Crucial Track for 02 May 2025

"Sit Down" by James

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> Which song would you use to introduce yourself to someone new? Not sure this is a thing I've ever done in the musical kind of sense, but I guess somebody might say, 'Tell me a song you love,' or something. I could answer with 'Sit Down' by James, for sure. I saw them live a ton of times in the late eighties/early nineties. They're probably the band I've seen most, along with The Pogues and The Fall. Including on my 25th birthday, headlining the Reading Festival. Actually The Pogues were on that day, too. Or so my memory says, even if the Reading histories don't. An interesting thing about 'Sit Down' is that they released it as a single and it didn't do much. I saw the video a load of times on the old ITV Chart Show on Saturday mornings back when I lived in Walthamstow. But like a year or so later they didn't just rerelease it; they rerecorded it, with reordered verses, and a more upbeat performance. [Here's the original video on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew7Zkkucos8). The new version, of course, became a huge hit.

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