here she is with a gun in her hand.'”

“It’s like this ridiculously melodramatic wonderful poem. It’s my favourite song ever. In fact, Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’ album influenced my whole musical agenda. She wasn’t frightened to make an arsehole of yourself, and I think to be a good lyricist you have to make an arsehole of yourself. To fly, you’re going to have to crash, too. If you look at some of Neil Young’s lyrics, some of them are terrible and some are pure genius.”

10 JOHN LENNON : ‘No 9 Dream’ (from the Apple LP ‘Walls And Bridges’)

“A mediocre album, but what I like about ‘No 9 Dream’ is that it’s got three parts which shouldn’t be together in the same song; it’s very hallucinogenic and very composed. Only a very good musician could ever attempt anything like that. It sweeps you in to this dream world and then half way through it changes into the daftest thing.”

“The first time I discovered how brilliant it was, I was on the tour bus, going between Seattle and San Francisco, and we were in the mountains, at nine in the morning and I put it on and it was so beautiful, I just started to cry. Then I went and found Saul, who was awake, and I said ‘Come here, listen to this song and look at the mountains.’ And he did and he started crying as well. I thought ‘I knew it was scientific.’ I was convinced.”

James are back with a new single She’s A Star from the album Whiplash and a video that pays tribute to one of the world’s most famous film directors.

Tim : The video was meant to be a kind of homage to Fellini and a kind of parody of it and took the idea of, yes, film stars and the other black-haired woman becoming the star even though there’s the more obvious blonde star. So it’s kind of a cruder version of what I think I was probably writing about which is about people coming into their own power and realising their own strengths.

Jim : This is the James rock n roll tour bus, part of the Vantool collection which is top of the range I’m told. Well that’s what the driver told us anyway.

Oh, we’ve found a member of James asleep in his bed. Surprise, surprise. It’s Adrian Oxaal. Hello Adrian.

Adrian : Hello

Jim : How are you today?

Adrian : Sleepy

Jim : He’s always sleepy. Hangover. Surprise surprise.

Alcohol. And this is the back lounge where we kind of meet the general public and acts of gross indecency go on. So I’m told, I’m also in bed by half nine.

Tim : To me, Black Thursday wasn’t a catastrophe at all. It was one of those points where things have to change and it’s not going to change. Larry resigned, our accountant came to us and said we had a five-year tax bill that had been frozen for five years and money we’d been told had been put aside hadn’t been put aside and everything came down on one day. And so I went off to make the Booth And The Bad Angel record and left it to Jimmy to sort out.

Jim : I had to sell things to try and meet the tax bill. Children.

Tim : His body. Your little son

Jim : Still miss him.

Tim : It’s schizophrenic. We definitely have the tension of the yob and the saint working within the band continuously. It seems like a good balance, a good pivot. We don’t believe in black and whites.

The whole press view of James has always been very weird to us. We’ve never understood it. They were calling us Buddhist vegans. There’s no Buddhist vegans here. There never were and we’d tell people this and they’d never believe us for some reason. So for years people had this view of us as a very polite band, this band has been very rock n roll, very cliched for a number of years.

Partly, I mean some of the reputation has come because I’m a sick man. I had an inherited liver disease so I have a very clean life out of physical necessity. It’s not something I preach to anybody else. It’s what I do and I do a lot of things like yoga and meditation and things like that. Mainly because I nearly died when I was 22, I stopped breathing and I’ve had to find ways of nourishing myself in that way. But it’s not something I’d like to get self-righteous about.

The lyrics I’ve been writing, a lot of the stuff has been about spirit and the nature of spirit. I got a lot of it out on Angelo. It’s probably more suited to his cheesy keyboard than it is to James guitars so me and Angelo could indulge in that area and do a record like that because then I didn’t need to force it upon these guys. Oh no, not another one, can’t you sing about birds and tits and football

Jim : Well you like football as well. It’s not just God

Tim : No, I want to sing about God again.

Jim : (sings) God is good

Tim : It was like I almost got the right medium for it I think, probably with Booth and the Bad Angel. And then it meant I could come back here and appreciate this and they could appreciate me again.

That break was fantastic because it was like you know. There must have been about a year when we hardly saw each other. And when we came back it was like “Oh God, these are my friends. You know when you’re too close to something, you forget to appreciate it sometimes and we’d got into that place. And now it’s like we’re having a blast.

It’s 3:45 on a Saturday afternoon at 99X. It’s fairly quiet as the disk jockey simply known as Jill cues up the next disc. All serenity is quickly dispersed as three members of the British band James arrive at the studio. Herded in by bustling management and followed by a small entourage, this faction of James looks tired. Hungry and tired. “Could someone possibly fetch some coffee?” asks Saul Davies, who is shrouded in dark glasses.

“Some food would be nice,” adds Jim Glennie. Vocalist Tim Booth seems to shake off his sluggishness and sits in one of the three chairs next to the soundboard. His two band mates follow.

Their exhaustion is easily justified. James has its nose to the grindstone at the moment promoting their new album Whiplash. A few small, warm-up gigs in Britain were followed by a series of club dates in Washington and New York. After the guys chat with Jill and choose a diverse set of music to play on the air, they’ll make their way to the Roxy where they’ll perform the last of these intimate shows. And then it’s back to New York in the morning where they’ll get ready for an appearance on Letterman.

“It’s a good, quick show,” Booth says of Letterman’s program. “With some of the shows in England you’re sitting around for eight hours. It’s tedious. But on Letterman, you’re in there, you play live, and you get out. We didn’t get offended by the fact he didn’t talk to us. He stuck his head around the door and said, ‘Hi.’ The only grind I had with him the last time we played was that he wouldn’t let me wear a dress. He was worried he was going to lost his Bible Belt following.”

Glennie, Booth and Davies shuffle through the discs Jill has retrieved for them and simultaneously attempt to eat lunch. This potpourri of music includes artists such as Beck and Smokey Robinson & the Miracles. “Where’s the Dolly Parton?” jokes Davies. The band seems much more interested in playing other people’s music than listening to their own this afternoon. This, however, doesn’t reflect the rest of the world.

Whiplash, which was released worldwide at the end of February, shot to No. 5 on the British charts just after it came out. Its sales are doing comparatively better than their 1993 smash Laid. When asked which album is the strongest musically, Booth shakes his head. “That’s impossible,” he says. “Laid was quiet, mellow and delicate. Whiplash is more in your face, aggressive, playful and uplifting.”

The new album contains 11 tracks that vary from radio-friendly pop to hypnotic grooves to dance-floor rave-ups. Produced by Stephen Hague, Whiplash also included some input from Brian Eno, who was involved with Laid and the improvisational double-album Wah Wah. The band says they’ve learned a lot from Eno, but his role in Whiplash was fairly minor. “It’s great working with Eno,” says Davies, “but I think we ought to stop overplaying this thing because that also says in a way that we’re slaves to what he does. And it’s not that way at all. Four years ago, when we made Laid and Wah Wah, it was an immense learning experience for us in terms of how we can make music. A lot of patterns and cliches were questioned by Eno. So we took a lot on board [Whiplash]. A lot of the weirdness on this album that you would associate with somebody like Eno is us. He’s a genius. We’re not, but we’re naive, and we’ve got a lot of energy. And I feel Whiplash is like a first album for James in some ways.”

Glennie agrees. “I think Brian didn’t really need to be there,” he says. “I think he worked through a lot of the conceptual stuff when we were doing Laid and Wah Wah. But this time around it’s like how we implemented that. There was no need for him to sit there babysitting us. And how we applied that kind of space and freedom we found was our angle on it and our input.”

Promoting this music obviously requires a world tour. It officially starts off in England, and James is scheduled to make it back to North America next month. Although touring can be tough, James tends to leave an impression on audiences in more ways that one. In fact, Booth says when they were playing in New York in support of Laid the crowd in the balcony was dancing so hard the floor fell through. “It nearly took the head of our record company with it,” he says. “He was literally about 10 yards away from it when it came down.”

After finishing their live interview with Jill, Glennie, Booth and Davies hop into a rented Lincoln Town Car headed for the Roxy. Although their bellies are now full, their hunger to record more music is extremely apparent. “Yeah, touring is great, but you want to get stuff out to people,” Glennie says. “You want to move on. We want to get on with a new album as soon as possible. Maybe next year.”

Bands should ask themselves three big questions once in a while. For starters: do we still matter? Secondly: what’s the point? And crucially: what difference do we make?

Most acts will admit that they’re just along for the jolly. Music provides them with a laugh, a few shags, a nice earner. But for a tiny amount of groups, there’s a crusade worth fighting. They want *betterment* of some kind. That’s what James fought over in the past, and you want to see if they still wear the scars with pride.

So when you meet the core of the band, still cackling over their “pervy” NME photo shoot (drummer Dave Baynton-Power, guitarist Adrian Oxaal and keyboard player Mark Hunter are apparently still, erm, tied up), that’s the important poser. How do James justify themselves these days? Singer Tim Booth suddenly turns stern. For the past few minutes he’s been charming and carefree. He’s been walking the line between flippant and serious conversation, but this question bothers him, and the good humour falls away completely.

“We don’t have to *justify* James,” he snorts. Jim Glennie, bassist and only original member remaining after Tim, rises to the question. “But hypothetically, if we have to justify ourselves…” “No!” Tim insists. “But we *don’t*!” So why are you in a band? What’s the point? “World peace,” says Jim with a straight face. “And global unity.” What are you bringing to the party after 14 years?

“Great music,” Tim decides. “To me, it’s about heartfelt music- ‘cos most people blow out bands after two LPs and we’ve managed to keep it going for a few more than that. It’s looking for depth and looking for real connections and real communication.”

“We still enjoy it,” Jim enthuses. “And we keep changing and moving on and challenging ourselves…and finding another area that we get bangin’ songs out of. We haven’t played for two-and-a-half years. It’s scary, and on-the-edge again. For us, it’s still vital.”

Tim, Jim and guitarist/fiddle player Saul Davies are loading up on poppadoms in a balti house on London’s Brick Lane. The background music consists of old faves (Deep Purple’s “Sweet Child In Time”, *The Godfather* theme and Jim Reeves’ “But You Love Me Daddy”)- all played in a Bollywood style, with masses of strings and wailing voices. This is surreal enough to usher us into the warped story of James, ’83-’97.

In the beginning, they were scatty, sacred fools, livening up Manchester. Each member appeared to be playing a different song to the other. Fold melodies were stretched beyond recognition, gone wild and raggedy. Their early releases on Factory Records typified the adventurous style of the label and the city’s post-punk esprit.

James became fellow travellers with The Smiths; railing against meat-eaters and the phoney glamour of the video age. They made the cover of the NME before most people had heard of them. Tim, like Morrissey, claimed to be celibate and aspired to a kind of gender liberation- away from set distinctions of masculine and feminine. He also danced oddly and wore cardigans.

“Yeah, we looked like a right bunch of losers in those days,” Jim remembers, with mock embarrassment as we mention the facial hair, waistcoats and Victorian pill-box hats of those formative times. “Granted, you *are* right. We couldn’t afford a stylist.” James echoed U2 in their aim to escape the conditioning and compromise of adult life. The Irish band called their debut LP “Boy,” and James wanted theirs to be titled “Lost Innocence,” before settling for “Stutter” instead.

In short, James were a classic indie band of the age. They survived crappy business deals to triumph during the Madchester boom of ’89; ranked alongside former support acts the The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, their flower-power T-shirt a top accessory. The James anthem, “Sit Down,” was cherished by rock fands and E-heads, a call for friendship a Smiley-suffused nation. It was ace.

But James fell out with Brit fashion again sometime after 1990’s “Gold Mother” LP and a mad finale to the year at Manchester’s G-Mex. The music became grander afterwards, losing some of the twitchy, village ambience of old. Oh well: America thought this was just great. Their sixth album, “Laid,” sold 600,000 copies there.

James’ last gig thus far was at Woodstock ’94, before a potential audience of 300,000 people. Typically, they played obscure indie tracks and songs from the then unreleased free-jam album “Wah Wah.” Still, the crowd went suitably bonkers, and marvellous prospects seemed to be opening for them once more. Nobody figured that Black Thursday was looming instead…

“We didn’t know that was Larry’s last gig with us,” Saul muses, remembering how original guitarist Larry Gott decided that touring and family life were incompatible. “He said, ‘I don’t want to be in this band any more.’ Then our accountant said, ‘I don’t know if any of you can *afford* to be in this band any more.’ Everything collapsed around us.”

Martine McDonagh, the band’s long-standing manager and mother of Tim’s son, Ben, had also left the camp, and Tim was ready to make his album, “Booth And The Bad Angel” with Angelo Badalamenti. He was also suffering from an injury that forced him to wear a neck brace onstage – something American concert-goers had loved. However, poor Tim had to spend 8,000 pounds on various treatments afterwards.

The band was practically done for, until Jim, Saul and Dave made off to the latter’s home studio near Wrexham on a rescue mission that developed into the new “Whiplash” LP. Later, Brian Eno and Stephen Hague duked it out as producers, and jTim passed by, leaving vocals on a multi-track tape to be mangled and uncoiled by the other musicians. Booth was free to work with Badalamenti, happy with his new-found freedom.

Everybody seems pleased with how it came out- free from the indecision and deadening democracy that stalled the experimental “Wah Wah” for ages. By the time *that* artefact was released, U2 and Eno had steamed through with the like-sounding “Zooropa,” which made James seem silly and after the fact. Not so this time; Tim reckons the new LP sounds “triumphant.” Heartstrings are soundly plucked on this record as Tim sings of long roads and good causes on current single, “She’s A Star,” rubbishes the cynics on “Greenpeace” and mocking capitalism on “Go To The Bank.” Booth’s voice is never better than when he’s aggrieved or beseeching- offering up a vision of something that’s going to give the old karmic wheel an extra spin. Some of the techno experiments of “Wah Wah” have even filtered through, offsetting the charge that the band are liberal tub-thumpers, a Simple Minds for the ’90s.

So maybe James have accidentally managed to catch the *Zeitgist* once more; now that emotional, cause-carrying rock is again acceptable in this post-“War Child” era. Now that every record company has signed up a band in the Radiohead/Longpigs vein, it’s only a matter of time before acts are claiming that there’s *always* been a “Joshua Tree” element to their music. In short, is anyone ready for a New Sincerity revival? “Sincerity is such a shitty word, isn’t it?” Jim figures. “It implies a lack of humour- that you’re po-faced. But I also think sincerity means that you’re putting yourself on the line and you’re giving your all. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It’s easy to undermine what you do- by slightly taking the piss to avoid being criticised. But I think that’s a cop out, musically.”

So what’s the mood of the band like now?

“It feels like we’re victorious, almost. After “Laid,” we thought, ‘Let’s have a really up album.’ There were a lot of miserable songs we didn’t put on the record because we wanted to tour it. So many of the new songs are in-your-face, with a f— you attitude.”

The closing words on the record are “into the deep.” It’s from a song called “Blue Pastures” that imagines some care-beaten individual crawling off into the snow to lay down and die. Bizarrely, a week after recording the lyrics, Tim discovered a friend’s mentor had actually chosen this method of suicide; taking a favourite walk into the Lake District at night and expiring slowly from the cold.

“That’s what songs do sometimes,” he supposes. “That was a brave thing to do. It’s not mucky and it’s you taking responsibility for your own life, because you take a long time to go that way. He’d tried it before and he woke up in the morning and the snow had thawed. That’s how they knew he’d done it on purpose the second time.”

James don’t sound ready to expire just yet. The mission is incomplete, the missionaries haven’t lost enthusiasm for the job. Which is where we came in, really. Given that Tim refuses to justify his band, we have to answer the questions ourselves.

Do James still matter? Yes, kind of. And what’s the point? Well, they make fine music, and float important ideas around. They restate the value of the alternative and make the outsider feel less alone. The new regime even has time for a right old laugh. And a final query: have they changed *anything* at all out there? Sure, James have made a bit of a difference. You’d miss then if they hadn’t existed. It’s time, once more, to fetch them in from the cold.