With more than 25 million albums sold over their 42-year career, Manchester legends James are amongst the most commercially and artistically successful – and most loved - alternative rock bands of their era.

Having gathered a cult following around compulsive art rock gallops like Johnny Yen during the 1980s, they broke through to mainstream chart success with their 1990 major label debut Gold Mother and went on to unite the early Nineties with euphoric anthems of solace, love, sex, loss and frustration at the ills of the world: Come Home, Sit Down, Sound, Sometimes (Lester Piggott) and Laid. Their fifth album Laid – the first of a string of James albums produced by Brian Eno - saw them break the US charts, while subsequent hit albums including Whiplash (1997), Millionaires (1999) and Pleased to Meet You (2001) cemented their standing as a classic 1990s singles act, adding Tomorrow, She’s a Star, Just Like Fred Astaire and Getting Away with It (All Messed Up) to their formidable canon.

The band entered a six-year hiatus in December 2001, but such was the connection and fervency of their fanbase that their 2007 reunion was met with such renewed success that it was as though they’d never been away.