POP In The Name Of Love

I MAY have been a straight ‘A’ student at the University of Life, the School of Hard Knocks and the Kindergarten of Getting Your Head Kicked In but I’ve never been the sort to indulge in extra-curricular wallowing.

Thus, while everyone else was gleefully hailing Joy Division as the four horsemen of the post-punk apocalypse, I declared Stately Clark Mansions an angst-free zone and without let or hindrance of a floppy fringe, continued my relentless quest for the perfect pop moment. Madness came close on a couple of occasions, The Jam might’ve succeeded if Paul Weller wasn’t fundamentally such a miserable old sod and I had high hopes for Elvis before he ditched The Attractions and decided to grow a beard.

Having promised so much, it looked as if the ‘80s would ultimately fail to deliver but just as the dust was beginning to settle on the decade, along came the Lightning Seeds with a song so immaculate in its conception you half-expected Mother Theresa to be on backing vocals. Strangely, one of the few people who failed to recognise ‘Pure’ as a work of heart-palpitating genius was its author Ian Broudie.

“I’d been in a lot of bands prior to the Lightning Seeds,” reveals the ardent Liverpool F.C. supporter, “but I’d never actually sung before and it’s only recently that I’ve stopped feeling like the perpetrator of some elaborate fraud. You know, I’ve been waiting for the police to sledgehammer their way through the door and arrest me on suspicion of impersonating a singer!

“‘Pure’ was also the first time I’d come up with the words and music to a song on my own. I always remember finishing and thinking, ‘oh no, I’ve done it wrong’, because there were three pages of lyrics rather than the usual three lines and a chorus. To be honest, I wasn’t too sure if I wanted it released but Ghetto, the label I was on then, were convinced it had hit potential and much to my amazement they were right.”

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Even when Broudie was dragged kicking and screaming to London for a debut Top of the Pops appearance, he couldn’t quite believe that something he’d concocted in his front-room was now changing hands for £1.50 a copy at Woolworth’s.

“I’ve never been able to think of my songs in terms of ‘product’ because they’re too personal. This is going to sound dreadfully pretentious but writing is very much an organic process – ideas happen, they can’t be forced, and the most important bit is when you take that snatch of melody or those couple of words and muck around with them on an acoustic guitar. I’m a producer by trade but I’m almost afraid to go into the studio in case the essence of that inspiration gets lost.

“Everyone takes it for granted because it’s part of modern life,” Broudie continues, “but I still find it fantastic that a song starts off as an impulse in your brain, gets laid down on magnetic tape and then gets sent out all over the world on the radio and satellites that are orbiting thousands of miles above the Earth. Initially, I couldn’t get my head round the concept but then I was in Texas and this huge great big cowboy-type wandered over and said, ‘I want to thank you for ‘Pure’ because I’d just broken up with my woman and was having a breakdown and that song pulled me through’. It was so weird – here was this out-and-out redneck who was the total opposite of me and somehow we’d managed to connect.”

This puts me in mind of the time I was scumbagging my way round Egypt and found myself sharing a room – well, a randomly-assembled collection of breeze-blocks – with a young fellow from Taiwan. Communication appeared impossible until he uttered the words ‘Richael Lackson’ and the rest of the night was spent perfecting an Anglo-Chinese version of the moonwalk. (Are you sure your mint tea hadn’t been severely spiked Stuart – Ed.)

“Pop culture gets dismissed as being very trivial but if you were to go to, I dunno, Iraq and ask someone to name a famous British person, there’s as much chance of them saying The Beatles as there is The Queen or Margaret Thatcher. Music mightn’t stop wars or save rain-forests but on a basic human level, it can be wonderfully unifying.”

This supports my theory that rather than sitting round the negotiating table, Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley would be better off teaming-up with John Hulme and James Molyneux in a Bootsy Collins-style soul collective and funking their way to peace in the North.

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While it’s only in the past couple of years that he’s been championed by butch American cowboys, Broudie’s musical C.V. stretches back to the same late ‘70s club scene which spawned Echo & The Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes, Wah! Heat, Dead Or Alive and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. It’s a period he remembers not just for the music but the profound effect it had on his athletic abilities.

“When you’re walking round a reasonably tough working-class city with characters like Pete Burns and Holly Johnson, you soon learn how to leave Linford Christie standing in the 200 metres! Liverpool was the same as London at the time – if you were a punk or dared wear anything other than flared trousers, you were setting yourself up as a target for the local headcases.

There were three places – a club called Eric’s, Probe Records and the Tea Rooms – where we used to hang-out and although none of us had any notions about ‘making history’, it was obvious that some of the crowd were going to make a name for themselves.

“Myself and Holly were in a band together called Big In Japan. I was fascinated by the bloke because he was the first person I’d met whose full-time occupation was being gay. I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense – it’s just that his whole life revolved round his sexuality to the exclusion of, well, everything apart from music.”

Big In Japan’s seminal ranks also included singer Jayne Casey, who was doing a Bjork long before the Sugarcubes, and Bill Drummond who’s currently burning his millions with the K-Foundation.

“If Jayne was around today,” Broudie reflects, “she’d be a huge star but unfortunately in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, there wasn’t much room for women operating outside of the mainstream. She went on to form Pink Military Stands Alone, then that fell apart and the last I heard she was organising the Festival of Comedy which takes place every year in Liverpool. Bill was as big a lunatic then as he is now and when he became Echo & the Bunnymen’s manager, he asked whether I’d be interested in producing them. As with everything else that’s happened to me, I never made a conscious decision to become a producer. The opportunity arose and I couldn’t think of any reason to say ‘no’.

“Actually, my life seems to work in reverse. Most musicians turn their hand to production when they start suffering from terminal road fatigue but in my case, I was pushing faders for the Bunnymen when I was 18 and now as a wrinkly thirtysomething, I’m discovering the delights of tour bus culture.”

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Yup, five years, two months and fourteen days after making Larry Gogan aware of their existence, the Lightning Seeds finally stopped being a one-man band and made their live debut last month at the London Borderline. Ian’s reluctance to leave the safe sanctuary of his studio seemed well-founded when the monitors decided to go A.W.O.L. but following a few carefully chosen and thoroughly unprintable words with the sound man, normal service was resumed and the general consensus has it that the gig was a cracker.

“Nobody asked for their money back,” he laughs, “so it can’t have been too horrendous. I’ve kidded myself in the past that as long as the singles are getting airplay, there’s no need to tour but, really, the main reason the Lightning Seeds haven’t played live before is that I’ve lacked the confidence. Like I said earlier, it’s only while recording this latest album, Jollification, that I started feeling comfortable as a singer and now that I don’t cringe everytime I open my mouth, the next step is to evolve into a frontman.”

Having recruited a bunch of musicians that he’s happy going on stage with, does Broudie now intend abandoning totalitarian rule in favour of group democracy?

“This idea of group democracy is a bit of a fallacy. I’ve worked on albums where, certainly, the engineer has more input than the bass player but that’s okay because the bass player’s the only one who can wake the singer up in the mornings! Every band has its own unique balance and that’s why it’s an art form, not a science.”

Just in case you’ve been neglecting to read the small print on your record labels, Broudie’s credits include Dodgy, Sleeper, Terry Hall and Cork’s very own great white pop hopes The Frank & Walters.

“I’ve known – or rather chatted on the ‘phone to – Keith Cullen of Setanta for the past four or five years and it was him who suggested that I produce the re-recorded version of ‘Fashion Crisis Hits New York’ which unfortunately didn’t fare quite as well as the single before it, ‘After All’. I’m not crazy about re-recording songs because everyone judges them against the original but they were incredibly nice people and I wouldn’t mind working on something from scratch with them in the future.

“You come across bastards of every nationality but, I have to say, I’ve always hit it off with the Irish. Perhaps that’s because there are so many similarities between Liverpool and Dublin – I spent some time there in the early ‘80s producing tracks for In Tua Nua and felt really at home. I also saw a Leonard Cohen gig in Dublin which blew me away.”

So his tastes extend to the masochistic, then?

“There’s this clichéd notion,” he counters, “that you’ve got to be maniacally depressed to listen to Leonard Cohen but I find his stuff very uplifting. ‘Suzanne’ is a classic pop song in the same way that ‘Across The Universe’ or ‘God Only Knows’ is. It’s stood the test of time and it doesn’t matter whether you’re 11 or 111, you can still relate to it. Lennon & McCartney, Brian Wilson, Leonard Cohen – that’s the level of songwriting I aspire to.”

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He’s probably far too modest to admit it but there are at least a couple of moments on Jollification – ‘Lucky You’ and ‘Feeling Lazy’ – when Ian Broudie not only belongs in such exalted company but could teach the survivors a thing or two about melody.

“I know I’m obliged to trot out the ‘this is the best album I’ve ever made’ routine but for once it’s true. There was absolutely no interference from the record company and I was able to rope in Terry Hall who co-wrote ‘Lucky You’ and Alison Moyet who supplies the vocal on ‘My Best Day’. Terry I’ve collaborated with before but this is the first time I’ve managed to bully Alison into the studio and she was great – for a Southend supporter!”

Talking – very loosely in Southend’s case – of the beautiful game, what was his reaction to Match Of The Day choosing ‘Life Of Riley’ as the backdrop to their weekly Premiereship goalfest?

“Out of all the songs I’ve written, it’s the one I feel closest to because it’s about my son who’s called Riley. I didn’t think I was particularly ‘Dad’ material but his birth has proved to be the most important event in my life and with me being a rabid footie fan, it’s an appropriate sort of a tie-in.”

And doubtless a nice little earner, to boot.

“That’s what I reckoned. I’d heard those stories about David Dundas, the bloke who wrote the Channel 4 identification tune, getting fifty quid every time it was played but mine’s classified as background music which means I’m lucky to get £50 a season. My publisher says I should be happy with the honour but, sod that, I’d rather have the money.”

I knew it, a man after my own heart!