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James’ set of summer shows headed to the beautiful setting of Tynemouth Priory’s ruins with a North Sea backdrop for a two-hour set perfectly mixing hits, fan favourites and curveballs to delight a sold-out crowd basking in the evening sunshine. Support came from The Lilacs.
With their debut album Keeping Up With The Joneses out at the start of October, The Lilacs are on a charm offensive. Having only been announced as support just over a week before they’ve already got fans within the James crowd judging by the reaction they get including a singalong where they take the chorus of upcoming single What’s The Worst That Could Happen? and make it their own much to the amazement of frontman Ollie. They wear their influences - early Courteeners and Arctic Monkeys - very much on their sleeves, but they do so with an assured confidence and strong delivery that many of their contemporaries lack. They leave, having come to the barrier distributing drumsticks and setlists and posing for selfies, with a new bunch of admirers.
As the familiar sound of Jocelyn Pook’s On This Rock fades and the band wander onto stage - James dispensed with the big entrances years ago - the chairs that were disturbingly close to the front have been packed away and the audience gig ready. After the opening trio of Johnny Yen, Five-O and Waltzing Along, Tim jokes about them testing our ability to take in musicality if we’re all still drinking after England’s World Cup win. That James can start a sold out show of this size with two songs that were never singles, have improvised sections and the latter starting with a long violin intro is testament to their enduring ability to not play by the rules of bands of their vintage.
Waltzing Along and Ring The Bells are staples of the James hits period of the early to mid 1990s but here the expanded nine-piece inject them with a joyous boundless joie-de-vivre that shakes any lethargy from the week’s enetgy-sapping heatwave and football late nights. Stay strips things back for a moment, a band favourite in its rearranged form from their last album Yummy.
She’s A Star gets a rapturous response as Tim comes down to the barrier, whilst Beautiful Beaches confirms its undeniable status as a late-period James classic. The drum-off between Debbie and Dave might not be a surprise any more and in sunlight also lack the benefit of strobes but it loses nothing in impact as a consequence.
Then we get a surprise. Other than the 2022 Alton Towers reenaction at Castlefield and its Warrington warm-up, What’s The World hasn’t been played since 2014. Stripped back to a five-piece James take us back to the raw energy of their early years with their 1983 debut single but make it sound fresh contemporary and invigorated.
It’s followed by Attention which builds to the breakdown where Mark’s keyboard section is cleverly visualised by overhead cameras looking down onto his hand movements. It blossoms into a wonderful improvised outro that if it wasn’t for time constraints you suspect the band would have been happy to carry on all night. Tim’s face, magnified on the big screen, has a look of awe on it, not for the first or last time tonight, at what his bandmates have created.
Things take an even more curveball turn next with Stutter. Described by Tim as being the "sort of thing we were doing around 1984" while video evidence dates it even further back to the Hacienda days of 1982, it's a song that's taken a journey with the band throughout the intervening forty-four years. The core of the song is still the same, remaining proudly unreleased in studio form as both its Factory incarnation and their attempts to record it for Strip-Mine never captured its live energy, but it now exists as a cacophony of drums, band members switching instruments and a wild lawlessness that shatters any preconception of what this band is about.
As if to soothe any battered souls it drops straight into Out To Get You, another song that ends in a flurry of glorious improvisation with a beautiful moment where Saul moves towards Tim to spend the last seconds eye to eye as a huge smile cracks across Tim's face. The churlish few might list half a dozen "hits" that could have been played in the time that James spent improvising tonight, but they're missing the point that this band is about these moments and wouldn't still exist if they were just going through the motions. With no new album to promote at the moment and two years since Yummy, they're taking their joy from how far they can push these classic songs.
Way Over Your Head has, despite not being chosen as a focus track, forced its way into being the defining song of the Yummy era and one that is likely to endure, if you're brave enough to predict anything with this band, in setlists for years to come. Stood atop the barrier with Chloe down at the front too, he looks on in awestruck wonder as the song is sung back to him with the sort of gusto usually reserved for the really big hit songs from their past.
"I'm going out" Tim shouts as he jumps off stage and heads into the crowd, reappearing on the accessibility platform where he's mobbed as he sings Getting Away With It (All Messed Up). He then takes his life in his hands and heads out into the crowd, walking from one side of the arena to the other and still managing to navigate the lack of a gate at the far side and make it back to duel with yodelling to Andy's trumpet over the outro of the song. Sound continues with the glorious improvisational theme of the evening as the sun starts to set and is accompanied by some wonderful visuals on the screen that capture the song's depth and off-centre structure. It's Andy's turn to go out into the crowd, also reappearing on the accessibility platform.
"This is the last song and we need your Northern voices for it" Tim tells us as the restrained piano intro to Sit Down starts to ring around the dusk. He barely has to sing any of it, although at the start of the second verse he remembers that there's an extra set of lyrics from the original Rough Trade version that many might not know. The breakdown has the crowd singing it first before Tim repeats it. It feels constantly on the edge of collapse, a million miles from the infamous G-Mex video, but represents the real genuine human connection this band makes with their audience.
They leave and return with under fifteen minutes to curfew and a few big hitters not yet played. However with James the one thing you can predict is that they don't do what most other bands would. "This is a new song, it has no chorus, it goes on forever, but you'll love it" is the intriguing (to those who don't know it from the arena tour) introduction to Nantucket from the album they're in the process of making. A magnificent journey song, it's one the band are quite rightly very proud of as they move through its multiple phases, each one different and taking it in a new direction, the crowd reaction tells its own story.
They finish with Sometimes which ends with Tim braving a sea of phones and diving into the crowd, relying on them to finish the song as the sound to the instruments is cut on stage as curfew is reached. He almost gets dropped a couple of times but makes it back to the stage to take the bow with the rest of the band.
Between album summer shows are a tricky beast for a band like James that thrive on not going through the motions and doing the obvious and not having a new record to bring to the party. Through improvisation, curveballs in the setlist and their unrelenting search to take songs in new directions and fully utilise the opportunities being a nine-piece gives them, they deliver a two-hour masterclass in how to connect with an audience whilst challenging them.
James played Johnny Yen, Five-O, Waltzing Along, Ring The Bells, Stay, She’s A Star, Beautiful Beaches, What’s The World, Attention, Stutter, Out To Get You, Way Over Your Head, Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), Born Of Frustration, Sound, Sit Down, Nantucket and Sometimes
James' official website can be found here and they are on Facebook and Twitter.
Some of the band Tim, Andy and Dave - are also on Twitter.
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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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