First Direct Arena, LeedsLed by Tim Booth, the band play an adventurous set that shows them still questing for enlightenment
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Tim Booth shuffles on in an outsize wool hat and Afghan coat and without speaking a word, starts singing: “We’re all going to die.” It’s a typically perverse opening from a band who have long ploughed their own furrow, and darkly but amusingly tees up one of their most absorbingly wilful shows. If having Happy Mondays as a support act suggested a night of Madchester nostalgia, James’s first 75 minutes takes in just three copper-bottomed smashes – She’s a Star, Born of Frustration and a rapturously received Come Home.
Instead, an adventurous setlist careers through six songs from recent Top 3 album All the Colours of You to surprise Hymn from a Village, a Factory Records single from 1985. Clearly not content to become a heritage act, Booth seems on a mission to prove that James still say something. The songs’ themes range from the pandemic and the transitory preciousness of life to George Floyd’s murder and the state of the US, with lyrics that are wonderfully observed (Curse Curse’s acrobatic leap from the couple having sex next door to, well, God) or simply powerful (Miss America’s “live the dream, as long as you’re white”). After a brief trip to 1990 for Gold Mother, Booth chuckles that during the baggy
explosion James were “writing songs about childbirth”.