The Charlatans

Spin, 1990

by Simon Reynolds

In the U.K., the last few years have seen the original sequence of '60s rock replayed – in reverse. Nineteen eighty-eight was the year of 1969 – the year the hippie dream turned sour (Altamont, Manson).

Groups like Spacemen 3, Loop, and M Bloody Valentine resurrected a version of psychedelia that was more about the chaos of schizophrenia than a jolly day trip from reality. But in 1989, the U.K. pop scene backtracked to 1967, with the Manchester wave of groups leading the retreat to flower power's Day-Glo euphoria. The Stone Roses name-checked the Beatles, Hendrix, and Pink Floyd; the Inspiral Carpets exhumed the tin-pot organ and nasal harmonies of psychedelia's first flush of callow enthusiasm. In 1988, the watchword was ‘heavy’, in the last two years, it's been ‘good vibes’. Psychic and social disintegration has given way to mellow communion, as proclaimed by anthems like Primal Scream's ‘Come Together’ and the Stone Roses' ‘One Love’.

Some observers have compared the Manchester upheaval to the trajectory of mod music in the '60s. In both cases, British groups took lessons in rhythm from the black American dance music of the moment. "Detroit and Chicago have been to us, and other current groups, what Memphis and Chicago were to the Stones and the other white R&B groups of the '60s," claims Tim Burgess, lead singer of the Charlatans. "The acid-house boom was the first time I got excited about music that was happening in my lifetime."

The Charlatans hail from the midlands of the U.K. (a nondescript, industrial region south of Manchester). They originally formed at the instigation of keyboard player Rob Collins, who wanted to base a band around his Hammond organ. Martin Blunt (bass), Jon Baker (guitar), and Jon Brookes (drums) were recruited from sundry mod and psychedelic bands in the locality. The group's rise began when they supported the Stone Roses on tour. From the Roses, the Charlatans cribbed two essential factors for U.K. pop success. First, a loose-limbed, syncopated dance beat (ultimately derived from James Brown's ‘Funky Drummer’) Second, a desirable, charismatic front man, exuding laid-back arrogance. They spotted the lippy – that's to say, luscious and loudmouthed – Tim Burgess fronting his own group, the Electric Crayons, and wasted no time in nabbing him.

The result was the weird hodgepodge of period detail and 1990 pop currency that is the Charlatans – crisp rare groove rhythms, folk-edelic ‘60s harmonies, the sepia-tinted swell of the Hammond organ, and guitar that veers from flecked funk to flanged psychedelia. The Charlatans' LP, Some Friendly, ranges from lightweight Talking Heads-style albino funk like ‘The Only One I Know’ to glowering mood pieces like the frustratingly implosive ‘Then’ and groggy, druggy bouts of acid-rock experimentation like ‘Opportunity’, ‘1O9 Pt 2’ and ‘Sproston Green’. Like so much indie/college rock, it can't help but be music about other music, telling you more about the extent and excellence of a band's record collection than anything ‘out there’.

The Charlatans fail to shrug off the burden of their multiple precedents more often than they succeed (the exception being the aforementioned druggier songs like ‘Opportunity’), but like the Stone Roses they have been seized upon by a generation that's either too young to know or too desperate to care about what deja vu means.

When Tim Burgess's face made it onto the cover of The Face last year, it was an uncanny echo of a decade-earlier Face cover featuring the luscious, pouting Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen. Nothing could have more clearly signaled the sea change in UK pop consciousness than this flashback to the days when the mop-top-and-black-clothes look was in. For most of the '80s, the Face had celebrated ‘style culture’ – a semi-mythical metropolitan scene, based around nightclubs and brasseries. Rock was decreed ‘dead’, and Face disciples danced on its grave to the beat of the latest U.S.-import 12-inch. But by 1990, style culture's bubble had burst (thanks to the anti-elitist rave scene and the insurgent indie rock/dance crossover). TheFace was forced to revert to what it had been in its early days: a rock magazine featuring the kind of pallid, spotty indie kids it would have previously barred entrance to for not looking sufficiently cool.

Burgess comes from Northwich, a small town equidistant from Liverpool and Manchester. "I've always believed that the northwest of England has produced better groups than the rest of the U.K. They have more time to develop, whereas London bands get hounded so quickly by the press. The early-'80s Liverpool scene is kind of a parallel with the Manchester thing now. Back then bands like Teardrop Explodes and Echo and the Bunnymen got lumped together; now it's the Roses, the Mondays, the Charlatans. I don't understand why, because all the bands are really different.

"We're not a total life-style package like the Mondays or the Farm," says Burgess, "with clothes and drugs and soccer and a whole attitude. We're obsessed with taking music further. We don't have the attitude of other groups who say, 'Well, we're not playing a gig that night 'cause a big soccer match is on TV.' I've never been into sports anyway."

The Charlatans

Melody Maker, 22 December 1990

by Simon Reynolds 

1990 could well go down in the rock almanac as the year The Charlatans stole the initiative from The Stone Rose. While the figureheads of the Manc explosion spent the year paralysed by the expectations of critics and audience alike, The Charlatans materialised out of nowhere (the West Midlands) to usurp the Roses' rightful place as chartbusting purveyors of Sixties psychedelia with a 1990 funk undercarriage.

The Charlatans are the photogenic option in the post-Manc jamboree: Tim Burgess' enigmatic, androgynous allure makes him the material for classic teenybop obsession, in a way that the laddish likes of Shaun Ryder and Peter Hooton never could be. And where The Stone Roses have been stalled by the obligation to articulate Manchester's ‘new vibe’, The Charlatans are free to be vague, to suggest more than they reveal.

After the Top 20 hits ‘The Only One I Know’ and ‘Then’, the critical/commercial success of their debut album Some Friendly, and the first signs of future mega status in America, The Charlatans now look like the ones-most-likely to prosper after the Manc hype runs out of steam.

Here, Tim Burgess reflects on a glorious year.

Manchester

It's not a movement, it's more like an atmosphere. Any idea of it being a movement was created as an afterthought, usually by journalists. But I think it's true that in 1989, a whole load of fresh attitudes started to come through. The independent scene used to have this traditional indie attitude, which was that if you were successful, that meant you weren't really indie. But the Charlatans have never been afraid to call ourselves pop. At the same time, our attitude is independent. We're not puppets, there's no one dictating anything to us. We've always despised that kind of thing.

Northwich, his hometown

It's 18 miles south of Manchester, and 20 miles away from Liverpool. So I've had the most brilliant musical upbringing. I've always believed that the North-West has produced better groups. They have more time to develop. London groups get hounded so quickly by the press, the music business is right on your doorstep if you're a London group. There's quite a few parallels between the Manchester thing and the Liverpool scene in the early Eighties. Back then, Teardrop Explodes and Echo And The Bunnymen got classed together, and nowadays it's the Roses, the Mondays, the Inspirals, The Charlatans, who get lumped together. But all the groups were really different from each other.

Being a sex symbol

I never, ever thought of myself like that. But I won't argue with it, so long as it's not used to trivialise the music. Before I was in a group, I was never considered to be particularly good looking. For about three years, I was going out five nights a week, but I never had a girlfriend. I can't complain about being regarded as a sex symbol. It won't affect my ego, because I've always had a big ego! At the same time, I'm pretty realistic. All the people in this band are among the most sorted out people I know.

Fame, Destiny, life in a small town

Being a teenager in a smallish town, it always seemed so tragic to be so far from the cities, where all the excitement was. But I always knew I'd be doing something extraordinary one day. For years, I was dying to be doing what I'm doing now. Everything apart from being in a group just seemed so trivial. It was either that, or wanting to be a pilot or a footballer or a writer.

The indie/dance crossover

We definitely have a kind of black feel in our rhythms. I suppose that's why everyone compares what's happened in the last two years to the Stones and the mod groups. They were influenced by the black dance music coming across from the Memphis and Chicago. And our sort of band has been influenced by the House rhythms coming over from Detroit and Chicago. House was the first time I got excited by a music that had happened in my lifetime. See, I just missed out on punk. So the rave scene was the first musical revolution of my 22 summers!

The Hammond organ

When we started out, we realised that there had never been a brilliant group whose sound was based around the Hammond organ. And we wanted to be the first. I don't know what it is about that sound, it just gets me really excited. There's something really perverse about that instrument. It sounds sort of orgasmic. It really turns me on!

The songs

‘You're Not Very Well’: I suppose it's a bit like out ‘Get Off My Cloud’. It's our response to the people who try to scrutinise you for having a good time, and analyse everything to death. It was originally gonna be called ‘Sick In The Head’, but we decided to go for the understatement. We're too clever to say, "F*** off!"

‘Flower’: It's a death threat aimed at someone who's been disrupting my past. I don't harbour grudges generally, but there's three that I won't forget. ‘Sproston Green’: It's about a place in Northwich, where I had my first sexual encounter. I was 14 or 15, and there was this girl who used to make me do things to her. She was much older than me. So I guess you could say that I was seduced at an early age.

Androgyny Versus ‘The New Laddishness’

If we adopted a laddish image because that's what's fashionable, it'd be contrived. We're not like that. We're just into music. Whereas with Happy Mondays and The Farm, they're about a whole lifestyle package: the football, the clothes, the drugs. Music is our supreme obsession. We don't have that attitude of other groups, where they'll say that they won't play a gig on a particular night because there's a match on telly, or they won't rehearse on Sunday because they're playing five-a-side. We've no interest in anything apart from music. We're obsessed with taking the music further. I've never been interested in sport. I've very little time for football.

Mystique

I don't like to open myself up totally. After all, it's not as though I know the people who interview me. Sometimes I'll leave the room after half an hour, when I know the interviewer wants five hours of open heart surgery. Always leave them wanting more, that's my attitude.

With the lyrics, I like to leave things oblique. Like the title Some Friendly: I kept it deliberately vague so as to give people a chance to think. And they do, they read so many different things into it. With a lot of lines, I don't know where they came from, or what they mean. There's parts of the brain that we don't know anything about. I use intuition and dream imagery and random things. And I like to use images and allusions that I know only mean something to me. Listeners seem to make more out of stuff like that, rather than if you spell everything out. It's the only way I know how to think or speak or be. I don't like to analyse, it ruins everything. For instance, if you were married to someone for two years, you could probably write a really accurate assessment of that person. But for me, it's the guess-work that's interesting, that early stage when you can't figure someone out.

The songs are a mixture of fact and fantasy. Sometimes they're about imaginary relationships, or they're wishful thinking, things I dream of happening. That's far more exciting than some dreary factual account of my life. Who wants to know if I've had sex and what it was like? It's miles better if I'd never had sex and wrote about what I imagined it was like!

Butthole Surfers interview 1990

BUTTHOLE SURFERS
Melody Maker, 8th December 1990

by Simon Reynolds

Butthole Surfers have re-emerged only to suffer the indignity of being topical. With uncanny punctuality, their cover of ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’ coincides with the current Donovan revival (an upshot almost as bizarre as the rehabilitation of The Carpenters earlier this year).

"Isn’t it horrible?" says Gibby Haynes, on the phone from Texas. "We had no idea that Donovan had suddenly become hip. See, we’ve been playing that song live for years and years."

The original ‘Hurdy Gurdy’ was weird enough in its own right, and the Buttholes have only marginally increased its queasiness by putting a stomach-turning wobble in Gibby’s vocal. Still, it’s strangely appropriate that the Buttholes should be the Happy Mondays’ accomplices in rehabilitating the twee troubadour of flower power. There’s a case for saying that the Mondays are the nearest the UK has to a group like Butthole Surfers. Both groups have trailblazed the return to frying your brain with hallucinogens. And both groups’ ‘art’ consists of a torrential outpour of plagiarized and pastiched fragments of pop history, media flotsam and jetsam: a regurgitation of all the cultural garbage that’s been shoved down their throats.

"I don’t know too much about Happy Mondays or the Manchester thing," says Gibby. "We played there once and they hated us. Kathleen stood on her head for three songs. The promoter said we couldn’t come back."

In fact, the Buttholes have been disconnected from the state of pop over two years. Since 1988’s Hairway To Steven they’ve been lying low in Texas. Gibby has been absorbed by his obsession with video technology and computer graphics, one byproduct of which has been the perverse, rubberised images on the cover of last year’s Widowermaker EP, and the garbled, gurning faces on the cover of the new single.

‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’ (the song refers to a folkloric figure from ye olde rural England) hinted that the forthcoming Buttholes album might be the full flowering of the penchant for pastoralism displayed on Hairway. In fact, it’s a grab bag, the Buttholes indulging all their disparate whims, and too often aiming to titillate rather than disorientate. 

On the plus side, ‘Barking Dogs’ and ‘Blind Man’ reprise the gastric/cosmic turbulence of ‘22 Going On 23’ and ‘Jimmy’, with guitarist Paul Leary scaling his usual Faustian heights. On the whole, though, there’s far too much emphasis on pastiche. ‘No, I’m An Iron Man’ pointlessly parodies The Jesus And Mary Chain, ‘Golden Showers’ is Southern fried boogie in the style of ZZ tap or Foghat ("A cool band, they were the model for Spinal Tap") and ‘Lonesome Bulldog (Parts 1-4)’ spoofs "the kind of MOR C&W you’d buy at a truckstop cassette stand, like Red Sovine."

Is there no form of cultural effluent that you can’t wrest some amusement from?

"I do appreciate just about anything," admits Gibby. "I don’t go as far as those people who have videotapes of their favourite TV commercials. I don’t go looking for weird shit, but it seems like it comes for me. There’s always stuff that never seems to cease to amaze and amuse. Like, for instance, I’m out in our front yard now, and I’m looking at where deer graze at night. In fact, I’m looking at a pile of deer droppings. And recently there’s been these incidents where stray deer have been attacking people. It’s the rutting season and they’re kind of aggressive. Three building workers were attacked by some stags. Then there was a 65-year-old man who was collecting bottle tops from the roadside and a deer gored him. Another story I read in the local paper was about this dog that got hit by a car. His owners buried him. A couple of days later the dog dug himself out. He’d been in a coma. So the stories crop up continually. The lyrics are almost 100 per cent derived from this kind of material."

*

ONE BENEFICIAL RESULT of the Buttholes’ two year furlough is the long-awaited fruition of Gibby and bassist Jeff Pinkus’ sideline project, The Jackofficers. The LP Digital Dump is a surprisingly convincing (but, naturally, thoroughly off-kilter) foray into dance music).

"It’s Tex-house", explains Gibby. "It’s kinda like Acid House if you’d never heard the music, but were inspired by the term. I’m not particularly into dance music. I used to be into disco when I was in high school, but I’m not up on the current dance scene. It’s taking off over here. Every town has a couple of clubs full of kids with weird haircuts dancing to industrial music. But there’s nothing like the UK’s rave scene over here. It’s a shame, I’ve always wanted to go to one of those huge dance parties out in the country. But somehow I can’t see a weird social revolution basing itself around synthesiser music. The way I’d like to go is further into psychedelic atmospheric and ambience. I’ve been into space music for a long while."

"The album is basically a load of jacking off," continues Jeff. "The working method was to sit in my bedroom playing with samplers, and most of all, make sure I changed my weed as often as possible. If I smoke too much of one kind, I get immune to the effect. So we’d rig up the technology to get weird effects and then take it to the studio. There’s no end to the games you can play with technology.

"Jackofficers is a pretty mindless project. It’s kind of training in getting new effects. I’m not especially into dance music. I was really surprised at how easy it is to make a dance track. I call it ‘bong-House’ because I listen to it when I’m doing bong hits. Hold on a second, I just want to turn the video on – there’s a documentary about this guy called Richard Speck who killed eight nurses."

Gibby and Jeff are speaking to me from the porch of the domicile they share with their two dogs. "It was the dog’s birthday yesterday," adds Jeff, apropos of nothing. "We barbecued him some filet mignons."

How do the neighbours react to the strange goings on and aberrant sounds emanating chez Butthole?

"Well, the nearest neighbour is 10 acres away and, when I met him, the first thing he said was, ‘Hi, I’m James, I’m into rebirthing and psycho-massage.’ The other neighbours are these people who own a 1,000-acre ranch which they inherited from the guy who invented the coat-hanger. So we don’t get too much trouble from the neighbours."

What kind of stuff have you been playing on the family stereo recently?

Gibby: "I’m listening to quite a lot of heavy metal these days. It seems like metal’s got so fast, it’s slowed down. If you play it at a low volume, it’s like ambient music, like a chorus of buzz-saws."

Jeff: "I like MC 900 Ft Jesus and Eric B & Rakim. I like the heavy low-end bass. The low end is my thing, that’s what I always look to aggravate in the Buttholes’ sound. Who care about guitars, y’know? I’m always looking for new ways to make the low end more gruelling."

And what does the future hold in store? "That’s half the fun, sitting around the family bong and spacin’ out on ideas, and then forgetting them. I can see a big ole roadrunner in that cloud – it’s bad-ass! We don’t want to take Jackofficers on tour, but we would like to have a Jackofficers party, with a huge sound system, and elephants and chickens and monkeys with skateboards. Shit like that. It would be real nice to have two bad-ass titty dancers from New England onstage with us!"

Big Audio Dynamite and Schoolly D live 1986

Big Audio Dynamite/Schoolly D at Brixton Academy, London

 Melody Maker, 22 November 1986

by Simon Reynolds

HIP HOP is about a strange kind of unity: it's a community that responds to oppression not with a dream of solidarity and equality, but with a sociopathic individualism. A brotherhood bound in ruthless competition with each other. At a hip hop event there's a resonance between audience and performer that comes because the star lives out the fan's megalomaniac fantasies in a theatre of cruelty and triumph.

But tonight Schoolly D faced a different community, a hostile and ignorant audience. That faceless plain of rock fandom, shorthaired hippies, Mick Jones lookalikes nostalgic for the golden days of 1978. Many were wearing trainers, but not for the right reasons. There was no resonance. There was shit sound, far too little volume, and in truth Schoolly D didn't seem to be trying too hard either. The audience were indifferent, desultory even in their throwing of glasses on stage.

A pity, because the record is a quantum leap for hip hop. In the search for higher and harder hits, some have tried to mix hip hop with other substances, like rock or Go Go. Schoolly has opted for a purer, more vicious distillation of the drug. 'P.S.K.' is an avalanche. 'Put Your Filas On' shows D.J. Code Money to be a virtuoso, a poet of scratch.

But Schoolly let the side down badly, failing to tyrannise the audience. He bobbed from one end of the stage to the other, flicking his wrists in little gestures of dismissal, stopping now and then to adopt the new B-Boy posture: arms folded across the chest, supercilious gaze of disdain. Who's afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? Nobody here tonight.

I have not been impressed by Big Audio Dynamite hitherto: hip hop and punk united in relations of mutual enfeeblement, I thought. The very idea seemed a bit naff: four outlaw myths for the price of one — the rocker, the B-Boy, the rasta, the cowboy — all merged into a single cartoon swagger. Pile it all on. Basically, though, this is a rock'n'roll band, having as much to do with hip hop as ZZ Top. All that Jones has acquired from hip hop is the idea of theft — he'll rip off anything from 'Summertime Blues' to The Big Country theme to Raw Silk's 'Do It To The Music' to Ennio Morricone.

You know it's not in any sense dynamic rock or dance music, but somehow it works, as a fierce sloppiness, a flurry that sweeps you along in its blur if you're prepared to let it have its way with you. Strummer didn't make an appearance, which is what everyone wanted (even me), but this is The Clash at heart, with some technology and a new cosiness and songs drawn out for seven minutes. But the sentimentality (The Clash's great strength) is well to the fore. Mick Jones, with his pissed grin and slicked back hair and drainpipe physique, is a reactionary figure, but hard to dislike. And songs like 'V Thirteen', with their crestfallen melodies and cissy vocals, are really rather pretty in a mopey sort of way. But then I always thought 'E=MC2' sounded like China Crisis.