“It’s insane how creative we are!”: James’ Saul Davies on the band’s new album ‘Yummy’ and UK tour

Veteran musicians James, 38 years after the release of their debut album Stutter in 1986, are still on a roll. From hits ‘Laid’ and ‘Sit Down’ in the 1990s to their most recent hit single ‘Our World’, James remains one of the most creative and forward-thinking bands, lyrically and sonically, within the music industry today.

Despite being on the verge of releasing their 18^th album Yummy, it doesn’t look like James will be slowing down anytime soon. This year alone, the band have already played two shows in Mexico and has a UK and European tour planned in support of their new album. Most recently, the lead single for Yummy, ‘Our World’, was announced as BBC Radio 2’s ‘Song of the Week’.

“I’m quite surprised by that but good on them for having the balls to do it,” states Saul Davies, guitarist of the band James, on ‘Our World’ being announced as Radio 2’s ‘Song of the Week’. “If Radio 2 can get behind that and some of the observations in the song about people being cool with each other and people being cool to the planet and all the rest of it, I mean it’s almost like a manifesto the song, in some ways, so if Radio 2 can feel like they can get behind that, it’s fantastic really.”

People who are fans of our music tend to have a lot in common regardless of where they might be across the world

Saul Davies, James

The success of the lead single for Yummy proves James’ relevance within music today, attracting a fanbase of younger listeners, as well as those who can gloat that they were there since the beginning, spanning across the globe. The band have just returned from playing two shows in Mexico, one in Mexico City and a second in Guadalajara, to their “really passionate” Mexican audience.

“People who are fans of our music tend to have a lot in common regardless of where they might be across the world. It’s quite a big warm family of people across the globe, they’re not necessarily in huge, huge numbers everywhere but in Mexico, for example, we have this fantastic, quite large audience, as I say I don’t know how quite that happened, we just ended up with that,” comments Davies. “People I think get into James, regardless of where they are, because there’s lyrical content that they can identify with and there’s an uplift in a lot of our music that people really appreciate.”

One song off their new album that encapsulates this “uplift” is ‘Shadow of a Giant’, a track which takes the listener on a journey through its lyricism, as well as through its sound, ranging from an orchestral opening to an electric guitar solo.

The beautiful orchestral section at the front of the song was Davies’ contribution. “That song existed in double time, twice as fast,” explains Davies. “I just asked Leo [Abrahams (Jarvis Cocker, Paul Simon)] to play the track and I just started playing the drum halftime. Everybody was like ‘I don’t think this is gonna work’ but I said, ‘listen you mad fuckers this is going to be amazing!’”

It is certainly one of the most special moments across the album, something that the band recognised when they heard it for the first time. Davies illustrates how he diverted his usual violin sound to craft something more “poetic”, and “lyrical”. When he played his introduction for the first time, “everybody was like ‘woah this sounds amazing,’” says Davies. “I was like ‘I told you! I told you it would!’” The string section is antithetical to the pop music that dominates the charts today, proving that James continues to push boundaries with their music.

It’s insane how creative we are!

Davies

‘Shadow of a Giant’, along with all of the twelve tracks that appear on Yummy, began from a jam session. With 86 jams recorded over the space of three weeks, the band had reams of content to use as a basis to record demos. “We just press file on a drum machine and make an unholy racket and it becomes coherent at some point and we can identify a song within that,” Davies illustrates.

James has become known for their use of jam sessions to allow their creativity to flow when crafting new tracks. “It will certainly be time to hang up our boots if we get to those environments and we don’t have anything to say to each other,” Davies states. However, Davies assures fans that James is far away from that being the case. “It’s insane how creative we are!” he exclaims.

Indeed, followers can listen to snippets of these rough jam sessions on the deluxe version of the album Yummy + Pudding, also released on 12^th April. Davies encourages all of James’ fans to listen to the jams and demos to familiarise themselves with the band’s working process. “It’s quite brave of Tim [Booth] to let those things go out because there are no words, there are some initial ideas, but a lot of it is quite phonetic,” details Davies.

Out of the twelve tracks on Yummy, Davies had a big hand in bringing four of them to life, two of these being ‘Hey’ and ‘Butterfly’. He describes how ‘Butterfly’ is a “melting pot of different influences”, albeit not incredibly obvious, drawing on inspiration from bands including Talk Talk and Pink Floyd. Creating a rhythm track for ‘Butterfly’ was also an interesting experience for Davies, as he explains, “Actually I was getting some of the chords wrong and making some quite interesting mistakes, which kind of pushed the song a bit. Then I kinda played some drums, which I’m not very good at doing, but I was very committed to the process of making a rhythm track, which I did.”

Davies’ instrumentation coupled with Booth’s pensive, storytelling-like lyricism results in one of the most interesting songs on the album. “Maybe it’s the Radiohead song that Radiohead didn’t write!” laughs Davies.

“We’ve yet to get [‘Butterfly’] together as a live piece but I look forward very much to playing that and grabbing the flavour of it, it’ll be quite a moment in the show,” Davies reveals. “It’s a hugely dynamic song, and those songs can work really well live because you can pull people and slap them over the head.”

It’s always a bit nerve-wracking playing new, new songs

Davies

It appears that ‘Butterfly’ will be finding its way onto the setlist for James’ upcoming UK tour. The band’s extensive discography consequently means that they have endless choices for combinations of songs on the setlist. The members of James are keen to resurrect the chart-topping songs from the early 90s with some often more unknown songs from their catalogue, including ‘Government Walls’ (Gold Mother) and ‘Jam J’ (Wah Wah), a song which Davies describes as “just a big, brutal stab of quite strange guitar, alternative guitar rock”. Alongside tracks from James’ early releases, fans can expect five or six songs from their new album.

“It’s always a bit nerve-wracking playing new, new songs. Although I know some of us get a little nervous about that, I personally don’t. I think that it’s more than acceptable to play new songs to people as I recognise that the majority of James fans that come to these events, that is actually what they want to hear,” admits Davies. “A lot of bands struggle with that. It’s a bit like ‘oh, it’s time to go to the loo’ or ‘it’s time to go to the bar now that the band is playing a new song’, but in fact, with us, because we do so much of it, it becomes the thing that people want to see and judge it – what worked, what didn’t work – not everything can work and it shouldn’t do because it’s an art form and it should be a bit messy.”

During their UK tour, James will be playing, in what can be considered their homecoming gig, at the brand-new Co-Op Live Arena in Manchester. The arena is set to open this year, with a huge roster of artists already queued up to play it this summer, including Olivia Rodrigo and Niall Horan.  The 23,500-capacity venue will be the UK’s largest indoor venue when it opens in April, with Peter Kay being the first performer to appear on the new stage. Investors, such as Harry Styles, had a hand in the design, therefore, the arena was designed with both sound and the experience of the spectator and artist in mind. “I’m quite interested to see what the initial reports are from the audience when it opens because it’s quite a statement, I think, for Manchester, to have that venue,” states Davies.

With a jam-packed summer ahead of them, playing arenas and festivals across the UK, it seems like James still has much more to give. Despite the band being on the verge of releasing their 18^th album, their creativity is still overflowing and James continues to make a statement within the music industry today.

James’ new album Yummy is out on all streaming platforms on 12^th April.