Chameleons on their legacy: “I think we’ve earned the right now to be able to diversify what we do”

When it comes to Chameleons, Mark ‘Vox’ Burgess and Reg Smithies don't lose sleep over pleasing their fanbase.

“We’ve always polarised our audience to a certain degree,” says Burgess, the band’s vocalist and primary lyricist. “Always, right from day one.”

The Manchester band know they’re not traversing the same sonic landscape they cut the edge with in the mid-1980s. Though Chameleons remain a pillar of the post-punk boom, they never hit it quite as big as their contemporaries, which perhaps gives them greater leeway in terms of reworking their sound. Their fifth studio album, Arctic Moon, is both a return to form and a departure for Chameleons as they find their footing with three new members, following the 2017 death of drummer John Lever and the departure of guitarist Dave Fielding.

I speak on Zoom with Burgess and Smithies about the band's current iteration, their new music, and their upcoming return to Ireland. High on the release of Arctic Moon, the two have no misgivings about how their new era will go over with listeners.

These days, Burgess and Smithies are joined by Danny Ashberry on keyboards, Stephen Rice on guitar, and Todd Demma on drums.

“We’ve brought some fresh blood in,” Burgess says.

“COVID got in the way, which was quite fortuitous actually. It sounds terrible to say that. It was a horrible thing to happen, but the industry shut down for two years, and by the time it reopened, we had the right people in the right spots to take music forward.”

“There’s no baggage, there’s no egos. We don’t fall out over stupid things. If we have a problem, we solve it. We have a motto: no problems, only solutions.”

“Everybody brings something really valuable... it’s very collaborative,” Burgess continues. “If you’ve got an arrangement but you don’t know how to execute it, it’s such that when everybody comes in, what they put into it transforms it into something way, way, way, way better than you could have ever expected.”

That successful collaboration is audible on Arctic Moon, which plays with genre to create a more distilled and tempered version of Chameleons' post-punk past. Burgess insists that Chameleons has never had a signature sound. Indeed, Chameleons have plenty of sonic variety throughout their discography, starting with their drum-heavy 1980s albums to their reggae-influenced work from the early aughts.

“For some bands it works, to have a formula, but we’d find that dull and restricting!” Burgess asserts.

“I think we’ve earned the right now to be able to diversify what we do and work on ideas because they’re interesting and excite us. That’s the primary motivation.”

“I was saying to Reg, you know, ‘I’ve got these ideas, and I think they’re strong, but I don’t know if it’s Chameleons music,’ and he goes, ‘Well, Chameleons music is whatever we do, because we’re Chameleons, right?' So, whatever we do is Chameleons.”

“We don’t want to keep repeating ourselves all the time,” Burgess continues. “We don’t want to make Arctic Moon 2 or anything like that.”

Arctic Moon speaks for itself as a record of its time. Smithies created the cover art, as he has for each of the Chameleons’ LPs. Its depiction of a mushroom cloud next to a young girl in a gas mask prepares listeners for a dark take on today. And there’s a distinctly dystopian hue reflected in the lyrics of ‘Feels Like the End of the World’ and ‘Saviours Are a Dangerous Thing’.

“I like playing ‘Saviours’ because it’s current,” Burgess says, referring to it as “one of my favourite tracks, if not the favourite track.”

“That was an idea Stephen brought to the table. He had these guitar lines…I could hear the song pretty much right away.”

In ‘Saviours’, Burgess criticises an unnamed world leader with sardonic bite: “Here he comes, gliding down the street, thousand dollar trainers on his feet, all the monkeys part to let him pass, thinks he's Jesus riding on an ass.” It’s clear Chameleons haven’t gotten any shier as they’ve matured.

Though there are plenty of upbeat moments throughout Arctic Moon, the album is tinged with dejection. 'David Bowie Takes My Hand’ paints a stark picture over a slinky, foreboding bassline: “Washroom walls of whiteness surround me, my fear has found me on the floor.” The track wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Bowie’s glam rock records.

To Burgess, Bowie’s influence on the record was not just musical, but philosophical.

“I heard an interview recently and he [Bowie] put it perfectly. He said, as an artist, you should always feel like you’re a little bit out of your depth.”

“If you’re in the shallows and you feel comfortable…then you’re not going to create anything interesting. That really resonated with me.”

These days, Chameleons have been pushing themselves into deeper waters, both onstage and off.

“As we’re older, we’ve got a lot of personal stuff going on, families and whatnot,” Burgess says. “So you have to juggle all of that. It’s not like your early 20s when you all just pan in the back of a van.”

Even with the juggling, the band's been touring nearly nonstop since they got back together. This February, they'll return to Ireland, playing The Academy in Dublin on Monday, February 16, and Dolan's Warehouse in Limerick on Tuesday, February 17.

“The last visit to Dublin was amazing,” Burgess says. “The first time we went there, I decided to stay behind when the band went back to England and I toured around a bit... it's a beautiful country.”

“I want to go to Cork,” Smithies pipes in.

“Yeah, that’s where I went!” Burgess replies. “And Dingle! I think I’ve got ancestors that came from Dingle.”

“We've gotten a lot of mail and a lot of feedback from Irish [people] asking us to go. And I always let the agent know that we wanted to go there. It’s only in the last few years it’s happened, really. We’re very happy about it.”