Festival headlined by the The Verve, and also featuring Manic Street Preachers, Robbie Williams, Finlay Quaye, The Sea Horses, Junkster.
Chelmsford, however, made up for it in spades. Faced with a torrential downpour, James took the momentum provided by the rather excellent Stereophonics and bombarded the crowd with an opening medley of Sit Down, Destiny, She’s A Star, Sometimes and Come Home creating a moshpit going back beyond the sound desk. Tim’s dancing seemed even more frenetic than usual and Saul took every opportunity to encourage the now drenched audience. Out To Get You was played to slow things down and seemed oddly inappropriate in the setting and was followed by another excellent version of Surprise.
This audience (myself included) really just wanted to hear the hits in the rain and so Laid and Tomorrow were dispatched as conditions got worse before the opening bars of Sound signalled the show was nearing its end. Tim took the opportunity to tell the crowd that “when you read in the papers how shit we were, remember what you witnessed with your own eyes”. Tim’s megaphone failed and he smashed it in annoyance, so we were treated to Tim hollering without it which made for an interesting take on the song, the sheer awesomeness of the improvised ending not being lost despite the rain and the size of crowd. This was James at their very best and a complete contrast to the day before and the tedious Space and Texas who were to follow later. They were the band of the weekend – but we knew that already.
Moving onto Leeds and James were disappointing. The audience did not even appear to recognise opening track Sit Down and seemed more concerned in when Robbie Williams was coming on. Persistent technical problems plagued the show. ensuring that the original set list had to be tom up and Surprise had to be ditched totally to keep within the time slot. With the threat of imminent rain, Tim tried his best to incite the crowd into activity with frenzied dancing, but the technical problems meant that whenever they gained momentum it was lost between songs. Destiny was dedicated to the “freaks” that like James. After the high of the previous night, this show was better forgotten.
And they do at least have one thing going for them: they aren’t JAMES. Oh yes, despite being a band who began as brittle artisans with aromatherapy workshops, James have amassed a stonkingly huge vault of poptastic hits. Alas, not many are recent, as the clunking ‘She’s A Star’ and the rank ‘Destiny Calling’ prove when measured against the old belters. It’s a workmanlike set, pressing familiar buttons, low on surprises. And is it just me who remains unconvinced by Tim Booth’s conversion to glam-rock tart, an even more belated and half-arsed U-turn than Bono?
Arriving at Carlisle Sands Centre, a Doncaster Dome type atrocity of a building awaited us, but once inside the venue, our fears were allayed as the main hall was actually a very decent venue. After a short support slot from the excellent Hillman Minx, James came on at about 9.20. Tim apologised for the postponement of the gig in July due to his bronchitis and, as at Oxford, they launched into Lullaby, a typically bold James move in front of an audience hungry for the hits.
Introducing new song Surprise, Tim informed us I that this was the only new I song they’d learnt, despite “the fan club that follows us around everywhere wanting new songs”, and we’d have to believe him how great the others were. On the basis of Surprise we have to. Michael’s backing vocals blended into Tim’s in the chorus and the verses demonstrate Tim hasn’t lost any of his wordplay ability – “we all prayed you’d rise again, phone in resurrection, what the doctor ordered”and “love and laughter, I surrender, have no fear of what comes after, I’ve got a message for you, you’re the one who makes it come true”.
Following Surprise, James launched into a series of Greatest Hits – Waltzing Along, Say Something, She’s A Star, Sometimes, Laid “shamelessly enjoying their own songs” as Tim put it.
Jam J followed and was, alongside Surprise, the highlight of the evening with Tim dancing again and an awesome strobe display. Out To Get You and Five-O followed, James slowing the pace down and wowing the stunned audience with their more fragile side.
Johnny Yen was strangely curtailed when the audience gave them a “standing ovation” before launching into Sit Down. Tim came out into the audience to meet the adoring masses and to soak up the red hot atmosphere before launching into Tomorrow as the finale.
The inevitable encore began with Come Home, now a shadow of its former self having aged less well than other songs from the early nineties. “To test your concentration” Top Of The World followed and the show was rounded off by a ten minute frenzy of improvised noise called Sound. Carlisle left impressed and judging by the business at the t-shirt counter, James had won over a new young audience that had come to see one of the few gigs in the town that year .
Tim Booth appears in a souwester and announces that since – in a world a million miles away with flushing toilets, running water and warm weather – England have won a football match, James will play a greatest hits set. Result, strange tantric hippy bloke! Result, English footballers! Goodnight, sadomasochistic noodles and ruminations on “fame”! This decision does however represent a significant advance. Finally it appears that after decades of blowing it at every conceivable opportunity, James have risen to the occasion.
She’s A Star / Laid / Sound / Tomorrow
Arriving early for this “secret” Glastonbury warm-up show, we were treated to being able to listen to James soundcheck sat outside the venue. Two new songs “Surprise” and “I Know What I’m Here For” were run through a couple of times along with Lullaby, Jam J, Runaground (not actually played) and a number of improvisations. This led to a great sense of anticipation entering the venue especially as we’d managed to get some kind of unofficial confirmation of the December tour as well.
Theaudience opened for James again and , played basically the same set as April, but had obviously worked on some of the arrangements, and made the songs sound fresh again. I know a lot of James fans (particularly the female ones I wonder why) despise them, but anyone remember Ambitious Beggars, The Spaceheads, Silver Sun? : James came on about 9.20 and started with a chilling version of Lullaby, a welcome change to the full-on intro of Come Home from the April shows, Despite Tim’s comments in his interview at Brixton (see elsewhere in the fanzine), it appears James are still willing to take risks, Say I Something, She’s A Star and Laid followed, Tim starting to dance more freely than earlier in the year The next real surprise in the set was the inclusion of Jam J, one of my personal live favourites given its extreme energy and potential for improvisation, with the strobe lighting serving to enhance the chaos of the song. Out To Get You, which followed, provided an immediate and soothing contrast. The band had now won the whole crowd over and saw this as the time to introduce a new song as we’d hoped they would. Despite only having played the song a few times Surprise was a total success reminiscent of Runaground but taken a step further. A long introduction to a wild version of Born of Frustration followed, Tim dancing like a possessed dervish in the limited space available with the crowd chanting back the “woo woo woo” section. Waltzing Along and Destiny Calling kept the momentum before a truly astonishing version of Sound. This had been one of the highlights of the April tour with the band taking the song up and down and stretching it to over ten minutes, but there was even more life in it tonight.
The encore started with an eerie version of Top Of The World before Saul announced they were going to play another new song but that “it might be shit”. Shit hot, perhaps? I Know What I’m Here For starts off with a wall of “nah nah nah nah” chants from Saul, Adrian, Michael and Tim, before Tim laments on the sacrifices made in the quest of fame and then urges the crowd to “follow me”. Apparently the lyrics had been written during the soundcheck and Tim was singing them from a sheet, but this song was truly special and hopefully the audience reaction conveyed this to the band. This was the real James, taking risks, creating unique moments of brilliance by semi- improvisation. More, much more please.
Sit Down was almost an anti-climax after this, but managed to rouse the crowd. There’s probably been more written about this song than any other James song, but it seems to have gained a new lease of life this year. They’re not playing it any differently, but it seems to have a focus for those who’ve followed James for years and the casual observer and, after a gig of this quality, it is a celebration.
The lights were back up and then suddenly it all went dark again and James came back out and ran through a frenetic version of Tomorrow, before leaving an audience well and truly mesmerised and me wondering whether Glastonbury would be a bad idea the next day.
Those fears we all had in April about James blanding out, not taking risks, playing safe set lists, the jury’s still out, but this was a pretty compelling case for the defence.
And sticking folky fiddle on the tail of “Johnny Yen” won’t convince anyone that James are Irish. Or indeed, that they are any good. But (deep breath, confession time) I’m actually quite fond of them. Tim Booth still can’t dance. They still use horrible contrived puns (“She knows where to hide / There’s nowhere to hide”). They can be clumsy, pompous, embittered and often are. But “Come Home” and the sheer glee of “Laid” warm up the whole rain-tinged, wind-chilled crowd. For all their faults, they’ve still got the spark; they can still burn and glow.
None.
“CLONE us in a test tube, sell us to the multitude,” sang James on their recent hit single Destiny Calling , an acidly intelligent analysis of the ephemeral nature of pop fame. “Tell us when our time is up,” the song went on to ask plaintively. Of course, two years ago James themselves seemed uncertain whether to continue, but they found their second wind, and the band’s current sell-out tour and a chart-topping greatest hits album suggest that the obituaries will have to wait a little longer.
Once the darlings of the Manchester indie scene, James were turned into stadium stormers by singalong hits such as Sit Down and Come Home in the early 1990s. Then they seemed to lose it and a three-year silence ensued. There was an encouraging return with last year’s Whiplash , but their only British appearance at the Reading Festival was a low-octane affair, the gamin charm of the all-dancing, all-singing Tim Booth subdued by a neck injury that left him in a surgical collar.
Now, after the pain, the band is ready to enjoy the gain. The phenomenal success of the Best of album has been re-energising and at the Brixton Academy they were in triumphant form in front of an adoring crowd, many of them dressed in the petal-printed insignia which have become the James uniform.
On stage the energetic power pop of the hits took on a rockier aspect, driven by the edgy and often psychedelic guitars of Saul Davies and Adrian Oxaal and the amphetamine drumming of David Baynton-Power who, just when you think he has hit overdrive, seems able to summon up the capacity to shift up yet another gear. Eschewing new material, the band chose to run through the Best of album in its entirety. It was perhaps an unadventurous approach, but there was no doubting it was what the crowd wanted and it further illustrated what a consistent band James have been over the years.
Comparisons with other epic stadium rockers such as U2 and Simple Minds are obvious, but although Booth tends towards the melodramatic the songs are always taking unexpected emotional twists and turns. More interesting comparisons are with David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust period on She’s A Star , while on Johnny Yen the ghost of Jim Morrison strutted in Booth’s skinny persona. His uniquely crowning glory, however, is his howling falsetto, at its startling best on Born of Frustration and Sound . For the final encore they turned inevitably to Sit Down , an inappropriate exhortation which instead provoked communal singing fit to rival a Cup Final crowd.
“COME HOME, SIT DOWN, SHUT UP.”
This was the considered verdict of one pundit of this parish, and dare we suggest, many other fickle observers on Tim Booth’s brave baggy survivors, upon their return to planet rock after a four year absence last year. Rarely has a band been so cruelly betrayed by the ’90s. For what seemed like at least half an hour, or the length of an arts degree course at a provincial university, James seemed to have the zeitgeist firmly sewn into the lining of their T-shirts. And then, the next time we looked, there seemed to be several hundred reasons to hate the very arenas they walked on. “Those who find themselves ridiculous…” Well, you said it.
And still, seven years on from the days when they were Number Two for almost as long as Bryan Adams was Number One, they and their shockingly loyal fanbase (3,000-odd singalong armwavers here tonight) exist in a strange netherworld in the armpit-hair of fashion. The graduates of the baggy class of ’91 and ’92 may have since got married and had children, the floppy centre parting cut down to size, the guts expanded and the cotton on their backs turned into wool, but tonight it seems they’re still as likely to get their kicks from the ‘Whiplash’ stuff as ‘How Was It For You’. Whatever gets you through the night, darlings.
How much can one hate James? Let us count the ways: The sub-Stipe psychobullocks; Tim Booth’s ‘I am dead weird, no really’ periods of drama school dancing and ropey Buddhist skinhead haircut; the whiff of ’80s middle-class liberal conscience that pervaded their every Green, vegan, celibate, anti-war sentiment; the numerous searingly naff attempts at changing their image in photo shoots to reflect ‘humour’; lyrics like “Dress me up in women’s clothes/Mess around with gender roles” – cooool! As well as the fact that their new single ‘Destiny Calling’ is a bitter attack on the superficial transience of commercial pop (this from a band who have one comeback hit and rush release their greatest hits), with such original targets as, erm, the Spice Girls. And don’t even mention S***le M**ds.
And yet, that old bulkwart of anti-cynicism gets in the way again. The simple fact that when you see the whites of their hairs and the nodules on their throats, you can’t help but be swayed away from the path of over-critical rightousness and undeniably good tunes, heartfelt emotion and overwhelming mob psychology.
Tim Booth looks like Wayne Sleep if he had become your geography lecturer, the band as singularly uncharismatic as ever, but the atmospherics and spiritual (ouch!) resonance of these songs still fill the room. A slightly odd dance sequence to start the show worries us briefly, but then it merges into ‘Come Home’ which is so overwhelmingly received that they can’t go wrong. That said, lesser known, more low-key efforts like ‘Out To Get You’ and ‘Top Of The World’ maintain almost the same vibe level, not to mention the sublime likes of ‘Johnny Yen’ from their ’80s wilderness years.
Such is the communal bond they develop with their audience that they don’t need to go through the aloof ritual of going off and coming back on for the final encore, and ‘Sit Down’ is being sung like a hymn before they even strike a chord. “This is the happy ending at the end of a big, long book,” Tim tells us. Make of that what you will, but further reading may yet be required.
The Doncaster Dome is located in a grim no-man’s-land of exurban recreational boxes: a Warner Village, a bowling alley, a McDonald’s and a Deep Pan Pizza Co. The venue itself doubles as a leisure centre, so its labyrinthine corridors are incongruously awash with squash players and the smell of chlorine. It is as placeless a place as you could imagine. The perfect setting, a cynic might say, for a concert by James, a band who have managed to remain largely anonymous through 15 years of minor hitmaking.
The marketing campaign for their No1 Best Of album presents them as `the soundtrack to your life’. Which is true, sort of, if you’re between 25 and 30 and have spent some time in university bars. James are a blurry, intermittent, half-heard soundtrack. I saw them a couple of times in the late Eighties, but all I remember of those gigs, apart from Tim Booth’s neo-Ian Curtis epileptic folk-dancing, are arguments and lovebites and a red James T-shirt.
The T-shirts are the one constant in James’s up-and-down career: striking and flowery, they are as close as the Mancunian septet have got to an image. James have been celibates and sex-gods, vegan monks and narcotic neurotics. Musically, they have gone from indie-folk (`Johnny Yen’) to baggy anthems (`Come Home’) to overblown stadium ballads (`Sound’) and on to a kind of blissed-out rock (`She’s A Star’).They’ve been hip, obscure, popular and forgotten jobbing pop stars now in receipt of a deserved golden handshake.
There are no great revelations after years of playing arenas, you would expect James to blow away a smallish venue like the Dome. But there are several pleasant surprises: the acoustics are exceptionally good for a space designed primarily as a basketball court; Tim Booth’s stage presence is still kinetically strong, less manic but more radiant than it was; and, despite the plodding predictability of singalong hits like `How Was It For You?’ and `Sit Down’, some of the other songs stripped of their differing production tics sound genuinely timeless.
There is a sense of elevated wonder to James’s best work. `Say Something’, `Waltzing Along’ and `Ring the Bells’ have a hymnal, joyful quality which even a bunch of chanting Leeds United fans can’t spoil. The latter song, according to Booth, was used by a group of kids to help them escape a religious cult run by their parents. Some compensation, one imagines, for the fact that it only made No 37.
Former student favourites James revelled in their new-found sexiness at the Barrowlands.
A sell-out crowd could hardly contain themselves as the Manchester seven- piece ripped through a set covering their 16 years in the business.
And, as lead singer Tim Booth introduced their latest hit Destiny Calling with the words: “This one’s about sexy people in your life”, he got more than he bargained for.
Female fans climbed on to their friends’ shoulders and stripped to their bras. A redhead went a step further, pulling her bra down to flash to Booth. As for the pair of knickers thrown on to the stage, someone must have been a bit chilly on the way home.
All this raunchiness is a step in a new direction for James.
Best-known for their 1991 hit and student anthem Sit Down, James are a band who were always more cuddly teddy bears than hairy- chested sex gods. But the last couple of years have seen a revival of fortunes for James and they seem to have found a new swagger to match their success.
Last year’s Whiplash album cracked the Top 10 and The Best of James, released earlier this month, was only stopped from hitting No 1 by Pulp’s This Is Hard Core.
So James were in the mood to party and it showed. Early songs such as Johnny Yen rubbed shoulders with last year’s She’s A Star.
By the time Booth introduced Born of Frustration, the crowd were in raptures. Never mind Sit Down – this deserved a standing ovation.
IF you can’t do it when you’re young, when can you do it? asks the T-shirt for support band the audience. It’s a song title which doubles as a marketing slogan for their funky teen chantette Sophie Ellis Bextor and it’s a challenge for the main draw. Can James still “do it” now they’re, er, not quite as young as they once were?
With a chart-topping “best of” in the shops, the night was billed as a celebratory Return of the Mancunian Seven with all big guns blazing. This is the band, remember, that’s been there, done that, and flogged a million T -shirts. The Barrowland is packed with such garments and, as bopping commences to the sizzlingly souped-up strains of opener Come Home, it strikes me that no matter how nuts you go, you couldn’t possibly make dafter whoopy-whoopy noises than vocalist and man of maracas Tim Booth. The Top Jameser has often been portrayed as an icon for the miserable, the disillusioned, and the disaffected and tonight keeps up this image effortlessly by donning the Wim Jansen wig someone kindly tosses on to the stage.
Despite the glorious racket created by tunes like Laid, She’s a Star, and Destiny Calling, I’m never certain whether the lads are revelling in these greatest hits or cursing them.
I wonder just how comfortable James are churning out the songs that made them famous for an audience that’s all too appreciative. A wearily counted intro ushers in an encore stagger-through of sit down.
The sing-along sequence highlights the difference between singer and crowd accents. Indeed, the syllables the locals use loudly to pronounce the word “ridiculous” sounds so ridiculous they even make the band smile.
WHEN Manchester DJs played the James song Sit Down in the early Nineties, many dancers took the sentiments at face value – and sat down.
The reaction as James returned to Manchester on the back of their first Number One album was more animated: the crowd sang the chorus before the band started the song.
To call this homecoming show a triumph would be an understatement. It was a glorious vindication of all that James have stood for in a career which has survived three generations of Mancunian rock. Contemporaries of the Smiths in the Eighties, they rubbed shoulders with the Stone Roses and now coexist with Oasis.
The set list, which drew heavily on the ‘best of’ album, was a perfect indication of their enduring strengths. From the opening dance-led Come Home through to the epic Laid, Sometimes and She’s A Star, the performance had a rousing, anthemic quality.
For all the arena-filling aplomb they can bring to a rock anthem, however, it is subtlety that sets James apart.
As Sit Down, driven along by glam-rock drumming, provided an intense finale, frontman Tim Booth acknowledged his home crowd in the best way possible: he sat down.
It’s like Last Night Of The Proms without the flags, pomp, and dubious patriotism and with infinitely better music. To my left, the first of many James war veterans departs on a stretcher (eerily, at the exact moment Tim Booth sings “Help comes when you need it most”, during “Waltzing Along” – is this man a God?) Behind me, several beered-up prannies do their best at impersonating Booth while surely knowing that in order to do this you need to 1) be able to yodel, 2) dance like a demented marionette and 3) have had several “revelatory” experiences, most of them involving religion and Aqua Libra. Around, beer and hands fly into the air, the entire audience sings along with all the songs and you couldn’t find a more committed bunch of followers this side of England in the World Cup. And, arguably, James have a much, much better team.
They could certainly give Hoddle’s boys a few lessons in surviving the first round. This year, James are 17 – almost old enough to vote, and certainly experienced enough to make whole albums about the other stuff (1994’s “Laid”). Implausibly, when they formed in 1981 they “rejoiced” (ahem) in the unfortunate name of Model Team International, “thanks” to a friend of theirs who worked for a modeling agency and lumbered them with promotional T-shirts. Hardly surprising that bassist Jim Glennie donated his Christian name and the band became James. Thank Jim’s mum he wasn’t called Sidney. Seventeen years, several line-up changes, several very embarrassing cardigans, Tim penchant for drastic hair reshuffles, insanity and neck braces later, the rest is history. But James aren’t. Today, James “Best Of” hit Number One. The Bunnymen had better haircuts, New Order better beats and the Charlatans more bona fide “baggy” status, but it’s a sobering thought that in 1998 James are (gulp) bigger than Pulp.
It’s the songs that have kept them there and, as they flow past, it’s remarkable how many hits they’ve had (15), and not only Tim Booth and Jim Glennie have portraits in the attic. There’s an occasional whiff of stadium bluster, but “Come Home” (1990) is fresh, inviting and urgent, “Sound” (1991) is as uplifting as a Boeing and “She’s A Star” (1997) actually sounds better this year than last, its twirling guitar motif floating upwards like a balloon. Freed of his recent medical troubles, Booth dances furiously to entertain us and equally thoughtfully, the band provide a Mid-Set Lull – very handy if you’re aching for a piss. But normal euphoric service is resumed as “Waltzing Along” echoes “Born Of Frustration” and the achievements of “Sit Down” in taking lyrics about mental illness into the Top 10.
Curiously, despite considerable success, James are still perceived as outsiders, not least by themselves, which is why “Destiny Calling” cornily rants about the rock biz. However, long-time fans would point out that they did this far more acutely with 1985’s dissection of rock exhibitionism, “Johnny Yen”: “Ladies and gentlemen, here’s my disease… give me a standing ovation and your sympathy”; in sympathy, they play it. But any “decline” is countered by the new “Runaground”, one of their most hypnotic moments in years.
James will take us to newer, more intriguing pastures with their next album, but from 1985’s Factory classic, “What’s the World” (not on tonight’s original set-list) to the standing ovation-earning “Sit Down”, James remind us of their mainly glorious journeys so far. Some may have appreciated fewer Big Hits and more Idiosyncratic Moments (“What For?”, “Stutter”, “Folklore”…), but for two hours this is their youth, and – for fans of varying ages – our generation.
Tch – to think Tim Booth once wore a T-shirt saying “James suck”.
Someone get the chairs! Veteran rockers James are trying to play a whole gig standing up. Dave Simpson feels for them.
Once upon a time, when James performed their most famous song, Sit Down, whole audiences would do just that. Nowadays it’s tempting to suggest the band take their own advice, lest their creaking joints make the decision for them and they crumple in a heap. Implausibly, this is the Manchester survivors’ 17th year, celebrated by a Best Of album (number one today) and a marketing campaign that proclaims the band’s songs have “soundtracked our lives”.
This is probably a salesman’s way of saying that James have always been there, or more usually thereabouts. Never truly enormous (although they were megastars in both 1985 and 1990), they have survived largely because their stirring folky rock has taken in (and occasionally inspired) every trend from indie minimalism to baggy beats but has always remembered the tune.
While vampires attain immortality by feeding on the blood of virgins, the James beat has had a legendary appetite for drummers, trumpet players, guitarists and, more recently, even founding strummer Larry Gott. Original members Tim Booth and Jim Glennie remain, the latter because he provided the band with their moniker, and presumably if he left they’d be forced to rename themselves Timothy.
Inside Manchester Apollo on a second sold-out night, hordes of ageing indie kids chanted for their heroes. Sadly, City were away at Wolves. “Boothy” isn’t some hairy centre-forward, although the spindly James frontman has endured his own career of slipped discks, twisted vertebrea, instability, worrying cardigans and ghastly follicular injuries. But with the whirling Booth in fine shamanic form, the gig soon became an Event. Beer flew, chants arose, and it felt like soccer used to be, before seats and Kenny Dalglish conspired to ruin the fun.
Oddly for an idiosyncratic and often intellectual group, James have always had a footy following. Suddenly, the explanation was here at full volume – it’s those massive, crowd-surging anthems that usually arrive at their gigs every few songs but tonight came thick and fast to promote The Best Of.
James’s great moments – Come Home, Say Something, Sound – boast an unfathomable spirit. It’s a bit like gazing over the English countryside after five pints of Guinness. But, as anyone who’s seen Manchester’s slagheaps will tell you, the view can be disturbing. Booth made sure Born of Frustration’s lyrics hit home. “I don’t need a shrink, but an exorcist,” he howled.
Suddenly his demented marionette dancing took on new meaning – this was the demons being driven out.
But the most startling moments were comedic. First, during Sound, whirling spotlight’s were held aloft by two burly blokes in balaclavas… perhaps they were trying to spring Deirdre Rachid but had arrived at the wrong venue. Then, as the septet prepared to launch into their expected encore of Sit Down, the audience got there first and sang it themselves. It was an incredible moment, and Booth could only stare dumbfounded at the crowd.
There was only one decent response, and he knew it. He sat down.