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Topanga Canyon, California. Late evening in early 2020. Tim Booth was driving home, his mind fizzing from his first ever meeting with Jacknife Lee, the Grammy-winning producer who happened to live two miles away and had just agreed to work on James’s new album. Two women emerged from the darkness with a dog in tow and flagged the singer down. They’d seen and heard a rattlesnake on the unlit asphalt and couldn’t get past it, back up the road, in the direction from which Tim had come. He told them to hop in and turned the car around. It transpired that his passengers were Jacknife’s wife and daughter, out for an evening stroll. Call it dumb luck or a happy accident, but it made Tim smile. “It was one of those moments. I thought, ‘OK, this is looking promising,’” he says.

You see, serendipity was James’s friend in 2020. Serendipity and a knack of overcoming obstacles, be they rattlesnakes or a global pandemic. With momentum behind them after a run of outstanding albums, James went into the year intent on upping their game further. They signed to a new label Caroline International and a new publisher Kobalt Music. They had demos ready for a new album. But then lockdown struck and Charlie Andrew, who’d produced the band’s 2018 LP Living in Extraordinary Times, suddenly became unavailable. It seemed as though circumstances had left James high and dry. But that’s never been their way. Their management approached Jacknife. The fit was perfect. He and Tim could work together as almost-neighbours in California with the rest of the band contributing remotely from the UK. Circumstances be damned. Tim’s inkling was right. It was a match made in heaven.

The result is All The Colours Of You, the Mancunians’ 16th studio album. It’s a widescreen LP that takes the band into new sonic territory – from lo-fi electronica to Can-like motorik Krautrock – while remaining unmistakably James. Tim explains “He’s made us more accessible and we didn’t realize we weren’t accessible." To Jacknife it sounds “spontaneous” and “fresh out of the box”. James co-founder and bass player Jim Glennie simply calls the music “massive”. Me? I’d describe it as the sound of one of Britain’s best bands deconstructed and reassembled by one of the world’s most renowned producers. 

The tunes on All The Colours Of You are among the most arena-ready in James’s 38-year history. The title track and Wherever It Takes Us will have people singing from Malibu to Moss Side. But forget any semblance of jangly indie-pop – these tracks surprise and disorientate too. James have a history of working with mould-breaking producers such as Brian Eno, Youth, Flood and Markus Dravs. Jacknife continues this tradition with an outlook that combines punk’s DIY ethos with electronica’s veneration of textures. He’s worked with everyone from Taylor Swift to U2, he produced REM’s final two albums, seminal records for Snow Patrol, The Killers, and is a peerless remixer. “When you’ve been around this long you don’t want to be predictable,” says Tim. “You want to keep moving forward and explore. That’s what gives us a buzz.” 

The new system of working saw band members send parts in – violin parts from Saul Davies or trumpet parts from Andy Diagram, for example – as they collaborated with Jacknife from afar. Technology ensured that distance was no hindrance to inclusivity. Meanwhile the producer would build up songs, chopping, dicing, looping and replacing as he went. This virtual collaboration “pushed us into new areas and made the album more extreme”, Jim says.

 “I was trying to find out how rock ‘n’ roll could sound if you incorporate digital editing possibilities, time stretching, changing context and just taking one bit and looping that,” Jacknife explains. His goal was to “make the album sound fresh” and highlight the music’s strangeness. Jim loves the “little splashes of primary colour” that Jacknife introduced. All The Colours Of You is a true musical kaleidoscope, encompassing everything from belting techno and woozy soundscapes to fragile ballads. “We think we’ve made a masterpiece,” Tim says, “but we can’t be trusted”.

Lyrically, All The Colours Of You deals with some the dark and difficult issues. Themes range from politics and race relations to climate change to the Covid crisis.

Most moving is Recover, which deals with the death of Tim’s father-in-law from Covid-19. It’s a sad and poignant song. “I wouldn’t say I tempered the songs’ themes. You have to meet these things head-on,” says Tim.

Yet Recover is, ultimately, hopeful. Its production is delicate and simple and its tempo is upbeat. It’s a song about honouring a loved one’s legacy and spirit. There’s a lightness to it, as though it celebrates the joy of life rather than the sadness of death. Tim says that upbeat music sometimes “enables people to digest uncomfortable emotions in the lyrics”, himself included. “And so Recover – which is about my father-in-law not recovering – is a kind of uplifting, joyful song,” he says.

 The album also picks up on the politics that Tim dealt with on Living In Extraordinary Times. Having lived in the US through the Trump years, he witnessed the divisiveness and hatred stoked by the former President. The song Miss America examines the country’s tarnished image through the prism of a beauty pageant, while the album’s title track addresses the rise of white supremacy in the US (Tim has taken the knee on stage every night since the last album). “To go from the hope of Obama to Trump was radical, and I couldn’t keep it out of the songs if I’d tried,” Tim says, thankful that history has now moved on.

Meanwhile, Beautiful Beaches is about climate change and the fires that ravished California. “We had fires within three miles four miles of our house every week for about three months,” Tim explains. The song is about a vision he had of an earthquake and even bigger fires which saw his family race for refuge on beautiful beaches. His family have since left California. “Global warming is going to make itself massively felt this year. We could have called this album Extreme Weather,” the singer says.

 Jacknife praises James for being “totally open” to his way of working. What allowed the songs to breathe so much, he adds, was the band’s spontaneous way of writing. As ever, the demoed songs stemmed from long jams in which band members fed off each other as they played. “It’s almost a jazz thing,” Jacknife says. Long-term fans shouldn’t be surprised. Anyone who knows James’s 1986 debut album Stutter will recognise a band blissfully unconcerned with traditional song structures. Decades may separate them, but Johnny Yen and Miss America share the same DNA.

 James are British music’s enduring gem. Their breakthrough single in 1991, Sit Down, may forever link them with the ‘Madchester’ scene, but they’ve sold in excess of 25 million albums over their 39-year career. Not bad for a band who grew up in the heyday of NME when success was something to be avoided like the plague. They’re mavericks, they’re alchemists, they’re survivors. Not many bands have toured with Neil Young and also released one of the all-time great rave-era anthems. I tell Tim I first saw James live at Glastonbury in 1992 when then replaced Morrissey on the Pyramid Stage. Did he ever think back then that they’d still be releasing joyous, challenging and chart-conquering music almost three decades later?

“The truth is we felt we were built to last,” he says. Apart from a six-year hiatus between 2001 and 2007, Tim, Jim, Saul, Andy, Mark Hunter on keyboards, Adrian Oxaal on guitar (replacing Larry Gott), David Baynton-Power on drums and recent addition Chloë Alper on backing vocals and percussion are still going strong. Stronger than ever, in fact.

James’s last tour saw them play 86 shows in 14 countries, including a sell-out concert at the legendary Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. The reason is simple: James live are a force to be reckoned with. Their recent homespun live album – Live in Extraordinary Times – debuted at number one in the UK midweek charts. The momentum continues: the band have sold 55,000 tickets for a UK arena tour scheduled for this November and December, a tour which has sold faster than any previous James tour. The Happy Mondays will support. “Ticket sales are steadily increasing every tour,” Jim says. “We’re selling more than we did in the 1990s when we were meant to be famous,” Tim adds.

Of course, the pandemic has caused havoc with touring and live music. As of early 2021, venues remained shut. But this is James we’re talking about. They’re on a serendipitous roll. And they have a knack of overcoming obstacles.