Tim Burgess

We've already seen how Tim Burgess, whenever he steps outside the Charlatans, always likes to make choices that manage to surprise in some way. Indeed, his two solo albums, released nine years apart, don't echo any of his main band's various stylistic shifts, but instead stand as self-contained musical adventures in their own right. And the way Burgess is presenting his new record live is equally unexpected. On stage, in fact, he's backed only by the acoustic guitar of his trusty Charlatans lifer Mark Collins, absent from the making of this record, and by a drummer. A set-up that clashes openly with the breadth of sonic textures on the album, but one that, as we'll see, has clearly worked in the live show's favor.

The main flaw of "Oh No I Love You" is undoubtedly that it comes across as a collection of ideas without any real logical thread tying them together, rather than an album in the classic sense of the word. It becomes clear right away, then, that stripping the songs down to such bare-bones arrangements (the artist himself called this a "stripped down show" on stage) brought a stylistic coherence that the record itself lacks. So there was no sense of being thrown off by sudden shifts in mood and attitude; instead, the overall flow across the hour-long set was very solid, and it helped put the audience — not huge in numbers, but not too sparse either — at ease. The rest was down to the same qualities that make the album worth hearing despite the flaw mentioned above: the quality of the songs themselves, and the ability of all involved to deliver a performance that was always dynamic and never flat, even within that overall bare-bones approach.

It was already clear from listening to the record that Burgess is far from running out of compositional inspiration, here likely spurred on by his collaboration with Kurt Wagner. Hearing his new songs again live, the same strong impression of the songwriting's quality holds up — if anything, it comes through even more clearly, precisely because it's thrown into sharper relief by the stripped-down presentation already described. And considering Burgess could also have drawn from the vast back catalogue of a band like the Charlatans, who, having moved past the Britpop era, have managed to reinvent themselves time and again without ever really dipping below a more-than-satisfying level, it's easy to imagine there wasn't a single weak moment in sight. In fact, there were only four excursions outside the new album: three into Charlatans territory ("The Only One I Know", "Impossible" and "North Country Boy") and one pulled from his first solo album ("Oh My Corazon"), and in any case all the new songs held up well against the great classics and his solo past.

We mentioned, too, the trio's interpretive imagination. All three brought a good range of touches, each within their own domain, with the result that these, both individually and through their interplay, gave each song performed its own distinct character. This was also because, due to the gap between the semi-acoustic setup and the album's studio sound, some songs stayed fairly faithful to their studio versions, while others were reworked quite drastically. Particularly striking were the changes made to two classic tracks, "The Only One I Know" and "North Country Boy".

A well-executed evening, then, one that showed yet another side of Burgess's freshness of ideas and artistic vitality — undoubtedly one of the britpop stars who has aged best of all.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google