Music Arcades: James: Whiplash

I was very excited on Saturday 25th January 1997. I had a ticket to see James play a warm-up gig at The Leadmill. The single She's a Star had just been released. They must have been warming up for the tour to promote the not-yet-out Whiplash, their first 'proper' album in nearly four years (Wah Wah, though released in 1994, was recorded in 1993, and then there was the James-but-not-James Booth and the Bad Angel album in '96.)

I spent much of that day writing the first draft of the Online Group Working course for the Living IT Curriculum, typing it directly into a free demo version of Apple's latest HTML authoring software. The demo version had officially expired, but it seemed to be saving all my input as I went. As stage time approached — my office was only a one minute walk to The Leadmill — I did a final save and closed the document. Something didn't look quite right. I tried to re-open it, and realised that none of my work had been saved after all. I had no notes, no outline, no record of what I'd written other than what I'd written. And that was gone. So I nipped down to the gig, all the time going over in my head the substance of my text, so that, once the gig was over, I could return to the office and type it all out again before I forgot it. That's not the most relaxed way to see a gig. I eventually left the office around 4am the next morning. We did many more drafts in the years after that, growing the course into two units, but I always had a feeling that 'first' draft was the best, most fluent one.

Memories of the gig. It was James' first without founder member Larry Gott (he plays on the album, but left before the tour). Tim Booth asked if Larry was in the audience, as he'd heard he was going be, and Tim wanted him to join them on stage. But if Larry was there, he was staying incognito. I think they played Tomorrow, which I recognised from Wah Wah. And, errr, that's all I can remember. Obviously I wasn't in the best frame of mind, but I could tell the music wasn't as impressive as the first Laid shows had been.

I've long pigeon-holed of Whiplash as a below-par James album, the beginning of a slow decline through to 2001. Listening to it in the office yesterday morning, it didn't sound as bad as all that (and just 43 minutes; that's closer to how long an album should be). Even though I recognise few of the song titles on the song cover, the songs themselves sounded immediately familiar, so I must have played it a lot at the time, possibly more out of hope than belief. Probably the horrible artwork had something to do with me remembering it without affection.