The Charlatans
Barrowlands, Glasgow
14/05/2010

We’ve got a Tory Prime Minister and the DJs are playing ‘Ride On Time’, it’s like the last 20 years never happened. Tonight’s performance marking two decades since the release of The Charlatans’ chart topping debut album ‘Some Friendly’ is musical time travel and The Barras is our Tardis.

Blokes of a certain age in zipped up tracksuit tops dance like Madchester was just yesterday and play air maracas, pointing salutes are thrown at the stage for each keyboard riff. The audience are a bit wider and have less hair, but they remember the days of voluminous jeans and freaky dancing. On stage Tim Burgess, bowl haircut restored, seems more animated than when the band first emerged as the poster boys of the Baggy scene. The shuffling beats and organ flourishes of ‘Then’ and especially ‘The Only One I Know’ set the crowd off, but there is a certain restlessness during some of the less familiar album tracks. 

This is a fan’s only experience and there is everything an enthusiast would want, including the chance to purchase a recording of the show on the way out.
Burgess dedicates a track to the band’s original keyboard player, Rob Collins, who died in 1996 and whose playing was the foreground for ‘Some Friendly’. Present keyboard player Tony Rogers is now just as fundamental to the band’s sound. The album closer, surging psych-mod epic ‘Sproston Green’, is saved for the encore and demonstrates the enjoyment this band take in building up momentum in the room. After spending ten albums trying to persuade us that The Charlatans have more facets to their sound, this return to their origins leaves the faithful audience on a high but perhaps hungry for some of their other hits too.
Lucy Brouwer