When I left Hampshire and skittered off to London, I packed a bunch of things into boxes to ship to my mother. As is basically inevitable when one does anything besides languish in the bosom of one’s family immediately after college, I never saw most of the contents of those boxes ever again.
One of things things that went into those boxes was my copy of the James album Wah Wah. I was heavy into Pulp at the time (I had finished my div 3 with no coffee and very little booze by basically listening to This Is Hardcore 7 or 8 times per day), and I think that I may have considered James to not have enough “fourths and ninths,” my glib way to describe the haute-pop style of Jarvis and co. I didn’t want that kind of space-cadetery any more.
After periodically being made aware of the absence and deciding it would be too much of a pain to get in the cardboard packaging over the years, I finally got a new copy in the mail today. It’s pretty heady stuff. The kind of thing that you get from miles of tape and a deck of oblique strategies. Glad to have it back.