Press release for James’ album Whiplash in Germany.
The video features well-known actress Keeley Hawes. There are two versions of the video, again for censorship reasons, one with a gun in it and one without.
Released ahead of the Whiplash album, She’s A Star was James’ first single in 3 years. It reached 9 in the UK Singles Chart.
CD JIMED 16 – She’s A Star / Johnny Yen (live) / Stutter (live)
CD JIMCD 16 – She’s A Star / Chunney Chops / Fishknives / Van Gogh’s Dog
CD JIMDD 16- She’s A Star / She’s A Star (Dave Angel’s PAT Mix) / Come Home (Weatherall Mix) / She’s A Star (Andrea’s Biosphere Dub)
| Release Name: | She's A Star |
| Artist Name: | |
| Release Date: | 10th February 1997 |
| Format: | Studio Single |
| Catalogue: | CD JIMED 16; CD JIMCD 16; CD JIMDD 16 |
Three years after the band’s previous single Jam J / Say Something, She’s A Star was crucial to James hopes of a successful comeback and measuring the fan-base that had remained loyal to the band. Radio 1 A-listed it immediately and the band promoted the single heavily with interviews and live performances on Channel 4’s TFI Friday and The Bob Mills Show in the week before the release.
Controversially, the record company decided to ditch the vinyl and cassette formats and chose to release instead a 3 CD set housed in a slipcase sleeve.
The first CD featured two older James standards Johnny Yen and Stutter recorded live at the band’s 1992 Alton Towers show. The second CD featured three new b-sides Chunney Chops (named in honour of Chunney Lad Mark), Laid sessions out-take Fishknives and Van Gogh’s Dog. The third CD saw two remixes of the title track by Dave Angel and Geir Jenssen (whose remix featured his eight month old daughter on keyboards) and a the Weatherall remix of Come Home that was making its third appearance as a James b-side.
The video featured the band playing at a party in a large house with two female lead characters, one blonde and famous and the other dark-haired living in the shadow of the blonde. Towards the end the dark-haired one pulls a gun and robs all the guests before approaching Tim and kissing him. In a MTV interview, Tim described the video as a homage to the director Fellini.
The music press were generally surprisingly receptive to the single with the exception of a few bemoaning the fact that it was not a great leap forward in style from the previous incarnation of James.
Artwork for the single had been designed by Blue Source, the photography is curiously credited to Davies and Davies.
Priced at £1.99 and preceded by an inspired promotional poster campaign featuring the cover model and exclaiming “She’s Coming : February 10” but without naming the artist in the weeks leading up to the release, the single entered the charts at number 9, James joint second highest chart position at the time and ensured a Top of the Pops appearance.
Best known for their early Nineties hit ‘Sit Down’ (at gigs the audience would sit on the ground when the song was played), James are a British band who made their name with the so-called ‘baggy’ scene. Four years ago, they set off on tour to the States, scored massive commercial success and decided to stay. ‘She’s a star’ is a storming homecoming single, complete with rousing, rock verses, a chorus sung in an incredibly high pitch and a sob story about boy-girl relationships.
During the 1994 US tour, James started to jam new material in preparation for the follow-up to the hugely-successful Laid album. No-one was to know at that time that it was going to be three long years before that follow-up was to be finally released and that release would be without long-term guitarist and key member Larry Gott.
Following an outstanding performance at Woodstock 2 in August 1994, James set about the task of writing their new album. However, fate, in the form of Larry’s decision to quit, Tim’s desire to go off and work with Angelo Badalamenti and a massive tax bill, meant that the recording of what became the Whiplash album was to be spread out over almost 2 1/2 years.
Early sessions at the Windings at Wrexham and Westside Studios in London had seen the band lose none of the creative energy that has fuelled its songwriting from the very early days in a South Manchester scout hut to the more luxurious studios the band can afford to use today.
By the time the album came to be released after James had overcome the trials and tribulations that almost finished the band off, many of the songs written in that initial period following Woodstock were lost on studio DAT tapes or discarded by the band as new ideas and new songs took their place.
Over the history of James, so many songs have been lost to the binbags of cassettes and DATs that Jim Glennie claims to have littering up his house. These songs never see the light of day despite continual badgering and the singles being littered with unsatisfactory mixes and live tracks.
Wah Wah was an insight into the unique working methods of the band, but it was merely a scratch on the surface. Below that one suspects there lies a wealth of improvised, off-the-cuff and truly inspirational music that we will never have the pleasure to hear as the band have deemed it unfit for our ears or it has simply got lost on tapes never to resurface. One only has to listen to the unreleased tracks that appear on bootlegs over the years – Somebody Help Me, Gregory’s Town and Pitiful as three examples, but the list is much longer – to realise this. Maybe one day James will be honoured with a boxset which reveals this previously unheard side to their music. We can live in hope.
Anyway, I digress. A selection of tracks in their early stages of development recorded during the post-Woodstock sessions has bubbled to the surface, featuring a total of twenty six tracks in total including fourteen songs that were not released on the Whiplash album or the singles that accompanied it. Dumb Jam and Make It Alright have since surfaced years later in a re-recorded format and Hedex featured in a different version on the studio disc of The Gathering Sound boxset, but there remain 11 songs, previously hidden somewhere away from the ears of the James faithful, a whole album of material that we were denied in place of the She’s A Star Dave Angel PAT Mix or the Tomorrow Droppin’ Cake Mix.
How these songs have surfaced is somewhat of a mystery. Why other songs from other sessions have not done so is equally mysterious. However, their existence must be addressed and documented as they are as much a part of the musical legacy James will leave as the commercially released material.
Brian Eno quite rightly identified in his first visit to a James rehearsal that the jams, the seedlings of James songs, are as much a part of the music James produce as the slick polished record that ends up in the shops.
These songs exist somewhere in the territory between the pure jams of Wah Wah and the finished product of Whiplash. There are pure pop moments as well as experimentation, both instrumentally and in vocal treatments. These are some truly fascinating pieces of music.
Many of the unreleased songs are documented in Brian Eno’s diary A Year With Swollen Appendices along with a number of other tracks which have yet to surface.
The Whiplash Sessions songs are:
Released 31 years ago in 1994, Wah Wah is an album of jams and experimental tracks recorded during the Laid sessions. The band had intended for it to be released with Laid, but this was overruled by their record company.
Hammer Strings / Pressure’s On / Jam J / Frequency Dip / Lay The Law Down / Burn The Cat / Maria / Low Clouds / Building A Fire / Gospel Oak / DVV / Say Say Something / Rhythmic Dreams / Dead Man / Rain Whistling / Basic Brian / Low Clouds / Bottom Of The Well / Honest Joe / Arabic Agony / Tomorrow / Laughter / Sayonara
| Release Name: | Wah Wah |
| Artist Name: | James |
| Release Date: | 12th September 1994 |
| Format: | Studio Album |
| Catalogue: | LP – 522 827-1, CAS 522 827-4, CD 522 827-2 |
Wah Wah was recorded during the six-week sessions for the Laid LP at Real World Studios in Bath. The band had set up a second studio where they could jam when not working on the Laid album. Brian Eno or Markus Dravs would then select a piece of this improvised music and mix it, but only doing one take on the mix to keep in the spirit of the improvisation. Tim was then left to come up with lyrics, but with many of the tracks they remained instrumentals or had soundbites rather than coherent structured lyrics.
All but three of the tracks on Wah Wah were conceived this way according to Tim’s liner notes. Pressure’s On dated back to 1991. Maria, albeit in more conventional form, had been in the James live set since 1992, but failed to make the cut for Laid. Tomorrow was said to have been conceived at BBC’s Maida Vale studios on the day Laid was released, when the band had time between playing a song into each show that day on Radio 1.
The concept of Wah Wah came about when Eno visited the band’s rehearsals in Manchester before the album sessions began and witnessed the unique jamming process which provided the seeds for James songs. He felt that the results of these jams were as important to James sound as the songs that emerged and encouraged them to consider releasing these jams.
Plans to release Wah Wah coincidentally with Laid were shelved as the record company were initially reluctant to release it. Jam J was coupled with Say Something from Laid as a double a-side in March 1994 – however it was the latter that received the majority of the radio play and the MTV-friendly video.
Struggling to decide how to release the album, it eventually came out as a limited edition which was to be deleted after one week in September 1994. There was to be no single, no tour and very little other promotion of the album.
Despite this the album reached number 11 in its week of release although it did disappear quickly from the charts. Pressure’s On, Basic Brian, Jam J, Honest Joe and Tomorrow (later to be resurrected for Whiplash) had featured regularly in James live sets, but there was little to appeal to the more casual James fan in the rest of the album. For the more committed, it provided a previously unseen insight into the band’s working methods.
The press response to the album was mixed. The low profile of the release saw it ignored in certain quarters. Some reviewers missed the concept of the album and were puzzled as to why James were releasing it at all. The NME bizarrely called it “one of the few genuinely engaging dance albums around.”
Press release announcing James’ album Wah Wah.
Two versions of the video were made. This first one was deemed unsuitable for certain audiences because it depicted caged animals the band dressed in costumes), so a second one was filmed on the streets of New York.
Two versions of the video were made. The first one was deemed unsuitable for certain audiences because it depicted caged animals, so this one was filmed on the streets of New York.
Double A-Side release featuring tracks from both Laid and Wah Wah. Reached 24 in the UK Singles Chart.
CAS JIMMC 15 – Jam J / Say Something
12″ JIMX 15 – Jam J James vs The Sabres of Paradise
CD JIMCD 152 – Jam J / Say Something / Assassin / Say Something (New Version)
CD JIMCD 15 – Jam J James vs The Sabres of Paradise
| Release Name: | Jam J / Say Something |
| Artist Name: | |
| Release Date: | 21st March 1994 |
| Format: | Studio Single |
| Catalogue: | 12" JIMX 15; CAS JIMMC 15; CD JIMCD 152; CD JIMCD 15 |
The double A-side combination of Jam J and Say Something came as a compromise between Fontana’s wish to release a third single from the Laid album and James not wanting to be seen to be milking their fans and also wanting to unveil the Wah Wah alternative project that they were very proud of.
The single was backed with an alternative version of Say Something and an outtake from the Laid sessions called Assassin about a Middle-Eastern executioner which featured Mark’s debut on guitar.
A 12″ single and CD were also released featuring a 33-minute remix of Jam J by Andy Weatherall’s Sabres of Paradise.
Two videos were made for Say Something – the first featured Tim dressed in a gorilla suit in a cage trying to escape whilst shredding the suit piece by piece. Concerns about complaints of promoting animal cruelty, a second video was produced featuring the band walking the streets of New York trying to attract the attention of disinterested bystanders.
It was Say Something that radio picked as the lead track even though it was technically only listed as a double A-side for the first week of the release. A flying visit back to the UK in between US tour dates saw a round of radio interviews and a recording of Say Something for Top of the Pops.
The single reached a respectable 24 in the first week of release, but without the band there to promote the single further, it fell down the charts in the second week.
Artwork for the single, as with the others from the Laid album, came from Larry’s wife Jane.
Who-oooh!!! Anbient moodswinging as the Sabres manage to make James sound as un-James-like as humanly possible. Gold star! The first one attempts The Aphex Twin Gold Award for longevity by weighing in at 17 minutes (split into an ‘Arena Dub’ and ‘Amphetamine Pulsate’): the second is a mere 16, where a load of guitars suddenly fly into the arena and chase out any dubious notions of a cash-in. More of such weirdness please.
A lesson in the producer’s / remixer’s art to rival the classic example of how Andy Weatherall helped Primal Scream become tranced-out club evangelists and Tom Dowd turned them back into bluesy, leather-trousered hard-rockin’ muthas.
James’ joust with the Sabres rivals Frank Bruno’s recent walkover in terms of being a woeful mismatch; Weatherall simply crafts an enchanting, dubby 17 minute ambient track from which Tim Booth is totally expunged. The original Eno-produced James cut is no doubt the harbinger of James’ much-vaunted “improvised” project. Fontana’s (lack of) faith in it can be gauged by the fact that they’ve made it a double A-side with “Say Something”, one of the more melodic cuts from Laid.
I sympathise with Tim Booth’s recent outburst that “Laid” was critically undervalued over here, but weighty laborious fare like this is hardly likely to redress the balance.
James release a totally awe-inspiring brand new EP on March 21st. ‘Jam-J’ / ‘Say Something’ will be released as a double A-side through Fontana.
‘Jam-J’ – the first track on the double header, taken from the bands forthcoming alternative LP, is produced by Brian Eno, and sees James stripped down and dubbing it up with an electro dance floor mantra that is nothing like you’ve ever heard James do before.
‘Say Something’ is taken from ‘LAID’, the bands current LP and is the kind of lyrically disturbing yet beautifully rendered love song that James are so good at, again produced by Eno.
The third track, ‘Assassin’, is a funky little number with Booth drawing out the word Asssssasssin ’til it hurts – A track produced by James and totally unavailable anywhere else.
This initial CD (JMCD152) also carries a completely new version of’ ‘Say Something’ produced by the band themselves.
The cassette (JIMMC15), released the same week, carries the previously mentioned versions of’ ‘Jam-J’ and ‘Say Something’.
The twelve inch – ‘James vs The Sabres Of Paradise’ carries an amazing version of ‘Jam-J’ which can only be described as a thirty minute ambient techno trip – produced again by Eno and remixed by ‘The Sabres Of Paradise’. The instrumental tracks have been described as “Soundscapes to a space oddity 1994”.
A second CD (JIMCD15), featuring the same tracks, ‘James V’s The Sabres Of Paradise’ will be released on March 28th – this is a 10,000 limited edition digi-pak.
James are currently ‘Heatseekers’ in the US billboard chart with LP ‘Laid’ at number 95 and rising, and packing em’ out at gigs all over America.
This Version 3 of the video is uncensored and features the line “She only comes when she’s on top”. Version 2 replaces comes with sings. Version 1 doesn’t appear to be available online.
This Version 2 of the video is censored and features the line “She only sings when she’s on top”. Version 3 has the uncensored “comes”. Version 1 doesn’t appear to be available online.
Press release announcing James’ US and Canada tour for Laid.
