By Jay Mukherjee
I caught up with Mark Burgess as he and The Chameleons were driving from Portland, Oregon to Sacramento, California. This was on the heels of the band recording a session for KEXP in Seattle. Talking to Mark was surreal to me as I have been a fan of the band since 1985. Never in a million years would 16-year-old me have thought that one day he would be talking to one of his musical heroes. That it was on Zoom, and the reception was spotty were other factors which made this whole experience memorable.
After a justifiably fanboy-ish introduction of myself to the band, I got going with a few questions. I started off by complimenting him on his new EP that had just come out in June. (See review by me here.) I remarked upon the fact that it had just cracked the Top 5 on the vinyl charts in the UK, and Mark was proud and couldn’t believe that, after all these years, the band were being recognized. Upon commenting upon how the single "Where are You?" is a perfect bridge between The Chameleons' legacy and a fresh new sound, he thanked me but did say that the single does not typify the rest of their new album. Called Arctic Moon, that one will be coming out later this year. Mark said about the recording itself, "I thought it was going to be a real struggle going in and getting something together after all this time. Especially with that pressure of the legacy on your shoulders! But, in actual fact, it was effortless."
After the release of the EP, Mark lurked around the band's message boards and saw that some folks were not thrilled with the song but he isn’t worried about that. "In fact, why the fuck would we want to sound exactly like we did 40 years ago? We've got four albums of that. Go listen to that and leave us alone." He went on to say that there are other bands, like Drab Majesty, who can carry out that sound better than them doing that type of material at this point. That’s where I pointed to the Interpol t-shirt I was wearing during the interview, to which he nodded. He finished up that idea by saying: “I didn’t want us to make a record that’s based around the sound of a guitar player that left the band 20 fucking years ago. I wanted, you know, [for the EP] to be this band, to reflect this band the way they are now."
Given the death of John Lever, and departure of Dave Fielding, is it still The Chameleons? Mark seemed a bit defensive.
"I mean, you know, it's not Echo and the Bunnymen, is it? It's Will Sergeant and Ian McCulloch. But it is Echo and the Bunnymen because they are potentially Echo and the Bunnymen!" Mark reiterated. "It doesn't really matter who else they're playing with, you know, right? And the same with The Cure. It's like we've got no right to do it, but they don't put their fingers at the fucking Cure. They don't put their fingers at The Bunnymen, you know? It's like, you know, what can you do? I mean, you know, it's like you're not going to start all over again at the age of 63!"
I mentioned to him how it is increasingly getting harder for me to go see these legacy bands because they lack passion and just seem, for lack of better words, old and bored, but I don't get that with The Chameleons. Mark remarked that they do have young people coming to the shows, even if it is with their dads and older siblings, and that threading the needle between old and new is hard.
I wondered what it is like for him, at 63, to sing songs with a point-of-view of someone in their twenties, when he wrote these songs. "Okay, if it’s not relevant, I don’t really want to do it," Mark stressed. "But all those things to me are more relevant now than they were when I did them." Especially so, as we discussed, with an increasing sense of alienation being more widespread which can be directly traced to the internet isolating people from each other. And with Covid and the lockdown, the topics of those songs are still pertinent. "Home is Where the Heart Is", which Mark sang as a tribute to his mother the day after she passed away at the show I attended in Baltimore, is "especially relevant, maybe even more so than when it came out," he remarked.
Once Mark mentioned the internet, it opened up something I have always wondered about bands with such a lasting legacy: whether he was nostalgic for life before the internet, nostalgia being a common theme all throughout his music. He went on to talk about how he has been using the internet to promote his work as far back as 1994, when he showed the guy who ran Dead Dead Good Records a demonstration on how he was using it. The internet, to him, started out as an exciting tool that showed that something without central regulation or governing could run itself and create a "anarchic social system." But just as with "all things of duality, it has become a giant shopping mall to make everyone own a computer, then to sell phones." In the end, the thing he is most nostalgic for from the pre-internet days is privacy.
In 2022, Mark Burgess did an acoustic tour with Chameleons guitarist Stephen Rice, playing in small clubs and people’s homes all over the United States. One of the stops happened right here in Kensington, Maryland, 15 minutes from my house, a concert my buddy John Gardiner organized as a birthday present to his brother. To see Mark in front of 30 or so people was one of the musical highlights of my life. I asked him if we were going to see more of these "crowdsourcing" gigs, the "bottom-up from the fans", intimate concerts. Mark wants to do more of those because they were so rewarding to him: "The most enjoyable tour I’ve ever done!" he said. He loved the intimacy of being able to talk about the songs to the audience in an informal manner. From a business standpoint it was great too since there was such low overhead. Plus, he got to travel to places like Winston-Salem, North Carolina where his wife grew up.
We ended our interview by Mark telling me about the new album. Mark and the band had been hard at work on it, and were hoping to wrap it up soon.
"I mean, it's about half-done," Mark elaborated. "We've already got, I think, more material than we need. And there's a few more ideas we want to explore and stuff. We know that we've got to finish it by probably the end of July. Once we deliver it, it's going to come down to how quickly can that artwork be done? And when do Metropolis want to schedule it for release? It's going to be, you know, it's all going to be production logistics. So, I can't actually say when it's going to emerge, but we're looking to finish it by the end of July."
The artwork will be done by Reg Smithies (guitarist in The Chameleons), so there's a chance the record comes out in late 2024 or early 2025.
We ended our discussion talking about his health and how he is really putting in the work to get in shape for these concerts. Burgess said he doesn’t want to end up like some others of his generation.
"I mean, I have been more active this year. Anyway, over the last year, I've been more active than I've been in the past, you know? I'm looking a little slender, and I'm feeling a little slimmer. I am going to be doing more of that coming up. I've signed up to this kind of, like, yoga thing. Because you never know when you're going to get struck down. You know, it's one of those things where you... I mean, toward the end, Mark Smith was doing fucking gigs out of a wheelchair!"
And with that, we said our goodbyes. It took me the rest of the evening to wrap my brain around the fact that I had just being talking intimately to Mark Burgess!
Thanks again to Glenn here at this site, and Rey Roldan, publicist, for allowing me this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!
Where are You? by The Chameleons is out now. Details here. See The Chameleons in D.C. at The Black Cat tomorrow (Saturday, August 17, 2024)!.
[Photos: Mick Peek]