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‘Music can save people’: Charlatans frontman Tim Burgess on success, sobriety and being a hands-on dad

At 10pm on 23 March 2020, Tim Burgess tweeted: “OK. Drop the needle on the record/press play/start streaming. We’re going in…” and an online phenomenon began. Elsewhere in the news that day: “UK could face Italy-style lockdown, warns Boris Johnson”; “No 10 denies Dominic Cummings argued to ‘let old people die’”; “Trump says unproven coronavirus drugs could be ‘gift from God’”; and, “Funeral directors told to make masks out of ‘towels and bin liners’.” Yes, astonishingly, the early days of the pandemic were even grimmer than you may remember them now.

One sliver of relief came via Tim’s Twitter Listening Party. The idea belonged to Tim Burgess, singer with the band the Charlatans. As an alternative to the nightly horror show of the BBC News at Ten, Burgess would invite his Twitter followers to hit play on a well-loved album and listen together in real time. Someone involved in the record would tweet anecdotes and memories of each track, and sometimes photos. Often that meant the singer, but just as often it meant the drummer, bass player, producer, PR, photographer or any combination of the above. Two-and-a-half years on, we’re out of lockdown, but the Listening Parties continue. At the time of writing there have been 1,183 of them: everyone from heavy-metal heavyweights (Iron Maiden) to obscure Irish folk (Mellow Candle). Paul McCartney has hosted one, as have members of the Sex Pistols, the Smiths and David Bowie’s band.

“People come up to me all the time and tell me it really helped them,” Burgess says. “I feel amazing about that. I knew music would save people, you know?”

Burgess is speaking from the Charlatans’ studio in Middlewich, Cheshire, in a room full of guitars and vinyl. As well that band’s enduring career, Burgess has established himself as a formidable solo artist. His fifth album, Typical Music, is out in September. If the Charlatans excel in big-venue bangers – they supported Liam Gallagher at Manchester City’s football ground this summer – then Solo Burgess may be compared to the sort of off-kilter pop made by XTC, Sparks or post-Beatles McCartney. In other words, very good pop indeed.

With his Cheshire cat grin and Warhol hair, Burgess is an exuberant presence. His new album is especially joyful. Coming out of lockdown, Brexit, Boris and the rest, consciously so. “I was trying to make a record to transcend all of that,” he says. “I wanted to build a world that was sealed and protective and multicoloured. A new world.”

People fell over themselves to do his Listening Parties because Burgess is as much a music fan as a musician. “Tim makes friends with everybody,” Blur’s drummer Dave Rowntree tells me. “He was at my wedding in the 90s and by the end he knew everybody, he had everyone’s phone number. He’s built up that goodwill over his life. I don’t know if anyone else would have been able to do that. He invented a new way of listening to music, one that made sense in today’s social-media landscape.”

It’s what makes his contributors go above-and-beyond. “It took a week to prepare,” Rowntree says, of his Parklife Listening Party that saw him post a trove of never-before-seen memorabilia. “It was a bunch of stuff in cardboard boxes up in the loft that I was saving for my autobiography, that I’m never going to write. But we all felt an obligation to do something.”

Other artists found the format allowed them to be uniquely candid. Gary Kemp hosted Listening Parties for Spandau Ballet’s 1983 album True and his 1995 solo record Little Bruises, for which he frankly discussed his marriage breakdown. “With True I was nervous the response would be lukewarm,” Kemp says. “But Tim gives it added validation and people’s biased, tribal instincts – against 80s pop in my case – get pushed aside. [The honesty with] Little Bruises was part of the Covid moment, where greater equanimity was felt and an honest openness occurred.”

“He did the best one by a long way,” Burgess says. “I never really understood Spandau Ballet. But I listened to it, with the stories, and that was just the most amazing experience.”

Burgess’s magnanimity is all the more impressive because, pandemic aside, the past few years can’t have been plain sailing. His dad – “My hero… he was the best,” as he wrote on Twitter – died in April 2020. And his relationship with electronic musician Nik Void came to an end. They have an eight-year-old son together, Morgan. (The tabloids say he’s now in a “secret romance” with actor Sharon Horgan, a longtime friend.)

“I came up with the song Time That We Call Time,” he says. “And that was about wanting to call time on everything. Politically, what was going on in the world and a lot of stuff that was going on in my life, too. The starting point was falling in love with the world again. I am quite positive… most of the time. And I think meditation helps with that. I meditate twice a day. But I think that also comes with constantly wanting to move forward. You have to.”

The afternoon we meet, Burgess is due to play Bluedot, the music festival at Jodrell Bank, a 15-minute drive away. He changes into a fetching purple velour top. “On an overcast day it can make any stage look bright,” he notes. He plays an eight-song solo set – plus the Charlatans’ The Only One I Know – to a capacity crowd, still somehow an indie pin-up at 55. “They went all the way to the back, I couldn’t have been happier,” he says afterwards.

Elsewhere on Burgess’s CV: running the record label O Genesis, organising pop-up diner Tim Peaks and having Kellogg’s create a cereal for him, Totes Amazeballs, after he made a joke on – where else? – Twitter. He’s now the author of four books, including 2012’s hair-raising memoir, Telling Stories.

The Charlatans were successful immediately. Their debut album went in at No 1 in October 1990, its lead single put them on Top of the Pops. Bass player Martin Blunt memorably described their original sound as “the Spencer Davis Group on E”. Still, you’d have got long odds on them being the one “Britpop band” playing football stadiums three decades later. Partly this is because they’ve kept moving. Subsequent albums have worn the influences of everyone from Bob Dylan to Bob Marley.

“Once you split up you can’t get back together,” Burgess says. “We try and dismantle the sound and build it back up again. Because starting from nothing is an interesting way of making music.” At some points this has surely been born of necessity. They raced to finish their third album, 1994’s Up To Our Hips, because keyboard player Rob Collins was about to be sent to prison for armed robbery. He later died in a car crash. In 2010, drummer Jon Brookes collapsed on stage and was diagnosed with a brain tumour. He died three years later. As it happens we’re talking on the anniversary of Collins’s death, Burgess having put out tributes on social media.

“It was him who really wanted me in the band,” he says. “He was the eldest and without doubt the most naturally gifted. We wrote a lot of the melodies together. We used to watch Beatles documentaries all at the time. He was great to hang out with.”

For a time the Charlatans were labelled The Unluckiest Band in the World, something Burgess makes short shrift of in Telling Stories. “People should think of the things we have got right: stepping out of our comfort zone… surely the unluckiest band in the world is the one you’ve never heard of.” Still, they have had quite a run of it. Their 2001 LA-recorded album Wonderland was released in America on 9/11. “The autumn tour was cancelled,” Burgess writes.

“You couldn’t… plan that,” he smiles, today. “I have enjoyed our story. It’s a unique story that’s still being made. I’m happy about that more than anything. Obviously losing Jon and Rob is tragic. But I think our best album is yet to come.”

Then there were the drugs. Seemingly every band in the 90s was off their heads, but Burgess really went for it. He was into solvents at secondary school – “Glue/petrol/Gen-Xene, Evo-Stik remover,” as his book details. By the mid-90s he was doing coke “24/7”. “I was living in LA, but I was mostly working in Manchester, so with time differences and drinking on planes it was just always time to get wasted,” he says. “I’d be always working, always drinking and always jetlagged. Whenever I used to wake up there was a bottle of wine next to my head, so I just used to start. I was drinking all the time. Vodka for breakfast. All the clichés really. And I never liked the idea of being a cliché. I’d only have a good two hours in me every day.”

There’s nothing worse than a celebrity giving it the retrospective My Drugs Shame/My Booze Hell sob story. Burgess is not one of them. “I did enjoy being on stage on E,” he beams. “I thought it was great.” But enough was enough. He got clean in 2006. “I had to lock myself away in the K West Hotel in Shepherd’s Bush. I was in there for 10 days and went to see a doctor who gave me loads of vitamins. And on the way back, the first two people I saw in the hotel bar were Shaun and Bez [of the Happy Mondays]. I thought: ‘If I can just get to my room, I think I’ve got this…’”

The afternoon after the Bluedot festival, Burgess sits on the floor of his two-bedroom house in Norfolk, playing Lego with Morgan. Jurassic Park, but never Star Wars – Morgan deeming that franchise “for dinosaurs”, ironically.All young children are underwhelmed by their parents’ jobs, which is as it should be. Burgess Jr is no exception. “I took him to Glastonbury in 2019 and he watched most of [indie singer] Mac DeMarco,” Dad says. “When the Charlatans played, he watched one song and went backstage for the doughnuts.” Still, perhaps he is more impressed than he’s letting on. “Sometimes he’ll be playing a video game or something and he’ll open his headphones and say, ‘Dad, tell my friend you’re a singer,’ and I’ll say, ‘Oh hi, who am I talking to? Yeah, I’m a singer.’ And then he’ll just hang up on me.”

“There isn’t another pop star who comes close to the ambassadorial role he’s taken on as a celebrator of music and the people who make it,” says Pete Paphides, the writer and broadcaster whose hit memoir Broken Greek spawned its own Listening Party. “It’s not that he’s not cynical – it’s more than that. Cynicism really upsets him.”

It’s surely a key to his longevity.

“ It’s extraordinary the degree to which he commits to the Listening Parties. He’s there for every one of them. On top of being in the Charlatans and making solo records and being a hands-on dad, that’s astonishing.”

“Being sober really helps, and I can say that from experience,” says Simon Raymonde, who runs Burgess’s record label Bella Union. “When you’ve got over all the excesses of youth and you’re seeking come kind of peace are serenity. Working hard comes naturally to him. He’s a committed, passionate music man, and there aren’t so many of those around any more.”

Before joining the Charlatans, Burgess says, in Telling Stories, he always had himself down as a frontman. What does he like about it? “Everything!” he hoots. “My favourite part of my job, if it is a job, is to make something out of nothing. I love being able to sing the songs. I like to really work the stage. If there’s someone at the back who might not be looking, I really like to try and get them. I think people need to get out of their shells a bit. I really like to bring everyone together.”

Typical Music, the new album by Tim Burgess, is released on 23 September via Bella Union. The book The Listening Party Volume 2 is out on 3 November