Interview - Jim Glennie, James

Back in 2018, legendary band James released an album entitled Living In Extraordinary Times against a backdrop of climate change, the rise of right-wing populism and race divides which were bubbling under the surface.

For context, it was eighteen months into Donald Trump’s four-year term as President of the United States, during the height of the Brexit debate, shortly after a record period of summer heat in the UK. No-one had even heard of George Floyd, and COVID wasn’t even a word in the common vocabulary.

With that in mind, Live4ever’s first question to Jim Glennie, founding member of the band, was simply: Do you wish you’d saved that album title?

“Could it get any more extraordinary?,” he replied. “It’s gone from extraordinary to bizarre. When we called the album that, they were extraordinary times, they were bonkers. I bet everyone in history, whoever you ask in whatever period, says they are living through extraordinary times.”

“It’s just gone even madder and stranger. I hope it’s just some bizarre anomaly that we never have to go through again. Something we tell the grandkids about; the days when we used to wear facemasks in Tesco and not the beginning of something new, where we have to go into lockdown every couple of years.”

That, in a nutshell, sums up James’ approach to music over the last few years. Since their reformation in 2007, the currently-seven-piece band have steadily become both more mainstream (not that they ever weren’t) and, to their immense credit, much more explicitly politically conscious.

https://www.live4ever.uk.com/2021/05/live4ever-interview-james/