To the Bristol O2 Academy on a Saturday night for a special warm up show for James’ forthcoming arena tour and summer festival shows. Cheap tickets (relatively speaking that is at “only” £50 a pop) and an intimate venue with no big screens or big production values. The big question was: what sort of warm up would it be?
I had populated the Bakehouse March playlist with a fairly conventional selection of James’ biggest songs in order to whet Jane’s appetite for the gig but half suspected it might not be a straight run through the hits in a downsized venue.
After all the last time I had seen the band, ten years ago opening The Other Stage at Glastonbury (where Nic, Wilf and I had assembled to celebrate our collective 50th birthdays) they had perversely ignored the braying of the festival crowd and not played Sit Down.
So maybe it would be one of those warm ups that played more to the devoted faithful than to more casual fans like us, a run through deep cuts and obscurities or maybe even (gulp) new tracks.
If so, so be it. We were up for that. After all there had been plenty to enjoy with 2024’s Yummy and likewise the two new tracks off the Nothing But Love compilation, a hugely comprehensive and sprawling best of which ventured beyond the singles and into more niche selections and fan favourites.
And in any event in recent years I had started to migrate beyond the hits and even belatedly joined the cult surrounding Getting Away with It (All Messed Up), the track that sound tracked the end of the band’s first era in 2001 and which my pre-gig instinct had told me would probably be the track I would end up writing about on here.
So all in all I felt ready to resist the casual punter tag and to look beyond the likes of Sound, Come Home, Sometimes, Laid, Born of Frustration, Sit Down, all the usual suspects.
As it was the gig covered all bases delivering up new songs and deep cuts but also a good few of the big guns: a rambling but absorbing and ultimately celebratory road trip through James’ long career.
And new songs really did mean new songs because the live premieres of Nantucket and Yeah Yeah Yeah were presented as works in progress with Tim frowning in concentration throughout as he read off typed lyric sheets.
However I was wrong about Getting Away With It (All Messed Up), it was missing in action as was Sit Down, the latter for my second time.
But Say Something, Come Home, Born of Frustration and Laid were all rolled out to an ecstatic reception from the Bristol faithful so no complaints. Say Something led to Tim’s first trip out down onto the narrow barrier to soak up the love and for the closing Laid well, it was full Don’t Look Back in Anger territory, Tim just handing it over to us to sing.
And my headline track? Well the track that did it was Tomorrow, a song I somehow criminally overlooked back in 1997 (and which actually dates back even farther to 1994’s Wah Wah, albeit in an earlier and truncated embryonic form).
1997 would have found me in Dubai but I do not recall even bothering with the Whiplash album, from which Tomorrow was the second single. I certainly knew its flagship and first single She’s a Star which garnered a lot of radio play and made an appearance on Now 36 but it didn’t actually do that much for me, the chorus reached for the stars but I found it a bit too high pitched and obvious, too obviously straining for anthemic status.
So that meant no Whiplash for me but a year later I did buy and enjoy the Best Of compilation which featured subsequent single releases Tomorrow and Waltzing Along in addition to She’s a Star, thereby rather underlining that I had been sleeping on the job a year earlier.
Because Tomorrow in particular was and is fantastic and at Bristol in 2026 it truly soared, you could feel its gleeful energy bouncing off the walls.
The energy, the optimism, its gleeful ebb and flow, live it built and built to a magnificent final flourish, and you could truly feel the love for the track in the room, completely out of proportion to its modest chart placing (number # 12) at the time.
So maybe I can be excused just a little bit for not recognising the power of Tomorrow back in ‘97.
Now your grip’s too strong
You can’t catch love with a net or a gun
Gotta keep faith that your path will change
Gotta keep faith that your luck will change tomorrow
Tomorrow
