Ian Broudie on 35 years of The Lightning Seeds: 'I've enjoyed our lap of honour'

After selling out 22 shows last November and December, another 11 have been added this month, including York Barbican, Holmfirth Picturedrome and Middlesbrough Town Hall.

“I’ve enjoyed our lap of honour in a van travelling everywhere around the country, and on a plane,” Broudie says. “It’s been beautiful, actually, because the tour last year went very well, (the gigs) were well attended and there was a lot of affection between the audience and the band. We enjoyed it so much we decided this year we’d go to some of the places we missed.”

The Lightning Seeds actually began life as Broudie’s solo project in 1989, after his spells as a musician in Big In Japan, Original Mirrors and Care plus extensive production work for the likes of Echo and the Bunnymen, The Colourfield, The Icicle Works and The Fall.

Back then, he recalls, it was at odds with the traditional A&R “model” that London-based record companies preferred, with gigs being scouted before an artist was offered a “fortune” and despatched to a studio to make an album. “I didn’t have a band and I was producing, so it was pretty tricky for me to do any of that. It was very lucky the way it worked out,” he says.

He was “thrilled and pleasantly surprised” when his debut single Pure became to top 20 hit, selling 200,000 copies. “It was unexpected,” he says. “When we had a few hundred copies of that song pressed up, I didn’t think it was a life-changing moment. It was just, oh, at least one of my songs will make it onto a record.”

Surprise or not, it would be the start of a three-and-a-half decade journey encompassing seven studio albums and four compilations – the best-selling of which, Like You Do, went double-platinum in the UK and contained the number one single Three Lions.

Along the way, guests on Lightning Seeds albums included Andy McCluskey of OMD, Alison Moyet and Terry Hall of The Specials, of whom Broudie says: “He was a genius, he was a fabulous singer but he didn’t have ‘singer’s disease’, he was very easygoing. Frontmen can be quite difficult, and certainly looking at The Specials, you’d expect Terry to be one of those difficult sods, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. He was very easygoing by the time he’d reached the ripe old age of 29 when we first worked together.”

Broudie has a more complicated relationship with Three Lions, a football song co-written with David Baddiel and Frank Skinner which has been number one three times – in 1996, 1998 and 2018 – and has become ubiquitous at England games. “I think at the time it felt a bit strange with Three Lions placing us in the centre rather than left of field,” he says. “I became recognised all over the place, before it would just be at gigs. But obviously, I’m very grateful for the whole thing and now at ease with Three Lions. At the time it was something that was hard to attenuate to, maybe.”

For a time Broudie retreated from the limelight, mothballing The Lightning Seeds for a decade and putting out an album under his own name. He admits it was “a bit of a confused time” and he only “refocused” ​​​​​​​when his son Riley came on board as the band’s rhythm guitarist and manager.

“Then the whole second wind or this new chapter really came from me initially wanting to show him,” Broudie says. “It was exciting for me to see him experiencing these things​​​​​​​ and it was infectious and it kind of re-energised me.”

See You In The Stars, The Lightning Seeds’ 2022 album, seemed a restatement of many of the things that fans had long loved about the band.

Broudie reflects: “I think events overtook me and I had a lot of bereavement and divorce and my career probably stuttered after (the band’s 1999 album) Tilt, so it was a funny time for me and I think I became quite withdrawn, and when I wrote songs they seemed to have a different kind of melancholia in them, and I couldn’t make them have the duality that The Lightning Seeds’ songs had. That’s why Four Winds (the band’s 2009 album) should have been a solo album because it had that feeling.

“It felt like on See You In The Stars, although there’s some sadness in there, the title track particularly, the feeling was I think three quarters of the way back there to a Lightning Seeds feeling, which is more bittersweet than bitter.”

If See You in the Stars was “kind of a halfway point back to the way” he likes to write, “and maybe just an emotional recovery”, Broudie hopes a new album will emerge fully formed next year.

“I just seem to be very slow these days,” he says. “I was always slow, but now I’m frustratingly and annoyingly slow getting the songs finished. I hope I will have another album out very soon, I’d like to have these songs finished in the next couple of months.”

The Lightning Seeds play at York Barbican on October 9​​​​​​, Holmfirth Picturedome on October 11 and Middlesbrough Town Hall on october 16. https://lightningseeds.co.uk/