118. The Charlatans
O2 Academy Brixton
19 December 2015
As gig buddies go, I have a friend who is an unimpeachable gold standard. Once a Kerrang! journalist, now a criminal barrister with a photographic memory for every Carry On film and every episode of On the Buses and George & Mildred, she has tales so outrageous they make Mötley Crüe’s tour diaries read like a school newsletter. She has war stories from both sides of the bar, and the bar in this case is either a courtroom or a sticky-floored boozer. She’s been there, done that, but is intriguingly straight edge.
Naturally, she has got form with tonight’s headliners: Echo & the Bunnymen and The Charlatans. She’d crossed paths with both during her journo days and wasted no time lamenting that neither outfit was what you’d call ‘full-fat’ these days, more semi-skimmed with a couple of original ingredients still bobbing about in the mix.
First up: Ian McCulloch and Echo & the Bunnymen, with McCulloch giving a performance that can only be described as... sedimentary. He emerges as he always has: long coat, sunglasses, hair styled somewhere between Eraserhead and a windswept goth, standing stock-still like a gargoyle. There is a sneer, of course. There is always a sneer. The man looks like he’s consistently sucking a lemon.
But for all the lack of movement, McCulloch still casts a weirdly compelling spell, helped, it must be said, by a back catalogue that still smacks of brilliance. ‘Lips Like Sugar’, ‘Seven Seas’, ‘The Killing Moon’, songs so good they could practically walk on stage and perform themselves.
Then came The Charlatans, and with them a distinct change of gear. If Echo & the Bunnymen were the brooding older sibling, The Charlatans were the chirpy younger brother still on an ecstasy high from 1995. Frontman Tim Burgess, he of the still-resplendent blonde mop, bounded onto the stage like a child high on sugar, lurching about in a manner that sat somewhere between Bez and a toddler avoiding lava.
The crowd, heavily populated by middle-aged men in Fred Perry and receding mop hairlines absolutely lost their collective shit. The opening bars of ‘One To Another’ detonated like a Britpop air raid siren, and by the time ‘North Country Boy’ and ‘Weirdo’ arrived, half the audience had mentally time-travelled back to when their knees still worked.
When ‘The Only One I Know’ burst forth, the place became a Proustian rave-up. People who definitely had sales reports to be made to the regional office tomorrow were mod-dancing like they’d just disembarked a WKD-fuelled time machine. Even the local E dealers patrolling the crowd appeared to down tools for a bit of a shuffle, momentarily forgetting commerce in favour of communion.
By the end of it, we both agreed, this wasn’t just a gig, it was a defibrillator to the heart of Britpop nostalgia. A slightly older, beer-spattered E-comedown defibrillator, but one that still packs a jolt, nonetheless.