Tasty treats from James as Tim Booth and co. serve up musical dessert
Any band managing 40 years in the business would have cause for celebration, so it’s no surprise that James have been living it up for the past year.
After all, the Manchester-formed act were also honoured at the Ivor Novello Awards, receiving the PRS Music Icon Award and received some of the best reviews of their career with orchestral double album Be Opened By The Wonderful.
That hit #3 in the UK album charts, the latest in a long line of success with more than 25 million albums sold over their four decades.
Having brought their initial cult following along on their ride the band became chart stars, with 1990 major label debut Gold Mother leading a succession of euphoric anthems of solace, love, sex, loss and frustration at the ills of the world – Come Home, Sit Down, Sound, Sometimes (Lester Piggott) and Laid.
That latter single also served as the title track to the first of a string of James albums produced by Brian Eno and which saw the band crack America, while in the UK they’ve continued to be a classic singles act, adding Tomorrow, She’s A Star, Just Like Fred Astaire and Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) to their canon of hits. Meanwhile, subsequent albums including Whiplash, Millionaires, and Pleased To Meet You, cemented their place among the most enduring, but down-to-earth, of pop megastars.
Now it’s 18th album Yummy, which if its lead single ‘Is This Love’ is anything to go by finds the band in romantic mood – the album’s string-swept opener seeing frontman Tim Booth poring over the pain, heat, battle, distance, fear, release and endurance of this emotion, in pursuit of its point and purpose. “Love as a bomb,” says Booth, “a Tsunami that rolls over our life as we cling to the wreckage of our peace of mind”.
As well as ‘Yummy’s 12 songs, there’s another dozen bonus tracks released as ‘Pudding’ – demos, sketches from the band’s four songwriters – some more full-formed than others. “Maybe view these as the B-sides,” the band suggest, appropriately given their singles track record.
Similarly, another single ‘Life’s A Miracle’ is positive: “The most uplifting track on the album. A celebration of inclusivity because, even with all the dark sh*t going on in the world that drags us down into a morass of fear and negativity.”
All cause for optimism – and further celebration