JAMES : INTERVIEW WITH TIM BOOTH, 1991 TOUR PROGRAMME

Simon Price, on loan from 'Melody Maker', talks to Tim.

I've finally tracked down the elusive Tim Booth, looking improbably healthy due to his new close-cropped haircut and a tan developed on a holiday in the more obscure parts of Spain (i.e. those parts where he doesn't risk recognition by coach loads of Brits), in a vegetarian restaurant in West London. Relentlessly articulate, his intense brown eyes (funny, I'd always assumed they were blue) and animated hands emphasise every sentence.

I want to know what will be going through his mind tonight when you're looking at him looking back at thousands of you looking back at him ...

"Different things at any given second. If the songs are going badly, it can be terrifying. 'Oh my God, what are we gonna do here?'. An audience really amplifies your emotions, the whole event ...and if it's going badly, it can make it ten times worse. But you can always find a trigger in the concert to fire yourself out of that state. I purposely look around for someone to sing to: you might see someone's face looking at you with such joy, and that can really take you somewhere else! Or I might do it to a member of the band: attack Larry and force him to play something else ...and suddenly it triggers the band off into a different gear."

The words "trigger", "spark" and "fire" crop up more often than any others when Tim discusses the James live experience. A catalytic reaction between audience and band is what he's after. This must make for some strange and memorable evenings. What's the weirdest thing that's ever happened at a James show?

"I don't really know how to answer that. When you're touring, you're living in a space which is psychologically very strange and back-to-front anyway. But at the concerts, anything can (and does) happen. It's the oddest time for me when someone strips off in the middle of a song ...just weird little things like that where you trigger off things in the audience that really excite you.

"I remember at one gig in Finland there were potted plants all around the stage, and I started throwing them at people, and they started throwing coins back at me. Then I threw a plant at this bouncer, and he was like, wanting my blood! He was saying 'I'll see you afterwards' (in Finnish, but I didn't need an interpreter), and I thought 'My God, I'm going to get killed!' This guy was huge! So after two songs of wondering how I'm going to avoid this guy, I just thought 'fuck it' and jumped on top of him from the stage. And he was alright after that ..."

Then there's the giant albatross itself (of which, more later) ... 

"The first time an audience sat down and sang 'Sit Down' to us (at Liverpool), it was because a guitar was broken, and we just took the song down really quietly to try and fix it. And the audience just took it, sat down and sang it to us for ten minutes! That was fantastic, it had some of the band in tears.

"When we first did 'Promised Land' in Edinburgh there'd been a lot of Poll Tax trouble in Scotland, and the crowd were laughing at the individual jokes in each line. And when we finished, they just hollered at us. And Larry burst into tears! Things like that are lovely ."

So do you enjoy touring? 

"Jesus. I don't know. You have to accept you'll be a gypsy for about four years. The performances are wonderful, but the travelling and the build up can be very draining. Your body seems to know that something oddisgoing to happen tonight. I find it needs a lot of rest. I go really quiet for four hours before the show, and I often sleep for about an hour beforehand : I can't help it, I just have to crawl into bed for something. Then you can't sleep for five or six hours after the show because you're so high off it. So you're awake at 4am in a weird hotel ...it's a strange lifestyle. Not totally wonderful. I've got a few tricks that I do. That's part of the meditation, to help me get to sleep (at least that's how I've been using it recently). Hypnotic tapes, that sort of thing. You've got to do something, or you end up turning to drugs or sex, which is the traditional means of musicians getting to sleep after good gigs (laughs)."

Meditation? Hypnosis? Sleep? Hardly Guns'N'Roses, is it? So James don't indulge in the traditional Sex & Drugs & Rock'n'Roll on-the-road lifestyle?

"Uh, it's coming, I think. I feel it coming! We're giving up these old harder-work methods. On the last tour, everyone was thinking 'Fuck it, I can't be doing with this any more', and getting into partying. Sometimes you've got to go with the lifestyle really."

I ask whether he puts much forethought into his performance, or prefers random spontaneity.

"Well, it's spontaneous. That's the whole point. We fought for that like mad. We change the set every night ...you do a gig like Reading where you try to make it a bit different (we didn't put 'Sit Down' at the end, we played 5 new songs, etc) and you get criticised for taking those risks. If we'd done a 'Greatest Hits' package maybe it would've been better in terms of some weird, I dunno, commercial standard ...but people wouldn't get an event if we did that every night. They'd just get the same theatre performance. A recital of James songs, with no life in them."

Tim's referring to a review by Andrew Mueller of Melody Maker which he later admits was witty enough to make him laugh out loud and stinging enough to make him want to push Mueller's face in. As a rule, does Tim read his own press?

"Yes." (Pause). 

Do you take notice of it? 

"Yes. I hardly ever follow the advice, but it's interesting to know where you're seen to be by those people."

Just a quiver of contempt there for my noble profession ...but Tim's had more than his fair share of misquotes. First there was the time the Guardian had Tim saying The Clash lost their credibility with the Levi's Ad. In fact, Tim reckons Strummer & Jones lost it years ago: when the authors of "I'm So Bored With The USA" went to the States and hypocritically fell in love with the American Dream. Then there was the gutter press ...

"The News Of The World said I was a drug addict who became celibate for three and a half years in order to give up drugs ...which although it's is a highly unique and rather magical cure, isn't the actual fact. I've never been a drug addict. I did become celibate for three and a half years," (A while ago- Tim now has a baby son to prove it) "... but that was to do with the meditation. Anyway, two days later The Sun printed the story with Jim's name instead of mine. I think he'd like it known that he's never been a drug addict either!"

I mention how strange it seems, in hindsight, that James were lumped together in the press with the bands which made up the farcical 'Manchester Explosion' of the last few years. For the first and only time, his face hardens into something resembling anger.

"We aren't. We weren't at the time." But didn't it help bring you a wider audience? "I always say no to this question, Larry always says yes. I tell you, when the whole Manchester thing broke, we kept completely out of it. We were offered split front covers in the music press with The Charlatans, but we turned it down. I'm sure The Charlatans turned it down too ..."

"I remember the first 'A-Z of Manchester' was in NME, and this woman wrote 'James: Bearded Vegans Buddhists'. And that was all we got. The face that none of us had beards, were vegans or Buddhists was beside the point."

I decide this is not the best moment to mention that when I first saw James (supporting The Smiths at Chippenham in '85), the drummer had a beard and was wearing open-toed sandals, I try, instead, to take Tim back to the early days. Does he think of James as the same band that released "Hymn From A Village" and travelled the country with Morrissey's barmy army?

"Well, I hope not. The core of me, Jim and Larry is obviously the same, but James is an ongoing thing. And it will be in the future too, it won't remain static. We're not frightened of change. The whole point is to welcome change ...which is quite a frightening psychological attitude. Buddha said that change is pain. It's a threat. People will reject us because of that change, and I'm happy with that too. But they'll come back to us at a later date. We know from the past that we have to keep heading towards change. Otherwise rigormortis sets in: as a band and as a person, you just become boring."

But how would he describe the various musical/lyrical phases James has been through? Tim fixes me with a mischievous smile across his plate of tomato penne.

"I don't bother to analyse that, I leave that up to the journalists!" 

OK, I'll have a go. In 1985, James' jittery, staccato, very unique and curiously moral indie-folk made them one of the hippiest names to drop. Gradually, through all the different record record deals and line-up changes, while they were being written off as the aforementioned (ahem) BVB's, they managed to knock out some cracking singles (not to mention a handful of fairly decent albums), becoming more direct and, perhaps, communicative with every passing year. Some would say James discovered Sex. I had a theory (which Tim later politely refutes) that the singles "Sit Down", "Come Home" and "How Was It For You" form a kind of Seduction Trilogy. Whatever, the James of the Nineties seems far more confident, far more able to speak to people. But if the music's changed, has their following?

"I was watching a band in the tent at Reading, and this 35- year-old guy came up to me and said 'I used to love you, I thought you were wonderful, magical, I followed you everywhere ...but now you're awful, I can't listen to you!' So I said 'Well, I sold my soul to the Devil years ago. I don't really believe in music any more, I just want to make loads of money.' And he was going 'Yes, yes, this is what I thought!' In three years' time he'll look back and think 'yeah, they were great!'

"These things are difficult to judge at the time. I remember hating Blondie because they were so popular and T. Rex because Bolan was so flamboyant, and then I listened to their Greatest Hits years later and thought 'This is beautiful!'"

"You see, we're going to be really popular, and that means a lot of journalists and hipper bands aren't going to like us. But we were snobbish in our day too. They'll only like us in ten years' time. That's one of the problems of being successful."

What do you think of Morrissey these days? 

"Nice guy. We bump into each other now and again. We get on really well. I'm pleased to see him enioying himself. I saw him at Brixton, and it was better than any Smiths concert I saw, partly because of his obvious pleasure. In The Smiths he was always so tense ..."

A guarded response. Getting back to the point, this seems as good a time as any to bring up the one song which upset the purists more than any other. How does Tim feel about the enormous success of "Sit Down"?

"You'll have to lead me gently into that one. Ask me individual ones." 

OK, isn't it strange that it's become a Party Favourite like "Come On Eileen" or "The Shoop Shoop Song"? Isn't is bizarre that people will be yelling the lines "Those who find they're touched by madness, those who find themselves ridiculous ...sit down next to me" at their office Christmas Disco?

"Yes, very strange! A friend of mine went to Turkey recently, and went to the third biggest disco in Europe. It was full of families, real families, fifty-year-olds with their little daughters. They play 'Sit Down' halfway through the night, stopped the song in the middle, and everyone got up and sang along! In fucking Turkey! When you hear things like that, wow! You just can't understand it. "We knew it was a really good song when we wrote it. We had to stop playing after twenty minutes because we were laughing so much! But it's gone off and done things we never anticipated. Obviously we're happy, but it's been played to death on the radio to the point where you can't enjoy it for five years."

Is one of the side-effects that James are a much stranger band than their new audience perceive them to be?

"Yeah, they're gonna get a shock, aren't they? Mmm, I look forward to meeting them." 

Have you ever regretted following a career in music? 

"Hm! No. Honestly. Good question, but I'd never thought about it. There are other things I'd like to do that I don't have time to. Writing. Acting. Seeing my son."

What do you do with your time when you're not busy with James? 

"Recover! Be with myson. Try to find a life. Write. And ...other practices, which had best remain nameless."

What are the worst parts of it all? 

"Getting into the creative state of mind is wonderful. If I could just be the 'primitive artist' and write books, etc, it'd be great. But then there's like, this interview, which calls for a different state of mind: the salesman (although I try not to think of it like that). Then there's the travelling around the world: the travelling salesman! At least half my time's taken up with the business side, which is a real pain in the arse. Maybe I'm lazy, but it feels like a distraction from the creativity."

Look behind you. " JaJaJaJaJa". Look to the front. "eseseseses". Look to the side. Chances are there's a letter "m" on someone's sleeve. The brilliant James t- shirts, apart from being the first rock merchandising to see clothina as a 3-dimensional canvas (rather than an awkwardly-shaped place to slap a bad photocopy of an album cover), are the most visible sign that someone in the James camp has a business mind. So if the business holds no joy forTim, can he remember what inspired him to join a band in the first place?

"For me, it was two concerts: Patti Smith and Iggy Pop. With both it was the feeling you didn't know what would happen next. It wasn't scripted, it was dangerous, exciting. Her unpredictability was her artisticness: she'd make up poetry, improvise stories ...some nights she'd fall flat on her face, but other times it was wonderful. With Iggy it was that threat of animal violence. He'd work the audience into a kind of rage, surfing on his own adrenalin."

Tim's pleased with that one. He decides "Adrenalin Surfing" would be a good title for this interview. But somewhere between that hero and heroine lies what James hope to achieve. To what extent is Tim the dominant figure in James?

"Haha. I've no idea. Externally I'm seen as such, we know that, but that isn't how it works. At any point, anyone of us could put a halt on anything, even if they were completely outvoted. Or anyone could get their own way if they really believed passionately in it. You'd have to talk to the others. I can be the agitator. In some ways that's my role. But I don't get my own way. And it's a good thing!"

A tactful answer, and I have no reason to believe it isn't a truthful one.

What should listeners expect from James in the future? 

"The new single is six minutes long, full length. How would I describe it? Darker. Tribal. Brooding. I don't know. I sing a lot of falsetto on the new album: that's the only thematic link I can think of! And Larry doesn't really play any straight guitar, it's all slide or whammy-bar, which I really love. There's no reality, it all slides around."

I'm out of questions. I ask whether there's any message he's particularly like to end with. Before leaning forward to press the "Stop" button on my tape recorder, he says:

"What we're looking for from an audience is spontaneous reaction. We want people to be creative in their response because that fires us. If people want to 'Sit Down' they can, but they shouldn't feel that pressure. They should do what they want. Take your clothes off. Strip off. Anything, OK?"

You heard him. Go on. Surf the adrenalin. Do anything. Make it an event.