Getting along
Spanning three decades, a box set to celebrate the fallen and the living. By Lois Wilson.
THIS YEAR marks 31 years since The Charlatans, a group forever associated with Manchester but formed in the West Midlands by ex-Makin’ Time bassist Martin Blunt with his twentysomething pals off the garage/Mod scene – drummer Jon Brookes, organist Rob Collins, guitarist Jon Baker, lead singer Tim Burgess – issued their first single Indian Rope, a riot of ’60s psych influences and dancefloor urgency. It is also 25 years since Rob Collins, the heart and soul of the band, died.
Using the Hammond organ as his emotional vocabulary, Collins injected the group’s terrific early run of singles – Indian Rope; The Only One I Know; Then; Weirdo – with an energetic cool, and their live shows with a fierce intensity. His memory looms large over this careerspanning set. Five discs and a 7-inch map their 13-album career via a well-chosen cherry-pick of singles, live tracks, demos, and remixes by The Orb, The Chemical Brothers, Sleaford Mods, Norman Cook and Jagz Kooner. Each disc is named after a lyric from their biggest hit, 1996’s One To Another – for example, the demos disc is titled Pleased To Meet You.
Not expected to last beyond the baggy-era they helped define with
The Only One I Know – its amalgamated Byrds/Deep
Purple groove a staple of indie student nights – The Charlatans nevertheless outlived scene spearheads
The Stone Roses and Happy
Mondays to become one of the UK’s most dependable indie rock outfits. This they achieved partly through hard graft and consistent touring, and partly through lead singer Tim Burgess’s intuitive ability to read and react to changing, and troubling, times. Most recently Burgess emerged as a hero of the pandemic with his Twitter listening parties.
The Charlatans have never really stood still; from the shoegazey distortionbreakdown of 1992’s Can’t Even Be Bothered (by which time ex-Waltones guitarist Mark Collins had replaced Jon Baker); the Mod pop and soulful rhythm of 1994’s Can’t Get Out Of Bed, which drew a cold-call from Paul Weller congratulating them on the single he wished he’d written; the Stonesy/Lennonstyled country funk of 1995’s Just When You’re Thinkin’ Things Over (released the same week that Blur and Oasis battled it out for Number 1, it made Number 12), to the aforesaid One To Another, a Number 3 and Collins’ last stand, its mesh of organ riffage and Chemical Brothers drum loops recorded during a period of peak narcotic excess.
Nineteen days after Collins’ death, The Charlatans were supporting Oasis at Knebworth with stand-in keyboardist Martin Duffy from Primal Scream. Then, in ’97, they recruited another Midland keysman, Tony Rogers, and began making records that sounded more grown up, more heroic: Forever (1999); Love Is The Key (2001); My Foolish Pride (2010, the last to feature Jon Brookes who died in 2013 from a brain tumour). The most recent recording here, which closes the second disc of singles, is 2018’s Totally Eclipsing: “We continue, because we get along,” Burgess sings. And perhaps the answer to The Charlatans’ resilience and enduring appeal is as simple as that.