AS THE SINGER WITH TRANSVISION VAMP, WENDY JAMES WAS THE ENFANT TERRIBLE OF LATE-80s GLAM-POP, AN INTOXICATING BLEND OF PEROXIDE SWAGGER AND TABLOID-BAITING PRONOUNCEMENTS. THREE DECADES ON AND SHE’S LOST NONE OF HER VERVE, TELLING OLIVER HURLEY HOW HER NEW DOUBLE ALBUM IS INSPIRED BY THE STOOGES, THE SHANGRI-LAS AND, ER, STEVE MARTIN…

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.”

INSIDE THE SOUND CLASH

Reassuringly, she still remains an unstoppable force of nature, all optimism, energy and slightly unnerving focus. A gentle enquiry about her forthcoming album, Queen High Straight (her sixth post-Vamp solo project), results in a four-and-a-half-minute monologue on audio formats that encompasses how much music you can fit on one side of an LP before you begin to lose fidelity, her love of flexi discs, the minor revival of cassettes, and Sandinista! by The Clash. Ask her about the musical influences on her new album and you’re given a potted history of popular music that takes in African-American spirituals, Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry and skiffle.