Podcast Corner: Tim Burgess of The Charlatans is essential listening for music fans
Tim Burgess of the Charlatans interviews all sorts of music people for his podcast. (Photo by Joe Maher/Getty Images For Bauer Media)
Announced last week, one of the highlights of the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival later this year will be the Charlatans at City Hall on October 27. Even if you might not know the band’s music, you may have become a fan of frontman Tim Burgess during the covid lockdowns through his Twitter Listening Parties.
In case you somehow missed them, they’re all archived on https://timstwitterlisteningparty.com and feature bands and artists talking through various facets of a full album of theirs, all in short tweet form. He recently transposed the format to podcasting, completing an eight-episode debut season, in association with Absolute Radio, which saw him talk to guests like the resurgent Sparks, Def Leppard, the Kinks, and the Edge.
With such a star-studded rolodex to hand, it’s odd that the series starts with US pop-punks Fall Out Boy talking about their newest album. The best bits of that opening episode are when Burgess relates to them through his own experiences in music.
Of course, from an Irish perspective, The Edge will be the one we gravitate towards, as he talks through U2’s latest album, Songs of Surrender, which contains 40 reworked classics. Burgess, again, can relate to such an exercise as he did it with some of the Charlatans’ old songs but felt like they ended up covering rather than reworking them. Did The Edge feel the same?
“Well a couple of songs sounded too like that, so we didn’t use them,” he admits. “'Angel of Harlem', when I did an acoustic version of that, it’s like, well that’s kinda 'Angel of Harlem', there’s not really a twist, there’s not really a new angle there so we ended up leaving that to one side.”
Talking about 'Stories for Boys', Burgess tells his guest that Bono’s voice sounds so youthful, to which The Edge guffaws: “Here’s the funny thing - it’s me singing.”
He adds: “We sound so alike. I ended up taking the lead vocal on four of the songs and people don’t know the difference between our voices… I take that as a huge compliment. Clearly, Bono is one of the great singers.”
It’s a great chat - and while Tim’s Twitter Listening Parties continues on the social media site, we’re sure there’s plenty of Cork acts he’d love to chat with for the podcast while he’s over for the Jazz Fest.
If you want more of The Edge - and on his press rounds earlier this year for Songs of Surrender, he proved himself to be an affable, amiable interviewee - he was on Broken Record (S6E58) talking with Rick Rubin for a more freewheeling conversation that involved his singing the praises of Ireland’s new folk/trad bands like Lankum and Ye Vagabonds.
