A lockdown Monday morning and the Zoom screen kicks into life with a laughing Tim Burgess, lead singer with The Charlatans.
He’s holding up a pile of records he’s brought to the famous Rockfield recording studio, in Monmouth, to help him make his second solo album in a year. “I couldn’t tour the first, for obvious reasons, so I just thought I’d record another.”
Even in a pandemic there is seemingly no stopping him. He’s a fervent social media operator, tweeting everyone “Good morning” in English and sometimes Japanese, he “droplifts” copies of his book and tickets for shows, has his own coffee spot, Tim Peaks Diner, at the Kendal Calling festival, Kellogg’s once created an actual breakfast cereal after he suggested the name “Totes Amazeballs”, he’s written four books, he DJs with partner Nik Void’s band, Factory Floor, and, of course, he has his super-popular Twitter Listening Parties. That’s before you even get to him still fronting The Charlatans as well as having solo projects on the go. And being a father.
For a moment I look at him and laugh; he knows what I’m thinking. “So many people have said they are surprised and glad I’m still alive.” Sadly, key people from his life aren’t. He lost his father, Allan, in April 2020 and two key members of The Charlatans, Rob Collins (keyboards) and Jon Brookes (drums), died in a car crash and of a brain tumour, in 1996 and 2013 respectively. The last time I interviewed him was at The Charlatans’ first big NME interview in 1990, when they had just burst out of Northwich, in Cheshire, with a self-financed debut single, “Indian Rope”. No one saw it coming.
Every week at the NME we’d sift through a huge pile of singles to review, hoping for gold. With “Indian Rope” there was a glimmer of something really unexpectedly exciting. I gave it a very positive review and, as was the case in those days, if you got a decent first review in the NME promoters would book you, labels would sign you and John Peel would give you a session. Not that The Charlatans necessarily needed it: their energy made it clear they were going places.
“It definitely felt like something was happening,” Burgess remembers. “And it just felt really great. Mind you, I thought we’d made it when we recorded our first ever demos.”
Their first London headlining gig, at Powerhaus, Islington, was packed with coachloads of fans they’d bought with them. The songs and performance were so confident that the attendant A&R managers, agents and radio producers looked on in a sort of delighted shock. The talent was obvious: a charismatic singer with a tight band playing well-structured, instantly appealing songs, which were bedded in the 1960s by the Hammond organ but somehow sounded modern. Most importantly, the crowd were not only dancing, but also actually singing along to unrecorded songs because they knew the lyrics.
Beggars Banquet, the independent home of The Fall and The Cult, signed them, which was a good move for both parties. Within months they released “The Only One I Know”, which, with its organ sound charging about under Burgess’ impassioned vocals, went right into the top ten. Not in the alternative chart, full of cult acts from the music weeklies, such as Half Man Half Biscuit, Psychic TV and The Nightingales, but the actual Top Of The Pops top ten, where Snap! had “The Power”, UB40 longed for “Kingston Town” and Betty Boo was “Doin’ The Do”.
To this day Burgess is comfortable both in the mainstream and enthusing about the darker corners of the music world. Two nights before our interview he’d hosted a Listening Party with Bee Gee Barry Gibb, who, like him, had spent his early years in Manchester. Had he any awareness of the Bee Gees having been a local band when he was an angelic upstart and they were the bronzed horseman of the disco apocalypse? “Well, everyone knew they were from Chorlton.”
In the mid-1980s, prior to hitting Top Of The Pops, Burgess was working at the same Cheshire ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) plant that employed his father, but was spending weekends commuting 24 miles from Northwich to Manchester and New Order’s Haçienda, not far from his Salford birthplace. He’d be dancing into the early hours in the converted yacht showroom, which felt like the epicentre of a new music world. Late at night, long after the last train home, the 20-year-old Burgess would be outside The Haçienda with his gang of Perry Boy mates, Cheddar, Ronnie and Frank, facing the stark reality of a long walk home.
“I was desperate to stay at people’s houses – obviously that would have been the preference. Sometimes it would just be sweltering and we’d wait and get the train at seven o’clock on Sunday morning, but, yes, we walked all the way back to Northwich a few times, singing other people’s songs, talking about what was on The Tube or a new record by The Smiths – any of these brilliant things that were part of the culture. One time Cheddar and I were walking back and talking about looking for the orange one in a bag of Revels.” This would become the inspiration for one of The Charlatans’ first songs, “Polar Bear”.
Like all bands who ride a first wave and then a second and still have momentum 30 years later, The Charlatans really were in the right place at the right time with the right people.
The end of the 1980s was a time when young British bands were striding up to the mic emboldened by the way acid house had shaken everything up, making it easy and fun to create records again. New Order had long since shown you could mix disco into post-punk sounds with “Blue Monday” and “Temptation”, but there was a growing mainstream audience for this new, younger, ecstasy-fuelled Manchester sound. Boys and girls were wearing Joe Bloggs flares, -pastel-coloured bucket hats and androgynous long-sleeve T-shirts that you could dance all night in and not freeze on the way home.
This was a generation inspired as kids by punk, new wave and two-tone, that spent post-school dole and weed days discovering The Doors, The Byrds and Pink Floyd and were now spending their nights dancing their tits off on E in Nottingham, Manchester, Leeds, Blackburn, Stoke, Liverpool, London, everywhere.
In 1989, as The Charlatans recorded their first demo, the Stone Roses had conquered the high ground of the forthcoming decade with their sun-kissed debut album. Happy Mondays had already fused their own Factory heritage with the Balearic sounds of Ibiza a year before. The Farm were riding their “Groovy Train”, James were inviting everyone to “Come Home” and “Sit Down” and Inspiral Carpets’ Cool As Fuck T-shirts were everywhere. Primal Scream’s Screamadelica was two years away, but throw in De La Soul, Soul II Soul and Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique and you had this constantly changing laboratory of great pop sounds. That’s before anyone even begins to list the endless acid house hits where no one knew what the artist looked like because it was all about the dance floor at dawn. Amid all of this was young Tim Burgess, dying to have his moment too. Charlatans founder-member and bassist Martin Blunt remembers, “The moment I met him I wanted him in the band. He looked great and had a presence that a singer has to have. He brought an energy and positivity that’s uniquely his.”
In 2021 that energy still abounds, albeit on a different platform. Those 1980s late nights on the dance floor are a world away from being trapped inside your own home, unable to travel, tour, perform or go to gigs because of a global pandemic. Tim Burgess spent much of lockdown drinking Diet Coke, listening to music and tweeting. When he wasn’t online he was making his own music and when he wasn’t doing that he was at home “near the beach in Norfolk” with his seven-year-old son, Morgan, enjoying water-blaster fights, Lego and father-and-son Minecraft and Fortnite sessions on the Nintendo Switch. The difference between Burgess’ lockdown tweets and yours and mine is that music fans throughout the world were waiting on his nightly because he’d invented a brilliant way to bring people together at a time when they couldn’t meet in person.
Burgess’ Twitter Listening Parties were something he’d done with The Charlatans’ own music when he only had 6,000 Twitter followers. Now, with 130,000 followers and everyone under lockdown, he decided to revisit them, choosing 10pm (John Peel time) as the start, allowing Japanese fans to join in.
Musicians and fans would start listening to a classic album at the same time and the artist would offer retrospective insights on Twitter. They are a cross between lying around on your bedroom floor listening to your favourite music and a director’s commentary. Starting with the first Charlatans album, Some Friendly, the lockdown response was so positive and appreciative he immediately lined up Blur, Oasis, Franz Ferdinand, New Order and Prefab Sprout, before progressing a year later to megastars such as Iron Maiden, Paul McCartney and the last living Bee Gee, via new indie bands and Hawaiian, Cuban and South American bands he’d never even heard of but whose fans were asking for. At a time when so much was going wrong for people around the world, these were something undeniably good.
“It was March 2020. It was springtime but it was dark, some people were on their own and music was being played as memories and explanations were going up on a timeline on the computer and it was magic, really. Then this guy called Andrew designed a ‘Replay’ switch, which allows you to pick any Listening Party that has already happened, play the record and see the artists’ tweets in real time.
“Getting Paul McCartney was a beautiful moment. I grabbed his tweet that said McCartney III is coming out and said, ‘Any chance of a Listening Party?’ Six weeks later, I just got a McCartney thumbs-up on Twitter, in front of everybody. I just thought, ‘Oh, my God. It’s on.’ And it was actually him. It was amazing.
“Iron Maiden was the most unbelievable one in terms of numbers and it trending at number one within 40 seconds of starting. I wanted it to be Listening Party 666 and then someone dropped out at 630 and I was like, ‘Shit, I need to get someone in to get it up to being the correct number.”
The musicians enjoy discussing their music without a filter. Stephen Morris of New Order and Joy Division admits, “I really enjoyed doing them. They reminded me of how, in the good old days, I would sit in my bedroom and just listen to an album from start to finish. It was oddly exciting listening to something at the same time as loads of other people. The listeners’ questions were brilliant and helped me remember a lot of things I would have otherwise forgotten. It was much more chaotic than I expected, but in a very exciting way. It was also good to be reminded of how much fun we had when we were making the records and writing the songs. It made me appreciate the fact that music has a great way of bringing people together, especially at a time when we are all being kept apart.”
Burgess explains, “I wouldn’t consider myself a fan of all of it. If it was just my personal taste, which is pretty broad, it would just be a box of records. It had to go further out, had to be about the fans.”
While he’s now doing it for the fans, he spent many years essentially doing whatever “it” was to himself. He’s been up and down the mountain of rock’n’roll excess and lived to write a book about it. Telling Stories, from 2013, jumps around just like Bob Dylan’s Chronicles. “Ah, I love that book. I love that he was telling you something new, but also that he only chose a few things to talk about. Fans were complaining, ‘I want to know about “Like A Rolling Stone”.’ With Telling Stories I knew that there would have to be some stuff that people didn’t know already.” His second book, 2016’s Tim Book Two, was about discovering songs other musicians recommended and his fourth (after 2019’s One Two Another), out in September, will be a compendium of the best Listening Parties.
It’s only when you sit and delve into their history that you realise how much has happened to The Charlatans. Between 1990 and 1997 they had three No1 albums and even 20 years later, in 2017, their 13th album, Different Days, reached No4. In 1993 their main creative force, Rob Collins, was imprisoned for eight months (serving four) for driving the getaway car in an armed robbery. In 1996 he died in a car crash. “Just at the end of the road here,” Burgess says over Zoom, nodding to the drive outside Rockfield, where the band were recording at the time. At the start of their career Collins was certainly the most engaging interviewee.
“Martin and Rob always got together for the music and Rob and I always did the vocals. Rob was the best singer. He was the oldest and the hardest; that’s the thing.”
When he died the band were three weeks away from supporting Oasis at Knebworth, which would become one of the biggest live gigs in British history. They were enjoying their golden period, writing superb Dylanesque singalongs, having seamlessly been swept from Manchester to Britpop, fuelled not only by their music, but also by how good Burgess looked and his overall likability. The band were naturally in shock at losing Collins.
“Jon and Martin came down and because Jon led from the back on many occasions, he just said, ‘We’ve got to keep going.’ It kind of resonated. Bobby Gillespie suggested Martin Duffy [Primal Scream’s keyboard player] could play with us. I was like, ‘Well, you know, if Duffy is up for it then I’m sure we can.’ We did Knebworth and from that moment on our world just went crackers.
“It was hard to talk to people about Rob’s death – we weren’t in good shape emotionally – but the whole build-up... We even took a helicopter to the gig and then when we played it was huge. We were amazing, but as we finished I walked over to Martin [Blunt] and said, ‘I think that’s it. I just don’t know whether I can do it any more.’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ And then Oasis started playing, they dedicated a song to Rob and we left and then it just got a bit easier.”
By 2001 Burgess was married and living in Los Angeles, where the rock’n’roll lifestyle accelerated. The physical distance had the benefit of giving The Charlatans enough personal space to keep going; the band were comfortable with their singer on the other side of the world.
“We’ve never needed to live in each other’s pockets,” says Blunt. “When it’s the five of us in a room, there’s a chemistry and a spark that’s always special. His solo projects never interfered with what we would do together either – it has allowed him to explore ideas that might not work in the band.”
One of these ideas was to explore the well-worn path of the Hollywood cocaine trail. He admits in his book he became a connoisseur of cocaine. “I moved to Los Angeles during the giddy heights of Tellin’ Stories,” he recalls. “We were touring and I moved to a flat on Lanewood Avenue in between Orange and La Brea. I lived the debauched rock’n’roll party animal to the full for about seven years, only coming out at night, like a vampire. I do think living in LA give me a good 12-year life lesson. Even though lots of it was drenched in debauchery, there were also years of the other side of LA, the good life, the healthy way, vegan cafés and beautiful weather, which I never really noticed for a while.”
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when someone who wants more than a nine-to-five life has to offer goes on to want more than being a successful singer has to offer. Nor should we be surprised by the way that ends up. Already a famously drunk drinker in England, his head charge into the white stuff went, like many others, from curiosity to fun to habit to just being a drain on the soul and the savings account. He has admitted in previous interviews that at one point on tour some members of the band tried blowing one up each other’s backsides just to see what the appeal had been to a previous generation of rock stars.
If ever there was a red-flag moment this should have been it, but his book Telling Stories manages to capture the inevitable seediness, the repetition, the distrust that goes with excessive cocaine use. Somehow a drug that is apparently glamorous ends up being far from it. The point when he realised endlessly doing cocaine, all night, with others keen on the same scene, might not be a good idea came when he watched one supposed friend violently beat up another on a bright and sleepless Sunday morning in a flat opposite Hollywood High School while the marching band was practising away with their drums and brass.
In 2016 he told the Guardian, “I had to stop taking drugs when I started running low on money. I spent a lot on cocaine and alcohol and, after that, prescription pills. When I tried to stop, my [then] wife took more. She was probably trying to make me jealous. We did talk about it, but there was no one listening, really. So I left her and everything apart from my records.”
Eventually the singer’s relationship with his wife and his own excess ran its course and he found himself back in Britain detoxing in a West London hotel under the guidance of his tour manager and a Harley Street doctor. “I turned my life around straight after recording Simpatico in 2006. It was a 21-day detox but I did it for three years. [I continue to completely watch what I eat] but I was actually withdrawing from everything at the K West Hotel for about ten days.
“I gave up drinking for a lot of reasons. I was flying from Los Angeles, constantly jet-lagged, thinking, ‘Well, I can have a drink now because it is after midday somewhere,’ but it had got to the point where I had to get drunk just to rehearse.”
He found a new experience in transcendental meditation, or, as one interviewer called it, “transatlantic levitation”. “I started doing meditation in 2008, so it was two years after I gave up drinking and I was stuck in a kind of emptiness. The meditation helped to start to fill it. Elton John described it best; I thought it was brilliant. He said he felt like he was inside an empty egg and he had to start filling his life with new memories and new things. And I got that with meditation.
“Rob and I used to watch The Beatles’ videos all the time. And the best bit for me was when they met the Maharishi. And so when I found meditation I thought, ‘Well, that’s good. I might be able to tap into some of that.’”
It’s a strange journey from an ICI plant in Cheshire through 30 years of rock’n’roll to a world of mantras and meditation, but throughout his life music has been at the heart of it. He hung out with David Bowie on the Isle Of Wight; Paul Weller calls him a “fella who understands the importance of hair” and describes The Charlatans’ 1990s recordings as “some of the best singles of that decade”. When they supported the Stones, Mick Jagger lent Burgess his onstage cooling fans and Ronnie Wood went further by playfully locking him into a walk-in fridge. New Order’s Stephen Morris describes the Listening Parties and Tim Peaks Diner as “genius. The sort of things that make you wonder why no one had ever thought of them before.”
Does Burgess have any idea why he is still fresh, still finding new things to record or create? “Lots of my heroes died quite early: Sid Vicious, Gram Parsons. Others are still going pretty strong: New Order, Brix Smith, The Cult. I like old bands and I like new bands. It just feels natural to keep going.”
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