The Charlatans U.K.
Melting Pot (Beggars Banquet)
by Nik Rainey
The Adventures of Nik Rainey
Semi-Hemi-Demi-Professional Critic
Episode Two: “Use Your Allusion”
Intro: Next Exposition, Please
I’ve been hanging in a state of languid flux for weeks now – what the Catholics used to call “Limbo” before they closed it down, claiming all the bending backwards was too hard on their backs. Whatever sense of purpose being a music critic once held for me was lost, elusive, and as hard to grasp as a greased supermodel. All my efforts to expunge the worthless and overwrought parts of my syntactical psyche had merely left me hoarse, confused, and with paper cuts the size of the Marinas Trench from trying to speed-read my thesaurus in search of the fabled Lost Synonym for “Throbbing Bassline.” My pseudonym wasn’t much help – he pretended to indulge my misdirected soul-searchings for a few pages, then dropped me like a hot potato salad in the lobby of who he claimed was one of the world’s foremost authorities on critics’ block before ellipsing into oblivion in the back seat of a newspaper taxi with the crossword puzzle already done, incorrectly and in indelible ink, no less. Truthfully, that’s not exactly what happened, but I don’t care and I haven’t seen Jimmy crack corn in some time, although his half-brother Marty has been spotted around town breaking peas. Oh, Christ… get me out of this intro, somebody…
Nobody trampled to death when the kids rushed the stage to be nearer Inspiral Carpets. So what’s this vaguely-groovy-in-a-bandy-legged-Limey-fashion analgesic-rock you’ve got in the background?” That would be The Charlatans U.K., Melting Pot (Beggars Banquet).”
“Ah, yes, a seventy-five-minute stroll down Hazy Recollection Lane. The stuff of Electric Lucozade Acid Tests U.K.-wide. From the evidence here, it looks like they managed to sustain a decent career over there – not saying much for a country that forces its citizens to buy another copy of Definitely Maybe every few months as a show of civic pride, but still – even though, of all these songs, the only one I know is, uh…”
“‘The Only One I Know’?”
“Thank you. This certainly isn’t bad, mind you, just amiably faceless like most of that… I forget, were these blokes part of the Madchester scene? Or was it one of the regional offshoots, Daftford or Wiggedstershire or Maladroitwich or something?… Doesn’t matter. As I move through the disc, I dunno, I start getting wistful in spite of, maybe even because this band and all like them really added next to nothing to rock history. They may have carried on well into the nineties, far past their moment of microglory to the point that the lead singer’s inquiries of ‘Can you feel it in your soul?’ and similar pseudo-anthemic phrases have a knowing sadness to them, as if they realized that people were barely feeling it in their ears by then, but they’re of a piece with their time, that brief but shining moment when English groups forgot to be over-ambitious. A breather between apocalyptic concept albums, half-baked literary referentialism, and blues against the Empire. When music meant something by signifying nothing – just a vehicle for getting fucked up on champagne, paracetamol, and Tizer cocktails. Whatever gets you through your O-levels. I’m running low on Anglophilic minutiae here; do you think we can move on?”