Good morning,
Yes, it is a good morning, no comebacks and none of your cheek please. In today’s edition, we’ve got a chat with James frontman Tim Booth. Look away now if you’re a western hippy pretending to be a shaman, Tim hasn’t got time for you. But he did have time for Niall. Otherwise the interview wouldn’t have happened. Today’s edition is free, so get stuck in.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Tim Booth
James have been fighting the good fight for four decades now, the Manchester indie-rockers celebrating their 40th anniversary last year with a series of jubilant live shows. But they rarely sit still and look back for long and this week they release their 18th record Yummy, another collection of stirring, state of the nation missives. Recently, indefatigable frontman Tim Booth spoke to Niall and told him all about it…
Hello Tim, how are you?
Hi Niall, I’m very good, thank you.
How long have you back in the UK for?
A year and a bit in Brighton, cos I lived out in LA.
Did it take long to readjust to living back here?
I haven’t adjusted. I’m missing nature. We lived in a national park, it was pretty amazing, there were rattlesnakes and bobcats and mountain lions but we were gonna get burnt out by fires. That’s why we left. In California, they’ve stopped doing fire insurance for housing which tells you what’s coming.
Whoa. What do you miss about the UK when you’re not living here?
Baked beans. Good bread – they put sugar in all their bread. And friends.
Congratulations on the new record. How did it start?
It’s the same process we always use which is four of us improvising, no-one takes anything in the room, we have a drum machine, you hit play and we go. It becomes this meditation between four people. We might do six hours a day and some jams might be an hour and ten minutes long and the shortest would be 12 minutes long. We usually do three weeks of that in one week blocks. It’s like submerging yourself in water, we go into a world with each other when we do the jams. You’ll have a day where you might not get a single song out of it but the communication between the four of us becomes so fine-tuned that it’s like a meditation, you come out feeling as high as a kite. It’s all about listening, improvisation, and responding.
We have all that material made and then any one of the four can take their favourite jams away and shape them into the ten songs, like, ‘This could be a verse, this could be a chorus, this could join to this bit’, and make a demo. We all makes demos and then play them to each other and start to work out which ones we like the most and then we go looking for a producer.
Does that process take a lot of out of you?
No, it’s one of the most fun bits of being in James. It’s private, no-one sees it, it’s beautiful and uplifting. Tours take stuff out of you but not this. Sometimes my voice gets a bit strained if I’m doing six hours of singing but then some weird cracks come out that are quite useful in the voice.
Are you the same writer from one record to the next?
You can feel the progression each time. Lyrically, depending what’s going on in the world and my world, there are different lyrical focuses, and whether the four writers are up or down or going through divorce or love affair, it fluctuates according to the individual ingredients. There’s a sense of progression for us, always. To be so turned on by the same musicians after all these years, I think, is exceedingly rare. I think singer-songwriters run out of music after four albums but once you have four people there’s an exponential twist and turn and ways they can interact. Nobody controls this process, it becomes a third thing.
Sometimes we make music that isn’t in the style of music I’d normally listen to but I can go, ‘Oh, that’s great, let’s see how I would write a lyric to that’. On the album, the example of that would be Butterfly. That isn’t a style of music I would gravitate to but I like the melodrama of the song and it has a melodramatic lyric to go with it because that’s what it called for. The lyrics are always unexpected, sometimes they take me by surprise. The song Our World is a fairly bang on the nose political update of where we are in the world on the Clock Of The Long Now and it just kind of describes where I am in England as a white man with this historical perspective of an empire that colonised and enslaved and is in massive decline. I didn’t want to write that lyric, it’s not necessarily I want to hear but some of it came out in the initial jam and the initial jam lyrics have to give you the clue about what the song is about.
Which lyric on the record means the most to you?
I think the song Folks, which is probably going to be the most neglected song on the album. That one I wrote in two sittings, which is unusual. I have this thing where I write a lyric and they tend to come true. Usually they come true when the album is released or if it becomes a single but sometimes it happens in other ways. The day I finished singing that lyric – it was the first song I sang – I got in an Uber and I’m texting in the back of the Uber and our car gently hits the car in front at about 1mph and I look up and he’s pulled into the parking lane in heavy London traffic and I go, ‘What’s going on?’ and the driver turns to me and then slumps forward and I’m like, ‘Fuck, he’s dying!’. I jump out the car and pull open the door and he’s drenched in sweat and collapsed on the wheel and I’m checking his heart and he’s still alive but not good. I call the ambulance, trying to work out where I am, and he came round ten minutes later before the ambulance got there and he’s like, ‘Please don’t tell Uber, I’ll lose my job!’. So here I am in an interview talking about it but hopefully they can’t track him. He’d had an allergic reaction to eating Sharon fruit. I thought he’d had a heart attack, it looked so final. I got him in the ambulance and his brother drove me home. The brother said to me, ‘Well, when you get to 50, you’re in sniper’s alley’, which I thought was an amazing statement. I’d just written this whole song going, “Folks, it’s time to go, let’s hit the road, death’s a fixture go and kiss her’ and I was a bit freaked out. So that happened during the making of the record.
You recently turned 64 and you look in remarkably good nick. Is there any circumstance where you feel old?
Yeah, there are definitely. The first person I had the strongest crush on died last week, my age, first contemporary who’s really died. I covered it in the song on the album… what’s it called?
Is it Rogue?
Rogue! There’s a part of me that just rebels against the cliches of what we’re meant ot do when we get to a certain age, how we’re meant to just fade into the background. I want to go out with a bang. That’s my plan, too. I don’t want to fade away slowly or have a lingering illness. I’m fairly sure I’m not going to let it happen. So there’s definitely a sense of mortality, I’ve written a lot about death on the last number of albums since La Petite Mort, when I lost my mum and one of the my best friends, but she was much older than me. So yeah, it’s definitely a fixture for me. It comes up quite a lot when I work with shamans in ceremony. A month before Covid struck, I was doing some breath work where you get into a trance state through breath work and I got into the trance state and it was all about death. I thought it was telling me I hadn’t got long and I was like, ‘Oh, ok, thank you, very kind of you to tell me’ and then Covid struck and I think it was telling me Covid was coming.
It comes up a lot in most work with a real shaman – I’m not talking western hippies who’ve worked with a shaman once and think they’re shamans, I’m talking with an indigenous elder, where the work involves an experience of thinking fairly convincingly believing you’re going to die at some point if you work with them long enough. It’s not an illusionary thing, you’re convinced you’re going to die. Jung would have had that’s the death of the ego but it doesn’t feel like that, it feels like you’re going to die and that’s come up a number of times for me. And I died once, when I was 21. I stopped breathing in hospital. And I nearly drowned in Hawaii about 15 years ago, I thought I was done. I went out and tried to swim with the surfers in 12 foot waves, it wasn’t very clever. An Englishman on a beach, doing something very stupid.
The band recently celebrated its 40th anniversary for you, did it mean much to you?
No, not really. Numbers don’t mean much to me. Lots of things that mean a lot to other people don’t mean that much to me, probably if I decided to get a spectrum test, I would discover why. It’s nice going, ‘God, I’ve been with Jimmy 40 years and the rest of them nearly 30’, except the two women who came in in the last five, and how committed we are. Most marriages don’t last that long. James is about longevity. I used to be upset, looking at the artists I loved, most of them only made one or two really good records and then they’d decline really fast and hardly any of them made good records older. Nick Cave… Neil Young made one, Leonard Cohen made great songs, not necessarily brilliantly-produced, but there aren’t many. But I believe we’ve kept our standards high. Unfortunately ageism is a thing, much more prevalent and invisible than sexism and racism, so we’re in our ghetto of age, which is frustrating.
But you’ve got these huge shows coming up? I feel like there’s a turnaround on that front, older artists are much more accepted now, the idea that you do your best work in your twenties or something is dissipating.
The truth is, a lot do. And a lot of scientists do too when they’re young. With bands, it’s been that they burn out quickly because of the lifestyle and the addictions.
Who do you see as James’s peers?
I’m gonna sound too arrogant so I’m not sure I’m gonna say.
Go on!
No, I’m not! I’ll let it go. For me, it’s leave behind a legacy that people can discover. Music has now become totally about money and sales, yet when I was a kid it was like, ‘Oh, the Velvet Underground, they sold 20,000 copies in their lifetime’ but the music lasted and affected generations. Iggy wasn’t selling much, Patti Smith… the Pattiphiles were small until she got Because The Night, and now she’s an artist and she has credentials. Those were all the people I adored and who inspired me, like Leonard, so we were never concerned about sales, didn’t give a shit. We wouldn’t let the record company release Sit Down in America, we owned it and wouldn’t let them. They came to us and said, ‘We’ll do a quarter of a million dollar campaign, we’ll break you in America with Sit Down’. It was two years after we’d released it in England and we went, ‘No, we go forward’. That’s who we were. Now we’ve moved into an age where it’s all about money and sales. I remember being on Jonathan Ross with Jay-Z and Charlotte Church and Will Smith and Jonathan Ross made this joke about how we’d sold 25 million and they’d sold a hundred million and they’re not even trying. It was like, ‘Wow, that’s your world’. It’s not the size, it’s what you do with it, what your intention is. For us, it was always about trying to make music that reached out to people who needed it.
When you look back over it all, what are you proudest of?
Our longevity and making new music as good as we’ve ever made. Folks could grace any of our albums. We’re making albums where 90% of the album, people are gonna go, ‘Fucking hell, these are good songs’ and I don’t see many contemporaries doing that. And we’ve done it on our own terms.
Has there been any time where you haven’t stuck to your principles and regretted it?
Yeah. There was a promotional campaign we did with a red top in the 90s where it’s like, ‘We probably shouldn’t have done that…’. But art always has to make accommodation for business to survive. Especially now we’re a nine-piece it’s like, ‘How do we fly to America and tour America if we can’t play to 2,000 people a night?’. Most people are so proud when their music ends up in adverts but that’s not why I’m a singer in a band, so our song can be used in a holiday commercial, but obviously I’m appreciative when it does because it pays for the band to continue and it pays for the band to be able to take the extra two members and fly around the world with them.
ND