‘JAMES GIGS ARE A BIG CELEBRATION OF THE FUCK UP OF BEING ALIVE’ | INTERVIEW WITH SAUL DAVIES

INTERVIEW | SAUL DAVIES – JAMES By Keira Knox

Few musicians can claim to have joined a band as a ‘temporary measure’ and stayed for over three decades, but Saul Davies is anything but typical. Since being discovered at an improvisation night in Manchester in 1989, Saul has become the multi-instrumentalist backbone of James. Whether he’s wielding a violin with punk-rock ferocity or crafting the soaring guitar textures that define the band’s arena-filling sound, his influence is woven into the very fabric of their 45 year legacy. We sat down Saul to discuss the band’s enduring chemistry, touring stories and the upcoming 2026 ‘Love is the Answer’ arena tour.

Looking back over your career, what feels most surreal about the longevity of James?

That’s a very good question. It is a bit surreal, really. When I joined James in 1989, the band had been going for a few years, since ’81. I just thought when I joined, along with Dave, our drummer, and then later that year, Mark joined our keyboard player, and Andy kind of appeared because we made a record, Gold Mother, we made that year. I just didn’t expect it to be anything other than just like almost week by week, and then it would just disappear.

I don’t think we ever had the kind of arrogance. I don’t mean this in a bad way, the arrogance of Oasis, you know, that was like, ‘we’re going to conquer the world’. We’re going to be the biggest band since, you know, we didn’t feel like that.  I didn’t imagine that. We’re in our 45th year now! So, it is a bit weird to think, oh, what should have been just like a hobby? Or should it just been something that you did and then didn’t do anymore? We’re still here. This tour that we’re doing in April this year is the biggest tour of our career. It’s kind of mad, really.

Do you feel more connected to your early work now than you did like sort of a decade ago? And does distance change that relationship with that music?

I think I probably speak for all of us when I say that we tend not to listen to anything that we’ve done. I think one of the main reasons why we’re still going in the way that we are, we really entered probably a year or two ago, a really healthy phase for the band is because we make new music, some of which I think is great. It sets us apart, I think, from a lot of our peers. I think it’s pretty scary as you get older. You think, oh, well, maybe I can’t. You begin to doubt yourself. If you think about it in sport, say, as you get older, just naturally, you can’t do that thing anymore. You can’t be the best footballer in the world anymore when you’re 50.Your brain might say you are, but you’re not. Even Mo Salah is going to be fucked in a couple of years.

So, just naturally, things tell you that you’re done. As a creative, it doesn’t necessarily matter how old you are. There’s not really a physical activity, it’s more emotional or spiritual or intellectual, expression of what it is to be alive. Nevertheless, fears start to appear around thinking, you’re not going to be very good anymore. You know, you can still play, but is it worth hearing? We are very restless as a band, and we never stop trying to do new things. We’ve become, I suppose, quite aware that it’s something like our fans really want us to do new music and do new things . Fuck it, that’s great, because we are restless, and we are quite creative. And not everything always works, but that’s normal.

I’ve seen a lot of people, describe James as quite a timeless band. You can still listen to music from years ago, and it still feel relevant. What does being timeless mean to you as a band? What does it mean to you personally?

When we make a tune, it’s very much of that moment, and then we move on. I suppose the only time we might go back to music is when we want to either have a good laugh, and go, oh fuck, what were we doing? Or we think, oh, let’s put something in the set. Let’s revisit something and learn it and understand what it was we were doing. And then you force yourself to listen.  

I think, collectively, we’re quite scared about nostalgia, about being nostalgic, because we don’t feel nostalgic. We feel like we’re doing new things, and it’s good, right? Challenging ourselves. The relationship with your music does change,  because the relationship with your own life changes, and with each other. I have to say, I’m often quite pleasantly, really pleasantly surprised by when I go back to hear things from early days, and I go, wow, there’s something great  about even the naivety of certain things that you did.

It’s a beautiful process, that of reimagining yourself, is it a bit like looking at photographs of yourself when you’re young. The thing about creative stuff is, if you put it out into the world, like music, it becomes very much the property of the people that consume it, then, and the people that buy it. It’s also a process that our fans go through.

Recently, we did some signings in some independent stores, and it was amazing to hear some of the stories that people tell you when they stand in front of you, and say quite private things to you in a way, and quite interesting things about when a particular song hit them, and why it was important, and whatever. And that forces you to re-evaluate your music as well.

One woman came to us, and she said, just a few years ago, she was determined to end her own life, and she knew exactly how she was going to do it. She had everything planned. Her plan was undone by, her friend bought her a ticket to come and see our gig.  I think the idea was that she was going to end her life the next day, and she’d never seen us play before. She left the gig and said, fuck that, I’m not killing myself. But it’s just, that’s what music does, though. It changes your perspective on things It’s amazing. Yeah.

You can imagine you’re sitting there, and somebody’s telling you this, and you’re just like, wow. That’s a heavy responsibility, which you don’t know you even have, because you don’t have it, you didn’t give yourself that responsibility. You didn’t get a stamp from the government, did you? Saying you are now responsible, you know what I mean? 

James is known for such incredible live shows, what does having a great audience and reception mean to you as a band?

It’s everything! In the next few weeks, we’re going to do some little acoustic things, like in the Cavern in Liverpool. It’s a very tiny space and not very many people, so it doesn’t really matter whether it’s the Co-op Arena or it’s the Cavern, you get the same, if you get that energy in the room, which is just something that naturally happens with us. I think we’re quite intense musically. Even when it’s a celebration, if you’ve seen some of our shows, you probably agree. Even though, the best James gigs are big celebrations of the fuck up of being alive. In all of our glory, all of our failures and our successes and all the rest of it.

But one thing is that we’re quite intense, and it never really lets up. And that creates a bit of a vibe between the band, us on the stage amongst each other. I mentioned Oasis earlier, and I wasn’t able to go to any of their gigs that they did last year. I looked at some of the footage from some of the shows, and I thought what remarkable events they must have been, you know, for those guys to stand on stage again, together. Maybe they thought they would do it, maybe they didn’t think they were ever going to do it again, whatever, it doesn’t really matter. But there they were playing in front of a football stadium after a football stadium of people whose response to their music was so insane.

Sometimes I feel it’s like that, you just you get blown away by the noise from people, or the intensity of the response from people, because some of our music is very delicate, as you know, in some of it, and there’s real power in delicate music. Without the audience, we’d still enjoy loving making music together, but it would seem a bit pointless.

2025 was such a huge year of gigs for James as well, Neighbourhood Weekender headline, you played rock and roll circus, supported Catfish and the Bottlemen at some huge venues, including stadiums as well. What was your highlight for 2025?

We did some really, really nice things last year. It was great. I love playing in America, and we did go to the States in September and October. The year before, and we’d been with Johnny Marr, which was great as well. What a nice man he is, and what a wonderful musician. This series of shows that we did in September, October last year, I thought that was the highlight for me, not one gig even within it, but just the whole tour, because we did something that I thought maybe we would never do, which is we just, although we mixed it up with other songs, some songs from the last record, and some catalogue as well. Primarily, the idea was just to play the album Laid, I didn’t think we’d ever do that. But we did.

It was the only way, probably in America, that we were going to be able to go and just do it ourselves, it was amazing. This kind of touches on what you were saying earlier about the relationship to your music. We were forced to go back and relearn some of the songs from Laid that we never play. We play some of the songs anyway, obviously, because ‘Out To Get You‘ is there and sometimes, and ‘Laid‘ is there and ‘Five-O‘, and we play those songs quite often. But there’s a lot of other songs on that record that we don’t play, if ever, really played. We were forced to learn them. And it was a remarkable process.

I don’t think we’ve ever been better as a band than on that tour. It’s a shame people in the UK didn’t see us. But people over there did. I don’t think we’ve ever been better. It freed us up again, there’s a thing that happens when you play in festivals, which is you don’t get enough time really to express yourself. It becomes like a snapshot of the band rather than being the band in a way. It was only us in the venue, the shows were really long. And we split them into two parts. We had even had an interval so we could kind of get our breath back.

After that, we went to South America, and I always love going to South America, because you never quite know what you’re going to get. You kind of know what you’re going to get in Sheffield. You don’t know what you’re going to get in Brazil. It was it actually on that American tour, we did play a couple of festivals, we played a festival called Riot Fest, which is one of the biggest alternative festivals in America, in Chicago. We absolutely fucking smashed it. It was amazing. We were on fire. When you’re backstage after a gig, you always know whether you touch people because other musicians want to tell you how good you were. Something happened, we hit the stage just at the right time, something and maybe about the weather. I don’t know, it’s Chicago, it’s hard, you know, it’s hardcore, it’s powerful. And there’s 100,000 people there. We just clicked with the people there. And it went insane. So that was a fiery, fiery moment .

America, what’s really nice about it is because I hate going on a tour bus, I hate tour buses, they’re horrible places, because everybody else is on them. You never get a break from everybody. So I like to drive. It’s a bit (16:30) of a problem driving across America, it’s fucking massive. Jimmy, our bass player and founder member of James, he’s not a big fan of the bus. We were renting these ridiculous cars that only in America, you could get and then we would just drive after the shows. We’d come off stage by 11 o’clock at night, we’d be in some truck that we’d rented. And you can feel bad, you know, because you’re destroying the planet and all the rest of it. But a little bit of me is like, I don’t give a shit. This is mad. This is what America is about. Right? It’s about excess. It’s very difficult to not do excess when you’re in America, because it just because everything is so big and silly. We kind of clamber up into our truck and drive off into the night and then stay in some insane motel somewhere and then say, I’ll see you tomorrow, Jim. I’ll see you tomorrow. Then do the rest of the drive the next day across America. So our experience of being in America is very different because we felt like, truckers almost.

You’ve got a huge headline tour on the horizon with some huge venues including Manchester’s Co-Op Live, how has the build up for this been for you all? and is there a venue you’re most excited to play?

All of the venues that we’re doing, we haven’t played in Nottingham for years, for example, and we’re going to play Nottingham on this tour. The Leeds Arena, we’ve never done a bad gig there. It’s magic. Same with what’s now called the M&S fucking arena in Liverpool. It’s the Echo. You know, call it what you want, but it’s called the Echo. I still call the one in Manchester 9X. Glasgow is cool. I think the best sounding venue maybe in the world is the Co-op Arena. We did it just after it opened, and it was amazing. It was like, wow, this is, they really got it right. I’ve not seen a band in there, so I don’t know from the perspective of being a punter in there, but as a performer, it’s absolutely insane. It’s amazing. So we’re really lucky to go in and play there. It’s going to be sold out. It’s almost sold out now, I think.

I just think we’re really fortunate to have to do this tour. It’s ongoing kind of our relationship with Simon Moran as well. SJM, he’s been hugely significant in the career of James. When I joined in 1989, I think James and the Inspiral Carpets were the first two bands he ever promoted. SJM Concerts, which is a massive pillar of how our live industry works, as you’ll know. He’s very connected to our band as well. And so it shows his ongoing faith in us that we can fill these places, you know, as well.

It’s beautiful, really. I mean, nobody should expect to have a job like the job that we have. It’s a little bit like, when you’re a kid and somebody says to you, what do you want to be when you grow up? And you say, oh, an astronaut or a racing car driver or whatever. We get to do one of those jobs. I want to be in a band. I remember one many, many years ago, some years before she actually passed away. My grandmother, who was a very dour Scottish lady, but she lived in Oldham and I was in her house and we were watching Top of the Pops. And she said to me, so maybe one day you’ll be on Top of the Pops, because I just started learning how to play violin. I was very young at the time. And I said, oh, yeah, maybe. That’s all I could think about the first time we did Top of the Pops. We were on it nine times. And by then she’d passed away. So she never got to see me on Top of the Pops. But I thought it was great. These are the things that, that’s when you pinch yourself and go, oh, yeah, I’m doing a job that, you shouldn’t really do. It shouldn’t really exist, should it? 

You can catch James on tour this April across the UK – Tickets HERE.