British rock act James, who’ve sold more than 12 million albums worldwide and just completed another sell-out tour of the UK, have announced that their groundbreaking Brian Eno-produced Laid and Wah Wah albums are due to be reissued on vinyl in March 2015. Each double 180g LP package features printed inner sleeves and a download code.

According to Tim Booth, Laid and Wah Wah were “the culmination of playing four or five hours a day four or five days a week in Manchester and the new band adapting to that. It is about the transition of becoming more of a band but with Brian at the helm.” Booth remembers jamming “hundreds of songs that never saw the light of day” and guitarist Larry Gott suggests it might have been “as many as 340 tracks.”

The reissues are particularly notable due to the fact that Eno and the band had originally favored releasing the records as a double package. Recorded concurrently in 1993 during a frenetic six week period at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Complex, the albums were always intended as companion pieces – Laid being referred to as the “song” album whilst Wah Wah was known as the “experimental” or “jamming” album – but the record company decided to release them months apart to their detriment.

Laid, released in the UK in October 1993, reached the No. 3 spot and became the band’s breakout album in the US selling over 600,000 copies. However, subsequent follow-up Wah Wah effectively sunk the band in the states. More pertinently perhaps, by the time Wah Wah came out, U2 (and Eno) had released Zooropa and Booth says, “everyone thought we were copying off them instead of the other way round!”