Charlies In WonderlandCharlies In WonderlandThe Charlatans are set to swagger into V2001 like the living embodiment of rock itself. Hanging out in Hollywood, they ask NME, 'What's wrong with being sexy?'
It's the kind of car that turns heads and draws whistles. Long as a killer shark, red as a brothel ma'am's lips, chrome wheels flashing like the circular saw of Zorro. Down the Sunset Strip in crocodile-slides, past the strip joints and sushi bars, a vintage convertible Cadilac Eldorado with fins smooth as a supermodel's thigh and an engine purring like a nymphoid alleycat on heat. Guitarist Mark Collins is at the wheel - shades on, sunburn up - and slouching on the cream leather passenger seats are the rest of The Charlatans, soaking up the envy and admiration of every pedestrian in Hollywood as they rock down to Wonderland Avenue.
'It feels like being in a David Lynch film,' drawls Tim Burgess as we pass within a few hundred yards of the house where he's lived with his LA-resident wife since 1999. 'I think moving to LA was important to me personally and important to the group because everyone realises what they have. If you stay in a place all your life I think you take things for granted.'
Tim Burgess, unshaven, hungover, riding the comedown tiger and wearing a shirt he first put on 48 hours ago, slides back in his dream on wheels and grins seditiously. He's not a man to take things for granted. The simple fact that his band is still together is a miracle. The imprisonment for armed robbery and eventual death in a car crash of keyboardist Rob Collins; the upping sticks of the singer for a house in the silicone paradise of LA, with a view of the Hollywood sign - The Charlatans (every indie fan's eighth favourite band, according to scientists) have coasted through enough traumas, upheaval and misfortune to shatter bands with weaker wills or less pretty lips.
In fact, that they've all avoided carking it in the past two days is proof enough that someone upstairs is in the fan club. The day before they flew to LA, a Greek festival the were due to play was cancelled during the most apocalyptic electrical storms in the country's recorded history ('It was as if Zeus had come down from the Acropolis and thrown down his spears of gilt-edges jaggedness,' according to poetically inclined bassist Martin Blunt). And since arriving they've strolled casually through areas of the city the tourist guides advise you only see from the window of a speeding car, brawled in nightclubs over money and partied harder than Andrew WK and incontinence-era Aerosmith on a stag night in Amsterdam.
So when Tim tips down his shades and says, 'There's no place I'd rather be right now,' you're not sure if he means a) back in his adopted home town of Hawl-ee-wooad, b) in a band on the brink of a sensational mid-career reinvention with their new album 'Wonderland'' or c) not in a drawer in the nearest hospital morgue. If there was ever a series of Survivor featuring only bands The Charlatans would walk it, such is their world-beating ability to kick adversity in the nadgers and walk tall through the slings and arrows of outrageous fame and fortune. And 48 hours in LA with them is a ride more thrilling than anything up at Universal Studios, more foolhardy than a fishing trip with that Australian idiot who captures baby crocodiles for a laugh and more self-destructive than half a dozen National Front representatives marching through Compton. Buckle up in the back...
Friday, 2pm: when the bicycle is upturned it means the crack dealer on the corner outside the Million Dollar Hotel is open for business. A fat cop with a gun slumps back in a canvas chair and, bored in the blazing heat, watches the customers jive edgily up, buy their rocks from a cardboard box by the kerb and slope away. It's such a blatant transaction that the dealer may well erect a 12ft neon sign over his patch saying CRACK-U-LIKE', but the cop does nothing. This is downtown LA; if he busts this one guy on the corner of 5th and Main he'll have to go round busting a guy on every other street corner for 20 blocks.
You wouldn't need a million dollars to buy the Million Dollar Hotel these days. Now called the Frontier, its last paying guest checked out decades ago and it's fallen into squalor, converted into apartments for welfare no-hopers and 'recovering' drug addicts. Since there's only one lavatory on each floor, residents prefer, when necessary, to shit in a carrier bag and throw it out the window. The walls are stained with rotting faeces, the service alley littered with plastic bags and hypodermics.
'I wouldn't wanna come down here without a policeman with a gun, ' says Tim during a break in filming for the loose-limbed funkarama that is the video for 'Love Is The Key' up on the hotel roof. I've been downtown quite a lot of times, mostly to do my immigration stuff, and that's a rough neighbourhood, but this is an eye-opener. Crack dealers and needles on the floor. I've heard that a couple of films have been made here and there were people actually throwing needles at the crew and they had to wear rubber suits and hard hats.'
Jumping a high-security crew van down to the next location - disused underground parking lot that looks like it doubles as a disposal dump for drive-by victims - Tim watches the crack deals openly going down on every corner and realises the utter ludicrousness of his new barbies-with-the-A-list, back-slappy lifestyle.
'I hung out with Goldie Hawn the other week,' he admits. 'But I think my proudest moment was contacting Eddie Izzard at the Chateau Marmont; just faxing him a message saying 'Can we come to your show?' He put us in the front two seats. Even two years ago I would never have done that but because people are a bit more free about stuff like that over here, if you don't ask you don't get.'
When Tim moved to LA in 1999 and was photographed on Venice Beach with thick blonde Tommy Lee highlights as if his new life was one big Baywatch audition, many thought The Charlatans were strapped to a flaming Harley headed for the great past-it LA rocker cliche in the sky. In fact it had the opposite effect: rather than dawdling about in Manchester for months on end letting the album get bogged down in whatever extraneous shit was going down around the band (Rob Collins' death on 'Tellin' Stories'; the embezzlement of £500,000 by their ex-accountant on 'Us And Us Only'), the move forced The Charlatans to work on 'Wonderland' like starving greyhounds out of the traps. On the first day of Mark's first writing trip to Tim's LA pad the pair wrote 'Love Is The Key', a demo of which was enough to secure the production services of techno boff-toff Danny Saber. From there, all lights were on 'rock': the lyrics were written at 35,000ft, the band hopped between Saber's LA studio and their own Big Mushroom joint in Cheshire and 'Wonderland' took shape before you could say, 'That'll be your 'Screamadelica', then.'
'With me moving away we had to structure it properly,' says Tim. 'If they're coming over to LA they want to settle everything because they're taking the time out of their lives. And if I'm going over to Manchester it's taking time out of my life, so you wanna explode. So you get there and do three songs in one day.'
'It's given us a sense of urgency again,' Martin adds. 'When we get together now it's, 'What you been listening to? What you up to? What's happening?'' Or, more pertinently right now, what time is booze?
Friday 8pm: the Cat And Fiddle bar on Sunset Boulevard is Tim's local, a home from home full of British ex-pats and thankfully few hydraulic soap actresses diving on single movie producers like wanker-seeking missiles. Video shoot wrapped, it's here we retire to drink furiously with notorious LA Friend Of The Stars Harry The Dog and prise open the gates of 'Wonderland'. Tim claims he wanted to make 'a modern day '70s coked-out LA rock record' but the end result, with it's falsetto warbling, full on R&B tracks and lounge-rock moods, is more like student disco night round Prince's gaff. Plus the spooky Moog woogles that made 'Us And Us Only' so sinister are gone, replaced with dance segments like 'Bell And The Butterfly'. That'll be keyboardist Tony Rogers' influence then?
'He still gets people turning up in the audience slagging him off because he's not Rob,' Tim says. 'People actually pay to come to our concerts just to stand at that side and hurl abuse at him. But he's shone on this record. He's a Charlatan. On this record he sacrificed the sound that's traditionally known with The Charlatans, the church organ sound of 'Forever'. He's a shining star on this record.'
There's also, to be brutally frank, a lot of shagging on it. Lil' Tim's having it away all over the shop, on 'You're So Pretty, We're So Pretty', on 'Love To You' and on - ahem, can we open a window slightly? - 'Is It In You?'. Which adds more fuel to the rumour that you recorded the entire album on E. Martin coughs: 'If this LP could be done with just the gut force of your full feeling, do it, instead of that 'well, maybe....'' Er, does that mean you were all on E?
Martin squirms: 'Errrmmmm. I think we all had a common cause of how we wanted it to go.' Was that down to all the E? Tim frowns: 'What are you gettin' at?' Just wondering if you recorded this album whacked off your wizbits on Hacienda '89-quality tablets of Ecstasy.
'Yeah, a lot of it was,' Tim grins. 'It was a definite change from previous drugs.' How did it change the record? Tony laughs: 'We woke up the next day, then found out what it was like.' 'I think it wound us down,' says Tim, 'stopped us being so precious about things, brought it all together. There's a lot of sex in it because we felt sexy. We felt free and wild and that abandon. It allows you to have no inhibitions and just let go. That's what it's all about, letting go. Some people have sex and they're so uptight they can't even get it in, y'knowworrimean?'
So did you all end up in the shower with a big bottle of Radox at the end of the sessions? 'Jacuzzi mate,' says Tim in faux Cockney, 'fackin' Jacuzzi! But it's also an anti-masculine society record about how women do get the best out of you. I think 'A Man Needs To Be Told' (the album's falsetto centrepiece) is the opposite of 'It's A Man's, Man's World'. Men need guidance, they need a kick, but they also need to be told when they're fuckin' brilliant. We need reassurance. So I guess it is quite emotive because it's about everything that a man or a boy feels. You don't just have to fight to show you're a man; you have to show your feelings. I think the whole record is admitting a lot of things.'
Like how all men are worthless worms squirming beneath the stiletto of existence, for example? 'I think men are good at telling women quite inane things and women tell men things they they need to be told. Like, 'You're so pretty.' What the fuck fo they want to know that for? They fuckin' know that, anyway. Tell them something important; tell them they're strong or vital. It is a very much a masculine society, a world run by fucking idiots.'
Doing our bit for the improvement of the male race, the conversation turns for some time to globalisation, George Bush, the owl-burning piss-gods who secretly run the world and the inherent evil of multi-national corporations until Tim concludes out of the blue: 'Blame. The whole world's society is based on blame.' Who do you blame? He drags on a Marlboro and hawks down a mouthful of Budweiser. 'I blame myself.'
Saturday, 4pm: the Standard Hotel is the Milan of Sunset. Impossibly thin models totter through the '60's Bond-chic foyer, past the glass case behind the reception desk where 'resting' actresses lie in their bikinis as 'living art' for five dollars an hour, and out onto the blue plasti-grass beside the pool. Here they mwah-mwah their impossibly thin model mates and sniff the air. Yeew, what is that foul stench, like someone's been belching pure vodka or somethin'? And why hasn't security cleared away those disgusting bums over them? NME thinks it might retch...
The part went on until 4am in the recording studios next door to the Cat And Fiddle last night and this afternoon, through the lingering chemical haze, The Charlatans gather to consider Indie.
'Isn't rock'n'roll dead?' Tim asks. 'Isn't everything dead? Then it all comes alive again, dunnit? If everything dies then something else grows, comes alive. I died and came back. Just by moving territories. Drinking or doing drugs for different reasons. You do drugs because you're happy out here; you do drugs because you're fucking suicidal in Manchester.'
Indie's dead though, apparently. 'Indie is dead, yeah,' he says. 'It's fuckin' old school, fuckin' boring. I'm sure it'll make a resurgence in years to come but right now it's just fuckin' not interesting.' But throughout the '90s you were the epitome of indie. Are you saying your time has gone? 'No, no we're not. It's freeform, innit? Everything now is a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but of that, bit of that. It might get to the point where that gets monumentally boring but right now it's postmodern gone fuckin' mental. What reminds you of indie?'
'The Only One I Know' playing forever in the Highbury Garage. 'Well, we don't play that one anymore,' Tim sighs. 'There's always been a little bit of an indie element to The Charlatans. I don't mid out past, really. I'm sure we've been dull at times but the love of your life can be dull at times, can't they?'
Saturday, 10.30pm: 'Indie?' says Alan McGee. 'Yeah, man, it's so over. Have you heard the New Order track? Fuckin' brilliant man...' The death knell of Old Man Inide thereby rung, Alan scurries off to present his shining Final Solution: the future of vibrant, butt-kick cyber-rock from Venus. Yes, the Ping Pong Bitches are playing the latest monthly Radio 4 night that McGee has put on at the Knitting Factory on Hollywood Boulevard. They are Atomic Kitten after being locked in a Nazi memorabilia shop on bad acid for a week and they suck so much the ceiling turns convex. Yet Tim is down the front, grinning and nodding along to the aural pig-slaughter, clearly the proud owner of ears of iron. But once the band mercifully finish, he scuttles over looking concerned, dragging his 'indie' albatross.
'With this record we've achieved much more that most groups,' he states, 'more than, say, The Smiths. I met Morrissery and I thought he was sad, I thought he was a fool. He lives in LA for a completely different reason than me. He expects people to treat him with respect. I make sure I gain respect. He sits there in Greta Barbo's old house waiting for someone to offer im a record deal whereas I'll phone anybody, I'll talk to anybody.'
Not that Tim has anything to worry about, The stale old indie of which he's been a figurehead for ten years may be on its last legs, but Indie: The Attitude is alive and thriving. It's there in the clattering squall of The White Stripes, the arch scuzz of The Strokes, the diamante misery of Spiritualized, the pure noise terror of Primal Scream and even, at a very long push, the shouty shouty racket of Ping Pong Bitches. And remarkably, 'Wonderland' has it too, It's a record without boundaries or snobby rules of credibility, an eclectic and brilliantly inspired album that stops The Charlatans being The Problem and turns them into a part of The Cure. It's a glorious, gob-smacking miracle.
Within two hours, Tim will have punched the singer of headline act The Lilys in the face for upsetting his wife, snorted Columbia and collapsed unconscious in two different hotel rooms. Forty eight hours with The Charlatans in LA? It's like being in a David Lynch Film.
Mark Beaumont