Tag archives for Us and Us Only

Octo­ber 18th sees the release of The Char­la­tans’ debut major label LP, ‘Us & Us Only’, on Universal/Island. Many lessons have been learned along the way, and with almost a decade of Indie sta­tus behind them the band have done as much home­work as R.E.M in How To Be A Global Super­power. But is it what they want? Tee­ter­ing on the eve of their head­line per­for­mance at the 1999 Read­ing Fes­ti­val, drum­mer Jon Brookes joined RMB in look­ing at the Path­ways of The Char­la­tans. And the path revealed shows that the top is some­times a dizzy­ing place to be.

The Char­la­tans sold 15,000 copies of their first sin­gle, ‘Indian Rope’, which worked its way to the top of the Indie charts. The next thing to do was record an album, and the sit­u­a­tion con­tin­ued in its fla­grant dis­re­gard for real­ity when it too went straight to num­ber one.

Think­ing back to these days, Jon says: “We got together quite quickly as a band. A lot of groups get together and craft their first album, and then just go on to rewrite that first album over and over. ‘Some Friendly’ is very bright and bub­bly, and it was put together quite quickly. It wasn’t crafted over a long period of time-I think you can hear that on it.”

If there is any­thing that makes the Char­la­tans stand amongst the qual­ity bands at the turn of the decade it is the drums. Amidst all the ego it’s easy to for­get that asso­ci­a­tion with the best bands in the land can be a very good thing. In 1990 The Char­la­tans stood in the same field as The Stone Roses when it came to a sorted rhythm sec­tion, and Brookes con­sid­ers the Roses’ drum­mer Reni as one of the best ever.

The Char­la­tans’ own tal­ent is best heard in ‘Then’-the sec­ond sin­gle from ‘Some Friendly’. Brookes’ solid beats shape the song into a strik­ing stop-start rhythm, pin­ning down and kick­ing up the melan­choly air that fills out the body of the song. ‘Sonic’ also relies on its tech­ni­cally immac­u­late drum­ming, before the beau­ti­ful bash­ing of the ‘Spros­ton Green’ finale.

“Mar­tin Blunt [Char­la­tans’ bassist] has had a big effect on my play­ing,” admits Brookes. “I mean he’s always going on about drums.”

The only songs from the first album that get a reg­u­lar air­ing in the cur­rent set are the beat-heavy ‘Then’ and ‘Spros­ton Green’, and Jon believes that tracks can look after them­selves. “There are cer­tain songs that just stay rooted. They don’t move how­ever much you change your­self. You can still refer back to them and they are still right.”

There is how­ever some­thing blurred about The Char­la­tans around the time of ‘Some Friendly’. Of course it was the era of blurred. It meant some­thing then that we don’t under­stand now. Blurred album cov­ers, blurred back­drops at gigs, and one blurred track on every album. The Stone Roses’ ‘Don’t Stop’, the Inspi­ral Car­pets’ ‘Mem­o­ries of You’, and the Char­la­tans’ ‘109 pt2’. (Wisely, Blur con­signed their early exper­i­ments in sound to their b-sides.)

But the whole of ‘Some Friendly’ has a blurred qual­ity about it. Jon Baker’s gui­tar is all sound­scapes, and blends in with the Rob Collins’ drift­ing Ham­mond tech­nique, mak­ing the over­all effect monot­one. At times it washes together to excel­lent effect, as in ‘Oppor­tu­nity’ where it cou­ples with an inevitably loop­ing bassline and relent­lessly long-worded lyrics. But too often there is a lack of con­trast, and the star tracks suf­fer by being up to their hips in similar-sounding music.

After the furore over the new major label mate­r­ial has died down (“prob­a­bly late 2000″), Indie label Beg­gars Ban­quet is propos­ing another between-albums album. It will be another har­vest­ing of the band’s nine years at Beg­gars’, com­pris­ing of all the non-album mate­r­ial recorded up to 1997. Amongst over thirty tracks under this cat­e­gory are two that didn’t make last year’s ‘Melt­ing Pot’ com­pi­la­tion. ‘Hap­pen to Die’ and ‘Me. In Time’ are two of the most inter­est­ing tracks to come from the Char­la­tans fold.

They hark from two EPs sand­wiched between the first and sec­ond albums, and hop­ping from one to another is to hop from a monot­one era to a much more excit­ing, fluc­tu­at­ing, chal­leng­ing era. Hard as it was for the band, you can­not look at the 1992 Char­la­tans through Stone Roses tinted spec­ta­cles. ‘Hap­pen to Die’ is a gem of a track (rel­e­gated to track 3 on the ‘Over Ris­ing’ EP due to Gulf War sen­si­tiv­ity), and it con­sti­tutes a log­i­cal pro­gres­sion from ‘Some Friendly’, all I-Shot-The-Sheriff Ham­mondy with that bass line, a beau­ti­ful cho­rus, a beau­ti­ful song. And, ret­ro­spec­tively, ever-so slightly dull.

Com­pare then with ‘Me. In Time’-a track that has been fairly well dis­missed by the band, who call it “really hes­i­tant and unsure”. The open­ing gamut is a crys­tal clear gui­tar, quickly backed up by beau­ti­ful clar­ity, a piano sound cut­ting the Ham­mond cliché and a lovely pop song all round. This last offer­ing announced a real change for the band, with Mark Collins tak­ing over from Jon Baker as gui­tarist, pre­sent­ing a much-needed change of dynamic.

The “really hes­i­tant and unsure” feel is cer­tainly encap­su­lated in the next album title. ‘Between 10th and 11th’ arrived at a ner­vous time for UK music. Lead-weighted hopes were hung on the Char­la­tans and Oxford’s Ride to progress and main­tain some kind of Indie scene after the cre­ative burst of Mad­ch­ester. Ride rebelled, refus­ing to cut their songs down from seven min­utes, although the album they pro­duced, ‘Going Blank Again’, con­tains qual­ity mate­r­ial. The Char­la­tans’ sec­ond album is a sim­i­larly awk­ward affair, with its sul­lenly non-co-operative title and its bunch-of-bananas cover con­tra­dict­ing the clear, direct, pop style of a num­ber of the songs.

Tim Burgess once recalled, “Lyri­cally it was weird, it was like ‘Please get me out of this place…What am I up here singing for? I only wanted to play the tam­bourine anyway’.”

The whole album does have a faintly apoc­a­lyp­tic feel, with ‘The End of Every­thing’ an attempt at some­thing like a protest song. It doesn’t sit right, with the lyric ‘They only want a “yes-man”/they will tell you what to believe and no (erm…)/Yes I do I only want to be strong’ stand­ing out as being out of kil­ter with the band’s personality.

Jon Brookes recalls the mood: “I think we were concerned-not that the bub­ble had burst exactly, but that we were there at the top and we were start­ing to ques­tion if it was what we really wanted. It really shook us. A cer­tain panic started to set in.”

‘Weirdo’ was the first sin­gle (Tim: “We were going to scrap it because we thought it was crap”), and the con­trast with ear­lier mate­r­ial is great. There is the rebel­lious mash­ing of the Hammond’s key­board, which really does lend a weird, dan­ger­ous sound. Again, the drums sig­nal a change. The organ­ics of ‘Some Friendly’ are replaced with the Genet­i­cally Mod­i­fied sequencer that was preva­lent at the time. After all the Baggy Music, pro­duc­ers like Flood and Robin Guthrie were clean­ing up music. Unfor­tu­nately the rest of the world was going Grunge, leav­ing hith­erto promis­ing bands like James, Lush, Chap­ter­house and Curve try­ing with lit­tle suc­cess to reverse out of the cul-de-sac of UK music.

It was too soon to go all Eight­ies again, although ‘Between 10th and 11th’ has dated bet­ter than ‘Some Friendly’. The vast effects work fore­tells the work with the Chem­i­cal Broth­ers and tells much about the band’s inter­est in dance. If the album didn’t pro­duce their best sin­gles, the sequence of tracks drift­ing through ‘Sub­ti­tle’, pop­ping through ‘Can’t Even Be Both­ered’, crunch­ing through ‘Weirdo’, chew­ing through ‘Chew­ing Gum Week­end’ and finally breath­ing through ‘(No one) Not Even The Rain’ is some of the deftest album-work around. The last track quotes e e cum­mings’ poem-‘not even the rain has such small hands’. No one, not even the Stone Roses had done this.

By the time the real­i­sa­tion was made that drum pads were not the way to go, the UK had no music indus­try to speak of. Blur were going to be the next big thing, but were still cir­cling for land­ing with ‘Mod­ern Life is Rub­bish’. The best thing hap­pen­ing was in Amer­ica. The Black Crowes’ ‘South­ern Har­mony and Musi­cal Com­pan­ion’ was pro­vid­ing a healthy foil for Grunge, and was cer­tainly doing great things with key­boards. If any­where was going to pro­vide inspi­ra­tion for a UK band it was there, hence Pri­mal Scream’s blues/gospel incarnation.

“Some­thing was said about us recently,” says Jon, “That really struck a chord. We were described as the clos­est thing to white soul. I wish that had been said about us ear­lier, because I think we’ve had that for a long time. It comes out on the third album, ‘Up to Our Hips’. We’d had such a tough time, and that album has like a ‘phoenix ris­ing’ vibe.”

The great­ness of the open­ing track on ‘Up To Our Hips’ comes in its mara­cas, har­mon­ica and blues piano. The reac­tion against ‘Between 10th and 11th’ is huge, and with it came a return of the blurred­ness, only this time it was an anti-technology blurred­ness. Blurred­ness with intent, if you will.

Jon says, “We used a lot of hand­held per­cus­sion with really raw pro­duc­tion. The most tech­no­log­i­cal thing we used on that album was a torch, because we used to go out fish­ing in the pitch dark after a day in the studio!”

There is cer­tainly a new soul shin­ing through what sounds now like a fairly dark album. The open­ing track is a real high point, and ‘Jesus Hairdo’ pro­vides a poppy relief, again draw­ing con­fi­dently on the blues piano, with lyrics sug­gest­ing a sym­pa­thy for Amer­ica: “If every­thing you say is true it’s bad TV”.

But, con­trary to the gen­eral tide, there are tracks which utilise a more com­plex pro­duc­tion value. In ‘Feel Flows’ it is as if the house cul­ture is struck through with techno/indie sen­si­bil­i­ties. An absolutely filthy key­board, links up with a frosted glass gui­tar over very cymbal-driven per­cus­sion. It is def­i­nitely a fine moment for the Char­la­tans, and their best instru­men­tal by a long stretch. More great­ness fol­lows on the title track, with a sim­i­larly organic dance feel. The soul is high, although as an album ‘Up To Our Hips’ doesn’t quite gel, with the dance and blues influ­ences seem­ing to pull in con­tra­dic­tory directions.

One impor­tant move towards the Char­la­tans of today is in the lyrics, which start to shed the hes­i­tancy that char­ac­terises pre­vi­ous albums. On ‘I Never Want and Easy Life if Me and He Were Ever to Get There’, the words are much more direct: ‘Save me I wanna slip with the slide/Shoot it up and go for a ride’. The choice of this as a sin­gle shows the intent of the band to get much more randy, but the whole album can prob­a­bly be con­sid­ered tran­si­tional. The album scored well, although the sin­gles per­formed worse than any oth­ers, barely crack­ing the top 40, with ‘Jesus Hairdo’ peak­ing at 48.

But The Char­la­tans knew what they wanted to do, and they went ahead and did it. The change of direc­tion to come is evi­dent in ‘Up To Our Hips’, and with the release of ‘The Char­la­tans’ the change was thrust into posi­tion. A high-profile vocal slot for Tim Burgess on the Chem­i­cal Broth­ers’ sin­gle “Life Is Sweet” helped both bands at this point, help­ing the Chem­i­cals achieve debut suc­cess and thrust­ing the Char­la­tans back up to the fore.

Oddly enough for an epony­mous album, ‘The Char­la­tans’ sits awk­wardly in The Char­la­tans’ out­put as being some­how unlike them. You might say it was their Amer­i­can Rawk album, if it would ben­e­fit you to do so. It is cer­tainly very loud and very tre­bly. It sits there as a state­ment of intent: a more expan­sive sound, with flat-out qual­i­ties rather than the (com­par­a­tive) plinky-plinky gen­tle­ness of before.

So what made the dif­fer­ence? “That was when Tim and Mark Collins [gui­tarist] really clicked,” recalls Brookes. “It was their hon­ey­moon period. Tim was look­ing for some­one to write with and they came together at that point.” It cer­tainly shows. The blurred Ham­mond sound is mixed low to allow for big fat wedges of gui­tar and thrust­ing lyrics, although Rob Collins turns up trumps on ‘Just When You’re Thinkin’ Things Over’ with some inspired piano work.

Jon remem­bers: “Every­thing going on in music at the time was self-destructive. Nir­vana were really big, and every­one was talk­ing about tak­ing heroin, and we were like ‘No, no, no-that’s not what we want’. Mark espe­cially was adamant that what we did socially should work in the band’s favour. It was quite a con­scious deci­sion to behave pos­i­tively. We ended up with a mas­sive clutch of really upbeat tracks, each one fight­ing to get on to the album.”

For a band who are con­stantly fend­ing off comparisons-and The Char­la­tans’ career has vir­tu­ally been defined by accu­sa­tions of sound­ing like other bands-it is very dan­ger­ous to rad­i­cally change direc­tion. Of course these are the days when bands can dupli­cate their heroes and it passes unno­ticed in a wave of ado­ra­tion. But any­one tak­ing the trou­ble to play ‘Here Comes a Soul Saver’ beside Pink Floyd’s ‘Fear­less’ will see every rea­son not to take the mate­r­ial as The Char­la­tans. The Rolling Stones’ ‘Exile On Main Street’ also leaps read­ily to mind.

Tim con­curs about the lift­ing of mate­r­ial: “With ‘Just When You’re Thinkin’ Things Over’ we were think­ing of rip­ping off ‘Ram­ble On’ by Led Zep­pelin. ‘Toothache’ was us try­ing to cap­ture the spirit of ‘When The Levee Breaks’.”

Undoubt­edly this was a very silly time for the UK bigshots. Sud­denly it was okay to sound like someone-and I mean exactly like some­one. For all the qual­ity there were lit­tle indul­gences that sank entire ships. Oasis have con­sis­tently flirted with pop writ­ing excel­lence before tram­pling all over their straw­ber­ries with irrel­e­vant Bea­t­les ref­er­ences. Ian Brown must sorely lament allow­ing The Stone Roses to screw up a per­fectly good start to an album with Led Zep­pelin licks.

But the fact of the mat­ter is The Char­la­tans have always been able to main­tain a high stan­dard of musi­cian­ship. That was what put them up there with the best of the Baggy lot, and that is what keeps them there through thick and thin. ‘The Char­la­tans’, when it comes down to it, is an excel­lent album. It is tight, focused and confident.

Lyrics like ‘Feel­ing good, feel­ing high, it’s a rush’, and ‘I can go for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles’ leave no doubt as to where the band are com­ing from. They mark a new phase for Tim Burgess who sings with a spitty brash­ness, with­er­ing the for­mer timidity.

‘Tellin’ Sto­ries’ is imme­di­ate. Opener ‘With No Shoes’ is mas­sive, and single-handedly makes the album “What the Stone Roses’ ‘Sec­ond Com­ing’ should have been™”. The lyrics (“Stone me”/“I’ve been walkin’ with no shoes”/“I could hardly wait to shoot you down”) is all Roses, head on, with­out a care. ‘One To Another’ becomes so packed with energy it is almost unbear­able, almost break­ing the Char­la­tans’ care­ful shape-it is a real favourite moment.

‘You’re A Big Girl Now’ is firmly dri­ven, deny­ing the pause for breath that most acoustic tracks afford. ‘Area 51′ breaks the album just past the cen­tre before the trump card of ‘How High’, which sums up the relent­less­ness of the set. Burgess’s vocal melody is a one-noter, repeat­edly bat­ter­ing the lis­ten­ers up high and keep­ing them there: “Yeah too right I’m gonna pledge my time ’til the day I die.” The crescendo is reached with another glance at the old adver­saries, with ‘Get On It’ bear­ing a struc­tural resem­blance to the Stone Roses’ first album-closer.

‘Tellin’ Stories’-according to Mar­tin Blunt-“sounds like a big bag of span­ners”. It is another huge leap for­ward for the band. But it is so great, so con­fi­dent, so emo­tion­ally charged (com­ing as it does on the back of key­boardist Rob Collins’ untimely death), one doesn’t-can’t-stop to see the real­ity of it.

Jon Brookes, inescapably tan­gled in its mak­ing, can­not hear what the fan hears. “I’ve lis­tened to the album a mil­lion times just to try and fig­ure out what mood Rob was in, if he was unhappy,” he told RMB. “And I can hear cer­tain con­flicts on there between us all. I think the ascent made us dizzy again. I still haven’t quite digested the songs-there are a few ghosts on that album. In time it might make some sense.”

One track that will pro­vide a great sell­ing point for the pro­posed Beg­gars Ban­quet non-album tracks com­pi­la­tion is the b-side to the ‘How High’ sin­gle. ‘Title Fight’ was reput­edly recorded too late for inclu­sion on ‘Tellin’ Sto­ries’, and it cer­tainly makes for a class-A b-side, paus­ing mar­vel­lously before its con­clu­sion to get all dirty with some super­loops sup­plied by Bent­ley Rhythm Ace’s Richard March. As it turns out, it’s a pointer for things to come…

THE NEW ALBUM

‘Us & Us Only’. What a title. Only, think­ing about it, it’s like call­ing it ‘The Char­la­tans’, except there’s already an album called ‘The Char­la­tans’. And now is the time for The Char­la­tans to make a defin­i­tive mark. UK music des­per­ately needs a pickup, with all the thunder-stealing acts like the Man­ics, Oasis and Blur on some­thing of a back foot. What The Char­la­tans can do is estab­lish them­selves once and for all as main­stays, unaf­fected by the flit­ter­ings and non­senses of fash­ion and fad. ‘Us & Us Only’ it is then.

Accord­ing to Jon Brookes, open­ing track ‘For­ever’ is a touch­stone of sta­bil­ity: “It’s a great start­ing song. It’s the first track and the first sin­gle to come from the album. Tim took the music with him to Japan and wrote the lyrics in an after­noon. We thought it was the per­fect way to start an album, and it remains so even now. It has stayed exactly where it is as a track.”

Clock­ing in at over seven and a half min­utes, ‘For­ever’ rep­re­sents a new direc­tion for The Char­la­tans. Now safely in the Universal/Island fold, they can afford the time to exper­i­ment on the album as a whole. Here we are intro­duced to a dis­torted vocal and a choppy drum loop which, together with a clas­sic dub bass line, keep the song throb­bing under a Hammond/strings haze.

The track to really flip out with new form is ‘Good Witch, Bad Witch 2′. A dou­ble bass and key­board repeat a dreamy hand­print, pro­vid­ing crys­tal clar­ity over the filthy fail­ing drum. Burgess’s lyrics switch from exor­cism to blus­ter to Simpsons-style drunken maniac and back, mak­ing for an unhinged feel. It occu­pies the penul­ti­mate spot on the album, but the posi­tion­ing of a minute-long taster at track two means that it suf­fuses the whole set, skew­er­ing it with a dark tension.

‘The Blond Waltz’ starts a lit­tle can­ter of tracks that dis­play a supreme relax­ation and self-assurance with the mate­r­ial at hand. (It’s the band’s first ever foray into a three-four time sig­na­ture, music fans!) Mar­tin Blunt has described the new album as “Bob Dylan and The Band on Ecstasy play­ing at the last night of the Heav­enly Social”, and Tim Burgess’s ten­dency to imi­tate Dylan reaches its extreme in ‘A House Is Not A Home’. To be hon­est the vocal sounds like a dig­i­tally remas­tered Shane Mac­Gowan over a relaxed rush of a song that is musi­cally all smiles.

‘Senses’ is said by Blunt to lay late key­boardist Rob Collins’ ghost to rest. It brings the mood right down, start­ing with a solemn piano chime accom­pa­nied by har­mon­ica before burst­ing into an impas­sioned vale­dic­tion from Tim Burgess. Once again it is unlike any­thing heard from the band before-not a famil­iar song struc­ture or sound, but rather a flat-out emo­tional expression.