Interview - Tim Burgess
Although it’s been eight years since The Charlatans’ last album, frontman Tim Burgess has released three solo records, written several books, and spearheaded the lockdown-era phenomenon Tim’s Twitter Listening Parties, which later evolved into a spin-off show on Absolute Radio – all alongside a host of other creative ventures.
Meanwhile, Northwich’s finest haven’t exactly been idle themselves since Different Days arrived in 2017. A Best Of collection (A Head Full Of Ideas) and a post-lockdown tour kept things ticking over, though this remains the longest gap between albums in their nearly four-decade career. For the band themselves, however, the wait hasn’t felt quite so long.
“I guess we started writing it before 2023, but I keep thinking it was two and a half years ago that we started,” Burgess tells CLASH. “We had a download from above telling us we had to make a record, and so that’s what we did. We felt like we had something to say and something musically to add.”