On Monday, March 16th 2015, The Charlatans played their longest-ever gig at the London Camden Roundhouse. Ending, as their gigs always do, with the glorious Sproston Green, it was two hours that proved the songs from twelfth album Modern Nature sat cooly alongside classics from the bands' 27 year history. Tim Burgess says that the Roundhouse gig marked the high point of the band's return, the place where they hardly believed they'd be able to get to: "There was no agenda, so everything grew from nothing to all of a sudden playing at the Roundhouse and we've got Jim Paterson from Dexy's playing the trombone, we've got the girls as backing singers." He laughs, "all of sudden we sound like Talking Heads in Stop Making Sense."
On Monday, March 16th 2015, The Charlatans played their longest-ever gig at the London Camden Roundhouse. Ending, as their gigs always do, with the glorious Sproston Green, it was two hours that proved the songs from twelfth album Modern Nature sat cooly alongside classics from the bands' 27 year history. Tim Burgess says that the Roundhouse gig marked the high point of the band's return, the place where they hardly believed they'd be able to get to: "There was no agenda, so everything grew from nothing to all of a sudden playing at the Roundhouse and we've got Jim Paterson from Dexy's playing the trombone, we've got the girls as backing singers." He laughs, "all of sudden we sound like Talking Heads in Stop Making Sense."
Modern Nature was the eighth Charlatans album to enter the British top ten, hitting number seven in the week of release. All four singles from the record, 'Talking In Tones', 'So Oh', 'Come Home Baby', 'Let The Good Times Be Never Ending' were A-listed at BBC 6Music and featured on playlists at Radio 2, XFM and Absolute Radio. In October 2014, the Charlatans were given a lifetime achievement award by Q magazine, the icing on the cake after journalists wrote glowing reviews of Modern Nature across the UK and international press.
Reflecting on the past twelve months and the long process that brought The Charlatans to this point, Burgess says that though the band were confident that they'd made one of the best records of their career, "until something happens you never really know. But it's gone as well as we could have hoped."
