Lightning Seeds
About
LIGHTNING SEEDS: TOMORROW’S HERE TODAY
“Some people look down on pop, but I never have. After all these years, it’s still the one thing I truly believe in. These melodies land on your shoulders and if you treat them well, you might just create something that outlives you.” Ian Broudie
35 years after the very first Lightning Seeds singles made their way to record shops, Ian Broudie’s obsession with melody and the magic of recording is a mat-ter of… well not just one record, but a golden run of hits which tells its own sto-ry: Pure, Lucky You, The Life Of Riley, Change, Perfect, You Showed Me and Sugar Coated Iceberg have long since become modern standards alongside the de-finitive football anthem Three Lions, whose four spells at number one have made it one of the 30 best-selling British singles of all time. It’s a story which Broudie finally put into words with the release of last year’s acclaimed memoir Tomor-row’s Here Today – which now also happens to be the name of his group’s first ever career-spanning anthology. Comprising twenty fan favourites alongside brand new music, Tomorrow’s Here Today is to be released alongside a pro-gramme of long-overdue vinyl releases for classic Lightning Seeds albums, Cloudcuckooland, Sense, Dizzy Heights and Tilt. These will now stand alongside 1994’s Jollification which enjoyed its own 25th anniversary reissue in 2019.
And yet, at the centre of this extraordinary body of work is a songwriter who stumbled into a solo career with not even a hint of a fanfare. For most pop fans of a certain age, the first time The Lightning Seeds would have entered their ra-dar would have been back on August 3rd 1989. Among the household names jos-tling for supremacy that week were Paul McCartney and Kylie Minogue and the briefly omnipresent Jive Bunny. Nestled almost apologetically among them was a video from a group who had, to all intents and purposes, appeared out of no-where. The song was instantly beguiling, a rhapsodic outpouring of romantic idealism which answered to the name of Pure. This most perfect of love songs, re-leased on a tiny independent label had – thanks in part to a couple of plays from Steve Wright on his BBC Radio 1 show – scraped into the lower reaches of the Top 40. But the identity of the man in the video, with his shaggy fringe and stripy top, remained something of a mystery.
If Ian Broudie had his way, Pure would have never seen the light of day. It was just one of a dozen songs he was recording for a pretend band he’d named after a misheard line in Prince’s Raspberry Beret (“Thunder drowns out what the light-ning sees”). “When I’d recorded it,” he recalls, “I hated it. I felt like I’d failed, that it was really embarrassing. I felt like there were too many words and that I’d said too much. So I said to Cenzo [Townshend], the engineer, ‘Stop mixing it. I don’t want it on the album. I’m not even going to finish it.’ But after I left the room, he did it anyway.” Townshend sent the songs that would form The Lightning Seeds’ Cloudcuckooland album to Dick Leahy head of Ghetto Recordings, who were putting the record out. Upon hearing it, Leahy exclaimed “That’s the hit!"
From thereon in, Lightning Seeds assumed a momentum that Broudie was in no position to control. The song advanced across America via college radio playlists (at one point, championed by Rodney Bingenheimer at KROQ, the most-requested record in California) like a musical Mexican wave. In fact, Broudie’s musical rite of passage had come a full decade previously, thanks to his entry in-to the Liverpool post-punk scene with Big In Japan. However, while the rest of the band – Holly Johnson (Frankie Goes To Hollywood), Budgie (Siouxsie and the Banshees), Bill Drummond (The KLF) and Jayne Casey (Pink Military) – would all appear on magazine covers over the course of the 1980s, the callow, be-spectacled ingenue beside them found his metier as a producer for the likes of Echo & The Bunnymen, The Fall and The Pale Fountains and Care, the short-lived duo he formed with Paul Simpson. It was with Care that Broudie first ac-quired a taste for songwriting. “I saw myself as a songwriter, but if I was produc-ing and not writing any songs by myself, then what right did I have calling my-self a songwriter?” he explains, “Working for other artists allowed me to postpone making that leap into what felt like the unknown.”
The Lightning Seeds’ formative album releases –1990’s Cloudcuckooland and 1992’s Sense were essentially solo endeavours. He augmented the melodic influ-ence of early Pink Floyd, The Beatles, David Bowie and The Lovin’ Spoonful with the recording techniques pioneered by De La Soul on 3 Feet High and Rising, studying the way they used loops and samples in order to create something both classic and contemporary. For a time it felt like the profile of songs like Sense (co-composed with Broudie’s friend and confidante Terry Hall) and The Life Of Ri-ley eclipsed the profile of their creator – not least when the instrumental of the latter enjoyed nine months of nationwide exposure as Match Of The Day’s Goal of the Month music.
That would all change dramatically in the summer of 1994 with the release of The Lightning Seeds’ third album Jollification. It was perhaps on that album that Broudie distilled the essence of his songwriting philosophy, citing the “bright, clear moment” represented in the pop art of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol alongside his aforementioned musical touchstones. For Broudie’s songs too, the goal was to convey the feeling of being suspended in a moment of pure pleasure and wanting things to stay that way forever. These were the bittersweet sentiments that formed the core of its hit singles Lucky You, Change, Perfect and Marvellous – songs which made Broudie such a regular presence on Top Of The Pops that at the end of 1996, he would be even invited to host the show.
By that time, of course, his profile had skyrocketed after a summer which saw The Lightning Seeds – augmented by comedians Frank Skinner and David Bad-diel – soundtrack England’s (almost) triumphant Euro 96 campaign with Three Lions, the song that would not only define it but render all future attempts at England football songs redundant. Not only has Three Lions gone on to sound-track future campaigns; versions of the song have also been appropriated German fans serenading their own team. But at its essence are the same sentiments that propel so many of Broudie’s songs: the pursuit of (and belief in) perfect happiness in spite of all evidence to the contrary.
For a time, Ian Broudie made the most of his “peak pop star” years, for a time be-coming a regular presence on the irreverent TV shows that some of his more self-conscious contemporaries chose to eschew. Just at home with The Big Break-fast’s aliens-in-residence Zig & Zag as he was doing Live & Kicking on Saturday morning, his hitmaking purple patch encompassed the release of two more al-bums in the 1990s. Dizzy Heights (1996) spawned Sugar Coated Iceberg and his inspired reinvention of Gene Clark’s You Showed Me, while Tilt (1999) ushered in a sleeker more electronic direction, flagged up by the singles Sweetest Soul Sen-sations and Life’s Too Short.
The ensuing years have seen Ian Broudie diversify his options, re-establishing his credentials as a producer. Recently, Ian has produced Paul Heaton’s critically ac-claimed album The Mighty Several. He also had a key influence for the emerging generation of Liverpool bands such as The Coral and The Zutons, both of whose debut albums benefited from his intuitive, empathetic production. In turn, mem-bers of those groups would feature on Broudie’s stunning confessional 2004 solo album Tales Told. After a long hiatus, 2022’s See You In The Stars saw The Lightning Seeds return as a recording entity, in the process harvesting some of their most effusive reviews to date. Mojo hymned its “perfect pop” qualities, de-scribing its ten songs as “giddy bursts of optimism and wonderment”; whilst Un-cut called it “the group's most unabashedly pop-forward and irresistibly buoyant effort since Dizzy Heights.”
Perhaps the most delicious irony of Ian Broudie’s thirty-five years fronting The Lightning Seeds has been the extent to which what was once very much a soli-tary undertaking has, almost by stealth, morphed into one of our most raptur-ously-received festival draws. Augmented on stage by Broudie’s son Riley (gui-tar), Martyn Campbell (bass), Adele Emmas (keyboards) and Jim Sharrock (drums), The Lightning Seeds are a ubiquitous presence on the festival circuit – their televised 2023 Glastonbury set attracting one of the biggest crowds of the weekend on The Other Stage.
But whilst Ian Broudie rightly takes pride in his past, the goal remains the same as it has always done: “I still get a thrill when I pick up my guitar. To have a thought, which turns into an idea that gradually becomes a song – which you then capture on tape, and that gets turned into a record. Then that record is somehow beamed magically across the planet. And if you’ve written a good one, someone will hear it and relate to it in a profound way. You might know nothing about that person but a connection has still been made.” If it was as easy as Ian Broudie has spent the last 35 years making it sound, everybody would be at it. You suspect that Ian Broudie’s obsessive pursuit of the perfect moment won’t be abating any time soon. In the meantime, anyone else need only press play on Tomorrow’s Here Today. Pure and simple every time.
Tomorrow’s Here Today is released by Sony Music on 4th October
