JAMES : 1998 TOUR PROGRAMME BIOGRAPHY

James, 16 years and 9 albums in the making, purveyors of the anthemic Sit Down. For those who have discovered or rediscovered the band through this year's number one "Best Of" retrospective, James would seem like one of the eighties great success stories. But as legend goes, it hasn't been easy. This tour is a celebration of their very survival and their continuing relationship with the following that drives them.

Today, Tim Booth, one-time troubled eccentric and God freak, and multi-instumentalist Saul Davies are representing a seven-strong assortment of contenders. They are back, with two top 10 singles this year, a new LP close to completion and a second sold out tour. A slight frisson of nerviness is evident, like skinny, gloved-up sluggers dancing from foot to foot. And, oddly enough, despite Tim's history of psychic unrest now no longer evident - it's more apparent in Saul. Saul is a terrible fidget and ant-like in physique. "I'm eight stone two. Not bad eh?" Uh - are you trying to get it up?

"Ooh, so that's the tone of this interview is it? Been trying to get it up for years, boom boom." He's a strange cross between Basil Brush and Nureyex apart from one significant problem. I don't think Mr Brush experienced. Saul is working on an eating disorder of which he's become so proud, he brings it up (so to speak) on radio chat shows. Saul, are you anorexic? Are you the Princess Di of this band? Tim chuckles. Saul's jaw clenches. He's just come from the gym and he lifts weights.

"Are you, eh?" needles Tim, immaculate in chalk-stripe suit. "The Princess Di of the band?"

Maybe it's better not to talk about it.

"We're into working like crazy." Tim. "And Saul will work till 6am on coffee, fags and one meal."

"Sometimes no meal"

"And he loves it. Loves the drama of it. Except after four days he hits the wall and has to have two days off, and I'm going, why haven't you paced yourself, you bastard? This is a marathon, not a sprint."

Saul's nails are long and painted midnight blue, and he wears a vast solitaire that, if it were real, would make Liz Taylor puke with envy. He wears wraparound shades, too. Nervous energy leaks from every pore, and he talks fast.

"I enjoy it - you get a buzz, don't you, where you push yourself, when you surpass your schedule. You go into a different headspace when everything speeds up." How about juice, Saul? You can drink juice, that's easy.

"It's very interesting this," I can't see his eyes, it's like conversing with Bono as The Fly. But he sounds quite sly. "It gets to women. All the women at the record company have been ringing me since our show last week. They want to mother me." "I'm going to order some food," says Tim, "and I think you should order something. How about a sandwich?"

Big smile. "No, I won't eat anything. Saul's been weighed and he's waiting for the bell.

In many ways James have been waiting since 1982, which is when bassist Jim Glennie, drummer Gavan Whelan and guitarist Paul Gilbertson spotted Tim dancing at Manchester University, where he was studying drama and picked him to be Bez before Bez was out of nappies. These days, Tim teaches a system of shamanistic dance. Back then, he was just wacko. And James were called Model Team International because Paul was going out with a model and that was the name of her agency and the logo on their free t-shirts. When the agency boss threatened to sue, Tim suggested something to honour his inspiration James Joyce. Their first release, on Factory Records in October 1983, was the Jimone EP, its guitar pop frippery claimed as a successor to Orange Juice or the Fire Engines at their best, though many thought it embodied the very weakest elements of indie. One track, What's The World, was quickly covered by Morrissey, an early and ardent admirer of the band, and subsequent close friend of Tim's.

If The Smiths were influenced by James "then we were influenced by The Fall and Joy Division - by their bloody-mindedness, their awkwardness, their refusal to play media games." Media games were no problem for Morrissey. James may have had a certain mystique, but by now long-time fans The Smiths were up and past them, touring the States, and James, though they'd co-toured here turned down that support slot as well as several music paper front covers. "We want to introduce the band by music, not by words," they rather pompously declaimed.

Nevertheless, when second EP James II appeared in 1985, the band were minor legends in their home town. It was a matter of time before they were approached by a major label - Warners offshoot Sire - to record their first full LP Stutter. Produced by Lenny Kaye, right hand man to another Booth icon, Patti Smith, Stutter appeared in 1986. A Luddite counterblow to the futuristic technological indulgence surrounding them, it owed much of its success to new member Larry Gott's nimble guitar picking, and mixed traditional folk with more powerful rock - Iggy Pop tribute Johnny Yen introduced themes of exhibitionism, despair and violence, ideas that Tim would continue to explore, although arguably the sound that backed those ideas wasn't always powerful enough to carry them.

1988's Strip Mine continued the melodic course, with off-kilter folk influences, a few simple singalong choruses that would lay a path for the future and Tim's vocals a cross between Ian McCulloch and operatic yodelling worthy of Heidi. Perhaps the most interesting track is Riders in which Tim, slipping from Morrissey to Cave, howls of "sipping the juice that causes the pain that all great singers need." Here began a tumble toward dark and devastating depressing lyrics, though at the time most of these were artful and not gleaned, as they soon would be, from experience. "All my early songs were either paranoia about the business and how it destroys the soul, or abour suicide, the myth of the tortured artist." Some time later, Tim will tell me he is often wary of the words he writes because they often prefigure future events.

However, Sire were not kind to James and their time on the label was unhappy for both parties, Ironically, Sit Down was written during this time but never shown to the record company. Eventually James escaped from their deal on a legal loophole. Without a record contract and in need of finance, there followed tedious months of paid drug trialling at local hospitals, remuneration from which bought rehearsal time. A self-financed live LP, 1989's One Man Clapping, prompted a deal with Rough Trade, although this too was not entirely fortunate. Rough Trade were not only on the point of bankruptcy, they also failed to see commercial prospects in James. Geoff Travis (Rough Trade's Managing Director) said "Look, this is minority music, it won't sell to more than 20,000 people. So I asked him to let us go and he did." James regrouped, adding enough members to bring them up to a seven-piece (Gavan Whelan left, Saul, Andy Diagram, Mark Hunter and Dave Baynton-Power joined) and took the record Travis had heard to Phonogram/Fontana. The album was Gold Mother. It sold 350,000 in the UK alone.

Gold Mother was triumphant blossoming, and brainy, with a full, sometimes distorted, guitar sound, sparky bass and danceable rhythms. Tim's lyrics, though, if you cared to listen, were black as pitch. By the time it came out, in 1990, Sit Down had reached no 2 in the charts. Fontana rereleased the album to include the single, and James made history by insisting punters who'd already bought Gold Mother be allowed to swap it at no extra cost for the complete version.

The Manchester music scene was revving up to full swing and James, along with the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses, were its visionaries. The music merchandise industry, too, was in their pocket, with almost as much cash generated from the ubiquitous JA (turn around) MES t-shirts as from the album. Every venue they played sold out. The arena tour throne was there was the taking and yet once more, James took the opposite path to their peers. Diversifying from the "mad for it" ethos championed by the Madchester scene, Gold Mother turned Tim into a different sort of leader, a leader for the lost, lonely and confused. His furious lyrics yelped about devious politicking (Government Walls) and, since he'd been the victim of a sternly religious upbringing, about Christianity and TV evangelists like America's Jimmy Swaggart. The pungent vitriol of God Only Knows which stands alongside Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood in terms of religious disillusion, saw the band receive sacks of hate mail; later, with Seven's Live A Love Of Life ("I don't believe Jesus was a human being / I've never met a prophet whose sheets are clean", James would be banned from the Johnathan Ross show - although, says Tim now, that song was vigorously supported by an order of Franciscan monks who came to a gig in Brighton "and said they played it in the monastery the whole time."

However the band's famed passionate live performances were fuelled by personal problems and reviews showed Booth wild-eyed and manic, often in tears before a show. One story has him climbing speakers mid-gig to walk along a 40ft high balcony rail ("I didn't give a shit, I was totally f**ked up), only getting down when we saw his minder crawling along on all fours behind him - "the guy was risking his neck for me, I came down"

There's more than an element of course of glorious self-indulgence in it all; there was bound to be a fall. One of Tim's last quotes of 1991 was "We'd have to do something pretty bloody minded to go into reverse gear now"; and so, unwittingly, they did. 1992's Seven was where the James sound really changed. Opening track Born of Frustration was accused of being cribbed from Simple Minds' Don't You Forget About Me and, though it wasn't, the two tracks sounds arguably were not dissimilar - hypnotic, ululating and epic in proportion, Seven was windswept and often inspired. But the press were doubtful, petulantly slamming it as "bombastic stadium rock" - James were by now big enough to fill Alton Towers, where they played to 32,000. And then they went west, intending to take Manhattan, LA and all the bits of America in between. Looking back, Saul tells me, "It was a mistake to leave this country. We could've nailed it here, and it felt like we had, but we hadn't. We weren't quite big enough or strong enough to avoid a backlash and it came."

It was to be a three-year stateside sojourn, during which they toured an acoustic set with Neil Young, and Tim was quoted as saying he yearned to "get out beyond the treadmill", beyond having to do interviews where you get asked "all the same questions, like a Groundhog Day nightmare." Egotistical as this may sound, Booth was in fact beginning to sort himself out. He'd dabbled with analysis, though the therapist cut short treatment, saying "I'm sure I could cure you, but I don't know what that would do to your songs." So he turned to less conventional methods and, though still capable of insisting "art" could only come through pain, had embarked on a method of shamanistic dance, which helped release his demons.

Work had begun on another album, 1993's Laid, produced by Brian Eno. Laid had a subtle stripped down sound, loose with slide guitar, but the working atmosphere with the cultured Mr Eno wasn't always as relaxed. Says Saul: "I'm not sure Eno liked me. He used to get annoyed because I play a lot of instruments and when we were improvising I'd flit between different things. I remember him once getting me against a wall during a jam - he goes, Listen to this f**king guitar you're playing, you little c**t. It's brilliant and then it stops. Why does it stop? He had me by the collar, up against the wall. I thought he was going to hit me. I wanted to beat him up." But you went back and played the guitar the way he wanted? "Oh yeah" And being produced by Eno they claim as one of their fondest memories.

Laid broke James in America, where it sold a mighty 600,000 copies. Follow-up Wah Wah (1994), a series of ambient jams from the Laid sessions, was less successful. Intended as a reinvention, release dates got delayed for over six months by which time U2's Eno-produced and like-sounding Zooropa had appeared, effectively stealing James' thunder. Aware that, at home, Madchester was history and feelings had changed, the band remained in America. Interviews of the time show six men on a debauched bender, snorting drugs in the tour van, watching porn and waving around willies upon which young groupies had inked their names, while Booth, closeted away, isolated from the shenanigans, sounds tired and defensive: "I think," he said head in hands, in 1994, "we've failed to present a coherent myth."

What followed was 1995's Black Thursday, so-called because on that day Larry Gott and manager Martine walked out, it was found that James owed £250,000 in back tax, and the band very nearly imploded. A long break from each other led to Tim's solo LP. 96's Booth and the Bad Angel with 50 year old Twin Peaks instrumentalist Angelo Badalamenti. Meanwhile, Jim, Saul and Dave were back in the studio. They corralled the band, and the outcome was last year's Whiplash. It wasn't easy to make, says Saul, the process "surrounded by months and months of turbulence and uncertainty"  Nevertheless, headstrong and poptastic, it was regarded by many, but not the band, as James' best album to date, entering the UK Top 10 and delivering one of their all-time best-selling singles She's A Star.

But how quickly they forget. Despite all this, and only 12 months later, people asked, surprised, if James were "still going". They are doing more than that. With 750,000 copies of the number one Best Of sold in the UK alone, the band held rainsoaked audiences captivated at this year's V98 festival. And if there were any doubts remaining, a 7-0 thashing to Blur in a football friendly served only to reinstate their position at the top of British music's premier league.

"All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light" - James Joyce.

It is hard to believe, for long time and recent fans alike that James have been with us for 16 years, enduring the numerous professional and personal obstacles the music business has thrown at them. But where lesser bands may have faltered James have deviated. Their personal belief in their music has remained; their constant, their binding force - their raison d'etre. 1998 has seen the restitution of the pop crown. James dues have begun to be paid.