The Lightning Seeds’ Ian Broudie: ‘I had to rebuild myself’

Ian Broudie sighs deeply, soul-punctured by every mention of “the record”. Gamely but wearily, he lets the warm-up questions about the Lionesses’ win pile up. He was recording an episode of Never Mind the Buzzcocks at the time. He didn’t meet up with David Baddiel and Frank Skinner to celebrate. His phone didn’t go crazy. There’s talk (since confirmed) that they might re-record the pan-cultural phenomenon that is “Three Lions” for the unusual event of the World Cup being in Qatar in December, because “I’d love to have a Christmas football song”.

“I love the women winning it, now I want the blokes to win it three times. It’ll never end for me,” he says. Sigh. “Is this all about that song? Because I’ve got a new album, y’know…”

If you’ve got Broudie pegged as synthpop’s Mr Brightside, the grandmaster of uplifting indie whimsy with his optimistic footballing anthems, raindrops splashing rainbows and candy-coloured albums called Cloudcuckooland, Dizzy Heights and (the platinum-selling) Jollification – full of songs called “Joy”, “Sweet Dreams”, “Love Explosion”, “Happy”, “Marvellous” and “Perfect” – think again. Whatever the final score, Broudie is currently racking up his 33rd year of hurt.

“It’s fairly consistent that I’m being a miserable bastard,” he grins down Zoom from a garden room of his home. He cuts a slightly forlorn figure as he exposes the yearning, melancholy and discontent at the root of many of the brave-faced hits; songs that combined effervescent alt-pop moods, childlike imagery, silver-lining melodies and wistful outsider angst to make his band The Lightning Seeds one of the biggest and most huggable indie-pop acts of the Nineties. He quotes lines about “crying in your sleep” from his impeccable 1989 debut single “Pure” and points out that the “Sugar Coated Iceberg” he sang about on a 1996 single concerned “people who are just frozen on the inside but look good on the outside”. “The Life of Riley”, written for his son, was an anthem of aspiration to finding contentment “for the first time”; “Perfect” a portrait of the ignorant bliss in ignoring the “warning signs” of a dishonest partner.

“I don’t think any of the records are cheery, that’s the funny thing,” he argues. “The first line of [1995 hit] ‘Marvellous’ is ‘you had to fit but you’re fit to drop, open up the window and jump’, because things could be great. ‘Pure’ is about trying to hold on to a dream that keeps slipping through your hands. I think all my songs are about the fear of change and they’re all about ‘[making] sure you love this moment, this bit, [because] it might not happen again’.”

It’s a mindset that was driven home to Broudie in the aftermath of his overwhelming Nineties success. By 1999, “Three Lions” was overshadowing his career, and he admits to being ill-equipped for the “unexpected” attention he’d received since Jollification made him a bona fide pop star in 1994. “I think I could have made a lot more of it to a degree,” he confesses, “and emotionally it wasn’t the place [for me]. I don’t aspire to be the centre of attention. That’s definitely not the place I’m comfortable, I prefer to be slightly off to the left… I definitely [became] a lot more anxious. It broadened my horizons massively but at the same time kind of put me through the wringer.”

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There was, however, a protective element to stardom that, when Broudie dropped out of music following 1999’s fifth album Tilt in favour of producing bands such as The Coral, made the fallout all the more suffocating. “You’re in a certain bubble and then when that bubble bursts all the stuff that was held at bay descends on you. And it coincided with a lot of deaths in the family all at once.” Over the space of five years in the early Noughties, the recently divorced Broudie lost both parents and two siblings. He entered what he’s called “a period of temporary insanity”.

“I had to rebuild myself to a degree,” he says. “When all that happened, I felt like ‘you’ve got to live in the moment’. And for a bit I thought living in the moment was just being an idiot, being drunk, then I figured out that’s not being in the moment.” He abandoned recording to try to make positive changes in his life, then gradually realised, “No, that is actually what you love, but just don’t put yourself in situations where you don’t love it and you’re being told what to do by other people. You have to find the balance between sitting in a room full of guitars and drums, but at the same time don’t let it engulf you.”

Broudie’s personal tumults eventually found a voice on 2004’s pared-down solo album Tales Told, and on The Lightning Seeds’ subdued 2009 comeback Four Winds, released 10 years after their previous album. A further 13 years later, their plush pop seventh album See You in the Stars finds him back in sparkling melodic form and wrapped once more in lyrical daisy chains, even as tracks such as “Losing You”, “Permanent Danger” and “Pure” sequel “Green Eyes” lay Broudie’s underlying melancholia bare. [ Sample lyrics: “My heart’s in trouble”; “Why do I feel broken from the start?”; “Love is such a lonely feeling”; “A kiss is better than another fight.” Everything alright at home, Ian?

“Well, I live alone,” he says, “so it’s probably me I’m fighting with… I tried so hard not to make it a sad record. The first song that I finished was ‘It’s Great To Be Alive’, about the fact that as you grow older you’re sort of a replica of yourself every day… a slightly worse version of yourself, to a degree. It’s saying, ‘Stop f***ing moaning with your first world problems, it’s f***ing great to be alive’.”

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The sentiment is echoed in the title track, a tribute to a friend of Broudie’s who died from cancer during the pandemic. “When I was going through probably my darkest time, he was a guy who you just couldn’t stop laughing when you were with him. He was just a brilliant guy. He couldn’t abide me not doing a record, so that’s about him coming round and saying, ‘Look at the world, I had such a great time and you’re sitting in your house, get out here, come on’.”

Is it difficult to maintain such an optimistic outlook in the face of a diseased and overheated world going to hell in a post-Brexit mini-Budget? Broudie breaks into another grin. “I’ve tried to build a bubble around myself because if I turn the news on and look at everything, I’ve pretty much lost faith in anything bigger than [the] people you speak to. That’s great, but as a wider thing of ‘the people’ and ‘the government’ and ‘the world’, I think I just need to put my bubble around myself because I can’t affect that. So it isn’t hard.”

Dodging any political discussion (“I’m an old punk rocker, anarchy is probably the answer”), he points to an uplifting bubblegum pop song he wrote mid-pandemic called “Sunshine”. He’d been waking up in the middle of the night, worrying. “I’d have Donald Trump going on about some b******s about injecting yourself with bleach or something, and I’d wake up in the night going ‘Oh my God’,” he recalls. “But then you go up onto the roof, you have a cup of tea and then the world wakes up, and every day is a new day and everything is another chance. The world keeps turning, nothing’s forever, everything changes. For me personally, when the sun comes up and the sun shines, I’m able to just turn all that s*** off.”

Ask why it took him over a decade to come around to making a new Lightning Seeds album and he speaks for 20 minutes straight. He cites “uncertainty and anxiety”, his OCD studio obsessiveness (“if it’s not right to my ears I feel physically sick and it upsets me until I can put it right – it’s a mad, silly feeling and it makes me difficult to work with sometimes because literally, physically, it drives me nuts”), and the evasive quality of a definitive Lightning Seeds song.

“It’s really hard to be positive and uplifting without being banal,” he says. “You want it to reach people, you want to give it a positive energy, but you don’t want to be Mr Blobby. It’s easier for me to write something that’s a little wistful, and The Lightning Seeds, when I get it right, capture both things in an odd way. When music does that, it gives it a 3D quality and you’re able to discover things… emotionally you get something else.”

In recent years, Broudie has discovered a fresh love of playing live (with a band now featuring his son Riley). But he’d “been through the wringer emotionally and lost the joy” of songwriting, and was wary of adding to pop culture’s self-pitying undertone. “I started writing and I liked the songs, but I felt like there’s loads of other people doing records that are moaning at the minute, and I don’t love them. I didn’t want to join in.” Plus, he confesses, “opening myself up to making an album and going to that place in my head I have to go – it takes something out of you, and then you’ve got to put yourself up for judgement.”

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Fans at shows would constantly push for new material, but it took the intervention of The Coral’s James Skelly to convince Broudie to record a finished song at his Parr Street studio in Liverpool. Having one tune gave him the recording bug again (“you start to get emotionally attached to the songs and it rolls on from there”), but recording many of the tracks alone at home in the middle of the night proved challenging: “Sometimes when you had something it was elating, but a lot of it I was miserable having to do that.” The technology of music-making had marched on since his last foray too.

“There was a moment when I thought, ‘should I approach it like people do records now?’,” he says. “So I got a couple of programmes that you can get and you press something and the record just starts making itself. You can control it to a degree, it’s a bit like you’re driving the car but it’s on automatic, it won’t go near the next person, it won’t go out of the lane. So you’re able to drive it but you’re not able to go where you want to go. I found that I couldn’t use any of the stuff that was why I was good at music. It would let me. But if I just ignored all that I could come up with something that was kind of cool, to be honest. And I was like, ‘is this the song I wrote or is this where I pressed eight buttons and it took me somewhere?’.”

It isn’t any sort of indie-pop purism that keeps Broudie married to the idea of organic melodicism. It’s more rooted in his insecurities about his singing voice (“I always feel like I have to have a really strong melody, if you’re not a great singer”) and his background in the thriving 1980s Liverpool rock scene that revolved around the 600-capacity venue Eric’s. He played in Big In Japan with The KLF’s Bill Drummond, Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Holly Johnson and Siouxsie & The Banshees drummer Budgie; produced Echo & The Bunnymen’s most celebrated albums and mingled with The Teardrop Explodes, OMD, Pete Wylie and Dead Or Alive.

He speaks fondly of the era. “Out of those people I was probably the least likely to [succeed] because everyone was so much larger than life. You’d be having a drink and it would be Holly Johnson or Pete Burns or Pete Wiley never shutting up or Mac [Bunnymen singer Ian McCulloch] telling you he’s written The Best Song anybody has ever written in the world ever, and it’s one chord.” He recalls Drummond convincing him to produce the Bunnymen records – despite a total lack of production experience – by telling him that he could do it as an alter ego called Kingbird from an alternative universe. “I didn’t want to get pulled into being a successful producer,” he chuckles. “‘No, no, I want to be a failed writer!’” And in remembering how he initially stumbled into Big In Japan simply by wandering into a Liverpool arts school as a Velvets-obsessed 15-year-old, being instantly recruited as guitarist in a play called The Illuminatus and thereby running into Drummond and singer Jayne Casey, he weaves his way to the crux of The Lightning Seeds’ success.

“[Big In Japan] was rubbish, but it was a laugh,” he says. “We only had five songs but we had a track called ‘Reading the Charts’. We used to [play] feedback on our guitars and Jayne used to read the charts of that week. It was that kind of thing. I had this kind of epiphany and I’ve lived by it ever since. It’s a simple thing, but if you have a good idea and you’re not great at doing it, it’s always going to be a great idea. Even if you can’t master it, it’s a great idea, it’s a great melody. So even if you’re unconfident in yourself, you know this is good. I think The Lightning Seeds is absolutely that.”

‘See You in the Stars’ is out this Friday