Wednesday, March 26, 2014

does only God know the band James?


I'm sure I'm way late to the party; but I was just introduced to the band James (via a U2 fan )with these  first two  songs/DVD excerpts; quite intrigued. 

 They have a song called "God Only Knows," but I didn't know about them until now?(:

Watch this song, and I dare you to not be engaged:  
Later note: I still haven't met anyone in the US  who has even heard of them!
Most of this concert DVD:
 

"James' music exists in past/future territory. Somewhere between eccentric, romantic, tender, crazy and ecstatic. 
 I think they probably discovered this place. 
 Their best songs rank among the very best of British pop music: you find yourself thinking "I've never heard anything quite like this before, but it makes perfect emotional sense. 
It rings true "-- Brian Eno 1997

One fan writes about frontman Tim Booth:

Tim’s greatest asset to me is his intelligence that he brings to his writing. He is brave enough to explore the spiritual (not religious) side of life and to try and educate his audience about what he has discovered. He writes about politics, war and then about his most vulnerable moments in his own life. He’s a proper artist who is willing to let his audience in to his own world and most bravely in to his own mind. By doing that he lets his audience understand their own better.   link

Interview:

Is it important to you to feel vulnerable as a musician?

I have an inherited al iver disease which I've had it all my life. It's probably saved my life, because I can't indulge too much in alcohol or drugs - which go hand in hand with my profession! I think having periods of severe illness gives you a strange perspective. I've nearly died a couple of times. Being brought close to the end, to near death, is always a good place to write from. It's a real leveler and it's made me look for what people would term “spiritual answers”, which really just means coming to terms with the fact that you're going to leave this world....

I think the fact that you were tackling those big, existential questions is what drew me to James as a teenager.

Great, I'm so happy that's what you found. That's what we put down there...Then there are certain things that you read and you go: ‘Thank God! I’m not alone!’ They seem to have a bead on this. For me, it was Patti Smith and the writers Doris Lessing and Albert Camus. ‘The Outsider’ is one of those books where you go: ‘Oh thank God! I'm not alone.’ link
 Links:



Excerpt from faith and music by Tim Booth:

I can't see a reason for living unless you want to ask, or answer, or try and ask very difficult questions, but otherwise you're born, you live, you die. There's more than that. This world is far too intelligent, and too interesting, fascinating a place for there to be nothing.

For a start these things are hard to talk about. They're often not rational or logical so communication is very hard, so yes, I've been misunderstood because it's damn near hard to understand in the first place.

It's no-one's fault. Secondly, the rock world obviously has problems with anything that's not sex, drugs and rock and roll. It's every limited tabloid world, very cliched and I don't fit. I'm happy with that. Then there's been those papers aren't the right place to talk about this and so yeah, I've been ridiculed and laughed at, but that goes with the job.

A song like Seven was one of the first times I openly referred to God, much to the annoyance of my fellow band members who don't really like me talking openly about these things because they don't share those beliefs and that's totally fair enough and James got painted as a Buddhist band, really because of the stuff I did.

I got this lyric in: "God made love to me, soothed away my gravity. Gave me a pair of angel wings, clear vision and some magic things." When I'm singing "Love can mean anything", it could be "God can mean anything."

They're just highly abused words. Well the idea behind that, if you really pursue the idea that everybody can get in touch with God, that everybody has God within them, then the ultimate union would be having sex with God, so "God made love to me..." That was the first time I started getting interested in that idea. That's what I think ecstasy is, not the drug, the state, is when you feel totally at one. You're free from all of your smallness, your day-to-day identity.

I was brought up in a very Christian religious household. My parents were very proud of the fact that we were related to John Wesley. My father was strong in the Church and I used to go every week or every two weeks. I used to like the stained glass windows, and I used to like the Bible stories with the big pictures of floods, and arks and dramatic sweeps like that.

And then I was sent to public school at 13, which I hated, and I didn't fit in, and had all these feelings running through me which I couldn't explain, couldn't fit. I think of one of the big nights was when I was about 15 and there was an older boy who wrote out four questions on a piece of paper and they were:


  • Who are you?
  • Where do you come from?
  • Where do you go when you die?

Three questions. And he handed these questions round and everybody else didn't like them, and I felt a huge sense of relief as someone had asked the questions which must be the most important questions of one's life, if you want to have any idea of what the hell we're doing here. I can't remember what I answered but I remember getting very excited by that.

My state of mind was very strange and I thought I was quite crazy. I didn't eat much as a kid, so my mum made me drink a lot of milk, and milk is one of the worst things for the liver. So I would drink a pint of milk and go into an altered state through illness, but it was never diagnosed, so I was always dealing with very strange states of mind, which is part of why I didn't fit in. When I was about 22, I ended up in hospital. I couldn't walk up stairs. I stopped breathing at one point and I remember that very clearly as very peaceful. I actually breathed out and the breath just kept on going and I remember thinking "Wow, this is fantastic." I was sick of life, and I gave myself a year to investigate alternative medicine and therapies and meditation, and I actually gave myself one year to find proof of the existence of spirit or of God, and if I didn't find that proof, I decided that I was going to burn myself out.

I then looked at meditation, as it seemed safe, you were on your own. I was scared about falling into a religion and being caught in a dogma, being caught by a guru, being caught by a great leader. So I looked at different meditation groups, I went to a Buddhist group for a while and tried transcendental. I was shopping around. I was a tourist. And I eventually heard of a group in Manchester which all the other groups were slagging off, because they said they can get you to enlightenment in two years, they can show you your own spirit within a few months and I thought that's the one for me.

In a sense, the meditation was the first peace, I'd had in my life where you really sink into yourself. I had a huge resistance to meditation as I'm quite an active person. I used to do 18 hours, 1 meal day. At first I had huge resistance, the first 4/5 hours would be hell, where you'd be screaming to get up and run and then you'd hit certain things where you'd just feel like this light was passing through you and you'd just sit there nailed and you'd be letting energy just pour through you. It blew my mind. All kinds of things started happening to me. I'd see light around people. And I got my proof basically and unfortunately I succumbed to the usual trap of cults which is to think, "My God, this man did this to me. He must be powerful," and I started falling for the dogma and the whole trip. I was celibate, no alcohol, no drugs, two hours meditation a day, 16 every weekend. It was a very aggressive path as I did it for 3 and a half years, and then we found out that the guru had been sleeping around and he wasn't who he said he was. As a personality, he was a bit of a dick, and we disbanded the group an we went on our way, wiser hopefully.

I wrote a few songs looking at the nature of Christianity, which I'd had force fed for 20 odd years and included observations on the cult I got into. God Only Knows is probably the most successful and the song is really "What is the nature of God? And the chorus is "God only knows." I mean, anyone who sells himself up as a holier-than-thou religious leader is going to come crashing down. The thing I see about religious leaders, or spiritual leaders, is that they've often focused on just their spirituality and as a result, they haven't dealt with their sexuality, their greed, their ego, their flattery. If they haven't learnt to deal with the more mundane parts of their character, they've gone straight to their spirit, they become op-heavy, like some kind of body-builder who thinks only about their muscles. To me it's about a balance, you have to get the mind, the body, the spirit, everything. You have to keep them in balance too. If one gets over-developed it's always going to be to the detriment to the others.


 ..When we did Gold Mother, I had just split up with the mother of my son, and I had just left her and my son. That was probably my darkest time and a lot of the lyrics in Gold Mother are about that. In Come Home, "After 30 years, I'd become my fears, I'd become the kind of man, I've always hated."
Which is about as dark as it gets. Like a lot of that record, I kind of hated myself. I dunno how close to suicide I got, but I got fairly dark.

I don't think I'll get to suicide, I just don't believe in it as basically, I know that you'll come back, and secondly, I don't think that it's a way out. 

The first gigs that we played were in Blackpool, and I remember when we got to the lines, "After 30 years..." the audience sang it back to me, punching the air with joy, and I remember being completely done in by it, completely devastated by it. They'd taken something that I'd written as self-abuse and dark, and turned it into a celebration, and I thought, that's healing. And they did that on all those songs that night. And I suddenly realised that was what being in a band was all partly doing for me. It was helping me heal my on pain. And that's been my promise to myself each time, to go in deep each time, to keep writing about the things that are uncomfortable because it gets to the real stuff and it also touches people on a deep level.


..In the first part of this interview, we fell into the trap of setting a beautiful white environment with candles, the clichés of religion, and really religion has been ghettoised. It's thought of in pious, probably very dull terms, probably because the dominant religion in this country is Christianity and it's been force-fed to children at school, and so most of us are like, "Jeez, don't talk about that crap anymore," where it should be something passionate, something discussed in cafes. I should have a fag (cigarette) in one hand and a beer in my other hand, and I would have faked it for the camera but, you know, it's not me. It should be a day-to-day thing. I think more and more people are getting into it. To be honest, I'm trying to make it more concrete for this programme, cos a lot of my life, I couldn't talk about here, because a lot of the realms, the altered state realms you go to are by definition, outside language and outside the rational, therefore how the hell do I explain it to anybody.


..The danger with message, it's like you asking what is the message? That's the usual danger of any spiritual organisation, is that it becomes a package to sell. And it's also, "I've found a way that's right, and right for you.".. link
--

NME Interview excerpt:

Is it important to you to feel vulnerable as a musician?

I have an inherited liver disease which I've had it all my life. It's probably saved my life, because I can't indulge too much in alcohol or drugs - which go hand in hand with my profession! I think having periods of severe illness gives you a strange perspective. I've nearly died a couple of times. Being brought close to the end, to near death, is always a good place to write from. It's a real leveler and it's made me look for what people would term “spiritual answers”, which really just means coming to terms with the fact that you're going to leave this world. All of us at some point go: “What the *&^% happens next?” I think that’s true of most religions - it’s everyone going: “What the  *&^% happens next?”




I think the fact that you were tackling those big, existential questions is what drew me to James as a teenager.

Great, I'm so happy that's what you found. That's what we put down there. There were artists who similarly reached out to me, especially in my teens when you're *&^%ing confused and asking: ‘What the  *&^% is this about?’ You know it’s all a *&^%ing mess and piece of $#@! – or you can do! Then there are certain things that you read and you go: ‘Thank God! I’m not alone!’ They seem to have a bead on this. For me, it was Patti Smith and the writers Doris Lessing and Albert Camus. ‘The Outsider’ is one of those books where you go: ‘Oh thank God! I'm not alone.’ I love that we were part of that daisy chain, that paper chase.

I had the same experience reading Camus. What was it about Patti Smith that you connected with?

Well, speaking of Camus: there’s that amazing scene in ‘The Outsider’ where he’s imprisoned and they want the priest to come to him and he's telling them to  *&^% off even as he's about to die. So when you hear Patti Smith's opening line on ‘Horses’: “Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine,” you realise it's all about taking responsibility for your own life and your own sins. You also realise that within what is called ‘sin’ there’s a huge amount of power and energy. Part of what makes us individuals is sometimes doing taboo things we definitely would have been burned for hundreds of years ago by the authority. I particularly remember hearing Smith’s song 'Birdland' the night I was told my father was going to die. It was the first time I'd ever really listened to it and it’s about a boy losing his father. So I think that went in at a very deep level, and probably unconsciously made me become a singer and a lyricist. She was a poet, so words became hugely important to me.


...In 13 years I still haven’t seen many performers go into the sort of trancelike state that you do during a James show – when did you start dancing like that?

I don’t know. It was just something I could do. I used to take songs when no one else was around and I’d throw myself around the room, often ending up crying or shouting or screaming. It was my choice of release. You can see the power of dance from the fact that 100 years ago it was banned in many Christian countries, on pain of death, because it was seen as a very sinful thing. Look at Elvis! His dancing is Shamanic. Then early Iggy was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen on stage. In my 30s I met a woman who taught dance as a way of going into trances, but she recognized that that’s what I already did. You get into an ecstatic state. It’s a great place to write songs from, and an amazing place to see the world from. There’s a tradition going back to the Sufis of dancers writing poetry. It’s a tradition of ecstatic worship.

‘Sometimes’ is a personal favourite, how did you write that?

Oh, thank you! We jammed it in our rehearsal room at Beehive Mill in Manchester. We knew it would be a big song, so we sent the demo to Brian Eno. Everyone wanted to work with Eno, and they still do! He rang me up at 9 o'clock in the morning and said he’d record with us. 'Sometimes' was the main song he talked about. I hadn't got the lyrics for it at the time. I had the bit about the boy who wanted to be struck by lightning but no chorus. In the studio I had to keep telling him I wasn’t ready to record it yet, because I hadn’t finished the lyrics. We had this layout where we're in a circle around him with the recording console is in the middle of the room. Eventually we say: “Okay Brian, we're ready to record 'Sometimes'.” I'd got the chorus ready and I hadn't told them. He's prowling around the floor while we were playing the start of the song, just waiting to see what I'd got. I sang the chorus and he kind of went white and sat down while we were playing. I thought: 'Oh shit, he doesn't like it'. When we finished he didn't say anything. He had his head in his hands on the desk and we all crowded round him and eventually he looked up and he said: “I've just experienced one of the highlights of my musical life.” We went: “Woah!” We were completely blown away. That someone we held in such high esteem could have such a physical, tangible reaction to that song. His reaction was one of our highlights of our musical life!

Just to burst our balloon and bring us down to Earth, I was going through customs in Manchester airport once, and one of the customs guys is frisking me and he goes: “You’re in that band James?” I go: “Yeah.” He says: “That song ‘Sometimes’: does the chorus lyric bear any relationship to the verse?” I said: “Not really.” And he said: “Thought not. I'm a Morrissey man myself.”

liNK http://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/james-tim-booth-on-sex-death-and-growing-up#OEEl2tKhTZt1iPkz.99
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