Category Archives: Era: Girl at the End of the World

Setlist

She’s A Star / Dear John / Move Down South / Catapult / Ring The Bells / Come Home / Interrogation / PS / Just Like Fred Astaire / What For / Surfer’s Song / Bitch / Curse Curse / Sometimes / Sound / Attention / Moving On / Nothing But Love

Support

The Sherlocks

Review

Even The Stars

James’ summer season of gigs moved on to Sheffield for the opening night of the Music In The Gardens festival set in the picturesque surroundings of the Botanical Gardens on the outskirts of the city. In pouring rain, James delighted the picnic-toting crowd with a set heavy on recent number 2 album Girl At The End Of The World but with enough, but not all, of their big hits for everyone. Support came from Sheffield’s next big thing The Sherlocks.

It’s seven o clock when The Sherlocks take to the stage, unfeasibly early, but as their set progresses the venue does start to fill up and people get themselves up off their picnic mats and deckchairs to take a closer look at one of the country’s hottest tipped bands. To be fair to them, they’re on a bit of a hiding to nothing tonight – the £45 ticket price probably deprives them of much of their local teenage fan base that has carried them to the point where they’ve booked a huge tour in September in venues like The Ritz in Manchester and the sound, toned down for the residential area around the gardens, doesn’t help their full-on adrenalin-charged tales of growing up, falling in and out of love that have won them so many fans.

What’s reassuring though is that they don’t let this get to them. Kiran has developed into a much more dominant and confident front man than when we last saw them – and they display that cocksure assurance in what they’re doing it that tells you a band is ready to make the next step. Despite the hand they’ve been dealt, they still deliver a set full of power and passion – songs like Last Night, Escapade, a new one called Candlelight, Heart Of Gold, Live For The Moment and the closing Chasing Shadows suggest that they might emerge from the shadows of the city’s more famous sons and take the undoubted adulation they have here to the rest of the country.

It’s already started raining by the time James take to the stage and whilst we’ve been drowned at shows before (Porto 2014, Hardwick 2015), it’s not quite at those sort of levels so is more of an irritant than a trigger to let go and lose yourself in the ensuing carnage. The first few songs are marred by the sound as well; the venue set up is ill-equipped for a band of James’ scale and size if we’re being honest, but the FOH sound man more than earns his corn because after three songs he’s made the best of the cards he’s been dealt with and we can hear the separation between instruments and a great mix and disaster is averted.

They open with She’s A Star performed semi-acoustically with Adrian on cello and Tim dedicates to Nicola Sturgeon as the only politician who knows what she’s doing. Dear John bears the brunt of the aforementioned sound problems but still comes out the other side triumphant just about. Move Down South turns the heat up a little, even if lyrically the tales of deserts being drilled out in the drought possibly not quite connecting with a Sheffield audience with rain running down their foreheads. There’s no concession to the possibility that this might be more your greatest hits festival type crowd as they then go into Catapult and Tim makes his first venture down to the barrier despite the rain that has the band set back on the stage to avoid electrocution.

The crowd really comes alive as they strike up into Ring The Bells and Come Home; the rain becoming an irrelevance as people let loose and the band look as if they’re being fuelled on by the reaction they’re getting. Interrogation is a dark, claustrophobic song, but one that feels quite fitting in these very strange times in which we’re living, and as the rain starts to hit home harder as the band reach an improvised section that lifts the song to its conclusion, we’re all uplifted by the spontaneity and the whirlpool of energy they’re creating. James 2016 feels fresher, more invigorated than they have done for a long time and even the austerity of the sound set-up can’t disguise that as the sound man is performing miracles by this point.

Tim stops to tell us about the safety pin campaign to show support for fellow Europeans and those from the rest of our planet that are being subjected to attack from the uneducated fascists that are emboldened by the country’s ridiculous referendum vote to express their hatred and bigotry that angers any right-minded person (our words not his). Anyone who doesn’t get this political and socially conscientious side to James, which has always been there, doesn’t get the band.

PS is nothing to do with that, as Tim deadpans, but it is possibly the highlight of the evening. It’s far from an obvious (or even sensible) choice for this type of event, but rather than get lost in the open air, it feels like Saul’s violin and Adrian’s slide bounce off the trees and envelop us with their beauty. Things are kept low-key with two more semi-acoustic songs; Fred’s transformation from soaring love-struck ballad into an acoustic bass and guitar led folk beast is complete whilst What For and it’s edgy, always on the edge of breakdown delivery is a real genuine throwback to a time when the band were on the cusp, riding a wave that the music press were ignoring as they are now.

It’s then back to the Girl At The End Of The World for two more songs. Surfer’s Song, which Tim tells us is about watching the surf and gay marriage, has been the real revelation from the album when played live. It encapsulates the raw vigorous energy of the record in its four minutes perhaps more than anything else on it. Tim comes down to the barrier and goes surfing and there’s a worrying moment where it looks like he’s thrown up in the air and left to fall, but he manages to just about recover and make his way back on a sea of arms and held up mobile phones. That rumbling belligerent opening section to Bitch is made for more powerful set ups than this one, but having retired further back where the sound is less impacted, it also has that vitality that you wouldn’t expect from a band of this vintage. Curse Curse has a similar impact.

Sometimes, always appropriate when you’ve got rain dripping off your forehead into your eyes, is an absolute triumph. It feels like it might just be the one song that they could never drop from their set such is the communion it ignites in the crowd singing that line “sometimes when I look in your eyes, I can see your soul.” It goes into Sound which again battles the odds and wins, Andy appearing down on the barrier with bright red trumpet urging the masses on to lose themselves further in the music, not that any invitation is needed.

Attention completes the main set. Tim tells us it might be a new song, but “it’s a fucking good one” and it is indeed. It has to be to keep its position at the end of the set and tonight, like at so many of the shows, the audience get it from the slow build to the dramatic dropdown and the song slowly building back in aided by a thousand pair of clapping hands. It might not quite get the impact of the lights as it does indoors, but it’s still potent, powerful and final confirmation that they’re still a force to be reckoned with.

Never content with just doing the obvious and eschewing so many easy choices (Sit Down, Laid, Say Something, Tomorrow etc etc), the encore is very much about the here and now. Moving On is particularly poignant for Tim as his mother, whose death the song is about, spent her final days not too far from here whilst Nothing But Love seems to have inspired a new “dance”, the swaying from side to side, arms around the person next to you in a sign of coming together in celebration is adopted at least where we’re stood. It’s the final proof that this band, whatever grouping they might get lumped into by the laziness of the music press, is one of the here and now not some heady bygone era.

The beaming smiles on the drenched crowd as they stream out of the park rain rolling down their cheeks tells its own story – a joyful uplifting night despite the weather and despite the sound which could have blighted the evening had it not been for the unsung heroes that make evenings like this seem like they run like clockwork.

James played She’s A Star, Dear John, Move Down South, Catapult, Ring The Bells, Come Home, Interrogation, PS, Just Like Fred Astaire, What For, Surfer’s Song, Bitch, Sometimes, Sound, Attention, Moving On and Nothing But Love.