There was a moment when Ian Broudie feared his career with The Lightning Seeds was finished before it had even really begun. It was 1989, and his debut single “Pure” – a song Broudie recorded mostly by himself in his spare room and was limited to just 300 copies for sale – was about to be played by influential Radio 1 DJ Steve Wright.
Broudie sat next to the radio expectantly as song started up. Then suddenly, Wright stopped the record. “Who are The Lightning Seeds?’ he asked live on air. “I’ve never heard of them?” Broudie’s heart sank. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, they’ve took it off! They obviously think it’s awful, it’s over.’”
But then Wright said: “This is fantastic!” and turned it back on, from the start. When the song ended, he played it again. “Pure” became Broudie’s favourite song. It is “a miracle that changed my life”.
Broudie would go on to become one of the best tunesmiths of his generation, a writer of wonderfully melodic and uplifting indie-pop songs tinged with vulnerability and life’s uncertainties – think how his enduring England football song “Three Lions” is at once anthemic while capturing the realities of being a football fan (that your team mostly doesn’t win, but you live in hope anyway).
Broudie, 65, has a gift for what he calls “the bittersweet thing”. Where does that come from? “I’m a miserable bastard and I’m desperately trying not to be,” he says laughing. “I’m a person who finds it hard to live in the moment. So I’m really trying to err on the positive. I don’t want to give in to the negative, because that’s my natural habitat.”
![STRADBALLY, IRELAND - SEPTEMBER 03: Ian Broudie of The Lightening Seeds performs at Electric Picnic Festival 2023 at Stradbally Estate on September 03, 2023 in Stradbally, Ireland. (Photo by Kieran Frost/Redferns)](https://wp.inews.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/SEI_178134338.jpg?w=760)
His excellent new memoir Tomorrow’s Here Today: The Lightning Seeds, Football and Cosmic Post-Punk reads like one of his own songs: full of heart and sparkling melancholy. It contains highly entertaining, often self-deprecating stories about a journey that began immersed in the thriving Liverpool punk scene of the late 70s that was populated with an improbable number of future pop stars: the members of Broudie’s first band Big in Japan, Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood and The KLF’s Bill Drummond, as well as Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch, Pete Burns of Dead or Alive and Julian Cope of The Teardrop Explodes.
A music obsessive, from there he “accidentally” became studio producer to bands like Echo and the Bunnymen and The Fall before his own 90s chart success with hits like “Lucky You”, “Perfect” and “The Life of Riley”, written after the birth of his son, Riley, in 1991.
But the book is also a personal tale that touches on failure, faith, tragedy and loss – and ultimately, the redemptive power of music. Sitting in an empty west London pub one rainy Wednesday afternoon, Broudie, short and slight in dark blue shirt and grey stubble, is good-natured company: funny, sincere and self-effacing.
But he admits to being nervous about the book, as he didn’t intend to reveal quite so much of himself. “I’m a little unguarded and I didn’t mean to be. When I did the audiobook, I kept saying, ‘I don’t think I want to share that, can I take it out?’”
Broudie is open in a way he’s rarely been before. He was born in Liverpool in 1958 into a happy Orthodox Jewish family, and the book reveals for the first time what it was like for him growing up Jewish with what he describes in his memoir as “a small but ever-present sense of threat”.
“Liverpool, contrary to popular belief, was really racist back then,” he tells me. He writes in the book about some uncomfortable moments, including a Big in Japan gig in Halifax full of National Front members making Nazi salutes (“that was frightening”).
It meant at Eric’s, the famous Liverpool nightclub at the centre of the punk scene, he was more reserved and self-conscious than many of the “larger than life” characters. “I think I just felt outside of everything. I felt a little bit alone. Some people weren’t great to you. I think that made me extra cautious. And I think that tends to keep your head down. You don’t want to be the frontman. You want to be the guy behind the frontman.”
![UNITED KINGDOM - JANUARY 01: Photo of Frank SKINNER and LIGHTNING SEEDS and Ian BROUDIE and David BADDIEL; Ian Broudie with Frank Skinner & David Baddiel (Three Lions fame) (Photo by Patrick Ford/Redferns)](https://wp.inews.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/SEI_178134495.jpg?w=760)
What he really wanted, he says, is “to be Keith to someone’s Jagger”. But, without a band, he reluctantly sang his own songs, encouraged by his great friend and long-time collaborator Terry Hall of The Specials. Hall died last December. “The idea Terry’s not around is weird. I always think ‘Terry would like this – oh’.”
It wasn’t until 1994’s third album, Jollification, that “I found my voice. I’m not just there by default”. It went platinum. How did he take to becoming a pop star? “In the loosest sense of word,” he smiles. “Well, I got disguised. I put sunglasses on and grew a beard. I was like Mr Potato Head.” Was he trying to hide? “Looking back, yeah. I’m not the most confident person within myself.”
Things turbocharged with 1996’s “Three Lions” – composed with comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner – which, for a short while, made him “McDonalds famous”. He originally turned down the offer of writing England’s official Euro 96 song, but became excited when he saw posters advertising tournament matches at Liverpool’s Anfield stadium. Hence “it’s coming home” – as in the tournament, not the trophy, which has become the widespread (mis)interpretation.
“It’s like Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’,” he says, of another misread song. “It’s just about the tournament – it couldn’t be more straightforward. But songs do take on a different meaning. And I’m okay with that. Because it’s not mine anymore.”
The song was actually misunderstood from the start. The FA rejected it at first, annoyed that it wasn’t triumphant enough and irked at the “30 years of hurt” sentiment. “They went ‘you’re saying we’re shit!’” The England squad didn’t take to it either. “The players were like, ‘are you talking the piss?’ But it’s not about the team. It’s about the fans.”
![Undated handout photo of (left to right) David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and Lightning Seeds frontman Ian Broudie who have given their classic football anthem Three Lions, a festive reworking ahead of the 2022 men's World Cup. Issue date: Friday November 18, 2022. PA Photo. See PA story SHOWBIZ Football. Photo credit should read: Joe Magowan/PA Wire NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used in for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder.](https://wp.inews.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/SEI_134150353.jpg?w=760)
But “Three Lions” captured the mood of the nation. “I didn’t realise what a massive headline it would be in my career. You can talk about ‘Pure’ all you want, but no one’s gonna remember that.”
The song’s success left him with a dilemma – one he still wrestles with – about whether to perform it during Lightning Seeds gigs. At the first concert after Euro 96 in Preston, he decided against it – only for the lights to come up at the end of the show to reveal a front row full of football shirts. “There were kids crying,” he says. “There’s people still upset about it now.”
Dizzy Heights (1996) gave The Lightning Seeds another hit album, but Broudie, post-divorce, soon ran out steam. After 1999’s overthought album Tilt flopped (“my sense of uplift deserted me”) he put the band on pause – only to find he struggled with the loss of status. “Which is funny, because I never liked fame. But it’s a real readjustment. And not for why you might think. It’s because you’re on the backfoot all the time. You don’t know if someone recognises you or not. And I wasn’t famous enough to be shielded. It was a funny no man’s land.”
While he had success producing The Coral and The Zutons, it proved to be a dark period for Broudie. In a few years in the early noughties, he had a series of bereavements: both his parents in quick succession; his sister Sharon at 44 from a brain tumour, and then his older brother Robert from suicide shortly after in 2006. It left him feeling like “one wing is broken”.
Broudie writes movingly in the book about his brother, a subject he included reluctantly. Robert, a criminal lawyer, had a history of depression, and jumped off the top of the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool aged 55. “It never stops being raw,” Broudie says quietly. “I have so many regrets to deal with around my brother. It’s hard to be around people with mental health issues. And it’s hard to figure out when they’re ill and when they’re horrible, to be honest. We had a kind of fractious relationship. It was unresolved to a degree.” He’s didn’t realise how badly it all affected him. “Later you go, ‘God, I wasn’t fine.’ I think I don’t deal with things terribly well.”
![UNSPECIFIED - JANUARY 01: Photo of Martin CAMPBELL and Ian BROUDIE and LIGHTNING SEEDS; L-R: ?, Ian Broudie, Martin Campbell (Photo by Mick Hutson/Redferns)](https://wp.inews.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/SEI_178135421.jpg?w=760)
It led to a period where Broudie, living alone, found solace in drink – he once drunkenly left his flat and stumbled onto the set of the Paddington film in Notting Hill. “It was my attempt to live in the moment. I thought that life is a fragile thread, so I decided to stop worrying about music. But that is not getting drunk and being a fucking idiot. It took me a while to realise that.” He gradually asked himself: “’What would make you feel like you’re fulfilled?’ Oh – music.”
Realising he’d “let The Lightning Seeds slip down the divisions”, he credits his son Riley, who became his manager (as well as live guitarist), for re-energising his “journey back to music”. The Lightning Seeds’ 2022 album See You in the Stars, their first for 13 years, was full of vintage Broudie vim and melodicism. “I think my concentration has come back. I seem to have recovered myself.”
The future is bright, and he has made peace with the past: that “Three Lions”, and not “Pure”, will be his legacy. “Unless I can do something else,” he says. “Maybe that’s why I’m driven to still try.”
‘Tomorrow’s Here Today: The Lightning Seeds, Football and Cosmic Post-Punk’ is published by Bonnier, £22