The Charlatans’ Tim Burgess on his ‘spiritual experience’ making new album

Formed in the West Midlands, with early demos recorded in Dudley and rehearsals in Wednesbury, the band moved to Northwich, Cheshire, the home of Richard Burgess and The Charlatans' manager early in their career, where they were embraced by the Madchester scene on their acidic danceable debut, Some Friendly (1990).

The album featured classic tracks such as The Only One I Know, Then and Sproston Green, which went on to inspire the Britpop movement that would break out later that decade.

The guitar heavy sound of the era was taken on by the band for 1997’s Tellin’ Stories, which featured the rousing singles How High, North Country Boy and One To Another, and was recorded at Rockfield Studios in Wales, based in a working farm and known for its hedonistic atmosphere.

But while working at the Monmouthshire studios, tragedy struck, with the group’s keyboard player Rob Collins dying in a car crash on a road close to the studios.

Now made up of Burgess on vocals, guitarist Mark Collins, bass player Martin Blunt and keyboard player Tony Rogers, the band have returned to Rockfield to record their latest album We Are Love, which is due to be released in late October.

Speaking from his home, with its walls lined with thousands of records, Burgess, 58, explains: “We all started to gravitate towards Rockfield over the past couple of years.

“I made a solo album there, I brought Mark along to play on a track, he stayed in the same room as he stayed when we were there in ’97.

“Obviously, then Tony and Martin were very curious about what it was like, and the idea just seemed to stick, and then once we got there it was emotional.

“We felt like, as a band, we could bring along or include past members who weren’t with us any more, and it was kind of transcendental, a very kind of spiritual experience.”

He went on to say the studios still have the same atmosphere they did in the 1990s, but laughs that “just the people who go there and the time of their lives that they go there” has changed.

“I’ve been to a lot of parties there, and woken up in the morning to see Kingsley (Ward, a farmer and the studio’s co-founder), putting hay bales in the barn, it’s continuously a mind melt, because this is a working farm,” Burgess adds.

The singer says his group’s new album is in part aiming to acknowledge the band’s late keyboard player, and former drummer Jon Brookes who died aged 44 in 2013 from a brain tumour, who he says he and the rest of the band spent “a huge amount of time” with at Rockfield.

Burgess, who became known for his large mop of bleached blonde hair, which has now been trimmed back and reverted to his natural dark colour, says the band have also been embracing hauntology, by including samples of their own songs to evoke the “psycho-geography” of Rockfield.

He explains: “It was just doing things like including old songs in the new ones, like samples and titles, and kind of having some of the ingredients that we’d had during our past experiences recording in Rockfield, whether it’s How High, I Could Fly, or Opportunity, for one more dance.

“One of the topics of conversations that we had while we were making the record was things like, do machines have muscle memory?”

We Are Love has also seen The Charlatans assisted by producer and musician Dev Hynes, who released the critically acclaimed Essex Honey under his stage name Blood Orange and worked on Lorde’s Virgin LP earlier this year.

“He’s an enigma, and we all relate to enigmas, he’s very calm,” Burgess says of the London-born 39-year-old.

“(Hynes, fellow producer Fred Macpherson and engineer Thighpaulsandra’s) goal was to help us to understand how to create a Charlatans album that sounded like The Charlatans in 2025.

“That’s easier said than done in a way, because we’re all exploratory animals, the members of the band, and we want to push it as far away from the initial sound (while retaining the band’s sound), it’s kind of an exploration in what we do.

“And I think it’s finding the balance between pushing, creating and retaining, and Dev had a watchful eye over that, and heard things.

“So he would think that Many A Day A Heartache sounded like something from Some Friendly, he would suggest Deeper And Deeper sounded like something from Up To Our Hips, or something, he’s a fan.”

Burgess welcomes the recent Britpop revival, which has seen large scale reunion concerts from the likes of Oasis, Blur and Pulp, saying that while he is confident there was a strong appetite for the return of his band, pre-Britpopmania, he “never (knocks) an open door”.

He adds: “It’d be great if there’s, like, up and coming guitar bands too, I like good songs, and it doesn’t always have to be guitar for me, but obviously, I mean, I’m in a Hammond organ-based band, but I just want things with interesting people and attitude.”

Before the interview, Burgess had posted on X to warn fans of secondary ticketing sites selling on tickets for his band’s upcoming tour at heavily inflated prices, while they were still available at face value, an issue that became a national conversation when Oasis’s reunion was announced last year.

Burgess says: “I just think that, what I did yesterday (his post) was helpful? I think.

“I think what Robert Smith is doing is incredible, about having a limit on how much tickets are, I mean when you go out and you take a friend with you, and buy tickets that are, like, £70 a time, that’s a lot.”

During the Covid lockdown, Burgess also became known for his then-Twitter listening parties for albums, with hundreds tuning into his commentaries, which saw him joined by band members as fans listened with them, and asked questions about the record.

Burgess continues the spirit of the events to this day, often posting a record from his collection that he is listening to on social media.

The singer has been buying records since his youth, and says his last purchase was synth pop artist Geneva Jacuzzi’s Triple Fire.

A champion of the album format, Burgess says: “It’s great to put a record on in the morning, I try not to choose a triple album, because I like to go for a walk about an hour later, but it’s good to put a record on for me.

“This morning, it was a Devo record, their debut, I posted about Lamaze (another Geneva Jacuzzi album), which I’m going to play later, and Laura Nyro, this morning, that’s kind of classic I’m just getting into her really, everyone was telling me about her, I don’t know much about her…

“I like to give all music a chance, there’ll be bits about most songs that I love, and I think that’s how my brain works. It's a little bit like a magazine, it’s sort of like a cut-and-paste brain.”

The Charlatans’ We Are Love is released on October 31, with the band performing a number of UK dates in December including in London, Manchester and Glasgow.