Live Music / Rock and Roll

How Many Times in Your Life Do You Get to See Your All-Time Favourite Band?

The Charlatans with Ride / Commodore Ballroom / Vancouver, BC

There’s a conversation that happens with stunning regularity in my life. There was a time when it was frustrating, and it would be annoying if I still let it affect me like that. It revolves around music, specifically when someone asks what kind I like.

“Rock and roll” is the obvious answer, to me anyway.

“Like who?” typically comes the next question.

“Well…bands from the UK in the 80s and 90s (that you’ve never heard of, I’m already thinking to myself, meanwhile): the Stone Roses, Echo and the Bunnymen, James, Manic Street Preachers, New Order, Morrissey, Placebo, Depeche Mode (and if I really want to throw them for a loop), Ned’s Atomic Dustbin.”

It’s at this point I look for a flicker of recognition. But far more often than not, blank faces usually ensue.

There’s one more that I could mention and see if it stirs any glimmer of understanding whatsoever.

The Charlatans.

99 times out of 100, the blank look continues. It’s fine. If they don’t know, then they don’t know. Maybe that makes me a music snob; maybe I know what I like.

What can I say at this point? That music never really made it over here other than in dribs and drabs. Massive there, virtually unheard of here. But they’ve been my number one for decades.

At 30+ years into their existence, the Charlatans, as early 90s Madchester survivors, will play huge festivals in the UK and Europe this summer in front of tens of thousands of people.

Over here, I got to see them — my favourite band for the better part of the past three decades — last night, along with just one thousand other like-minded souls at Vancouver, BC’s legendary Commodore Ballroom.

This was the fifth time I’d seen them live. The first three times were in Vancouver between 2000 and 2006; the fourth was at the Corona Capital Festival in Mexico City in November 2015.

They played right after Psychedelic Furs and right before Primal Scream. I’m not making this up; it was an immense day. For me, anyway.

Like many bands of their vintage these days, they are mining their back catalogue, going out on tour, and playing the album they put out X number of years ago in its entirety. I blame U2 for that.

Any roads, in this case, it happened to be their second album, “Between Tenth and Eleventh,” released in 1992, that would get a good airing. This one was a follow-up to their wildly successful debut, “Some Friendly,” in 1990 but did not live up to the hype or maintain the momentum they had created with hits such as “The Only One I Know.”

I always thought it was a good, not great, album that could be listened to front to back on a Sunday afternoon. Definitely not their best work, but heads and shoulders above many of their contemporaries.

That album is where it could have ended for the Charlatans. For countless bands of that era, it did just that: two albums and never heard from again. But not these guys. They continued chugging away, in the form of eleven more albums since then.

The high water marks, for me, were “Tellin’ Stories” in 1997, released after the death of founding keyboard player Rob Collins, and “Us and Us Only” in 1999. Their most recent return to form was in 2017 with “Different Days,” albeit without founding drummer Jon Brookes who had died of brain cancer a few years earlier.

They’ve seen some things, have the Charlies. Highs and lows, peaks and valleys, just like all of us have. But they soldier on far more than gamely. Tim Burgess singing and smiling, Mark Collins on guitar, Martin Blunt playing the bass, Tony Rogers tickling the keyboards, and Pete Salisbury (erstwhile of the Verve) banging the drums.

But yeah, the show. It seems like a lot of UK bands of the most recent turn of the century have figured out that if two of them tour together, then costs are lower and receipts are higher. Fans go home doubly happy, and they can go back to England and their pending dotages with pockets jingling. It explains Pet Shop Boys / New Order in North America at the end of last summer and Manic Street Preachers / Suede this past fall.

The Charlatans are out this time with Ride, a band that probably should have caught me back when but didn’t and really still hasn’t. I heard them described as a wall of continuous and muddy guitar fuzz that only a sound engineering genius could make sense of. Unfortunately, that person was not at the Commodore last night.

Ah, but get to the Charlatans already. The quality of the sound was vastly improved. Or maybe it’s just because the musicianship of the actors within the songs provides its own separation of instrument sounds.

Those in the know could belt out the tracks from the album they were playing, but nearly all of them would be obscure to a casual listener. It’s quite a stripped-back, subdued, and perhaps even cerebral album, and only “Tremolo Song” and “Weirdo” really got people going as the danciest tunes among them.

They managed to amble and shamble tightly through the album from start to finish and then got to the meat of the order.

It was the six that they played after that that really brought the house down. You don’t hear much from the other band members, and aside from Tim with a microphone constantly in his hands (and no use for a mike stand), only Tony provides backing vocals. Tim is beyond any doubt the star of the show. His sheer joy in still belting out these bangers is infectious.

It amazes me how a man can eke out a whole career on a bit of talent, and youthful looks but based almost entirely on his own charisma, raising his arms in a V and making a double-handed pot-stirring motion.

Yup. He’s been dining out on the same stage moves for 30-odd years now. That and a genuine smile for everyone. And there’s no one there that didn’t love it.

Standards like “The Only One I Know,” “Can’t Get Out of Bed,” and “Just When You’re Thinkin’ Things Over” elevated the crowd and lifted the roof off the place, and that’s what we all went there for, to see a tight band remind us why they have lasted this long.

The highlight for me was the pure rock and roll energetic joy of “One to Another” that had me and everyone around me feeling good about getting our money’s worth.

“Can you please crawl out of your window?

You can play with all my love

Yeah, yeah yeah

Box up all our records

And a head full of ideas

And a handful of escape routes

They’re going to burn you”

And I belted out every last word. I almost didn’t have any voice left for “Sproston Green,” with which they finish every gig. But I found a way and went off into that good night, happy in the fact that I had just seen a great performance from my favourite band of all time.