Chart entered : 2 June 1990
Chart peak : 9
Number of hits : 27
Unless I've forgotten someone the last piece of the Madchester mosaic falls into place here. The Charlatans can be compared to Depeche Mode : more or less instant success as part of a movement, suspected of being bandwagon-jumpers and then outlasting all their contemporaries.
Of course, The Charlatans are not really from Manchester at all. Most of them hail from Walsall. They were put together by bassist Martin Blunt who had been in the band Makin' Time in the mid-eighties. Makin ' Time were part of the mini-mod revival scene in the Midlands and put out three singles on Stiff's Countdown subsidiary in 1985-86 including a raucous cover of Elvis Costello's "Pump It Up". They were a more than competent sixties revivalist band but there was a limited market for their sound and they couldn't get their noses in front of the likes of Big Sound Authority and Katrina and the Waves. They were moderately successful in Germany and managed to record three albums before splitting up in 1988.
Martin recruited organist Rob Collins, drummer Jon Brookes , guitarist Jon Day and vocalist Baz Ketley. The latter didn't last long. He was replaced by Tim Burgess , singer with The Electric Crayons whose one single "Hip Shake Junkie" in 1989 is a tuneless approximation of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' funk-metal sound. Obligingly the band relocated to Tim's home town of Northwich.
At the beginning of 1990, they put out the single "Indian Rope " on their own Dead Dead Good label. The lyric is vaguely self-questioning and doesn't refer to the title at all. The song itself is secondary to the groove , a rather tighter take on the Happy Mondays ' funk sound with Tim's shaky vocals, indistinguishable from Ian Brown, and Rob's accomplished Hammond taking it in turns to add colour to the track. Although not an obvious single it came close to charting and led to a deal with Beggar's Banquet subsidiary Situation 2. "Indian Rope " did chart for a week on reissue in 1991 making number 57.
"The Only One I Know" was their next single. It's sonically very similar except that Rob plays the main riff , suspiciously close to Jon Lord's on Deep Purple's Hush but instantly recognisable, and it has a conventional verse/chorus structure even if the latter is a direct steal from The Byrds' Everybody's Been Burned . The song is about an infatuation although Tim's diffident vocal doesn't really convey that. It's an effective radio record but I preferred the next one.
I think this song's value has been burned out of me by countless plays at whatever Indie nightclub/venue/student union I may have been in at any particular time. Not the band's fault, of course, and once they moved on from the Baggy sound, they did put out some very good singles.
ReplyDeleteAnd Martin Blunt isn't the only relic from that Midlands Mod scene that will crop up... I gather their own attempts at "Baggy" will appear as their "Hello" sometime in 1991.