Things are going well for once for the Charlatans. They’ve survived death, fraud, imprisonment and illness. As they tell Ben Marshall, who joins them on the road, ‘We are rock’
I got woken up by a battleship this morning," grins the Charlatans lead singer Tim Burgess, somewhat mystifyingly. It’s a very Tim remark, charmed, charming and spacey. Despite the boozy brown bags under his eyes and the slight tremble in his hands, he looks OK, chicly wasted, elegantly fucked-up. The rest of the band have yet to surface.
Yesterday, a day that had appeared like a magnesium flash from the coke – and alcohol-fuelled day before, had been one hell of day. The large tour bus that only 48 hours earlier had been as laden with wine, beer and spirits as any minor branch of Threshers was by the following evening as barren as a temperance league’s AGM. A month’s worth of booze wiped out in three days. Minor characters floating in and out. The main players, the boys, the Charlies, acting like hosts and kings. Tim screaming "Charge!", We are fucking rock". More than a lost weekend, more like a lost week.
Bands, or at any rate bands like the Charlatans, understands better than anyone the meaning of that phrase. The Lost Weekend. It’s not that you lose a few days, that booze and drugs obliterate memory and time, it’s that the two, three, four (take your pick) days all blend into one long, apparently endless party. The places change. But in the back of the bus, with its telly and stereo and drink and drugs, location and time cease to mean a thing. In the lovely warm poisonous womb, where the light never changes, the music is always at a New Year’s Eve high and no glass is ever empty. You could be anywhere and nowhere.
Of course you need a certain amount of optimism to carry this off. Things can get very morbid and tempers very frayed when there is nothing other than the bus and the tour itinerary and the company of people you may have known for years. You need confidence, a great record and the unassailable belief that when that record is played live it will sound better than it ever did in the studio.
The Charlatans have all that and more. Wonderland, their new album, is by far and away their best. Grabbing from Curtis Mayfield, contemporary electronica, the Rolling Stones and even American country rock, it sees the band worshipping in a broad church, but nevertheless distilling those influences into something potently and intoxicatingly their own. It is this year’s most optimistic record.
I have followed the band almost since the release of their second single, The Only One I Know, and in that period (almost a decade) the band have been though hell and high water. It is almost obligatory when writing about the Charlatans to list their litany of apparently terminal disasters. So let’s do that.
Shortly after the release of The Only One I Know, bassist Martin Blunt who has on more than one occasion described himself as a "partial schizophrenic", suffered an enormous nervous breakdown. In the same period, the Charlatans lost their original guitarist John Baker. He was replaced by Mark Collins. In December 1992, keyboardist and founding member Rob Collins was arrested for his part in an armed robbery. Bail was set at £25,000. There was a possibility that Rob would go down for five years. In actual fact, thanks to a good legal team, he served just four months.
In July 1996, as the band were recording their fifth album Tellin’ Stories, Rob was thrown through the roof of his BMW and died a few hours later in hospital. This time the band looked certain to spilt. But a few days later they issued one of the most defiant statements in the history of British pop. It ended: "The decision has been made to carry on in his memory. It’s what he would have wanted. He lived it like he loved it and he ran out of time. There will be no change. We are fuckin’ rock. We’ve lost our mate."
A few weeks later, in front of 125,000 people, they supported Oasis at Knebworth, playing one of the greatest, angriest shows I have ever seen. Tellin’ Stories turned out to be their best album to date. That youthful war cry was more than vindicated. Later drummer Jon Brookes would say that it wasn’t strictly true that Rob ran out of time. "He ran out of road, really." It was a joke Rob would have appreciated. The keyboardist was replaced by Tony Rogers.
In 1999, the man the Charlatans had put in charge of their financial affairs was arrested by the Serious Fraud Squad. He had embezzled hundreds of thousands of pounds of the band’s money. The band went on to record Us And Us Only, a beautiful, epic, highly introspective piece of work. In the same period Tim married his Texan girlfriend Michelle and the two settled in West Hollywood, a move most critics predicted would end the band. Needless to say it didn’t. Earlier this year Tony Rogers, still in his early 30s, was diagnosed with testicular cancer. The cancer is now, mercifully, in remission.
A battleship is perhaps the only thing that could have woken Tim up. Mark Collins didn’t need a battleship. Terror woke him up. He came to on the now empty bus convinced he had to play. "I just sat there thinking, it ain’t gonna happen. I kept thinking the band were waiting for me onstage. I was horrified. But I knew that even with best intentions it was never gonna happen. I was well and truly fucked."
Eventually Jim Person, the Charlies’ security man, mate, ironer of shirts and sometime tour manager (Robo Mum), found the disconsolate guitarist and reminded him that there was no show to play. By then Jon Brookes was already in bed and Tony Rogers was preparing to carry the evening on in one of Southampton’s many dubious night spots. This would involve a food fight in a curry house, and the avoidance of several crunchy beatings, thanks again to the tough but angelic presence of Jim. Martin meanwhile had missed all the fun having flown back to his hometown of Northwich to flog his house.
For the remaining hours leading up to the inevitable soundcheck (the Charlatans soundchecks are better than most bands’ gigs) and Southampton show, Tim and I are left to schlep around the city centre grabbing pints of weak lager at every other pub. One hour before the show we sit in the dressing room watching Millionaire and talking war. Both Mark and Tim are proud that the band’s last single, A Man Needs To Be Told, is the first anti-war song of the last 10 years. "Albeit inadvertently," adds Mark.
Just before 8pm, the Charlatans swagger on to the stage. Bristol had been hot and nasty, the local yokels lobbing cider and the Charlies tearing into songs with savagely punked-up energy. It was almost as if, via volume and fury, the band were taking revenge on a venue they immediately decided they hated.
In Southampton the band appear more relaxed. The softer and sweeter songs (Walking With No Shoe, Tellin’ Stories) and the newer and more delicate (Wake Up, A Man Needs To Be Told) are given the space and pace they need to breathe. The harder material (Is It In You, One To Another) combines the Bristol blitzkrieg with a huge cinematic sweep and soaring choir of soulful harmonies. What is most evidence is the band’s positively viral enthusiasm. Southampton simply went nuts. The band ended with an epic version of Sproston Green, a song that still reminds everyone of Rob Collins.
Back in the womb things are once again getting pleasantly poisonous. Tim is knocking back the brandy, Tony (the band’s only single member) is talking girls, John is explaining the difference between Bristol and Southampton, but thanks to the booze perhaps, it comes over as mind’s eye gibberish. Martin is still talking war. Everyone is on a huge high, part chemical, part natural.
Later the band will play London. Heaven to be precise. Tim will be awoken by the sound of Trafalgar Square, though he won’t quite know it. Momentarily he’ll be everywhere and nowhere. Then the feeling, the realisation, will leak in. Charge. We are rock. And they are. The only living band in the UK.