(#584: 4 April 1998, 1 week)
Track listing: Come Home (Flood Mix)/Sit Down/She’s A Star/Laid/Waltzing Along/Say Something/Born Of Frustration/Tomorrow/Destiny Calling/Out To Get You/Runaground/Lose Control/Sometimes/How Was It For You/Seven/Sound/Ring The Bells/Hymn From A Village
For most people, the best music “of all time” – meaning “their time” – is the stuff they heard and patiently absorbed when they were teenagers, before work, marriage, families and decay got in their way. They cling to these songs, those bands and singers, for the remainder of their lives because they remind listeners of a time when they (the listeners) still had life.
For me, however, the memory of those times, emboldened by selective amnesia and hindsight, is far more potent than their music. I think of the music I listened to when I was about to leave school, or university, and although I can pinpoint exactly why and where it hit me, I really cannot listen to the music itself.
Joy Division? I started backwards with them. I heard Closer before Unknown Pleasures and the singles before either. I thought, and still think, that the twelve-inch of “Atmosphere” and “She’s Lost Control” is their finest achievement. Closer, in particular its second side, meant a lot to me, newly out of secondary education and thrust into a world with which I didn’t really know how to deal, every classmate now automatically a professional stranger. It made me conjure up unimaginable worlds in my mind. The Smiths? Well, they hit me like everybody else. In retrospect their records could be viewed as generally disappointing – but at the time they felt magical and different to me.
The common denominator, apart from Manchester, is that I don’t and indeed can’t listen to either group’s work any more. If I catch them on the radio, my heart and mind can’t touch what I hear. These were different times, I was a different person then, who absorbed and responded to different things in different ways. and I have moved on since those days. At least I like to think that I have; it could of course equally well be the case that I’m exactly the same person in different settings. Yet so many people can’t, and won’t, move on.
I think it’s a bit like that with James. Everybody has their individual or collective memory of this odd band, who indeed didn’t stop existing – a six-year break in the noughties notwithstanding - and will be returning to Then Play Long a lot later. Usually these memories are of them on stage, where it is said they far outperformed what they managed on record. All I recall is the Saturday of the 1991 Reading Festival, where James topped the bill but had to follow a spectacular set by Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine. They didn’t succeed; they stumbled onstage at around twenty past midnight on Sunday, when most of the audience was already stumbling back to their tents or homes, and failed to kindle any fire.
Equally James have one of the most undyingly loyal of all fanbases. In British pop, possibly only Gary Numan, Steven Wilson and James Arthur come close. Tim Booth seems generally able to weave a special bond with his audience, and they with him. They trust and love him and his colleagues. Who are the other ones again? Oh, one of them is the bass player Jim Glennie, who gave the band their name. Well, there you have it.
It’s likely that Fontana were thinking of The Beautiful South or Crowded House when they commissioned this compilation; another potential triumph for perennial pop underdogs who'd been hanging around for some time before breaking through, and don’t they all sound familiar and good when you put all of their moderate hits (and one major one) together? This isn’t really a Best Of since with one dangling exception it is solely devoted to the band’s Fontana work; four songs from each of their albums that you might have heard of, three from their then most recent and commercially underperforming album, two obligatory new songs – and one uncomfortable closing blast from a far-off past which throws everything else on the record into perspective.
My feeling is that, with all the fat trimmed off, this 69-minute album – like most number one albums of the period, it’s far too long, probably with an eye to the imminent future of people listening to individual songs rather than the thing as a whole – would work as a cracking 46-minute greatest hits package. The AllMusic review complains about the songs not having been sequenced in chronological order, but even bearing in mind that compilations are generally designed as entertainment rather than a university lecture presentation, it’s pretty clear that if strict chronology had been observed, this album would have been top-heavy – a great first half followed by a fairly dreary second one.
Instead, The Best Of darts about all over the place like a moderately excited pinball and shamelessly frontloads the really big, or biggish, numbers. I’m rather fond of the Gold Mother material myself. Indeed, when I listened to “Come Home (Flood Mix)” I quite unexpectedly found myself contradicting what I said at the beginning of this piece, with thoughts about the lurid pastel-coloured music that defined 1990, when the world was happy and life still seemed possible. The genius of the House piano fill which refuses to change despite the song’s overlying chord sequences – see also the two-note guitar riff that David Byrne added to the entirety of the Fun Boy Three’s “Our Lips Are Sealed” – is, well, genius. “Perfume” by the Paris Angels – either mix will do. The Weatherall/Jesse Jackson mix of Primal Scream’s “Come Together.” Even Candy Flip and Flowered Up. The optimism of the times struck me at an age – twenty-six – when, historically, Bad Things always Happen to Music. 808 State. E-Zee Posse. The Inspirals. The Shamen. The Mondays. My Jealous God! I didn’t have time for Joy Division or the Smiths – neither, at the time, did New Order or Johnny Marr – and felt it was enough that they’d been avenged, that closure on Closer had been achieved.
Probably because it hasn’t been ruinously overexposed on heritage theme park radio, this music still remains fresh to me, and Tim Booth sounds utterly at home in this setting and generally angry and “passionate” in “Come Home” (what an enormous scream he unleashes on his "makes me wanna SCREEEEAM" - his is the best growl in British pop since Eden Kane) and the twirly kaleidoscope of “How Was It For You.” Meanwhile, in “Lose Control,” the singer manages an elegant melancholy (“Where is the love that everyone is talking of?”) which sat and sits very well next to Billie Ray Martin and Electribe 101. This is someone who can sing and act (and it was little surprise that, during the band's six-year sabbatical in the 2000s, Booth trained and mainly worked as an actor).
The one of course that heritage theme park radio routinely pounces upon is “Sit Down.” The original version was eight rambling minutes long and quietly powerful. But to get it onto daytime radio and into the charts – which it certainly did; only nineteen other singles in 1991 outsold it in Britain – I guess they had to realise that the only way of doing so was to, well, sound like everybody else.
The modish production of the remake/edit instantly flattens the song. It thuds in the dull middleground and neither punches nor embraces. And yet it is a song, written in 1988 when Booth was suffering from depression, which has touched and continues to touch so many. They say that, when the song was sung live (much more powerfully), audience members would turn to and hug one another. To me it all sounds as transitory and bogus as the fake ecstasy described in “Sorted For E’s And Wizz.” In telling people that, really, they’re not alone in feeling weird, ostracised and/or displaced - or just "different" - it did fulfil a primary function – and fellow Mancunian duo Olive’s 1997 number one “You’re Not Alone” could stand as a fairly deliberate sequel.
From personal experience, however, my feeling was that “Those who find themselves ridiculous” etc. was generally consumed with eagerness by yuppies who didn’t have to be mad to work where they worked but it helped, whose idea of going crazy was a weekend camping trip. The final, crashing, echoed “DOWN” seems to be an acknowledgement that this utopia can’t last for more than a few radiant seconds.
The primary benefit of mixing up James’ chronology is that you get plenty of smashing pop songs, almost one after another here. For instance, “She’s A Star” is the best fake-Suede song I know of (and a lot better than most of the fourth Suede album, but that’s for another time). “Say Something” and “Laid” are concise and funny. “Sometimes,” complete with Eno’s Oblique Strategies Male Voice Choir, is propulsive and genuinely rousing, and paves a direct path to bands who would follow in their path, like Elbow and Coldplay. “Born Of Frustration” is basically a reheating of “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” complete with Jim Kerr impressions, but Booth’s sheer determination, and Andy Diagram’s important trumpet, help transcend any stadium dreams; towards its end the song sounds as though about to buckle and collapse into freeform cacophony, becomes intentionally fuzzy.
Nonetheless, I fear that Fontana glimpsed their own U2, and steered the band accordingly, Eno productions included. The abbreviated “Sound” almost outdoes its closet, again by means of Booth’s implacably adamant force (his polite howls resonate like a Home Counties Howlin’ Wolf, or so he would wish, though are nicely subverted by Diagram's wobbly but deadpan trumpet fanfares and what sound like random verbal barks from a megaphone, like a passing by-election campaign car). But the middle of The Best Of becomes bogged down in conciliatory dullness. The that way the Smiths/this way Mumford And Sons romp of “Waltzing Along” is entertaining enough, and "Say Something" is New Order in most ways (especially Glennie's bass hook). New track "Destiny Calling" is absolutely spot-on and utterly hilarious trolling of Oasis - James know their fellow Manchester bands - complete with a pretty vicious lyric, over-sauced guitar overdubs and sputtering-down ending. However, “Tomorrow,” “Out To Get You” and “Runaground” are all flatulent, feasibly dull Joshua Tree clone wannabes. “Seven” or “Ring The Bells" are oddly unspectacular, and to me sound like prototypes for stage development - these are all songs designed to be roared out by a crowd.
Watching the videos that accompany some of these songs, I am also not wholly convinced by Tim Booth. He always seems up and ready for things, unquenchably and earnestly enthusiastic, but a lot of the time he simply tries too hard, so he comes over as less of a Morrissey with a degree, and more of a slightly more self-aware Colin Hunt, or Robin Williams performing a routine on nineties Manchester indie singers. There is something of a sanctimonious, thou-shalt-not aura of pseudo-purity to many of his words, which usually fit the musical picture but are otherwise generally incomprehensible (and nobody listens to the words in pop music anyway – otherwise the new reality proposed in “Sit Down,” which in itself is really a very old remedy, would have come to pass), even though many of these songs, when you can make out what Booth is going on about, are just the other side of being too strange to become stadium "anthems." Uplifting singalong "Laid" is about someone losing his partner and going psychologically mad, hallucinations included. "Born In Frustration" is about having all these plans in your head but being thoroughly unable to realise any of them.
In other words, James are sufficiently fun to warrant forty-five minutes of your time but you wouldn’t necessarily want to go on a fortnight’s holiday with them. It's not so much the case that they weren't cut out for stadium rock, but more the case that stadium rock isn't cut out for them. In a lot of ways, Tim Booth's absolute refusal to edit his expression is admirable - this is, when it all comes down to something, art-rock; it's there and that's what it is.
All, however, is thrown into quite stark relief by The Best Of’s closing song, extracted from their second E.P., recorded for Factory Records in 1985 and which I, and possibly only I, bought at the time. I’m not saying that “Hymn From A Village” absolutely excretes over everything else here but there is a dynamism, a force and a real fury here which the band subsequently seemed to abandon. Gavin Whelan’s drums are dizzily active (although his replacement drummer David Baynton-Power is certainly no slouch, as "Come Home," "Sometimes" etc. demonstrate) and Tim Booth sounds like he’s actually got something to say that he’s had bottled up for a quarter of a century. “You can hear the question, can you feel the reply?” he yodels and screeches. “OH GO AND READ A BOOK, IT’S SO MUCH MORE WORTHWHILE!” which are wise words to this day and I might just take him up on that when I’ve finished writing this. It was just under three minutes of scorching economy and it was perhaps James’ real moment. And I can still listen to and enjoy it because it is so fundamentally and furiously happy – and happiness is what I need to hear in whatever lifespan remains due to me.