Tim Booth has been lead singer of indie rock band James for nearly 40 years. Their 15th album, Living in Extraordinary Times, was released this summer, and they’re about to start a UK arena tour, beginning in Glasgow on 5 December and ending in Leeds on 9 December.
You live in California now – are your family OK following the fires?
I got on a plane and my family were evacuated just as I left. They’ve gone back now – Topanga Canyon was untouched. But for three days everyone was saying the wind was going to blow the fires to us. Twice a year they try to evacuate us – we always say: “Piss off.” This time it was four miles away, so… yeah, we’d better get out of here. You pack your car and assess. What’s important to you? What do you need to keep? Surprisingly, not that many things. But you do think, those pictures of my kid aged two to seven, I might never see them again.
One great song on the album talks about work taking you from your family…
Me and my son were in denial about it. From the age of three or four he would say: “I’m fine with you being away, don’t worry.” I never knew how much it was affecting him until I was away for eight weeks, and when I came home he came running to me and burst into tears. He’d been lying to me to make me feel better. I wrote the lyric [to Coming Home, Part 2] and didn’t connect to it emotionally at first. Now it floors me, singing it live.
Are you still vegan?
For about 10-12 years I was vegetarian or vegan. But I was so skinny, and on stage I do seven miles a gig! Ethically I’d love to, but I can’t. The band got into meditation partly to help someone [in the band] who’d taken a lot of drugs, to find an alternative high. I had a liver disease and nearly died when I was 21, so I was always very careful about doing drugs. Then I got into psychedelic therapy, which might be made legal in the next three years. Lots of medical professionals use MDMA therapy to cure depression and PTSD.
Have you tried it?
I have, and it’s like a year’s therapy in eight hours. I’m a trained therapist and my therapist friends are gobsmacked by what they’re witnessing. I’d looked down on all these drugs for 20, 30 years but when I see them used in a therapeutic setting, they are powerful medicines. We need new medicines to change human consciousness. We don’t have long left. With climate change, we’ve got five years, if we’re lucky, before it’s too late. And many think it’s too late already. Everyone’s splitting off into fear-based nationalism – America, Brexit, Brazil – at a time of global danger, when we need global solutions.
You were genuinely angry at the referendum result at Glastonbury 2016, weren’t you?
I don’t live in England, so that was more my bandmates. If it looks and smells like a disaster, it probably is. If it’s going to bankrupt us and there were illegal campaigns linked to Steve Bannon and Russia, maybe we should do this again? If you do the 100m in the Olympics and you cheated, the gold medal goes to someone else.
When was the last time you got goosebumps watching an artist at work?
Nick Cave, two weeks ago. Regina Spektor. Sufjan Stevens. When I first saw Regina Spektor I couldn’t write a song for two months after. Our music is nothing like Nick Cave’s, but I always had great respect for him. I don’t think he likes James at all. I pretended to be a journalist in 1986 and interviewed him when he was using drugs really heavily. We nearly got in a fight, and it was hilarious – he was so strung out he couldn’t fight anyone. Then he found out who I was, and he slagged us off! But I still love him, he’s one of the great songwriters.
You’re a good writer. Would you write an autobiography?
A lovely gentleman tried to persuade me last year but my wife says: “If you write one, everyone will see how mad you are.” I don’t see how I gain from that. I have written a novel about a fucked-up singer in a band who sees ghosts. It’s a ghost love story. But I hit a wall after 350 pages.
And would you ever do a heritage album tour?
No. I think it’s death. Rock dies when it becomes theatre, with no sense that London on a Wednesday is totally different to Paris on a Friday. Different days, different countries, different temperaments. We change every night. The present is the only thing that exists.
