By the time of their first flush of success – concomitant with the turn-of-the-90s Mancunian baggy scene, when indie discos thronged with people in big daisy petal T-shirts, and the anthemic Sit Down was only kept off the No 1 spot in the charts by Chesney Hawkes – James had already had as many ups, downs and near misses as most bands have in a lifetime.
Subtitled Sects, Trance and Rock’n’Roll, this good-natured, funny and occasionally rousing documentary portrait details them all. It begins when their middle-class, boarding school-educated soon-to-be-singer Tim Booth meets cute with a bunch of working-class borderline hooligans in a band, after they sneak into the University of Manchester’s student union bar and swipe his drinks. Described by their manager as “a band that took all the wrong turns and made every mistake possible”, they turned down Factory Records’ offer to release a first album because they didn’t want to have a product number. They then turned down a support slot on the Smiths’ US tour because half the group had by then joined an esoteric meditation cult and the scheduling would have clashed with the bassist’s enlightenment.
