There was a writer at the NME in the '80s who regularly used to write about the kind of music that I enjoyed at the time, and also wrote things that I either already agreed with or would come to agree with. I can't be sure, but it might have been Don Watson. I'm fairly sure he was chucked out in the great middlebrow putsch of the late '80s.
Whoever he was, he wrote a review of Strip-mine that captured much of what I felt about the album. He wrote how James as a live band gave performances as exciting and risk-taking performances as anyone else at the time, and that this album failed to capture that excitement. I think the band themselves would almost certainly have agreed (as soon as they were free of their contract, they put out a much better live album). Apparently Seymour Stein took an unwelcomely close interest in the band after signing them, and kept interfering. So he gets the blame for the rather soft production of the album, and possibly for a track selection that plays safe and misses many of James' more leftfield songs of the period.
To hear those songs you had to listen to James' Peel Sessions, which included songs like Stowaway, a personal favourite that remains unreleased in any format to this day (I had a cassette somewhere…). Or you had to see them live. Between 1987 and 1989 I saw James three times at what was then known as the Lower Refectory of Sheffield University. These were increasingly desperate times, as the band weren't even getting records out, let alone selling them. I think I'm right in saying that most of their income came from t-shirt sales. But they refused to compromise, and would play one unreleased song after another, ignoring requests for Johnny Yen and Fires So Close until right at the end. I'd give anything for recordings of that period of James live, towards their last days as a four-piece band.
As for this album, Medieval, Riders and, to a lesser extent, What For and Ya Ho, give a distant sense of what James could be. Don't get me wrong, I like the album; I doubt there were many in 1989 that I liked more (though it was a good year for US and Canadian artists). It's just that James were capable of something five times better — better, even, than Laid.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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Strip Mine ranks as one of my favourite James albums - Fairground and Strip Mining being standout tracks for me alongside the two singles.
It would be fair comment to say that James were far less precious in the studio during the production of Strip Mine compared to Stutter where they would engage in lengthy arguments with Lenny Kaye over the merits of female backing vocals in Really Hard or whether or not So Many Ways needed a piano line.
I'd love to see a re-mastered Strip Mine with the pre production versions of the songs, the What For and Ya Ho b-sides as well as the unreleased contemporary songs you refered to
Posted by: Michael O'Brien | 07 August 2009 at 02:41 PM