Tim Booth on The Smiths: "It was like coming to see a guru."
Part 2 of my 2011 interview with the James front man, on touring with The Smiths, a calendar pic with Moz, and why "we hate it when our friends become successful."
“People look from the outside and they think, especially young boys or girls, you want that level of adoration, but when it comes, at that level, and you’re close to it, there aren’t that many people who are that desperate to want that.”
Tim Booth of James was talking about himself in the quote above, but also about Morrissey, with whom he was good friends during the years of the Smiths and in the immediate aftermath. As detailed in part 1 of this interview, pulled from the vaults of those I conducted for my biography, A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths, James may have pre-dated their fellow Mancunians, but the two groups moved at a totally different speed, and so it was James who opened for The Smiths in Ireland in 1984, the UK in 1985 and would, as Tim explains below, have also supported their close friends in the US that year or the next if their meditation guru had not been coming to the UK instead! Yes, some bands are different than others. I hope you enjoy what follows.
(And a reminder: James are the subject of the next Crossed Channels podcast, which I co-host with of Jagged Time Lapse. That show, like my interview archives, are for paid-up subscribers to Wordsmith. Those subs start at $5/£4 a month, and also get you access to the entire Wordsmith archives, around 150 articles and counting.)
-I get the sense from [everything we’ve discussed so far] that you were closer to Morrissey than (to) the other Smiths, and you were observing him more than (you were) the other Smiths. Is that fair?
Yes. But Mike Joyce was really friendly with us. And Johnny was really friendly with us. And to add to that Morrissey cultural icon thing, there was something very big about the partnership, because Marr grounded Morrissey. And made him, I think, more accessible in some ways. It was Iggy and Williamson. Or Bowie and Mick Ronson. Where Morrissey got the lion’s share of the spotlight.
Below: Tim Booth joined Johnny Marr on stage at the beautiful Brooklyn Paramount Theater on October 8, almost 45 years since I first saw James live, opening for The Smiths at the Oxford Apollo. It was a wonderful evening. Both of them!