Tim Booth furrows his brow and purses his lips, deep in thought. I’ve just asked who would play him in a biopic of James, the band he has fronted since 1982, and he is taking the question very seriously. “I’m too old to play me,” he says, despite having acting experience. He thinks a bit longer. “In my ideal world, I’d go for Timothée Chalamet: he’s skinny enough, and he’s a good enough actor. So my ego would say Timothée Chalamet – and he gave me chills in the Dylan biopic.” But can the American dance? Booth grins, raising an eyebrow. “Yeah, he has to have the dance moves. That could be a problem.”Booth’s life story would certainly make for interesting viewing. Recruited to the Manchester-formed band initially for his dancing skills, he had a near-death experience at 21 because of a chronic liver condition that means he has been sober for the duration of the band’s existence – not average rock-star behaviour. (It also explains why, at 66, he could pass for someone at least a decade younger.) Then there was the period when he and Jim Glennie, the James guitarist, were members of Lifewave, a controversial spiritual group often referred to as a cult, in the 1980s. There was his solo work, including a collaborative album with Angelo Badalamenti, the Twin Peaks composer, in the 1990s and his brief dalliance with Hollywood, most famously with a role in Christopher Nolan’s film Batman Begins, in 2005. A forthcoming documentary about the band, titled James: Getting Away with It, recently premiered at SXSW London. “It shows that traumatic time from the 1990s when we were seemingly on top of the world but internally falling apart,” he says. “It was quite hard to watch for me, although it’s very funny. I think it’s very comedic from an audience’s point of view, but it’s fascinating seeing where we’ve got to. “The whole band roared with laughter and cried with tears. We enjoyed looking at the journey and, in that context, appreciating where we are today. So it’s fantastic. I just hope we don’t go backwards. “I don’t think we will, though.”A documentary about the band, titled James: Getting Away with It, recently premiered at SXSW London It is gratifying that more than four decades since James formed, notwithstanding that 1990s implosion, which led to a six-year hiatus, the band are as popular as ever, selling out increasingly bigger venues and, as evidenced by their last album Yummy in 2024, still making great records. Booth, who is now based in Brighton, on the south coast of England, with his wife of 30 years, Kate Shela, is happy to be back on home turf after a long period living in the United States. He is also looking forward to returning to Ireland this month for a trio of dates. He vividly remembers the disastrous events that befell their first Irish tour, in 1984, when they were supporting The Smiths.“We had a camper van from the 1950s that we travelled in,” he says. “We had to ditch it somewhere outside Derry because it broke down, and we couldn’t afford to fix it. So someone probably still has it in that area and has it working again. “But I remember that tour really well. It was a lot of fun. And I remember when we came to Derry how militarised and appalling it was, really; we were told that it was not wise to be in there for long. Rumour had it that The Smiths had to get permission from the IRA to tour at the time.”The Smiths later covered the James track What’s the World? Booth is still in touch with Johnny Marr, having shared a headline tour of North America with the guitarist in 2024. There is no mention of Morrissey, although Booth wryly noted in a 2023 interview: “We don’t speak ill of the dead.”James have certainly outlasted many of their peers from the Madchester period. What is the secret to their longevity? “Botox,” Booth jokes. “God knows. I mean, we love what we do. Even when we were dysfunctional in the 1990s, with a lot of addiction issues and falling out, we loved what we did. And we got to work with Brian Eno for five albums, which was amazing.”Yummy was the band’s 18th studio album, but they will always have a handful of signature songs. Booth says he remains proud of songs such as Sit Down and Laid. Improvisation is still key to a James concert: they will habitually change the set list mid-gig. “We are a mixture of this level of organisation and a level of absolute chaos – and the chaos is what we purposely bring to the mix,” he says. “If you’re too organised you become too rigid, over-rehearsed. You’re more like a theatre act than a spontaneous piece of communication. It’s important for us not to do it by numbers. If you do it by numbers you get a soulless performance.”The band encourage their audience to stay in the moment, often gently suggesting that people keep their phones in their pockets during the set. As a long-time meditation practitioner, Booth admits that it’s a tricky topic to navigate, as explored on the Yummy track Mobile God.“We’ve all got a god in our pocket now that can tell us anything and can entertain us endlessly, and there’s no room for boredom,” he says. “But boredom is often the wet nurse to creativity. “We want people to be in the moment as much as possible, and if they’re on their phones they’re basically splitting their attention. And if you split your attention you’re not in the now, and the power of experience is in the now.“The other thing is that I do like to come into the crowd [while singing], but if people are either thrusting phones in my face or if I’m trying to stage dive, and people are wanting to catch me with one hand and film me with another, they’ve broken that trust. “I can’t stage dive to one-handed people: it’s dangerous. So some nights I go in, some nights I don’t. If I look out and there’s arms full of cameras, I can’t do it. But I don’t want to police anything, either. It needs to be almost a voluntary choice of people to say, ‘This is worth being present for’.”Tim Booth stage dives while performing at Glastonbury in 2024. Photograph: Jim Dyson/Redferns Writing has already begun for the follow-up to Yummy, which was the first James album to reach number one on the UK album chart. For Booth, there is no end of topics to mine for his lyrics. He has written political songs – most notably on Government Walls, from the album Gold Mother, which denounced the UK government’s alleged shoot-to-kill policy during the Troubles – but the tone has to be right.“There’s so much going on in the world that’s distressing, so I want to sing about the Epstein list, and Iran and Israel, but many songs can’t take that weight,” he says. “It takes a very specific song and a specific energy in me to pull off a political song. It’s like when my anger gets really, really indignant, then I can write a good lyric that I’m happy with, but it has to be very clear for me. “So it’s hard, and there’s a couple of songs on this [new] record that I wanted to load up with my fury at the world, my impotent rage at the growth of fascism in America, and the way billionaire corporations are controlling our feed, which means they are controlling the vote, and that is just driving me nuts. “I’m wanting to get that in song, but it’s hard to get into song without it being a bit dry, or dull, or prescriptive, or preachy. So it may be that this album is going to be about the many aspects of love: romantic love, love that blows you up, long-term love, spiritual love. Therefore, maybe I’m meant to let go of these ideas for political songs.”[ All Madonna’s albums rated, in reverse order – from unlistenable to sublimeOpens in new window ]Keeping an open mind has been imperative to Booth’s creative process. So many people, he says, get stuck in a rut with their musical taste, but he adores younger acts such as Geese, Black Country, New Road and Idles. At 66, he pooh-poohs the notion of being an indie survivor; indie thriver may be a more accurate description.“We’re still sticking to our ideals, our sense of freshness. There are only a few bands who get bigger as they get older – because at our age we’ve lost our beauty privilege. Who wants to look at old people on stage? You can put a smiley emoji after that,” he says.“So you’ve got to be pretty special to cross that barrier. Leonard Cohen did it, Nick Cave did it, but there are not many other bands who’ve done that.” He smiles. “So we feel very honoured by the fact that we’re still here.”James will headline Forest Fest Music & Arts Weekend, in Emo, Co Laois, on Saturday, July 25th; they also play the Heineken Big Top, in Galway, as part of the city’s international arts festival, on Thursday, July 23rd; and at Gleneagle Arena, Killarney, Co Kerry, on Friday, July 24th