After 12 long and turbulent years, NME Carling Award winners and eternal survivors The Charlatans are finally up where they belong...After 12 long and turbulent years, NME Carling Award winners and eternal survivors The Charlatans are finally up where they belong...
"Everyone knows what I do," smiles Tim Burgess wickedly, sipping red wine on a leather sofa, artfully dishevelled good looks reflected in a flickering wall of fairy lights. "I snort a lot of gin and I eat a lot of noodles. But y'know, I can handle it."
His fellow Charlatans amassed in varying degrees of influenza upstairs in the red-walled lounge area of their own Big Mushroom studios (decoration: Dylan, Prince, Pete Townshend, South Park; location: Middlewich, near Crewe), barely raise an eyebrow. Who can blame them? If Tim announced he was flying to Aspen in a private jet to spend the weekend with Michael Douglas, it would only be surreal business as usual.
"I met Michael backstage at a Paul Weller concert in LA the other week," he continues, wide-eyed as ever. "He was beautiful. We were both watching the gig at the side of stage. His wife's a big Weller fan and she must have got him to go. He was asking me all about the band. Even if he wasn't entirely interested, he was definitely fake interested, and that's good enough, right? I'm going to dinner with Linda Gray (Sue Ellen from 80's soap Dallas) next week and to me that's fucking ace, y'know?"
The beansprouts, the Bombay Sapphire, the Hollywood wives: You could lose more than your accent in the City Of Angels. But for Tim Burgess it's, well, 'Wonderland'. Having masterminded last year's dazzling return-to-form album of the same name partly recorded, on Tim's insistence, in LA, The Charlatans have landed, after 19 Top 40 singles and 12 turbulent years, in a new, more self-confident place Up Where They Belong.
The karmic payback is arriving thick'n'fast. First there was a series of reverential write-ups in the wake of 'Wonderland' and now there's headline slots at Glastonbury and the Isle of Wight Iined up, a new single 'You're So Pretty We're So Pretty' plus a personal invitation from Oasis to play at their Finsbury Park shows in July. A triumphant summer looms. That 'special' phone call from Bono, seems imminent. One person who won't be ringing, however, is Phil Spector. Martin: "He came into our dressing room after the LA show, and for a second he just stood there in his shades and we thought, ' Fuckin' hell, it's Phil Spector, come to see us! ' And he said. 'Are you guys Starsailor?' Next minute he was gone."
The band shrug. A heady whiff of vindication mingles with the fog of Silk Cut. "We are getting perceived in a different way at long last," agrees Jon Brookes as a storm whips up outside. "But I think it's about time we had an ego boost. It'll be good if we get a bit arrogant. God help the world when The Charlatans start believing everyone thinks they're great!"
The last 12 months has seen a strange equilibrium restored to The Charlatans' sweet'n'sour universe. This is a band who mislaid original guitarist Jon Baker in the first flush of success; recorded turning point third album 'Up To Our Hips' with the threat of jail hanging over keyboardist Rob Collins; played Knebworth while still grieving over his subsequent death in a car crash and signed a major new deal only to discover their accountant had embezzled £300,000 owed to the taxman.
No-one tripped up on the red carpet and broke their ankle when they received their NME Carling Awards for Best Radio 1 Evening Session and Outstanding Contribution To NME, but you wouldn't have been surprised if they had. So when keyboardist Tony Rogers told the group he had testicular cancer while recording 'Wonderland', it wasn't so much a case of deja vu as, erm, deja voodoo.
"It's not something you can shrug off like the accountant thing," continues Jon. "Tony's health has been a major concern. But he's been very open about the last 12 months, which, as you can imagine have involved some quite horrific treatment. His commitment to the band and his creativity has never dipped below a 110 per cent. Without him I dunno where we'd be. His energy and musicianship has reinvigorated the whole band."
Over the years, many things have been sent to try The Charlatans. Not surprising, then, that, they've figured out a way to judge them.
"People see The Charlatans as being a representation of their own lives, of the ups and downs and the things that don't go right," Jon continues. "Being in a band ain't all about being in the gossip pages of the tabloids, it's about messing things up and then dusting yourself down and carrying on. And it's not just because of what we've been through, but there's an underlying melancholy in The Charlatans. It's been there since day one, and I've always liked that sadness because that's life."
Tony, it transpires, having already undergone chemotherapy for his condition, was due to receive his latest set of medical results today. Instead he's finishing off his keyboard part for a cover of, suitably, Bob Dylan's 'Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You' and laughing off any suggestion that he might be better served being elsewhere.
"I've had a had of a year, mate," he concedes, "but the music is the one thing, the only thing, that's never let me down. Everything else has. Relationships, you name it. Music is the one thing no-one can ever take away from me. I think about being in the band every day. Even with my treatment. I've managed to avoid missing anything important. And for me, the day I say I don't want to do it whether it's a gig, a rehearsal, anything, is the day that my heart won't be in it."
"I AM A DALEK! GIVE ME A CHEESEBUR-GER!" Later, and the normally mild mannered Martin is moving towards the studio pool table with his arms outstretched, yelling robotically. He is explaining the lunacy that was day-to-day life in the band when Rob Collins was alive. It was Rob's custom to enter fast food chains and demand service while screaming like an alien from Dr Who. To calm his over?excited bandmate, Jon takes on the role of psychotherapist. "Calm down, Martin. You are in a safe, warm place," he ventures soothingly. "A river is flowing by. You can hear the sound of a Vespa in the distance. The Small Faces are playing on the radio..."
Jon and Martin, rhythm section and organisational heart of The Charlatans have been close friends for over 20 years. They speak on the phone every day. How long is it before their general chit-chat over the fortunes of Wolves and West Brom turns to the band? Jon: "Oh, it varies. Usually no longer than five minutes...."
Outside, a hard rain continues to fall. This will escalate into a freak storm which will bring down electrical power lines throughout the whole of the northwest. The Charlatans aren't bothered: the bathroom lights in the studio conked out weeks ago. Suffice to say, it's not the kind of weather Tim misses.
"The skies are grey, it ain't raining men, it's raining hail," he sighs later, relocated to the womb-like conditions of the studio downstairs. " I just ran out of space in England. Living in LA for me means I've found my home, a place to start. Without LA I'd still feel like a labourer. Its not like I've got a new job, its just a new platform. I'm in a resting place. If you're climbing Mount Everest you have to have a camp halfway up. I'm on a perch."
The mountaineering analogy isn't accidental. Tim grew up with parents who had both climbed the Matterhorn, and the young Tim was groomed for a lifetime clambering up the sides of inanimate objects. He realised it wasn't for him when he climbed 35 feet up a tree and was unable to get down again. Next came sports.
"When I was a teenager I was into all sorts of athletics and fitness. I swam this big lake in Cheshire and I was gonna go for the Channel. But then I gave it all up for the r'n'r... and I don't mean rest and recuperation!"
This spirit of adventure (which Jon describes as Tim's "beautiful innocence") fuels the entirety of 'Wonderland', but it's the hot funk of the sassy' You're So Pretty We're So Pretty' which finds Tim at his cockiest. Singing falsetto, and in love with the mirror, it's a display of uncharted narcissism from a singer who, despite having been pinned to bedroom walls for a decade, has always shied away from drawing attention to himself.
"It's about a lot of things really. I knew a lot of people were gonna say, 'Oh, he's had his balls cut off' when they heard me singing falsetto, so I thought I'd go the whole way and make the song a challenge about what sexuality is for a man. You can sing like a girl and still be a man, probably more so, for daring to do it. Plus the word 'pretty' is still punk because of the Sex Pistols."
But those lyrics - "Show me the diamonds/Show me the gold" and " Show me the money/Show me the money baby" - it's like you've had enough of letting everyone else take the limelight: and now it's payback time.
"Yeah! I mean I know that in a lot of ways LA is the last stop on the planet, but things happen there, you meet people, you get stronger. Y'know, I want Shelby Lynne on backing vocals, Gwen Stefani. Why not? We deserve the best, why settle for less? I've never felt scared of any fame or any beauty, and that's what gives me confidence, it drives me on.
To prove it, at deafening volume, Tim plays demos of two new tracks the band recorded over the last few days. One is a beautiful late-night acoustic blues song where his singing is more ragged, more confident than it's ever been. And the other is a pumping acid house monster with Tim providing Supremes-like soul harmonies and, presumably, Ready Steady Cook inspired lyrics which include the lines "I like musical notes in my soup/I like free-thinking in my noodles".
Always those noodles. The rain lashes down outside. What is it with the noodles, Tim?
But when you look at him, head back, eyes closed, grinning from ear to ear, you know he's already miles away. He's back in 'Wonderland'.
Jason Fox