Wendy James is returning with an ambitious double album, Queen High Straight
Wendy James doesn’t mess about. For her last solo album, The Price Of The Ticket, she recruited a backing band comprising a starry line-up of alt-rock royalty: Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ drummer Jim Sclavunos, Sex Pistols’ bassist Glen Matlock, and so on. For its forthcoming follow-up, she decided to put together a 20-track album that, through crowd-funding support, will be released on double vinyl, when anyone else might have simply figured that doing a 10-track CD would have been an awful lot easier. “If you decide to do 20 songs, you’re going to have to go in deep,” says James. “You can’t just show up, you actually have to commit.”
Incredibly, it’s more than 30 years since James crashed into the public consciousness fronting Transvision Vamp, wherein her role seemed to be fairly evenly split between singer, pin-up and somewhat unpredictable, self-aggrandising mouthpiece. To wit, “I will be more famous than Madonna,” or the bafflingly brilliant, “We’re just doing to Warhol what he would do to bananas.”