Feels A Lot Like Love That I Feel For You…

No reviews this time, no gigs unfortunately, though the upside of James being locked away in a studio recording the new album is tantalisingly exciting. This is the inspirational bit, the bit where I attempt to put into words the importance of what this band do to me, physically and emotionally. I’ve said a lot about the transformational effect that this year and it’s James related activity has had on me. About a year and a half ago I rediscovered James and started writing again, proper writing that one day will add up into a novel of some sort. It was very cathartic, I listened, cried buckets, picked up a pen and the words just flowed out from some locked up place. But more has been released than just my words. I guess at its most basic level I’ve felt connected again, connected to everything that at my core is important to me at a very primeval level. I wanted to go home, but I’d lost the map. This year and the James related madness has been, excuse the cliche, a voyage of discovery where I've found myself again and been able to move on after an overly extended hiatus.

Not just any music does it for me. Something happens when I listen to James that moves my spine, stretches my neck, moves me at a molecular level. I regularly laugh out loud at the insanity of what I’ve had to re-remember this year. Movement is something that has been a part of my life for so long that for a while I forgot what it meant to me. This year has thrown so much back into place with all of that. Many years ago when I was a student I picked up two leaflets for two different courses, one was for a Gabrielle Roth 5 Rhythms class, the other was for something called Life Moves with an amazing woman called Mala Sikka, who was based in South Wales at the time. It took the mindfulness of yoga and tai chi to some fantastical space beyond, at the time I couldn’t put into words what it meant, I needed space and time to grow older and wiser before I could understand the path I’d embarked upon. The movement work was very bare and raw, we worked in silence, it was a very intense period of attunement. At the time I had no idea that Tim was involved in the 5 Rhythms thing, which is amusing and bizarre at the same time. For me in the last couple of years, one of the funniest and most intriguing things about rediscovering James is finding out how so many of the things I spent 10 years trying to work out had their seeds sown way back. Listening to Chainmail live this year suddenly made the penny drop, my body began to move properly again. Consciously, unconsciously and sub consciously all at the same time. Ah well, that’s life I guess. I'm glad to be alive again.

Something was said recently on one of the James forums recently about the sexual side of James’ performances. Moving your body, dancing, sweating with strangers doesn’t have to be limited to being a sexual thing. It is and can be sexy, but it’s so much more. We’ve narrowed down our routes to experiencing joy so much, that I think we confuse ourselves at times into thinking that things are the only way. When I dance it goes beyond words. When James play they throw out energy in all directions, I think it’s why Tim stresses the importance of connection so much. That energy circles, it goes from band to audience and back again. When you feel that take you, and you dance into oblivion, then yes it is sexual and impulsive on a very everyday level. But step outside your conditioning, what you feel is release, release from the crap that accumulates on us and wears us down, release from our self imposed boundaries, release from reality. I’m trying to find words that won’t end up being twisted by others into a suggestion that James gigs are some kinda mad tantric orgy. James are a sexy band, in particular they have a divinely sexy Tim and Larry, and the others aren’t bad either. Their music is impulsive and spontaneous, it gets confused with sex because most of us only experience that total abandonment during sex, we associate all that mad fizzing joy with that alone and don’t realise that it exists in so many other forms. Hence Tim saying ‘Sex is overrated, I need to dance.’ God, I understand that. There’s that line in a Sit Down, that Tim is singing to Doris Lessing and Patti Smith, ‘Feels a lot like love, that I feel for you’ and that just encapsulates it. Love, joy, passion, lust they all operate in so many ways, not just by the surface and obvious.

I say all this largely because I’m clutching at straws to find a way to explain how this band have cast such a magical spell over me. I sometimes wonder if there are subliminal hypnotic messages embedded in their words and sounds. I’ve spent years travelling around India, trying to learn, and yet it is listening to James that opens up the cosmos to me. Irony is a splendid thing. Magic abounds when those guys get up onstage, I can only believe they have an awareness of that.

The Gap Between Crack And Thunder Is Closing In....

'Sometimes' is an amazing song, a moment of songwriting genius. I love the song live in it's guitar soaked frenzy racing away, the crowd carried away by it's wave of euphoric possibility. Equally I love the version Tim Booth sang at Glastonbury in 2004 with The Individuals. Stripped down to the bare bones of vocals, sax and piano, the song is vulnerable and haunting. My skin tingles every time I hear it. Apparently when Brian Eno heard it for the first time he declared that it was the highlight of his musical life. It's that kind of song.

When I heard 'Sometimes' for the first time as a teenager I was intrigued by the peculiar poetry of the lyrics. These strangely beautiful and yet violent images in a song that sounded so joyous and celebratory had an oddly unsettling and discordant effect. This sense of something extraordinary being around the corner, standing in the rain, making choices no matter what the consequences. It's really brave and powerful. I'm always totally blown away and wrung out to dry by Tim Booth's lyrics, but this one has a special power of it's own.

One of my favourite lines has to be the one I've stolen for the title of this blog. It has an unworldliness to it that hints at all kinds of possibilities. The gap between crack and thunder is a moment frozen in time. A split second of indeterminate length, the frame has been briefly stopped and you choose where the next step takes you. For me it's a moment that allows the gaps between worlds to shift and the magic to escape. The moment the Shaman moves and weaves his spell. That one man can see a rainbow, the other only endless rain. That death can be a choice, a positive act, that sometimes being delivered on to the next round isn't always a bad thing. That a soul is a tangible thing to be touched and held. That a storm can bring good in it's havoc and that waiting for the storm to break is an act of defiance as much as an act of cowardice.

I tend to see the world in the four new colours rather than the endless grey. To me magic and mystery are woven into the fabric of our existence. I believe in the multiple rather than the singular, I don't believe in fixed outcomes. This song is about choices, about being tiny in the face of such enormity, the fishing boats being spewed onto the shore and the buses stripped to chrome, and yet still being able to remain human. To make the choices that make us human and to still see our souls. To always look for the spark that lies inside our eyes.

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.