Tim Burgess The Charlatans tour blog #2
- Oct 25, 2010
The Charlatans frontman Tim Burgess guest blogs for Virgin.com on new bands, In The City, playing with Shaun Ryder and what is next for The Charlatans...
The music never really stops with us - even days off are taken up with gigs or music of some kind. A few months ago, In The City, the music convention in Manchester that Tony Wilson had started in 1992 had asked me to put together a showcase of some of my favourite new upcoming bands. We'd been given the Umbro design studio where Peter Saville had just been designing the new England kit.
Over 200 bands were scheduled to play over the 3 days with most of the UK music industry descending on Manchester looking for new talent - I'd been listening to a young London band called Chapter Sweetheart who had caught my attention and they were first on the bill. Their singer is part Kevin Rowlands and part Serge Gainsbourg and they were a great start to the night.
Electricity In Our Homes had to be on the bill too as I'd produced their last single but not had chance to see them live for a while - I'd invited some old friends from Manchester along to the gig to show them what I've been listening to - John Robb, left as an Electricity in Our Homes fan and the feedback from the gig was more than we expected.
Not wanting to miss out on all the other gigs that were being put together for In The City we ran across town to catch Factory Floor put on a breathtaking show. They are playing as part of the Topman CTRL gig that I did on Wednesday October 20th too - it was the first time a band was stopped playing by someone having to confiscate the drummer's sticks - it's been called analogue techno (by me) amongst other things, arpeggiated dance noise (also by me) they are produced by New Order's Stephen Morris and it rattles the fillings out of your teeth.
A lot of the new music I was listening to when growing up was supplied via Tony Wilson's label, Factory Records, and the way they had an in house style from everything from artwork to production is something that doesn't seem to be around anymore - the identity of the labels has been lost while lots of people are chasing dwindling sales. the attention to detail seems to have disappeared - labels like Small Wonder, Rough Trade, Fast Product, CRASS are all too rare these days.
I'd started producing records over the last few years - bands like Hatcham Social and Electricity in Our Homes and I was beginning to think that if they signed to other labels it might not be the best place for them. Recently a brilliant new band called Blue on Blue had asked me to produce some tracks. Dee, the singer had been in An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump and we recorded 4 tracks with them. Maybe the safest place for some of these bands would be a label that cared about them and their music. How it was presented and was done for love not money. After much talk and excitement I found myself with a new label - O Genesis. Watch this space…
After that it was back to The Charlatans for another run of gigs in Leeds and Sheffield and Manchester. Home town gigs are always really special and The Apollo in Manchester is such an amazing venue - Shaun Ryder has been supporting us on the tour and his new band have been setting the audience up nicely - everything from Happy Mondays to Black Grape and their Manchester set really was something else. We watched them from the stage in Manchester and we'd seen many a headline band not go down as well as they did, so the pressure was on. It was such an awesome gig for us and made all the better to have Jon Brookes there to watch us too - he came out and spoke to everyone before the encore and thanked Pete for sitting in for him.
This is John Robb's review of the Manchester gig.
So that leaves us just about half way through the tour - there's more gigs in the UK and after that it's off to Europe and back to Australia for the first time in a while.....
By Tim Burgess of The Charlatans.
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