By the time of their first flush of success – concomitant with the turn-of-the-90s Mancunian baggy scene, when indie discos thronged with people in big daisy petal T-shirts, and the anthemic Sit Down was only kept off the No 1 spot in the charts by Chesney Hawkes – James had already had as many ups, downs and near misses as most bands have in a lifetime.
Subtitled Sects, Trance and Rock’n’Roll, this good-natured, funny and occasionally rousing documentary portrait details them all. It begins when their middle-class, boarding school-educated soon-to-be-singer Tim Booth meets cute with a bunch of working-class borderline hooligans in a band, after they sneak into the University of Manchester’s student union bar and swipe his drinks. Described by their manager as “a band that took all the wrong turns and made every mistake possible”, they turned down Factory Records’ offer to release a first album because they didn’t want to have a product number. They then turned down a support slot on the Smiths’ US tour because half the group had by then joined an esoteric meditation cult and the scheduling would have clashed with the bassist’s enlightenment.
Later, the non-enlightened ones earned a reputation for being the party-hardiest reprobates on the 1997 Lollapalooza tour – the same year Korn, Snoop Dogg and the Prodigy were on the bill, no less. Mind you we only have their own word for it; Getting Away With It is a very insider account, to a fault, and other than sometime producer Brian Eno and lifelong superfan Chris Martin, virtually every interviewee in this documentary is or has been in James. The film is far more concerned with the internal dynamics of the band than their times or even their songs.
But fair enough; the interpersonal dynamics are fascinating. They’re a mixture of hippies and hardnuts, dreamers and pragmatists, united by music. “We’re not alike but we share an ethos,” says one of them. And, quite deliberately it starts to seem, they have maintained a position on the brink of implosion, always dancing on the edge of chaos, generating drama to keep the sparks and the embers of their creativity glowing.
• James: Getting Away With It is in UK cinemas on 17 August for one night only.
