THE CHARLATANS have managed what Paris Angels, The Mock Turtles, Intastella, World Of Twist, Northside and the rest of the Class of '90 failed to do - keep on keeping on, getting better and better when the easiest thing would have been to lay down and die. With their new single out next week, and their best LP to date released this summer, THE STUD BROTHERS meet Manchester's Third Band in New York. Fake that: Tom Sheehan.
"WELL, IT'S NOT BLACKPOOL, is it?"
Mark Collins, The Charlatans' guitarist, stares narrow-eyed across the miles of rough wooden boardwalk and dirty sand leading down to the Atlantic. Behind him stand a couple of low and lonely ferris wheels and a burnt-out rollercoaster, grim and ghostly even under the bright blue April skies. He's right, Coney Island is no Blackpool, not even Southend. With its desolate warren of a train station (a mugger's nirvana), streets of shut-down cheap shops and rows of dodgy arcades, each open 365 days a year and packed with painfully outdated shoot 'em ups, it's the poorest, dirtiest, most life -threatening seaside resort we've ever seen. It's absolutely perfect.
MARK, along with singer Tim Burgess, drummer Jon Brookes and the girlfriends of all three, is in New York for a bit of fun before the new album comes out and goes ballistic. They've all just flown over from Las Vegas where they attended the wedding of their tour manager. With two days free to f*** about, the plan is to eat well, drink better and shop for England (for a scruffy gang of Mancky oiks, The Charlies have always looked peculiarly sharp).
So to Coney. Though for most, a 75-minute subway ride to America's most unpleasant coastal town might seem unnecessary, even downright foolhardy, to us it means only one thing - "The Warriors", Waiter Hill's ultra-flash, hyperventilating gangland odyssey. It means cute, barechested teenagers fleeing from truckloads of psychotic, screaming skins, James Remar kicking the shit out of hard-eyed harlequins with baseball bats, 22 berobed black geezers in mirrored shades, all tooled up and trained from birth in the martial arts. Riffs! YEAH! RIGHT! For us, this is a pilgrimage.
For The Charlatans, it's a crock of soft southern horseshit. When it comes to action movies, it has to be "Predator", a film they watched constantly during the recording of the album and even, for reasons known only to themselves, believe influenced the record. So it's with some difficulty that we persuade Mark and Tim (Jon's having none of it) to accompany us on our dream-trip. The possibility of a few wicked pix tips the balance, and maybe we'll do a bit of hack-style rabbiting on the train. CHAR-LATANS! COME OUT TO PLA-AYY!
Like we say, Coney is as crap as could be, utterly deserving of Swan's withering dismissal, "is this what we fought all night to get back to?" Even Tim and Mark are impressed. Indeed, so enthused is Tim by the degradation of the place that he spends the entire return journey explaining the dismal nature of his career before the Charlatans.
Apparently, ICI have a bunch of chemical plants and whatnot scattered all over the Manchester area especially around Northwich The Charlies' hometown and, after school, Tim became a pushbike messenger-boy, scooting between factories, delivering letters and parcels.
"If I'd had a Lambretta, I'd have been in f***ing Quadrophenia, man," he says.
Promotion was meteoric and, after lying about his qualifications, he rose to the position of toilet cleaner (no, really). Next came contract work - bricklaying, carpentry, and a long time scrubbing asbestos-coated ceilings and the nauseating insides of chemical tanks.
"I had to sign a contract," says Tim, "so that if I die of asbestosis me mum and dad or me sister can have a four-year legal battle for a load of dosh."
A couple of years later, Liam Gallagher of Oasis did exactly the same job. Two years ago, even after the Charlatans' hit singles and Number One album ("Some Friendly"), Tim still believed he could go back to that life.
Now he knows he never could.
SINCE bassist Martin Blunt brought them together some five years ago, The Charlatans have enjoyed the strangest of careers. Initially, behind The Roses and the Mondays, and alongside Northside, New FADS and Paris Angels, they were considered the runts of the Madchester litter, bandwagon-jumpers shored up by Tim's pouting bravado. Real charlatans.
Even so, they were immediately and ridiculously successful. Their first single, "Indian Rope" was an indie Number One, while their second, "The Only One I Know", went Top Five in the nationals, closely followed by "Then". And that debut album went straight in at the top of the charts.
From the word go they were a bona fide pop phenomenon.
With the Mondays exploded, though, and The Roses confined to studios and courtrooms, Madchester went bad. The Charlatans, a baggy Bros if ever there was one, were fully expected to spin their sorry way down the pan. Sure enough, the second album, "Between 10th And 11th" was a relative flop, yielding only a couple of minor hits in "Weirdo" and "Can't Even Be Bothered". The Charlatans were off the front pages and off the road, appearing only on the two-gig "Daytripper" bill with Ride.
Rumours emerged of problems within the band. Martin, at the best of times pessimistic to the point of paranoia, was said to have suffered a depressive breakdown. Guitarist John Baker left on the grounds of pressure and loss of privacy. And keyboardist Rob Collins was charged with getaway-driving in an armed robbery and sentenced to jail. From the outside it looked like the end.
Hunched over a Heineken in an Irish bar just up from Times Square, Tim explains "none of this was ever really that much of a problem."
"I always liked the idea that people thought we were charlatans," he says, "because I always thought they were meant we were like charming rogues who'd come along to take all the money. It always made me laugh. And it was good because it made us try harder. We always felt that, because of the Mondays and The Roses and the way we were seen in that whole Manchester thing, we had more to prove than anyone else."
ROB'S imprisonment only served to draw them closer together. According to Mark, Rob was the real force behind "Some Friendly" (the keyboard frenzy of the singles, "Opportunity" and the "Interstellar Overdrive" -style "Sproston Green" are testament to that) which in turn lent direction to the more democratic follow-up.
With Rob gone, someone else had to shoulder the responsibility and it was Martin, the man most concerned with The Charlatans continuation (as well as everything else), who stepped into the breach. Producer Steve Hillage was called in and the band took off to Monmouth to record the comeback album, "Up To Our Hips".
Captain Blunts deep involvement made the record gratifyingly bass-heavy, without burying a pop sensibility clearly heard in "Jesus Hairdo" and "Can't Get Out Of Bed". The stand-out track was "Feel Flows", a Tim-free instrumental that crossed funky hard rock with ambient techno and a synth theme straight out of John Carpenter (the band actually sampled some of Rob's pre-nick tapes). To date, it was their finest moment and saw The Charlatans, a pop phenomenon presumed dead, begin to reinvent themselves as an ultra-modem rock band, pissing all over their corny copyist peers.
IN time-honoured Charlatans style, though, they threw it all away. Couple of singles, couple of gigs then a short tour of America. They seemed to have no interest whatsoever in selling what most considered to be their best album.
"In America," says Tim, "we found that the gigs had only been advertised about a week before we got there, so they hadn't sold out. We'd being selling out everywhere, big time, for four years, so really it was the first time it felt like a struggle. And also, even though we were pleased with "Up To Our Hips", some of it was brilliant; we just felt we had a better album in us right then. So we thought, f*** it, let's just go back and make another album."
"In a way, we're a bit narrow-minded like that. We really love making records, even though it's hard sometimes, and I know Mark would love to go in and do another one now. But I think we really ought to go out and play for a while, spread the word."
Back in the studio, the better-than-brilliant album was not forthcoming. Steve Hillage was pissed off by a Maker news story where Tim claimed "Up To Our Hips" was bollocks (he meant compared to what was coming next), and the band were unhappy with Hillage's mixes and the fact that he was contracted to other jobs when they wanted someone 100 per cent dedicated to the cause. They dumped Hillage and reconvened with Dave Charles. The resulting album, as yet untitled is a killer, up there with Oasis and Black Grape as Manchester rises from it's hastily dug grave.
STRANGE evening. First a schmoozy networking party where Clem Burke from Blondie turns up
looking like he's been cut open, embalmed wrapped in rags and buried under a million tons of Egyptian rock. Then a vodka bar with the bizarre and hugely entertaining Wildhearts.
Then a pub beside the Letterman Theatre where a beaming Mark discovers a drink called Vodka Collins (the rest stick to the new Charlatans quaff of choice - a beer with a cinnamon schnapps chaser).
And finally the long walk back to the hotel during which Tim is accosted by a quick-draw artist who begins to sketch him on the hoof while demanding a profoundly unreasonable $20 for his 30 seconds of effort. Tim, sharp as an Armani waistcoat, legs it, leaving us at the mercy of the blag-man who, with a few well-practised sweeps of the hand, amends his portrait of Tim and shows us a likeness of our own sweet selves. Well, that's what he reckons. We see only the horribly mutilated corpses of George Washington and his mother. We dutifully cough up a dollar, receive the now-standard outraged accusations of racism and scarper.
Back in the hotel bar, it's My life Story time. Mark tells us of his pre-Charlies days on the dole (eight years) and in a kebab house where he'd crush mince with his bare fists, then mould little bloody balls into bigger bloody balls until, ever the perfectionist, he'd created the ultimate kebab- thing. From there, he moved into carpet cleaning, then drove a van for the Inspiral Carpets, playing football in empty pre-gig venues with Noel Gallagher, then on the Inspirals' backline.
Jon, meanwhile was ensconced in a sawmill, "Half-severing my fingers every day." Jon loves the
smell of wood and spent his spare moments making drumsticks. When he was 18, two mates with
a publishing deal asked him to drum for them. He shot down to London, stayed with them in a
Caravan at Crystal Palace, then ran out of patience.
"I never really understood their music," he says.
"I knew it was crap, but I didn't know why."
He f***ed off back to Manc (via Ibiza), cut his hair and dyed it yellow. Martin, taken more by his hue than his musicianship, recruited him for his pre-Charlies band, the Gift Horses, and he's been in every incarnation of The Charlatans since.
Of them all, Jon's the one most openly delighted with the new album.
"I think we've made an important record this time," he says. "We've really gone and done it. That's because we've just settled into it and made the record we wanted to. There's no point chasing success, it's like chasing your tail. All I want out of it now is to play live in some mad places and get invited to the Brits, refuse to go and therefore not get nominated. That would be in true Charlatans style."
It would. But Jon's ambition stretches further into the perverse.
"Eventually I want to be a frogman, that's what I want to be. Not a police frogman, dragging for bodies, but a proper frogman on the Barrier Reef. I just want an underwater job where I can swim about and explore."
"When I was a kid I used to get washing-up liquid bottles and sellotape them to me back and chill out, swimming about on the carpet. Me family used to have to step over me, the dog'd walk past, looking at me, wondering, 'What the F*** is he doing?' I never had a speargun, I never liked the violent side of frogmanship. But I did sometimes get into difficulties near the telly. I'd get - caught under the settee and be thrashing about, looking at me watch to see if I was running out of air. If we get to Australia this year, I'm gonna set some time aside and do it for real."
THE next day Tim, thrilled by the blue sparks flying off his room key every time he inserts it into the lock, lends us (less impressed by the murderous shocks we're getting from the bog door handle) an almost-complete tape of the album.
Where the single, "Just lookin'/Bullet Comes" is as funky as f***, a soul-packed rock/dance crossover complete with swirling guitar and masterfully understated keyboards, the LP goes further. Driven on by Rob's sometimes panicked, sometimes soaring excesses, Mark's super-distorted Sixties wah-wah ("Toothache in particular recalls Peter Green at his filthiest), and ever backed by Blunt's funky rumble, it's the best rock album we've heard this year, and all the more so for the debt it owes to dance and reggae.
With Burgess occasionally singing through what sounds like a blender on slow, Rob tinkering till he tumbles into the groove, Jon thrashing and pattering and even joining in the happy howling la la chorus of the otherwise instrumental "Nine Acre", it seems as though The Charlatans are exploring the possibilities of their psychedelic pop sound, just as Leftfield have with dance and Renegade Soundwave with dub. It's a great album, their best by a mile.
With Tim, we repair to the Irish bar, first getting harangued by a haggard and dusty gloom rocker who needs $6 to get back to Yonkers and is willing to give us his watch in exchange (old one, that). This man, we learn, aside from looking like Bela Lugosi's grandma and smelling like a Death Valley roadkill, once worked with Bowie and Mick Ronson, has just had his car towed away and is mourning the very recent death of his mother. We chuck the silly old moo a buck and race after Tim. Safely ensconced in the pub, Tim gives us the final word.
"It was only when we were making this album that we finally realised how complex it all was, how completely different we are as people. There was Rob, the E man, and Martin who really really worries about keeping it all together. Then there was Mark, who's quite sensible sometimes, and Jon who broke his leg playing football during recording and ended up playing congas and shakers. And then there's me being a bit hyperactive, getting up at 11 and trying to get things rolling, even though the others tried to bug me and wouldn't do anything till half-past-three."
"But it all came off and we're really happy with the album, and that's what really counts. With 'Up To Our Hips' we thought maybe we had a better album in us, this time we don't. Not even a better song. We tried to squeeze out one more but it wasn't as good. If the Chemical Brothers remixes come off, it'll make 14 tunes on one album and it'll cut really deep"
The Chemical Brothers have remixed "Toothache" and "Nine Acre," one of which will appear on the album. And that will cut deep.
Oasis, Black Grape, The Charlatans. A Manchester treble in 1995.
Unbelievable.