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JAMES : TWENTY FOUR HOUR PARTY PEOPLE TIM INTERVIEW

 

I don't have a bad word to say about Tony Wilson.  I think he's got a lot of balls and a lot of time. He'll let his mouth go first, but you need people like that. You need people to put their neck on the line, and Tony that, he did that for Factory.

One of the things we hated about Factory was how cool the image was. So we were like "Nope, not gonna let anyone do our sleeve, we're gonna do it." And then I think the night before the deadline, we kind of rang each other in a panic because we hadn't got a sleeve together and Jimmy did it with felt-tips, and scrawled JIMONE, couldn't even fit it all the writing with felt-tips and they had to put out this sleeve that looked like it had been done by an autistic child. And they prided themselves and every sleeve had been so cool and I hear Tony ranted at us for that one for a long time, he was well pissed with us for that.

We toured with New Order, and, as I said, we took the Mondays on tour and gave them their first kind of big... We went to see them. I remember, Nathan, their manager, went "Tim, come and see..", he was quite friendly with us, me and Martine, "Come and see this great band I'm managing, great band" and he took us to Wigan to see them in this little club and Shaun was so out of it that he came off after twenty minutes, he was so far gone, he thought he'd been on for hours. So they played literally about four songs. And the rest of the band were like "Shaun" and he was like "We've been on for hours man, we've been on for hours." He was obviously off his head. But they were brilliant for about twenty minutes and we were like "Yeah, fine, we'll take you on tour, great."


 

James' seventh album 'Whiplash' is worth checking out

By Rebecca J. Lauck
Entertainment Editor

James is back again. Not James the person, but James the band. Their seventh album, "Whiplash" is a mixture of insistent melodies and intimacy.
James has been a sextet for 11 years now, and has had quite a few obstacles to overcome during that period.
They began in Manchester, England and have evolved into a successful group. Made up of Tim Booth (vocal), Jim Glennie (bassist), David Baynton-Power (drums), Saul Davies (violins, guitar), Mark Hunter (keyboards), and Adrian Oxaal (guitar), their sixth album, 1993s "Laid," sold over 600,000 copies in America, and "Whiplash" is rather similar to it.
One of my favorite tracks is "Waltzing Along" mainly because of its feel-good melody.
Another good one is the newly released "She's a Star" which is in heavy rotation at radio stations. With lyrics like "She's been in disguise forever/ She's tried to disguise her stellar views/ Much brighter than all this static/ Now she's coming through," I can't help but like it. The bouncy guitar rhythms add appeal to the song, too.
"Play Dead," the seventh track, is a dance mix that turns into a love story about doing anything for the one you love.
"Watering Hole" is an experimentation that sounds like a cross between Cowboy Junkies and The Smiths.
James has also been through some rough times, especially when Larry Gott, a founding member of the band, decided he was going to quit.
"Still, we've had a lot of these days, we have been together for a long time. It had been me, Tim and Larry for hundreds of years," Glennie said. "And when Larry left it really altered the balance. Suddenly everything was completely broken. All we had was totally shattered. Which meant that the rest of the band came closer into things and what we've rebuilt from that is much stronger, much more open, and much more of an honest reflection of what James are about. But it was painful, seriously painful."
Overall, "Whiplash" is just as enjoyable as the other James albums. "This album has the same restless spirit of the other James albums, it's looking for some new language, something new," Booth said. "Its got a lot more energy to it. 'Laid' was a hard record to tour because it was so delicate, but we want to tour this album. So it's a definite thumping record."
 


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