James’s baggy brilliance outshines Happy Mondays at South Facing Festival
If pop’s history books were to be believed, James should really have been the support, not the headliners, on this sunny evening in Crystal Palace Park. Happy Mondays, fronted by mouthy Shaun Ryder and his shape-throwing sidekick Bez, have been apportioned unwaning cultural significance, for channelling late-’80s acid-house and ushering in the so-called “chemical generation”.
James, meanwhile, made hay in that era, more by the coincidence of geography than any spiritual kinship: indeed, singer Tim Booth and founding bassist Jim Glennie were teetotal practitioners of Lifewave meditation at the time, and thus hardly archetypal ravers. Where the Mondays imploded in druggy disarray circa ’93, James went on to make another 12 studio albums, six of them charting highly.
Thus it was that Ryder, Bez and co stumbled on first at the park’s South Facing Festival, to air the same greatest-hits set they’ve been delivering for 25 years now. Ryder prattled on about his driver warning him that his flies were undone (“we’re daft old c---s now”, he gamely admitted), while new bassist Dan Broad deputized for Shaun’s brother, who passed away last year.
The contrast between statuesque, sickly Ryder croaking Step On at 60, and James’s 63-year-old Booth, clear-eyed and impassioned in a furry jacket and black yoga flares, dancing his wild dervish jig, and at one point even crowd-surfing on his tummy, could hardly have been more dramatic.
Booth’s wonderfully weirdo eight-piece ensemble opened with rollicking 1986 deep cut Johnny Yen, about an outsider artist who’ll routinely “set himself on fire again”. A full-blooded commitment to Booth’s humanist mission drove every moment of the band’s theatrical and occasionally self-indulgent 90-minute show, as it trawled from the simmeringly expansive, U2-esque Isabella, from 2021’s All The Colours Of You, right back to 1992’s Sound, all comers joining its spiralling “oo-oo” chorus before an intense coda thundered SE19’s leafy amphitheatre into the heavens.
When Booth led off into 1999 B-side All Good Boys, it might’ve squandered the audience’s attention, had its meditation on father-son nurturing not been so poleaxingly poignant, nor duly been followed by Madchester-era megahit Come Home, the whole field erupting in joy at its doodling synth line and shuffling beat.
During their other “baggy” big-hitter, Sit Down, Booth stopped singing to conduct his public through its chorus about embracing human difference, a capella. He soon dedicated it to their late collaborator, Sinéad O’Connor, emotionally eulogizing “her courage to try to break the chain of abuse in the Catholic Church”.
In a hectic post-pandemic summer of outdoor music, this was the most connective yet on-the-edge performance I’ve witnessed. Preposterously unheralded, James are a brilliant live band who capture your heart and don’t let go.
