Gig Review: James at Royal Concert Hall

James are here to entertain us - no support act, just straight in. The band, plus orchestra and choir fill the stage. They open with Magic Bus and Space. For the casual fan this is a bit of a slow start with two less well known tracks. Beautiful Beaches is next from the most recent album All the Colours of You which offers little to help the situation, but the issue (if you can call it that, because everyone is still enjoying the show) is compounded by Moving On, Dust Motes, The Shining, The Lake, Ten Below and Someone’s Got it in for Me – all perfectly good, but no big hits just yet. The first half of the show really has been a mixture of deep cuts from older albums or new songs. Nothing but Love gets the audience on their feet and We’re Going to Miss You is thrown into the mix, as James end the first half of the show strongly with Born of Frustration – which the audience loves.

Watching James with an orchestra is an unusual, but interesting, experience. These newly arranged versions of both popular and rarer James songs take the music in a very different direction, while still retaining a familiarity. Booth places emphasis on parts of the songs that he never has previously giving them an entirely fresh sound and feel, at times ephemeral and dreamlike. I’ve simply never heard James like this before. Violins, double bass even a flute, plus choral voices mixing with Booth and the rest of the band. I’m swept away by a wall of sound. Even if I don’t know every song, they’re being gloriously performed and it sounds wonderful. Sadly, a few tracks that appear on the orchestral album such as Hey Ma and She’s a Star, both of which work quite spectacularly with an orchestra, somehow fail to make the set list tonight.

The audience is delighted to hear these new exciting versions of James tracks. In what was a sell out audience, with just a few people missing, no doubt due to the rescheduled date, pretty much everyone is standing, singing and clapping when the moment to do so arises. It feels like a slightly strange venue for an alt-rock, indie-pop band, but if you want to put around thirty people on stage including a seven-piece choir and a fourteen-piece orchestra, plus the band that currently seem to boast about nine members, then you’re going to need the big stage that the Royal Concert Hall can provide. Chloe Alper who joined the band in 2018 adds vocals alongside Booth, and whilst you might question if James ever needed a second drummer, Deborah Knox-Hewson who also joined in 2018 really adds something special to the mix. She plays in a standing position and gives it absolutely everything, frantically swishing her long blonde hair around and bouncing up and down throughout the entire show.

The second set of the evening begins with a bit of fun and games as Booth tries his hand at conducting the orchestra with a snippet from Bolero. Booth mentions something about the first half of the show being made up of less well known songs and that the second half will be more familiar. They play Sit Down and of course, everyone stands up. Say Something comes next and then Hymn from a Village. Andy Diagram who is dressed in a rather stunning white top and long skirt topped off with a little white hat and looking very angelic plays the haunting trumpet intro.

Alaskan Pipeline, Hello, Many Faces and All the Colours of You are thrown into the set list, the latter of which concerns the pandemic and gets the audience on their feet once again to sing out the final lines. Anyone expecting an encore break is confused as James just keep playing. They end with Tomorrow and Sometimes. It feels like the end, but the crowd want more. Laid brings the house down. Everyone is happy.

There is a lot to like about tonight’s show and these reimagined tracks. They bear testimony to the fact that forty years have not slowed this band down (as they add new members and new albums with almost alarming frequency). It proves without doubt that they genuinely have endured the test of time and have remained both commercially popular and critically relevant. They clearly have lots more to offer in the future as Booth promises to be back in 2024 and 2025 with something different again. I can’t imagine that James will be slowing down any time soon.

James performed at the Royal Concert Hall on 25 October 2023.