STACK #152 Jun 2017

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Congratulations on the new album. I’m enjoying it. There’s some strong music on there. Thank you very much. We always start as we mean to carry on. We came off the last album with feeling a little bit depressed and trying to cheer ourselves up following the loss of Jonny Brooks. So it was a bit of a challenge, again, to not have to think about things like that. But where we left off on the last album, we carried on from this album, so we’re on a bit of a roll. The recording of Different Days was quite a change then after Modern Nature ? It was hard recording Modern Nature ; we had to get into a different mindset. There’s a lot of people who are spiritual and some people aren’t, you know what I mean? I’m quite spiritual, and Jon was. So with this album, I had to make sure that he was okay, or make sure in my own head that he was okay with this whole thing. We just had to leave things as they were and just move on and be happy, ‘cause that’s what he would’ve wanted. So this album was a lot easier for me. We were in a good headspace. That’s good to hear. As a band, you have an innate ability to pick yourselves up and keep moving forward. We have to. What are you meant to do? You can’t pack in. The bandmembers who have gone before us would’ve done the same. They’d want you to carry on. The name of the band was so important to all of us - The Charlatans as a band means so much to us. It’s not about individual people, it’s about a collective. We’re a collective, and everyone who comes into this fold really, really appreciates what The Charlatans mean. We’ve  got Pete [Salisbury, drums] at the moment. He came from The Verve, and this band means so much to him too.

When you come into it, you have to be passionate about it and that’s the whole thing about The Charlatans. It’s very easy for every single one of us to go off and make a record; that’s the easy route, really. But we’ve got five people, and to collectively make an album which is worth listening to is a harder cast than one person going off and making a solo album. We’re passionate about working together as artists, and making a good record. What was the writing process like for Different Days? Did you meet in the studio and start writing, or did you come together with demos and start bouncing ideas off each other? We all write individually; the whole band does. We have individual ideas The Charlatans as a band means so much to us. It’s not about individual people, it’s about a collective and we basically bring it to the coffee table. We sit down and work on every single one. So we might’ve written 24, 25 tracks, and basically we just picked the ones that worked together as a collective. There’s a few songs that didn’t make it, which, probably now looking at it, should’ve. But that’s fuel for another album. We all work together and we appreciate everybody’s inputs; I think the

biggest thing is we respect each other.

Well, you have spent a lot of time together - 28 years now. There’s a real positive feel to the album.  Well, we used to hang out a hell of a lot together. As we’ve got older, we don’t need to do that anymore. We just know what each other is thinking. We have this kind of telepathy, I suppose - we know which way to go. I tell you what, it’s always fun when you’ve got a good song to work on. When you’ve got a song that you’re not sure about, that makes it difficult, but when a song is good, when it’s got a great vibe, you’re throwing yourself into it. “I want to do a bit more”,  “I want to do this”, “I want to do that.” We’re fighting for the studio time to finish it off. I think that’s what this album’s proved, because although it sounded like it took a long time - we went in there in September and we finished in January - we actually only did two weeks in each month.  So in all, ten, twelve weeks and it was finished. I know it sounds a long time in a studio environment, When you’ve got a dodgy tune you think is not working, we always put it to sleep, and we just work on the ones that do work. I liked the spoken word and the instrumental sections between the tracks - it has a real ‘concept album’ feel to it. Where did that idea come from? Well, this is the 13 th album. How do we carry on? We can’t just do something that sounds the same and feels the same - we need to add something. Somebody mentioned the idea of working with our friends.  And the whole idea [was], it’s not just about music. A lot of our friends are poets [and] authors, so we wanted to get them but it’s easily eaten up. For us, we did it very quickly and only because we enjoyed doing it.

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