The wood-gabled farmhouse is centuries old, picture-postcard
perfect, and several rustic miles outside of Brighton,
England. Who knows? Maybe Shakespeare himself once downed
flagons of mead from its gnarled dining-room table. This
chilly January afternoon, however, said table is hosting the
members of classy pop combo James, with cans of Boddingtons
bitters and greasy sausage sandwiched. For a few days, this
multi-cottaged estate-and all the British food in it-belongs
to the band, a rented rehearsal retreat where James will
streamline the eclectic material from its new album Whiplash
(Mercury). It's a relaxed, casual atmosphere-there's a
steady stream of jokes and witty asides, vocalist Tim Booth
is running around in flannel cow-print pajamas, and over
lunch, guitarist Saul Davies strums tentative chords to
bassist Jim Glennie, who ponders them and makes a few
melodic suggestions.
Booth-after showering and changing clothes-calls this
idyllic meeting to order. Everyone at the table agrees that
the simplest, most straightforward Whiplash track is its
closer, "Blue Pastures," which follows Glennie's skeletal
bassline through Mark Hunter's soft forest of keyboards and
Booth's gentle ruminations on mortality. "I'll give you the
Twilight Zone story on that song," offers the singer,
sipping some tea he's just prepared. "We improvised that
years ago onto 24-track, and I improvised a lyric, basically
what you hear on that take. Then when we came to get this
LP together, we improvised it once more and I did the rest
of the lyrics in that second take. And I didn't know what
it was about-just someone going for a walk and lying down in
the snow and they were dying. As far as I could see, that's
what the story was about. Then what happened is, two weeks
before we recorded it, my best friend's [spiritual] mentor
wen tout on his favorite walk and laid down in the snow and
committed suicide. So if you ask me what 'Blue Pastures' is
really about, I think it's exactly about him, and the
reasons why he did it are in that song."
Davies and Glennie are both staring wide-eyed, still
spooked by this strange turn of events. Booth turns in his
chair to address them. "Actually, I never told you this,
but it's amazing." That same spiritual adviser, he says,
also trained another friend: "A woman who was deaf, with
whom I did some dance work. And I told her the story of the
song, and she said she'd love to hear it. So we sat her
between the speakers and turned it up full, and I sand her
the words so she could read my lips. And, fuckin' hell, it
completely did me in-I was singing her the words and she
could hear the vibrations and she was crying. It was the
most astonishing thing, and she wanted to hear more of the
record, so I ended up doing nearly the whole record like
that. And it was devastating, re-experiencing what you've
done again from another angle."
Davies (who does double duty on violin for James) stops
playing and sets his guitar down. He's moved by his
partner's story. "It's especially weird when you're playing
a record for someone who, in essence, can't actually hear
it," Booth sighs. "They can't hear all the things that
people normally get so beguiled by when they hear a record,
like, 'Oh, I quite like ho those drums sound.' Things that
ultimately don't really matter."
Booth has spent over a decade studying "any method you
could have possibly heard of" to heighten his innate psychic
abilities. "When you make music," he insists, "you tune
into songs that've already been written. That's what it
feels like-the song's been written, and you've got to re-
discover it, which is why I don't always know what my lyrics
are about. But I know when I've written the lyric that's
meant to be sung. When Whiplash producer Stephen Hague
asked him to change a few words here and there, Booth
adamantly declined. "I just can't do that, because there's
a complete sense to me that I'm given those lyrics and if I
betray that, I won't be given them any more."
Booth wants the distinction made: He sees James, and
creativity in general, as one of the most healing things you
can do as a spiritual exercise; the rest of the group
doesn't necessarily feel the same way. A small discrepancy.
But it's one that literally saved them in their darkest
hour, a bleak moment known in the James camp as Black
Thursday. The Mancunian sextet had survived numerous lineup
changes, even the Stone Roses/Happy Mondays "Madchester"
craze in the late '80s, to finally strike sales-figures gold
with its sixth album, Laid (Mercury), a Brian Eno-produced
masterpiece of intellectual, folk-jangles sunniness. This
(and a surreal Eno-enhanced outtake disc, Wah Wah [Mercury])
led to an ostensibly pivotal movement: James playing the
prestigious Woodstock '94 festival, before a crowd of
300,000. The future appeared bright indeed.
"Then we went into the studio to start writing material
for the next album, which would end up being Whiplash,"
recalls Davies. "And suddenly, everything collapsed around
us, and it happened to be a Thursday." Slide guitarist, key
songwriter and founding member Larry Gott announced he would
no longer tour with James. Tim Booth announced his plans to
go to New York and record his long-stalled solo project with
film composer Angelo Badalamenti (the lush Booth and the Bad
Angel, released last year on Mecury). And the U.K. tax man
announced the unfortunate discovery of an overlooked James
debt of roughly 150,000. "We realized that everything we'd
taken for granted, even the existence of the band, was now
in doubt and required serious re-evaluation," Davies adds.
Black Thursday still sends a shiver down Glennie's
usually staid spine. "We owed all this money, but there was
no money coming in, because the only we get money is from
completion of the album. And we were only just beginning to
start _writing_ song-starting and finishing an album was a
long way away." With the zenlike Booth away, pursuing both
his album and dance/improv theater work in Los Angeles,
James' survival instinct kicked in. The musicians set up
studio shop in drummer David Baynton-Power's house, dropped
by individually to record their ideas, and tinkered with
every other number but "Blue Pastures" until all concerned
were satisfied. What Davies terms "a completely different
was of working for us."
All of the traditional James ingredients (even an Eno
vocal/keyboard/occasional co-production cameo) figure into
the Whiplash mix: Booth's breezy sandalwood acrobatics on
pop gems like "Homeboy" and "She's a Star," Gott's spiraling
slide that propels both the dreamy "Lost a Friend" and the
raucous juggernaut "Tomorrow," and that certain aura of
mannered grandiosity that flutters over every cut. But new
flavors waft in: throbbing techno (the title track), heart-
attack jungle patterns ("Greenpeace," "Go to the Bank"),
even industrial-strength riffing alongside fluid Beatlesque
beauty (the brilliantly schizoid "Avalanche").
Glennie says that "Greenpeace" is the most extreme
example of James' new way of working. "It came about
through a little spindly jam of me playing bass, Saul
playing guitar, and Mark playing keyboards-very pretty, very
nice and cyclical. And Tim came over the top of this with a
very sweet vocal. And then Dave had a vision and said,
'Leave it with me.' And we came in the next day to hear
what you hear on the record."
Baynton-Power beams proudly. "That creaking noise you
hear is a marble cutting board rubbed up and down a brick
wall. And Tim ran out of the room when that beat kicked in.
That's when I thought, 'Ah, we're onto something!'"
The secluded farmhouse, you figure, is probably one of
the first peaceful moments James has had of late. But the
muse still beckons: Davies and Glennie retire to the living
room to finish their spur-of-the-moment song. Booth stays
behind to conclude the tale.
"Black Thursday wasn't as big a thing for me, partly
because I walked away from a lot of responsibility." A
placid all-knowing smile inched across his face. "But I
wasn't worried-I knew James had to transform to survive.
James in the past has been much more like a novel, songwise;
you start pretty well, there's a good middle and you peak at
the end. But we're now in a space where we though, 'Well,
why not grab people right from the start?'"
Booth gazes out the window at-ironically-miles and
miles of rolling blue pastures. Then he, too, gets back to
work with James.