IAN Broudie is struggling to remember when the The Lightning Seeds last played Edinburgh.
“It’s been a long, long time – too long,” he says, supping coffee while sun streams into his Liverpool home.
The last time his beloved outfit “toured in earnest” was the best part of two decades ago, he says.
The jaunt supported Tilt, a more dance-orientated album featuring collaborations with Stephen Jones aka Baby Bird and Terry Hall of The Specials and Fun Boy Three.
Tilt isn’t the most recent Lightning Seeds album.
Record company Sony released a collection of songs in 2009 under the title Four Winds, but Broudie didn’t take the record on tour.
“I always feel like that one doesn’t count,” Broudie says of Four Winds.
“Even though I love some of the songs on that record, I don’t really like the way the album turned out, so I didn’t want to tour it.”
The producer-musician intended Four Winds as a relatively mellow, stripped down affair in the vein of Tales Told, a record released in 2004 under his own name.
Sony wanted more hits to match the likes of Lucky You, Sense, Sugar Coated Iceberg and The Life Of Riley; upbeat, infectious hits which crossed over from the indie periphery into the mainstream to be 1990s staples of radio and TV – especially football coverage.
In 1996 the Football Association commissioned Broudie to write a song for the English team’s efforts at Euro ‘96.
The songwriter agreed on condition of the participation of comics Frank Skinner and David Baddiel, then hosts of BBC2’s Fantasy Football League.
To this day, underdog chant-a-long Three Lions is the only song to have hit the UK top spot four times with the same artists: twice in 1996, once in 1998 and again last year during the World Cup in Russia.
Back in the 2000s, record execs wanted a bit more of that: something more produced, something more Lightning Seeds.
But by then Broudie had resumed his acclaimed production work, lending a hand to sparky garage trio The Subways and a new generation of bands from the Liverpool scene such as The Coral and The Zutons.
“I just didn’t feel like the guy from The Lightning Seeds in a while,” says Broudie, noting that he felt “wounded” by his treatment over Four Winds.
“That experience made me unsure whether I wanted to do it any more. At the time too there was a lot of turmoil in my personal life. Lightning Seeds songs always had a certain positive energy to them. Though they’re really a bit miserable, they have this positive feeling to them. But the songs I was writing then didn’t have that feeling.”
The guy from The Lightning Seeds is back, says Broudie, now a youthful 61.
This Summer Sessions gig with two-tone godfathers Madness is the start of a new chapter, he says.
Next month sees the 25th anniversary reissue of Jollification, the 1996 album which spawned flawless hits such as Lucky You, Marvellous, Change and Perfect.
A tour will follow in March, when The Lightning Seeds play a date at Glasgow’s St Luke’s.
By that time, a brand new record will be on the horizon too.
“I’ve kind of breathed life back into the whole thing,” says Broudie, picking out a melody on his guitar. “I haven’t really wanted to do an album until now, but I’ve got a load of songs that I really like and things are in the process of being recorded.
These songs feel like me, and though it doesn’t feel like stepping back in time, whatever ingredients you seem to need to make a Lightning Seeds album, they are in there.”
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