James were on a roll when their second Factory single came out in 1985. Hand-picked to support the Smiths on their Meat Is Murder tour, they seemed in tune with their Mancunian counterparts’ world view. For all their similarities, whirring dervish frontman Tim Booth was a much more cryptic, elliptical lyricist than Morrissey, and his band regularly embraced chaos by swapping instruments or trying out deliberately obtuse set lists to keep them on their toes. If this single’s A-side ‘Hymn From A Village’ was a pealing protest against the second-rate pop lyricists (advising them to “read a book, it’s so much more worthwhile” and slamming plagiarists ahead of Moz’s ‘Cemetry Gates’), ‘If Things Were Perfect’ was packed with just the right level of twitchy tension, Booth’s stuttering existential wanderings backed up by Jim Glennie’s meaty bass chords, Lorry Gott’s highlife guitar flourishes and Gavan Whelan’s tempo-twisting backbeat. Although James’ early years were cursed with major label misfortune – a tale best told in their own words on ‘Burned’ – their B-side game has rarely wavered, be it ‘Out To Get You’ [‘Lose Control’, 1990], ‘Gone Too Far’ [‘Tomorrow’, 1997] or ‘Stolen Horse’ [‘I Know What I’m Here For’, 1999]. It’s also telling that the Smiths covered ‘What’s The World’ [‘Jimone EP’, 1993] most nights of that first British tour.