Mancunian indie rockers James reveal why they prefers gigs in Scotland
FROM humble beginnings playing pubs and clubs with only three people listening to you, Mancunian indie rockers James have come a long way.
They return to Scotland next month for a spring 2019 tour promoting their most recent album Living in Extraordinary Times.
Jim Glennie, bass guitarist and namesake of the band, recalled their pub days and aspiring to play at the Manchester Apollo after seeing The Jam perform there when we was around 16 years old.
He said: “I remember seeing the sign that The Jam was sold out, and I said, ‘One day it’s going to be my band that’s up there.’ And I did, I played the Manchester Apollo, and the sign said: JAMES: SOLD OUT.”
Speaking from his home in the Highlands, he shed some light on the writing and recording process his band go through: “Our song-writing style is very spontaneous, we normally just get together and jam, and record what comes out, we then listen back to it and look through everything we’ve done, plough through the stuff we’ve done and construct it into what becomes the beginnings of our songs.”
He continued: “We then take everything to a producer and we all whittle everything down to a sensible number of songs to work on. It steps outside of the thought process, you’re not just sitting calculating where the bridge should come in, there can be collisions, because people can hit wrong notes, but sometimes it sounds brilliant, and it’s something we would never have
come across while just thinking about it.”
Jim also has a love for Scottish audiences, and his fondness for his hometown, saying that James always get the best responses from Scotland and Manchester.
He said he favours Scottish gigs, saying it feels more like a “hotel gig” because he’s normally the furthest travelled when playing south of the border.
He said with a chuckle: “It doesn’t really matter where we play, because we’ve got an amazing fan base who put up with our weird James way of doing things and still come to support us tour after tour.”
One of his fondest memories in his music career was the first time he played the Royal Albert Hall, saying: “We were staying in a hotel down the road, and I was walking to it on my way to the sound check, I couldn’t find the stage door, while I was looking for it, it dawned on me: ‘You’re playing the Albert Hall tonight!’, that was surreal.”
James are preparing to set out on their tour and play Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on March 18. They will be supporting themselves with an acoustic set.
Jim added: “I can’t believe we’ve never supported ourselves with an acoustic set before, we love our acoustic sets because they’re unpredictable, we have to adapt because it changes things up so much, and it gives us access to a whole back catalogue of songs we wouldn’t normally play.”
Tickets are available from Ticketmaster, Gigsandtours.com and wearejames.com