Considering the tragedy that befell them the last time the Charlatans toured the US, it’s no surprise that it’s taken them five years to return.
Back in September 2010, the British rock band (sometimes known as the Charlatans UK to avoid confusion with another band) was onstage in Philadelphia when drummer and founding member Jon Brookes stopped playing midsong. “It was like he was frozen in time,” lead singer Tim Burgess tells The Post. Brookes then suffered a seizure and had to be helped off his stool.
“We thought it was just dehydration,” says Burgess, but Brookes was revealed to have a brain tumor and diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. After a brief period of remission, he died in 2013 at age 44. Most bands would crumble, but the Manchester-based quartet is back with its latest album, “Modern Nature,” and plays Webster Hall on Tuesday.
After forming in 1989, the Charlatans’ dance-influenced rock found rapid success, with the 1990 debut album “Some Friendly” hitting No. 1 in the UK album chart and singles “The Only One I Know” and “Then” reaching the Top 5 in the Billboard Modern Rock Charts.
But cruel misfortune has haunted the band through the years. In July 1996, it appeared to be hitting a creative peak with the blistering single “One to Another,” which was powered by rolling piano riffs supplied by keyboardist Rob Collins. But just days after the song premiered on radio, Collins was killed, at age 33, in a car crash in Wales. He was drunk, and misjudged a bend.
Burgess, 48, admits he and Collins had argued before the accident, though he wasn’t in the car. “It nearly killed me, too,” he says. “It broke my heart. He was like my older brother.”
Brookes pushed the band to continue, and just two weeks after the deadly crash, the group was fulfilling a previously booked show, opening for Oasis in front of a record crowd of 150,000 at Knebworth — the biggest crowd at a UK rock concert since Led Zeppelin played at the same venue in 1979. It should have been a celebration, but instead Burgess remembers simply feeling “numb.”
In 1998, the Charlatans bounced back by signing a major-label deal, only to find accountant Trevor Williams had embezzled well over a half-million dollars from them and failed to pay the band’s taxes. “We were playing huge festivals at the time, but had to forfeit most of the money,” says Burgess.
Some of the band’s misfortune has been self-inflicted. Burgess lived in Los Angeles between 1998 and 2010, and during much of that period he was gripped by massive cocaine and alcohol addictions, downing four bottles of wine just to get buzzed. When he quit cold-turkey in 2006, his poison became Diet Coke — 13 cans a day. “After giving up drugs and booze, you feel empty, so you grab whatever you can to fill it in,” he says. “For me, it was coffee and aspartame.”
But Burgess and the band (completed by keyboardist Tony Rogers, bassist Martin Blunt and guitarist Mark Collins) refuse to bemoan their luck, and still retain a dark sense of humor. “We’re looking forward to the American tour, but we’re all hoping to get out alive this time!”
