The Art of Longevity Episode 84: The Charlatans, with Tim Burgess

I’ve been trying to get Tim Burgess to join me on The Art of Longevity for at least 10 seasons. Ultimately, a new Charlatans album, We Are Love, seemed like the right reason to finally do it. I’ve said it before, but I’m genuinely amazed and thrilled about how many ‘old bands’ have put out a recent album that is up there with their very best work. Suede, The Manics, Nada Surf, Tindersticks et. al. And I’m delighted to now include The Charlatans in that club. The band’s new album, #14 no less, is wonderful. Confident, varied, suitably different but very much representative, it’s a thoughtful and entertaining record throughout, containing some of the band’s best songs for ages; notably both the lead singles, opener Kingdom Of Ours, Appetite, For The Girls, You Can’t Push The River and, Tim’s own choice - Out On Our Own. But honestly, this is another cracking end-to-end listen with none of the filler that has perhaps been there in the past on some Charlatans offerings (along with all those above mentioned bands). “I’m really confident that it will seep in. We’re enigmatic and thugs as well. Some of it bangs you over the head but it has an emotional impact that I think, gets there”. ]Like many people of a certain vintage, The Charlatans have been one of those reassuring presences in my life over the years. Perhaps never the best or the biggest, The Charlatans longevity story has been to simply keep on keeping on, eventually unfolding into a slow-burning surprise journey towards British indie rock legend. You may not have predicted it back in the early days, despite a couple of genuine early hits, but when a band finds its formula and works at it, the miracles come later. Some early success in 1990 brought the top 5 hit “The Only One I Know”, but it wasn’t a linear rise from that point on. By album five, Telling Stories (1997) the band had a genuine classic album on their hands, including the legendary indie hit “One To Another” (which new single “Deeper And Deeper” nods to brilliantly). With that momentum, the Charlatans crossed the rubicon into longevity, establishing themselves as one of the more enduring British indie bands, with genuine peaks of popular success (three UK number one albums). When I asked Tim the secret to the band’s longevity, he’s pretty clear with the answer: “The reason why people are into older bands now is that they don’t all sound the same. Now, everyone sounds the same but has to invent a persona to be different, whereas we [old bands] all are, effortlessly different”. From the get go, the band’s instrumentation, with the late Rob Collins’s Hammond organ at its core, gave The Charlatans a distinctive fusion of indie rock, soul, psychedelia and dance music. But with due respect to the band’s sound, much of the enduring fondness for the band comes from Tim Burgess himself. His vocal style is sunny but with underlying yearning, his style as a frontman effortlessly optimistic and embracing. And while Burgess remains best known as a singer and frontman of this band, he has also pursued a range of solo, collaborative and curatorial projects that make him something of a “renaissance man” and, as I suggest in our conversation, something of a National Treasure.