INTERVIEW WITH DAVE HASLAM, 1990 TOUR PROGRAMME

There's really no such thing as overnight success. Occasionally a club single comes from nowhere to storm the charts, and turn an act into a smash.  But in anything remotely approaching rock music, the hard slog is more likely to be the path to fame. All our favourite Mancunians have worked hard; Happy Mondays were together for five years and two LP's before their music turned Manchester mad; the irresistible rise of The Stone Roses took many years and many songs; and The Inspiral Carpets gigged more than any other band between 1985 and 1989

But for James, the road has been especially rocky, full of obstacles (some of their own making), snares (laid down by the music industry), and frustrating diversions, and, at times, surely, seemingly never-ending .

Glorious promise has always been there, and so too has acclaim in sections of the music press, and, indeed, the massive live following (take a bow, cherished reader) always kept aflame the hope that the band would be acknowledged one fine day. A day like today.

So I sit with Tim, Larry, Jim and Saul, and it's made clear to me that they're still happy with themselves as they are, that they're still, to some extent, patient. However, they're now keener than ever that the promise and the acclaim should translate into sales They want their records in the Charts (encouraged, no doubt, by the sales successes of the three previously-mentioned hard-sloggers)

Tim confirms this; "I get the feeling that the people who write the history books are going to be taking sales as a primary consideration. Only a very few bands who didn't sell, like The Velvet Underground - who are so obviously influential - are going to be remembered. We've always done well artistically, but we've never achieved high sales, and that's why the emphasis is there now. It's the one thing we haven't satisfied yet"

A meticulously self aware band like James realise the pitfalls of too desperate a search for ever-increasing success. Tim, again; "The juggling act is to get sales while still keeping the integrity of the music. Most bands can only maintain that for a short period of time."

The world is littered with bands who've changed their clothes, swapped styles (from rock to dance and back again), added brass sections, and discovered political causes, and all in the search for stardom. Bands are often eager to change their music, though, and it's not always possible to sense whether they do this for the sake of creativity, or to save their careers.

As Saul points out, bands don't want to be stuck repeating their early songs, and have a natural desire to progress. Their integrity may not be jettisoned, but some of the things that first attracted fans to the group may be lost; "People always think that their favourite group sells out because they don't appreciate that the music has to move on, and this means they might stop hearing their old favourites at gigs."

Saul is one of the new boys, a bright lad who describes his joining James thus; "I came to it from obscurity and by accident. As far as I was concerned, I was being rescued from personal disaster. I wasn't aware of the band's history, or any personal history. I wasn't at all intimidated by them"

He says that at no point did Tim; Larry, and Jim - the original nucleus of the group - make him feel unwelcome. "But I'm like that anyway; I'm blissfully unhindered by the restrictions of social convention"

 And what exactly does "blissfully unhindered by the restrictions of social convention" mean? 

Jim knows; "It means that he's horribly insensitive!" 

With the benefit of hindsight, all our mistakes would be rectified, and all our disasters avoided. As far as the James experience was concerned, I wondered whether they felt like they'd made the right decision when they left Factory Records.

Tim; "In retrospect, I'd have thought we should have released an LP on Factory, and then seen what would happen.  But the thing is, at that time they were not Factory as they later became. They were much less ambitious, in a way. Certainly if they'd treated us how they now treat Happy Mondays, then we'd never have had cause to leave. I think it's fair to say that they had to lose bands like us and Ratio and The Railway Children to realise they had to change some practices."

James haven't changed line-ups as often as they've changed labels. Until last year, that is, when four new members were drafted in. Jim sees this as making a real difference to what being in James is like; "It's obviously brought a lot of new ideas into the music, and given us a kind of new start. And on tour we've had a great time"

But is there a division between the songwriting nucleus (Booth/Glennie/Gott) and the rest? "The business side has made a division, with us on one side, because it's our band. It's our band in the sense that the money is our responsibility; if it goes down, then we three personally go down with it. At the end of last year we owed a lot of money to a lot of people. If we hadn't signed to Phonogram we'd have been snookered "

The first fruits of the Phonogram deal are a single, 'How Was It For You', and an LP Gold Mother. The LP is James's most faultless LP to date, with an especially wonderful second side; 'Walking The Ghost' I love. And the first two things I noticed about the LP, in relation to previous James offerings, are the guitar sounds, and the more direct drum patterns.

Larry explained the thinking behind the more overtly electric guitar style; "It needed to be a lot more upfront because when there was just a bass, a guitar and the drums, the guitar had a lot of space of its own, and the sound could be quite restrained, or even very thin-sounding, and it would still be heard in the mix. Now we've got keyboards, trumpet, and violin, so the guitar needs to be a lot more dynamic, just to make its presence felt. Also Nick Garside, the producer, had a lot to do with it. He's verygood at getting guitar sounds that make an impact - not necessarily loud sounds, because that can obscure everything - but sounds with a distinctive character"

After all these years of electric guitars, it must be hard finding anything unique; "Yes, it's difficult to keep away from any of the categories. If it's gota twang it sounds like Duane Eddy. If it's got a clean rock sound it's like J J Cale. A Strat with loads of distortion sounds like Jimi Hendrix"

'Government Walls' has a similar arrangement to one of those epic banner-waving U2 songs. I guess you took steps to avoid it sounding like one.

Tim; "Yes, we could have gone all the way, with a wacking great snare sound But Nick, again, was determined not to let it get that way"

Whereas James songs have been notorious for their idiosyncratic rhythms, the rhythms on Gold Mother are more linear, more straightforward. I wondered if this was a conscious change of policy, or because of the change in drummer, or because they've started writing songs using a drum machine.

Tim; "Sometimes it's the drum machine, certainly on 'Crescendo', 'Gold Mother' and 'Government Walls' Also because in the past we were dead restless, and we'd fill songs with different ideas and rhythm changes. We wanted to make a different kind of record. One less agitated. And I often felt my vocals got too hysterical because of what was going on, and I was really conscious of that. We wrote 30 or 40 songs last year, and I think we made a point of not choosing for the LP ones which sounded like old James songs. We were more interested in getting into areas we'd not been in before"

Larry; "Sometimes I felt that in the past we'd put enough ideas for a whole album into just one song. Songs like 'Billy's Shirts' and 'Vultures' have enough ingredients for four or five songs each, and, to some extent, were getting lost"

Gold Mother seems like the first LP James have released when not in a state of financial or emotional adversity. At the time of writing, it seems likely to sell well, and reward James for the years without acknowledgement. Welcome, at last, to the house of fun.