George James Enterprises, Brook Street

Voodoo Messiah

The Residents had once penned an album entitled George and James, and it was one of James George’s favourites, celebrating the classical jazz world of George Gershwin and the dance funk of James Brown. This seemed like just the kind of juxtaposition that captured the essence of what he was trying to do with his own work. His friends all hated it.

He lives in a tiny apartment wedged between the store rooms above two shops on brook street, barely large enough to lie down in.

His collection of harpsicords and guitars fills every spare nook and cranny. His insurance is astonishingly high - crooks and nannies he jokes. He writes songs for a living, although really he’s dependent on frequent handouts from his aunts who live upstairs from a fairly unsuccessful brewery they own in the lovely Suffolk town of Walberswick, largely because they insist on letting their cats run the business, and everyone complains of finding whiskers in their ale.

It is clear that James George was born too late and too early. Many of his harpsichord pieces had a remarkable resemblance to much-loved ones written in the eighteenth centre, and the world was just not ready for his psychedelic guitar parts.

Then one day he had his famous breakthrough. What was missing in his work was also what was missing in the Residents’ album. Each side only carried music of one style, I Got Rhythm, and Out of the Blue were never combined into one seamless whole, I Got Out the Rhythm and Blues so to speak. Now James George was truly ready to unleash his Modern Sounds in Acid Baroque on an unsuspecting world.

But while he was having his breakthrough, the doorway between numbers 24 and 26 had been growing narrower and narrower, and was now only wide enough for Deliver to post his meals through the letter box. James George considers this a reflection of the breadth of his thinking and the reception he would have received for his work in any case, and is happy to live on in splendid isolation writing and recording his increasingly  strange but beguiling music.