Tim Burgess does not look like someone in the throes of an existential crisis. The Charlatans singer has twinkling puppy dog eyes and the kind of smile an unkind American might describe as a ‘shit eating’ grin.
Roguishly dapper in pork-pie hat and charity-shop tie, Burgess is a picture of post-Strokes chic. He’s relentlessly chirpy, too. Twenty four hours from now he will DJ in a Dublin bar; the prospect seems to genuinely thrill him. After 17 years in music, nothing about Burgess appears stale and jaded.
This is all quite deceptive, however. Burgess, is nearly 40 and, suddenly, wondering what he wants to do with his life.
“Sometimes, I ask myself why I’m still in the band and I think, well, what else is there to do?” he muses, disarmingly upbeat. “Me and the rest of the guys – we use each other, I suppose. I get what I want from them, and vice versa.”
Burgess and I are nattering in a hotel on the capital’s quays. He flew in yesterday, from the continent, where he has been shilling for the Charlatans' new record, a confused, if intriguing piece called Simpatico. Before that, there was Japan and the United States, his home for the past five years.
“Being apart keeps the band together,” Burgess believes. “It’s not like the old days, when we were all mates in the back of a van. You can’t go on like that forever. You shouldn’t. You need to have your own life. That’s one of the reasons I moved to Los Angeles and made my solo record. Space is important.”
Simpatico has received a bit of a critical panning, not so much for the quality of its songs (which vary from half cocked to wonderful), but because it tips its hat to Afro-Caribbean influences. For reason unclear, the thought of The Charlatans making an avowedly ‘black’ LP fills many with chagrin.
It’s also an album of unexpected depths. Great quantities of dread and regret appear to slosh around in the bowels of the record. With its slow, dub rhythms and reggae tempos, Simpatico find The Charlatans abandoning what has become their trademark – dreamy indie rock, with just a hint of danger – for a sound far more serious, and occasionally portentous.
“Well, it was a dark time. That’s why it’s a dark album,” says Burgess, still smiling. “The last record was made in LA. We did most of the new one in Reading. It rained constantly. I used to really like walking out in it, every day, into the woods, to get drenched.”
By Charlatans standards, Simpatico is strikingly political: the London bombings receive a mention; Burgess ruminates on the World Trade Center attacks (the band’s acclaimed seventh record, Wonderland, was released in the US on September 11).
“'When The Lights Go Out In London’ was written about 20 minutes after we heard that all our London friends were okay after the bombing,” Burgess recalls. “‘NYC' is about me finding out about September 11. The Charlatans were supposed to be in New York when the planes hit. It was a miracle we weren’t. I remember waking up at four in the morning in LA and turning on the telly and seeing the Pentagon on fire. That song is about the dreadful feeling in my stomach.”
What’s peculiar about all of this is that Burgess should fall prey to melancholy so late in The Charlatans’ career. When things don’t kill you, aren’t they supposed to make you stronger?
After all, it's not as if he, and the rest of the band, haven’t been through the grinder already. In the early ‘90s, the implosion of the Madchester scene nearly killed The Charlatans off.
Then, in 1992, keyboard player Rob Collins drove the getaway car in an armed robbery, receiving eight months in the clinker for his troubles (he claimed to be an ‘accidental’ accessory). Four years later Collins, en route to the studio where the Charlatans had started their fifth record, lost control of his car and hit a tree, dying instantly.
Fate – the bastard – had one final, absurd twist, in store. In 2002, The Charlatans' accountant skipped town with e500,000 in royalties, saddling the band with a crippling Inland Revenue bill.
Looking back on all that has happened Burgess shakes his head slowly and smiles, though the warmth has drained away.
“People ask whether we're the band we are today despite or because of all we've been through, and I honestly don’t have an answer. We just muddled on. Kept going. What else do you do? A journalist once asked how we survived. I said it was karma. He wanted to know whether it was good karma or bad karma. I’m still trying to work that out.”