‘Everyone wants to pickle you in aspic and freeze you in time’

James singer Tim Booth on the secret of their longevity

IT’S before 9am, but already Tim Booth sounds excitable. The James singer has woken to the news that two of Donald Trump’s former aides are going to jail, leaving the president potentially open to impeachment and prosecution.

“We’re watching a president go down in slow motion,” he says. “At last, this is the big moment. I’m absolutely elated.”

The 58-year-old has been living in California for the last 10 years and says political upheaval on both sides of the Atlantic fed directly into the band’s latest album, Living in Extraordinary Times, the 15th in a career that has lasted more than 35 years.

“Watching Brexit and Trump unfold has been just incredible,” Booth tells me in his soft northern English brogue on the phone from London, where he’s editing new songs. “With Trump, the essential theme is that whatever he accuses others of, he’s guilty of himself. Karma works for all of us in this way but it’s happening to him more quickly and publicly.

“Social media is changing the way our minds work. These companies hire the best psychologists to hook us with clickbait and get us spending endless amounts of time reading things that don’t matter, buying things we don’t need, eating the wrong foods.

“As a culture we have become incredibly psychologically manipulated and I certainly include myself in this.”

Released this month and already riding high in the charts following a raft of positive reviews, Living in Extraordinary Times is the band’s second album in two years, following

2016’s much-lauded Girl at the End of the World.

Such consistency and longevity are rare indeed in the music industry. Although James enjoyed a moment of proper stardom in the early 1990s, surfing on the wave of Madchester and Britpop with a hatful of hit singles – Come Home, Laid, Born of Frustration and She’s a Star, as well as the ubiquitous Sit Down – the band always had a maturity and authenticity that defied any particular musical scene.

“We always consciously stood back from any movements,” explains Booth. “The Smiths and New Order took us on tour and at first we were lumped in with them. Then there was Madchester. We loved the bands – we took the Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets on tour with us – but we didn’t want to be part of the scene. Then there was Britpop. Lots of those bands cited us as influences and we felt honoured, but at the same time you want to keep moving. We realised quite quickly that scenes only last a few years then everyone wants to pickle you in aspic and freeze you in time.

“We never wanted to be frozen in time. We’re not a heritage band – the word ‘heritage’ is like death.”

James headline the Electric Fields festival on Thursday night in the grounds of Drumlanrig Castle, Thornhill, Dumfriesshire, joining a line-up that has a noticeably 1990s feel thanks also to the inclusion of Ride, Leftfield, Teenage Fanclub. Do these bands have anything in common?

“Maverick bands often don’t go as far and fast in the culture as pop stars and the latest cool thing, but they tend to last longer,” says Booth. “Look at the likes of Neil Young and Leonard Cohen. The Electric Fields line-up is a bill of mavericks and I look forward to seeing all these bands.”

Leeds-born Booth was studying drama at Manchester University in 1982 when the other founding members of James spotted him in the student union and asked him to join as a dancer. Before long, he had been promoted to lead singer and lyricist.

Years on the indie scene followed, before the band scored a minor hit with Come Home in 1989. The anthemic Sit Down became a smash on its second release, in 1991, peaking at number two in the charts (kept off the top spot by Chesney Hawkes’ The One and Only) and at live gigs entire audiences often did just that.

A succession of top 20 singles and albums followed, although Booth continued to pursue a parallel career as an actor, appearing in films such as Batman Begins, and he has spent time teaching dance and meditation. After taking a prolonged break from the band in the early 2000s, he rejoined James in 2007.

“The way we write and perform has kept us motivated all this time,” he adds. “I’ve been around bands for 35 years and realised no one writes like we do. We get in a room with a drum machine and we just improvise, finding a musical language with each other. No one person controls this, no one is the main songwriter, we’re just following the threads of the now. You end up with an hour of material and when you go back and listen to it you realise a particular 10-second bit sounds ace, then so does another bit, and a song forms before your eyes.

“The improvisation part is unconscious while the editing bit is conscious. It’s an unusual way to write – it’s coming from our unconscious mind, really. Our process dips into the greater resources of the human being and that enables us to continuously inspire ourselves and each other.

“The part of me talking to you now doesn’t really write those lyrics. That’s