Author of "The Birth And Impact Of Britpop: Mis-Shapes, Scenesters And Insatiable Ones"
“Could you write a review of James in concert?”
Of course I could.
Easy.
It’s so easy to write a review of a concert that you could probably write the bulk of it before the actual show.
Look at the setlist for the previous gig on setlist.fm.
Talk about how much the crowd loved it.
Lights down/lights up.
Check the thesaurus for alternatives to the usual superlatives.
You could even do what I once read in a review of one of the worst bands in British pop music history and talk about the car parking arrangements at the venue.
I’m not making that last one up.
Jesus really did weep.
There are two problems with writing a review of a concert; most concerts are the same (particularly when it is the same band), and most people who write reviews of concerts just run through a list of the songs the band played, and that is really fucking boring.
I saw James play in Glasgow over a month ago.
I’ve started to write a review on about a dozen occasions.
Writers block?
I can almost hear the roars of delight at that prospect from certain Fila and Adidas clad non entities across the internet at that prospect.
I’m not blocked.
I’m tired.
Tired of so many things.
And of so many people.
Shortly after the show my daughter fell ill - nothing serious, but serious enough to blow a hole in my best laid plans.
Then my wife fell ill - nothing serious, but serious enough to blow a hole in my plans.
I fell ill - that’s always more serious because of my general health, and all of what was left of any plans I had were blown into the air, scattering like dandelion stems on a summers day.
As one bad day drifted into another I found myself returning, over and over again, to that night in Glasgow.
Not to the order of the songs, or to the size of the crowd, or to any of the dial-a-cliche descriptors that everyone uses when they come home from a gig, but to the way I had felt.
When I was an acne ridden, socially awkward, little Mormon teenager, I would attend regular discos at one of the Church buildings in Dundee. These were opportunities for us to meet other weird kids, and to keep us away from the sort of things that were going on at real discos - wickedness like alcohol, fighting, and getting off with Carmen from my English class.
The very first time I heard James was at one of these nights - the DJ under explicit instructions about what he could and could not play (no “Push It” by Salt ’n’ Peppa) put “Sit Down” on the turntable and by the second verse we were all sitting on the floor.
Tragic.
But I vividly remember hearing Tim Booth singing the line at the end of the first verse; “Hope that God exits, I hope, I pray.”
It was the first time I had ever been confronted with the idea that God might not exist. Until that point I had acted not on hope, or even faith, but on instruction.
Now at just shy of my 16th birthday a radical idea had been implanted.
I had to work it out for myself.
I didn’t know anything.
I only had hope.
This was both terrifying and comforting.
Go figure.
I’ve written other pieces about James where I explain the pivotal moments in my life that have been shaped, and soundtracked, by them. About how they have changed me in very real ways. About the fact that, on more than one occasion, they have presented a word, an idea, a mood, in a way that has felt like it was crafted specifically for me at that moment.
It isn’t easy to write about seeing James live.
It isn’t about rock ’n’ roll tropes.
You can’t check the set from the previous show because the set changes every night…sometimes it can feel like there isn’t a set at all, that the band are so in tune with one another that from one chord the entire thing begins to unfold without any need for planning. The set is a living, responsive, reactive, thing…it exists in its own little world, oblivious to the demands of the “industry”.
What good does it do to mention the things people usually mention when all that you really remember by the time you are leaving the venue/temple is the way that you felt before, and the way that you feel after?
This was an unusual witnessing for me - I usually go to gigs on my own (BIG SURPRISE says absolutely nobody who has ever met me) but I wasn’t alone this time, I was with my daughter.
She’s a little kid.
Still not even a teen.
In very many ways she is naive.
Simply thrilled by things with a childlike wonder.
Full of hope and joy.
I don’t know where she gets it from.
Her mother, my too good for me wife, has done a wonderful thing in helping to build so beautiful a thing.
I don’t do that thing that some parents do (always the men) of forcing my child to listen to “my” music.
I hate it.
“Listen Celery, this is The Beatles, and they are really important, they are the best band ever, and blah, fucking blah…”
She has heard the music I listen to, she shares the music she has discovered with me, we are feeding one another.
Her only real knowledge of James was “Moving On” - she loved the video, she often asks for it to played in the car.
I worried about how she would respond to a full concert from a band she didn’t really know anything about - maybe the evening would be cut short because she would be bored.
As the madness, mayhem, euphoria, of “Laid” took the congregation to a high they had never before experienced, arms aloft, eyes cast up to Heaven, voices raised in a communal song of praise, she was twirling, spinning, grinning, and laughing.
Almost forty years after I first heard “Sit Down” and sat down on the floor of a Mormon Church in Dundee, here I was with a child of my own hearing the same song for the first time, watching as she too was changed by the experience of hearing James.
In sickness and health, through good times and bad, from childhood to within spitting distance of the grave, James have been a constant, and now maybe they, and the magic they weave, are going to carry on for more years than they, and me, have left.
Life’s a fucking miracle.
For further tour dates and the latest James news visit https://wearejames.com
Add comment
Comments