As James head to Newcastle’s Utilita Arena this June, Lee Allcock caught up with the band to discuss their new album, ageism and more.
Tell me a bit about your 18th album, ‘Yummy’. It confronts ageism, conspiracy theory, AI control, the mental health pandemic, ecological apocalypse and more…
Tim Booth: The record is really uplifting and joyful, but a lot of that comes from the music. Some of the lyrics are pretty hard-nosed. More recent albums such as ‘La Petite Mort’ (2014), the Number Two hit ‘Girl at the End of the World’ (2016), ‘Living in Extraordinary Times’ (2018) and ‘All the Colours of You’ (2021) dealt with politics, grief and a doomed world spinning out of control, but our inclusive, love-laden heart still glowed like a beacon. ‘Yummy’ is a quintessential James album: comforting yet adventurous, electronic yet human, dark yet life-affirming, experimental yet familiar, heart-warming yet deeply introspective on both the personal and human scale.
It’s actually quite a positive record on the whole…
Tim Booth: Love engendered at the album’s core, ‘Yummy’ sets out to help us endure – nay, often appreciate – life’s many dilemmas. ‘Life’s a Fucking Miracle’ is one of the most joyful songs we’ve written in years – it could be a queer dance anthem. Even the most mundane fishbowl existence should be seized and celebrated. And ‘Better with You’, a celestial disco tune and apocalypse romance, suggests that even global Armageddon and the subsequent post-human regeneration of the planet would be beautiful to behold with the right person and a good view.
Having been singing about environmental issues since the 1980s, it seems that it’s no longer the earth itself that you worry about…
Tim Booth: The planet will re-bloom whatever we do to it. It’s so alive. Instead, it’s the generations who will have to face down the corpocracy of a world run by oil companies where the politicians are bought and 100 companies are creating 70-odd percent of global emissions, and they are not going to change because they’re making a huge profit. It’s a topic tackled with accusatory relish on the synthpop ‘Our World’. Greed and power and money have control of the issue. People want change but our Governments have been bought by the profiteers. It’s mind-blowingly stupid, mind-blowingly ignorant and short-sighted, but that is the flaw in human nature; that if there’s a profit to be made, everything else goes out the window.
Tell me about the hurdles you faced when writing the record…
Jim Glennie: There were a fair few hurdles to jump in the making of this record. Writing sessions began in September 2021 but two sessions were stymied by covid outbreaks. In the traditional James fashion, we recorded lengthy jams from which we later plucked sections to develop into songs. We reconvened for three more sessions between November 2021 and June 2022 at Broughton Hall Estate in Yorkshire – a real Heathcliff kind of thing. 86 jams were recorded over three weeks.
Alongside ‘Yummy’, Tim, you’ve also been turning your lyrical skills to the benefit of literature too…
Tim Booth: Yeah. My debut novel ‘When I Died For The First Time’ is a dark comedy musing on the music industry, addiction, racism, altered states, creativity and love, written from the point of view of a fucked-up singer coming back from rehab.
James head to Utilita Arena, Newcastle on Wednesday 5th June. Tickets, priced from £47.50 in advance, are available from ticketmaster.co.uk.
