Garbage Days Revisited #87: The Charlatans - "The Charlatans" (1995)

 

"And I don't take no shit from anyone/And I could land on money or the moon/You know the sun'll come soon/And we can sail away..." - The Charlatans - Tell Everyone

Quite honestly, I probably owe Tim Burgess one for helping to keep my sanity intact a couple of years ago. I think the Covid lockdown hit all of us pretty hard when it happened and I was no exception. A bit of background - at the time I'd moved back to my native Bradford a few months previously to be closer to my family, leaving my wife behind down south while she sorted out our house sale. The plan was that I'd live with one of my oldest mates up here in the few months it'd take to sort that out then we could concentrate on getting a place of our own and start moving on with our new life up here.

Needless to say, Covid fucked that plan up royally.

On the 17th March (the first anniversary of my mum's death which really didn't help matters), I was sent home from my job not knowing when I would return. As it happened, I wouldn't. Two weeks later, I was informed that due to my employer needing to cut costs and the fact that I was still on probation, that I was being let go. Stuck 200 miles away from my other half with everywhere suddenly closing down and suddenly being absolutely petrified as to how I was going to afford the rent on the house I was living in (an old Victorian terrace that was literally rotting away from the inside to the extent that my mate was suffering from respiratory problems due to how bad the mould infestation in his room caused by a rotting window frame was) and convinced that I'd fucked everything up in terms of our relocation away to start a bright new life and didn't know where the hell I was going to go from there.

After thankfully managing to scrape enough together through various benefit applications to keep the wolf from the door until another job was forthcoming (mercifully this would only take a couple of months), the sudden mundanity of an existence with nothing to do started to bite. Again, I was lucky in that I was isolating in Bingley with some nice countryside walks literally five minutes away from my house but the days were turning our lives into a weird cross between Waiting For Godot and the classic Rik Mayall/Ade Edmondson sitcom Bottom. In between us watching episodes of Tiger King, Sunderland 'Til I Die and various '90s football documentaries to pass the evenings, I also discovered Tim's Twitter Listening Party and it helped to give my day some structure and basically keep my sanity from snipping through the thread that was holding it by this point.

The premise of TTLP is simple - basically, everyone presses play on their record/CD/MP3 player at the same time to listen through an album that evening with Tim plus one or more of the people involved in making the album who give a commentary as it plays. Whether it was listening to a past favourite album I'd not heard in ages, listening to something I'd written off when I first heard it to see if time had been a bit kinder to it (sometimes it had, sometimes it hadn't) or just listening to something cool and new that I'd not encountered before, it certainly brightened up my evening and made those troubled times a bit easier to negotiate. I've continued to listen to them on and off ever since and it made me realise that I'm probably overdue writing something about the Charlatans here on GDR.

I think the consensus with the Charlatans from when I was growing up seemed to be that they were a great singles band who tended to struggle a bit with full albums but I don't think that's necessarily accurate. I think it maybe stems from the fact that the group's first two albums (1990's Some Friendly and 1992's Between 10th and 11th) probably did have a little bit of a quality gap between the singles on them and the album tracks but to say that those singles are all the albums have going for them is a bit unfair to say the least. I did actually buy Some Friendly in a Woolworths sale for £2.50 on tape as a 12-year-old (the same day as I bought Northside's Chicken Rhythms and Airhead's Boing! as I mentioned in an early Sounds From The Junkshop) and while The Only One I Know and Then are obviously the two standout tracks, there's a few other good ones on there as well such as the woozy psychedelia of Opportunity, the jerky rhythm of Sonic and the soaring closer Sproston Green (which the band still finish their live set with to this day). It's not quite all killer no filler but it's certainly not a two song album by any stretch of the imagination.

Between 10th and 11th was the "difficult" follow-up and is probably the weakest of the early efforts but even this has a few bits to recommend it - Weirdo and the under-rated Madchester/house fusion of Tremolo Song were strong singles while the ferocious The End Of Everything Etc and the mournful Chewing Gum Weekend are almost as good. Sure, the likes of Ignition and Subtitle are a bit anonymous but looking back it doesn't seem like half the disaster it was written off as at the time.

It's the two albums after that that I consider to be the Charlatans' strongest though. 1994's Up To Our Hips needed to be a confident statement from them as the Madchester scene they'd initially surfed the wave of was well and truly collapsing - the Happy Mondays had already split and the Stone Roses and the Inspiral Carpets would soon follow them out of the exit door. Add to that keyboardist Rob Collins serving a stretch in prison for being an accessory to an armed robbery at the time it was released and it could easily have been the band's last will and testament. However, although it still performed fairly modestly commercially it did at least show that they were a band who were kicking hard against the changing tides right from the ominous opener Come In Number 21 ("I've heard for ages that you're in the good books but you were no brother of mine") before the killer one-two of I Never Want An Easy Life If Me And He Were Ever To Get There and Can't Get Out Of Bed which gave the group a brace of much needed Top 40 hits kick things into gear.

Up To Our Hips is an impressively varied album and showed the group were moving forward beyond their Madchester roots ranging from the distorted acoustic shuffle of Autograph through the pure pop of Jesus Hairdo to the sinister six minute epic Patrol. It was pretty much the album which turned the tide for them and set things up for what was to follow.

By the time The Charlatans (aka The Yellow Album) saw the light of day in mid-1995, the climate had arguably swung back in the band's favour with the rise of Britpop and groups like Oasis citing them as an influence. Even so, the first two singles from it, Just Lookin' and Crashin' In both made a very meagre splash, only just scraping the Top 40. However, it would be the third single, Just When You're Thinkin' Things Over, released the same week as Roll With It and Country House and frankly miles better than both, that properly resurrected them, climbing to the edge of the Top 10 and dropping them firmly back front and centre.

But the truth is that The Charlatans is so much more than that one song. From the moment the instrumental Nine Acre Court with its insistent "Naaaa-na-na-na-naaaa!" refrain kicks it into gear, it's the sound of a band playing to their strengths and expanding their repertoire to excellent effect. Feelin' Holy sounds like some righteous collision between the Roses and the Faces, the sweet Just Lookin' and the insistent Crashin' In are the sound of clocking out on a Friday night and getting ready to blast off for the weekend and Here Comes A Soul Saver is a gentle Motown influenced ode to dusting off your favourite old records and listening to them for the first time in way too long (almost an echo of what was to come 25 years later you might say!)

At the other end of the scale, the almost jungle-style Bullet Comes and the dirty riffed up Toothache show the tricks the group had picked up from hanging around with the Chemical Brothers around this time while the gentle acoustic led Tell Everyone and the strutting riff of No Fiction are other standouts. It's only really the slightly Charlatans-by-numbers closing duo of See It Through and Thank You that don't score a full bullseye here but them aside this is a proper all killer no filler album.

Some would disagree with me but in my opinion, The Charlatans remains the group's high point all these years later. Tellin' Stories, recorded with the shadow of Rob Collins' death in a car accident hanging over the band, had an absolutely killer one-two-three-four opening sequence in the defiant With No Shoes, the anthemic North Country Boy, the sheer brilliance of the title track (one of the group's finest moments) and the barrelling One To Another but the rest of the album kind of felt as if it couldn't quite live up to that awesome opening run. It's still a good album but it felt like a small step down from its two predecessors.

The following two albums kind of continued the gentle downward slope - 1999's Us And Us Only was a bit of a hit and miss affair although the storming A House Is Not A Home was up there with the best stuff they'd ever done although I may be biased as I first heard it during a particularly nasty break-up with a girl who I found out had been cheating on me with one of my best mates at the time - that bit where Tim sings "On the streets I can feel a sequel...THIS IS A DIVORCE!" still makes the hairs on my arms stand on end all these years later. 2001's Wonderland meanwhile was a bit of an oddity - an excursion into Young Americans era Bowie style plastic soul which didn't quite seem to sit right although it had enough good moments to make it listenable. The band went on a short hiatus afterwards with Tim releasing an enjoyable solo album I Believe. By the time they came back with 2006's Up At The Lake, my music tastes had kind of drifted away from indie and it wouldn't be until 2015's Modern Nature that I'd cross paths with them again. That one was a slow grower on me but over time I've come to really enjoy it - certainly the epic Let The Good Times Be Never Ending is a prime example that they're a group who've still got plenty to say. I think I'd even go so far as to say that it's their best effort since the mid-'90s.

I always remember some hack in the NME sneeringly dismissing the Charlatans as "everybody's fourth or fifth favourite band" but that's doing them a massive disservice in my opinion. Sure, they were kind of in the shadow of the Roses and the Mondays at the beginning and in that of Oasis during the Britpop years but there's a reason they've survived this long and that's because they're a band with a very underrated back catalogue. Which, I'll admit, I ended up revisiting quite a bit during the Listening Party days. So thanks again Tim for helping me through those difficult times and, indeed, for all the great music down the years. Hopefully more will follow in due course.