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.
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