JAMES – LAID

Everybody knows the song. Far fewer know the album.

A Waxx Lyrical Deep Dive

ARTIST: James

ALBUM: Laid

RELEASED: 27 September 1993

PRODUCED BY: Brian Eno

ROTM PRESSING: 2015 remastered 180g 2LP reissue

ORIGINAL LABEL: Fontana

Most people met Laid through one song and, bizarrely, most never explored the album itself. To many, in Australia at least, James remain a one-hit wonder with an instantly recognisable album cover. Why didn’t that visual familiarity trigger enough curiosity in us to actually listen to the whole thing?

That one song, however, was certainly a banger-and-a-half that has lived eternally in our playlists since 1993. The title track is two-and-a-half minutes of lust, jealousy, gender play, beds on fire and a relationship spectacularly failing to behave itself. It is funny, frantic, immediately memorable and, particularly in America, became the James song, even finding a second life as something of a theme song for the American Pie movie franchise. It was the one that escaped the album and acquired a completely separate life.

Which makes the first surprise of Laid rather wonderful:

You have to wait until track eleven to hear it.

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By then James have already taken you through paranoia, monsoon rain, social conditioning, religion, silence between friends, the terror of loving somebody, depression, life on the road and the possible extinction of the human race.

Then 'Laid' bursts through the door. The title track isn't really the key to this album at all. It's almost the decoy. Because Laid, the album, is quieter. Stranger. Sadder. More intimate. It is full of people trying to reach each other and repeatedly discovering all the things that get in the way. Faith. Fear. Ego. Distance. Silence. Death. The awful knowledge that loving somebody also means accepting the possibility of losing them.

Hovering over all of it is the legendary Brian Eno, helping James discover that sometimes the most interesting thing a band can do when it has become very big is stop trying to sound big.

Released on 27 September 1993, Laid was James' fifth studio album. It reached No. 3 in the UK, only No. 86 here in Australia and, driven eventually by its title track, became their breakthrough record in the United States.

LISTEN TO THE WHOLE ALBUM: JAMES LAID

BEFORE LAID

James had already lived several musical lives by the time they arrived here. The band formed in Manchester in the early '80s, emerging from the same fertile musical world that produced The Smiths, Joy Division, New Order, The Stone Roses and so many other bands determined to make guitar music behave differently. Factory Records released their earliest material, Morrissey became an enthusiastic supporter and James toured with The Smiths before eventually signing with Sire. Success, however, took its sweet time.

Their early albums Stutter and Strip-mine earned admiration without turning James into stars. Line-ups shifted, label relationships became difficult and there were periods when the band seemed considerably more likely to fall apart than fill arenas. Then came Gold Mother.

'Come Home' opened doors to larger rooms, but 'Sit Down' changed everything. Its combination of communal release, vulnerability and a chorus seemingly designed for thousands of people to shout together turned James into one of Britain's biggest bands. By 1992, they were ready to make an album that sounded like it. With Seven, everything was broader, more polished and obviously built for large rooms.

And it worked.

The interesting part is what James did next. Rather than keep inflating, they began removing things. Andy Diagram left the group around the end of the Seven era, taking his distinctive trumpet with him. More importantly, James toured America opening for Neil Young with acoustic sets. Suddenly, a band accustomed to movement, volume and communal release had nowhere to hide. Booth described the experience as playing without a net: exposed, vulnerable and exhilarating.

That experience lodged itself deep inside what became Laid. Not an acoustic album, exactly, but definitely an uncluttered one.

BRIAN ENO ENTERS THE ROOM

James had wanted to work with Brian Eno for years. A founding member of Roxy Music, Eno had gone on to work with the likes of David Bowie, Talking Heads and U2, while introducing unconventional concepts and approaches to contemporary music and pioneering ambient music along the way. The guy was clearly a genius. They had approached him much earlier in their career, but the timing never worked. By 1993, however, James had become precisely the kind of band that could benefit from somebody questioning their instincts.

Eno's role on Laid wasn't simply to make James sound like Brian Eno. If anything, he helped them sound more like themselves. The sessions took place at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios, with two creative processes unfolding alongside one another. In one room James worked on the songs that would become Laid. In another, they were encouraged to improvise freely, often without any expectation that the music needed to become a conventional song at all. During these sessions, Eno and engineer Markus Dravs listened for moments worth preserving: fragments, strange rhythms, mistakes or points where several musicians briefly stumbled into something none of them could have planned. Those improvisations would eventually form the companion album Wah Wah, but the mentality seeped into Laid too.

For a band that had spent years learning how to make increasingly accomplished records, Eno became fascinated by what happened before everybody knew exactly what they were doing.

That distinction matters, and you can hear it throughout Laid. Instruments aren't constantly fighting for space. Ideas are allowed to appear and disappear. Some songs seem to reveal themselves while you're listening rather than arriving fully dressed.

'Dream Thrum', for example, grew from a piece of improvisation Eno recognised as worth pursuing. 'Knuckle Too Far' carries another beautifully Eno-ish story. During one take, Larry Gott and Tim Booth couldn't properly hear each other and ended up slightly misreading what the other was doing. When the band attempted to reproduce it correctly, the new version lost something, so they kept the mistake.

This ethos feels like the whole record in miniature: stop assuming the thing you intended to make is automatically more interesting than the unplanned thing that actually happened.

THE ALBUM ITSELF

That philosophy announces itself immediately. 'Out To Get You' doesn't behave like the opening song of an album by a band who had recently become enormous. It doesn't necessarily kick the doors open, but it does seem to quietly inspect whether anybody else is in the room.

Booth sounds suspicious, lonely and bruised, while Saul Davies' violin slowly becomes another emotional voice inside the song. The result is intimate without becoming fragile. Then 'Sometimes' demonstrates the other side of Laid—stripped-back James could still sound huge. The acoustic guitars push forward, the rhythm keeps gathering momentum and Booth throws himself into a lyric full of monsoon rain, flooded streets and people briefly overwhelmed by the natural world. The scale comes from repetition and performance rather than layers of production. It's one of the album's great tricks. Laid has space, but it never feels empty.

From there, the album gets increasingly difficult to summarise. 'Dream Thrum' floats somewhere between dream and unease. 'One Of The Three' brings Booth's longstanding fascination with religion into sharper focus, asking uncomfortable questions about redemption, sacrifice and who gets saved.

And then comes 'Say Something'. It began while Booth and Gott were barely communicating, but the song grows beyond whatever private disagreement inspired it. At its centre is one of the simplest and most painful requests in human relationships: just respond by saying anything and prove you're still there.

That anxiety runs throughout Laid. Again and again, people reach towards one another without knowing whether the connection will hold. Which brings us to 'Five-O'. If 'Laid' is the song everybody remembers, 'Five-O' is the extraordinarily tender song that might best explain the album. Booth turns love into a series of questions. Can this last? What happens when it doesn't? What happens when one person dies first? Is loving somebody partly an act of faith in something you already know cannot be permanent?

There is nothing particularly youthful about that fear. It's not the panic of wondering whether somebody will leave you next week. It's the much more adult terror of finding something precious and realising that possession comes bundled with eventual loss. Around him, the band barely presses the issue. Guitar and violin drift through the spaces. Nobody tries to turn the song into a grand statement. They don't need to.

'P.S.' is thornier, attraction and resentment tangled together. 'Everybody Knows' offers one of the record's rare moments where another person actually manages to break through the walls. 'Knuckle Too Far' turns the endless motion of touring into something strangely static, one town and one anonymous bed bleeding into another. And then 'Low Low Low' starts contemplating the possible extinction of the human race.

Naturally, it sounds almost cheerful. That's another very James quality. Enormous questions arrive without warning and are frequently attached to melodies that seem considerably less concerned about them than Tim Booth is. Humanity develops technology, builds weapons, creates systems of power, spends centuries learning and progressing and still seems spectacularly capable of destroying itself.

James turn the whole thing into something approaching a crooked folk singalong. And somehow it works.

AND THEN, FINALLY, 'LAID'

Track eleven.

After an album of spiritual anxiety, loneliness, mortality and failed communication, somebody finally kicks the bedroom door open. 'Laid' barely hangs around long enough to explain itself.

Sex. Jealousy. Obsession. Power. Gender. Attraction. Destruction. Somebody dressing the narrator in women's clothes. Somebody calling the authorities. A bed apparently on fire with passion.

It is ridiculous, exhilarating and an absolutely killer pop song.

James themselves apparently didn't initially understand quite how potent it was. Brian Eno did.

Its brevity is part of the magic. There is no unnecessary second act and no attempt to turn it into an anthem. It races in, creates chaos and disappears. And its position on the album changes it.

On a playlist or soundtrack, 'Laid' sounds like three minutes of delirious sexual energy. Inside Laid, it feels almost like a sudden feverish release after forty minutes of people trying very hard to understand themselves.

Then James do something beautifully perverse and follow it with 'Lullaby'. Any release offered by the title track evaporates as the album returns to darker territory, before 'Skindiving' closes everything in a suspended, submerged state.

There is no triumphant finale and no neat answer, just Booth drifting further away while the music sinks with him.

Laid doesn't resolve itself.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

In Britain, James were already stars. They were even dubbed "the next Smiths" by the press.

In America, Laid changed their trajectory. The title track became the breakthrough, slowly acquiring a cultural life considerably larger than the album around it. Years later, its association with the American Pie films introduced the song to another generation who may never have known anything about James beyond those frantic two-and-a-half minutes.

Which brings us back to the strange position Laid occupies today. The song is immediately recognisable. The sleeve is immediately recognisable. The band name is familiar. But for plenty of listeners, the actual album remains strangely unexplored.

With time finally giving the album the slow burn it deserves, that is beginning to change. Three decades on, Laid increasingly sounds less like an alternative-rock artefact from 1993 and more like the moment James learned that removing things could make their music more powerful rather than less.

Its restraint has helped it age beautifully.

As has its uncertainty.

THE SLEEVE

And then there's that cover. Even people who barely know James seem to recognise it. The band photographed in dresses, Tim Booth barefoot at the centre, the whole image sitting somewhere between rock-band portrait, religious tableau and a particularly strange group holiday photograph. It remains instantly distinctive because it refuses the normal visual language of early-'90s guitar bands. Keep in mind, this landed smack bang in the middle of grunge's global dominance. There's no brooding black-and-white seriousness, no heroic poses and no attempt to make James look dangerous. Instead, there is something playful, ambiguous and vulnerable about it, which turns out to suit the record remarkably well. This is, after all, an album fascinated by identity, sexuality, faith, vulnerability and the uncomfortable things that happen when certainty disappears.

Perhaps the stranger question is the one we started with.

If so many of us knew this cover, why didn't we ever find out what was inside it?

IF YOU LIKE...

If Laid gets under your skin, there are plenty of places to go next. R.E.M. at their most introspective, Crowded House when Neil Finn lets the darkness creep in, The Waterboys, Talk Talk and the more spacious side of U2 all share some of its emotional or sonic DNA. You can also hear traces of this kind of expansive restraint in later bands including Elbow, Yo La Tengo and The National.

But the most obvious next move is simply more James.

Head backwards to Gold Mother and Seven to hear the band getting bigger.

Then put on Wah Wah and hear them dissolve.

WATCH / LISTEN

James – 'Sometimes'

One of the best examples of how Laid can feel enormous without being overcrowded.

James – 'Laid'

The obvious one. Still completely irresistible. Even if you know it well, watch it again and look out for Booth's Emmy-worthy performance. The dress, the stare, the grin, the twitchy movements, he commits wholly to every gloriously unhinged second of it. Every moment is believable.

James – 'Say Something'

A perfect entry point into the album's obsession with communication and distance.

James – Wah Wah

The companion piece. Put it on once you've lived with Laid for a while and listen for all the ideas that hadn't yet learned how to become songs.

WHY IT STILL HITS

Because Laid doesn't sound trapped in 1993.

There are records from the period where you can practically hear the decade before the first chorus arrives, but this isn't one of them. Eno's decision to leave air around James gives the music room to survive changing fashions. Acoustic guitars, violin, bass, drums and voice aren't particularly time-specific ingredients. More importantly, the emotional territory hasn't dated either.

People still fail to communicate.

People still fall in love and immediately become terrified of losing it.

People still look towards religion, spirituality and philosophy for answers.

People still get depressed.

People still have extremely ill-advised sex.

Humanity still appears alarmingly capable of making tremendous technological progress while remaining emotionally ridiculous.

Laid seems to get all of that.

And perhaps that is why the famous title track now feels less like the album's centrepiece than its Trojan horse. It gets you through the door.

The real record is waiting behind it inside. The simple fact that everybody knows 'Laid' and far fewer people know Laid feels well overdue for correction.

That feels well overdue for correction.