Tim Burgess is all about the present

Somewhere between leaving his last meeting and hopping on our Zoom call, Tim Burgess gets caught in the rain. On the other side of the screen, I watch as the singer tries to tame his black mane into something more docile. He’s wearing a black jumper and a bright attitude, and he jokes, in his soft Mancunian accent, that his moppish hair makes him look a little like Jack White. While Burgess’ momentary lookalike is synonymous with 2000s garage rock, Burgess’ own band, The Charlatans, gained their legacy as a mainstay of the Manchester Britpop scene. And almost four decades later, the band are still evolving — imminently approaching the release of their fourteenth studio album, We Are Love, at the time of my chat with the frontman.

Our conversation starts, naturally, at the beginning. The fifty-eight-year-old musician tells me he’s been a music lover as far back as he can remember. And, while most artists lay claim to the same, Burgess actually has proof. “I insisted that my mum and dad bought me a copy of Little Jimmy Osmond’s ‘Long Haired Lover from Liverpool’ on a seven-inch and it came out round about my sixth birthday,” he confesses. “It’s a very embarrassing choice of a first song.” From wearing down his vinyl to tuning into Top of the Pops every week, Burgess quickly became hooked on music. “Every week I was into something different,” he recalls. “You know, it was like the Osmonds, Phil Lynott, Bonnie Tyler.” He seems to be relishing taking a trip back down his listening journey. “At age eleven,” he continues, “I decided that I was going to be a punk, and then I was a mod, and then I was into two-tone, then second generation punk.” As the artist puts it, his taste was “always changing, but always music”. And by the time he was thirteen, he was attending concerts in scout huts and saving up to buy Poison Girls, Zounds and Discharge records.

This love of music is what led Burgess to join a small band, the Electric Crayons. In 1989, while opening for The Charlatans — of which he was not yet a member — he started singing along to the headliner’s tracks. Martin Blunt, the band’s guitarist and founding member, noticed and beckoned him onstage. “As soon as I got up there, I think destiny was opening its door,” the artist smiles. As fate would have it, The Charlatans needed a new singer not long after. Personality, talent — Burgess was a perfect fit. Since then, they’ve released fourteen albums, achieved twenty-two Top 40 singles and been an item for longer than most married couples: thirty- five years. The secret to their longevity? “I think it’s because we actually enjoy what each other brings to the table,” Burgess effuses. “We’ve been through so much trauma that there’ve been moments we felt we only had each other, you know?”

We Are Love, then, marks the first time the band has returned to the Welsh village in almost thirty years. Owned by a farmer in his eighties, the studio has barely changed in the past three decades. The singer refers to their return there as a form of “hauntology”, explaining that it allowed him and his bandmates — Martin Blunt (bass), Mark Collins (guitar) and Tony Rogers (keyboard) — to reconnect with their past and process some lingering fragments of grief. “There was a day where nothing was going right at all,” Burgess narrates. “The equipment wouldn’t work, the desk wouldn’t work. I think there was even a power cut. We were just trying to get through the day.” At 5pm, Burgess returned to his room and realised it was the anniversary of Collins’ death. “He was always a trickster,” the frontman says, bolstered by a sense of humour only hindsight can afford. “So instead of helping us out, he was still messing with us.”

Just like Rockfield, the music industry has stayed somewhat similar over the past three decades in Burgess’s eyes. “It’s the same, but completely different,” he muses. “Artists always seem to want to make art, and the financial folk always want to balance the books.” He laughs. “[But] things travel around quicker, [and] you don’t have to save up for a record anymore.” Embracing the music technology of the modern day, Burgess started a Twitter listening party over lockdown. Imaginatively named Tim’s Listening Party, he hoped it would bridge together music lovers. Though initially a small lockdown project, it ended up spawning a podcast, two books and its own vinyl compilation. The artist puts its success down to nostalgia. “It reminded people of when they were kids,” he says, “going around to each other’s bedrooms and listening to an album in its entirety, comparing notes and discussing it.” Nevertheless, Burgess tells me, somewhat ironically, that he doesn’t have a natural affinity with the emotion: “I’m not really a nostalgic person — although nostalgia does feature heavily in my life.”

Though facilitating this new branch of his career, Burgess is keen to point out that not all the industry’s changes are positive. While on his last tour, Burgess noticed the impact of rising costs on support acts. This led to his next endeavour: Merch Market, an event where artists could sell their merchandise and music with no extra charge. As the frontman of a band so heavily associated with the Madchester movement of the eighties and nineties, Burgess’ commitment to community clearly hasn’t waned.

In contrast, Burgess tells me that, for him, songwriting is a solitary act. Nowadays, he often writes at home. “The walls are white like an art gallery,” he says. “Because having nothing to look at on the walls means you can start to colour it in.” He runs me through the trials and errors that ended up shaping ‘Deeper and Deeper’, the vibrant R&B- groover single from We Are Love that includes the delightfully odd “bathwater under the bridge” lyrics. Surprisingly open, he even details the process of writing ‘Curiosity’, my personal favourite track off his 2022 solo album, Typical Music. He tells me how he writes with a guitar in hand, strumming along until he hits a chord that makes him “feel” something. Then comes a sound, which becomes a word, then a sentence, and it builds from there.

Before my time sitting down with something of a music legend ends, I take the opportunity to ask Burgess about his writing no-nos. “Negativity,” he riposts. “I meditate, and that is a positive thing. Through that positivity, you tap in somehow, if you’re lucky, to the unified field.” He pauses. “It’s kind of shaped like that.” He articulates his thumbs and index fingers into an upside down pyramid. “So it’s like a triangle. It comes from one particle and creates a fountain of positivity.” The revelation pivots the conversation into something more personal.

When not making music or meditating, Burgess tells me he plays Minecraft, Roblox and GTA with his twelve-year-old son. “The thing that I’ve been looking for all my life is balance,” he summarises. But that balance has been hard won. “When I was making Wonderland [The Charlatans’ seventh album], I was heavily into getting inebriated and thought absinthe was the key,” he admits, “before that, smoking weed was the key. These things only last for certain amounts of time.” Speaking to Burgess now, it seems that the musician has done a one-eighty. He takes daily walks and meditates twice a day — he even works with a shaman. He describes the benefits of these habits as “longer lasting”, “more sustainable” and, crucially, “less trouble”.

With this newfound stability, Burgess sees the band’s latest album as the culmination of years of dedicated, emotional work behind the scenes. Recorded over the past two and a half years, We Are Love is an album that blissfully combines The Charlatans’ legacy, love and road ahead. As our call comes to
a close, Burgess snatches a beat to tell me about his favourite lyric on the album. It’s from the song ‘Glad You Grabbed Me’, written on a long bus journey while touring America. “Do you remember taking acid in Cambridge? A suitcase full of dollars couldn’t get us through college. Do you ever wonder where all our time goes? How wild the wind blows? Just some questions that I have,” he recites with a smile. “I’m happy to look back for a moment as long as what I do in my work is all about the present day — and, at best, the future.”