James opened The Piece Hall in Halifax's impressive summer season with the first of two sold out nights at the beautiful Grade I listed eighteenth century cloth hall. With a set that touched on most periods in their forty-year plus career, they delighted a crowd with hits, deep cuts and curveballs as the rains came down and Tim Booth crowd surfed on a sea of wet raised arms lost in the moment.
Just as dusk started to fall James took to the stage, Tim jokes "hello Venice" and they open with Johnny Yen, a perennial favourite and the oldest song they play tonight. Whilst it dates back to their nascent days as a band it's testament to the staying power they have that it's greeted like an old friend, a crowd favourite because they always manage to find new inspiration for it. Tim tells us it's what they were doing in 1983 and then zooms forward thirty years to La Petite Mort's Interrogation, one of, if not the stand-out track on many fans' stand-out post-reformation album. To the untrained ear, it's dramatic, showcases the band's improvisational spirit in their songwriting. To the trained ear, the joy of hearing it is always tempered by the fact they play an abbreviated version of it when the section that they omit is one of their finest moments where they capture the real spirit of the band in the studio most precisely.
Waltzing Along might not be one of James' biggest hits but it's certainly a song that always brings an audience to life and gets a strong reaction, aided tonight by Tim coming down to the barrier for the first time to get closer to the crowd. Its unmistakeable opening riff is sung back at them with as much gusto as the words. Sometimes follows, pulled forward from its position at the end of the night. The crowd take it on at the end without prompting and when the band stop it's sung back to them. Saul decides unilaterally to bring it back in and round for one final chorus. "You've gone early" Tim tells us, taken aback by the reaction it gets.
"This is a song about falling in love with the wrong person, which we've all done at some point" Tim laments ruefully before they play Busted, a song from the Better Than That EP that preceded the Living In Extraordinary Times album. Probably the least well-known track of the set it's the one moment where James don't quite connect despite the intensity of the performance and the fact that the song is a lost gem, one that befell the same fate as a few others in James' career, previewed while still touring the previous album, born too early in the album writing process to survive the full course.
Way Over Your Head, from last year's number one album Yummy, rightens the ship though, the crowd here clearly knowledgeable enough to have done their research even if they haven't bought the album. The song's outro becomes a singalong as the butterflies escape on the big screen behind the band. That screen is adorned with beautiful daisies as Born Of Frustration reaches its conclusion, Tim down on the barrier behind held up by a supporting arm as the crowd lose themselves in a song that'll never cease to delight a James audience of any age.
"If you want to propose to someone, this is your moment" is the amusing introduction to Just Like Fred Astaire, a soaring rare love song from the post Best Of album Millionaires. It ends with Tim and Saul sharing a mic and a moment for the song's romantic but foreboding final "come dance, the water's rising." I Wanna Go Home makes its first appearance for three years, the song from Hey Ma that endured the most in the band's setlists, a bold brooding beast of a song that starts off slowly and builds before exploding into life towards the end, Tim holding a very long note and losing himself in the music.
Where other bands with far less of them in their artillery might take the safe route and just blast out hit after hit James take the lesser trodden path and reintroduce All The Colours Of You's opening track Zero to proceedings. A song that they never quite captured the real essence of live when they played it around the album release, they certainly have now. Tim describes it as "fun" at the start despite its opening line of "we're all gonna die" that gets sung back at him and it dropping right down at the end as Tim and Chloe's faces on the big screen are morphed to skeletal using the innovative AI-based graphic technology that the band used last year. At the end Tim tells a story of a lady handing them a picture at the soundcheck of her sister who played the song over and over as she passed away in her thirties.
His promise before it of going up after Zero being a slow one isn't quite kept as they move back to Yummy's Shadow Of A Giant, with its atmospheric opening with Chloe's haunting vocals complementing the now teeming rain that no one seems to mind one bit. It soars and swoops majestically, something this latest incarnation of James are masters at. There's some confusion about the setlist at this point, but Five-O is the consensus, starting with Saul's extended violin intro before taking us on a winding journey through one of the Laid album's centrepiece tracks.
Those hits then come like buses in trios. Say Something is a song the band have spoken about realising the simple power of as it is versus their desire to select the less obvious songs in their canon. The Halifax crowd would heartily agree with that statement, it's bellowed back at a volume that almost drowns Tim out around us as he once more braves the rain and joins us at the barrier. She's A Star has an amusing moment at the end when Tim tells us he was considering coming out amongst us for before considering that he probably couldn't sing the higher notes whilst horizontal on a sea of arms, many holding a phone up.
He does come out a long way into the crowd for Getting Away With It (All Messed Up) heading towards the back of the flat courtyard area before being dropped down and dancing in the crowd as the band take the song round a few times, unsure of when to end it but using the invisible intuitive connection between them to know the right moment, to allow him to make his way back to the stage.
There's no encore ritual Tim tells us as we approach the nominal 10.30 curfew as it would lose us a song. Heads would probably have been the one to make way, so it's a wise decision as, like Zero, it's one that they've finally captured all its potential on its second circle round the building. Lots of hard drums create the marching beat that propels the song forward, the impending implosion of society under the greed of businessmen becoming politicians for their own ends captured in the lyrics, the images on the big screen and the way the song intentionally almost but not quite collapses under the weight of its momentum.
Tomorrow starts almost acapella with just Adrian joining in with the most subtle of guitars in the first verse and six thousand voices becoming the drenched choir of backing vocalists until it hits the chorus. It's a new treatment of the song but one that intensifies the message of hope and not giving up at its core.
We're right on intended curfew as the band kick into a no-frills Sit Down, the full-fat version from the start until the breakdown after the second chorus where the crowd simply take it away from the band leaving them as observers at their own concert, stood looking out at them. As the crowd finish, the band take their turn at finishing it. For a song that's been played so many times it's a turn of events we haven't witnessed before, a special moment at the end of the night.
Except we're not done yet. A quick conversation to the side of the stage and Tim announces "they're allowing us one more" and everyone is sent into the night with a raucous finale of Laid. The rain's stopped, the floor is turned into a sea of bouncing bodies and flailing arms before the band take the adoration and love of an audience that's been taken on a journey that finishes with a rollercoaster ending.
James tonight were at their most mercurial. It'd be easy to play the hits game at these big outdoor shows this summer and simply take the plaudits. Their mischievous playful side, that sits at the very core of their DNA as a band and keeps them going, has other ideas though. The Piece Hall crowd were willing to go on the journey with them, losing themselves in the bigger most familiar songs of which there were enough to satisfy most and getting into the spirit of the lesser known ones and the band's desire to challenge them. The rain and the stunning venue, one of the country's finest outdoor music spaces, simply added to a night where James were captivating, thrilling and never dull.
James played Johnny Yen, Interrogation, Waltzing Along, Sometimes, Busted, Way Over Your Head, Born Of Frustration, Just Like Fred Astaire, I Wanna Go Home, Zero, Five-O, Shadow Of A Giant, Say Something, She’s A Star, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Heads, Tomorrow, Sit Down and Laid.
James' official website can be found here. They are on Facebook and Twitter. Some of the band - Tim, Andy and Dave - are also on Twitter.
We also run the One Of The Three James archive, the most detailed resource for information about the band, and the site also has a Facebook and Twitter page.
TimBoothLyricADay, whose posts often lead to Tim explaining his thought processes behind the lyrics, can be found on Twitter and Facebook
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