It’s worth the 13-year wait
The Lightning Seeds’ frontman is back on top form with his first album release since 2009
DESPITE enviable music credentials that stretch back over 30 years, Ian Broudie has been having a crisis of confidence.
The man behind Lightning Seeds’ glorious gems like Pure, Perfect, The Life of Riley and Waiting for Today to Happen and production duties for the likes of Echo & the Bunnymen, The Coral and The Fall hasn’t released a record in 13 years.
But Ian, 64, is back with a fantastic new album See You in the Stars and a Scottish gig.
Your last Seeds album was Four Winds in 2009. Why the gap?
Four Winds should have been another solo album. I always feel Lightning Seeds, although just me, are a certain type of song. They are very positive but also sneakily miserable. I never want to moan and be miserable.
I got talked into making the songs that became Four Winds into a Lightning Seeds album and it ended up neither a solo album or a Lightning Seeds album. I kind of mourn for those songs because I think they could have been really good. That put me off making another record.
In the meantime I’d started playing live again and really enjoying it. I began writing and realised they were Lighting Seeds songs. I’ve remembered how to do them again both emotionally and technically.
How was it going back into the studio?
I was daunted at the idea of it. I was quite anxious. In my head I had stopped making music a few years ago.
We built back up live first until we were really good and that lead to making the record. Once I started I did the album pretty quickly.
Surely after the success of 1994’s Jollification you don’t have anything to prove?
Never felt like I haven’t got anything to prove. Inside I feel like I’ve never got everything quite right. I listen to albums by John Lennon or Stevie
Wonder and they dwarf you. You are aspiring to that but I don’t think I’ve achieved it. They either make you feel like keeping trying or thinking f*** this because they’re so good.
In the 70s you were in Big in Japan who would include future members of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, KLF and Siouxsie and the Banshees – have you ever thought about reuniting with Holly Johnson, Bill Drummond and Budgie?
It wasn’t a very good band so it’s not something you could rekindle, but what it did do was reshape my thoughts.
If you have a good idea, if you can’t do it very well it’ll never stop being a good idea but if you don’t have a good idea, however hard you try it’ll never become a good idea. All through my career that’s been my mantra – try to have good idea like a good melody to compensate for the fact I’m not a good singer or frontman.
You’re playing Glasgow in November. Do you remember your first gig in Scotland?
It was Dundee in 1982. I was playing guitar for Echo & The Bunnymen while working on the songs that would become Porcupine which I produced.
They were the first band I produced [he produced two songs on the band’s debut Crocodiles]. Bill Drummond, who was their manager at the time, thought it was a good idea for them to do some gigs in the Highlands. So we set off in a van with no crew, just us.
You wrote Emily Smiles with Terry Hall who co-wrote Lucky You – how did that come about?
I wrote it with Terry in an afternoon, sitting around
together. We wrote it at the tail end of the pandemic. We’ve remained friends for years and writing was an excuse for him to come over.
Why does another song, Green Eyes, have a brass refrain which sounds like the one from Pure?
It’s a song about falling in love, hoping the moment won’t shatter, keeping the dreams pure and simple. And when I was writing Green Eyes, I felt like it was a postscript to Pure – so I thought I’d shadow it with that little melodic line. In a way, it’s about the other end of that relationship.
See You in the Stars is out next Friday. Lightning Seeds play Glasgow Old Fruitmarket on November 6. Go to: lightningseeds.co.uk/ live/