The questions rattle around my head as the car lurches into second gear.
But James personal manager Martine and personable singer Tim Booth are oblivious to my thoughts and Tim favours an indepth discussion on UFOs and the CIA cover-up conspiracy.
As the 21:15 flight Manchester to Ibiza economy flight retracts its undercarriage, Tim glances out of the window.
“Look, there’s one now!”
The car journey ends at the International II, where free admission is acquired through a combination of bribery – a 12-inch copy of the new James single “What For” – and sympathy (a knee injury necessitates Tim’s use of a Dickens and Jones walking stick.)
Inside the garish grotto, Pere Ubu are yet to appear. Tim and Martine, now joined by James fresh-faced bassist Jim Glennie, are soon immersed in conversation with The Man From Del Monte’s maniacal singer Mike, and Edward Barton – both whom have recently supported James.
Edward, who prefers tweed to Mike’s Biggles chic, is a little upset that a recent Sounds interview questioned his sanity&ldots;.
“He called me mad. I’m not mad.”
The suggestion that mad might refer to eccentric is given short shrift.
“No, mad doesn’t mean eccentric,” he insists vehemently. “Eccentric is an upturned tea cup; mad is a tea cup teetering on the edge of a table.”
Edward is equally concerned that James might be misrepresented.
“Be careful,” he warns Tim, “they’ll label you and forget you.”
“They won’t call me mad,” says Tim gently to the agitated tweed wearer.
“No, they’ll call you a veggie loony, put you in a box&ldots; then forget you!”
In keeping with the veggie loony image, my arrival next morning at Tim and Martine’s flat – opposite an undistinguished door which leads into Factory Records – is greeted with a choice: decaffinated coffee and soya milk or medicinal Japanese tea. No sugar.
The pious celibate Buddhist stereotype is given further credence by Tim’s meticulous, almost obsessive shaving ritual. However, his addiction to Cheers (the soapy social documentary of life in a New York bar) shatters the illusion.
The choice of background music hardly enhances an aura of piety. Still, the Pogues “If I Should Fall From Grace With God” meets Jim’s approval, and that of Larry Gott, lead guitarist.
Drummer Gavan Whelan will be late. Of all the band members, his attitude most closely approximates the devil-may-care rock-n-roll rebel.
Despite associations with orange juice, James are not without their drinking songs.
“We’ve got some songs like that,” says Tim before slipping into song. “Wish I’d invested gold / Down go share prices / New York to Tokyo”
Larry: “We’ve done the drunken song live at Leeds Astoria”
“Christ!” Tim comes down to earth religiously.
“Went well,” says Jim
“Did it?” asks Tim incredulously
“There were a load of football fans in that night,” continues Larry. “We were on a stage that was about two foot high and they were spilling beer, throwing pots on stage and throwing tables in the air. And we played the drunken song and we all started falling about the stage with the drunken audience.”
Tim: “There were people on the stage from the first song and they wouldn’t go. The management thought : James, vegetarian band, lay off some bouncers. And it was a riot &ldots;.”
“People would come up and say, Autograph, give us an autograph, halfway through songs. And one guy came up and said, Sing a song for the working class then &ldots; sing a song for the working class! And he’s getting really irritated and his mate’s going, Yeah sing a song for the working class.”
“So at the end of the song I said, That song’s for you, it’s the best we can do. And he went kinda, Woarrr that was for us!”
Despite the carnage at Leeds, last October’s gig at London’s Astoria was spiritual and ten times better for you than a dose of Nicky Cruz or a series of Songs of Praise.
In white robes and adorned with a skull cap, Tim pervaded the auditorium with an aura of understanding and courted those that leapt onstage. This threaded with James sound – a crisp, traditional folk merged with various international styles and warped into a lush chart-compatible brew – had James leading the audience as the pied Piper led Hamelin’s sewer population.
“It varies, you see,” explains Tim. “Sometimes we stir it up because we’ve got a lot of aggressive songs which we’ll only play if we’re in that mood, where we go on from the beginning thinking f**k you.”
“We did that at WOMAD once.”
Jim: “It was a really sunny day, everybody was really laid back with the African music, the cheap falafels&ldots;..”
Tim: “So we started with all our unpleasant epics. They were the opening songs and people just couldn’t get a toehold.”
My misconceptions are now in splinters, an appropriate point from which to survey the past, present and future of James.
The upward spiral was swift: “What’s The World” and “If Things Were Perfect / Hymn From A Village” being released first as singles then together on a five-track EP by Factory, between october 1984 and July 1985.
A transfer to Sire (WEA’s American sister label) followed, bringing the ‘Chainmail EP’ and ‘So Many Ways’ 45s before the debut album, ‘Stutter’, in the Summer of ’86.
‘Stutter’ was a transition period for James, caught between the commercial demands of the record company and their own desire for complete control.
The result was a mish mash, a record with charm and erraticism, coated in a cheap lustre – a record to tape rather than buy. Then, nothing. Record companies operate on credit not acclaim and the band, as the record, were left on the shelf to gather dust.
Tim: -The record company didn’t want us to record so they didn’t give us any money. We tried to release something after the LP but they wouldn’t have it so we could do nothing. Then you try and tour and they say, Well, you haven’t had anything out for a while, wait.
“Then Martine resigned as our manager and you can’t get anything out of a record company without a manager. With a new manager (whose career spanned just four months) James got to work on a new album. ‘Strip Mine’ was finished in March 1987. Release was delayed until October and then halted altogether with the arrival of new manager, Eliot Rashman (of Simply Red fame).
Rashman felt that the album needed remixing and, after five months, got James (who also had misgivings about the production) and Sire to comply.
Sire’s decision to finance the remix coincided with the resignation of The Housemartins and The Smiths from the intelligent end of the pop market. An ideal opportunity for James to scoop the awards in ’88?
Tim: “I think that’s what they {the record company) think. Everyone wanted us to get a record out when The Smiths had broken up. We went the opposite way on that kind of idea.”
Their new single, ‘What For’, supports this claim, not that James have ever had to fear the Smiths copyists claims so wrongly attributed to them in the past (The Smiths actually covered them, recording the first James single on the cassette release of ‘I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish’).
With the subterfuge of The Housemartins’ ‘Happy Hour’, the tempo of The Cult’s ‘She Sells Sanctuary’, a lushness you’d expect of a band sharing the same label as Madonna and an advertising budget big enough to ensure blanket press coverage (surely a sign of Sire’s newfound confidence), it might seem surprising that the record has failed to gain the Radio 1 A-list grading so essential for chart success. It was practically constructed for Top Of The Pops.
Larry: “It was originally a Eurovision Song Contest Entry actually, a song for Europe.”
Tim: “I used to take the piss out of it and sing a real Eurovision chorus to it”
Larry: It went ‘Bonjour. .:”
“‘Bouncy bouncy bonjour!'” the band return unanimously.
Larry: “It changed a lot cos it was quite poppy and breezy and didn’t have a serious side to it, and then musically it got more serious.”
By its live airing in October, it had grown teeth, Tim singing “I will dive into Sellafield seas. Sick fish, myself and some strange debris”, but on vinyl the nuclear power plant reference disappeared.
Tim assures me that the absence of the leaky location was not due to record company censorship. I took it out because I didn’t want it to be that specific, so I sing ‘Foaming seas’, which refers to sea pollution more generally, not just nuclear . If you’re going to censor it you’d have to take out “will not think of torture or the rape of nature” which like ‘Misty Blue last year, is not A-list compatible.
THE LUSH quality and satirical lyricism of ‘What For’ is maintained throughout ‘Strip Mine’.
‘Vulture’ is the musical equivalent of the imagery of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil mixed with the blatant vulgarity of The Hitcher’s severed fingers in the pomme frittes.
“Yeah, I enjoyed that,” says Tim with relish. .’When you spy a fresh face / Remember the rich taste / You want a part in the cost of it all/ So you open your flicknife /And cut off a thick slice / Envy makes the flier fall'”
Then, before you can breathe in, Tim summons up Monty python’s exploding man.
“It was written before that,” says Tim defensively. “It must be about five years old, it was on the first Peel Session, but a different version. It’s all about greed and gluttony.”
If “Vulture’ provides enough colour for a good schlock movie, ‘Riders’ is the hospital horror incarnate -a nightmare at St Elsewhere.
“It was a dream,” says Tim quietly, a fairly exact description of a dream I had four years ago that turned my life around.
“Until then I’d been on a very self-destructive route and this dream showed me what I was doing and made me decide that I really didn’t ‘want that poison in’.
“I’d been in hospital very shortly before (with a chronic liver complaint) and I probably took from the experience. The woman in the song, the nurse, was Nurse Rachett from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and her assistant was Jed Clampett from The Beverley Hillbillies.
If ‘Riders’ took Tim off the motorway to self-destruction, it hardly diffused the potency of his songwriting
Each song has a purpose and prod. at the subconscious as it teases the eardrums. The most overt message is in ‘Charlie Dance’, which epitomises a country where a budget aimed to cripple the poor, is taken up by the media as a perfect package for the working class -.the mentality of Harry Enfield’s .Loadsamoney on the front page of a national newspaper.
“‘Charlie Dance’ is about a believer in official lines who accepts what the government says. It was written after Chernobyl so it was like ‘The cows don’t moo anymore/But “m sure they’re not dead/They don’t chew anymore but ‘.m sure they’re not dead'”.
“The one person in this country who drives me up the wall is Lord Marshall, head of the Nuclear Electro Generating Board. After Chernobyl he was saying there’s no danger from our machines. Anybody who’s ever owned a machine knows they break down. And he denies it and denies it. He should live on the site or swim on the sea if he thinks it’s that safe”.
This is the serious side of James, the side that finds the term Ministry Of Defence hypocritical.
Tim relates it to a Ben Elton sketch (the two were at college together): .A near mid air disaster. What do they mean near miss? More like near bloody hit.
“The Ministry Of Defence should be called the Ministry Of War.” It’s a high horse that all but Gavan are prepared to mount. What does Gavan want?
“Loads of money”
SO WHAT have we got?
Take the talking bit from Dr Dolittle (“I feel that it is very important in principle that one should avoid eating one’s friends”), yesterday’s tabloid headlines, Luxembourg’s Eurovision entries (circa 1985-1988), rhythms from Didsbury to the Congo Basin, the humour of Palin and Gilliam (and a dash of Cleese), add a pinch of Cheers and cook for 45 minutes on Sellafield radiation, mark four.
James James I, James T Kirk or James Anderton?
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