It's Saturday night and you're flipping through a case of CDs looking for something to play in the car. It has to be an album where every track is a killer as that is the only way you will be able to get through the crunch at the 101/134 interchange that you are required to take in order to get to Melissa's house. You pick up the CD where the guys are dressed in Monty Python-style drag-- drab potato sacks occasionally spiced up with a Queen Mum floral prints. I haven't listened to this one from start to finish in years, you think. In the car, you quickly realize that, despite the amount of time that has passed since I used to listen to this album on a daily basis, you still have every word of every song committed to memory.
In late-1993, a Manchester band whose name, James, was barely recognizable in the United States released Laid. If you kept close tabs on the music press, you would have understood that this band had been hyped upon the release of two of its prior albums. They were already massive in the UK, frequently compared to Simple Minds in magazines like Select, which seemed odd to an American teenager like yourself on account of the fact that Simple Minds had faded from collective US memory years earlier. If you were a diehard Anglophile, you probably had bought James' self-titled release with the daisy on the cover three years prior and you probably fell for "Sit Down" and you probably hoped that you could get into a stadium with 20,000 other people and sing along with this number like you read the Brits were doing. You probably told all your friends about it, but you knew that the popularity of UK bands was beginning to wane and, besides, all of your friends were busy anticipating the new Guns'n'Roses album. Two years later, you bought Seven and stayed up until 3:00 a.m. so that you could catch the video for "Born of Frustration" on 120 Minutes and you would race home after school so that you could wait through the last minutes of Wally George's rant-fest on KDOC because you knew that, once his toupee was knocked off his head by a skinhead, George would sign off and Gia DeSantis would introduce a new James video on Request Video. Again, you hoped that James really would become the next big thing, but it just didn't work out that way. The band built up enough of a following to play LA a few times. One of those gigs was at a Hollywood club and you and your friend were pretty sure that there was no age limit, so you decided you were going to go, but are thwarted by parents who refused to give you rides out to the Sunset Strip on school nights and were still really pissed at you for some teenage antics that occurred a few weeks prior (plus, they moved the doghouse outside of your bedroom window, so sneaking out wasn't an option). Instead, you took to requesting "Hymn from a Village," released as a 7" off Factory Records a decade prior, on Rodney on the Roq, so that you could tape it and listen to that grainy radio copy every day and sit around with your one really cool friend and wonder if you actually were going to have to move to a rainy island to find people who like the same music you do.
When Laid hit the streets, you had pretty much given up any notion of James becoming popular, particularly since everyone and their grandma was obsessed with that band from Seattle. But something happened and the album's title track burned up the playlists on KROQ and MTV. The album had gold-level sales in the US, no easy feat for a British band at the time, and became a staple of late-night cruising sessions across an earthquake-stricken San Fernando Valley by the end of your junior year of high school. You and the friends you made at your new high school would roll past collapsed buildings in second-hand cars, ashing cigarettes and clutching onto your newly acquired licenses while screaming "The neighbors complain about the noises above" at the top of your lungs. You knew that Morrissey hated it when his friends became successful, but you didn't because a moment like this was basically validation that James fans were onto something.
But James-mania didn't last. Wah-Wah and Whiplash didn't sell like Laid and, after the release of the band's singles compilation at the end of the decade, James lost its US deal, left to be remembered as a One Hit Wonder, when really it was so much more. The band's last two albums were only available as hard-to-obtain imports and when singer Tim Booth ventured solo, little was mentioned outside of official website posts that the remaining members were searching for a new singer. That site hasn't been updated in four years.