The Lighting Seeds look like a pop group, but they aren’t. This is the individual musical project of Ian Broudie (Liverpool, United Kingdom, 1958), a renowned producer and successful musician in his country, especially in the nineties. This year he celebrates his 35th anniversary in music with reissues of his entire catalog, a compilation album (Tomorrow’s Here Today: 35 Years Of Lightning Seeds) and a tour that will bring him to Spain in the fall. On October 15 he will be in Madrid (Sala Changó), on the 16th in Barcelona (Razzmatazz 2) and on the 17th in Valencia (Moon).
Broudie is very popular in England for a subject he claims to love and hate at the same time. Is about Three Lions, the song that the English football federation commissioned him to encourage their team on the occasion of the 1996 Euro Cup. The musician from Liverpool composed it and sang it together with two very famous comedians there (David Baddiel and Frank Skinner), and later It was re-recorded for the 1998 World Cup, for the 2010 World Cup (with production by Trevor Horn and with Robbie Williams and Russell Brand joining the vocals) and for the 2022 World Cup. “It’s difficult to know if I should play it or not at concerts.” , because if I don’t do it, people get very angry,” he says, remembering how, in his first performance after publishing the song, he decided not to perform it. At the end of the concert, when the lights came on, he saw a bunch of children in front of him dressed in the English team’s shirts crying uncontrollably because they had come only to listen. Three Lions.
“It’s funny, because I actually wrote it to celebrate the competition returning to England for the first time since the 1966 World Cup. For Liverpool FC we already had You’ll Never Walk Alone. When it came to writing a song about football, I wanted to do something similar to that. Not something like: Let’s win! It had more to do with losing, because England never won, and above all, with the excitement of the championship that is about to begin, hence his lines ‘It’s coming home / football is coming home’. Time has changed its meaning, people take phrases from it, politicians have used it, many clubs have rewritten the lyrics and used the melody.”
It was notable, in fact, when Tony Blair paraphrased several lines from the song, changing them to “17 years of pain have never made us stop dreaming. Labor is coming home” at his party congress prior to his election victory in 1997. “It wasn’t just Blair who did it, many more did it and I don’t like it. I don’t like politicians, none of them, I’m probably an anarchist,” says the musician.
“Bill Drummond, I never liked him. He was always very smart. He was a little older than us, and I always noticed that, when others smiled, he did so with a kind of self-sufficient grimace.
The point is that Three Lions caught him on the crest of a wave that he had begun to surf two years earlier, in 1994, with his third album, Jollification, still the best-seller of his career. It coincided with the explosion of Britpop, a movement with which Broudie does not feel identified, although he acknowledges that it benefited him. “In a way we fit in there because of the type of compositions, the melodies and the aesthetics, but not because of the way we recorded the albums. I did everything alone, using technology that I had access to through my work as a producer. I remember listening to the De La Soul album 3 Feet High And Rising in 1989 and I found it fascinating to think about how they had done everything based on samples”recalls the musician.
The Lightning Seeds at the beginning were such an individual project that Broudie did not want to tour their first two albums (Cloudcuckooland1990, and Sense, 1992). “I’ve never liked using session musicians. He saw that the experience of the groups that loved his music was very different from that of the people for whom that was simply his job, to play for others and get paid,” he justifies. “Besides, I had never sung in public, but when I signed with Sony for the third album, they put pressure on me to perform live. At that time, my friend Terry Hall, from The Specials, was very supportive and said to me: Why don’t we do some concerts together? We can use the same musicians and sing together. Maybe that way it will be easier for you, and so we did. Without Terry’s help [quien falleció en 2022]”I don’t think I would have ever been brave enough to do it.”
The ‘Erentxun case’
When Ian Broudie made the most headlines in Spain it was for an incident that was not merely musical. In 2005 Broudie sued Mikel Erentxun considering that 1+1 is seventhe central theme that he composed for the television series The Serranosit was a copy of Mashed potatoesthe first single by The Lightning Seeds, published in the summer of 1989. In reality, the song that Fran Perea popularized in Spain was, in turn, the adaptation of greatest hits, a 2003 song by Duncan Dhu’s vocalist. “I had never heard her song, but one day my publishing company called me to tell me that the Spanish publishing house had a song that sounded exactly like it. Mashed potatoes and that, obviously, it had been stolen from us. They suggested I take it to court. I would have to go to Spain to testify, I told them yes, and I didn’t hear anything about it again until, after a few years, I received an email from my editor saying: Oh, I’m very sorry, but we forgot about the trial, We don’t send anyone! And that’s how I lost the case,” explains the British musician with a laugh. “I know that the song became very popular in Spain, and it saddens me that they stole it from us and got away with it.”
Broudie adds that he never met Erentxun in person or spoke to him. The San Sebastian musician, for his part, always firmly maintained that he had not copied the song. Of course, the version that he transmitted on his website upon learning of the dismissal of the lawsuit, in 2009, differed from what Broudie says. “Mikel Erentxun, Jesús María Cormán and Vortex Music of the Warner group have been acquitted of charges of plagiarism. Prior to the Álex Pina trial, Globomedia Music and Telecinco Ediciones Musicales, also initially accused of alleged plagiarism, reached a secret agreement with the band The Lightning Seeds“said the statement.
You will never Walk alone
Broudie got into music when the punk scene broke out. As a child, he grew up experiencing in real time the local prides of football (Liverpool FC) and music (The Beatles). “Everything revolved around those two things, that’s where my whole story comes from, everything that drove me crazy, and it still does for me,” he says. However, he remembers that Beatlemania had declined in his city after the group’s dissolution. “If you look at the time scale it’s something very crazy. The Lightning Seeds have been around for 35 years, the Beatles barely lasted 10, and only five passed between their dissolution and the birth of punk. I remember around that time discovering The Doors, Scott Walker, and it is true that, in those years, not only the Beatles, but the entire merseybeatit was already seen as something of the past.”
In 1977 he joined as a guitarist in his first group, Big In Japan, a kind of superband in the making in which, among others, Holly Johnson (future singer of Frankie Goes To Hollywood), Budgie (later drummer in The Slits and Siouxsie & The Banshess), the later renowned producer and composer Clive Langer and Bill Drummond (who years later would revolutionize the pop industry with the crazy project The KLF). In addition, they hung out with a group of friends who included members of Echo & The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes (the cult band led by the charismatic Julian Cope).
“It was a very vibrant scene. To some extent, they’re all still the same as when I met them, but the only ones I’m still friends with are Holly Johnson and Ian MacCulloch [cantante de Echo & The Bunnymen]. Budgie I think he lives in Berlin, I never saw him again, and neither did Julian. [Cope]. As for Bill Drummond, I never liked him,” she reveals. “He was always very smart. He was a little older than us, and I always noticed that when others smiled, he did so with a kind of self-satisfied grimace. Obviously, he caused a huge stir with The KLF, he did incredibly well, but he was never really my thing,” he says.
“Before my natural habitat was the studio and I hated playing live. Now the opposite happens to me, because in the studio there are no longer people milling around with whom to talk, touch or have a cup of tea, but instead I spend hours in front of a computer.”
In 1980, Broudie came to the production by accident, and it was also the fault of Drummond, who was then manager of the Bunnymen. He proposed to her to record the first album of the legendary band post punk, Crocodiles. The guitarist reluctantly accepted, but then he took a liking to it, and ended up working with people as diverse as The Fall, Terry Hall, Alison Moyet, the French Noir Désir, The Primitives, Dodgy, Texas, The Coral and Miles Kane. “I never wanted being a producer to be my job,” he says. “I just wanted to work with people I loved, bands I fell in love with. I have always felt like a songwriter, but everything has to do with people, there are people I like to be with.” Among all of them, he stands out in memory of Mark E. Smith, of The Fall (who died in 2018), with whom he worked on his 1988 album, I Am Curious Orange. “Mark was very quirky, we both were, so we got along very well. It coincided with the time I was writing. Mashed potatoes. Back then, she needed to have songs and she played them for him. He encouraged me a lot. His support was very important in the birth of The Lightning Seeds,” he recalls.
Broudie’s career has also gone through ups and downs. Her worst moment came after the turn of the century, when she was sunk by a chain of personal misfortunes: she divorced and her parents and two of her siblings died. “I felt lost in life, I was stumbling around, I didn’t care completely about the quality of what I did, I lost the ability to think clearly. But I remember seeing an interview with Orson Welles where they asked him: ‘Did you get a friend to work on any of your films who you knew wasn’t the right person?’, and he answered: ‘Yes, many times.’ ‘How did it work?’ ‘Horribly always!’ ‘Do you regret it? ‘No!’. ‘Why don’t you repent?’ And he replied: ‘Because I value people and life above art.’ I found it very surprising that Orson Welles felt that way, it was like a revelation to me, I don’t know how to explain it, but he resonated with me and I think it’s something that had a lot to do with my recovery.”
Another fundamental factor for this was finding a band, led on guitar (and also acting as manager) by his son, Riley Broudie. He is the key to Lightning Seeds recording their latest album in 2022, See You In The Starsafter 13 years of silence, but he is also the protagonist of one of the best singles by The Lightning Seeds, Life Of Riley, from 1992. “When we play it live it is something strange for him and precious for me,” he says with a laugh. “I wrote this song for him when I was waiting for him to be born, and it is one of the most beautiful things that has happened to me in my life,” says a musician for whom the tables have turned. “Before my natural habitat was the studio and I hated playing live. Now the opposite happens to me, because in the studio there are no longer people milling around to talk to, touch or have a cup of tea, but instead I spend hours in front of a computer. Maybe it’s a little late, but now we have the best version of this band ever live, we’re finally a real band!” Broudie concludes with satisfaction.
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