The great, underrated overcoat band of the ’80s, with an anguished singer and mercurial guitarist to rank with the decade’s lauded stars, THE CHAMELEONS chose their own path over the road to fame and fortune. Reconvening for a fifth album, 41 years since their first, old wounds still smart, but their defiance shines as hard as ever. “Everything people love about us is everything we fought for,” they tell MARTIN ASTON.
POSTING ON HIS INSTAGRAM account on March 22, 2018, Noel Gallagher raised the subject of Strange Times, the third album by Mancunian alternative rock band, The Chameleons.
“I’d forgotten how much this album meant to me,” he wrote. “It came out in ’86. I was 19!! I’ve been listening to it every day since and I have to say it’s blown my mind… again! It must have influenced my early years as a song writer because I can hear ME in it everywhere!!…”
Reminded of this tribute in April 2024, Chameleons singer/bassist Mark Burgess is not exactly overcome with gratitude.
“I don’t give a shit,” he bristles. “Not really. I’ve had people throw their arms around me, crying, saying they love our music so much. Now, that touches me. If David fucking Bowie said it, someone I worship…”
Mention other artists who have acknowledged a debt to The Chameleons’ intense, brooding sound – Interpol, The Stone Roses, Suede, The Verve, Smashing Pumpkins, The Flaming Lips, The Horrors, Moby, it’s quite the list – and Burgess is similarly dismissive. “I don’t hear it,” he says. “Maybe because I’m in the middle of it. No perspective.”
Those who encountered Burgess in the ’80s, ’90s and more recently, will recognise the prickliness. A sensitive character whose feelings – even now, at the age of 64 – are always close to the surface, he’s never knowingly undervalued his band. Yet, unlike their peers in the mid-’80s atmospheric post-punk stakes – U2, The Cure, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Echo & The Bunnymen – and despite melodic gifts and emotional power crystallised on at least two classic albums of the era, The Chameleons failed to become household names.
From beneath still-dense, some might say Gallagher-esque, eyebrows and a shaggy mop of hair, Burgess admits that, to some degree, they may have brought that on themselves.
“We would never play the game,” he says. “Everything people love about us is everything we fought for: the sound, the artwork, how long the songs are. All the other stuff – videos, having the right look, miming on TV, writing hits – we weren’t interested.”
NEARLY 40 YEARS AFTER young Noel Gallagher’s epiphany, what remains of the original C
