Music > Live Reviews

The Charlatans

The Nick Rayns LCR, UEA

20/12/21

Oh, it’s Sunday evening and it always takes a very special band to get me out at the end of a weekend before a new working week begins. And so The Charlatans are back in Town, led by Norfolk’s adopted son Tim Burgess. Early doors he is quick to say, it’s good to be back home in Norwich, it is met with rapturous applause.
This is their thirty first year together as a band and tonight is all about the A Head Full Of Ideas Anniversary, Best Of Tour and from the opening bar to the final note the evening doesn’t disappoint at all as we head into a twenty plus track set list.

Click here to see pictures from night

Some thirty years on now they are still a great watch live, having survived many  challenges and crisis points along the way that would’ve broken many a lesser band. They have faced a cancer scare and the death of two key band members (drummer Jon Brookes and keyboardist Rob Collins) since they formed, enough to make many bands crumble.

They kick off with the epic Forever, all seven minutes of it and it’s truly magical, just a perfect opener that really helps to get all of the band members warmed up and in full flow, what a way to start the evening? It’s about two minutes in before we see Burgess enter the stage, still sporting his bleach blonde mop top, baggy jeans and sweatshirt that sports the wording, until we meet again on its front.  He is as charismatic and lively as ever, just doing his stuff all night long. He has such a great stage presence that commands your attention throughout the evening and is extremely engaging making regular eye contact with the audience and also just so thoroughly charming throughout to boot. What a lovely sweet man he is as he brings wide smiles to the faces of his many admirers.

The hits keep on coming and are accompanied by some quite fantastic album tracks too from the pulsating Weirdo, to the pounding One To Another, You’re So Pretty – Were So Pretty, Future Tense / Plastic Machinery, The Only One I Know, Country Boy, Blackened Blue Eyes and then How High. By now the audience are on their own natural high as things get rather lively and the gig heads towards the end of the main show. But the crescendo is yet to follow during the encore.

The Charlatans are born survivors and on tonight’s evidence there is still plenty more to come from them in the future.

For the encore and in particular Sproston Green, the atmosphere is still quite electric as Tony Rogers really ramps it up on the Wurlitzer organ, it’s a sight to behold and it’s really sounding quite incredible, it’s pretty spectacular to watch him in action as Mark Collins looks on like the rest of us in adoration at his skills with our jaws firmly on the LCR floor.

It has certainly been a late finish to the weekend by the time the car hits the shingle in the driveway, but then again The Charlatans are a very special band aren’t they? Roll on Monday morning?