The reason for buying James singles was to get the 'B-side' tracks that weren't available anywhere else. I bought two different versions of this single (alternative cover shown below), because they have different extra tracks on them (and I went to some lengths to get both, as one has an HMV sticker and the other an Our Price sticker). While the main track, the single, has been worked over at length until the music feels smoothed out and the lyrics enigmatic (is "The band is sharp, but the singer's slow / Everything must go" a sly reference to the Manic Street Preachers?). The extra tracks are rougher, spikier, more raw.
Downstairs is a particularly good example. It sounds like the singer has met someone in an encounter/therapy group and taken a particular dislike to them. It's as vicious in its put-down as Positively Fourth Street, only more verbose and thus even more unrelenting. I like the way that the song lists all the despicable traits of the person it's addressed to, but it doesn't flinch from showing the ugly, intemperate side of the singer, lacking in any kind of empathy. Tim Booth is very good at that self-hatred: the world is screwed, and so am I. All Good Boys, on the other CD, also touches on one of his favourite the themes: the transmission of the father's failings on to his sons. The other songs are Stolen Horse and Imagine Ourselves.
Shortly after I got my mini-disc player in 1999, I made a couple of discs of James B-sides (I had a lot of them, and their official B-sides compilation hadn't come out then). One of the discs in particular really grew on me; it was better than some of their albums. I listened to them a lot on my portable mini-disc player, which at the time was still an early-adopter, cutting-edge piece of kit. Around the same time, Griff was the first person I knew who had an MP3 player and told me that was the future. But his player could only hold about twenty tracks — not much more than a mini-disk — the quality was patchy, and you had to use all this special software and connection leads, most of which weren't available for Macs (there was no iTunes then, let alone iPods). I thought my mini-disc was a better bet…
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Discogs entry for CD1 Discogs entry for CD2 |
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