Tim Booth: The Story of James, Sit Down and Laid

0:02This is a global production. People say, oh, that James is influenced by the Smiths. I have it on good authority. It may be the other way around. They couldn't ignore us anymore. It was a phenomenon. Was there an inevitability that you'd get back together again? No. No, I really felt we'd finished. What happened? I got this inherited liver disease that no one diagnosed. I died of it when I was 21. And the doctor was brilliant because he didn't say it's incurable. He said, Western medicine has nothing for you. You're getting quite emotional. Yeah.

0:44I don't know whether you can tell when I am in full fan mode during these interviews. And you may have heard me in the past describe studio guests as being particular favorites of mine or longtime heroes of mine. never have those words applied quite as accurately as they do today tim booth welcome thank you that's very kind of you to say so well it's completely true um i i think that your band james is probably over the course of the last 30 years um more in fact being the band to which i return again and again and again and from which i derive over that period that the most of all the emotions the solace the excitement the the magic the beauty but anyway enough about me let's talk about you i'll try and disillusion you in the next 45 minutes um we should begin at the beginning because you're you're you're i mean so much in your past that probably helps to explain your your your present and and and your future but some of it It took me by surprise when I was preparing for this conversation.

1:55Your family was sort of wool industry royalty of sorts. Kind of, yes. Kind of managing director of MP Stonehouse and Sons in Wakefield, magistrate. We just discovered, actually, my brother, that he was part of the first kind of training of the SAS in World War II. It was like the nascent beginning of special forces operations in Burma. He never talked about the war, my dad. Never, ever. And so my brother just discovered that about four years ago. So he was very much a fine, upstanding member of society. Yeah, he was. He was a magistrate. He wouldn't join the Masons. He felt that was an unfair advantage.

2:43Very Christian, very gentle, sweet man. Strong in the church? Strong in the church. very absent too though i didn't really know him he's quite old when i was born i mean that was relatively normal you're you're it's hard to pin you down generationally partly because of that isn't it if you had an older dad that you don't necessarily seem immediately to fit into any generation is is that a pattern you've you've recognized in the wounding of fatherless men well also and a public school thing that we'll come on to as well there's a kind of i think not so much fatherless i was just thinking that both personally and creatively because you never stop moving you don't it's you can't be pigeonholed can you i can't say oh he's very much a child of the 60s or he's very much an artist of the 80s or any of those things because you're not yeah i think um but i think it's more i think i am the 60s even though i was some of the flavor and the idealism of it um through your sister partly probably yeah um patty smith but it was just around it was just a flavor of secrecy you know i remember going to a friend's house and his older brother they were talking about jimmy hendrix and they were alluding i was probably about eight or nine to probably they were taking acid listening to jimmy hendrix and they alluded to it and then they shut themselves up you know when this kid was around but it was clearly in the air that there was this kind of rebellion going on and when did you begin to feel part of it because it's nice that you describe your dad as gentle and your mum you've always described as very nurturing and very loving so it's hard to pinpoint What you were rebelling against?

4:38Well, actually, my mom was quite tough. She was quite critical, used guilt a lot and shame to control us. Oh, really? Christian guilt? No, she was less Christian. It was more emotional. Look at what you're doing to me. Yeah. Yeah, you gave me a stomach ulcer when I dyed my hair. You've given me a stomach ulcer. It was that kind of thing. And so that, you know, maybe and now I'm probably swinging her the other way. But, you know, but it was a very middle class. You know, I lived in this village called Clifford and I was the posh kid in the in in a quite a poor village. But my mates, my best mates, beautifully, poetically enough, were called the Hope Twins.

5:31And they were Hope. and they were the window cleaner's son who had pigeons and raced greyhounds and ferrets and beautiful man, beautiful family and I felt more at home at their house. I'd go to their house and have chips for the first time and be treated a bit more like there was more passion in that house. And less concerned with appearances. Yeah, that was the middle class thing that I hated. I could be a show pony, you know, and you get dressed up. And it was so about appearances. What were you like at school? Because before you went away to school, were you just at the local primary school?

6:14What did you do? First of all, local primary school, which was okay. One kind of traumatic event where I got kind of spanked in front of the school for being such an appalling human being at the age of about six. Scary. And then went to this, again, a private school in Leeds. But I went mid-year. So I didn't, I was quite alone. And it was quite hard. I didn't like it. I didn't, I hated school, basically. Throughout. Yeah. And it was like, you know, at first it got quite picked on. and then one day in the locker room, and I'm probably about eight, three kids surrounded me and we had a fight and then two of them went away and a group came in and formed a circle and I had to fight this kid and they kind of threw him onto my fist and I knocked out his front teeth, totally by accident, just stuck out my fist and I had two more fights that week, knocked out another couple of teeth and after that everyone left me alone i became like well you better be careful of him but it was complete accident it was all bluff and you didn't particularly want to be that person no not at all but you had to but you had to so this is the armor of survival it's quite early to be strapping it on isn't it yeah yeah yeah um what about academics did you enjoy because i mean no Not at all?

7:48I hid. I saw that the SWATs got bullied and teased, and I didn't want to be one. I did have an IQ test at the time, and presumably it came back pretty high because I had to see the head of master, and he told my mom off that I was shirking, basically. But I was just trying to keep my head down. So you were shirking, in a sense. Yeah. No, no, I was. I was trying to keep in the middle. The neurodiversity issue where you couldn't do the work. You just wanted to be quiet and not draw attention to yourself. I had more control of it at the next school. Right. You know, I was sent to boarding school.

8:26When I was 13, it was a school my dad went to in the 1920s. And you were called new scum when you arrived by the teachers, quite a few teachers and the students, and scum for the second year. And then you got your name in the third year. and it was really Lord of the Flies, dog eat dog and that was when I really learned to act and to lie and to, you know, I knew I couldn't be me and you couldn't show homesickness or sadness or you got picked on, you couldn't show fear or you got picked on so you had to have a good front to be able to survive that place and not get bullied. And it worked. It worked.

9:14It worked. It worked really well until the last year. Well, first of all, I got this inherited liver disease that no one diagnosed. So I was quite often yellow at that school. And the kids, one of my nicknames was **** because I was yellow. And yet no adult went, maybe he's jaundiced. Something's not right here. Something's not right. And so I was up and down physically and emotionally I thought I was mad um I actually thought I'd be certifiable if I if if people could because I was so up and down emotionally what would be the moments of madness then would it be a sort of delusional or um well for a start I'd get sick three times a year and the common medicine the nurse would give you was a thing called a night nurse at the time which had morphine in it which is the worst thing for your liver you'd be tripping uh and spaced out and couldn't focus i thought i could hear people's thoughts um and i'm not sure to this day whether i could i i was odd uh and got and got different nicknames at that point um did you have friends i had some friends but the friends i wanted didn't want me um and i did have some friends who just kind of like, oh, I guess they're my friends.

10:39And that was lovely when you discover you've got friends and you didn't really know how it happened. But not many. Where did you find solace at these times? I think music became a thing very early on. I mean, this is all looking back. But when I was 16, first of all, we had a good housemaster when I arrived. He was quite progressive. He changed the rules. he got rid of what was called fagging the year before I came. You were really on the cusp, weren't you? Because I think you're 12 years older than me. I went to a very similar school. And I was at the real back end. I got beaten at prep school.

11:18Proper physical queuing up outside. But fagging was a thing of the past by the time I got to public school. You were right, sort of, you know, the Lindsay Anderson film, If. I love that film. I love that film as well. That film tells you more about. But you'd recognize that much more than I would. that was your school days it was yeah it wasn't quite as bad as that sure to be honest they were melting and our house was the first to get rid of fagging a year or two before i arrived but the elder boys were pissed off because they you know they'd been fags they'd been slaves basically and and they wanted to be able to treat the new kids as slaves and then they suddenly couldn't um but there was a lot of bullying and you know called new scum all the time um and um yeah so i was 16 and then new headmaster housemaster came in and he was a rowing guy and he was pretty insensitive didn't like me could see that i was gaming the system quite effectively didn't like it at all um and he i got called out of you had to do two hours homework period every night got called out of it to his office my mum's on the phone and she is telling me that my father's going to hospital and he probably won't survive the night.

12:36And I'm like, well, can I come home? And she's like, well, no, you're too far away. And I'm like, well, why are you telling me this now? Why didn't you tell me in the morning? And it's like, it wasn't very, you know, it's not great parenting personally. So she told me this in front of this guy and I'm not going to cry because I don't like the guy. and I go back to my study and there's prayers at 9.30 and you're in your bedroom at quarter to ten, lights out at ten o 'clock, silence at 10.30 and I'm not going to sleep. So I sneak out down the corridors and there's monitors with torches trying to catch a kid sneaking out and I get to my study and I put on the cassette of this record I'd heard the week before and didn't think much of, but it had an amazing review, a life-changing one of those kind of like this is the record of the last five years kind of review and i put the headphones on and the third track was his father died and left him alone on that new england farm all the long black funeral cars left the scene and the boy was just standing there it was as if someone had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars because when he looked up, they started to slip.

13:55And I listened to this nine-minute Patti Smith improvisation about a boy losing his father. And it took me apart in a way that only music and words can, I think. And I listened to the whole album and was like, oh my God, this is what music can do. It was completely revelatory. I had music before then, but nothing had affected me like this. And I sold my whole record collection the next week. My dad survived. I sold my whole record collection the next week and went, I'm only going to get something as potent as this. And for about six months, I only had Paddy Smith's Horses. I was going to say, that's a small collection.

14:41And Louie's Berlin. And that was it. Wow. And then punk came and I thought, oh, this is worth lowering my standards. And I loved punk. it was great fun but again it was authentically emotionally real um which is the opposite of what you had to be at school yeah and and how successful were you at that i mean did you because so much of what you've done since is is profoundly spiritual and yet that is anathema particularly for that second house master who would have hated anything that that smacked of spiritual or smacked of cultural or artistic anything that was airy fairy how how far from your true self did you travel during this period were you cruel to other kids were you oh that's a great question god but once yeah i do remember an incident going oh my god what am i doing um but no i don't think in general i was and that housemaster after my last exam kicked me out and i think it's contagious don't they you're such a you've got nothing to offer the school i know you're manipulating the system i was sneaking out to see bands downtown i was watching the old gray whistle test on television you weren't allowed to you know at low volume because i knew it was feeding me and of course you look at my what i became obviously this was for my soul um but what happened was the next day a boy who was coming to be vice head of school went into him said you can't throw him out you don't know what he does for the younger kids and the homesick kids and and he doesn't tell anyone but this and so i don't think generally i was because he spoke up for me um what did you do for the homesick kid just try to make them feel like they weren't alone you know i had there was an older boy who did that to me um and was accused of being queer because of it let me let me sit in his bed sitting listen to music and have a cup of coffee cup of nescafe jonathan akers if you're out there thank you um just just just seeing you

16:51yeah you're getting quite emotional yeah because the contrast between somebody who cared in an environment where caring was weakness would have been so acute and so powerful yeah and so you paid it forward as they say you you tried to be Jonathan Aikhurst to other children I think so you might find a few kids from that time you might say otherwise but you know what I mean it's like I you know I but it it's um but that was beautiful that that boy stood up for me

17:26when did you allow yourself to think that there may be a life doing the things so what I did was you know you get to the point where okay what are you going to study at university and I knew I wanted to go to university more to decompress something to kind of like get over this traumatic prison like experience and it and all boys boarding school you know and so I there's nothing I wanted to do and then I went well I've acted all the way through this experience so I'm going to study acting I must be quite good at it so you knew I didn't have that I didn't realize until therapy years later that I had constructed an entirely false they call it a survival personality but you knew in the moment that this wasn't really you I knew I knew it wasn't me and I knew I wanted to recover buried emotions yes and music was probably my what dance was i used to lock myself in studies and turn up music and throw myself around and it was that was my therapy yeah and um dance has always been the most immediate response to anything for me to trauma to release to where do you think that came from was it just primal was it just primal yeah there was no training No influences.

18:50Never. It was. I remember the first school disco where they brought girls in at 16. And the girls were at one end and the boys were at the other. They played music. And I went on the dance floor and threw myself around and danced my nerves and my terror. And I went back to the boys end. And the cool boys who would normally talk to me came up and went, what was that? How did you do that? And they were quite like, oh, they quite like that. And nobody danced like that. in those days they after house it became a bit more common okay but it was always a threat to people you know i'd have knives drawn on me in manchester frequently for throwing yourself around the dance floor or you know threatened quite you know strongly a few times because at the time it would be the two-footed shuffle wouldn't it be one foot to the other and then out to the other or headbangers i suppose punk would have been a space where you could throw yourself around but but not in a beautiful way.

19:45In a specific way. Yes, yes. It had its own beauty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But not like, I mean, I've watched you dance, and it fills me with a curious combination of envy and joy, because you do communicate something through dance. One doesn't see very often. Yeah. Yeah, to me, it's the most primal thing, and I ended up obviously training in it, In learning how to teach people to go into trance states through dancing and breathing. And I trained in it. I taught it for 30 years. You know, in L.A. I taught 180 classes when I lived in Los Angeles. And then I taught classes in Brighton. We're getting ahead of ourselves.

20:27I know. But you can't go linear. No, I don't. And you won't be able to go linear with me, I'm afraid. No, I don't. I fully accept that. But we're in Manchester now. So. Reign me in. So basically, I lied myself into acting school. When I got to the interview, they said I had to write out all the plays I'd been in and my experiences. I hadn't been in a single play. And I had to lie. And I figured, well, acting is professional lying. So ergo, if I get into acting school by lying, that's justified. And I got in somehow. And I had a great time for three years. Immediately. Did you finally feel that you were among people who?

21:13Much more artistic people, crazy people like me. And I wasn't, I was very hit and miss with acting. I could be good. I had difficulty learning the words. So I'd improvise, which in rhyming couplets could be a problem. I would make my fellow actors quite nervous because they never quite knew what I was going to do next. So I was hit and miss. but I obviously, do I let you lead me into this? Well, I want to go back to what mum and dad were thinking at this point, because presumably they were hoping, against hope, that you might end up in the family business. Yeah, they did. And they accepted that that wasn't going to happen.

21:57No, no, they did. We're still hoping. Yeah, various pressures they applied.

22:05The mad thing is, right, they called me Timothy because they found a will in the family 140 years earlier, 13 kids. All the money must be shared amongst the 12 children, but on no account must anything be left to Timothy. And that apparently piqued their interest. Wow. They named this freak Timothy and then couldn't quite deal with the consequences. You know, my dad never saw me play. And I didn't really give a shit. Good. I'm glad you didn't. But were they actively disapproving? Oh, yeah. They were. It wasn't just a language they could not speak or understand. They thought it was just hideous.

22:46They kept trying to say, look, you're not making any money. Which was true for a long time. You could work at the wool firm, you know, a low job, but start the wool firm and, you know, blah, blah, blah. So this possibly, I mean, it's not exactly suggesting that it's a silver lining to the cloud that you've described, But that self-reliance that you learn at boarding school possibly gave you the ability not to care too much about what they saw. 100%. I cut off my parents when they sent me to prison. It was like, why would you do that to your kids? But listen, the thing is, everybody at some level, I think being born is a traumatic experience.

23:25I've written a lyric just recently actually about fatherless sons on the new album we're making right now. and I get in the line that in a sense we are all have Stockholm syndrome to our parents we are these tiny creatures they are these erratic giants shouting on the phone getting emotional about things and in a sense we're in their custody and we most of us feel we didn't choose them and often have complicated relationships with our family and parents and so So I really feel that, you know, everyone has these different things. And they do. They're character developing. I don't think you're meant to come into a perfect family.

24:12How would that help you grow? Who would you be? It's the things that they didn't provide that you have to go looking for. And that's the journey of individuation. And I think it's a crucial journey for everybody. So I don't feel sorry for myself for any of it. I don't feel the liver disease has been probably the best teaching of all. I died of it when I was 21 and was taken to Leeds Killingbeck Hospital. And the doctor was brilliant because he didn't say it's incurable. He said, it's as if you had hepatitis C last week, Western medicine has nothing for you. And this was 1981. And I went, oh, OK.

24:55so somebody does and i threw myself into meditation chinese herbalism homeopathy all the things that yoga that people do now but in those days were totally fringe and cranky um i worked out quite soon there were certain foods i couldn't eat again allergies to foods were unheard of and you you were not a proper man if you couldn't eat wheat or cheese or um the things i couldn't You just would listen to your body. I'd listen to my body and work it out with the help of the fringe medicine people. How did you find them, Tim? Because this is pre-internet and stuff like that. There was a magazine called Cahoots that had been set up by a lovely woman in Manchester who was one of the inheritors of Chase Manhattan Bank.

25:44And she taught Tai Chi and Qigong. And I went and learned Tai Chi and Qigong with her. and she had made a directory of all these mad things to do. And off I went. And you could feel them working? Some did, some didn't. Some were more bluff. And it worked, I mean, with regards to the liver condition? Very much. I have to watch it now and again. Every so often I get yellow and disorientated and confused. But most of the time I'm an athlete. I've seen you on stage. incredible for my age well even for my age she'd be incredible and younger um i mean you have acted it got the nod from the manchester evening news for best newcomer when you when you acted in it was an edward bond play in bolton that you did very heavy batman film as well yeah i love the line about christian bale saying that late had saved his life so you can come away thinking that batman is a james fan there's some incredible sort of moments on that side of things but but but did you feel at manchester it's quite a good vintage as well there were some people there with you who've gone on to greatness weren't there ben elton was in uh there at the time i acted in a number of his plays hung out with him lovely you know rick and adrian had left the year before but they dropped the shadow remain oh their shadow remain miris ayal in my year it was wonderful did you feel you had the wherewithal to make it as an actor was that what you wanted no I don't think I did I watched some of them there one particular man called Richard Sandler I remember watching him do Bend in rehearsal and be able to access tears with the director kind of almost conducting him and going holy shit I can't do that you know watching a great actor work and going oh i don't think i'm there um i could be interesting um and i knew i could be i could get there i i went and did that play at bolton octagon years later almost to prove to myself i could and because i'd been offered some films in hollywood and turned them down uh why did you turn them down i think fear yeah um that I hadn't felt I was quite good enough.

28:07So I wanted to go off to the sticks and do something where nobody would see it and I could just find out if I was any good. And you liked what you found? Terrified. Yes. I think I was very, again, hit and miss. And I think that when they gave me the award, I think they came on a good night. Other nights I would find myself sitting outside the character and going, how do I get in? Oh, be aware of that on stage. Yeah, horrible feeling. God, that must be awful. horrible because acting is not acting is it you need to be real not yeah there's the difference so i think i was erratic still and i still think i am so if i'd met you then you've got your health under control you've started long before it was cool or fashionable but for the most pragmatic of reasons you're leading a life quite an ascetic life you're certainly a life of self care and and and um and i'd said what do you want to be when you graduate or what you see yourself doing in 10 years time what do you think you would have said i mean i knew when i got there a friend was gonna wanted to start a band with me so that was in my mind as my biggest passion i think i partly chose manchester to at university because i'd seen a life-changing e-pop concert there and a life-changing paddy smith concert when you'd climbed the wall from school or when you'd escaped with the organ teacher's help i think you know the story yeah it was amazing um because the first gig we organized from a school trip i've gone back in time um was to see the clash on the first ever punk rock tour with the jam the subway sec the buzzcocks the slits and so we had 30 school party and school boys dressed in school uniform going to wolverhampton to watch the clash and the jam because they didn't know what punk was it was the first tour and after that they were like we're never letting you organize another trip again and and so we found iggy pop and we persuaded one teacher to take three of us oh he's not punk he's predates punk Yeah, and that gig was amazing, astonishing.

30:18Iggy covered in blood, bare-chested, you know, doing what Iggy does. So that's why I probably ended up in Manchester to some degree. I had these kind of peak experiences in Manchester that bonded me to the city even before I got to live there.

30:40So you had a friend who wanted to put a band together, but... And it didn't happen. And then maybe a year and a half into university, my girlfriend was away and I thought she was finishing with me. I was in the cellar bar and throwing myself around dancing. And I went to sit down and these three 16 year olds were stealing my beer. And I went, oi. And they all stood up like you want to make anything of it. and we started talking which was the wise choice and paul said we have a band um i loved you dancing and would you like to dance for our band i was like yeah we're rehearsing in the withington scout hut tomorrow okay he wrote his phone number on my wrist and the next morning i woke up a little over and went ah okay and next day i saw nascent james you know and by the weekend i was shaking a tambourine singing backing vocals opening for orange juice in sheffield that's incredible isn't it so they were already more than competent so that the other two you mentioned paul gilbertson and jim glennie and gavin whelan were the other two they already had a sound they already had a yes competent might be pushing it they'd stolen their equipment a year earlier paul and jimmy were self-taught gavin gavin was very competent he was a great drummer uh and trained um and the and the others were learning their craft like i was um after after about and and jenny glenny was a singer at that time the original singer had uh was taking a saison in strange ways um this is something that people who who haven't dug deeper than the music and the known music will be surprised by i think that that james quite a rough crowd rough rough crowd into which this public school boy uh-huh inserted himself or was inserted i mean that's a fascinating they He brought me in.

32:48I mean, I was a couple of years older. I mean, two weeks after we'd started, Paul was like, can we go out tonight to a club? I want to tell you something, like a confession. And I went with him and Gavin. And he told me, look, fights come to me. I don't look for fights, but they just come to me. And I win them, but I don't look for them. And I was like, okay. And Gavin was there going, it's true. it's true and we left the club paul needs a piss in the street pees against a car wheel and this guy walks down the street and starts a fight with him and he's got two mates and me and gavin are going we won't join in if you don't join in and we're holding them off and paul has a fight and wins it and it was like there's your proof and it wasn't the guy's car you know it was just some random dude who took offense and so it was like oh okay what have i got into here and it was true it was like fights came what what what was your response to that was it was it i hope this isn't the wrong word was it exciting was it real in a way that perhaps you had well because he didn't start it yes no of course and i paul was a lovely human being very innocent very real I kind of we all loved him he was the leader of the band he unfortunately couldn't tolerate weed and he became had a psychosis was eventually in a psychiatric unit and then prison later and we tried to stop him And partly we got into meditation because I wanted to find an alternative high for him.

34:46And I thought meditation would do it. So we dragged him along to Buddhist meditation. And then we found this organization LifeWave, which had this dramatic revelation meditation where you see a light and you hear a sound. And from then on, you can see a light and hear a sound. And I was still recovering from liver disease. And I kind of gave myself a year to find proof of the existence of God or meaning to life. Or I was quite happy to burn out otherwise. I hadn't really found my meaning. And I was still in and out of illness at that point. And that meditation provided it for me and Jimmy. It didn't for Paul.

35:27They kicked him out for weed. They were like, we can't teach you meditation if you just come here stinking of skunk every time. and unfortunately he couldn't come with us um already well not already but again you're doing that thing you did at school where you're trying to care for people you're trying to you're trying to help him did it did it kick both ways did you would it be over romantic to say that very very quickly you felt as if you were in the place and with the people that you were meant to be with Hmm. It's interesting. We didn't communicate very well, but we'd go in the drummer's kitchen for five hours and play without talking and have a Sony cassette machine recording the chaos for five hours.

36:23and then listen back and go, ooh, that could be made into a song. Let's try doing that bit over again. Were you singing by now? Yeah, I was singing by then. But this was four or five days a week. But it wasn't really with much conversation. Paul was the one I was closest to. He was Jimmy's best friend. But when Paul went after about two years, where we gave him an ultimatum because he was a different person trying to play his guitar upside down, left handed. And he was the only guitar in the band. And it was just chaos. I mean, the songs couldn't hold. And we were starting to get interest in big gigs with New Order.

37:11And New Order's manager, Rob Gretton, came in and begged Paul to play the guitar the right way up and not smoke weed. and Rob Graham was a pothead and he was in our rooms begging Paul not to smoke weed. I mean, that was how bad it was. That's significant. And we were playing the Brixton Academy and we managed to persuade him to play the guitar the right way up for that gig. So it was, when he left, I wouldn't say I was close to the other members, but we were doing something together that was a shared purpose. We brought Larry in at that point. And so we were a group, for better or worse. Was there ambition?

37:58Strange ambition. Yeah. It was all about live. We thought live was the authenticity. We didn't want to record. So when Factory came and asked us to record an album, we were like, no. But everybody else in Manchester at the time. Everybody wanted to be signed to Factory. Exactly. And then they came and said an EP. And we went, no. And they went, a single? And we went, okay, can we have Stutter, the song? No, you're having our worst songs. Because we knew we'd take a while to learn how to record. So we gave them what we thought were our worst songs. And then they came back. Will you make an album?

38:32No. An EP? No. We gave them the next decent songs. Was that all collegiate? Was that all of you? All of us. That's extraordinary. Yeah, we were bloody minded. We did all these photo shoots. We wouldn't do interviews. We only did interviews because the promoter said, unless you get more of a profile, we can't give you gigs. We did a photo shoot with the great Kevin Cummings and we all turned our faces away, except for Gavin, because we didn't want our faces to have anything to do with people liking the music. It was like it had to be about the music, not how we looked. And we wore the shittiest clothes on purpose, partly to not look cool.

39:13it was all kind of anti-fashion you know if you look at early Talking Heads they dressed a bit like us too it was all about the music but they learnt quite quickly that actually image does have something to do with it and you better wise up it took us till I think the Laid album when we were in our 30s to realise oh that we should be looking a little cooler but the sound was obviously reaching parts that other bands were not reaching partly because of the people that wanted you to support them i suppose probably i mean you've mentioned new order but the smiths were probably the biggest in that yeah period yeah that was interesting you you know i've been told that morrissey was a big fan um it's quite funny because later on people would say oh that james influenced by the smiths we were going a year and a half before the smiths and i have it on good authority maybe the other way around um but um and i got very close to morrissey and johnny and the band and they took us on tour and loved us and morrissey said the most beautiful things about us at the time and they really looked after us yeah but you never made any money during this period not really 30 quid a week and it didn't matter to you you know that's why i asked about ambition and you say it's a strange ambition because you just wanted to the ambition was to make great music and to be a great band live.

40:40To give that audience something very special. It's about being in the moment in a room. I don't know why we were scared of recording, but recording was much more secondary on our list. In some ways that still is what you're about. Yes, but really once we met Brian Eno, then recording became a big feature. If you're going to get introduced to the importance of recording, you could do worse, couldn't you, than Brian Eno? And the fun of recording. Yeah. And that's not to denigrate Lenny Kay was amazing with us, but we were too controlling. We wouldn't let him add much. We turned his hair gray in six weeks.