THIS WEEK the Charlatans released their new studio album Modern Nature to great critical acclaim. Julian Mash caught up with their singer and songwriter Tim Burgess in late summer 2014. Tim discussed how writing his book compared to songwriting, his legendary drug taking days and his recent sobriety and how his discovery of Transcendental Meditation has helped shape his world-view. You can watch the video for their latest single “Come Home Baby” above.

The interview appears in Idler 47; you can purchase it by following the link on the right hand side.

TIM BURGESS was born in Salford in 1967 and has been lead singer and songwriter with the Charlatans for 25 years. The band emerged from the late 1980s Manchester baggy scene and have released eleven studio albums, three of which were number ones, alongside seventeen top 30 singles and three top 10 singles. The band are frequently cast as survivors having lost founder member and keyboard player Rob Collins in a car accident in 1996 and more recently drummer Jon Brookes who died of a brain tumour in 2013. Despite these setbacks they have consistently release vital records and have a loyal following of fans.

Tim recently published his memoirs Telling Stories to critical acclaim. He has released two solo albums and recently moved back to the UK after a decade in LA. In 2011 he founded O’Genesis Records and has worked with numerous up and coming bands, producing and releasing their records. He has become a much-loved tweeter and is the proprietor of a virtual coffee shop Tim Peaks Diner that pops up at a number of summer music festivals.

Julian Mash: Tim, you visited the Idler Academy last summer to discuss your memoir, Tellin’ Stories, and I gather you are already working on the follow up book.

Tim Burgess: Yes. It’s a state of the nation thing about record shops. At least that’s how it is in my head. So far I’ve written about the internet, sock puppets, haters [?] and YouTube. Research has had me driving up and down the country going to record shops and hunting down records that people have recommended.

JM: So it’s an anti-internet kind of thing? You’re going back to good old fashioned record shopping?

TB: What I do want to do is to discover new records by people recommending stuff. And then also by turning up in a shop and buying something that the shop person recommends. For example I recently got an Iggy Pop album which I didn’t own. I’ve got everything else by him, but I just refused to buy that one at the time. Now I love it.

JM: Record shops have become something of an endangered species. Does that worry you?

TB: I actually think the record shops are in good shape. Obviously there are a lot fewer, but the ones that are around are very, very interesting. Some of them might have a café in there as well and there’s one in Norfolk that’s predominantly a post office, but sells records. And Pie and Vinyl for example, in Southsea, sells pies. Maybe it’s always been like that. Boots used to sell records, didn’t they?

JM: Like the very early 1960s, when electrical shops would have a little box of records on the counter.

TB: Absolutely, yeah.

JM: Going back to your memoirs, how did that come about? Was it something you had planned on writing for years?

TB: Yes. I’d been putting it off for a couple of years, and it did take a year to write.

JM: How did you approach writing it?

TB: At first I went to Wales after coming off a tour thinking that I didn’t want to play live for a while, and this was the time now to start writing the book. It was Christmas time 2010. I went to Wales with some friends and they wanted to know about the Hacienda. I think that was the first thing that someone asked me about and I thought this was the perfect time to bring my book into life… and so I said, let’s record this! So I recorded it on my phone and I ended up with quite a lot of material that I started to transcribe. The agent who wanted to represent me, originally had an idea that someone should ghost write it with me. There was a friend of mine, a music journalist who I had known for years… we met up like this, for a conversation, and he would say, ‘tell me about recording Tellin’ Stories’ and I would go, ‘you were there!’ It felt weird talking to him because he knew everything anyway. I found I just couldn’t tell these stories to someone who already knew them. And we agreed that it wasn’t right. He tried to hook me up with somebody else and that wasn’t right either. And then it went to the back of my mind for a while.

JM: When you were transcribing it, did you edit as you went along?

TB: I found it quite difficult to stay true to everything that I was saying, ‘cos actually what I was saying wasn’t as exciting as I wanted the book to be. So the first process was to put a lot of it down on paper and go from there. I wrote the whole thing in capital letters, ‘because it meant that I could type faster, without worrying about all the full stops. So the first thing I handed in had no full stops, it was all capital letters. No full stops, no commas or anything.

JM: And did you go back and correct all the grammar and punctuation yourself?

TB: Yeah. I mean, I wasn’t going for the world record of getting it right but I just thought: I wanna know how to write something.

JM: Did you have a good editor?

TB: Yeah, a guy called Tony at Penguin, who I thought was really good. I wanted to work with somebody who knew what they were doing. And I never noticed the cuts, so I thought that was a good sign. It just read good, and I didn’t know what had been taken out.

JM: How did you find the process of writing a book compared with song writing?

TB: I think it was Kevin Rowland who said that writing a song is like carving something. You’ve got a big block and then you start chipping stuff away. And I thought that was a really interesting metaphor: it’s there, and the essence of it’s there, and you’re just carving away, trying to get at the finer details. I guess I find that in song writing you don’t have to be as specific, you don’t have to use a full stop. In a book, when you’re starting a new chapter, or warming up with a song, it can be about a feeling. I think I’ve got better at doing that. People say ‘what’s this song about’, and I think half the time you don’t really know, it’s just a feeling. But with the book, you have to kind of build the drama up before the story comes. It helped that I hung around with a friend of mine who’s a comedian, and he taught me the essence of building something up. I thought, oh that’s really fantastic, how he would build it up and then come in with the punch line.

JM: So you found writing an enjoyable process?

TB: Very, very much so because I found it very interesting to be able to talk to people about my life. People would remind me of certain things. I spoke to every member of The Charlatans about it and they would all say: oh do you remember this and that, and I came to the conclusion that each member of the band could write their own story about the same people.

JM: You started work on the book after you gave up the drink and drugs?

TB: Well you see that’s it, that’s what I enjoyed most about writing the book: the fact that I wouldn’t have been able to write it had I still been doing what I’d been doing. And that’s ultimately the most enjoyable thing about the book.

JM: So it was quite a therapeutic exercise?

TB: The more distance that you get from those days the more you think it was pretty hardcore, the drug taking I mean. I went into it just like I go into everything, which is like with gusto and wanting to be the best. And I was really good.

JM: You were a good drug taker.

TB: Yeah I was a good drug taker, and a good drinker… people could count on me.

JM: So when did you stop all that?

TB: After I’d given up coke and alcohol, I stayed on the prescription pills for a while. And I had given up smoking in 2001. It has really been a process of taking things to the max and then going cold turkey. The cigarettes I only gave up because when we were making the album Wonderland. I started singing in falsetto and I wouldn’t have been able to do it otherwise, I remember I gave up on the eve of a tour and I managed to pull it off.

JM: In terms of the creative process and your drug taking how has that affected things? You have made three Charlatans albums and a solo LP since giving up the drugs. Have you approached things differently? I remember reading that Wonderland was a pretty druggy record.

TB: We recorded Wonderland on Wonderland Avenue in Los Angeles, the same street where the Doors used to live. It’s also known thanks to the John Holmes murders on which Boogie Nights is based. We were all just piled into this one house with drug dealers on tap and we would start at eight in the evening and finish at eight in the morning and go back to the accommodation and carry on until eight the following evening and just go back to the studio. And it went on and on like that, we just wanted it to sound like Sly Stone and it has got that thing hasn’t it?

JM: Is it one of your favourite Charlatans LPs?

TB: I don’t really know, that is always changing. My favourite album at this moment in time is the first one. And that is because it has something that is so brand new about it and so charming because we didn’t know what we were doing. Maybe because I am witnessing it all fresh because of having a kid and looking back a bit.

JM: Did you find that drugs aided the creative process?

TB: I definitely think so. I mean we didn’t know any different. The first album was made on ecstasy and whilst smoking spliff, our fourth album was very much just that as well, MDMA, and there is a really skunky fog around it, and then Tellin’ Stories is very coke and then it peaked with Wonderland really.

JM: How did you come to record Wonderland?

TB: I had moved to LA and I brought the band over to record. We went into this mental Sly Stone fugue and it was a very enjoyable time. The whole album was recorded in pitch black, it was LA but it could have been anywhereIt is a funny album, as is Sympatico, the one after it. I remember Mark and I went out to do some writing in Bodmin and we were having to chop wood to keep the fire going and I remember thinking it was very feral existence. And I don’t know whether that fed into the sound at all but it was a weird kinda time, it was when I was starting to need help I think. It was drug dependency really, not so fun anymore.

JM: You worked with Youth on your last Charlatans LP Who We Touch. How did that collaboration come about?

TB: I put on Killing Joke [Youth’s band] when I curated the big top at the Isle of Wight. They were one of the first live bands I had seen alongside Crass and Subhumans. Killing Joke had just reformed and Youth was back in the band so it was perfect. I put them alongside The Horrors, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Scum and Hatcham Social. And I got chatting to Youth and I just liked the idea of it. He was going through this thing of recording an album in two weeks. Although it was a good experiment I’m not sure it was the experiment we needed to do at that point. Hence this time we have been in the studio for seven months.

JM: How did recording on such a tight schedule work?

TB: It was good, we worked a lot of songs out in the studio and we got some collaborators down like Penny Rimbaud and we wrote a song called “Smash The System”, after an edition of the Idler, which I think is the best track on it.

JM: So were you happy with it?

TB: Mixed feelings within the band I think. Some of the songs on it are good but the next album is really going to blow people away.

JM: So tell me about the next one? It has obviously been a tough time for you lately with the death of Charlatans drummer and founder member John Brookes.

TB: Well it really started before John died and it really got harder and harder for us because the more he wanted to get involved the more obvious it became to us that he shouldn’t be involved because his health was failing. So after he died in August 2013 we started again in November up at our studio in Cheshire. So it was like we all had to sit in the same room and start the song from scratch because everyone was always avoiding being in the same room together because we have been through so much over the last few years it was hard to get everyone together.

JM: So has it been quite a therapeutic process to make the record?

TB: Absolutely. I firmly believe that John has been involved in the record.

JM: Have you used any of the tapes that he played on?

TB: Yeah he’s on there, but a lot of things have been played by other drummers.

JM: You put on a big memorial gig at the Albert Hall for him last year, tell me how that came about?

TB: Well it was mentioned at the funeral by a promoter, Simon Moran. The proceeds would go to a brain tumour charity, and some would go to Debbie, John’s wife and his kids. It went really well, we raised more than we thought we would, their brain tumour charity were happy and Debbie was over the moon.

JM: Did the memorial gig help you move forward?

TB: It really did. Because when you have to deal with the death of a friend, or someone that you’ve been working closely with for twenty five years, and especially when you’re expecting it as well… I don’t know whether the rest of the world were, but we kind of were, preparing for it… you have a barrier, don’t you? But with the Albert Hall show, all the barriers were removed. And everyone showed up, it was just brilliant,5,000 people. Everyone we asked came and people we didn’t ask offered their support. It was just a really good thing, and especially at the Albert Hall as well: the perfect place to do it.

JM: You have become a famous Twitterer over recent years thanks to you’re your  regular Breakfast banger and Twin Peaks coffee shop. How did that all start?

TB: I originally got myself a Twitter page ‘cos everyone else would go on about it but I didn’t really have that much of an interest at all. I only had about 4,000 fans: what you’d probably expect, the singer of an indie band. And then I did the coffee tweet, the morning tweet, does anyone fancy a coffee kind of thing. I got more response from that than anything else I’d posted before. And ever since I’ve been doing the breakfast banger every morning, round about seven o’ clock, something like that. Just like a track that I thought of the night before, or a track that I think of that moment.

JM: Your new Twitter following has coincided with your return to live in the UK.

TB: I moved back from Los Angeles around about 2010, at a similar time to when I started work on the book and my solo album too. It all kind of happened at once. I kind of gave up on Los Angeles or Los Angeles gave up on me. I moved to Seven Sisters, into a warehouse with about eight other people.

JM: Old friends or new?

TB: New friends. It was cheap living, a communal kind of thing. And I needed a place to stay ‘cos I didn’t have anywhere. It was a hub of activity, and I wrote quite a lot of the book and quite a lot of the solo album there. Factory Floor were making their album there and living there; the Quietus magazine had just moved in and were doing their thing, and people would come in and rehearse, bands like Blood Music. A guy called Joseph Coward came in and used the place as a studio, there was always stuff going on.

JM:  Quite a contrast to the druggy world you had been inhabiting in LA?

TB: Yeah although I had been two to three years sober in LA, and was always coming over to London. I began spending more and more time here until eventually I just stayed and packed up and moved over. This warehouse on Lawrence Road became where I had my sense of place. It was creatively fulfilling, like starting again in a really wonderful way.

JM: So that was an important time for you?

TB: It was a really important time, and from there I kind of decided that I wanted to make another solo album, I’d been putting that off for a while.

JM: You made your solo album Oh No I Love You with Kurt Wagner from Lambchop and recorded it in his native Nashville. How did that collaboration come about?

TB: We had talked about it for at least ten years, before it started. He was great to work with. I called him up and said can you suggest people to work with and a place to stay, and he suggested a hotel and various players. He was my mirror. I was going through a separation with my wife  and it was reflected very well by Kurt in the songs he wrote.

JM: Were you always confident that the collaboration would work?

TB: Yeah I was. I knew that he came from a punk background. He’s not always been alternative country; he’s got a wide musical palette and he spent a lot of time growing up in Sheffield, so there’s lots of little pointers. We found we could talk for hours and just enthuse about music.

JM: Around this time you started your own record label O Genesis Recordings.

TB:  That all happened organically, again though living at the warehouse, writing the book, and doing the second half of Oh No I Love You. I met Joseph Coward and he sent us some stuff. I thought it would be a really nice thing to put out, and I thought why not do a label? It was Joseph’s song “Jesus Christ” that made me think: this guy’s seventeen years old with a song called “Jesus Christ”, let’s put it out. So that worked out really good. And then this band called Electricity in Our Homes who I’ve always really really liked.

JM: Do you enjoy running the label?

TB: Yeah, because it’s not about me. Well it is about me in a way, but it’s more about them. And it’s very influential to me. I can offer to put their records out, which is good for them, but it’s really good for me too because I get to work with people that I love. Another band on the label, Hatcham Social, are a band that I love. I’ve worked as a producer for them.

JM: You have recently become a father? Has that changed your creative outlook?

TB: That’s right. It’s almost like the world that I wanted to live in inside my head is actually on the outside of it. It is amazing, because it’s not about you, it’s about them. And I love it.

JM: I remember when you came to the Idler last year you spent twenty minutes before the event meditating in the basement, I gather you have recently got into Transcendental Meditation. How did that come about?

TB: In around 2009 I was at a party in London and this girl called Amy came over to me and said have you ever thought about doing TM? She explained she had been practising for years, since she was four years old! You know I just had this impression that people doing TM would look a bit different, but she was totally normal and it began to sink in and I got interested.

JM: And now you meditate regularly?

TB: I do it twice a day for twenty minutes. It’s the funny thing, because it can put people off. You know, how am I gonna find twenty minutes? But by giving up those twenty minutes of an evening, you gain so much for the rest of the day. Everything else seems to speed up, and then this twenty minute thing that you do, this practice that you do for twenty minutes, is kind of where you really are with the self. Or as Maharishi said, the selfish without the fishy bit.

JM: Do you find that it’s helped a lot?

TB: Yeah I really think it has. It gets me through everything that I want to get through. And I don’t expect anything from it, I just take what it gives me. Everything that I wanted, but didn’t know that I wanted has come true. And the whole world that I live in now, I think its ‘cos of TM really. ‘Cos it’s the way you are with yourself and the way you feel quite grounded, and of the now and of the present and of the earth.

JM: Has it affected your relationship with money? I remember reading that you were ripped off by your manager years ago?

TB: Yeah, not our manager,  our accountant. It meant that everything we did for a few years, like headlining festivals, went straight to paying our taxes, because he hadn’t paid taxes for seven years or something ridiculous, even though he said he had been. My relationship with money has always been the same really, as long as I can make our records, and live, and pay my rent, then I’m fine. And that’s kind of still the way I think today. There’s been moments where it’s not been easy to do that, even though we were headlining festivals

JM: Did you have any jobs before you started singing in the Charlatans?

TB: Yeah I had a few – my first one was a mail delivery boy, on my bike. So I would ride around with a Sony Walkman on. And then I was a cleaner, which was fine as well because I could mop while wearing headphones. And then I eventually ended up in an office, I was pretty into Quadrophenia at the time so I had the suit, looking sharp, kind of Mod, in an office, fresh trousers, nice, suedehead. And then Thursday was payday so I could go out and buy records.

JM: And then obviously Charlatans took off. So you did have a bit of employment under your belt?

TB: Yeah, sixteen to twenty one. So I did five years. Five years and then switched my alarm clock off.

ENDS

This article originally appeared in Idler 47, to purchase this edition follow the link on the right hand side.