TIM BURGESS
Listening Parties Under The New Sky
By Tom Lanham
photo by Cat Stevens
B
enjamin Disraeli believed that
“Change is inevitable; change is constant.”
John F. Kennedy reckoned
that “Change is the law of life, and those
who look only to the past or present are
certain to miss the future.” But leave it to
Charles Darwin to summarize it best: “It is
not the strongest of the species that survives,
nor the most intelligent — it is the
one that is the most adaptable to change.”
It’s time-worn wisdom to which Tim
Burgess can easily relate. As the current
coronavirus pandemic tightened its grip
on the world over the past three months,
the Charlatans UK frontman quickly came
to realize that every comfortable nuance in
a musician’s life would be upended, stifled,
even squelched, possibly forever. He
knew that he needed a bracing new business
model in order to survive. Little did
he know, though, that he already possessed
such skills. And he’d had them for
years.
Now, it’s become a full-blown pop-cultural
phenomenon, and a quiescent comfort
to rock fans everywhere as they nervously
shelter in place — Tim’s Twitter
Listening Parties, nightly online events that
playback one classic album. At the same
time, a key band member discusses it in
real-time. Kind of like regular fireside
chats for the alt-rock set. In fact, Burgess,
53, has become so busy arranging this
unexpected flurry of activities that he’s
barely had time to promote his adventurous
new solo set, I Love the New Sky, his
fifth. And anyway, where could he even go
to book a concert to tout it? “But I’d been
doing these parties for a decade, but only
for Charlatans records, starting with our
1990 debut Some Friendly, he recalls of his
first tentative dealings with social media.
“I’d do a listening party every time it was
a record’s birthday, and people in Britain
really seemed to like it. But largely — apart
from Charlatans fans — they went unnoticed,
so maybe 1,000 people would listen
in, and we’d all listen at the same time, and
people seemed to get quite a lot of enjoyment
out of it.”
But everything changed a couple of
months ago. Burgess was innocently overseeing
his usual Some Friendly discussion
on Twitter when he happened to catch the
attention of one longtime chum from
Scotland, Alex Kapranos from Franz
Ferdinand, who had purchased said album
as a teenager and fallen in love with its
dreamy Madchester-Scene single, “The
Only One I Know.” Would it be possible,
he wondered, to do his own FF-centered
Listening Party the very next night? Sure,
the Charlatan agreed, no problem. By that
point, he’d lined up Blur’s Dave Rowntree
to chat about that group’s Park Life, and
Evening Four featured no less than Paul
‘Bonehead’ Arthurs, reflecting on Oasis’
legendary Definitely Maybe. And it never
slowed down from there. “Within four
days, it became newsworthy everywhere,
and within a week Rolling Stone was
reporting about it,” he says. “So it’s kind of
like the slowest overnight sensation ever
— an overnight, ten-year sensation. But it
worked well with the Twitter platform,
being shared with other people — people
took it as a genuine thing, this sharing
thing that was bringing people together
who liked all different kinds of music. And
it’s only gotten more and more varied, and
more things keep cropping up every day.”
Now Tim’s Twitter Listening Parties are
scheduled for 8:00, 9:00, and 10:00 every
weeknight, with bonus ‘Festival’ multiartist
programs on weekends.
Burgess even used one recent Listening
Party to premiere his own New Sky offering,
which caroms from the Cure-thumping
opener “Empathy For the Devil” to a
Beach Boys-jangly “Sweetheart Mercury,”
an Elton John-retro “Sweet Old Sorry Me,”
a dream-pop experiment called “Lucky
Creatures,” the Beatles-reverb-evocative
“Undertow,” and “I Got This,” which the
composer sees as the most vintage-
Charlatans-sounding track in the set. He
penned all 12 songs himself, curbing his
usually collaborative urges, and incorporated
varied musicians like Daniel
O’Sullivan on bass, drums and piano, and
Thighpaulsandra on additional keyboards.
One delicate minuet, “Only Took a Year,”
pokes tongue-in-cheek fun at the amount
of time it took him to write it. “I sit in a
bedroom, and I try to write this song,” he
sings of the process that turned out to be a
tad more difficult than he’d imagined. But,
left to his own devices in the Norfolk countryside,
with the nearest market being a
modest eight miles away, he discovered
another whole new skill set he didn’t realize
he had. He checked in from his retreat
recently to discuss it all.
IE: You’re in Norfolk, home-schooling
your son. How’s that going?
TIM BURGESS: How’s it going? Err, it’s
not going amazing. But I don’t wanna be
one of those super-amazing parents that
have charts on the wall to mark the
progress of their child. And it’s not easy,
especially when the parents are trying to
work, as well. So I’ve just been teaching
him about the environment, and we talk
about the coronavirus a little bit. And he
loves volcanoes, too. He’s seven, so we go
and play some videos, as well. But it is
hard, isn’t it? And I don’t even know
what’s going to happen when they let us
all out again, but I’m gonna take it very,
very carefully. Because they’re probably
opening the doors too early, aren’t they?
IE: Some folks have said it’s Mother
Nature, putting humanity in the penalty
box before it gets one more chance.
TB: And I kind of welcomed it, in a way. I
wasn’t afraid of it. And I’m sorry for anyone
who’s lost anybody during this pandemic,
of course. But I was kind of like
…well, I just wasn’t afraid of it. And I think
I might have had it, but I have no idea how.
For me, we went to New York, and we
were going to go to South By Southwest,
but while I was in New York, it was building
and building and building. So we
played four shows for this new solo album,
and then we had two days off. Then all of
a sudden, on the last day before leaving, all
the cafes there started doing only takeout
— they wouldn’t let anybody sit in the
cafes. And we thought, “Wow! This is getting
pretty crazy!” There were only 60 people
in the city who had it at that point. And
then I started getting a cough and not feeling
too good, so I was sent on a plane back
home. And I got back home and was in bed
for about five days, so what else could it
be? I don’t know. But if I had it, it was
probably a mild strain of it, but I still had a
pretty intense fever, leg pain, and chest
and kidney pain — just a really heavy
aching in my chest. So those were the last
shows I played. And who knows when
concerts are going to happen again?
IE: Are your folks still around?
TB: No, my dad died a week ago. It was
Parkinson’s, and he was in a home when
he died. So it wasn’t anything to do with
the coronavirus. But he had a different
kind of Parkinson’s, called subnuclear
palsy or something like that. [Ed. note:
Progressive supranuclear palsy, or PSP, is a
continues on page 24
22 illinoisentertainer.com june 2020