How Tim Booth Accidentally Became Britain’s Last Great Cultural Export While Everyone Was Looking at Harry Styles
Tim Booth and the Accidental Soft Power of a Mancunian Shaman
By Our Correspondent, Still Recovering from Glastonbury Mud, Somewhere Over the Atlantic
It is a truth universally acknowledged that when the world tilts toward apocalypse, people reach for either canned goods or anthems. In 2024, while governments squabble over submarine cables and semiconductor embargoes, one bespectacled 64-year-old from Cheshire has become an unlikely export more reliable than British rainfall: Tim Booth, front-mystic of James, purveyor of existential pop songs that double as group-therapy sessions for the streaming age.
From São Paulo rooftop bars blasting “Sit Down” at ironic volumes to Kyiv metro buskers turning “Sometimes” into a defiant hymn, Booth’s nasal incantations have slipped past customs without a single tariff. Spotify lists James in the daily Top 50 of 27 countries that have never hosted the band on tour—proof that algorithms, like viruses, ignore visas. Somewhere in Lagos, a fintech bro times his meditation app to “Born of Frustration.” In Jakarta, a bridal party choreographs its aisle walk to “Laid,” blissfully unaware the song is about catastrophic co-dependence. The empire may have crumbled, but its neurotic pop poetry has simply gone cloud-native.
Booth himself appears faintly embarrassed by the reach. When pressed in a recent Zoom—conducted from his kitchen, which looks suspiciously like it still contains the same 1993 kettle—he muttered something about “accidental diplomacy” before comparing global touring to “being a minor UN envoy with better catering.” The comparison isn’t entirely glib. Each summer, James play festivals in territories whose diplomatic relationships with Britain are otherwise defined by post-Brexit trade spats and weapon-sales receipts. Yet for ninety minutes, tens of thousands of Europeans forget to argue about fishing quotas and instead raise plastic cups to the exquisite pain of being alive.
Of course, soft power is never entirely soft. The band’s latest album, “Be Opened by the Wonderful,” was recorded in part with Ukrainian refugee musicians in Berlin; proceeds from the vinyl—pressed in the Czech Republic, shipped in sleeves made in Turkey—fund trauma therapy in Lviv. Somewhere in the supply chain a war criminal probably still got paid for diesel, but that’s globalization for you: every saint has a blood-stained ledger tucked behind the halo.
Back home, the British press prefers its cultural exports either knighted or canceled, and Booth has narrowly missed both fates. He once suggested in an interview that monogamy was “a capitalist construct designed to sell dishwashers,” which earned him a temporary slot on the Daily Mail’s “woke anarchist” dartboard. Meanwhile, the Guardian keeps trying to enlist him as a Brexit-whisperer, apparently because anyone north of Watford who reads Rumi qualifies as a geopolitical sage. Booth’s response has been to quote Leonard Cohen at them until they go away—a tactic the Foreign Office might consider.
The darker joke is that James’ music has soundtracked three decades of Western self-absorption just as the planet began its final feedback loop. Every time “Getting Away With It (All Messed Up)” blasts across an Alpine snowboard playlist, another glacier files divorce papers. Booth knows this; he’s been lecturing crowds about carbon offsets since before Greta Thunberg learned to sail. The band now tours with a carbon auditor who looks like she hasn’t slept since Kyoto. Audience members earn discounts on merch if they arrive by train, which is the closest rock ’n’ roll has come to indulgence remission since indulgences were an actual thing.
And still the songs leak into places that can’t spell Manchester without autocorrect. Last month, a TikTok trend in Seoul used “She’s a Star” to soundtrack before-and-after plastic-surgery reveals—an irony so dense it threatens to implode into a black hole of cultural appropriation. Booth, ever the Buddhist, shrugged: “Attachment leads to suffering, but at least they’re dancing.” In a world where despair is the only growth industry, even commodified transcendence beats no transcendence at all.
So when the next COP summit collapses into procedural farce and delegates sneak out to the hotel bar, don’t be surprised if the piano player launches into “Sit Down.” It won’t save the ice caps, but it might persuade two mid-level diplomats to stay for one more round and accidentally agree on methane reduction. Call it the Booth Doctrine: if you can’t fix the planet, at least harmonize the panic.
Until the oceans finish their slow-motion heist, Tim Booth will keep howling about human frailty to anyone with Wi-Fi and a wound. The joke, as ever, is on us: we thought we were buying pop songs, when in fact we were subscribing to the only international language we have left—shared exquisite misery, three minutes at a time.
