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James

Destiny calling

"I still can’t believe it, to be honest with you. It all happened so quickly," he smiles, sitting in a London hotel room near where the band are preparing for their first shows in six years.

Out to get you

It may have felt sudden for Jim, but the reality is that the foundations for a return actually came out of James’ farewell tour in 2001, as he explains:

"Larry Gott [James’ guitarist] left the band in 1996 but came back to do a few songs on the last tour, as part of a communal farewell. I’d not seen Larry for years. We started playing together again, writing songs for our own pleasure.

"As it developed, we started working with a few different singers and decided to do a fleshed-out demo. We both said, 'I can hear Tim [Booth, James’ singer] singing these', and it was something we’d never consider up to that point. Tim had left. We asked him to come and jam with us and he said no, which was fair enough.

Tim Booth in 1994

"We carried on, primarily for our own enjoyment. It was going back to the way that James used to write songs, which was getting in a room with nothing prepared and improvising, just playing for its own sake.

"Last November, Larry suggested we get in touch with Tim again. I presumed he’d say no, but he said yes. Our manager got wind of this, that we’d all got back together, and on the Saturday [of a weekend of jamming], he rang Tim and told him he’d got the April tour on hold.

"I’d seen Tim once in five years and I just thought ‘so much for keeping things quiet’. I didn’t really want to go down an avenue of a big James reunion. My idea was to keep our heads down, not tell anyone, not make any decisions about what we were going to be, but life never works like that. You can’t hold these things back."