Last week's shock revelations that keyboard player Tony Rogers is suffering from testicular cancer was a rare occurrence of a rock band making the national news. For the Charlatans, it was just business as usual: this, as singer Tim Burgess ruefully admitted, is "the unluckiest band in pop". In 1993, original keyboardist Rob Collins served eight months for his apparently unsuspecting part in a minor armed robbery; he died in 1996 when his car span out of control. Bassist Martin Blunt had a nervous breakdown; and the band's accountant was convicted after relieving the group of £300,000. Any one of these events would have finished a lesser outfit, but The Charlatans have developed an almost pathological staying power. In 1989, they were provincial underdogs to the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. They have outlasted them both.
Nobody questions The Charlatans' authenticity these days, but after three number-one albums the loyalty of their fan base is uniquely touching. Here, as the band plays a low-key warm-up for V2001, ticketless fans listen out in the street to the organ-driven grooves that have sound tracked their lives. Inside, almost everybody has their arms in the air.
Burgess (his sunglasses after dark reflecting a recent relocation to LA) is like a shamanic pied piper, leading his public with universal but endearingly personal songs steeped in dance and classic rock, about facing up to life with determination and an often bloody-minded smile.
The news about Rogers has overshadowed a dramatic musical development. Apparently inspired by doo-woppers the Flamingos and, possibly, the tighter cut of American trousers, Burgess has begun singing in a curious falsetto. Initially it sounds preposterous but gradually it makes sense in a Sly Stone kind of way. And new songs You're So Pretty, We're So Pretty (perhaps the plea "Show me the money" is aimed at unscrupulous financiers) and Is It In You? are as resplendent as any of their hits.
It may be significant that Rogers is the last to leave the stage, clapping the fans as cheers ring in his ears. Then again, his keyboards are situated at the right of the stage, the door is stage left. Even late-comers to the band adopt their philosophy of simply getting on with it.
