James.
With Happy Mondays. Utilita Arena, Birmingham. November 2021.
James (2021).
Me and Anita. I only really booked it for Happy Mondays. I hadn't seen James before, but when I did, they blew the Mondays, and a lot of other bands I'd seen, off the stage. Non-stop, life-affirming brilliance.
It was the All the Colours of You tour. Before Sit Down, Tim Booth told the story of his father-in-law asking him to sing it on a video call shortly before he died of Covid, and the crowd sang the first verse on its own. The curfew cut Sometimes short, so the band just kept going unplugged.
Five years later I saw them again, in Newcastle.
The setlist.
All 19 songs from the night, in the order they played them. Listen: Apple Music · Spotify
Setlist from setlist.fm. More from 2021: my songs of the year.
On stage.
James three years earlier: Latitude festival, July 2018. Photo: DerekL, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, via Flickr, resized.