The Charlatans
The Charlatans have reached a higher state of grace. Twenty-seven years since they first bagged a Number One album with ‘Some Friendly’, they’re still achieving fresh career highs, dreaming up new music that redraws their own map, increasingly assured of who they are as a band. Their trajectory has few parallels in British rock, and it’s all set to continue with the release of ‘Different Days’, their brilliant 13th album, which finds them never more forward-looking, yet equally never more self-defining, or relevant. As Tim Burgess pointedly sings on one anthemically optimistic track called ‘There Will Be Chances’, “I laughed when I thought about the past, a place I love, but I can’t go back – the present’s where it’s at”. Just listening to ‘Different Days’ makes you feel like a positive force has entered your life – and this, in a year when, as the title implies, the political outlook has shifted dramatically, bringing unforeseen prejudice, anxiety and division across the world. Explains Tim, “To us, the album represents an upbeat view of a world that might well be falling apart, in a time where you have to work out who your friends are, and gather them around you.” The Charlatans’ own ever-spiralling success has itself been a triumph over adversity. After losing not one but two members (to a car crash, and a brain tumour) in their rollercoaster history, this most resilient outfit have somehow soldiered onto greater heights – a people’s band, whose embattled mortal passage through life also mirrors our own. This time, the core surviving quartet of Burgess, bassist Martin Blunt, guitarist Mark Collins and keyboard player Tony Rogers, opened their doors to allow an enviable cast of friends to contribute to their latest work. Initially, this happened out of necessity: following the passing of founding drummer Jon Brookes in 2013, they have yet to appoint a permanent replacement. So, the first call went out to Pete Salisbury, the former Verve sticksman, who’d stepped in to help the band get up and running again on tour, through those difficult months of illness, loss and grieving. Their last album, ‘Modern Nature’, was also made under that cloud, but had come out amazingly positively – and, indeed, modern. “It was a very soulful and cathartic record,” says Martin Blunt, The Charlatans’ founder and avatar, who has captained the band through all its ups and downs. “On previous albums, it had all got a bit fragmented, but I think we realised that what makes us, is all of us in the room together”. Pristine and confident, ‘Modern Nature’ drew critical praise across the board, and duly notched up their eighth Top Ten on the album chart, all capped off with a lifetime achievement award from Q magazine. The Charlatans duly had a whirlwind 2015, completing two sold-out UK tours, popping up as unannounced opening act at Glastonbury, and headlining at the Isle Of Wight and Kendall Calling festivals. Touring continued on into 2016, taking in Europe, America and Australia, but by summer, they had a preponderance of individually carved ideas for new music, and when they met up at their residential Big Mushroom HQ in Cheshire in September ’16, arrangement and recording commenced right away, without recourse to demoes. Burgess describes the process as “very conversational”, as these friends chipped away, with renewed camaraderie and egolessness. Aside from Pete Salisbury, the first invitation into their world came on a whim, as they pinged an early version of ‘Not Forgotten’ over to Anton Newcombe from Brian Jonestown Massacre at his studio in Berlin. “Literally in the space of 15 minutes,” Mark Collins recalls, “he sent back some ideas on keyboard and guitar, and then he Facetime’d us to talk us through them”. After that encouraging response, they decided to open the gates a little wider. “We only wanted people that we actually knew,” says Mark, “and that we could let into our world without feeling fraudulent about it.” Adds Burgess, “It’s matter of sharing it with people we love.” Johnny Marr could easily have appeared on any Charlatans album since 1999, when the band were introduced to him by Jim Spencer, their in-house engineer at Big Mushroom. Marr dropped by for an hour, but ended up staying for five, and contributed to three tracks, including the majestic leading single, ‘Plastic Machinery’. Similarly, Stephen Morris, the New Order and ex-Joy Division drummer, is an old friend – he briefly helped out on ‘Modern Nature’. His role this time extended further, to seven tracks. As well as playing a physical kit, he brought his savvy in programming and other digital technology. From ‘Hey Sunrise’ and the title track, through to the album’s ‘housey’ phase (‘Over Again’, ‘The Same House’, which also features his wife Gillian on keyboards), Morris’s parts lend a gleamingly futuristic dimension to The Charlatans’ endeavours. As the spirit of collaboration prospered, Burgess fast-tracked a long-discussed team-up with Paul Weller, the expansive, Chicago soul-y album finale ‘Spinning Out’ taking shape between Big Mushroom and Wellers’ studio in Surrey. Other ‘star turns’ include congas from ACR’s Donald Johnson, and bass from his brother Derrick, on ‘Over Again’, and vocals from Sharon Horgan – yes, as in TV’s ‘Catastrophe’ – on the title track. As The Charlatans made the final push to complete the record in the early weeks of 2017, it was all about streamlining what they had into a sequence of music that flows, a good old-fashioned journey – another of The Charlatans’ key strengths. “It starts off bright,” Tim summarizes, “then it gets dark, but after that it gets sexy”. Strengthening the sense of narrative, the band enlisted further amigos, including crime novelist Ian Rankin, Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, and Shuri Endo (a friend of Tim’s on Twitter) to deliver spoken-word passages, binding the whole thing together. On the ideas level, Burgess has rarely seemed more subliminally connected to the things occupying our daily thoughts. Awake every morning at 5am to greet the dawn in rural Norfolk, where he lives with his partner Nik Void (from Factory Floor, who aptly sings back-up on ‘Over Again’). Tim was careful to exclude direct references to current affairs, which might shackle this most liberating and poetic of records to today’s political woes. “I just don’t want to spoil it by using those words,” he says. In the face of boorishness and corporate greed writ ever larger, the message in the creativity, diversity, and collective strength of ‘Different Days’ is implicit, but clear. “There are layers and layers to this record,” concludes Burgess. “It’s true to who we are. It doesn’t sound like we’re trying to be anyone else – aware of the world around us, but protective of the world we hold close.” In the days and months ahead, its boundless positivity and invention will be a comfort to each and every bewildered listener. RIDE
Based in Oxford, England. Ride consists of Guitarists/Vocalists Andy Bell and Mark Gardener, Bassist Steve Queralt and Drummer Loz Colbert. Ride have always been a band capable of seeing hidden depths others couldn’t. When the world was going baggy, they floated out of Oxfordshire art schools in 1988 on a sound like scorched clouds. It would become known as shoegaze, but Ride’s primordial blaze of noise, like Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine and The House Of Love, had a savagery and elegance that transcended the Home Counties waftiness that would emerge from their vapour trail. Their early run of EPs and Top Twenty debut album ‘Nowhere’ made them the alternative sensation of 1990 and Creation Records’ first major success story; its Top Five follow up ‘Going Blank Again’ (1992) - featuring the monolithic ‘Leave Them All Behind’ and the head-spinning ‘Twisterella’ - was a celestial torrent of noise and imagination like none other of its era. Even though Britpop blindsided Ride and the band split acrimoniously after two more albums (1994’s psych rock ‘Carnival Of Light’ and 1996’s scattergun ‘Tarantula’), their standing as leftfield sonic giants remained undiminished. Ride reformed in 2015 to play Coachella, Primavera and a package of other high-profile festival dates, welcomed like prodigal sons. The comeback tour grew from those few dates to a global victory lap. The technology of recording and performance had caught up with Ride in the intervening years, allowing their full sonic vision to flourish, and they also found they had something to say. Shocked and depressed by the rise of the right wing, the Brexit vote and the darkening shadows of Boris and Theresa, the songs they began constructing via email for a potential new album spoke to the sad and perilous state of modern society. Over six months off at the end of the initial reunion tour, Ride turned that helpless anger, frustration and ennui into a collection of rich, evocative and re-energised songs they called ‘Weather Diaries’ released in 2017 via Wichita Recordings. A critical and commercial hit, reaching Number 11 in June 2017, the band recorded a second-post reunion album, ‘This Is Not a Safe Place’ released in August 2019. It became their third Top Ten U.K LP.

Waving farewell to the Eighties: it was biggest pop kick there’d been in, ooh, ten years. During that godforsaken, musically atrocious decade, it was them and us. We hadn’t got a prayer. Our stuff didn’t register in corporate demographic terms, it was too vague and indefinable. And it didn’t register in the charts. There would be the occasional triumph, as the The Smiths, the Bunnymen or the Mary Chain made a lightning raid on the Top 20, only to limp back to obscurity the following week.

So, come the tail end of 1989, there was a mood of battered, hopeless optimism. As we took our huddled flight into the Nineties, a bolt from nowhere, from Oxford, overturned the inherent pessimism in that optimism and gave us something to believe in. Ride had tunes, noise, looks, style, confidence, everything. And they had youth: their two guitar-playing singers Mark Gardener and Andy Bell were both just 19, as was drummer Laurence ‘Loz’ Colbert. Stephen Queralt, the bassist, was an oldster at 21. They’d come together on a foundation course at North Oxford Art College and had been playing around the Thames Valley area for less than a year. Already, though, they looked and sounded supreme, like they’d been born with their guitars strapped on and had been jamming together ever since. Justifiably mistrusting the A&R scramble that ensued, they instead signed up where they felt they belonged, Alan McGee’s Creation Records.

The cover of the ‘Ride EP’, released in January 1990, showed a bed of roses. The symbolism there, and in the first words on the first track was lost on nobody. A new decade was rung in with a possibility that guitars gone into overload might become pop music – as in actually popular, in the charts and stuff. ‘Take me for a ride away from places we have known,’ Mark crooned on ‘Chelsea Girl’… implicit in the song’s delirious melody was a reaching for new heights, a belief in better things to come. It went to Number 71. In those days, for an independently released debut, with next to no radio airplay, this was a result. Creation had never slipped inside the Top 75 before. There hadn’t been such a buzz about a UK group in aeons. Ride were hungry to perform, and when they did, they blew everyone away.

It all kind of centred on Loz. He was a hurricane behind the drums, you’d just see this blur of sticks and hair. Stage right was Steve, staring intently downwards, snapping the groove tightly down. Off to the left was Andy, in his own world. And right up front you had Mark, thrashing wildly at the six strings, but cooing like an angel into the mic, the Ride duality in one body.

By April, they’d charged up enough audiences for there to be real anticipation for their next record – the ‘Play EP’ – and on that buzz alone, it went in at – unthinkable! – Number 32. Bands just didn’t happen that quick. Even the Roses and the Mondays and the Scream, who’d all been going for years, had only just started to hit. ‘It took Primal Scream six years to become a genius band,’ gushed McGee at the time. ‘Ride have managed it in six months.’ Eager anticipation now shifted onto Ride’s debut album.

Preceding it by a month came the ‘Fall EP’, the band’s third, with a foreboding atmosphere about it that those hooked on the noise/pop pleasures of ‘Chelsea Girl’ and ‘Like A Daydream’ might not have foreseen. After the Smithsian daffodils last time out, the sleeve showed penguins freezing to buggery in the snow. The four tracks were headed up by their darkest composition so far, ‘Dreams Burn Down’. For all the uncompromised storm clouds, ‘Fall’ near as goddammit matched the success of ‘Play’ at Number 34.

When ‘Nowhere’ dropped in October ’90, it not only became Creation’s first ever Top 75 album, but shot in at Number 11, to blanket critical appreciation. It was angst, but it was ecstatic, as witnessed by Bell’s awesome closing track, ‘Vapour Trail’, its brooding bassline/cello finale leading up and away into infinity. A fitting climax to the finest debut album of 1990. The rest of the world was listening.

In Japan, Australia and America, the ‘Smile’ mini-album was released, compiling the eight killer tracks from those first two EPs. Press excitement exploded around the globe. The band did an extensive European tour in the Winter of ’90, followed by a debut trip to Japan. They landed at Osaka airport to be greeted by 200 girls all clutching bunches of daffodils (how did they do that – in December?!).

Ride were pop stars. Where so many of their contemporaries had failed to stretch their fame beyond the British coastline, Ride were truly a global success. The 4000 tickets for the Japanese tour sold out in 12 minutes, and ‘Nowhere’ went Top 10 there. ‘Vapour Trail’ from the album was also a huge US radio hit. As people, the band’s time wasn’t their own anymore.

In March ’91, Ride Mark 1 released the ‘Today Forever EP’, with a killer shark’s jaws warning off competitors from the sleeve and the mesmerizing lead tune, ‘Unfamiliar’, doing much the same in music. It leapt into the singles chart at No 14, a career best, but already they were planning Ride Mark 2, to leave their peers for dust. ‘All that stuff just means we do something different next time,’ Queralt informed Select magazine’s David Cavanagh at the time. ‘We’re now very aware of what we don’t want to sound like.’

In 15 months, Ride had released two albums’ worth of material. For the rest of ’91, they played live all over the world. They toured the US for the first time, nipped down to Australia and back up for a second visit to Japan. Headlining the one-off Slough Festival in July, they aired some of their work-in-progress.

Withdrawing to rural Chipping Norton with Alan Moulder at the production controls, they recorded some 25 tracks, from which the ten great ones formed ‘Going Blank Again’. It was an astonishing LP that bore no trace of ‘difficult second album’ syndrome, soaring off boldly beyond anything that they, or any of their piddling peers, had achieved thus far. Its title sarcastically swiped at critics who alleged that Ride were vacant, had nothing to say. And ‘Leave Them All Behind’, which trailered it in February ’92, was as eloquent a mission statement as you could’ve wished for.

Without giving any ground (hell, by stealing more!), ‘Leave Them All Behind’ went in at 9 (Creation’s first ever Top 10 hit). In March, the LP went further, racing in at 5.

These were glory days for Ride. They’d very effectively legged it clear of the pack that had formed around them, and scaled the industry ladder to the point where, following an exhaustive and exhausting world tour – their second in as many years, they would play one slot below Loz’s all-time heroes Public Enemy at Reading ’92. If you’re holding the full-tilt box-set version of this ‘Best Of’, you can hear for yourself just how mind-meltingly brilliant they were live around this time.

The four of them spent much of that year getting fired up. They ventured out for the occasional live show including the spectacular Daytripper weekend, where they co-headlined the Brighton Centre and the Blackpool Empress Ballroom with The Charlatans – Ride closing the show down South with the bill flipped on The Golden Mile. And once their songs were close to ready, they went back to Oxford with producer George Drakoulias (Black Crowes, Jayhawks), to hone and re-arrange the next ‘difficult’ album, their third.

Pre-production over, George had to leave to take the helm of Primal Scream’s ‘Give Out But Don’t Give Up’, but there was a producer lined up – John Leckie, who could reel off a litany of classics he’d worked on, from John Lennon’s ‘Plastic Ono Band’ and ‘Meddle’ by Pink Floyd, right through to ‘The Stone Roses’. Initially bound tight as an insular band/gang, Ride’s gates had blown open and the world around them came flooding in. It was like swapping black/white for Technicolor, everyday life for hyperreality, With its opening minute of chirruping / chattering, this was not the stuff of radio dreams. Having been AWOL during the first tremors of Britpop (Suede/Auteurs, and in January, ‘Supersonic’ by Oasis), Ride came back as a ball of confusion. The single stalled at 38, but it set the stage for the main feature, ‘Carnival Of Light’, unleashed in June.

The fish-eye sleeve shot of the band spoke volumes to fans of lysergic history. The grungy cover of ‘How Does It Feel To Feel?’ by The Creation (the ’60s garage-psych band who’d given McGee’s label its name) harked back to familiar sounds, but for the rest, Ride strode boldly forward from behind their habitual wall of feedback and, as they’d promised before, just let it flow.

At Christmas, the band played as un-billed support to Oasis at their biggest gig to date, the 5,000-capacity Brighton Centre. Without realising at the time, this was to be the band’s last UK show, the only dates that followed in 1995 were a fourth tour of Japan and one festival in Spain. However one Noel Gallagher watched the whole Ride set from the mixing desk at the back of the hall, commenting at the end ‘It’s just as well we’re fucking good’.

With wives, babies and new homes they’d barely had time to decorate yet, the four now had lives of their own. They’d been at this for five years, and while they’d all grown up together, they’d developed their own domestic agendas away from the gang ethos.

It must’ve been a bastard to know what to do next. They each had their own ideas. It’s a miracle that they came up with anything at all, but what they recorded through 1995 was ‘Tarantula’, another quantum leap forward. However, by the time it was released in March ’96 the band had announced that they had effectively split up. To hear what a high Ride flew out on, how far they’d travelled since ‘Chelsea Girl, ‘Leave Them All Behind’, even ‘Birdman’, just cue up ‘Black Night Crash’: a blast of bad-ass blues, based on the car-smash voyeurism of JG Ballard’s ‘Crash’. Despite the lack of gigs, the album still charted at 21.

2001 saw the release of the re-mastered catalogue albums from the original analogue tapes, “OX4 – The Best Of Ride”; a timely reminder of just how brilliant, how different, how influential, and how fundamental they were to what has since followed. Alongside this was a 3xCD box set, featuring “OX4″ alongside an album of previously unreleased material, “Firing Blanks”, and a live album of their Reading Festival show in August 92.

A series of live shows in 2015 across the UK, Europe and US have now been announced, marking 20 years since the band’s last concerts.