(#570: 3 May 1997, 2 weeks)
Track listing: With No Shoes/North Country Boy/Tellin’ Stories/One To Another/You’re A Big Girl/How Can You Leave Us/Area 51/How High/Only Teethin’/Get On It/Rob’s Theme
As bad as things were for Depeche Mode in 1996, they were arguably worse for The Charlatans. Dave Gahan only “died” for a couple of minutes, but Rob Collins was killed permanently, in a drunken car crash on 22 July; he was twice over the alcohol limit and was not wearing a seatbelt, hence was thrown through his car’s sunroof. In last-minute body denial, he was able to stand up before collapsing. He died in the ambulance on the way to hospital.
The band had already been experiencing serious problems with Collins. While working on their fifth album, they complained that Collins fiddled about with and “ruined” some of the album’s songs, in the night after they had worked on them in the daytime, as a consequence of his alcoholism. They were considering letting him go, but his death understandably stopped the band in their tracks and caused them to wonder whether they should even bother going on.
It was Collins’ father who urged the band to do so. At Bobby Gillespie’s suggestion, they asked Primal Scream’s Martin Duffy (as that band were, at the time, “resting”) to join and help finish, and indeed tour, the album. He appears on at least four songs but is likely to have redone and reworked some of Collins’ original keyboard parts on others. Tim Burgess reckons he probably saved the band’s existence.
This all makes it quite difficult for me to evaluate Tellin’ Stories objectively. Clearly there was a lot of residual sympathy from the group’s fans, as well as the inadvertent poignancy of “anthems” like “How Can You Leave Us” (“How can you bleed on us?,” “No saint will save you this time ‘round”) and “With No Shoes”’ references to “walking with no shoes” and “fill[ing] my kidneys up with booze.” Moreover, the record includes two Collins-dominant instrumentals; “Area 51” and the closing “Rob’s Theme,” which latter is based on a tape the organist’s aunt made when Collins was three years old – you can hear the tweeting of birds and the murmurs of the infant Rob before a funk loop and breakbeat come in, like a nascent DJ Shadow track.
However, none of this actually makes Tellin’ Stories a better album. I’ve had problems with The Charlatans before and this record does not sound as though any of them have been resolved. It clearly isn’t for the want of trying – their Chemical Brothers chum Tom Rowlands, along with (on the opening song) one of the chaps from Bentley Rhythm Ace, turns up to add some loops here and there, and songs like “With No Shoes” and “One To Another” definitely benefit from the extra power. Preparing the songs in a cottage by Lake Windermere, Burgess in particular listened intensely to his Dylan and Wu-Tang albums in order to “analyse their vocal rhythms.”
But there are such things as being over-studious and over-respectful of Rock (and Rap)’s Rich Tapestry. Listening to Tellin’ Stories, it is clear that The Charlatans, whether with Collins and/or Duffy on keyboards, are a really good and powerful band. The authority that they stamp on the title track, whose key descending stone/Roses steps motif of guitar and drums was one of Collins’ suggestions that the band felt worth keeping, and “One To Another” is genuinely compelling. They know exactly what they are doing and, within their imposed parameters, are pretty inventive and resourceful – the increasingly crazed singalong of “How Can You Leave Us” benefits from their underlying control.
The problem lies, I’m afraid, with Tim Burgess. Sociable, genuine, generous, open-minded, honest, nice? Ticks for all six qualities. But a gifted lyricist and singer? Listen to their “comeback” single “One To Another.” If they had come up with something in the order of “Time Of The Season” by The Zombies, they would probably have spent six or seven weeks at number one. And the introduction to “One To Another” is literally awesome, with a sharply-defined killer riff (Tom Rowlands helps delineate that sharpness). But then Ian Brown’s kid brother comes in to mumble and drawl over the top, and all momentum is lost – there’s no melodic topline to hold onto. He manages to rip off both Jagger (“Pleased to meet yer”) and Shaun Ryder (“They’re going to burn YEWWWWWW!!”). One Steve Taylor – I wonder if it’s the same music journalist and sometime Channel 4 chat show host who used to bore the mellotrons off me in the eighties – writes in his unmissable tome The A-X Of Alternative Music that Burgess’ lyrics were “more understated and less cartoon” than those which Ryder and Kermit donated to Black Grape. Yet history repeatedly shows that it’s the overstated cartoon characters – be they Doctor John or Slim Shady - who get remembered.
Likewise, take a listen to “North Country Boy”; I’ve listened to it eight times this week in preparation for this piece, doing my damnedest to find worth in its arteries, and still think it remarkable, in all the wrong ways. A rewrite of Dylan’s “Girl From The North Country” but from the “boy”’s perspective? Well, there’s an idea for sure. But I remain amazed – again, in the wrong way – that somebody can sit and listen closely to (and presumably also itemise in delicate written detail) the vocal mechanics of Dylan and Raekwon and how delivery relates to or forwards or even subverts their words, and end up...singing the theme to When The Boat Comes In (you don’t know When The Boat Comes In? A painfully worthy but very popular BBC television series of the seventies – it was briefly revived in 1981 – set between the two world wars and starring James “better than polishing your bell up all afternoon” Bolam as a literal Jack-The-Lad to whom bad things happen over and over for our comforting pleasure. It boasted a terrific theme tune, sung by Alex Glasgow – the funniest thing about whom was that he wasn’t actually from Glasgow, or even Scotland – which David Fanshawe rearranged into an avant-gardey brass band thing. Obviously Tim Burgess also remembered it).
This happens so often throughout Tellin’ Stories that you’d be forgiven for nicknaming Burgess Tim Nice-But-Dim. That Tellin’, for a start. All the echt-Americanisms when you’re from the roaming plains of…Nantwich suggest a desperate desire to be a plainsman, which Burgess only achieves as an artist when he omits the “s” in the middle (it isn’t the last “n’” in 1997 Then Play Long album titles either). He said that he wanted “How High” to deploy “the punch of the Wu-Tang Clan but with the playfulness of De La Soul.” There are tangible hints of fusing Flashdance with MC Hammer shit in relation to this aim since the song sounds like the late Duncan Norvelle impersonating Liam Gallagher while dodging airgun pellets.
As for “Only Teethin’,” the singer’s hoped-for State Of The Nation address/epic – the conga motif from Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues” opens the song as a declaration of intent – well, you would have to call it something other than “Only Teethin’,” wouldn’t you (what does the expression even mean? Answers from residents of Cheshire, please)? Burgess hears a mix of Neil Young, Dexys and Sgt Pepper whereas I hear endless point-avoiding noodling, stream-of-consciousness stuff about Londoners and no climax or palpable purpose. Can I borrow his ears for a bit, since they seem to work better than, or at least differently to, mine? Meanwhile, “Get On It” would dearly like to out-Bob Dylan and The Hawks, and there’s even a coda of breakbeats and that type of thing to show how Up To Date the band (never The Band) is. But I forgot how it went even while I was listening to it.
Nonetheless, the album went down very well with Ian Indie types and hardcore Charlatans fans, enough to spend a rare fortnight at the top of the charts (it shifted 70,000 units in the first week of release alone), although that may have been due, not just to the public sympathy vote, but also to the fact that the cassette edition sold in Our Price for a fiver (I should know – I bought one. Hammersmith, the King’s Mall, if you please).
Thanks largely to the stupidity of Parlophone Records – the Plastic Beach/Boyzone debacle was neither unprecedented nor atypical – the success of Tellin’ Stories demoted a much finer album, which was absurdly released in the same week, to second place:
Supergrass knew what time it really was. They were getting un peu trop vieux to be singing about sitting up straight at the back of the bus. All bar two of the songs on their second album were worked up while they were in the studio recording it (Sawmills in Cornwall) and the spontaneity clearly worked in the band’s favour; see, for example, the frighteningly acute tightness they achieve on “Sun Hits The Sky,” complete with Rob Coombes’ antique synthesiser solo. If anything, In It For The Money paints a more realistic picture than its predecessor had done of what Supergrass, as a band, represented.
They try all sorts of new things on the record, do Supergrass, but there is also a deep, autumnal melancholy underlying their explorations that is particularly evident in songs like “Late In The Day” and its half-cousin “It’s Not Me” as well as the “I’m on my way” chorus of “Sun Hits The Sky.” They dabble with cocktail jazz (“Hollow Little Reign”) and scatterbrained artpunk (“Sometimes I Make You Sad”) but they do so with a lot more adventure and a lot less caution than Tim Burgess and Co. manage. "Richard III" - now a number one single by default - is so unapologetically punk rock as to qualify as "Song 3."
Above all towers the glorious lead single “Going Out.” I haven’t a clue what it’s about but it sounds big and akin to An Event, and moreover it is so effortlessly powerful – what a drummer Danny Goffey is – that it embarrassingly does The Charlatans better than, um, The Charlatans. The video is set at the famous bandstand in Battersea Park and mostly consists of the band energetically performing the song and a cloth-capped Goffey doing his best Keith Moon conspiratorial camera glances (there is also some brief slapstick as the band is chased around the park by a passing dog).
Supergrass succeed because they look and sound as though they take this music thing far less seriously and earnestly than The Charlatans. It’s fun watching them play “Going Out” and as a pop single of its 1996-7 ilk (as Cliff Richard might quip) I reckon it’s up there with (or at least towards) Ash’s “Goldfinger”; of course, it’s The Bloody Beatles (and a little R.E.M.; I like how the introduction to "Going Out" says hi to the one from "Stand"), but they momentarily make you believe in this stupidly wonderful thing called pop music again. Beyond that, I’d say that In It For The Money finds Supergrass reaching their real niche – they’re a no-frills art-rock band, like their indirect ancestors Supertramp, but with a better lead singer and better songs. They don’t sound crucified by the weight of Rock History, worried that Martin Freeman’s going to walk by with his digestive biscuit library of Classic Long-Playing Records and sternly admonish them. I’ve started listening to In It For The Money again out of pure pleasure as a result. I’m not sure I could apply any of those attributes to the worthy and in places powerful but overall dull Tellin’ Stories. Rob Collins, though. He had places to go other than being Brian Auger’s Number One Spiritual Son. If he’d taken better care of things, chiefly himself, he might have done.
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