Mid : Life.

James @ Shepherds Bush Empire

This is James.

This is a band, formed in Manchester in 1980. Who vanished seven years ago. After thirteen albums and thirty singles. After a life of colorful, grand anthems and pop experiments.

This is a band who toured, on either side of the bill, with New Order, Happy Mondays, The Fall, Orange Juice, The Cure, Neil Young, Inspiral Carpets, P.i.L., Radiohead, Verve, David Bowie, and The Stone Roses. Who have had their songs lifted by Modest Mouse, U2, Natalie Imbruglia, Erasure, and, a few months ago, The Courteneers. Who've influenced more bands than they've admitted.

This is a band who filled stadiums while never being popular. A band hated by critics. By the public. But admired, loved, by outcasts.

James have returned. As everyone does. But it's different.

These seven people, it's the best line-up they've ever had. There's a new album. Hey Ma. And it's somehow, impossibly, fantastic.

The band are here, dressed crisp with shirts and ties. Tim Booth, out front, stares at us all, and a simple wall of bulbs and lanterns bomb the audience with blues, which change over the course of the night, to oranges and reds, like a new day.

If James are known for 'Sit Down' here, and for 'Laid' in the States, they use neither. 'Born Of Frustration,' from 1992, kicks off, and we're taken back to places loud and warm and held at the heart. 'She's A Star,' 'Johnny Yen,' 'Waltzing Along,' and 'Ring The Bells,' all released over the years, get the greeting of friends. Of loved ones. Coming home.

But it's also about the new album, a Top 10 celebratory comeback, dedicated to Tony Wilson, which they play nearly all of tonight.

The chiming Mancunian guitars and bright, white-light synths of songs like 'I Wanna Go Home' and 'Waterfall,' inspired by the real Twin Peaks, build into explosions of strobes and sound, and, along with the manic 'Whiteboy' -- 'Too old for Hamlet,' we sing with them, 'too young for Lear' -- and the burned-out 'Of Monsters And Heroes And Men,' the songs are met with pride and pleasure, already with an early-adopter familiarity. And it's impossible not to want to hear it all over again.

'Hey Ma,' the lead single, cracks the place. With black words of horror and a chorus as big as a house, it's everything a James song should be -- the intimate, the underblown, wrapped in a subversive, joyous, populist, universal lifelong chant. 'Boys in body bags,' we holler along. As anti-celebration. Getting away with it.

These are massive pop songs, and they're fueled by experiments and unguarded, often embarrassing, emotion. These melodies. They feel like they've always been here.

'Sometimes,' from the band's high watermark, is the end. It starts slow and quiet. Without all the sound. Then we're launched, in the air, full-speed. We're not sure how it happened.

This is why we're here, why we've come so far.

This is music made by those forever out-of-fashion. Outsiders of outsiders. Preposterously brilliant.

When the song fades off, we all take over, and every single one of us sings the song back to them, without music, lights up, unprompted. For ages and ages. Just ages.

Everyone is standing. A sea of hands. Uncool. All smiles.

Beautiful.

The band leave and we take the song with us, out the doors, and people are singing on the stairs and in the streets and on the trains, out in the world. It's free.

It is ours.

It is James.