Interview with Tim Booth (James): “I ‘died’ as a teenager, but I’m so happy I was sick. It was the source of my creativity.”

They return to Portugal next June, bringing to Rock in Rio Lisbon, on the 22nd, their new album “Yummy”, but not only that. “We only decided on the line-up an hour before we went on stage”, assures us Tim Booth, lead singer of a band that continues to release albums for pleasure, and which currently has nine musicians at its core. “We should be like Ed Sheeran, it would make a lot more sense”, laughs the band’s helmsman. “But we chose to be the Jameses. We choose to make the best music we can, and that means employing a lot of people.” Conversation about the state of the world, from Bruce Springsteen and Coldplay to Donald Trump and the climate emergency.

Where do you live nowadays?
God knows where my home is. I can’t even say. I’ve been in England for a year and a half, writing. This is to finish my novel and the new James album.

The last time we spoke, I was living in California, in the United States, near a natural park.
Yes, it was incredible, but we were going to end up burning to death [devido aos fogos florestais]. So we had to pack our bags and get out of there. Right now, I don’t know where I live.

And what book are you writing? Is it the novel that had to stop, when he suffered from writer’s block, after 300 pages?
Yes, I worked on this book for over ten years, in between James’s albums, and I actually had writer’s block. For a year and a half, I couldn’t make any progress. The last year was very intense: I was finishing the book and rewriting a lot of things. Now it’s well underway. It’s a thriller about a crazy singer who has a band called The Lucky Fuckers. He comes back from detox and tries to get back together with his band, but all the temptations of the industry I belong to are waiting for him. In the story, we will try to understand if he can resist these temptations, or if he will follow the same path as before. It also has something supernatural about it: there’s a ghost and all kinds of things. It’s a bizarre journey, and a black comedy.

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