Maybe I’m Amazed: A Story of Love and Connection in Ten Songs

He did not join Mott the Hoople until he was thirty; in his voice, and the songs he began to write, there was already a strong sense of a life that had been fully lived, and someone who had seen through the rituals of the music business, even as he dutifully went through them. Sitting for an interview in a shabby-looking canteen area with three of his bandmates (the group’s guitarist, John Squire, would soon leave the Roses, and was elsewhere), he began proceedings by reaching for a toy harmonica embedded in a plastic banana. Is his reaction to barking dogs, vacuum cleaners and hand-dryers down to the fact that they are full of discords and dissonances, and that their overwhelming strangeness never really fades? As a result, things still feel fragile and fitful, but James starts to make progress.