53 f Getting It Done

From Uni social sec to Womad, from MC to Arts Council and EFDSS officer and now artist management, Alan James knows a thing or two about making stuff work. Elizabeth Kinder follows his tracks.

“P

unk came to Hull in 1977,” says Alan James, who was there. One week the audience at the University Students’ Union was sit-

ting cross-legged on the floor swaying to Caravan, the next up and standing, pogo- ing to The Damned. Also, Stuart Cosgrove (who was reading drama) strolled in for the new term rocking straight-legged jeans. These two events might seem totally unconnected, if not quite to each other, then certainly to the subsequent profiles of folk and world music in the UK. But the impact they had on James set him on a path that would help positively transform the fortunes of both across the British Isles.

“You couldn’t buy straight-legged jeans in Hull; you’d have to get your mum to take your flares in,” he says. “So I moved to London.” And he cut his hair, inspired not so much by Cosgrove as by David Bowie. With the release of Fame in his Thin White Duke incarnation, “Bowie,” says James, “became a fashion icon in the way that Lemmy did not. Bowie made skinny men cool.” Thus James could step out on his continuing career as a man of the times, to play his part in shaping their accompanying soundtrack.

Before this sartorial and geographical shift James gained his degree in Politics along with the realisation of what he wanted to do in life. Handily, Hull had given him a brilliant grounding in the wherewithal to achieve it. In this the study of politics was instrumental. This had not so much to do with reading the philoso- phies of Gramski, Marx and Hegel that the course entailed, but with the time it left to do other things.

That these included smoking on the library steps and incurring short shrift from Philip Larkin is not key to subsequent developments. James taking up the post of Social Sec at a time when for most bands the university circuit was a crucial step on the ladder of success, is.

At Hull, Social Sec was not a sabbatical position even though it meant running a full-time business. It included learning how to write contracts, negotiate with

agents and managers, organise staging, and generally do everything involved in promoting gigs, from putting the towels and rider in the dressing room (Lemmy’s first question leaping out of the van and onto the stage when pitching up late with Motorhead was, “Where’s the rider?”) to printing tickets and sorting out parking. It would not have been possible, says James, if he’d been studying Law or English.

In London James found his experience and newly acquired straight-legged jeans qualified him for a paid Ents. Officer job at ULU. “It was the time of The Slits, The Raincoats and Joy Division and you were short-changing the audience if you didn’t put at least three bands on a night (for an

entrance fee of £2.50).” Under his tenure, pioneering post-punk bands like A Certain Ratio, Scritti Politti and Cabaret Voltaire ripped it up from the ULU stage along with Aswad, Misty In Roots, Jamaican dub poet Michael Smith, John Martyn with Phil Collins, Orchestre Jazira, Ekome and Cul- ture. His love of Talking Heads – shared by his friend Justin Adams, who’d taken a break from studying at the Courtauld to operate the lights for the ULU gigs – led James to Fela Kuti. “I read a piece in the NME where Brian Eno was talking about Fela Kuti when My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts came out. I went straight round to Sterns on the Tottenham Court Road and bought Kalakuta Show.”

Photo: York Tilyer