“I know that if I keep going, I’ve got a song in me that could change the world,” says Chris Bridgett, a Levenshulme-based musician who has been plugging in and plugging away since the late 80s. Not for him are the tiny changes espoused by Frightened Rabbit’s late frontman Scott Hutchison, Chris is unashamed in aiming high.
Who can blame him? He’s had flirtations with fame before, most notably as Madchester came to the fore with Dub Sex – the era’s perennial ‘What if?’ band – and a decade later with Rude Club, who released a handful of singles, recorded an album, and were dropped by their label just as they built up a head of steam. After licking his wounds in the world of artist management for a few years (“musicians are some of the best people you’ll meet, but also some of the worst”) and running a digital marketing agency, he picked up a guitar again in 2013 and hasn’t put it down since. He releases his second solo album, ‘Seven Songs for Summer’ on August 1.
He slathers his speech with a profanisaurus-worth of swear words between sips of a flat white, and despite arriving in Manchester to study architecture 40 years ago, he hasn’t lost a syllable of his Geordie accent. He’s also at the stage of his career, of his life, where other people’s opinions of his work ricochet off an impervious layer of skin that has hardened to rival Kevlar.
“Back in November last year, I released Speedboat on Chapel Street, with no support from labels or PR, I just put it out,” Chris says as he removes layers in the rising heat. “I sold copies of it to people who already know me and a few fans, but there was no radio support, fucking nothing. But I had a load more songs because I play and write every single day. I’m part of the 5am songwriters’ club because I’ve got a business and a family, and it’s the only time I can fucking do it.
“I had 17 or 18 songs songs, and I thought: ‘in this batch, there’s going to be one really fucking good song, I know it’. So, I went in the studio with Ding [producer Simon ‘Ding’ Archer], who I’ve recorded all my stuff with since I started doing music again, and I very quickly put 14 of the songs down – just me, guitar, done. Guides, as we call them.
“So, the idea came to just do it like this, strip it back and find the essence of what the song is, what I’m talking about and who I am. Who the fuck am I in this day and age? Why the fuck am I doing it? As I was recording stuff there was, there was the realisation that it was about the songs. I need to write songs. I’m a songwriter, guitarist, singer – it comes in that order.”
However, with cash for embellishing the collection of tunes with bass, drums and other studio flourishes at a premium, Bridgett decided to roll with the stripped back approach. He took the strongest of his new tracks and chose to release them into the wild now instead of waiting another year or so for funds to make a bigger production.
He also noticed an unexpected thread running through the songs: ‘I See Rainbows’, ‘Golden Hour’, ‘Day in June’.
“It reminded me of Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats, y’know, Seven Songs for Summer, but it’s not,” he says, his hat now joining his tracksuit top on the bench. “The stuff I’m talking about isn’t about skipping through meadows or summery yellow flowers, it’s fucking not that at all. I mean, that’s something that might be worth writing about, but I’m not writing about it.
“It came to the point where I just wanted to release the seven songs as they are. I’ve finally reached the point where I genuinely don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks, I’m just doing it, and hopefully a few people will get what I’m doing.”
Levenshulme legend runs through Chris Bridgett’s music. Holiday at the Secret Lake, the debut album from his previous group Cold Water Swimmers, saw the band posing in the titular body of water on the border with Reddish. His first solo album, Speedboat on Chapel Street celebrates Shazam, which as the title suggests, is a speedboat that sits on top of a pile of wrecks in a scrapyard beside the Horseshoe pub on Chapel Street. There’d be uproar if the owners ever did scrap it.
“For the next album I’m gonna move to fucking Malibu so I don’t have to talk about fucking Levenshulme,” he says while supressing a smirk. “It’s where I live, it’s where I walk, it’s where I take inspiration from places around me, the people I see, the conversations I hear, the books that I read. It all feeds into stuff. If I walk past the speedboat on my way to the train station, I always wonder what its story is. Whose is it? Why’s it there? It’s been there for years. At one point that was somebody’s pride and joy, but now it’s on a fucking scrapheap.
“It just kind of said things to me poetically about life and its ups and downs, and the album was very much about that. The inside cover is a picture of the very first day I moved to Manchester outside my flat in Hulme in 1985, so it was very much about this is where I stared and this is where I am now.
“By ‘88 when I dropped out and joined Dub Sex it was the start of acid house and the Hacienda. I was really lucky because I had friends at Factory who worked there and I ended up working for the Happy Mondays when I left Dub Sex, and it was life-affirming naughtiness on a monumental level that probably scarred my life for the next 20 years, but I got a song called ‘1988’ out of it.”
As you may have gathered, Chris is on a roll.
“I see all this stuff about the Hacienda and 1988 and all these people being interviewed about those years. I was there every single fucking night, but I’ve never seen a photograph with me on it, I’ve never heard my name mentioned, but I was there for fucking all of it.
“So, I talk about our version of 1988. We were bandits in Hulme. We were lawless in the way we were living. We didn’t pay rent, we bought and sold, and that was the way we lived and the way we survived. But we had the best of times, and we never had to queue around the block because my mate Irish Gary worked at Factory – it’s all in the song.”
‘1988’ is the third track on Seven Songs for Summer, and he wants you to hear the entire thing as it’s meant to be heard, not in the bits and bats served up by Spotify’s algorithm. For that to happen, though, he expects you to commit.
“Albums don’t work in the modern era,” he says with a hint of resignation. “We love them because we wanna hear the first song, the second song, and we wanna hear the key changes or the tempo changes or whether there’s a story between the songs. All of that is here because that’s what I focus on.
“But streaming doesn’t like that. Streaming is just like, if you discover an artist, you’ll get the most popular songs. It might not be the most recent songs, and they certainly won’t play you the whole album. You never get to hear the last tracks, they never get any plays, so when I did this, I decided to do it differently. I’ve released four tracks already, then a fifth one on August the 1st, but the full album won’t be on streaming. You’ll only be able to buy the full album from Bandcamp and listen to it the way I want you to listen to it.”
The other way of hearing the album will be a one-off show at The Talleyrand in Levenshulme on Sunday September 21, where Bridgett will run through Seven Songs… in full, along with other tunes from his back catalogue. It’s a rare live outing these days for an artist who, to put it mildly, doesn’t suffer fools.
“Promoters don’t really take me on, and when they do, they offer me stuff I don’t wanna do. I don’t want to travel 150 miles for £50, fuck that, I’m not doing it. The only gig I’ve done this year is Shine On. They’ve always been great with me – probably because of my vintage – and they’re great lads, but the show itself was fucking awful. It was another show where I couldn’t soundcheck properly and I had to resort to playing hard all the time just to get across. So, when I do these [at the Talleyrand] I can play quietly, and you can see all the subtleties in what I’m doing and the stuff I work hard to be good at.
“If I get the chance to only play one or two shows a year, but I get to do them my way, then so be it. I won’t play in venues where you’re a sideshow to someone having a fucking burger. I’m too long in the tooth. My contemporaries are in fucking stadiums. Noel [Gallagher] and Richard [Ashcroft] are contemporaries, the Happy Mondays, too. Then again, the Mondays don’t make music anymore, they’re just a shambles of what they used to be, it’s an embarrassment to be honest.”
Aside from his solo material, there’s also some exciting news for those ever-so patient fans of Rude Club. The album they recorded more than 25 years ago is being teed up for release at an as-yet undecided date in the near future. He listened to it for the first time in over two decades recently, and even for a songwriter not lacking in confidence, was “blown away” by what he heard.
For the uninitiated, Rude Club released a trio of well-received singles in the late-90s, catapulted by the unique rasp of Jane Parker and a major label machine that looked nailed-on to help push the duo to critical and commercial success. Needless to say, men in suits – funnily enough, the name of their second single – kiboshed the notion before the album ever hit the shelves. ‘The Return of the White Paws’ is one of the great lost tunes of the era, which somehow found its way onto a Kerrang! covermount CD, despite sticking out like a steak at a vegan buffet among songs by Fear Factory, Life of Agony and Dearly Beheaded.
“Well, it is on the horizon, it’s going to happen,” Chris says. “Me and Jane have got all the WAVs of the songs and we’re going to put it out as the album that never came out. We’re going to put it out there on Spotify because fans pop up all the time saying that they love Rude Club, so we’re going to put it out so people can hear what a great record we made before the major fucking record label decided that it wasn’t, they wouldn’t make enough money off us, and dropped us.
“It’s something I’m looking forward to just having out there, so you can hear what we’ve done, and it doesn’t get lost in time. There’s nothing else planned around it, but we’ll see what the universe asks us to do.”
Before that, though, Chris Bridgett self-releases Seven Songs for Summer on Friday August 1, which you can buy from Bandcamp.
