Tim Burgess: Just as dangerous without drugs and booze
The Charlatans: Just as dangerous, just as cool. Clockenflap isn’t happening this year. Last year there were noise complaints at Cyberport; this year there have been troubles with permits for West Kowloon. Hong Kong just doesn’t want to make it easy for music festivals.
So in 2010, there will be no two-day rock-out, no fun in the sun, no feet on the grass, no T-shirt giveaways nor spinny-wheel prizes. But the guys behind Clockenflap don’t want to leave you hanging.
While Clockenflap get to work on 2011, they’ve put together a pretty special replacement for the meantime: an intimate night with Ninja Tune’s DJ Food, Waxed Apple’s purveyor of acoustic mayhem River Mouth, and, most excitingly, U.K. indie rock veterans The Charlatans, on November 20.
The Charlatans, celebrating their 20th year, have been on the road in the United States and Europe to support their new album, "Who We Touch," which has been garnering warm reviews since its September release. The band’s touring year got off to a rough start, however, when drummer Jon Brookes collapsed on stage during a gig in Philadelphia. He was later found to have a brain tumour, and the tour was called off.
“Emotionally, I think it’s still affecting us,” says a slightly dazed singer-songwriter Tim Burgess on the phone from Belgium, the second stop on the band’s European tour.
“It was the beginning of the best tour we’ve ever done. We were all really enjoying it. Then obviously that happened and we had to stop what we were doing and had to come back.”
With Brookes’ blessing, the band called in replacement drummer Peter Salisbury, formerly of The Verve. While Brookes has been back in the United Kingdom receiving treatment, The Charlatans have been playing to packed houses in Europe. Attendance at gigs is an increasingly important gauge of how a band is doing in the day of the download, reckons Burgess.
When the band started out, CD sales were still king and the established music press anointed rock royalty. These days, MySpace and blogs are likely to have more impact.
“It used to be a lot to easier to monitor how well your records are doing,” says Burgess, looking back. “Now I have no idea about how our records do, nor do I really care. The way I can monitor it now is how many people are in when we play.”
Hong Kong won’t actually be a good indication of that -- because of the venue and licensing conditions, Clockenflap can only allow 400 people into the gig, and it’s on an invitation-only basis. (Hopeful gig-goers need to sign up to the Clockenflap Society of Clockenflap via www.clockenflap.com.)
For his part, Burgess says he has “no idea” about what to expect in Hong Kong. “I’ve never even thought about going to be honest, and now I’m really excited.”
Seeing Burgess and company up close in Aberdeen’s Blind Spot Gallery will be a real rock experience.
Burgess is a man who has been there and back again. He’s now 43 years old, but with his pixie-ish features and bob of black hair, he doesn’t look all that much different from 20 years ago, when he got started in the business. A lot of that could come down to his sobriety -- he weaned himself off drugs and alcohol five years ago.
“I used to get really excited about everything that involved celebrating back in the day, when I was drinking and taking drugs. But [now] I find that everything is on more of a level -- so I kind of prefer it this way.”
He laughs, and adds, “So everything’s just like ‘Yeah, okay, great,’ and it never really raises above that; whereas in the past it was like, ‘Fuck yeah! Great!’ and f***ing bottles open, snorting lines everywhere.” He lets the memory hang in the air for a bit. “But I did have fun.”
Getting off the drugs, however, has changed his approach to music. “When I first started out, everything was cool -- I was like 21 or 22, things came naturally. It was like, the more and more I got into drugs, the more experiences I was having. It was fine for a while, then at a point, maybe 2004, I started to be less creative, less natural, even though I was taking more drugs. The drugs seemed to start having a reverse effect. And that’s when I started to realize that I was in trouble, and I felt a little bit hopeless to it all.”
So, he kicked his habit and, as he puts it, came back down to earth. “I started to realize that my natural creativity started to come back, and that you could be more experimental and more dangerous without drugs. I always thought, ‘Oh my God, best period of the Rolling Stones, Exile On Main Street.’ Maybe it was, I don’t know -- maybe that’s when they were at their most dangerous. But I couldn’t do that anymore. I felt like I was just as dangerous without anything.”
Perhaps that sense of danger is exactly what is scaring off the Hong Kong authorities from embracing an honest-to-God music festival. That’s too bad. When the Clockenflap folks bring acts to town as important as The Charlatans and DJ Food, they deserve all the encouragement they can get.
What goes down on November 20 might not be a festival, but it’ll still be a party. Burgess and friends will make sure of that.
