Interview: Mark Burgess of the Chameleons

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Interview: Mark Burgess of the Chameleons

Mark Burgess talks to writer Michael Nottingham about new material, musical time travelling, goth, ambushing John Peel and other Chameleons highlights from the last four decades. 

All photos by Martyn Gooddacre

Chameleons UK tour dates with the Membranes (London and Manchester) on Dec 14 Tickets here

Even if you’ve not heard the music of the Chameleons, you’ve certainly heard their influence.  

One of the most significant yet underappreciated bands to come out of the post-punk era, the band have earned widespread critical accolades and inspired the likes of Oasis, The Stone Roses, The National and many others. 

Formed in Manchester in 1981, the original lineup was Mark Burgess on vocals and bass, Reg Smithies and Dave Fielding on guitars and John Lever on drums. Their signature sound evolved across a trio of acclaimed albums – Script of the Bridge (1983), What Does Anything Mean? Basically (1985) and Strange Times (1986). Their music spans a wide arc – forlorn, thundering, joyous, wistful. Paired, reverberant guitars and tight percussion spin out rhythm, melody and a highly charged atmosphere – sometimes sturm und drang, sometimes summer rain. They’re masterfully crafted set pieces in which the young Burgess bares his poet’s soul, his dreamlike lyrics dancing with themes of childhood, identity, love, but also making nods to surrealist paintings, bad trips, and the 60’s British TV show “The Prisoner”. To listen through those early albums, you’re not just taking a musical voyage, but joining a young artist’s journey of self-discovery. 

But internal tensions and the death of a much-loved manager prompted the band to call it quits in 1987. A brief reunion from 2000 to 2003 produced another excellent studio album and a live compilation – followed by another break-up. Much has happened in the interim, including the tragic death of John Lever in 2017, but the band is now back together with a new line-up that includes Burgess and founding member Reg Smithies. A new album, Arctic Moon, is on the way and there’s an autumn tour of the States, followed by a string of dates in the UK.

This September Michael Nottingham caught up with Mark Burgess after the Chameleons’ sold-out show at Berlin’s Metropol. Which was, it turns out, once called The Loft, where in 1983 the band recorded their German debut concert for their classic live album Aufführung In Berlin.

You seemed to gain a lot of energy from the show, and then give it back to the crowd.   

It’s a very natural reaction to the band that I’m playing with. I don’t mean any disrespect to people that I’ve played with up until now – I have respect for all of them. But I feel that this is the best band I’ve ever played in.

I’ve always enjoyed your performances, but this show was extraordinarily energetic, and a really tight performance.

Well a big part of that is having Reggie back. He and I got most of the ideas behind the Chameleons up and running. Don’t get me wrong, Dave’s contribution was huge – the sound that he crafted elevated the whole thing and gave it an element of class, atmosphere and ambience. 

But all of the ones that people really kind of go gaga for like “Second Skin”, “Tears”, “Swamp Thing”, those started with Reg and I. So it’s fantastic to have him back in the band again. And he’s such a great and very underrated guitar player.

So when did he rejoin? 

It was by degree. Before the pandemic the guys I was working with started doing other things and often weren’t available, and it got to the point where I started having to turn down things that I really wanted to do. And Reg knew about this, and was in on the conversation.  At first he came in and guested with us. I thought maybe he’d come in and do one song or something, but he said, oh no I’d like to do a few. So he spent a week rehearsing with us, got into the vibe of where we were at that time. We all just really enjoyed it. And so that was his first foray. 

We were having such a great time – there was no bullshit, baggage or drama, so later when I was discussing the situation [of band member availability] with Tony, who I was managing with at the time, I just asked Reg if he wanted to help out and he agreed to.  And then he did Manchester and London, which were two huge shows at the end of the year. Again he just had a really great time, and miracle upon miracles was paid well. For the first time in his Chameleons career probably. 

Double incentives. 

Yeah. And then he said he’d really like to come back. And I was absolutely thrilled, as you can imagine. Because obviously when Reg came back, my first thought was we can finally write songs. 

But then that was stalled when the pandemic hit. Though after 18 months of shutdown, I’d at least managed to get all the other necessary elements in place. Now I’ve got a band that we can take the Chameleons’ music forward with.

So you started conversations. Or nurtured those relationships. 

I’d been working with these people on and off for a long time. I’d wanted Danny [Ashberry], who played keyboards live for a project I worked on called Invincible. Then he was playing with Chameleons Vox for quite a while. At that time I was probably thinking of doing something new in tandem with Vox, which was really about celebrating the Chameleons music. So I was thinking in terms of forming another band or whatever, and I definitely wanted Danny to be part of that.

And Stephen [Rice] was drumming with Vox for a few years. But then we ended up doing an acoustic tour of the United States as a duo.

Did you? When was that? 

That was a couple of years ago. It was crazy. The Chameleons had a tour with The Mission planned, but that got cancelled because of the pandemic. And deferred to the following year. Then the following year, they see the fiscal differences between [pre-pandemic] and 2023, and they pan it. And I could see the writing on the wall. I thought this is going to get cancelled again. And I need to work. So I had in mind to do maybe 12 or so of these special acoustic shows to small audiences who were excited enough by the idea to pay a little bit more to hear some background to some of the songs that they were passionate about.  

=Seriocity Sessions: Mark Burgess (The Chameleons)

Oh really, like this is what inspired this, and this is what I’m hinting at with that? 

Exactly – and the occasional funny anecdote that was relevant to the song we were about to play. People responded to it so well we ended up doing something like 46 shows. We did a big 360 degree tour of the United States. In my car. With everything in the back of it. And in that time I really got to appreciate what a great guitar player Stephen is. He was wasted really on drums. So I thought, he’s got to be in the new thing with me and Reg. And they really hit it off – they really enjoy playing guitar with each other.

Then Todd is an American drummer that I worked with here. I had really good feelings about him. It took us a while to really get into sync with each other. As the bass player and the drummer. He had such a tough act to follow.  

John Lever.

John was a powerhouse drummer. 

An amazing drummer. The first time I ever saw you both play was as [post-Chameleons project] the Sun and the Moon at the Marquee in Charing Cross, London in 1989.

That’s right. He was with Vox as well for quite a while. He’d literally give blood. He’d cut himself [on the kit while drumming], but he’d just carry on, with blood splattering on the skins. But he was also able to stand back and meticulously place rolls or impacts at exactly the right place, which wasn’t typical of what an average drummer would do. 

Responding to all the other timing around him. 

When he arranged his drums nothing was an accident.

The way he played was different because he played a left-hand kick. But John was a right-handed drummer. So he played it open handed, which is very unusual. So when drummers have come along since John they’ve had to figure out how he did things. Or why he did things. Because they have to cross [drumsticks] in a very unnatural way if they’re playing right handed.

Was that a challenge John gave himself?

No, it was because when he started out he didn’t take any lessons and didn’t know how to set up a drum kit. He had a poster of Phil Collins, his favourite drummer, on his wall and used that as a reference. He set his drums up accordingly, not realising that Phil Collins is a left handed drummer. So he learnt to play on a left handed kit. 

And yet was still an amazing drummer. 

And he got progressively better. Working with producer Dave Allen on Strange Times was a milestone for him. He was five times the drummer he’d been after that recording session, because Dave made a point of focusing on the percussion work for the songs, which encompassed a lot of different things – we were writing in a different way by that time. 

“Soul in Isolation” from Strange Times hinges a lot on the drums – they’re really integral to that intro, aren’t they? 

 Exactly. But also songs like “Caution” or “Childhood”. We’d never done anything like those before. He got a get-out card on “Seriocity”, because that song doesn’t rely on percussion at all in the conventional sense. He hadn’t been really sure what he was going to do with it, and Reg was trying to vocally convey the bass-snare kind of thing he had in mind. Dave Allen heard Reg do it, and went, I know what I’m going to do – a human beat box.  And that’s what Reg did. Not many people realise that, but go back and listen to it.

And again when we did the very last album, Why Call It Anything, with the same producer. John was a better drummer at the end of it. He was constantly improving. 

Sorry, I’ve led us down the garden path.  You were talking about Todd.

John was a very difficult act to follow. We needed someone who could understand the music and really hit the skins, but also have a drummer’s approach. Because Yves Altana, the drummer we’d had up till that point, was a multi-instrumentalist like Stephen. His main instrument was guitar, and he’d just come in cover for John when he broke his wrist, but then ended up staying the drummer for a long time. So Todd was the last part of the puzzle. Once I got it together and started working with everyone properly, I’m like, this is it. The band’s complete now. I felt we could finally take things forward, and it was the first time I’d really felt that since the original band broke up. 

Yeah, because it’s gone through so many different incarnations. Tell me about ChameleonsVox – how did that come about?

Chameleons ended in 2003. We first broke up in ‘87, spent ten years apart, got together again, and then finally ended in 2003. Not very well, I have to say. I did various things, but it was through John that ChameleonsVox evolved, and we kind of knew what it was from the beginning. They wanted to play the Chameleons’ music – John obviously did. 

They ended up asking me if I’d sing in it, and he was calling it John Lever’s Second Skin. I said, I’m not doing that, man. I’m not being in a fucking Chameleons tribute act. If I’m singing, it’s going to be the voice of the Chameleons, and people will respond to that.

Well, I wouldn’t have gone to see ChameleonsVox if you’d not been singing in it – and doubt many would have.

If you’ve got the voice of the band, you’re three quarters of the way there, and that’s not any reflection on anybody else. I’m just saying that it’s not a tribute band if the person who wrote those melodies and wrote those words and sang that is doing it. It’s not the Chameleons, but it’s not a tribute act either. It’s somewhere in between. 

It began with just celebrating that music. In the beginning it wasn’t that important to even replicate the sound. For the earliest ChameleonsVox gigs we didn’t sound anything like the Chameleons. It all had a more punky, rocky type of vibe about it. But then as it started to get bigger, we were saying, well, if we’re going to do it, then we should really do it right. 

That’s when guitarist Neil Dwerryhouse came in, who I’d also worked with before. His guitar sound was crafted from his love of Echo & the Bunnymen’s Will Sergeant and our original guitarist Dave Fielding. Neil melded those two styles together, helped the band become a little bit more authentic, and that is probably the band that you saw.

We did put out an original Vox EP called Sycophants, and I liked it, but again, I was trying to steer it away from rehashing a previous sound. It had very little in common with the Chameleons sound, which I felt was the way forward. And I continue to feel that – if we’re going to do it, we have to move forward.

It’s such an amazing body of work, but I suppose it’s good to look ahead.  

You’ve got to, and we had to. Specifically because of the Chameleons guitar sound. Nobody appreciates more than I do how good those two guitar players were together, because I’m in the middle of them, and I’m inspiring them, and they’re inspiring me.

I have complete respect for both of them, as guitar players, and Dave, his input was huge. I mean, it was pivotal in establishing that, but the man had left the band 20 years ago. I’m not going to steal his guitar sound for the sake of trying to sound like Script of the Bridge. When he went, he took his guitar sound with him, as far as I’m concerned.

So it’s got to be more than the sum of its former parts. To get people to come in, and organically grow it into whatever it is that comes?

Yes, and we have to reflect who the band are now. 

At the Metropol gig we heard the Chameleons we remember, yet the new musicians brought something different. The whole show was really elevated in some ways.

That’s what I mean by going forward. For everybody who has come into the current band, the one common denominator is that they absolutely fucking loved the Chameleons. Stephen wanted to play guitar, because one of the big influences that he had was a love of Chameleons, and the Sun and the Moon, and Invincible. He’s passionate. Same with Danny, and same with Todd. 

They’re going to revere that, right? But also bring their own style to it. We’re going to play those big songs, but we also want to bring in who the band are now. It’s going to polarise the audience, there’s no question around it. But my answer to that is, well, you’ve got four great albums there, plus all the demos, and the retrospectives, and all the rest of it. You’ve got a whole wealth of music that you can continue to enjoy and listen to, but while you allow us to try to do something different.

If Reg and I  – who were at the core, the foundation of all of that music that you’re going gaga for – if we can’t be the Chameleons then who can? 

I didn’t see any polarisation in that concert hall, by the way. I just saw adulation. 

Fortunately, we’ve been able to kind of preview under the radar, to a certain extent, a couple of things that we’ve been working on for the new album. And the response and the reaction has been extremely positive – and by people who have loved this band for 35 years.

Well, they’re great songs on the EP, and I can’t wait to hear the album.

Yeah, well the single… how can I put this? Well, all right, might as well just say it! We had to move it very quickly, but our drummer was back in America. So Stephen went back on drums and played drums on the single, and Reg did all the guitars on it.

So when we all reconvened, we agreed that although we had to do it that way to meet the release window, we were going to then record it again as the band. So we brought Todd in and Steve went back onto his guitar, and we recorded the entire track from scratch. And it’s five times better than the single.

So the album’s going to have a whole new version? 

A whole new version of “Where Are You?”. 

The Chameleons- ‘Where Are You’ (Official Video) 

That’s exciting, because the version on the single is also so great. 

Well, if you like that, you’re going to absolutely love the album version. Because it’s with the full band doing it. People who’ve got the record have something unique, right, but when you get the album, you’ve got a great new version of it. 

But some of the other songs are very different, and we’re calling on different influences. 

I wanted to ask you more about that. The first song I ever heard you sing on was the Sun and the Moon’s “A Picture of England” from 1989. Then I went back to the Chameleons back catalogue and fell in love with it, from huge, ringing guitar-laden songs like “Singing Rule Britannia”, these cathedrals of sound…

Yeah, that’s what they used to call them. 

And in particular the more balladic songs like “Tears”. I really admire the song “Forever” on the new EP, which seems to fall into that gentler melodic vein. 

That one was a complete fluke, something I’d done as a GarageBand demo when I was living in Hamburg. I ran across it when we were in the studio and going through old hard drives, looking for songs I’d started but not fully developed. I played it to everyone and they were like, that’s got to go in.  The guy who mastered and cut the record said “Great, I love it. Send me the WAV.”  Of course there was only a 12 megabyte lossless because I’d done it on GarageBand. So he did an amazing job mastering that.

And then the other song on the new single is “Endlessly Falling”, one of the very first songs Chameleons ever wrote, in 1981. That was great, because it allowed us to go right to the very beginning – even before John Peel. I had wanted to do that song on the Peel session, but it was outvoted in favour of “Looking Inwardly”. So that didn’t happen and then we just discarded it.  And then, on the 1986 compilation The Fan and the Bellows, we tried it with producer Steve Lillywhite. But we didn’t like it. It did end up getting released, but wasn’t supposed to as far as we were concerned. And the same for “Nostalgia”. So, we got these songs that, for us, felt kind of unrealised or unfinished. 

Another chance to kind of flesh them out.

Yeah. In December 2023 we did two nights at The Ritz in Manchester, playing through the history of the band from the very beginning until 2003.

So I said to the band, we’re going to take these tracks, dust them down and see what we can do with them. To see if we can give them a finished kind of vibe. Vox had done it with one or two other tracks, like “Dali’s Picture”. 

And after those couple of gigs, suddenly, they felt finished. We were so happy with the results that we decided to record them with the new band. It was really interesting – kind of like time travelling, because we went back in time, right? So, before the big cathedral of sound, as you described, was even conceived.

That kind of punk “In Shreds” sound.

Yeah. The kind of ethereal element of the Chameleons didn’t start to materialise until we worked with Steve Lillywhite in ‘82. At the beginning, Dave’s using flanges and things like that. So we go back to that point. We really are going back to our genesis here, in a metaphorical sense. It seemed like we should do these songs as who we are now. In a metaphorical sense, we’re back in that moment of the beginning. But instead of going the way we did…  

Like a musical version of that alternate history science fiction genre.

Let’s go this way instead. 

What if we had done this?

Yeah. Because at the time when we originally did it, we were coming out of post-punk, which was obviously going to be the biggest influence on us. 

Well, you could also say that you were one of the big influences on post-punk, don’t forget (laughs)

Right, but we had ours. My influence was punk, right? I’m still a punk.  Because punk is an attitude, not a sound. I’ll be a punk till my dying day. It’s an attitude you’ve got, you know. Same as Mark E. Smith had, right? So that was obviously very influential on us, because we were all learning. I hadn’t been playing very long when I joined the Chameleons – less than a year from actually getting my very first bass guitar to learning how to play it.  

But now we’ve decided to back up to that point, then let’s try this way instead. Which lets us start celebrating the influences that made us want to make music in the first place. Reg, Dave and I had all been collecting and buying records since the age of ten. Which is, like, the late 60s and the early 70s. We had David Bowie, T-Rex, The Who, The Rolling Stones. Yeah, all these and of course the Beatles.

So tell me about Arctic Moon, the new album that’s coming out.   

We started working on it in January of this year. I thought it was gonna take ages to write it, but by the end of that session we realised we had most of it already.  So anything that we wrote from that point on would mean we’d have too much, which is not a bad problem to have. 

And the benefit of re-doing those retro songs is that we did six. One of them is on the b-side of the single, but the other five we’ve just released as an extended play called Tomorrow Remember Yesterday. I first sent the songs to Philip of Berlin’s Aufnahme+Wiedergabe because that’s a vinyl label. And Metropolis have released it digitally through their Bandcamp shop. 

It’s the same release but in two completely different formats.

The Fan & the Bellows

Yeah I’ll take the wax (laughs)

Yeah me too – every time. I didn’t get into this to do CDs and streaming. 

You’ve got to have a big visual for the cover art as well. Speaking of which, Reg did the iconic album covers for everything from Script of the Bridge through Why Call it Anything. But not for the release on Aufnahme+Wiedergabe?

Philip has a certain look and vibe for his label and I didn’t want to fuck with that. I told him he could put whatever cover he wants on it as long as we like it. But the digital version on Metropolis will use Reg’s artwork.

I feel the same about Reg’s artwork and the albums as I do about the Cocteau Twins and Vaughan Oliver, or Joy Division and Peter Saville. 

It’s iconic. 

When I interviewed Vaughan years back, he bemoaned the fact that everything kept getting smaller, from vinyl to CDs, to an mp3 thumbnail – and now tiny Spotify graphics on your mobile phone.

I like my artwork big. I like to read something on the sleeve. I like if the lyrics are included. 

And it informs the music in a weird subconscious way. 

Yeah you connect with it. You put the record on the turntable and look at the sleeve while it’s playing. You’re more connected. 

There was an issue with the first label because they wouldn’t approve the cover art for “In Shreds”.  But it was just a kid with a doll and a bicycle helmet?

The Americans had a problem with it because they were looking at it in terms of what other contemporary bands were doing around us. So they gave us the idea that they wanted us to be very derivative of bands like Simple Minds or the Psychedelic Furs. 

I see. I thought it was because I thought it was because it was too shocking 

They just didn’t understand it. You know because accountants with no creative talent whatsoever always know better than you do what your record sleeve should look like.

Reminds me of that line in “As High As You Can Go” on Script of the Bridge: “Just sign the line and away you fly”. Is that a reference to the record industry?

Kind of. Yeah it was written during our transition from CBS Epic to the independent label Statik. I was kind of talking about all of this potential and promise that Epic presented us with. You know, like all we had to do was play that game: you do this, you do that, you wear this, you wear that. You can do this but you can’t do that, and sign here and off you go. Then you’ll be the next U2.  And we saw that for the bullshit it was, and how then your music doesn’t last.

The music of the bands that we were fans of is timeless. People are gonna be listening to the Who and the Beatles in 50 years. We knew that and that’s who we wanted to be amongst. 

Not the Top of the Pops flavour of the month.

Exactly. We knew that nobody had a better idea of how to present our music and arrange it and mix it than we did. Even if we didn’t have the technical know-how, though we’d a good grounding at the BBC. Indisputably, you could hire the best engineers money could buy.  Everybody wanted to work for the BBC when they became professional sound engineers so BBC got the cream. And we were fortunate enough to do multiple sessions at Maida Vale, and at Portland Place where so many original greats were recorded. Then we had about a month with Steve Lilywhite, who at the time was one of the highest paid producers in the world. 

Goldstaub as they say here – gold dust.

Exactly. So yeah we learned a lot. I mean we were arrogant at 21, but that’s a good thing to have at that age. You need to think you know better than anybody else. Whatever these people coming from the 60s and 70s were telling you to do, you did exactly the fucking opposite and then you got somewhere (laughs) 

Before you performed “Second Skin” in Berlin, you introduced it with a few words: “Fill your life with as many great experiences before you go because you’re gonna go”. And then you gave the most soul-shaking version of the song – you had the whole room spellbound. 

Thank you.

It seems like those words echo a theme you often return to in your lyrics. “Intrigue in Tangiers”, one of my favourites, has one of your most memorable choruses: “brother can you hear my voice, every second you cling to life you have to feel alive.” It’s very carpe diem kind of stuff.  Like you said, we’re not here so long. 

We’re not. And some of us are here even shorter than the blink of an eye.

And you have ghosts on that stage, whether that’s John …

Absolutely. 

…or your first manager Tony Fletcher, or John Peel. 

Which reminds me, you also did an on-stage dedication of “Perfume Garden” to John Peel. That was the name of his first radio show, from the late 60s, wasn’t it? 

It was. We listened to his program – you know he gave to multiple generations, in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. The kids had an insatiable appetite for something new that they wanted to discover, not have rammed down their throats by marketing people. John provided that because he had such an eclectic taste and embraced such a variety in terms of what he felt was really good music. 

And people trusted him.

Exactly, and when you listened to his show he earned that trust early. He was the first to discover some of the greatest bands you’ve ever heard and he did it consistently since the 60s: T-Rex, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Queen.  

He showed me a box full of cassettes that came from the floor up to my chest and said he was going to listen to every single one of them. But he’d put each one on play and if it grabbed him within the first couple of minutes he’d stick with it.

He had a talent radar like no other. 

Yeah absolutely, because he went from his feeling – what did a song make him feel? It didn’t matter how rough it was, it didn’t matter how well recorded it was. The one we sent him didn’t even have drums on it because the drummer didn’t turn it up, and Peel still wrote back to us.

Tell me about how the session with John Peel unfolded.

I haven’t got the letter he wrote to us unfortunately. But he basically wrote “Thank you for the tape – I’ve listened to it and it sounds like something really worthwhile is going on here.”

We’d recorded it in our rehearsal room, but in the letter he said “If you do a studio demo, make sure that I get to hear it. Forgive the brevity but I’ve got about a thousand other tapes to listen to”.  Signed John Peel.

So we sold everything that we didn’t immediately need to play a show, went to Cargo Studios in Rochdale, got some demos down, put them in cassette boxes, got on a train to London, then sat outside the BBC waiting for John Peel to walk past. When he did, we ran up to him, showed him the cassette, and said there you go.

He said, “Give me an hour…”

What, you literally sat there waiting for him to walk by?!

We sat on the steps of Portland Place waiting for John Peel to walk past. And then when he did we ran up to him and said “You wrote to us, you said make a studio tape – here it is.”

Then he said, well I’m not gonna listen to it while you sit there staring at me, so go and get a coffee for an hour and I’ll come back and tell you what I think of it.

Really?!

And he did, yeah! Then when he came back he said, “Well is this really you guys, or are you winding me up?” Which confused us at first. But back in Manchester Dave had just grabbed a cassette box, emptied it out and shoved our demo tape in to take it down to London. The cassette box had something like “Fast cars” written on the spine and John Peel had only seen that. “Is it actually you – Fast cars?” We said well that’s just a box we put it in. The music is us, yeah.  

“So what’s the name of your band,” he asked. We just looked at each other and said we dunno. We’ve not thought of one yet.

After we’d done the Peel session he said, “Yeah you’d better get a name. Get it quick because this is going to go on the BBC. I’m not playing this band I really like when I don’t even know what to say they’re called.” 

How did you come up with the name The Chameleons?

Each of us went off with a sheet of paper after the next rehearsal and wrote down some ideas for a band name. And one of the ones I’d written down was The Chameleons because I collected Spiderman comics and there was a villain called the Chameleon. One of the ones that never really took off. We all came back together with all these daft suggestions, but both Dave and I had the Chameleons on our list.

I’m not sure where Dave got it from – probably somewhere else. But we thought it was such a remarkable coincidence that it must be fate, obviously.

What was it like having that attention from John Peel?

I was living with my parents at the time. so we gave him my parents’ phone number. We’d gone to see him on a Thursday and we came back to Manchester on Monday. The phone rang and I picked it up and it was John Peel’s voice on the other end. I thought it was a wind up at first, that someone was having a gag because they’d heard we’d gone down there and met him. 

But then I was like, no this is fucking actually John Peel and he’s talking to me on the phone saying how much he loves the demo and how he’s going to give it to his producer. Chris Lycett was producing at that time, so he handed me over to Chris Lycett and we worked it out there and then. He asked if I wanted to wait for Maida Vale to be available or if I wanted to do it on an 8-track at Langham. As a music fan I knew Bowie and T-Rex had both been recorded in Langham. Hendrix fucking recorded in Langham, right? So I’m like yeah, let’s do it there! And they were happy with that because we could do it really quickly, since we didn’t have to wait for a slot at Maida Vale.

Then the night before the session John Peel’s on the radio, saying don’t miss tomorrow night’s programme whatever you do, because I’ve got a band for you that will blow you away.  

Well, we didn’t know he was talking about us. Then he said, “They call themselves The Chameleons”.  It was so unbelievable – he’s talking about us! You had to wait for the broadcast to find out who the band was, so we were there listening along with everybody else in the country who was a fan of John Peel.

That’s amazing – how did that feel?  

We were euphoric. All night we’d been listening to what he usually plays – some really big heavy hitters like Cocteau Twins or The Cure. He was playing all these great records. Some of them you love, some of them you don’t, but that’s John’s programme.

Then fucking hell it was “The Fan and the Bellows” blasting out the speakers!

Speaking of the Cocteau Twins and the Cure, you have fans from many different musical genres, but there seems to be a special affinity from the goth community.  You’re not goth, but there’s a dark, melancholic aspect to your music.

Yeah I think it’s the melancholy. When we made most of the early stuff that they responded to there wasn’t any such thing as goth.  

Yeah Siouxsie was punk then.

Yeah, Siouxsie was a punk and so was Dave Vanian [of the Damned]. 

There was no Andrew Eldritch and Sisters of Mercy about.

They didn’t really turn up till ‘84? I saw The Birthday Party in 1982 in the Hague. One of the best gigs I’ve ever seen from any band. There was nothing remotely goth about them.  

There was dark hair and pale skin, that’s it goth-wise. 

Nick Cave was wearing a beautifully tailored suit, with a tie with a diamond dagger. His hair I suppose inspired a lot of goths later on. But his vocal style certainly wasn’t goth. The band he was playing with weren’t goth – there’s nothing goth about Tracy Pew and there was certainly nothing goth about Roland.

The gig was so good I had to walk out of the venue to get my breath. Of course when the goth thing started to happen, Nick became a symbol for it really, because of the darkness of his writing.

The Chameleons’ dark melancholy, some might say that’s in part Manchester?  

Well, they used to call us the Manchester Miserablists. 

That sort of stuck, didn’t it, for the whole scene? There’s something about the music of Manchester, if you think about the mournful guitars of Vini Reilly or…

Or Joy Division, or the Smiths – all melancholic, mournful.

Is that the city?

It’s North West England. It’s very industrial, the weather was shit. It’s always cold, rains all the time, and is always grey. You have the hangover of the Industrial Revolution hanging around it, with all these dilapidated stinky canals running everywhere and all of these old brick Victorian buildings.

Dark Satanic mills.

Yeah – but rotting ones. Crumbling broken windows and fallen slates. More depressed than Liverpool, I’d argue.

Some might say it’s a sort of musical reaction to Thatcherism?

 Well… I mean, much of the amazing music The Fall and Joy Division made was when Thatcher was just an obscure MP. Thatcherism didn’t kick in until 1979. Of course, when she became PM, it fuelled that anti-establishment kind of thing that was hungover from punk. It gave that focus.

A whole range of bands have cited The Chameleons as a massive influence on them: The Charlatans, The Flaming Lips, Smashing Pumpkins, The Verve – and countless more. Who were your formative influences and who are your big musical heroes?  

Wow. [long pause] Well, I was a fan of the Beatles before I could even even talk. In 1964 my parents took me as a four-year-old to see Hard Day’s Night at the Odeon in Manchester. 

Then when about seven years old I got a record player for Christmas because it was music, music, music for me – all I was doing I was listening to music and singing. I’d take my pocket money and my Christmas money to buy records from Central Records and started to get a record collection going. I’ve been consistently collecting records from the age of seven right up until the present day. 

So obviously my main influences are going to be from that most impressionable period from the 60s to the late 70s.  But at the beginning of the 80s when I was in a band writing music, we didn’t want any influences. We didn’t want to sound like anyone else. What annoyed me a lot then was that some people were always saying, “Oh, their own influences are obviously this, their influences are obviously that”.  No they weren’t – it was much more subtle than that.  

People were trying to strain these connections.

Yeah. We weren’t influenced by anything going on in the early 80s.  

It was more what you all grew up with.

As a band. As a singer, on the other hand, I was influenced by musicians of the late 70s, initially by people like Paul Weller. In a lot of those early demos I was trying to do a Weller-type delivery because I hadn’t found my voice yet. Which was ok – it takes time for a singer to find his voice and you start by imitating singers who you admire. 

And then in about ‘86 when I started doing Strange Times I heard [Kate Bush’s] Hounds of Love and also Talk Talk. That’s when I started to really find my own way. And melded it with the huge love that I have of David Bowie. I think he’s probably been the biggest influence on me as a singer. 

I thought I detected a homage to Bowie in “Where Are You?”, both lyrically and musically.  

Which you’ll definitely hear on Arctic Moon. In fact one of the tracks is called “David Bowie Takes My Hand”. You can’t really declare your influence more obviously than that!

And on Strange Times you did a cover of “John, I’m Only Dancing”.

We did, yeah – it started as a joke, just goofing around in the studio. We didn’t intend to record it at all until our producer Dave Allen heard it and said, oh I’m going to put that on the tape! John’s not even playing the drum kit – he’s playing his drum cases.

Yet more stealthy, unconventional percussion! I’m definitely going to re-listen to that one as well.

We also covered the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” for that session. It had been the first song that Dave, Reg and I ever played together, at our very first rehearsal, in a church hall.  It seemed an obvious choice – let’s jam that because there’s only one fucking chord in it.  Except we put another chord in it [laughs]. So that track on Strange Times is a homage to that first song we ever played together.

You know I prefer your version. I know that’s speaking blasphemy to some.

You’re not the first to say that – it’s not mine obviously, it’s on Revolver, but it’s very nice to hear people say that.   

*****

The Chameleons will release their new album, Arctic Moon, in late 2024 or early 2025.  Tomorrow Remember Yesterday is out now, available in digital format on Metropolis Records or on vinyl from Aufnahme+Wiedergabe.

Visit the Chameleons bandcamp page for information on their 12 date tour of North America this October and November, which will be followed by half a dozen dates in the UK in December.