In The Beginning There Was Sound....Or How James Changed A Girl's Life Twice

A girl sits in her bedroom, listening to the radio. Out of the usual slush of indie suspects she hears something new, something fresh that stops her in her tracks. She sits still on the edge of her bed as if Moses has just appeared from the behind the burning bush. Her heart is in her mouth as she listens intently. There are great guitars and an amazing keyboard riff, but it's the voice that does it. Something touches her inside and it won't go away.

Over the coming months she greedily reads everything she can in the music press about her new find. They're called James, the voice is a guy called Tim Booth. When she hears them playing on the radio she'll tape it and soon she has a collection of their songs, and she loves it all. Hard earned cash goes on her prized possession, a red t shirt that reads 'come' on the front and 'home' on the back. Nobody gets it but she doesn't care. She's found her tribe.

Months pass and an obssession grows. They re-release Sit Down which goes stellar so at least people get the t shirt now. A tour is announced, and begrudgingly two parents give permission for their firstborn child to see her favourite band play live for the first time. The gig is amazing, despite being in the appalling Nottingham Royal Concert Hall, a venue more suited to piano concertos, than an electrifying rock and roll performance. It's a very long time ago now, but she still remembers a hurricane of images; the front row seat, the stage invasion, Tim scaling the audience and the balconies. And the music, a strange melee of what would become the Seven album, parts of the previous Goldmother album and stranger jangly folky stuff from further back. All these instruments, all this sound. She is transfixed.

Time begins to speed up, the girl becomes less of a girl. Seven is released, she makes it to the Alton Towers gig thanks to a guy in the sixth form who's a James fan and has a car. Then comes Laid and another tour. Wah Wah is released and then what? The trail goes quiet. For our heroine, girlhood becomes a distant memory, as she escapes the numbing tyranny of smalltownsville and goes on wonderful adventures, living in Morocco, finding her soulmate. At long last living outside the frame and finding a world out there that is just as thrilling as it always promised to be. She discovers a sub-continent, India, and her escape route, once limited to music becomes a blaring technicolour world. University and all sorts of new things are thrown into the mix. James are still there, but in their absence the place in her heart as been filled with so many more things. Her attention is focused every which way, the world has so much to give her.

Time speeds away from her now into the 21st century, passing quicker than she realises. She gives birth to a son and then a daughter. Amazing, joyful events, but nonetheless she becomes more and more disconnected from the girl inside her. Joy does not dwell in her heart the way it once did. She becomes stretched - her body, her soul, her dreams no longer feel like her own. Circumstance has led her back to Nottingham, but a nice village, a good place to bring up children. Boden conformity beckons, and it is so easy to fall in, to close her eyes and let it all wash over her. Then, one day, alone in the house, she plays a CD, her old Best Of James and the tears begin to fall, like proverbial scales from her eyes. She feels a connection running like an electrical charge to this music, these words. The sounds she is hearing shine like a light on her soul and she ceases to sleep. She picks up a pen and begins to write. Suddenly for the first time in a long time everything begins to make some kind of sense to her.