There is a certain satisfaction in watching a band finally get their due, even when the story attached to it is tinged with genuine tragedy.

By the time The Charlatans turned up on Top Of The Pops in October 1999, they were operating in a different landscape to the one they had left. Their previous appearance had been nearly two years earlier, off the back of "Tellin' Stories", an album that hit Number 1, went platinum, and became the biggest seller of their career. The catch: they made it while their keyboardist Rob Collins was killed in a car crash partway through recording. The album succeeded against odds that should have finished the band entirely.

Two Years, One Major Pivot

What followed was a significant change of direction on every front. Their contract with Beggar's Banquet came to an end, completed formally by the 1998 Best Of compilation "Melting Pot", and they moved to Universal. The new album, "Us And Us Only", took a country, folk and roots slant, reportedly shaped by Tim Burgess's affinity for Bob Dylan. It peaked at Number 2, which sounds impressive until you factor in that it sold roughly a third of what both "Tellin' Stories" and "Melting Pot" had managed. A chart position does not tell the whole story, and the numbers here tell a fairly blunt one.

The lead single taken from it was "Forever", and even granting it a fair hearing, it is not an obvious single. The full-length album version apparently makes more sense, leaning into a psychedelic quality that the truncated single format cannot quite accommodate. It is a song that works better when you give it room to breathe, which is not the easiest pitch to make on a primetime pop show in front of a studio audience.

It is worth noting that The Charlatans were not exactly strangers to chart success by this point. "One To Another" had gone Top 3 in 1996, and "North Country Boy" followed it up. The public had eventually caught on. But "Us And Us Only" felt like a band deliberately stepping sideways from that momentum, and the sales reflected it.

The TOTP Appearance Itself

There is something slightly awkward about watching a band perform a track this contemplative in the Top Of The Pops format. The show was being recorded at the Time and Icon club in Swansea as part of the Top Of The Pops On Tour project, a venue that no longer exists. Given what we know about the general quality of provincial club aesthetics, perhaps that is no great loss.

The Charlatans are a band we have always respected for not doing the obvious thing, even when the obvious thing would clearly have served them better commercially. "Us And Us Only" is a document of a group choosing their own terms after a genuinely devastating period. That deserves more than mild curiosity about whether it got played in Our Price.

Whether "Forever" was the right call as the single to lead with is debatable. Whether the album deserved better than a third of the sales its predecessor managed is less debatable. It absolutely did. The Charlatans in 1999 were a band carrying real weight and making genuinely interesting music. The numbers just did not reflect that. That is the sort of outcome that still stings, [even when the decade was full of bands who never got the recognition they earned](/uprise/music/10-obscure-but-brilliant-90s-bands-who-deserved-to-be).

They made the right record. The timing just was not on their side.