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Just 3 years shy of two decades in the game it still seems a bit early to be banging out a second ‘greatest hits’ set but if it serves no purpose other than to remind just how many great songs they have had over the years then fair enough. In that time period The Charlatans have released nine studio albums, twenty-seven singles, a B-sides album, a live album as well as a greatest hits across three record labels. Forever is more of a collection of singles than a greatest hits per se so if you have Melting Pot already, their previous compilation, there is plenty here to entice you still. Only six songs straddle both albums, which all obviously feature early in their recorded career.
The opening track here though is Indian Rope, which never featured on an album. Though sounding slightly dated this is The Charlatans that many were introduced to in the baggy heyday. One of the few survivors of that period, they also traded through Britpop and today still sell out venues the size of Brixton Academy with comparative ease and are still legitimate festival headliners. Where many bands have jumped bandwagons this can’t really be levelled at The Charlatans and this is one of the probable reasons they haven’t fallen too far out of favour at any point. Their sound may not be to everyone’s taste but you can’t knock their longevity and staying power.
They are one of those bands you can’t really take too much of a dislike too, and besides it hasn’t been all smooth sailing. The inside of the CD case lists the band members with a reminder that two original members have been lost on the way, guitarist John Baker and more famously Rob Collins who played the Hammond organ so memorably. Arguably this has made the band a stronger entity though they have always had a gang mentality; the Weirdo video showed this all those years ago. Confident rather than arrogant they have never been the biggest band around but have always been contenders.
There are those people for whom The Only One I Know is the perennial Charlatans sound. The two subsequent albums the self titled The Charlatans and Tellin’ Stories were the Britpop-esque albums and are a good as introduction as any featuring One To Another and North Country Boy amongst others. Us And Us Only and Wonderland saw the band trying different things, going Dylan-esque on the former album with Tim Burgess adopting a soulful falsetto on the latter. Forever and Impossible from those albums show how they could do upbeat and downtrodden in equal measure. Up At The Lake was in all honestly not a great album as evidenced by the two tracks lifted from it in the form of the title track and Try Again Today. It’s middle of the road sounds were made more obvious by their adventurousness at other times.
The fear that Forever would show that they are a band well past their prime, which is always a danger with these albums, isn’t realised. This year’s release Blackened Blue Eyes was a massive return to form. Rounded out with a remixed version of the Carlsberg advert soundtracking You’re So Pretty, We’re So Pretty this is either a great introduction to a great band or a chance to revisit a band that never went away. Initial copies come with a second disc of rarities.
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