James - BBC In Concert, Brixton Academy, London, Britain, 12-9-1993

When it comes to the British band James, generally speaking, I only like them at about the "greatest hits" level. However, I make an exception for their 1993 album "Laid." I think a lot of people agree. If you look at their page at the crowd-sourced rateyourmusic.com, "Laid" gets the highest rating, as well as way more votes than their other albums. Perhaps it was the fact that they collaborated with producer Brian Eno for the first time that took their creativity to a higher level. But whatever the reason, I consider that a five-star album.

Given my opinion on that, I was very pleased to recently discover that James did a BBC concert in late 1993 to promote the "Laid" album. Since that fits into my big BBC project, it's a no-brainer that I post this unreleased concert here.

The sound quality is excellent. My only quibble is that there's no banter between songs whatsoever. Perhaps the BBC cut that out as part of their frequent habit of cutting concerts down to fit into an hour-long radio show, I don't know.

Actually, I had another kind of quibble, that some of the excellent songs from that album weren't included in the BBC broadcast. (Again, probably due to the BBC cutting things down.)  So I found another concert James did in France just two weeks earlier, which was broadcast on French radio at the time. Most of the songs played were the same, but three were different. So I've included those three at the end of this album.

This album contains ten of the 13 songs from "Laid." But the band has other very good songs, as the four non-Laid songs here show.

This album is an hour and eight minutes long. Just the BBC portion is 53 minutes.

01 Born of Frustration (James)
02 Sound (James)
03 Laid (James)
04 Knuckle Too Far (James)
05 Honest Joe (James)
06 Out to Get You (James)
07 Low Low Low (James)
08 Skindiving (James)
09 P. S. (James)
10 Lullaby (James)
11 Sometimes [Lester Piggott] (James)
12 Come Home (James)
13 Five-O [Edit] (James)
14 Say Something [Edit] (James)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16023995/Jmes_1993b_BBCInConcrtBrixtnAcadmyLondnBrtain__12-9-1993_atse.zip.html

I couldn't find any really good pictures of the band in concert in 1993. So I used one that only shows the band's lead singer, Tim Booth. This is from the 1994 Woodstock concert.