Transvision Vamp star Wendy James delighted to head out on tour - here is how to get tickets

When the 55-year-old released her fifth solo album, the 21-track Queen High Straight, in May 2020, she was supposed to be heading out on a UK tour.

However, as coronavirus hit and the world went into lockdown, Wendy had to reschedule it three times.

Wendy, who shot to fame as the lead singer of alt-rockers Transvision Vamp in the late 1980s, says: “The venues, who've been under extraordinary pressure to stay afloat, were inundated with every band rescheduling, but we did it.

“Thank you to the venues, the promoters and, of course, to the NHS, my love to anyone and everyone who has lost someone to this pandemic, thank you to you all for getting vaccinated and helping open our collective lives again.

"And thank you to The Wendy James Band. Most musicians have had to find other ways of money earning because they simply couldn't work their chosen vocation, but my band did what they had to do, and we’re still standing and happier than ever to be heading into rehearsals to get this mammoth setlist learnt and then hit the road! Finally.”

Wendy, who enjoyed top-five hits with Transvision Vamp with Baby I Don’t Care and I Want Your Love, kicks off the 28-date tour in Blackpool on August 26. It includes a show at Nottingham’s Bodega on Thursday, September 16.

“Not only are we celebrating a return to live venues, we are celebrating Queen High Straight and also a different set list every night, from Transvision Vamp through all my albums,” she says.

“It’s a tour not to miss, and one which will not happen again, like this.”

‘It was a Eureka moment’

Wendy began writing Queen High Straight after a long stretch of writing, recording, delivering and touring her previous album, The Price Of The Ticket.

She says: “Overall, my taste and style have not changed with time.

“The music that excites me now is the same as when I was starting out songwriting and back through my days in Transvision Vamp.

“I continue to marvel at Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground, I continue to be blown away by The Stooges, I continue to be everlastingly enthralled by Bob Dylan, but of course, the older one gets the more one discovers and I am now informed more cohesively and fully by all the music, new and old, which settles into my consciousness.

“My track listings are never altered from the order in which I write the songs, maybe it’s because it’s too tangential for me to try to shuffle songs around, but really I think, in some kind of holistic way, the order in which the songs are written must surely be the most natural order for them to be listed in.

“Around song 14, Bliss Hotel, I hit a wall. I did not know where the inspiration was going to come from. But then somehow it comes again and one pushes on through, as it turned out, to some of my favourite songs on the entire album.

“My perfect moment? Song 18, Cancel It… I’ll See Him On Monday. it was a Eureka moment. I ran outside and started dancing, ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it’.”

Tickets for the tour are on sale at thewendyjames.com/live

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