Charlatans

“Some Friendly” entered the “Music Week” chart at number one on 20 October 1990. By the end of November, though, it had already dropped out of the top 40, setting off a dynamic that would recur time and again in the history of British pop rock: an alternative band that, thanks to a few well-placed advance singles, builds up so much anticipation around its debut that it shoots straight to the top of the charts, only to prove unable to hold its ground over time against the rest of the mainstream circus [1].

The most emblematic names one could cite in this regard – even though their careers would later go in very different directions – are Suede, Elastica and Mansun, staying within the britpop era, but the same thing would happen repeatedly in post-2000 indie rock too, before gradually fading out during the 2010s as digital music consumption took over.

The Charlatans thus marked the start of a new season for British alternative music – one they probably wouldn't even have wanted, given how damaging the consequences turned out to be. There's actually no precise reason why it happened to them specifically: they simply found themselves in that position at the pivotal moment of an epochal shift, driven by mechanics that were hard to foresee at the time.

Independent record labels had in fact gradually changed their role within the British market: from the invisibility they were confined to in the late Seventies [2], to a steadily growing audience that, as the Nineties kicked off, tipped past the point of sustainable demand.

From that point on it proved hard to keep under control and turned into a double-edged sword: alternative bands either grew strong enough to break into the mainstream [3], or got trapped in a kind of limbo that seemed to be pointing them toward the top for a fleeting season, only for the market's oversupply to later deny them the support needed to build a loyal fanbase. The result, without fail, was a second album that flopped commercially or, in the worst cases, wasn't even released at all (just ask Menswear).

The Charlatans were also a forerunner of that very flip side of the coin: their second album, “Between 10th And 11th”, released in spring 1992, stalled at number 21 in the charts – a surreal collapse for a band that had debuted at the top barely a year and a half earlier.

Unlike so many bands that get crushed by this merciless mechanism, never to recover, the Charlatans nonetheless managed a hard-won comeback, one that would see them become, by 1996, one of the most popular bands of the britpop wave (for details on that phase of their career, see OndaRock's band monograph).

If chance is what turned it into a landmark case in terms of record-industry mechanics, “Some Friendly” has nonetheless proven able to stand the test of time, both because, against all odds, it didn't turn out to be a one-off (it's the first building block of a band with a formidable career, one that in Britain still enjoys critical acclaim and top billing on festival line-ups to this day), and because its content is such an accurate snapshot of the local scene of the period that it makes the launch of the commercial dynamic described above look almost like a sign – or a joke – of fate.

The Charlatans line-up that recorded “Some Friendly” featured Tim Burgess (vocals), Martin Blunt (bass), Rob Collins (keyboards), Jon Brookes (drums) and John Baker (guitar). [4] The project pursues that revival of Sixties psychedelia typical of the sound critics had just dubbed Madchester (i.e., “mad Manchester”), a sound that would soon be picked up by artists outside the band's home city too, at which point it would be labelled “baggy”.

The Madchester sound essentially represents a transitional moment, bridging Eighties British indie rock and Nineties britpop, through an anachronistic short-circuit that draws on the dance music exploding at the time (house music above all, which was instantly embraced in Britain) and a nostalgia for Sixties Swinging London, complete with a healthy dose of LSD thrown in.

Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and Inspiral Carpets had already made their debuts, but that didn't stop the Charlatans from crafting a strongly personal recipe: where the Stone Roses are a guitar-driven band, the Happy Mondays scale back the instrument's weight with layered arrangements in which, while still important, it loses its dominance. With the Inspiral Carpets, an electric organ takes centre stage, though the guitars still boast noisy timbres that can't be underestimated. The Charlatans thus represent the endpoint of what looks like a natural evolutionary chain: the organ crowds out the guitars, pushing them to weave patterns in the background. What's more, the Charlatans use a Hammond, while the Inspiral Carpets use a Farfisa – instruments with quite distinct timbres, which further set the two bands apart.

The most famous track of the bunch, and also the lead single, is “The Only One I Know” [5]: a kind of chanted dirge, with Burgess's echo-drenched voice rising ethereally over an alternative dance groove, driven by Collins's Hammond organ, which lifts almost note-for-note John Lord's part in Deep Purple's “Hush” [6].

The second single, released just a month before the album, is “Then”, which crystallises the Charlatans' sound, suspended between danceability and hypnosis – as cathartic as a Sufi dance for an era in which rock music had married the rave, and as hazy as the moorland of northern England.

On more than one occasion, the eleven tracks on the record prove capable not only of innovative structures but also of genuinely noteworthy harmonic solutions, in keeping with the finest tradition of sophisticated English pop.

In the verses of "You're Not Very Well" there's a remarkable contrast between the instruments, a harmonic irresoluteness that creates a kind of ecstatic suspension: the bass riff is built around a D minor scale, while the organ backdrop refuses to steer the harmonic direction, avoiding both major and minor thirds. Over all this, Burgess sings a melody that never resolves the enigma, since it can be read in either major or minor terms.

"Flower" is one of the moments where you can most clearly hear a harmonic shift between verse and chorus (minor first, then major), spelling out a formula that elsewhere produces changes that are more gradual, or sometimes merely apparent.

"Sonic" is particularly lopsided, but also among the most refined in the way it fluidly blends its different sections. Over an almost bluegrass rhythm, the verse moves through alterations of the E minor chord, while the chorus shifts up a tone, with a descending harmonic movement in D minor. There's also a further instrumental break where the song moves from E minor alterations to C minor ones, in a rather unusual shift that exploits, perhaps unintentionally, a sixth-degree tension.

Finally, there's an intriguing sense of disorientation in "Spronston Green", generated by the interplay between the guitar riff and the vocal: the former follows a minor scale, drawing on blue notes, while the latter rests on the organ's harmony, which endlessly repeats a simple riff in E major. The track lends itself to being stretched out into a jam, and since then it has almost always been used to close the band's concerts.

With "Some Friendly", Madchester reaches perfection, to the point that it becomes hard to add anything further: the bands that later attempt that same path end up as little more than footnotes, until Blur and Suede come along to irrevocably shift the coordinates to follow, in 1992-93.

Notes:

[1] A few months earlier something similar had indeed happened to Inspiral Carpets, who had nonetheless fallen short of the symbolic number 1 milestone.

[2] Consider records now regarded as landmarks by fans of alternative music, such as "In The Flat Field" by Bauhaus, "Unknown Pleasures" by Joy Division, or "Pink Flag" by Wire: at the time, none of them even cracked the top seventy of the weekly charts. A thousand copies, or even fewer, would have been enough for them to get there.

[3] Often with the distribution backing of a major label, which of course would infiltrate the decision-making at the top of the independent label, eventually distorting its identity or driving it to close down, as happened to Creation after its deal with Sony.

[4] Burgess and Blunt still lead the band today, Collins and Brookes have passed away (respectively in 1996 in an accident and in 2013 from cancer), while Baker quit in 1991 (he remains the only official member to have left the lineup).

[5] The track was included at the time on the CD and cassette editions, while at the band's own request it was left off the vinyl edition. Since it appears on two formats out of three, it is nonetheless generally considered part of the album proper.

[6] Looking closely, that Deep Purple song, originally written by Joe South, is archetypal - allowing for the due technological gap - of the entire keyboard-driven side of the Madchester sound, but also of some of what came after (just think of the cover Kula Shaker released in 1997, Kula Shaker).

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24/01/2021