TIM BOOTH INTERVIEW PART FOUR

Do you go back and listen to older albums a lot then?

I go back to Seven and love Seven.  That’s one I go back to and am really proud of. I knew it when the reviews were so bad. 

That’s what I learnt about the media.  When the Seven reviews and they all picked up on the Simple Minds thing because of that one reference point in Born of Frustration.  The new guys in the band were freaking out because they’d had great press and suddenly they were being slagged off and Saul was like “we’ve got to change our music.”  I was like “Back off, we’ve had years of good press, you have to take the rough with the smooth.” 

I knew that was a great record but I also knew it was our time to get kicked in the gut, I just didn’t realize it would last so long.

Around that period was a real peak, live you were playing almost completely different sets every night and you looked like you could just turn up, plug in, play and do anything.  That must be a great feeling.

It was a really amazing feeling. I loved it with Andy in the band.  I love what he brought onstage, the charisma, more than anyone else, the fact he moved around and he looked great doing it.  I missed playing off him when he went.

Do you keep in touch with him?

I bump into him from time but time, but not really.  I’m seeing Saul in Portugal next week.  Mark sends me an email from time to time.  Dave and Jim sent me a Christmas email.  Really sweet. Michael does too so there’s communication.  I bumped into Adrian last week.

None of us pretended we were great friends.  Mark and Saul have remained close but that’s it I think.  It was always that we were doing something together that we loved doing

Moving on, what sort of music are you listening to at the moment?

In my car, I’ve got Franz Ferdinand, I’ve got Wire’s Pink Flag and I’ve had loads of Pixies for the past few weeks, I’ve been obsessed with them.

Did you enjoy the gig at Brixton?

I felt it was a bit too “by numbers”, I was very upset, but I may have had too high expectations. It’s probably a bit unfair on them as I’d been listening to them solid for two weeks.

Do you feel when bands come back like that, they’re doing it for the money and it’s never going to be the same as it was?

I’ve seen it work.  Springsteen, when he reformed the E-Street Band after 15 years, probably the greatest gig I’ve ever seen.  What he did was rework every song so that some I didn’t recognize.  It was amazing. 

Patti Smith. I’ve seen her blow me away in the last few years but she’s also been crap in the last few years too.  She swings very high and deep.  So I’ve seen it work.

I saw Captain Beefheart Band without Beefheart and thought it was going to be crap and had a fantastic time.

Do you tend to stand at the back and watch or go down the front?

I was in the front row and nearly dancing.  At Springsteen I was near the front and crying.  I took Kate and she’d never liked a single Springsteen song and she was crying after about four songs.

You mentioned Franz Ferdinand.  What do you think about the new breed of British bands, there seems to be a renaissance in British music.

Is there?  I saw Keane play a couple of songs on Later and thought that was pretty interesting.   I haven’t heard most of the others.  

I love Coldplay and I’m sure they’ll be getting slagged by now because they’re too popular but that last record is absolutely fantastic.  I know they’ll get a kicking because they’re too successful and too mainstream for the English press. The songwriting on the second album is fantastic and that DVD, I saw that one night on MTV and was blown away by that.  I’d say them and Radiohead are the flagbearers in this country.

I’d love to see Franz Ferdinand live, I hear they’re quite good.

Are you looking forward to seeing Morrissey again? 

Yeah, I heard most of the new record and I thought his lyrics were really arresting again, they really make you listen.  His voice sounded stronger.  It’ll be nice to see him in Spain.

Final question, are you going to be doing much outside the UK?

Trying to.  Financially it’s going to be difficult.  The record company won’t give us tour support, it makes it really hard.  We’re planning gigs at the moment.  We had to turn down a German festival because we couldn’t get tour support which was a real bummer because I wanted to play Germany. 

The only way we’re going to make it is to go out and really play because it feels like early James, round One Man Clapping. There’s a group of people who will always come out to see us but we’ve got a lot to prove and we ain’t going to get the media behind us because they’re not expecting this to be anything really.  And so we’ve really got to go and work our arses off.

Are you going to do it in small bursts then?

I don’t know. It doesn’t have to be.  I’m not averse to taking Kate and the baby on tour and my son is old enough now for me to leave him behind now.  So I’ve not got a vision of how that would be.

If we got offered a month or two tour in the States then I’d take it.  Like a flash.  But we need a good set up there.  We just signed an American deal a week ago, so it’s going to come out in the States.  James didn’t come out in the States for the last couple of albums so that’s really good news.

Who have you signed with?

Koch.  It’s more like a distribution deal.  They do The Charlatans out there and a few other people.  But I have a band who are all incredibly busy, all incredibly talented and at some point I’m going to have to be able to pay them and I don’t know whether they’re going to be able to go away for two months unpaid unless we’re making money, so I have to see if we can make some money first.

Are you going to do merchandise?

We are looking at that.  Haven’t got any ideas at the moment, the Monkey God logo is probably the best thing we have. I like that logo, I can see that on a t-shirt.  We’ll try a few things like that.

What about a James reunion?

No.

Never?

I’d never say never because you can’t tell.  But if we did it, I’d have to do it how Springsteen did it, rework the songs.  We’d have to rehearse for weeks, get hot, but to be honest, I don’t want that.  I don’t want to look back.  I want to go forward.  That was a great period for me of fantastic music.  We did it. 

And I would probably agree with you that we peaked around Seven and Laid and we did some great music after that, but if your expectations are of Seven and Laid, you’d have maybe felt the later ones didn’t quite match that. 

There were some gigs after that which I could say were as good, easy.  We had an amazing gig in Athens that was fucking fabulous, loads in Britain, in Scotland especially at Barrowlands that would match that period, but not as the feeling of a  band moving forward doing it every night, the unknown.

I got outvoted basically around the time Larry left.  When he left, everyone turned round and said that they wanted a more solid set every night and less uncertainty and I was outvoted.  On the Pleased To Meet You tour when we did it before recording it, they turned round and said “let’s shift it again”.  That felt really fantastic.

Does it feel like that with the new band as well?

I feel like I can do this with the new band.  At the moment they want some certainty, because they’ve only just learnt the songs.  For this tour, it’s probably what you’ve already seen with a few changes but the next tour after that will have some big changes.  We’ve got some ideas to mess around with, we’ll work something out.  When the tour starts properly we’ll try different things out on different nights and see.

The band are all going to make it in the next few years.  Lisa has got an amazing voice, Milo does stand-up and he’s a really talented guy and Lee has so many talents, you don’t know which way he’s going to be well-known – producer, musician, songwriter.

To be honest, that’s the excitement, these guys are so talented.  At least three of them thought they were never going to make it through music.  They’d virtually given up on the idea. 

Milo had said he was giving up on the idea of being a drummer because there seemed to be no way of getting further than drumming for a covers band and was getting bored.

Robin had been in so many great bands and had so many people come up to him and tell him what a great musician he is, but he’s probably never made a living out of it.

So when they get to a gig and there’s 200 people really enthusiastic, it’s a huge experience for them and that affects me and I think that’s great because I get to see it again through innocent eyes and it completely rekindles my enthusiasm.

It must a bit different than having 10,000 people stood twenty feet away from you?

I love having 10,000 people stood twenty feet away from me, but I love the intimacy of the small gigs. I’ll do them both, I don’t have any problem with either.

So what of the future?

I have to look at things differently now.  I’m lucky that I’ve been able to get an album out of songs that I love out to people and do it in a much more lo-fi way with much less restriction.  There will be at least one more album, probably more than that, but I’ll carry on scriptwriting, carry on acting, following all those things really.

Any final message?

Yes, really to the people who loved James to turn up and give this a look because I think they’ll see the spirit of James here and please don’t be affected by the media because they’ve never helped James or me connected to that and it’s much more about music and something still being alive and vital.