Tim Booth doesn’t want James to be a legacy act: “We’re selling more tickets now than we sold in the 1990s”
As a band, James should be in a reflective mood thanks to their career-spanning new compilation, Nothing But Love: The Definitive Best Of, which arrived on November 21st. However, frontman Tim Booth prefers to look ahead to the future.
Their last album, 2024’s Yummy, topped the UK charts, they’ve sold more than 20 million records worldwide, and next year, they will embark on a huge arena tour, including dates at Manchester’s Co-op Live and London’s O2 Arena. But, in 2025, that doesn’t mean that there is an endless pot of money available to fund their artistic desires.
Booth, who is speaking from a cabin at the end of his son’s garden in Nevada, frankly admits that he’s not yet listened to Nothing But Love: The Definitive Best Of, which is a reassuringly honest admission that bodes well for the rest of the conversation.
When asked why he wanted to release the new collection of songs, Booth surprisingly revealed, “I didn’t.” He then explained why he reluctantly agreed to it, sharing, “We’ve been making a documentary, and to get the money for the documentary, the deal was that we would release another archival look at the greatest hits.”
The singer elaborated on the forthcoming film, “That needed a lot of money to fund, and this great documentary maker’s been making it, and we’re nearly finished. So, it was part of the deal that came with the documentary. At some point, we would have done something like this because of the new songs, but it wasn’t on my hit list. I’m always looking forward.”
While Booth will be playing a series of intimate shows with James to promote the album in Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and London, he remarks, “I haven’t heard the album”. However, as the record boasts a chronological track-list of their career, he’s well familiar with every song on it.
Yet, sitting around and marvelling at songs that he made 30 years ago is not of interest to him. Instead, he’d rather write their next great song, adding, “I just never look backwards. I look backwards to learn songs to play in the gigs, but that’s it.”
The term legacy act is likely one that would repulse Booth. It comes with connotations that a band’s best days are firmly behind them, and they are clinging on to past glories. Booth is determined, unlike many of their peers, James never falls into that category. He’s much more content discussing their huge free concert in Portugal this summer, which he says around 30,000 people attended, noting, “We were told the maximum would be about 15,000, but it was a free gig, so the crowd just went back. It was insane.”
On their current wave of success, Booth adds, “We’re selling more tickets now than we sold in the 1990s, full stop, and yet, we aren’t getting much media exposure like we did in the ’90s when we were the hip young things. So it’s really satisfying.”
The group are not only selling more tickets in 2025 than in 1995, but he says that inter-band relationships have never been better, either. Also, they are doing things on their own terms without compromise from a business perspective, too.
Despite selling millions of records, Booth claims, “We now fund our own records. We never got a penny from record sales with record companies because they ran a cartel. They would only give you 11 or 12 per cent, it was kind of a hidden agreement between the record companies. Then, they give you tour support to go and tour America, because then that sells more records, but you pay for that tour support out of your 11 or 12 per cent.”
Booth has had a similar ghastly experience with the publishing industry after releasing his debut novel, When I Died For The First Time, in 2024. On the advice of his friend Johnny Marr, Booth is currently in the process of buying his book for them, and blasts the publishing house as “inept”. He adds, “These corporations are just greedy bastards, really, and the work is done by the artists.”
The James frontman elaborates of his unwanted experience with Constable Books, “I don’t mind them taking a big percentage if they’re good at what they do, but they weren’t good at what they do. Two weeks before it came out, I followed links to buy the book, and they had the wrong cover. They had a cover of the book that I had told them was shit a year earlier, and they had an AI synopsis of the book that was complete bollocks.”
As much as Booth’s enthusiasm for the publishing industry is nonexistent, he is optimistic about music in 2025, revealing, “I see a lot of great music coming out right now. I’m seeing a lot of really interesting bands that I’ve really enjoyed over the last year or so. The more eccentric ones, I love English Teacher, Cameron Winter and Geese, Idles. There was a long period where I wasn’t seeing bands that were pushing the envelope and creating something really entertaining.”
Booth then breaks down precisely why he finds this batch of artists endearing, noting, “You can push the envelope but be unlistenable, and I respect that, but I might not want to listen to it, but if you’re pushing the envelope and you’re really listenable, that’s amazing when that happens.”
James certainly managed to get that balance right, which pushed them through to the mainstream during the ’90s. Even if he doesn’t have their creations on regular rotation, ‘Sit Down’ is like a child to Booth. Naturally, he was dismayed to discover in September that the song was used on a social media video, without permission, by far-right activist Tommy Robinson in celebration of his Unite The Kingdom rally.
Booth says it’s a song he feels “very protective of”, before going on to explain, “I sang it to my father-in-law an hour before he died of Covid. So, it was infuriating to see it be used for such a divisive march that clearly has overtones of racism.”
The frontman clarifies that he’s not saying that everyone on the march is racist, but highlights the involvement of “Elon Musk with his salutes”, who delivered a video message at the rally.
He adds, “It’s outrageous that they can just take our music and think they can put it to that. It’s bullshit. It’s ours, and we have a right to protect it from that kind of use.”
After sharing his discontent with the use of ‘Sit Down’ without permission, Booth was greeted by “hundreds of tweets of abuse,” which he describes as “really aggressive and unpleasant”. Following the experience, Booth says that he’s planning to leave X, as it’s now known, in the near future, due to it becoming “so polluted” with right-wing rhetoric.
Booth has little reason to feel particularly optimistic about the current state of affairs, but a recent conversation with Brian Eno, who has produced five James albums, gave him a grain of hope. He recalled, “‘I said, ‘Tribalism will be the death of us’. And he said, ‘Yeah, but community will be the life of us’. He’s right.”
The vocalist continued, “When we play, we create community, we create unity and a sense of oneness. And we’re living in these times where the whole machine of social media and newspapers is all about division and divisiveness.”
Keir Starmer doesn’t have Booth’s approval either, who he believes is “doing the work of the Conservatives”, and whether in the UK or the US, he says of governments, “All our governments are exploiting us. They do not represent the people. They exploit the very people they are meant to represent, and the way they do that is by keeping us divided.”
He’s also critical of Britain’s involvement in supporting Israel, and says of the United States, “The special relationship is that Britain is the lap dog of America”. Booth then, seemingly in reference to Nigel Farage, warns, “We will follow suit a few years later with a mini Trump leader who’s coming down the pipe at the moment.”
The current state of the world, whether it be in the UK, America or the Middle East, keeps Booth up at night. Yet, when he steps on stage with James, these anxieties temporarily drift away from his mind, and he’s able to bring thousands of people together, even if it’s only for 90 minutes.
Although James will be taking their greatest hits on the road across April, Booth is already ready to snap out of nostalgia mode, and get to work on album number 19, revealing, “We’re working on songs and they wake they wake me up at four in the morning, I get out and write lyrics. They’re coming along, great. So, yeah, I reckon we’ll have a new album next year.”
Booth then ends our conversation on another nugget of wisdom that epitomises his philosophy, which is shared by his bandmates, “When we die or stop, then people can look backwards. We want to leave behind the most honest artistic statement that we can possibly leave behind that represents the craziness of all these amazing individuals in this band. That’s all you can ask for.”
While Nothing But Love: The Definitive Best of James is now available for fans to use as a tool for a musical journey back through time, vitally, they should know that it’s far from the final chapter of the band’s book, which Booth plans on continuing to write for many more years.
