Category Archives: Interview
That Was Zen, This Is Now – NME Interview
They used to dress up in muesli and eat sandals whilst meditating on their heads, but now they’re a gleaming multi-membered pop combo. Are James jessies or the finest live band in Britain? Stuart Maconie jumps on their tour bus and finds himself in teen pop heaven (!!!)
“Two weeks ago they said ‘We’ve got the Railway Children coming down here today’ and ‘I thought ‘Bloody Hell! Jenny Agutter and all that lot from that film’. Then they said to me ‘James will be here afternoon’ so I thought ‘James who?’ Was that two sugars, did you say?
PC68 is clearly the odd good apple that gets the whole force a bad name; a fine man whose notion of community policing extends to making coffee for journalists and keeping you up to date with the World Cup scores. His beat, happily, takes in that part of downtown Sheffield which includes the HMV shop and thus, it is he who is called upon to cast a firm but paternal eye over the drooling drug nympho teenies whenever rock phenomena such as Springsteen or Edsel Auctioneer are in town for a ‘signing’.
Downstairs in the shop, a disparate crowd of young folk are gathering excitedly to have their CDs, shoes, faces and tea towels signed by their favourite group whose current glorious ascent is testimony to the powers of human spirit and the importance of good t-shirts. Eighteen months ago, James were matchwood on the cruel and rocky shores of pop success; indie art-rockers (so the theory went) who had been left behind in the headless chicken rush for new good times.
When such things mattered, they had the King’s Ear, the Papal blessing – Morrissey liked them. But as the 80s ground to a halt and the spectre of disco entered many a polytechnic common room, so James became the sensitive Zen vegans who couldn’t dance properly and were not prepared to learn.
Now, in the summer of 1990, there are few more exciting or original groups on the planet. On record, they have become brazen, bold and eclectic; live, they are a revelation, of which much, much later. For now, I have seen the future of multi-cultural, chart-friendly, stadium pop/folk metal and its first name is James.
“The embarrassing thing about signing teenage girls t-shirts is that they always want you to sign them halfway up the back and you always end up in trouble with the bra strap. I wonder if that’s the idea….”
Saul Davies, if my calculations are correct, will have to get used to this for there is much of it ahead. Saul is one of the four new personnel whose introduction into the James camp has coincided (though it’s no real coincidence) with the spectacular renaissance in the group’s fortunes. When he and Dave, Mark and Andy joined the band, James were firmly in neutral and beleagured by a welter of preconceptions that had James backed into a corner. James the academic, aloof dilettantes, the bloodless folkies, the mantra chanting recluses.
Most of these were wrong but you could see how they had gained currency. From the outset, James had nurtured a peculiar style that invited comparisons with both folk, indiepop, The Birthday Party and other radicals, and even high life and tribal rhythms. They were touted as new and unusual white, Northern hopes; heirs apparent to the vacant Smiths throne.
There was a flurry of front covers, and a series of interviews in which the odd reference to Buddhism, meditation and alternative healing was to provide pundits with a dream of an angle; James as brilliant rock weirdos. And what was to make them intriguing and individual in 85 would have turned into a mocking albatross by the end of the decade. Those silly buggers with the carrot juice and cardies who never made it.
But such depressing thoughts seem inappropriate as we cruise through the Yorkshire streets sipping our Aqua Libres, idly pondering which CD to play or which video to peruse. Thanks to a logarithmically expanding fan base, a hit single and a burgeoning reputation as a live act of extraordinary power, the days of draughty Transits littered wiht old banana milk cartons are over.
Availing myself of the sumptuous tour bus comforts, I introduce myself to James. The central core of Tim Booth, Jim Glennie and Larry Gott has been augmented by Saul, a personable multi-instrumentalist who is probably sick of being called impish; Mark, the tactiturn genius of the keyboards; Dave, the AWOL drummer; and trumpeter Andy, once a member of the The Diagram Brothers, a curious group who I practically venerated in the early 80s. For the entire two days I think of bringing the subject up only to think better of it. I hope this explains my odd behaviour.
We’re on route to the venue having completed the successful in-store PA. These are invariably strange affairs, made stranger in this instance by James insistence on playing an acoustic set. So we are treated to Tim singing of global annihilation whilst wedged on the counter between tape cleaning kits and Kylie posters. The place is packed, though, and it does afford an interesting glimpse at the James fan of the 90s. And they’re young. Horribly young. Except for the old ones.
Many wear hooded tops, flared trousers and have faces curtained with floppy fringes obviously in the throes of geographical adolescent crush. Others are more conventionally alternative and have albums by Echo and the Bunnymen back at the flat. Their enthusiasm is as infectious as it is justified as they queue patiently to have their merchandise autographed and pass the time of day with their heroes. Two hulking, neanderthal bodybuilders who’ve popped in for Tina Turner albums stand bemused in the midst of it.
Many of the kids clutch copies of Gold Mother, latest and undoubtedly best James album. Fleshed out by the additional members, the sound is now free of the slightly edgy diffidence. The Jamesian quest for originality is still evident but so is the desire to make a full-blooded rock racket. It even garnered a bona fide hit in How Was It For You?, a straightforward, unreconstructed knees up of a rock tune that successfully completed a string of excellent ‘nearly’ singles: What For, Sit Down and Come Home, the latter now set for re-release.
At the soundcheck, James go through the complicated daily routine of choosing tonight’s set. They try Crescendo and declare it to be a ‘bloody mess’. They perform an excellent God Only Knows and still seem unconvinced. They run through a lovely version of The Velvet Underground’s Sunday Morning (admittedly a song that could withstand an Erasure version) which I love and they dismiss as ‘shite’. Being an unconventional pop group, ie not having your nightly performance worked out down to the last witty ad lib, clearly has its trials and I leave them to it.
Over the catering crew’s delightful strawberry meringues, word goes round that tonight’s gig is sold out. Saul throws up his hands in mock horror. “Oh no, we’ve sold out! I knew we shouldn’t have released How Was It For You?” There probably are poor benighted souls who think this way (indeed, some of them work on music papers) but fortunately there are thousands of others to whom James are a new band and come unfettered by associations. Unsurprisingly, all of James turn out to be extremely nice folk indeed. Tim and I realise we have a shared love of the Lake District fells and I am quietly impressed and dead jealous when he tells me of travelling Helvelyn’s Striding Edge in a blizzard.
The bar is filling up with many of the same faces that were at the record shop earlier. They wear their freshly signed t-shirts as trophies, as proof that they are privy to the inner sanctum. James have always had a considerable live support but something indefinable and inexplicable has happened. The Manchester connection, though powerful, is not enough to account for this broadening of appeal, this new devotion.
And within two hours, I know why. I have a confession to make. I’ve been a little lukewarm about James in the past. Hymn From A Village, Johnny Yen, Scarecrow, interesting stuff I agree, but…. Maybe it was just me being suspicious but I could never really get past the wilful awkwardness of some of their songs and their seeming substitution of bug-eyed dementia for genuine passion.
In case you have harboured these thoughts yourself and have not had the pleasure of the new James, then let me, as Peter Purves would say, enlighten you. James have metamorphosed into an extraordinary rock group, a live event of breathtaking force. The individuality remains but with it comes grit, pluck, fire and brimstone.
As the siren riff of Come Home plays over the slide show of James banners, the expectation is palpable. They begin and immediately you’re struck by the imposing weight of the sound and the sense of self-assurance. Hang On and Government Walls are the work of a band not afraid to make a big beautiful sound, an intoxicating tumult.
Bring A Gun and Suffering are raucous and intense rock songs, with a physical presence most speed metal bands would envy. They take chances with impunity, dropping into the spectral atmospherics of Walking The Ghost or chancing their arm with an untitled new song building on relentless repetition and the interplay between an agitated violin and a bruised, blue-black trumpet.
There then follows a kind of mini greatest hits segment that sends the assembled bonkers with glee. How Was It For You? leads into the frenetic, primitivist Johnny Yen complete with ad lib along the lines of “Aren’t you just sick of all those translucent Manchester bands” If concessions to modernity (Mondays drumbeat, splash of house piano) have been made in Come Home they’ve been made with an elan that you can’t fault.
Sit Down; the new James anthem brings legions onto the stage, forcing Tim on to the speaker cabinets for fear of being crushed. In case anyone thought they were playing to the gallery for cheap applause, they finish with Stutter, a nightmare blast of psycho metal. The image retained is that of Andy’s wildly flailing searchlight illuminating corners of the hall, of Tim’s frantic dervlish dance, of Saul roaming the stage like a man possessed and of a pop group at the height of their powers. You could say I was impressed.
I gave it a week. It could have been a trick of the light or something in the lager, I figured. The James World Cup tour finished up at the Birmingham Hummingbird and I proposed to be there. To get some more of this addictive stuff and to sit down with James and a tape recorder. The night in Sheffield had ended in champagne, autograph hunters, eight different types of soft cheese and a curious coach journey to Manchester where the video entertainment came courtesy of Stallone and First Blood, not perhaps an automatic first choice as most people’s idea of fave James viewing.
James arrive in beautiful downtown Brum in good spirits, having had several good gigs in the interim, including one particularly special, emotional shindig at the Liverpool Royal Court. The World Cup tour proper ends tonight, the 20 gigs in 23 nights, although there is Glastonbury and some Irish gigs later. Are these extraordinary scenes of fervour and mass communion seen every night? Tim Booth laughs.
“Not always. God knows what it is that starts them off. I suppose certain songs like What For and Sit Down are very warm and they invite an emotional response. But in other songs like Come Home, you don’t get the same singalong quality, it’s darker… ‘After 30 years I’ve become my fears…..’ But, yes, often the audience seem to get involved in an almost U2 kind of way.”
You see, this has been bothering me. Though there’s nothing of the bombastic or messianistic about James, the last show I saw that had a similar feel to it was a Simple Minds concert. The same sense that for the crowd, and band, this was more than a collection of pop songs played loud but implied some celebration of import. Is Tim insulted by this comparison?
“No because I know what you mean. We’ve always had it, even though in the past the audiences have been a bit thinner on the ground. In Manchester, it’s been a celebration for four years. There’ve been times when we’ve had to stop playing because the crowd was singing so loud it was putting us off! But in the past this never got reported.”
“On stage, it’s a performance but it’s also a reflection of ourselves. Sometimes we don’t want to do the nice songs, we want to do the heavy ones with the nasty lyrics. Then the audience aren’t invited to join in, it’s more like ‘witness this’. We like those as well, though the sound people say ‘that was weird’.
“This tour I’ve encouraged people to sing Sit Down. In London they wouldn’t. But I guess I shouldn’t really try, it’s a bit of a cliche. So sometimes it’s a celebration – uplifting and rewarding. Other times, we release demons.”
Larry : “There used to be a real barrier between us and the audience. It was a criticism that was thrown at us a lot … that we were separate, somehow insular and aloof with all this improvising on stage and stuff. And we didn’t realise because we were concentrating so hard. In effect it was like a practice room with 600 people.”
Jim continues this rueful reflection. “We were much more self conscious then. Much more vulnerable. Going on stage was terrifying because we were right on the line, taking real risks…. and sometimes it would go badly wrong. It would fall apart and we’d all freak out, all turn round and retreat, heads down and face the drummer. Try and get off quick.”
How about the audiences themselves? Who comes to James gigs these days?
Tim : “Well on this tour it’s been young girls. Loads of them. That’s certainly never happened before. I can’t remember when it started…..”
Saul interrupts. “Basically it’s been since I joined the band, hasn’t it?”
Larry : “I think partly because we never made it, our records have become very dear to people. It’s as if there have been a lot of people quietly rooting for James who are now coming out of the closets.”
Jim : “It seems to go in pockets around the country. In Glasgow and Norwich, it’s older people. You can see the odd grey hair in the audience. But you go elsewhere and there’s these really young girls down the front.”
I ask whether they are beginning to get tired of hearing that James areon the verge of stardom. Larry is quick to reply. “What, after seven years of it, you mean?”
Tim takes up the thread. “No, it’s very different now. This is it. In the past our music was often quite skeletal and difficult. But now there are seven of us, working hard and the sound has become more accessible. Fleshed out and huge. Like Johnny Yen, which has always been a good song has now become an anthem.
“There’s a real wave of support now. The biggest we’ve ever had,” continues Jim. “You definitely get the feeling something is happening.”
Tim : “It’s a new band. I’ve wanted this for so long but we were never able to find sympathetic musicians. Now we have. I wanted to change the name to emphasize this. But I’m glad we didn’t now because it’s become a good name again after a period of being terribly out of fashion.”
Larry : “I’m glad we kept the name too. For me, it’s like The Fall. They’ve gone through so many changes but they are still The Fall. The same spirit persists. And we’re still James. It’s just that now there are seven of us playing to the same principles that the four of us once had.”
Jim : “For me, changing the name was about destroying the preconceptions that people had about us. It was going to be a way of saying ‘Look we’re back and we’re completely different. Forget all that bollocks you read in the past.'”
And what preconceptions might those be, I ask innocently. Jim eyes me with a wry smile.
“I don’t really like to repeat them because it only helps to perpetuate them. You know that in the past we’ve been associated with…….” Tim clamps a hand across Jim’s mouth and doesn’t remove it until he’s certain Glennie isn’t about too say anything too incriminating. “… some softer areas of music. Yes, we do have our quiet moments. But really, we play half a dozen heavy metal songs in the set and people still say we’re a folk band. How can anyone who plays a song like Stutter be described as a ‘folk band’? It’s as if people are desperate not to confuse the issue. ‘Look you’re vegetarians, we suspect that you’re Buddhists, you do the odd acoustic number. You’re a folk band!”
Larry : “It’s like touring with The Smiths. We did that specifically to destroy the endless Smiths comparisons. We thought that by going out and playing with them every night, we’d hammer home the point that we were nothing like them. But it backfired. It just made the association stronger.”
Tim elaborates on this theme. “At the time the things that Morrissey said were very flattering and we were very grateful but when we didn’t make it, it became this millstone around our necks that we had to put up with for five years.”
James, undoubtedly, are a group reborn. They have not disowned their past but they have built something completely new from its foundations. At what point did this rebirth occur?
Tim : “In some ways it was external events like coming off Sire and Gavin (ex-drummer) leaving. That was a stimulus. We’d wanted more people in the band for ages.”
Jim : “We tried everybody. Ron Johnson. Blokes from the Halle Orchestra. Clint from the Inspiral Carpets. But it never seemed to quite work.”
Then Tim makes a shock admission. “You see I’ve always been a big fan of Bruce Springsteen live. I’ve seen him a few times and I’ve always been blown away by the real depth of talent within his band. That’s something I’ve wanted for James but it never seemed to work until this year. It all fell together.
“Andy’s really the most freelance of the four. He’s got his jazz band. Dave was suspicious because he’d been badly ripped of in the past. And in the beginning he had to join on trust because there was no money to pay him with. At the end of the first tour I think he was amazed when we paid him. Mark is extremely talented but so quiet that for a year we didn’t know whether he was enjoying himself or not. (He also has a sense of humour. In the tour programme, he lists his least attractive trait as being ‘loudmouth and pushy’) And Saul was spotted by Larry, doing his bit in a get-up-and-improvise club.
And how did Saul feel, I wonder, about his discovery, a la the Human League girls?
“Well, it came at a particularly good time for me as I was doing absolutely nothing. Indeed, I was up a particular creek without a certain implement. I’d never played on a stage in my life and within two weeks I was playing to 2000 people at the Free Trade Hall. I gradually learnt stagefright.”
It would seem to me that only a person stupider than a very stupid thing could not be enchanted by the new James. But have there been any mealy mouthed cries of ‘sell out’?
Tim : “Well, there have been the reviews. For the first time in our career, we were landed with a whole batch of pretty vicious reviews saying ‘what a good LP Stutter was’ which, of course, no one said at the time.”
Larry : “It’s ironic really, this talk of ‘selling out’ because we never saw ourselves as being particularly oblique at the time. We always wanted to be popular as well as experimental. An esoteric pop group. We thought we were accessible when really we weren’t. Stutter has its difficult moments, though a lot of it was naivety. We didn’t realise that there was anything odd about songs with no choruses.”
But, around the time of the Stripmining LP, things had reached a low ebb. Faced with public indifference and an uncooperative record company, there must have been a strong case for packing it all in. Larry pales visibly.
“There was one point. Sire had pretty much refused to do anything with What For and our management then couldn’t seem to do anything. I remember the four of us being in a cafe and I think it was Gavan who said ‘well, that’s it then’ and I think it all swung on the next remark. But fortunately someone said something to the effect of ‘let’s show the bastards’. I knew I wasn’t prepared to be told that my career was over by some bloke in an office in America who knew nothing about James.”
But did you ever feel, like many others did, that James had had their chance?
Tim : “Not really. We knew our music was improving. We were always confident that we’d be one of the biggest groups in the world. So we waited with a kind of arrogant patience.”
Cynics might suggest that your rocketing popularity has more to do with a general infatuation with all things Mancunian rather than your own qualities.
Larry : “Are we seen as part of that scene? I’m not sure that we are. There may be some overlap but I don’t think that it counts for very much.”
Tim : “When we toured with the Mondays well before this Manchester thing, we were beginning to get big audiences and a great vibe. You can’t win. Someone said ‘Oh you’re getting popular now because The Smiths had gone,’ but The Smiths have been gone for years now. So then it’s ‘well, The Stone Roses are doing well’. How can you argue with that?
And are these the happpiest times ever for the James gang?
Tim : “Musically, yes. My personal life is in a shambles. But everything to do with the band is very exciting and uplifting at the moment.”
And does the imminent threat of fame appeal to you?
“It used to frighten us; back in the days when everyone was saying it was bound to happen. But then it passed us by. We thought ‘we’ll never know’. Now we can’t wait. I’m getting used to all that strange business about feeling watched all the time. Being asked for autographs in nightclubs. And then there’s the sex……”
Pardon?
“The feeling of it being around all the time. The constant availability. It’s both very frightening and very exciting.”
I bet. That night in Birmingham the James World Cup Tour 1990 came to an exhilirating end. I was converted for the second time in a week. The air crackled. The rafters rang. And by Sit Down the band gave up and simply let the crowd sing the chorus in proof that sometimes pop music can still be powerfully affecting without resort to schmaltz or overblown, fake sentiment.
Backstage there is an intoxicating, gentle euphoria. For me, there is the joyous realisation that pop music doesn’t have to pick its spots and pull some potato-faced sneer in the mirror of its mum and dad’s house to be wildly, dangerously brilliant. Backstage, a hugely, tipsily pregnant woman gets Tim to sign the stomach wherein resides her unborn child. Is this making you feel sick, rock n rollers? Good. You’ll be getting a hell of a lot sicker before this party is over.
The Mancs That Like To Say Yes – Select Magazine
Their T-shirt went to number one in Britain and now JAMES aim to follow it up with their debut LP for a major. So how far are they the band that Manchester forgot, or just a Madchester crazed media overlooked?
May Day in Manchester. Thermometers are nudging the 80 degrees mark and everyone’s stupid with the heat. It’s too sweaty too wear flares, so the city’s youth have left their flapping dungarees at home in favour of surf jams and questionable Bermuda shorts. So much for the Rainy City – this is more like Torremolinos.
On a postage-stamp of parkland near their city centre offices, the founder members of Manchester’s best kept secret lounge on dry grass. Today’s Today says that record smog levels make sunbathing a high-risk activity, akin to changing a lightbulb while standing in a bucket of water, but James couldn’t give a bugger.
The charming and amiable trio of Jim Glennie, Larry Gott and singer/wordsmith Tim booth are keen to relax – a wise move considering that their workload is about to increase considerably. After nearly eight years of diligent gigging, an unhappy marriage with a major label followed by 18 months in limbo, a succession of managers and enough false starts to wear down the most patient of artists… all these trials are about to pay off.
Their forthcoming debut album for Fontana, ‘Gold Mother’, is not merely James’ best studio recording so far, but the most accomplished example of what used to be called Indie-rock that 1990 has seen. And as bassist Glennie says, Beats International have already taken a James T-shirt to number one in Britain. All they need to do now is to match it with a record.
The omens are unmistakable. The smart money says that, at long last, James are about to happen. ’’This time we’re prepared to take the breaks,” Jim Glennie says. “And we weren’t in the past. That’s the difference. We’ve created a situation where we could have been successful, we could have gone for it and done everything, but we didn’t, we held back. And we lost our chance.” Today you could get a donkey ‘Blogged up’ in flares and Kickers and it would probably be hailed as the next wonder from the land of the Orange Buses.
Despite selling upwards of 2,000 concert tickets in most cities – more in Manchester – and despite shifting two grand’s worth of their distinctive T-shirts this week, James were virtually blacklisted by last year’s Madchester media circus.
With their back catalogue of sophisticated oblique pop, James clearly didn’t fit into the conception of a cartoon world filled with bowl-headed, so called scallies berserk on horse tranquillisers and bent on mischief. James were a Manchester band, not a Madchester band. And Madchester was about the Monday’s, The Stone Roses, 808 State, Oldham’s Inspiral Carpets and a slew of promotion play-off candidates like The New Fast Automatic Daffodils.
Maybe James (est 1983) had been around a bit too long and outstayed their welcome, failing to match previous glowing references from the press with attendant hits. Or perhaps it was the Morrissey seal of approval, priceless when he bestowed it on James in 11985 but now the equivalent of the Black Spot, that dropped them into the perceived no man’s land between the bright young things and the old Manchester of New Order, The Fall and The Smiths.
Either way, James fell victim to a conspiracy of silence. This rankles with guitar talent and conviction man Larry Gott. “James is not the band that Manchester forgot,” he says testily. “Once we were the medias darlings, but because we didn’t do what they expected of us (touring America with The Smiths for instance) we were forgotten about. It didn’t mean anything to us. Our audiences and record sales kept growing.”
Tim Booth is also at pains to put Manchester matters in perspective. “You have to divide what’s really going on in Manchester – the bands who know and respect each other – and what’s written in the press. The journalistic conception of the Manchester scene is totally different to the reality of how the bands relate to one another which is, on the whole, very good. And we are part of that. That’s why we’ve taken the Mondays and the Carpets and the Daffodils on tour; that’s why we were taken on tour by The Smiths, The Fall and New Order. It’s nothing like what’s written about by journalists from the South.”
James’ conspicuous failure to do the business was partly due to their ill-starred three year deal with Sire Records, signed in 1985, which was so grim it nearly finished the band off. Even today they groan at the mention of the company that promised so much – not least to share a label with band favourites Talking Heads and The Ramones – and delivered nothing but misery. ‘Stutter’ and ‘Strip-mine’, their two albums for Sire, were both fine, spiky offerings, but each received a negligible push from the label which was more concerned with its American operations. The records duly evaporated. The bands’ attitude did not help. ‘We were idealistic”, says a rueful Jim. ”We thought the music would win through, regardless of whether or not we we did interviews, or didn’t release anything for years or whatever. It was just naivety.”
These were dispiriting times for the then four-piece James, even when the contract expired, as Larry explains with the black humour of hindsight. ”We nearly called it a day there and then, when Gavin (Whelan, James’ original drummer) said, well that’s it. And we knew that whatever the next person said would decide whether it went one way or another.” Glennie, Booth and Gott opted to soldier on, eventually recruiting new drummer Dave Baynton-Power. They returned to indie-land and Rough Trade for the singles ‘Sit Down’ and ‘Come Home’ and an acclaimed live album, ‘One Man Clapping’. The album’s lengthy stint in the indie charts proved that there were still plenty of James fans out there after all.
For most of ’88 and ’89 James paid the rent not as musicians but bizarrely with the proceeds of the range of James T-shirts designed by a fan in London. The T-shirts have a ‘Ja’ on the front, ‘m’ on one arm and ‘e’ on the back and ‘s’ on the other arm. ‘Poor As Fuck’ might have been more appropriate. ‘It was ridiculous,” recalls Booth. “While we were producing ‘Gold Mother’ last year none of us even had cassette machines that worked properly to listen to the masters. Our record players were useless too. We’d been on £30 a week for about seven years and we had no money for the necessary technology.
This is unlikely to be the state of affairs from now on. It’s early days, but the new seven-piece James are enjoying a productive relationship with Fontana. The fiery ‘How Was It For You’, first fruit of the new deal shifted 15,000 copies in the North West alone during its first week of release and the label is doing it all it can to ensure the record’s chart success. Tim Palmer, who worked on the release of The House Of Love’s ‘Shine On’ has remixed ‘How Was It’ for single consumption with James’ blessings and Fontana are releasing the track in a variety of formats with bewildering permutations of exclusive extra tracks.
James, though not entirely happy with this chart chicanery have spent enough time on their metaphorical arses to realise that some compromises are worth making. “It is a fix really,” Glennie concedes. “But at this moment we do need that push. Hopefully when we’re in a situation where we don’t need it anymore we can stop bloody doing it.” Of course there are remixes and there are remixes. And it’s something of a surprise that James, stalwarts of the pre-Acid House, no disco-dancing, indie-kid brigade, are taking the plunge with a dancefloor remix for their next release.
Paul Oakenfold and Andy Weatherall (the men who made Happy Mondays dance) are possibles to re-work ‘Come Dance’ as is Inspirals and Erasure remixer Flood. And somewhere in the James tape cupboard is a remix by Graham Massey of 808 State which, reckons Jim, is more “bassy but too muffled to release.” The band had it done last summer – “When it wasn’t so fashionable, “quips Booth. “Yeah, dance mixes are a departure from what we were doing two years ago. But since then the Mondays and ‘Fools Gold’ and countless others have proved that there are no longer two camps of dance and rock, that it doesn’t matter which are you work in as long as the song itself is good.”
Inspired by the distant sight of Strangeways Prison’s wrecked Rotunda, Jim and larry toy with the idea of a ‘Strangeways Rooftop Dance Mix’ of ‘Come Home’ with the former indie hit’s spiralling hook replaced by incessant police sirens and an opening sample of a rioter shouting, “Good Morning Manchester!” All agree it would be mega-classic. They want to call it ‘Come Down’ but realise that then the song wouldn’t make sense.
This month’s Gold Mother is a measured, tempting collection with confidence to spare. The fractured wit and melodic inventiveness of ‘Stutter’ and ‘Strip-mine’ are still there but the context is new with recruits Mark Hunter (keyboards), Andy Diagram (trumpet) and Saul Davies (everything but specifically violin) bringing extra colour to what are some of James’ finest songs. ‘How Was It For You?’ and ‘Come Home’ are already well-known as wild things with heart and ice and ‘Top Of The World’ finds a pitch of poignancy that James have never reached before. The textures are many and varied, the sentiments intriguing and more readily intelligible if not exactly commercialised. Weak links are few: this is how James always should have sounded.
Booth’s lyric writing, noted for its tendency to sharp contrasts of specifics and abstracts has also moved into focus. ‘God Only Knows’ is hilarious, skewering religious head-the-balls of the Swaggart and Bakker school with some cruelly apposite sampling from Satellite God-slot programmes and the priceless lines, “If God is in his image/Almighty must be small”. Booth does not bother to disguise his contempt for today’s cheap goons who pass for religious authority. “If God made man in his image then it doesn’t reflect too well on God does it?” he grins. “Man is a total screw-up and if there is a spirit or meaning of life then man clearly has no idea what it is. He is much better off keeping his mouth shut rather than saying, Follow me as your intermediary.”
Maybe the title track gives the most telling clue to James’ present concerns. ‘Gold Mother’ deals with the birth of Tim’s son Ben in graphic Technicolor but it’s no lame bout of new-man drivel. The song is positively peculiar, an angular bass-driven chant with backing vocals by everyone’s favourite obstetricians the Inspiral Carpets. “Have you ever seen a woman giving birth?” asks Tim…. Only on the telly….” It’s not the same on the telly……”
Back at the James offices, the aforementioned Ben is having a messy late lunch and the band are poring over a limited edition of ‘How Was It For You?’ in a particularly desirable metallic sleeve. It comes with a free James logo stencil which Jim reckons will kill off their T-shirt sales in one fell blow. Talk turns to which of Larry’s guitars will look best on the inevitable Top Of The Pops slot and to the Gold Mother tour which begins this week coinciding with the World Cup. Instead of a support band, James will be screening the match of the evening with a DJ on at the same time so you can dance or watch the game. Or both.
“It’s not as if we’re a great football band or anything but people will want to see the game which seems fair enough,” says the obliging Tim.
Tim Interview – Melody Maker
Front Man with James, Tim Booth was THE sensation of this year’s Glastonbury Festival. James have a new single, ‘Come Home’ and a new album, ‘Gold Mother’, out now on Fontana
WHERE DID YOU GO LAST NIGHT?
To bed
WHAT WAS THE LAST THING YOU THOUGHT OF BEFORE YOU WENT TO SLEEP?
I’m too tired to sleep.
WHAT DID YOU DREAM?
That I was asleep dreaming I was awake.
WHAT WILL YOU DO TODAY?
Move home.
WHAT IS YOUR GREATEST FEAR?
Lingering pain.
WHO ARE YOUR FAVOURITE SINGERS/MUSICIANS?
Nick Cave, James.
IF YOU COULD BE SOMEONE ELSE, ALIVE OR DEAD, WHO WOULD YOU BE?
Who wants to be dead? God.
WHAT ANNOYS YOU THE MOST?
Guilt trips.
WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER YOUR GREATEST STRENGTH?
Optimistic determination.
WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER YOUR GREATEST WEAKNESS?
Guilt trips me up.
WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE RECORDS?
“Horses”; “Mercy Seat”
WHAT WAS THE LAST ACT YOU SAW LIVE?
World Party.
WHAT DO YOU ALWAYS CARRY WITH YOU?
A hanky.
WHO WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO KILL IF YOU COULD?
Thatcher; Waddington; Terra Blanche; Alistair Burnett; Paul Daniels (getting petty here).
WHAT WOULD YOU FIND DOWN THE BACK OF YOUR SOFA?
Keys, coins, my wallet (I hope)
WHO WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO MEET?
Doris Lessing; Patti Smith; Sam Sheppard; Robert Anton Wilcox.
WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING AT THE MOMENT?
“A Confederacy Of Dunces”.
WHAT WAS THE LAST FILM YOU SAW?
“Jesus of Montreal”.
WHAT DO YOU NEVER MISS ON TV?
“Cheers”.
WHAT DID YOU LAST RECEIVE IN THE POST?
Bills.
WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE WORD?
Fingers.
WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO AN ALIEN?
“Take me with you”.
WHAT MAKES YOU LAUGH?
Paid professionals: Connelly; Martin; Williams; Wright; Hegley; Redmond; Elton; Atkinson; “Cheers”; “Roseanne”.
WHAT MAKES YOU CRY?
Being human
HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO DIE?
Gently.
WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE YOUR EPITAPH TO BE?
“Nice try”
Les Irrockuptibles Interview (French)
Going For Gold – Sounds
Select Magazine Interview
Their forthcoming album for Fontana, Gold Mother, is not merely James best studio recording so far, but the most accomplished example of what used to be called indie-rock that 1990 has seen. And as Jim Glennie says Beats International have already taken a James T-shirt to number one. All they need now is to match it with a record.
The omens are unmistakeable. The smart money says that, at long last, James are about to happen.
“This time we’re prepared to take the breaks,” Jim Glennie says. “And we weren’t in the past. That’s the difference.”
“We’ve created a situation where we could have been successful, we could have gone for it and done everything, but we didn’t, we held back. And we lost our chance.”
Today, you could get a donkey Bloggsed up in flares and Kickers and it would probably be hailed as the next wonder from the land of the Orange Buses.
Despite selling upwards of 2,000 concert tickets in most cities – more in Manchester – and despite shifting two grand’s worth of their distinctive t-shirts this week, James were virtually blacklisted by last year’s Madchester media circus.
With their back catalogue of sophisticated oblique pop, James clearly didn’t fit into the popular conception of a cartoon world filled with bowl-headed, so-called scallies berserk on horse tranquilisers and bent on mischief.
James were a Manchester band, not a Madchester band. And Madchester was about the Mondays, The Stone Roses, 808 State, Oldham’s Inspiral Carpets and a slew of promotion play-off candidates like The New Fast Automatic Daffodils.
Maybe James (est 1983) had been around a bit too long and outstayed their welcome, failing to match previous glowing references from the press with attendant hits. Or perhaps it was the Morrissey seal of approval, priceless when he bestowed it upon James in 1985 but now the equivalent of the black spot, that dropped them into the perceived no man’s land between the bright young things and the old Manchester of New Order, The Fall and The Smiths.
Either way, James fell victim to a conspiracy of silence. This rankles with guitar talent and conviction man Larry Gott.
“James is not the band Manchester forgot,” he says testily. “Once we were the media’s darlings but because we didn’t do what was expected of us (touring America with The Smiths for example) we were forgotten about. It didn’t mean anything to us. Our audiences and record sales kept growing.”
Tim Booth is also at pains to put Manchester matters into perspective.
“You have to divide what’s really going on in Manchester – the bands who know and respect each other – and what’s written in the press. The journalist conception of the Manchester scene is totally different to the reality of how the bands relate to one another which is, on the whole, very good.”
“And we are part of that. That’s why we’ve taken the Mondays and the Carpets and the Daffodils on tour; that’s why we were taken on tour by The Smiths, The Fall and New Order. It’s nothing like what’s written about by journalists from the South.”
James conspicious failure to do the business was partly due to their ill-starred three year deal with Sire Records, signed in 1985, which was so grim it nearly finished the band off. Even today, they groan at the mention of the company that promised so much – not least the chance to share a label with band favourites Talking Heads and The Ramones – and delivered nothing but misery.
Stutter and Strip Mine, their two albums for Sire, were both fine spiky offerings but each received a negligible push from a label which was more concerned with its American operations. The records duly evaporated. The band’s attitude did not help.
“We were idealistic,” says a rueful Jim. “We thought the music would win through, regardless of whether or not we did any interviews or didn’t release anything for years or whatever. It was just naivety.”
These were dispiriting times for the then four-piece James, even when the contract expired, as Larry explains with the black humour of hindsight.
“We nearly called it a day there and then, when Gavan (Whelan, James original drummer) said, Well that’s it. And we knew that whatever the next person said would decide whether it went one way or another.”
Glennie, Booth and Gott opted to soldier on, eventually recruiting new drummer Dave Baynton-Power. They returned to indie-land and Rough Trade for the singles Sit Down and Come Home and an acclaimed live album One Man Clapping. The album’s lengthy stint in the indie charts proved that there were still plenty of James fans out there, after all.
For most of 88 and 89 James paid the rent not as musicians, but, bizarrely, from the proceeds of the range of James t-shirts designed by a fan in London. The shirts have ‘Ja’ on the front, ‘m’ on one arm and ‘e’ on the back and ‘s’ on the other arm. ‘Poor as Fuck’ might have been more appropriate.
“It was ridiculous” recalls Booth. “While we were producing Gold Mother last year, none of us even had cassette machines that worked properly to listen to the masters. Our record players were useless too. We’d been on £30 a week for about seven years and we had no money for the necessary technology.”
This is unlikely to be the state of affairs from now on. It’s early days, but the new seven-piece James are enjoying a productive relationship with Fontana.
The fiery How Was It For You?, first fruit of the new deal, shifted 15,000 copies in the North West alone in its first week of release and the label is doing all it can to ensure the record’s chart success.
Tim Palmer, who worked on the re-release of the House Of Love’s Shine On, had remixed How Was It For You? for single consumption, with James blessing, and Fontana are releasing the track in a variety of formats, with bewildering permutations of exclusive extra tracks.
James, though not entirely happy with this chart chicanery, have spent enough time of the metaphorical arses to realise that some compromises are worth making.
“It’s a fix really,” Glennie concedes. “But at the moment, we need that push. Hopefully, when we’re in a situation when we don’t need it anymore we can stop bloody doing it.”
Of course, there are remixes and there are remixes. And it’s something of a surprise that James, stalwarts of the pre-Acid house, no disco-dancing, indie-kid brigade are taking the plung with a dancefloor remix of their next release.
Paul Oakenfold and Andy Weatherall (the men who made Happy Mondays dance) are possibles to rework Come Home as is Inspirals and Erasure remixer Flood. And somewhere in the James tape cupboard is a remix by Graham Massey of 808 State, which, reckons Jim. is, “more bassy but too muffled to release.”
The band had it done last summer – “When it wasn’t sofashionable,” quips Booth.
“Yeah, dance mixes are a departure from what we were doing two years ago, But since then the Mondays and Fools Gold and countless others have proved that there are no longer two camps of dance and rock, that it doesn’t matter which area you work in as long as the song itself is good.”
Inspired by the distant sight of Strangeways Prison’s wrecked rotunda, Jim and Larry toy with the idea of a “Strangeways Rooftops Dance Mix” of Come Home with the former indie hit’s spiralling hook replaced by incesssant police sirens and an opening sample of a rioter shouting “Good morning, Manchester!” All agree it would be mega-classic. They want to call it Come Down, but realise that then the song wouldn’t make sense.
This month’s Gold Mother is a measured, tempting collection with confidence to spare. The fractured wit and melodic inventiveness of Stutter and Strip Mine are still there but the context is new, with recruits Mark Hunter (keyboards), Andy Diagram (trumpet) and Saul Davies (everything but specifically violin) bringing extra colour to what are some of James finest songs.
How Was It For You? and Come Home are already well known as wild things with hearts of ice and Top Of The World finds a pitch of poignancy that James have never reached before.
The textures are many and varied, the sentiments intriguing and more readily intelligible if not exactly commercialised. Weak links are few: this is how James always should have sounded.
Booth’s lyric-writing, noted for its tendency to sharp contrasts of specifics and abstracts, has also moved into focus. God Only Knows is hilarious, skewering religious head-the-balls of the Swaggart and Bakker school with some cruelly apposite sampling from Satellite God-slot programmes and the priceless lines ‘If God is in his image, Almighty must be small”. Booth does not bother to disguise his contempt for today’s cheap goons who pass for religious authority.
“If God made man in his image then it doesn’t reflect too well on God, does it?” he grins. “Man is a total screw-up and if there is a spirit or meaning of life then man clearly has no idea what it is. He is much better keeping his mouth shut rather than saying, Follow me as your intermediary.”
Maybe the title track gives the most telling clue to James present concerns. Gold Mother deals with the birth of Tim’s son Ben in graphic technicolour, but it’s no lame bout of new-man drivel. The song is positively peculiar, an angular bass-driven chant with backing vocals by everyone’s favourite obstetricians the Inspiral Carpets.
“Have you ever seen a woman giving birth?” asks Tim.
Only on the telly.
“It’s not the same on the telly”
Back at the James offices, the aforementioned Ben is having a messy late lunch and the band are poring over a limited edition of How Was It For You? in a particularly desirable metallic sleeve. It comes with a free James logo stencil, which Jim reckons will kill off their T-shirt sales in one fell blow.
Talk turns to which of Larry’s guitars will look best on the inevitable Top of the Pops slot, and to the Gold Mother tour, which begins this week, coinciding with the World Cup. Instead of a support band, James will be screening the match of the evening with a DJ on at the same time, so you can dance or watch the game. Or both.
“It’s not as if we’re a great football band or anything but people will want to see the game, which seems fair enough,” says the obliging Tim.
What Every Lentil Wants To Know – Smash Hits
James are a crazy seven-piece from Manchester who everyone used to think were vegan buddhists but weren’t really cos they’re all like really normal guys and they want to talk about the music, right, and not meditation and chunky cardigans etc. With their single How Was It For You? gliding into the Top Forty, Smash Hits slipped into its sandals and spoke to Tim Booth, singer 28, about like the James concept, man.
1. Tim Booth was born in picturesque Bradford but has lived in not so picturesque Manchester for ten years
2. He once worked in a Yorkshire brewery. “That was quite weird, quite aggressive. I don’t have a Yorkshire accent and I had to put one on. Friends of mine who’d worked there before had been beaten up because they didn’t have the right accent.”
3. James came together in 1983 and they thought their name was “very original” then. “But now it’s ten a penny, it’s disgusting.” spits Tim.
4. Touring was once a problem. “Tour promoters thought ‘James’ might be a poet, so I used to go on at concerts and pretend I was a poet, and that the audience had been conned into thinking they were seeing a band. I had to write a poem in the day and narrate it to the audience,” mutters Tim.
5. They’re always being accused of being intellectual. “I think that’s a dead end,” argues Tim. “Intellectuals tend to be people who’ve got overdeveloped brains and underdeveloped hearts.”
6. Seeing James t-shirts has saved them from bankruptcy. Lester in Beats International wore one on Top of the Pops. “We’re going to give us music and open up a retail outlet,” jests Tim. Ho, ho!
7. In the past they’ve meditated a great deal. “When you’re leading the kind of lifestyle that we lead in the band, you just need something to balance you out and you just gonna be off your head all the time.”
8. Tim thinks happiness is not a permanent state of mind. “If it is them there’s something wrong with your hormones.”
GLR Interview
Interviewer : Now on a major label, Phonogram’s Fontana, James having a hit single with How Was It For You? and the band are downstairs in our basement studio. Tim Booth on vocals, sometimes known as Maharishi Booth. Bit of a guru on the quiet
Tim : Not round my parts mate. You come down here and tell me that to my face.
Interviewer : I love reading about your dream though. Which featured,
Tim : (groans)
Interview : Well, you told the story once, it comes back to you
Tim : Yeah, the guy can’t write. He got it completely wrong as we did the interview on a train so he couldn’t hear his tape back afterwards. It’s embarrassing
Interview : But was Jed Clampett and Jim Morrisson in it? Nurse Crachett
Tim : I’m afraid so, but it had a punchline to it. It had a point to it and it didn’t read like that. It’s an old dream too as well, you know. My dreams are much more clinical nowadays since I’ve been having the treatment.
Interviewer : Did you have one last night?
Tim : That’s a very personal question isn’t it?
Interviewer : I suppose it is
Tim : How Was It For You?
Interviewer : Dreams are very personal things.
Tim : I can’t remember. I can’t remember. I’d better censor it. I think you’d get cut off on air.
Interviewer : Listen, have you had to change at all, going to a major record label? Has there been any compromise along the way?
Tim : No, because we actually recorded the LP beforehand so part of the deal with Phonogram was that they had to sign for completed masters of the LP. So we’ve just handed them the tape and they said “Yep” and so we actually haven’t had any problem like that. They’ve given us some input, some ideas that they’ve suggested, and we either say “yay” or “nay”. But they kind of seem to respect us at the moment.
Interviewer : How long that will last is anyone’s guess. Alright, a song Tim please….
20th Century Schizoid Band – NME Interview
Loud, dumb, obnoxious, red-neck Americans. Dontcha just love ’em? There are seven of the Big Mac dickheads in a Soho restaurant, terrorising the lettuce-reared, trendy wimp clientele. The yanks are shoving mountains of pasta into each others’ Grand Canyon gobs, splattering the table cloth with Sandinista blood sauce and chanting “Nicaragua! Grenada! Vietnam!” at the tops of their nuclear deterrent voices.
At a nearby table, one reputedly ideologically sound, sweet young English vegetarian and his two Manchester mates sit laughing at the Stars ‘n’ Stripes gorillas, winding them up, “What movie are you from? Animal House?” says the curly haired one. But the Americans prefer to pick on the girl opposite who’s getting ‘confrontational’ “Come on darling, frighten me with more than your face” they tell her. “Plastic surgery would be worth it, sweetheart” So her boyfriend picks up a bottle and starts to wade in.
At this point, Tim Booth, Larry Gott and Jim Glennie, who were thinking of leaving, decide it’s their moral duty to order a pudding and stick around for the fun.
None of this is quite the sort of behaviour that people would normally associate with James. But then people do have some funny ideas about them. In their seven year history as Manchester’s precious enigma boys, assumptions have grown around James like fungus on a dead fish. Despite the dashing pop energy of last year’s brilliant two singles, ‘Come Home’ and ‘Sit . Down’,they are still broadly conceived of as follows : the Smiths inheritors who slipped through the net; rustic English oddballs, too arrogant to write a decent pop song; village poet laureate mystics with a boring Green-leftie moral certitude streak; bookish wimps, not at all the types to join in with a bunch of meathead US shitizens singing “America The Beautiful”
The latter however is exactly what James were doing the night before I met them. In the intervening 22 hours Tim Booth took in a movie, danced like a nutcase at the Wag Club, slept for four hours and then got woken up by workmen singing “Ooooh Black Betty, bam-a-lam” outside his hotel window. Then in the hotel lobby he met a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps who pinned him down to recount his life story , and when I met him that afternoon he was standing by a large fish tank in a photo studio, herding fish into frame for photographer Cummins.
Tirn Booth is nobody’s caricature. He is intense, open and funny, and after a weird , sleep-deprived day and night, has the manic stare of an amazed child.
“James are going to be a big fish in a big pond,” he tells me with reference to the band’s recent return to major label Fontana / Phonogram, so I take Tim, Jim and Larry down the pun for a bit of a grilling.
Funny ideas about James One : James are a bunch of bleeding-heart, knee-jerk liberals.
Tim : “Well, for a start, you’d have to be referring to the lyrics to make a statement like that because how do knee-jerk liberals play? I’ve never seen David Steel play a guitar and I wouldn’t really know how he’d handle it. As for the lyrics, anyone who actually bothers to look at them will see that they’re a lot darker than that. Do you think that, or is it a provocative statement?”
It could be.
Tim : “Well it’s a good thing I’m not a bottle-on-the-head jerk left wing angry young man isn’t it?”
Booth’s mad eyes are staring rather intensely at me, so I agree. OK. Funny idea number two : James are a folk rock band.
Tim : “Anyone who has seen us live would have that idea changed. There might be certain songs in the set which have that element in them especially the acoustic ones, but that’s at most ten percent. And no one says we’re a heavy rock band, but there’s an equal measure of heavy rock songs in the set.”
Three : You, Tim Booth, would rather read a good book than shag Madonna.
Tim : “I think we’d better leave you with your popular misconceptions. I think you should get some help. I don’t think Madonna is actually… I think she’s quite sexy, I guess. I think I’d rather have safe sex than read a good book. I’d rather have safe sex with Madonna than read a good book. Now, if you’d said Jodie Foster…..”
Four : You, Tim Booth, are a surrealist poet who nicked all his ideas from Arthur Rimbaud.
Tim : “No, Anton Artaud please. I can’t read French anyway… I find poetry boring.”
Five : None of you have sufficiently similar musical tastes to want to play the same song at the same time.
Larry : “Probably not too far off the truth there.”
Tim : “That’s a nice one. They’re getting a bit soft now.”
Six : James moment has come and gone
Tim : “Well we can’t say anything about that, can we? We’re just going to have to show you. We’ll show whoever decides that. We’re going to make them all eat fish.”
Aside from the fact that they’re suckers for a dumb fish joke, what becomes quickly apparent from locking antlers with Tim, Larry and Jim is that they’re in confident combative mood. There are good reasons for this. A year back when the new breed of Manchester bands were getting geared up for Top of the Pops, James were still recovering from an unproductive period with Sire.
Three awkward years on the major label had left them without even the money to sue the name crowding Halo James (“He deserves a good kicking”). As they expanded to a seven-piece they were for a while planning to change their name, feeling that they were by no means the same band who put out Hymn From A Village in Factory in 83.
Tim Booth was, however, outvoted. They kept the name and by the end of the year, they’d had two glorious singles out on Rough Trade, kept their dedicated fans happy with a live LP, One Man Clapping, and had their summer. recorded, imminently released album ‘Gold Mother’ picked up by a major label.
The new James songs, of which the single ‘How Was It For You’ is the first unleashed, are fiercer, poppier and funkier than before, without losing any of the humpbacked dementia. They would seem to be going through the same sort of renaissance that The Fall went through with ‘Extricate’
Tim “We’ve all been stripping things down and trying to make the songs more simple and more direct in what we’re trying to say”
Do you think you’ve been musically arrogant in the past? Expected too much?
Tim: “Not from…. There were definitely people who were reading us on our level, and a lot in Manchester. We always got that feedback there…. If you ever see us play in Manchester, they’ll tear you apart if they ever found out who you were. You’ll see. It’s a really different kettle of fish there. Oh dear, nearly said ball game.”
“But some people have been able to respond to us on the level that we take ourselves, which is very seriously. I mean, we don’t take ourselves… I mean yeah, we were difficult, we were arrogant, we were very protective of our babies, our songs. We thought they were masterpieces and we wouldn’t let anyone else touch them. That ended up with us hiring producers who we didn’t let do their jobs. Now we’re more relaxed about it.”
Lying somewhere in Bristol is an entire student thesis written entirely about James. This would make for curious reading because as a songwriter, it has to be said that Booth is a bit of a schizo. On the one hand, there’s the fraught wordplay of the likes of Stutter or Whoops. In the other cranial hemisphere there’s the liberal protest songs, ecologically concerned, like Sky Is Falling, anti-Thatcher, like Promised Land, or bleeding heart for the disadvantaged like Sit Down.
So far from the new album, it emerges that How Was It For You? is about using drink and drugs to evade sexual guilt, How Much Suffering is about English emotional restraint and Gold Mother is about mother courage in child birth. Just occassionally it seems that Halo James would be an appropriate name for Booth’s own band. Is he angling for a sainthood or what? Fortunately, God Only Knows from the new album suggests otherwise.
Tim : “It’s about people speaking in the name of God, or thinking you can speak in the name of God, which is a highly dubious claim. Because a long time ago, I used to speak in the name of God.”
What do you mean?
Tim : “I had that kind of self-righteos zeal that only people who think they’re favoured by God can have. It was a long time ago, but I’m still very attracted to people who try and live their life by a thought-out code, and then find their life has another idea about it and it goes its own way. The more you say Thou Shall Not to anything in your life, the harder it becomes to resist. It’s like you build it up. So someone like Jimmy Swaggart I find very interesting. You know, the public posture contrasted with the private personality.”
“It’s like all the heavy left wing people, when they get to about 60, they all become fascists. It’s like they can’t hold back any longer. And all the atheists you know suddenly become born again pillocks.”
Does that mean the more you try and be a reasonable bloke who just happens to sing in a band, the bigger wanker you become? Hypothetically speaking, of course.
Tim : “No, it means that if I started telling people I was a regular guy in a band, which I don’t, but if I pretended I was, then I’d be a very irregular guy…. It doesn’t mean I’d be a wanker. An irregular wanker, perhaps, which I am. Not a man of habit.”
Back in 83, with Tim Booth fresh out of Manchester University drama studies, James put out Hymn From A Village, the song which was to line them up as the next big post punk jangle. A sprightly piece of off-kilter guitar pop, it’s mostly remarkable for a lyric which snaps at the inadequacy of pop-song language. So maybe the moralising streak in Booth, the bit that keeps coming up with – songs about wicked governments, evil preachers and irresponsible sex, is fired by plain old guilt. Do you feel guilty about doing something as frivolous as singing in a pop group?
Tim : “In terms of how you define pop, I don’t consider myselfto be in a pop group. You know, we make music and I don’t feel at all guilty about that because we make brilliant music and give a lot to people and get a lot for ourselves. I mean, unless I become Mother Theresa or a lawyer or something, there’s no moral high ground in most people’s jobs, to absolve you of guilt. You know, unless you’re Bob Geldof. So I really don’t feel like that at all, and I don’t think any of us do.”
“I hardly ever express just one viewpoint in a song. Usually, there’s lots of different attitudes in them. I don’t understand how people can have clear cut attitudes to basically anything, except this government. I don’t understand how people can have clear cut attitudes about morality, about sex, about drugs. You know ‘DRUGS ARE GOOD’, ‘DRUGS ARE BAD’. Who can say? I don’t take liberal viewpoints.”
“I don’t believe there’s any morality. I don’t believe in morality. If I have to take a decision on something the decision will be practical, not moral. Liberalism is a lot to do with guilt and morality. If you’re going to make me fight out of that corner, you bastard.”
Neither wet liberal apologist, nor in-tuned poet nutcase, Booth is maybe too much of a slippery character to fit in with the conspicious pop personalities. Last time around, while the Morrisseys and Mark Smiths ran off with the miserable bugger prizes and the Housemartins stole the right-on plaudits, James were left muddling along in the margins. Too leftfield, too flighty as musicians, too cool for their own good. This time round though, there’s a focused, hard-headed determination in the James camp that comes across both in Booth’s righteous indignation at my James jibes and in the kick-ass edge (honest) to the new songs. The fired-up Tim Booth who sits at the back of a North London pub spouting lyrics in defence of his songs and telling me I’m as rude as the Americans in the restaurant, hardly matches up with the serene, angelic portraits painted of Tim in the past. Has “the little woolly lamb” who skipped out of Manchester University changed much over the years?
Tim : “Yeah, I’m born again now. I mean how do you answer a question like that? Y’know, I’m much more handsome than I ever was and more modest. No, but we’ve been through a lot of crap. A lot of strange experiences. We’ve got a lot out of James. It’s been our focal point, and the more people who wrote us off, the more it’s been, well, they’re going to have to eat humble pie.”
“There was one day when we talked about packing the whole thing in, for about an hour, but after that it was ‘We will fight them on the beaches!’ Because the music turns us on so much. It’s like we’d be having all these business problems, but the rehearsals would be brilliant. You get a song, and you lose yourself in a song and you feel fantastic. There’s no way we were going to give that up. And we knew that when we play live, we could take people to the same place.”
Last October, when the James tour came to the London T&C Club 2, they took the young dedicated and hot as f–k crowd way out to rapture and back. Frantic, climatic and ebuillent, wiht Booth losing himself totally in spasms of electric eel dancing, it was far from any creaky-jointed nearly-men display. On that kind of form, when they play at Glastonbury at the end of their June World Cup tour, then James have every chance of stealing the Happy Monday’s thunder.
James are, of course, thoroughly affronted by any suggestion that the rise of Mancunian dance society has left them a bit out in the cold.
Tim : “You don’t know how we relate to that and what we do in our private lives. Yeah, that’s how it’s perceived, but the reality, that’s a different matter. If it’s seen like that then OK, but we don’t want to part of the scene, because that isn’t going to last and there’s going to be a backlash. It’ll be fine for the Mondays and The Roses and the bands that get through, the good bands. But that’s it. And that was 1989.”
There is however, nothing blinkered about James current course. There were remix discussions going on last year with A Guy Called Gerald. Graham 808 State Massey danced-up their Come Home single although it was never given an official release. James are just smart enough to scowl at the bandwagon jumping implications of a rumoured Andy Weatherall remix of Sit Down (“It’ll make us the most un-hip band in Manchester”) and wily enough to promise that the dance mix of the already eight minute long rambling groove jam Gold Mother complete with backing vocals by Inspiral Carpets will only come out as a b-side.
It is time for the funny ideas about Booth and his band to binned for good. Whatever weight of history they have in tow, James in the 90s are not going to sink beneath the raves. They’re sleaker and groovier than ever before and Tim Booth is a match for anyone who wants to try and box him in. Well, for a lettuce-reared, caring, sensitive, sweet young Englishman he is anyway.
Do you think, Tim, you might one day write a song about, say knobbing Jodie Foster on the back of a motorbike?
Tim : “Actually, that’s the next single Knobbing! Isn’t that a crude word? I’m a bit more romantic than that. So ‘no’ is the answer to that, I mean, who would be driving for a start? And you know, crash helmets and so on, I’d never be able to keep an erection going while driving a motorbike. My technique would suffer….”
Cool as Hadd–k for sure!
How’s That? – Record Mirror
Interview Ritual Fanzine (French)
« Si Smiths est un joli nom de famille, alors James est le prénom idéal » écrivait Michka Assayas en novembre 1986 dans Libération. Il essayait sans doute d’expliquer par là que James représentait la deuxième génération mancunienne de pop mélancolique sur fond de guitares cristallines. Quatre ans plus tard, le quatuor a grandi et évolué. Tim Booth, chanteur et leader de James s’explique.
(Tim Booth) Cela fait six-sept ans que l’on existe sous le nom de James. On est basé à Manchester. On a sorti quelques disques sur Factory. On s’est fait bloquer par Sire, la compagnie de disques américaine pendant quelques temps. On est maintenant sur notre propre label. On est sept dans le groupe : un violoniste qui joue également de la batterie et de la guitare, un trompettiste multi-instrumentiste, un clavier, une guitare, une basse, une batterie.
On est un grand orchestre maintenant. 1989 aura été une année de grands changements pour nous. On est complètement différent.
Chaque fois que je vous vois en concert, vous êtes deux de plus dans le groupe.
Oui, on s’agrandit, on se multiplie. Ca tombe bien, avant on était un peu limité.
N’est-ce pas plutôt pour essayer de combler un vide quelque part ?
Non, dans le groupe, tous sont excellents musiciens. On a cherché pendant longtemps des gens qui avaient la bonne attitude musicale. On les a trouvé cette année, on ne pouvait pas les refuser.
Avec The Band Of Holy Joy, vous avez fait en octobre 89 un concert pour le CND (Campagne pour le Désarmement Nucléaire).
C’était juste un concert de soutien pour lancer une vidéo de groupes indépendants anglais. Tout l’argent va servir à financer un e campagne pour le CND. Il y a tout le temps des benefits dans ce pays. Les groupes y participent pour différentes causes et l’importance du groupe ne devrait pas jouer&ldots; même si le but est de gagner le plus d’argent possible.
Bradford a été sauvé de l’anonymat par une déclaration de Morrissey qui disait qu’il était le groupe le plus intéressant d’Angleterre. Ceci posé, peut-on dire que les Smiths vous ont « découverts »(James ayant fait la première partie de la tournée Meat Is Murder en 1985) ?
(Ton sec et télégraphique, histoire de faire bien comprendre que l’on pourrait parler d’autre chose) Non pas du tout ! Ils aimaient notre musique. Ils nous ont emmené en tournée avec eux. Ils reprenaient nos chansons sur scène. On s’entendait bien avec eux&ldots;J’ai aimé pas mal de trucs qu’ils ont fait. J’ai pas aimé d’autres trucs. Je suis pote avec Morrissey, je l’aime bien&ldots;Je n’ai jamais été fan des Smiths.
Toute la musique intéressante vient de Manchester en ce moment. Vrai ou faux ?
Vrai ou faux ? C’est un jeu ? Je gagne quelque chose si je réponds bien ? Non, tous les groupes auxquels tu penses jouent à Manchester depuis des années. Ils ne recevaient aucune attention de la part de la presse. Et puis, depuis un an, la presse et les médias se sont dits « eh, regarde ce qui se passe à Manchester ». Ils pensent donc que tous ces groupes sont nouveaux.
La presse musicale en Angleterre est-elle si importante ?
Je suis très cynique à propos de l’argent, des maisons de disques qui achètent les charts, du pouvoir de l’image sur les journalistes&ldots;Ils semblent être tous obsédés par l’imagerie, la mythologie rock’n’roll. Je trouve cela enfantin&ldots;Quand on a commencé avec James, on ne prenait pas les interviews au sérieux. On mettait des fringues ridicules pour les photos parce que l’on pensait que ça n’avait rien à voir avec la musique. On a refusé longtemps de donner des interviews ou alors, on racontait des conneries qui étaient prises au sérieux. Tout cela nous a valu une image très négative. Il nous a fallu beaucoup de temps pour redresser la barre. Maintenant, on sait que les choses sont importantes pour des gens, maos pas toujours pour nous. On joue plus le jeu qu’avant, c’est tout.
Avez-vous eu des choix difficiles à faire avec le groupe ?
Oui. Avec Sire, on a eu un combat. Un combat d’affaire. Ils voulaient qu’on devienne un grand groupe de rock alors que nous, on voulait juste continuer à faire notre musique. Ca a été un combat qu’on n’a pas gagné d’ailleurs vu qu’aucun disque n’est sorti pendant deux ans. Ca nous a tué créativement&ldots; On a perdu beaucoup à l’époque.
Votre album live s’intitule « One Man Clapping », est-ce une blague ?
Oui, c’est juste une blague. Dans tous les albums live, les groupes rock veulent toujours qu’on entende bien qu’il y a un public énorme. C’est une partie importante de leur disque. Dans notre live, le public applaudit d’un bout à l’autre et, à la fin du dernier titre, ça monte en intensité et il n’y a plus qu’un seul mec qui applaudit. C’est le sens de l’humour de James&ldots; ce n’est pas très drôle.
James, vous prenez au sérieux ?
Oui, nous prenons notre musique au sérieux mais nous ne nous prenons pas au sérieux . Tu sais, tu fais un concert et après, il y a des gens qui veulent t’embrasser et qui ne partiront pas avant de t’avoir embrassé. Il y a des gens qui font 300 kms pour nous voir, qui nous suivent dans toute l’Angleterre. Alors, tu ne peux pas prendre cela au sérieux ou alors tu devient maboul. Il y a des gens que je connais personnellement et qui sont devenus des mythes du fait de la presse musicale&ldots; je sais que c’est très dur à assumer. Au début, c’est drôle, on joue avec ça, je préfèrerais que les choses soient plus honnêtes , qu’il n’y ait pas de mensonges, qu’on ne doive pas être des personnages exotiques ou glamoureux pour vendre des disques&ldots; Je pense que nous faisons une musique formidable et que nous produisons sur scène l’un des bruits les plus excitants qui soit. Je voudrais que les gens viennent nous voir, s’amusent bien, passent du bon temps et que les rapports en restent là.
Mais je crois que je ne suis pas réaliste.
Richard Bellia (Ritual [belgian fanzine])