After the death of their drummer Jon Brookes, the Charlatans thought their gig at the Royal Albert Hall last year could be their last, but their new album, Modern Nature, finds them in surprisingly euphoric form
Last year, the Charlatans played a charity gig at the Royal Albert Hall in London in memory of their drummer Jon Brookes. Brookes had died a couple of months previously from a brain tumour that was first diagnosed when he had a seizure onstage in 2010. The show was, by all accounts, a huge success, one of those occasions on which the Charlatans are called on to display their famous resilience in the face of tragedy: perhaps not quite on the same scale as their appearance in front of 150,000 people at Oasis’s 1996 Knebworth concert shortly after keyboard player Rob Collins was killed in a car crash, but still a potent demonstration of the indomitable spirit that has seen the band through death, imprisonment and drug addiction.
Or at least that’s what it looked like. The reality was, apparently, slightly different. Even before Brookes’s death, the band had been struggling to come up with new songs: they were trying to make an album, because Brookes had insisted he wanted to be involved in their next record, but “he was obviously very poorly and we were all a bit distracted,” says frontman Tim Burgess. At least one member of the band thought the Royal Albert Hall show might represent the Charlatans bowing out. “It wasn’t happening in the studio, it was a mess,” says guitarist Mark Collins. “And I thought, ‘That could be the last gig we ever do.’ My daughter took a picture of me coming off stage, I’ve got my head in my hands, and, Jesus, that’s what I was thinking about.”
A year on, the three members of the Charlatans sitting in an east London cafe – Burgess, Collins and bassist Martin Blunt – do not look much like men contemplating their band’s imminent demise. Contrary to Collins’s fears, the Charlatans’ 12th album, Modern Nature, ended up being finished, with the help of three guest drummers: the Verve’s Peter Salisbury, who was Brookes’s own choice as his replacement, Factory Floor’s Gabriel Gurnsey and New Order’s Stephen Morris, the latter happy to contribute despite the prospect of being confronted with the collection of homemade New Order scrapbooks that Burgess keeps at the Charlatans’ studio. “I think he was a bit freaked out by that,” nods the singer, “but I was only 14 years old when I made them.”
Moreover, Modern Nature sounds suspiciously like a triumph, packed with great songs, occasionally flecked with disco and soul influences, and is surprisingly euphoric despite the circumstances that informed it. Although it includes a song written by Brookes called Walk With Me – the lyrics dictated to his wife three weeks before he died, the vocals from the choir of the school at which he occasionally taught – it’s not an album overshadowed by his death. The one thing it never sounds like is the umpteenth album ground out by a band 25 years into their career.
After some years working outside the traditional music industry – they gave their 2008 album You Cross My Path away for free on the internet, and Burgess set up his own label, O Genesis, in 2011 – they unexpectedly find themselves with a major label deal: “We self-funded the recording, and then our manager sent out some tracks,” says Blunt, “and, lo and behold, several labels went: ‘We just weren’t expecting this, but we want to talk to the band.’”
Perhaps understandably, the Charlatans have come to imbue the album and its making with a certain mystical significance. Gabriel Gurnsey claims to have felt someone slap him across the head while he was using Brookes’s drumkit in the studio. The title, meanwhile, comes from film-maker Derek Jarman’s journals, a title that struck Burgess in the most literal manner imaginable: “We didn’t just go round like stealing a name or anything. I’d never read the book, but a copy of Modern Nature actually fell from a bookshelf and landed on my head before it hit the floor.”
Collins and Blunt wear their years in the Charlatans a little more obviously than Burgess, who beneath a fairly majestic bottle-blond bowl-cut still looks about 24. That seems faintly unfair, given that he spent a significant proportion of his 47 years taking vast quantities o
Perhaps understandably, the Charlatans have come to imbue the album and its making with a certain mystical significance. Gabriel Gurnsey claims to have felt someone slap him across the head while he was using Brookes’s drumkit in the studio. The title, meanwhile, comes from film-maker Derek Jarman’s journals, a title that struck Burgess in the most literal manner imaginable: “We didn’t just go round like stealing a name or anything. I’d never read the book, but a copy of Modern Nature actually fell from a bookshelf and landed on my head before it hit the floor.”
Collins and Blunt wear their years in the Charlatans a little more obviously than Burgess, who beneath a fairly majestic bottle-blond bowl-cut still looks about 24. That seems faintly unfair, given that he spent a significant proportion of his 47 years taking vast quantities of drugs: as his autobiography, Telling Stories, cheerfully details, at one stage he moved in with his drug dealer and also took to encouraging people to blow cocaine up his bum. And yet, here he is, sober since 2006, now resident in rural Norfolk, a veritable ball of youthful eagerness – he enthuses about everything from his love of the American musician Arthur Russell to his forthcoming second book. He is considerably more bright-eyed than the father of an 18-month-old has any right to be.
Perhaps it’s all down to the rejuvenating powers of transcendental meditation, of which Burgess has been a devotee for several years. “It’s kind of revitalised me. It’s definitely had an effect on my day-to-day enthusiasm for things. It just gives you consistency more than anything, consistency and like … maybe a fire.” Not that his loud advocacy for the practice, including fundraising for David Lynch’s Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace, has had much impact on his bandmates. “I have a couple of beers,” nods Collins, gruffly. “That seems to have the same effect.”
Nor have the other Charlatans followed their frontman’s lead and taken to Twitter, on which Burgess is an indefatigable presence: he’s on the social network so often, recommending music, posting videos and enthusing about record shops it seems a miracle he has any time left over to actually be in a band. “That’s another thing that re-energised me,” he enthuses. “I can go to people directly, it feels a bit more real. It took me a while to work it out, how to do it and then one morning I just said: ‘Anyone fancy a coffee?’ and I got more responses to that than having posted any kind of video or information about the band. Hundreds of people saying ‘I’ll have a flat white’ or ‘Americano with cream’, and it just became a thing.” It certainly did: his virtual coffee shop begat a real coffee shop – the Tim Peaks pop-up cafe regularly turns up at festivals – and his own brand of Fairtrade charity fundraising coffee.
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More importantly, Burgess’s presence on Twitter seemed to shift perceptions of the Charlatans slightly: the music he posted and enthused about was of substantially more leftfield bent than you might have expected from the frontman of a band perennially labelled as either baggy or Britpop survivors. Perhaps a slightly avant-garde edge was always in the Charlatans’ music – Burgess claims that the instrumental 109 Pt 2 from their debut album, Some Friendly, was influenced by Throbbing Gristle – but it tended to get overlooked.
Either way, their links to the leftfield seem noticeably more pronounced these days: remixes come courtesy of Chris & Cosey and Grumbling Fur, the first single from Modern Nature, So Oh, was released on the record label owned by the Quietus, not a website usually known for its love of doughty Britpop survivors. “Avant garde?” frowns Collins, when the term is mentioned. “That’s a very big word.”
“I like it,” Burgess offers, quietly.
“I think between us we cross over, but there’s a lot of stuff individually. We don’t really ask ‘Where’s that from?’ when someone brings an idea in, it just sort of knits and it comes out sounding like us,” Blunt says.
They have, says Burgess with admirable understatement, “been on a bit of a journey over the past five years, and yet here we all are.” No one thinks about the band they’ve spent their entire adult lives in ending any time soon. “That’s what I was doing that night at the Albert Hall: imagining life without the Charlatans,” says Collins. “Yeah. And it’s not a nice place to be.”
- The single So Oh is out now and Modern Nature will be released on 26 January, both on BMG.
