"Everyone's been burned before, everyone knows the pain" - The Only One I Know - The Charlatans.

I've seen the Charlatans twice now. Once in Valencia in 1995, and once completely by accident in 2008, when they played for just under an hour in the basement of Virgin Megastore in Oxford Street. On both occasions, they captivated the audiences in front of them, leaving the thousands watching in Valencia feeling as enthused and connected to the band as the lucky hundred or so who had seen them in the grey bunker-like basement room in London. 

But it could have been so different if lead singer, Tim Burgess had not joined the band back in 1989.

Tim Burgess spoke to James Simpson in The Guardian about joining the Charlatans, and how their first hit "The Only One I Know" came about. 

I was in a band called the Electric Crayons and we managed to get a gig supporting the Charlatans. They had a different singer, Baz Ketley, then. I ended up jumping on stage and singing one of their songs. Shortly after that, I got a call from the band. They didn’t ask me to audition. It was more a case of: “Would you like to come down to Wednesbury in the Midlands and hang out?”

"When I got there, it turned out the singer had left, and they asked if I would have a go. In the Electric Crayons we’d covered LA Woman by the Doors, so at first I did a sort of Jim Morrison impression. Martin Blunt, the bass player, went: “Right, let’s try again, but can you try singing this time?” I did and everything clicked. The Electric Crayons’ first single, with me singing, came out on the day I joined the Charlatans."

That song was called Hip shake junkie, and is still on YouTube, It's a very different sound from the one we have come to recognise with the Charlatans.

Burgess then moved on to talk about the Charlatans first chart hit. "The Only One I Know was an instrumental at first. I had a job at ICI, and one night after tea with mum and dad, I went to the local garage to get some fags and halfway there realised I had the melody and some words. I didn’t have my Dictaphone, which I always carried around with me, so had to pelt back to my mum and dad’s to get it before I forgot it all. I never got the cigarettes.

The Charlatans' first single was "Indian Rope." It became an indie hit and gained their first small group of hardcore fans. It helped them secure a major label deal with Beggars Banquet offshoot Situation Two. The song's success paved the way for their subsequent releases, including "The Only One I Know" and their debut album, Some Friendly. 

We went into the Windings studio in Wrexham to record the song Polar Bear as our second single,  but my mate Jonah – David Jones – said: “You’re recording the wrong one!” He’d come to all our gigs and pointed out that everyone went nuts for The Only One I Know. Then when we got to the studio there was a fax from Beggars Banquet, who’d just signed us, also saying: “We think you should record The Only One I Know.”

Martin Blunt, bass, songwriter said. "Whenever we played the song live, the reaction was carnage, in a good way. John Peel played the single on night-time Radio 1 and Simon Mayo made it single of the week. We were invited to go on Top of the Pops but being silly sods we turned it down, like the Clash had, but the single still went Top 10."

The song, written by Tim Burgess, is about teenage feelings of unrequited love. Burgess, drawing on his own powerful emotions at the time, incorporated a nod to The Byrds' "Everybody's Been Burned" with the line, "Everyone's been burned before, everyone knows the pain". He was also ecstatic when Roger McGuinn of The Byrds praised the song.

The song featured on the compilation called Happy Daze (see previous post) released in 1990, compiled for Island Records by Gary Crowley, which also helped raise its profile within the indie world. 

The Only One I Know" became the Charlatans' first mainstream top-10 hit in the UK, peaking at No. 9. The song was also certified silver by the BPI in 2019. 

The Charlatans have recently announced a new album and a few gigs this year. If you get the chance, make sure you go, you will get the same euphoric experience that I did all those years ago, no matter what size the audience is.