Creativity Quote by James Young

There is a faintly defensive pride in the way James Young frames “the excellences of our stage performance” as both heritage and proof. He’s not just bragging; he’s staking a claim in the one arena where a rock band can’t be algorithmically optimized, auto-tuned into plausibility, or reduced to a playlist skip. “Always excelled” reads like a rebuttal to some implied doubt: maybe the records didn’t get their due, maybe critics fixated on fashion or genre labels, maybe the band’s identity has been flattened into hits and nostalgia. So he points to the thing that survives every cycle of taste: the live show as credibility.

The phrasing is revealing. “Something we have” makes excellence sound like a possession, almost an inheritance, while “prided ourselves” admits that this is also a self-mythology the group has actively maintained. Young’s use of “excellences” (plural, slightly formal) hints at craft rather than chaos: not just volume and charisma, but pacing, tightness, interplay, the unsexy discipline behind spectacle. It’s the language of a working musician insisting that endurance is earned, not granted.

Context matters: for artists who came up in the 1970s arena-rock ecosystem, the stage wasn’t promo for the album; it was the product. In an era when rock authenticity gets litigated constantly, Young’s line functions as a quiet manifesto: if you want to understand us, don’t over-interpret the brand. Watch the work.