The Life and Times of Tim

Last year The Charlatans made musical history when they gave away their most recent album for nothing. Looking back, frontman Tim Burgess isn’t really sure that what they did made much business sense.

“What you’re meant to do when you give away something for free, is to collect all the data from the people who download it so you can use it to sell them the next thing,” he says with a big grin. “That’s what everyone tells us anyway. Well, we didn’t bother to do that, which was a bit silly. ”
This and a litany of other mistakes will, Burgess says, make up the bulk of what he has tell a cadre of wide-eyed and up and coming Irish bands later on the day of this interview. As an icon of this year’s JD Set, a new band competition sponsored by Jack Daniel’s, Burgess is meant to take on a bit of a mentoring role.
“Business-wise we’re not really the best role models,” he admits. “We’ve made a lot of mistakes. Signing to a record label for hard cash was a mistake. We’d been on Beggar’s Banquet for years, and we didn’t have any money at all. However, they did put a lot of money into the albums. So we made the mistake of signing to Universal for a lot of money. ‘Yoo hoo!’ we thought, ‘a big pay day!’. Then they didn’t put any money into the record and we ended up spending all the advance. So we learned a bit from that. We’ve always been terrible businessmen. Our current manager says that it’s a wonder we’ve survived at all given how badly we’ve been managed over the years.”
Of course, when Burgess got involved in The Charlatans back in 1988 he had no idea he’d still be with the band 20 years and 10 albums later.
“I wanted to make as many records as a band called The Prisoners who I really liked,” he says. “Well, they made four records, and we’ve gone way beyond that now. Music’s come full circle in a lot of ways for me. The first band I ever really loved was Crass [anarchist punk legends] and the first album I ever got on the day it was released was Penis Envy [Crass’s classic feminist record]. It taught me a lot about women and turned me into a bit of a feminist. I’m meeting Penny Rimbaud the drummer next week, and I’m hoping to do something with him.”
He soon found a mellower sound closer to home.
“The second band I loved were New Order, who were also really terrible business people,” he smiles. “The Madchester thing was starting to happen, and it really did feel like a big deal. Me and my friends would walk into Manchester and media people would be following us with cameras asking us about flared trousers and ecstasy. It was chaos. Ride were our rivals at the time. The Roses had the Mondays as rivals and we had Ride. We always ended up releasing on the same week for some reason. Andy from Ride even stole ‘Polar Bear’ from us as a title when they read about it in the NME. The hype only really disappeared when Nirvana came out and people moved on.”
The Charlatans, however, did not. They rode out the grunge years and enjoyed another wave of popularity during the Britpop era. They suffered the death of their talented organist Rob Collins in a car crash in 1996, and then, in 1998, quintessential Northerner Tim Burgess decided to move to LA, while the rest of the band remained in the UK.
“I was living in Manchester and had lived in London twice before, and my wife wanted to live in either London or LA,” he explained. “I thought that LA seemed like a new experience so we went for it. And now I’ve grown to love it. There’s a lot more space. And the sunshine is different... it doesn’t burn you. There’s a kind of haze; a constantly soft focus. I think it’s probably because of the smog, but the light is just really beautiful. So we moved into a place, did it up a bit, got a great vibe there. I’ve got my records there and I write there. It’s a bit of hermitage. I was practically sent there by my band to write the new Charlatans record and I spent a month in one room writing it.”
Although he writes in the US, now with the help of a home recording studio (“Tony our keyboard-player is the technological Jedi,” he says. “He cleans up and tweaks everything I do”) most of his collaborative work still takes place in the Charlatans’ studio in the UK. He’s about to enter into another recording stint with his long term bandmates, and is also in the midst of sessions for a second solo album (the first, I Believe, was released in 2003).
“I like hanging out with people who make music and I like coming to London to do that,” he proffers. “So I’ve been making music with Josh from The Horrors and Steff from Klaxons. It’s meant to be a solo record but really it’s more like a collaboration record. We’re doing it in The Charlatans’ studio. We did the first tracks last Christmas and they sound, unsurprisingly, like a cross between The Charlatans, The Horrors and Klaxons - a Charlatans verse, a Klaxons middle-eight and a Horrors chorus. I think there’ll be an album soon. Ladyhawke sang on it and Kevin Shields is coming to play on it next week.”