Glastonbury 2024: Watch James perform ‘Sit Down’
Manchester rock institution James injected a hefty dose of energy into Sunday at Glastonbury Festival. A career-spanning set lighting up the Other Stage, the band’s extensive legacy was confirmed when their resonant 1989 anthem ‘Sit Down’ had the large crowd chanting in unison.
Formed in Machester in 1982, James first came to global prominence thanks to ‘Sit Down’ and ‘Come Home’ at the end of the decade, with 1990s hits such as ‘She’s a Star’ and ‘Laid’ later bolstering their status. Notably, ‘Laid’ became an American college radio hit and was used as the theme of the controversial hit film series American Pie in 1999.
James released a string of albums before splitting up after the deparutre of frontman Tim Booth in 2001, and would not reunite until 2007. They released the tenth album, Hey Ma, the following year and have since released eight more studio efforts. A singular entity, the group have a loyal fanbase and have always continued on their path regardless of the zeitgeist, earning a UK number-one album with their most recent effort, 2023’s Yummy. It marked their first chart-topper since 1998’s The Best Of compilation.
Although Booth and the band have continued to develop artistically, their definitive anthem will always be ‘Sit Down’, a song written in late 1988 as a homage to the author Doris Lessing and Patti Smith, who both inspired the vocalist. In 2004, he told the Daily Record: “Sit Down is about me feeling so alone in my 20s and reading books by a writer called Doris Lessing which made me realise I wasn’t. It was about being awake at 4am and having no-one to talk to.”
It was made emphatically clear at Glastonbury that neither Booth, James, nor anyone in the crowd was lonely. Unified in pure rock abandon, as soon as the classic riff rang out, the audience was locked in with the band. As is customary, the first “Oh sit down” and the ensuing ones utterly thunderous. On a day also boasting the likes of Avril Lavigne, The National, Justice, and final headliner SZA, for those present, this moment will go down as one of the highlights of the entire week. A nostalgia-drenched moment of unity in a world that finds itself on the precipice once more.
In an April interview with Channel 4, Booth discussed Yummy going to number one, noting that after 42 years, it’s “quite an achievement” that perhaps even put “a little crack in an ageist glass ceiling”. Then asked if ageism in the industry annoys him or whether he’s made peace with it, his comments were significant.
He said: “It annoys me. We’ve been making (a) very high standard of music for a very long time and I think we’ve been somewhat neglected. Now, if Radio One said, ‘We’re only going to play music made by men’, there would be an uproar, but they just say, ‘No, we’re only going to play music made by people under 33, approximately’, and there’s no uproar. So, agism is a silent ism.”
Watch James performing ‘Sit Down’ at Glastonbury Festival below.
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