James at the Albert Hall

It was my friend, Ric, who first introduced me to James. I knew of them, of course; back then when you bought the NME and Melody Maker, you read the papers cover to cover. But words like 'folk' were often associated with James and, anyway, they didn't have synthesisers. But Ric introduced me to their track 'What For', which was irresistible and I love it to this day. 

It was almost certainly this track that led to me buying their third album, Gold Mother', which I played so often that, to this day, if I hear the end of one of the songs from it, I can hear the start of the next track in my head. 

The next single, 'Sound', was fantastic but the accompanying album was a little too over-produced for me and maybe we would have parted ways there and then, except they recorded their next album - or, more precisely, pair of albums - with Brian Eno. 'Laid', the main album, was a bit acoustic and, yes, folky, for me - although the single, 'Sometimes (Lester Piggott)' - is actually my favourite James song - but 'Wah Wah', the dark, mysterious, improvised sister album could not have been more up my street if it had moved in with me. 

Last year, the Minx and I went to see them play live in Newcastle, which was pretty good but, really, was never going to match my expectations based on their farewell concert at the MEN years earlier. (I wasn't there but the DVD is astounding). To be honest, I wasn't too fussed about seeing them again until they announced a one-off gig at Albert Hall, in Manchester,  which is a cracking venue. And that's where we went, this evening.

The venue kindly took the Minx's foot into account and let us sit in the reserved area just above and to the right of the stage, which gave us a brilliant perspective on what turned out to be a really interesting gig. 

First up was the opening support band, The Slow Readers Club, much championed by James and certainly worthy of their support. After that, James came on to take some questions and also to demonstrate the process of improvisation that they use to write their songs (see photo). It was experiencing this process that led to Eno suggesting the 'Wah Wah' album and I'd suggest that process must be toughest on the vocalist, so I thought it was really brave of Tim Booth to try it, this evening. I guess it lasted five minutes or so and, actually, it was very good (and interesting). 

(Brief aside: I think the only drawback to this improvising must be that you fall back on quite common chord progressions. A band I was in many years ago was engineered by a chap, Mick Armistead, who had toured with James, playing keyboards. He said that, musically, it was a bit dull for him.)

After that, they played some songs with a string quartet, of which the best was 'Sit Down' (not a song I'm usually that mad about), and then the second support act came on. This was the front man from Glasvegas, performing with a guitar and keyboard. Unfortunately, it was possibly the worst support set I've even seen, although it will stay with me mostly for the fact that his mum joined him on stage for the last song.

And then James were back for a barstorming set. Happily it was one of those gigs where I enjoyed every song, even the ones I didn't know, and the icing on the cake was that they finished with 'Sometimes'. The whole audience kept singing along for so long after the song finished that, in the end, the band joined in again. Fantastic gig: what a way to finish the year!

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