A tribute to James Jam, from former NME editor Conor McNicholas

"For James, having a voice on music wasn’t just a passion, it was a compulsion..."

Hello Spoook readers. It’s been a bit quiet over here, hasn’t it. I take my role as the custodian of the Spoook empire seriously, but the winter has been long since losing James, and concentrating on more than one thing at once is a skill I seem to have lost somewhere in the shuffle.

I do have a treat that I’ve been saving for you, though. Friend of Spoook, Conor McNicholas, wrote an incredible tribute to James, which he read out at the funeral. He has very kindly agreed for me to publish it here.

Conor is arranging a get-together in London on Thursday 19th June for James’s NME colleagues and anyone else who knew him from that time to come and share a drink and remember how awesome James was. If any Spoook subscribers would like the details, reply to this email and I’ll send them over.

Anyway, over to Conor…

Rumours circulated about James long before we came to know him at NME. As we’ve heard, James, or James Jam, or just Jam to most of us, was someone who made shit happen, and his pivotal role helping develop the Sunderland scene had made some good noise.

Achieving that alone would be impressive, but James was so much more. For James, having a voice on music wasn’t just a passion, it was a compulsion. Perhaps something we came to understand more in later years.

Let us start, though, with James’ incredible raw talent – his voice, his skill as a writer. And James really was that precious thing – a true writer. Who else could craft a line such as this, one of my favourites from an NME review in 2006: “Theorising Oasis is like drinking butter – pointless and bad for the heart.”

When describing James’ writing I can’t do better than the words of Anthony Thornton, then Reviews Editor of NME, when he talked recently of James’ introduction to paper:

“He was wildly enthusiastic and passionate – already a great writer with an uncanny ability to get inside a subject and inside your head. And he just kept getting better. Then he made the trip to London, and I finally got to meet him properly. He was even funnier in real life. I was lucky because I got to read all his reviews as soon as they hit my inbox. Each one was terrifically opinionated and unflinchingly honest.”

James said later that all he ever wanted to do was work for NME. Well, he did that and then some. On reflection, and it’s great to look back on those days, James absolutely embodied the spirit, the very soul, of NME – his passion, his drive, his writing, but also the sense of community he fostered. Because, despite his enormous talent, it was never about him. He was always looking to support and grow and give. He might not have been the saviour of the broken, the beaten and the damned, but he was a fierce champion for all of them. He knew what it meant to feel like an outsider, as a fan, as a musician, as a writer, and he always went out of his way to support those people who needed it. He continued to do that with all his friends right up until his last days.

Working with James, managing and supporting James when I was Editor at NME, was something of a rollercoaster experience. He was never short of energy and it would often spin out in all sorts of directions. But he was always fast to learn – always listening, always eager to develop. He started as a writer, won a coveted place on the NME staff as New Music Editor and was promoted to Features Editor.

Eventually, he consciously dropped the ‘Jam’ and wanted to be known by his full name so his success could be firmly identified with his family. It was a very James move.

Having left NME and taken up a senior Editorial role at GamesMaster, James then had the opportunity to apply for the Editorship of Kerrang. I can’t tell you how delighted I was when he asked me to support him through the endless interview process. I really wanted him to get that. He’d been great at NME, but here was something that would be his, an era he could define for himself.

He smashed the interview, bagged the job and became one of the longest serving Editors in the Kerrang’s history switching on a new generation of metal fans, birthing bands that are now huge and emerging as a powerful champion of youth mental health.

In the years after Kerrang, James, rightly and confidently, went solo. He wrote for everyone from The Observer to The Big Issue. He launched the Spoook newsletter where he could indulge his musings on ghosts, aliens and Bigfoot conspiracy theories. Mostly, though, his profile centred around The James McMahon Podcast. James proved to have a talent for broadcasting, his warm tone and soft Yorkshire accent having almost ASMR qualities. The episodes where James spoke solo rather than interviewing a musician were, I thought, some of the best he did.

Somehow, in amongst all this, he also found time to create a series for Radio 4 on the 80’s darts gameshow Bullseye. It was Super. Smashing. Great.

The last time I saw James was in hospital. Just before I left he held out his big strong left arm for a fistbump and said, “Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.” I found those words difficult to live with at first, but I now find they give solace. Because, as was usually the case, it turned out James was right. We might not have him with us in person but his collective work is vast and proud. I want it on record that James absolutely achieved that one thing he wanted from his work – a legacy. There are hundreds of thousands of music fans that have been inspired by his work and his passion, countless people who he’s encouraged to take the leap and become a writer, to set up a label, to put on a band, perhaps just to talk about their issues with a friend. He also championed a generation of brilliant musicians and bands. And The Twang. Thanks James.

And we still have his words and his voice. They live on as a body of work. It feels like it would take a lifetime just to read through and listen to it all. Regardless of what James was dealing with, my goodness, there was a man who could graft.

How to end this? I’m not the writer James was and I don’t think I could do him justice. So instead I’ll turn to the words of an artist James loved dearly, Rivers Cuomo of Weezer:

Somebody said all the world's a stage
And each of us is a player, that's what I've been tryin' to tell you
In Act 1, I was struggling to survive
Nobody wanted my action dead or alive
Act 2, I hit the big time
And bodies be all up on my behind
And I can't help myself
Because I was born to shine
If you don't like it, you can shove it
But you don't like it, you love it
So I'll be up here in a rage
'Til they bring the curtain down on the stage

Rest in peace, Jam. You truly rocked.

- Conor McNicholas, December 2024