Joseph Murphy got the chance to natter on the phone with Tim Booth, lead singer of Manchester band James – responsible for multiple Britpop bangers and still going strong in the midst of their 40-year career. With over 25 million records sold worldwide and a special live show involving some onsite circus clientele, festivalgoers will be in safe hands for the headline slot on 31 August.
Ahead of your performance in Sheffield, how do you feel that your recent number one album, Yummy, reflects where you and the band are in 2025?
We’re playing those songs live, along with our older stuff. There’s a certain sense of relevance to some songs – there’s at least five or six from that album we’re playing in rotation at the moment. So the older fans might not have heard the newer album, but we feel that the older stuff is just as vital and alive as the new, and people will really enjoy it as a whole.
A lot of your early stuff, namely Laid or Gold Mother, is still relevant and very big with my generation, Gen Z. How do you feel about the band’s career being so long spanning with its influence?
See, there we’re talking about the 90s, which is definitely before your time. We span decades, my friend – like vampires who never age. It is nice, though, to see so many people come back to us. I like to think we’ve been fairly consistent. Some bands have this issue where they create one astonishingly good album and it just defines them – it becomes somewhat of an albatross. They can never move on from how good that record was for them. I think we’ve been able to keep moving quite effectively. That’s also what’s unusual about James – 42 years in, we’re still making music that is challenging our earlier works.
Are there any songs that you’ve been particularly surprised about the longevity of in the public eye or the charts?
I guess it would be ‘Getting Away with It (All Messed Up)’, which seems – by things like Spotify – to be one of our most popular songs. But when we released it, it didn’t do very well in the charts. That was written in 1984, and it was Morrissey and Marr’s favourite song at the time. They came through to the studio and said it should be a single. We should’ve listened to them, really, because they knew quite a bit about what singles were good.
What goes into the process of writing a setlist for James?
You see, it’s funny really – I’ll be writing a set according to the general feeling. But it’s never set in stone. If the audience is a bit low energy, we might decide we need to bring it up. If it’s more of a thing where we can put in a more moody or heavy tune, then we’ll do that. So really we make the set according to the location, the people, the weather. We did a gig in Portugal and it was by the sea and it was like, wow, I wonder if we could start in a boat and come ashore. So we found someone with a boat and started the set that way. You just kind of think, with both the music and the spectacle, how can we break this up, how can we make this an event that people will remember? It’s much more of a communication with the audience – it’s all about that interaction.
What’re you most looking forward to adding to the set for Rock N Roll Circus?
I think that having those performers available to us is going to be great fun. We’re going to see if we can get those firebreathers, ask how many acrobats can we get on stage, what can we show the audience alongside the music. We’re really going for that crazy, psychedelic – just overall a visual thing, not just the music. We’ll try and get in some of the tunes from before, but also some of our big stuff from the more modern releases, so hopefully we’ll have something for everyone to enjoy.
James headline the final night of Rock ‘N’ Roll Circus on 31 August.
