Madchester’s quirky outcasts. A male band in dresses in the 90s, singing about childbirth, with a tee-total frontman as an entire scene notorious for drugs unfolded before them. Cult icons whose fans, by many accounts, prefer not to hear their hit singles. Manchester band James, fronted by the enigmatic Tim Booth, are not what the casual observer might think.
Best known for their massive hit singles ‘Laid’ and ‘Sit Down’, the band nonetheless scored their first UK number one album only earlier this year, a continuation of the success of their reformation. ‘Yummy’ sparkles with thoughtful and well-constructed music, inventive and accomplished, and Tim Booth, long one of the British indie scene’s most memorable characters, is loving every minute of it.
“We adapt our sets because we want to be understood,” Booth says of James in their modern incarnation. “There’s no good or bad audience, but we have to adapt to what they need at a particular time.”
“A problem can be that anyone that comes to a James gig is going to be disappointed. They’ll generally have favourite songs that don’t get played, as we have about 400. Our hardcore fans don’t really want to hear ‘Sit Down’, they want to hear a song they haven’t heard from six albums ago, like ‘Bubbles’, or ‘Zero’.”
“We were financially suicidal in many of our choices,” he recalls. “We did things that we felt were artistic, or we made dumb young choices. We were breastfed on NME and the idea that success is bad for you, that you shouldn’t be too successful, an equation that was very prevalent at the time.”
“I try not to be too rose-tinted about it, to give all the different sides. The positive one was that it gave us this longevity, and people have trusted us to make musical choices over business choices.”
“We refused to put ‘Sit Down’ on the album ‘Gold Mother’ even though the record label said we’d sell another 250,000 copies. We said we’d fight them over it. Eventually they agreed that anyone who bought the original could take it back to the record store and swap it over. It made us respect them. That was something no one ever got. Though no one ever took the record back. People wanted the songs that had been taken off to make way for ‘Sit Down’.”
“We used to speak about shoot to kill in Northern Ireland. The guy who uncovered it, he came across as this really honest guy, and they discredited him. That drove us mad. Injustice is injustice. I’m not a political lyricist, but over the years there have been a few times I’ve had to say something.”
“I ended up writing songs about mother courage, and women reaching the edge of death in search of a child. More recently we’ve had two women join the band, and they called it a feminist anthem, which made me really proud.”
“We were considered idiosyncratic,” he laughs, “and I was considered lyrically weird. It doesn’t seem as strange anymore, but 34 years ago it was seen as very weird. It was the same with the dresses. We stirred things up. We were clearly straight boys, but we found ourselves playing Lollapalooza with Korn, Tool, Snoop Dogg and so on. The crowd would scream abuse at us.”
“After a couple of shows we went out in sequined dresses, and I’d sing in the faces of these people screaming abuse at us, in a sparkly top, and nobody would touch me. I’d go out with no anger, and sing to them from an honest place. It was incredible. I was offered drinks and drugs, anything to get rid of me.”
“Of course, I wasn’t into those things at the time,” Booth says. In fact, it was the extracurriculars that ultimately led to James splitting and reforming. “Then I got into psychedelic therapy a few years back. Go figure.”
