The Loud Achievers
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday November 7, 2008
Brit rockers the Charlatans shunned the mainstream for a quirkier path to success.
THE often troubled, occasionally brilliant British band the Charlatans have written singles as euphoric and iconic as Oasis's finest, made a bunch of great albums, have a lead singer in Tim Burgess who's prettier than Liam Gallagher and The Stone Roses-era Ian Brown put together . . . and still they're not perceived as superstars by anyone other than fans of British indie rock. Why is this?"Oh, I'm not interested in that," Burgess says, less charismatic and eloquent on the phone than I had hoped. "We've never been as big as Oasis - y'know, I mean, mass-marketed [like] Coldplay, Oasis, Nickelback . . . I mean, they've made some good records but [being mass-marketed] doesn't appeal to me at all."The Charlatans' career started promisingly enough in 1990 with their second single, The Only One I Know, which became an instant indie-dancefloor classic. Like the debut album it came from, Some Friendly, the band's first few longplayers tended to merely carry the odd terrific single rather than qualify as classic albums - until their fourth, 1995's superb The Charlatans. Then their keyboard player, Rob Collins, was killed in a car crash.The band somehow survived - the album that followed the loss of Collins and the last one he worked on, 1997's Tellin' Stories, supplied some of the biggest (British) hits of their career - but ever since then they've been plugging away, rather than living the dream, releasing the occasional strong album but never really hitting it big."None of the stuff that I ever listened to was ever that big, really, in its time and it's only grown to be kind of influential," Burgess says. "I suppose the exceptions are the Beatles and the Rolling Stones - I mean, everyone loves them - but . . . hopefully we've influenced people. I really don't know. I'm not really into that kind of like placement of things. I just like to connect with people and make music that hopefully resonates, really. I know that sounds a bit of a cop-out . . ."But what keeps a band going when circumstance has given them a reputation as rock's perennial underdogs? Again, Burgess is depressingly vague."Well, I actually just like to see where the music goes, really, I'm kinda quite into that," he says. "I've always had an incredible amount of love from people and a huge amount of respect, so . . . that's pretty good."The singer makes more sense when explaining why his band went one better - or what initially sounds like one worse - than Radiohead. The Charlatans gave away their latest album, the typically solid You Cross My Path, via the website of British radio station XFM. There was no "pay what you want" gimmick a la Radiohead; it was free."We didn't have a record deal [and we wanted to] do something a bit more interesting," Burgess says. "We did some gigs with the Rolling Stones and the Who - and that kind of paid for the record - and then we thought we could maybe give it away with the [music magazine] NME or, like, a daily newspaper or something like that. "And then, kind of out of the blue, someone suggested XFM and that seemed like a really exciting idea 'cause it was a radio station . . . and it kind of appealed to us, really. We were making this record knowing that we were gonna give it away free but we didn't know on what scale."Why give it away in the first place, though - especially when it was justifiably well received? Practically speaking, one needs to get paid to survive. And even Noel Gallagher said there was no way he would even consider giving away the new Oasis album. "Well, for us - obviously it works differently for everybody but I think it's probably a bit old-fashioned of Noel, saying that," Burgess says. "I mean, CD sales are really on the decline and there's no way that he sells as many CDs as he did when they first came out."And they're a mass-marketed band. We're not a mass-marketed band. We want as many people to hear our album as possible . . . We wanted to cut out the middle man, which is the record company - which we found always seems to get in the way of artistic ideas - and we just wanted to put what our thoughts were into people's iPods. It kinda worked because, according to our manager, our live income has gone up 400 per cent."It certainly will in Australia - this will be the band's first tour Down Under. Do they have any surprises planned?"I think people will be surprised that we're even there. That's a surprise in itself, really."THE CHARLATANS November 14, 8pm, The Forum, Moore Park, sold out.
© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald