With more than 30 million albums sold over their 42-year career, Manchester legends James are amongst the most commercially and artistically successful – and most loved - alternative rock bands of their era. Having gathered a cult following around compulsive art rock gallops like ‘Johnny Yen’ during the 1980s, they broke through to mainstream chart success with their 1990 major label debut Gold Mother and went on to unite the early Nineties with euphoric anthems of solace, love, sex, loss and frustration at the ills of the world: ‘Come Home’, ‘Sit Down’, ‘Sound’, ‘Sometimes (Lester Piggott)’ and ‘Laid’. Their fifth album Laid – the first of a string of James albums produced by Brian Eno - saw them break the US charts, while subsequent hit albums including Whiplash (1997), Millionaires (1999) and Pleased to Meet You (2001) cemented their standing as a classic 1990s singles act, adding ‘Tomorrow’, ‘She’s a Star’, ‘Just Like Fred Astaire’ and ‘Getting Away with It (All Messed Up)’ to their formidable canon.
The band entered a six-year hiatus in December 2001, but such was the connection and fervency of their fanbase that their 2007 reunion was met with such renewed success that it was as though they’d never been away. James’s celebrated second era, launched with 2008’s Hey Ma, would earn them more Top 20 album placings and faster ticket sales than their whirlwind initial run, completing an unbroken run of 15 Top Twenty albums since 1990. 2014’s La Petite Mort – inspired by the deaths of singer Tim Booth’s mother and his close friend Gabrielle Roth – was critically acclaimed, while 2016’s Girl at the End of the World returned them to the upper echelons of the album chart, where they’ve remained ever since.
In 2023, James celebrated their 40th Anniversary with the release of Be Opened by the Wonderful, a double album of orchestral reworking of their biggest hits and rare cuts and received The PRS for Music Icon Award at the prestigious Ivor Novello Awards, a testament to their enduring influence and contribution to British song writing. In April 2024 James released their 18th album Yummy which reached #1 in the UK Albums Chart, their first studio album to do so. One of their most prescient releases, Yummy deals with politics, AI and conspiracy theories, and documents the creative process of a band who continues to evolve and defy expectations. Best described by UK music bible MOJO: "after 18 LPs and over four interrupted decades at the coalface, James are still re-inventing themselves”.
This year, the band embarks on their largest UK Arena tour to date, gracing the stage of the new 20,000-capacity Co Op Live arena in Manchester and concluding at The O2 in London. Following the tour, fans can anticipate captivating performances in Greece, Spain, and Portugal, and immediately before launching their US tour in September, James will headline a main slot at the legendary Rock in Rio festival in Brazil.
