MB : It’s more a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t! if you do new songs you have people saying it’s nothing like the old stuff and if you just do old stuff then people moan that you don’t do new stuff! you are in the middle of it really. Is it important to have new stuff or more important trying to make sense of old songs? LTW : I saw you play a few years ago and it was a great gig. What I will do if I ever get it done? I will see what kind of record it is and then take it from there. The band have said they wanted to play on it and other people want to play on it as well.
I couldn’t get back on it for a while so I don’t really know what kind of record it would be. I did start it but when John split it kind of knocked me back and shocked me. If I do it I just don’t know what kind of record it would be. MB : I don’t know if it’s going to be with this line up. I don’t take any of it very seriously to be honest.
He was living and breathing Chameleons when he was in the band and then went off his head and left and wanted nothing to do with the band and went.
Me and Dave (Fielding – guitar) have never seen eye to eye and, if anything, John (Lever -long standing Chameleons drummer) is just a turncoat really. Reg (Smithies – guitar) and I are still mates and still good together and that’s all I care about really. It’s just fucking ridiculous and very immature. LTW : Famously the original line up had a lot of tension… It’s keeping it fresh and it gives each stage a freshness that I needed to have for me to get to the level where I needed to be and get me to perform this in anything but a perfunctory manner. I’m still on great terms with everyone who has played in this band. They come and go and there is no animosity with people who leave. Playing with different people is interesting. Then going back on the bass as well as the singing shifted it up a gear though and it puts me at the heart of the band again – at the heart of the rhythm section and also the feel of it and that’s another thing entirely. That was good for a bit because I could focus on the singing. MB : When I first started playing the songs again I was not playing the bass and I was just doing the vocals. LTW : Is it very different to play these songs with different people? MB : I’m striving to reach a point where I need do it as well as I possibly can and that drives it – the desire to performthe music as well as possible with this line up and I’ve enjoyed it more than even when we were originally doing it. LTW : Do the old songs feel different to play now. If people want to see me perform then I will perform it as long as people want to see it. MB : Yeah, I mean try not to take any of this for granted. LTW : The Chameleons endearing legacy remains untarnished and the band are still huge especially in Manchester. Then on December 19th they finish with P.S Goodbye an evening of songs selected by the audience. The band then seemed to be on the verge of a big breakthrough with Europe and America beginning to take a big interest and then fell apart leaving a powerful legacy and a fractured history with occasional reformations, falling outs and a patchwork history.Ĭurrently bassist and frontman Mark Burgess fronts Chameleons Vox with an ad hoc line up and a really effective celebration of the band’s legacy which sees two big home town shows this weekend with December 18th seeing them perform The Fan And The Bellows + Early Recordings.
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My band the Membranes once supported them in the 1500 capacity Free Trade Hall in Manchester which in 1985 was about as big as it got in gig terms in the city before Madchester shifted the goal posts. The group played a dark and powerful music – a missing link between the post punk Liverpool Psych and the thundering melancholy of Joy Division and were running in parallel with these feted groups and were their musical equals. The Chameleons are one of Manchester’s truly enigmatic bands.
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