This month The Charlatans release their 12th studio album Modern Nature.

To celebrate the release, and the 25 years since their 1990 debut Some Friendly, we went to visit frontman Tim Burgess at a North London rehearsal room.

Armed with a dozen of our own favourite songs by the band, we quizzed Tim about his thoughts and memories of Digital Spy's own personal Charlatans best-of.

1. 'The Only One I Know' from Some Friendly (1990)

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"It was obvious that song was a big one when we played it. We always played it second. We had this instrumental called 'Imperial 109' and it'd go into 'The Only One I Know'. People would just kick off at that one.

"After 'Indian Rope' we signed to Beggars Banquet and we were going to put out a track called 'Polar Bear'... my mate who was a fan said, 'I was just thinking about how people erupt when the guitar riff comes in [on 'The Only One I Know']'.

"I thought, 'I'll mention it to the band when I get to the studio', and there was a phonecall from the label saying ' I think you should record 'The Only One I Know'. A lot of people were thinking the same thing. That was the first time we were aware that we should do something!"

2. 'Then' from Some Friendly (1990)



"The thing that we had that no-one else had was Rob Collins. We thought, John Squire is a brilliant guitar player for The Stone Roses and he can have solos, but we've Rob who can do equally great solos but on a Hammond."

3. 'Weirdo' from Between 10th and 11th (1992)

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"I used to go to The Hacienda and I used to like a lot of dance music. On Some Friendly I was quite getting into [drummer] Jon [Brookes] playing certain beats, or taking beats from something that we'd heard from the Hacienda or a club track.

"It was quite shared. Rob was a big Who fan, [bassist] Martin [Blunt] was a big Prisoners fan. So everyone brought stuff in. The second album we wanted to change, we wanted things to be more direct. The musical landscape at the time - grunge had come in, Nevermind came out and it was quite direct.

"We thought if we were more direct it would be quite suitable to the surroundings. 'Weirdo' was about as direct a Hammond organ as some of the more explosive songs on the radio were like then. 'Weirdo' was the last song mixed and a brilliant job done by Flood."

4. 'Jesus Hairdo' from Up To Our Hips (1994)

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"I was reading Douglas Coupland's Shampoo Planet - my mate went to a book signing and got a book signed to me and I was quite chuffed about that. In the video I had the British flag and the American flag on my back and it was quite funny.

"It was the last single from Up To Our Hips and probably the most commercial, even though where it was coming from wasn't commercial.

"I remember with Between 10th and 11th it was a big shock to a lot of people. We went more electronic and then after that we decided we didn't want electronics at all, we went back to bass, drums..."

5. 'Just When You're Thinking Things Over' from The Charlatans (1995)

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"That's my favourite video. The video was directed by a girl called Lindy Heymann... she ended up doing five videos for the band, we got very close and we trusted her completely.

"She got me to act, which was something we'd never done before and we'd never considered. It felt very natural and she was very good at coaxing it out of us. It's inspired by Performance and it came off really well.

"The thing about the Britpop thing that was happening, 'Jesus Hairdo' came out in June and we started straight away on our next album, which became The Charlatans... 'Just When You're Thinking Things Over' got put on daytime rotation on Radio 1 and went in at 15, which was brilliant.

"That set the album up and the album went to number one. It was amazing. We got single of the week in the NME the week that 'Country House' and 'Roll With It' came out but we didn't think about that at all - it was everybody else. We just had our biggest hit since 'The Only One I Know'."

6. 'One To Another' from Tellin' Stories (1997)

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"It was weird. Rob had died, and we'd never played it live before. Knebworth [with Oasis] was the first time we'd ever played it live, and as if we didn't have enough to think about, we were debuting 'One To Another' and 'North Country Boy'. They were good songs, so people went with it.

"People, to be honest, went with us the whole way that day because everybody in the whole audience knew. Maybe not everyone in the audience knew of us before that. It was one of the most difficult, but one of the most rewarding, under the circumstances."

7. 'Forever' from Us and Us Only (1999)



"We wanted to push it and we wanted to release a seven-minute single. I don't know where it came from. We thought we'd push our luck. We'd had five singles on Radio 1 and we thought we'd try and sneak in a seven-minute one!

"After Rob died we had to reinvent ourselves again, we didn't have any choice. Tony [Rogers] came in and it's like, let's have a song that begins with a Hammond, then a break then it's all piano, and is all really lovely sounds.

"The song is a hard one to talk about because the words that go with it are not very flattering words - 'progressive', 'in sections' and stuff like that. It's quite prog! But it doesn't sound bad at all... but you could say quite bad things about it if you wanted to."

8. 'My Beautiful Friend' from Us and Us Only (1999)



"It doesn't sound like it really, but the beat came from something off Bobby Digital [in Stereo] by RZA. There's this digital drumbeat. We got into using loops on Us and Us Only quite a lot, even though in my head it's an acoustic record - I don't know where I get that from!

"It's just a song about saying goodbye to something and welcoming something new. That was a phase I was going through. We'd lost Rob, we'd gained Tony, and I was about to move to Los Angeles. I was saying hello to 12 years of my life living out there."

9. 'Love is the Key' from Wonderland (2001)

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"The first song that was written for that album was 'A Man Needs To Be Told' and I sang it in falsetto. I was listening to Neil Young and I was thinking about the first three tracks on After The Goldrush and I was a big fan of Nixon by Lambchop, and I was listening to a lot of Curtis Mayfield as well.

"All these things made me feel that falsetto wasn't a weird thing. We did 'A Man Needs To Be Told' - me, Mark and Jim [Spencer] our engineer just had this little demo for months. I don't know if anyone else in the band liked it!

"A couple of months later Mark came over to Los Angeles and we started writing. We met up with Danny Saber who had been a fan and a friend of Mark's... we produced 'Love Is The Key', pretty much the three of us. We sent it to the band and said, 'We want to work with this guy - what do you think?' They said, 'We like it!'"

10. 'Blackened Blue Eyes' from Simpatico (2006)

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"I didn't really know what I was doing on that album, because I was a bit worse for wear to be honest. It was an instrumental and I had a few attempts at singing on it.

"I don't really know where the music was coming from, but it was a good riff. It was kind of heavy metal, it sounds like a heavy metal riff to me. But in Los Angeles, I probably didn't notice!

"I thought it was quite interesting. LA's a very dark place, even though it's bathed in sunshine. I was living on the dark side but with sunlight on my face."

11. 'You Cross My Path' from You Cross My Path (2008)



"It's exactly the same as 'Circus of Death' by The Human League and it's pretty much exactly the same as 'Sunrise' by New Order as well. I don't know what came first. It was a three-chord thing. I just thought, 'It's only three chords but I can put my own thing on top'.

"It was very angry. It was very much about somebody. It was fuelled full of a new fire that I'd found from getting sober. I was still living in Los Angeles but I'd quit the dark side and went to the clean living side, but I was quite angry.

"It was very much inspired by the New Order record, because I wanted it to be three chords all the way through. I love that about it."

12. 'Talking In Tones' from Modern Nature (2015)

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"It's got the fizz of electronic stuff in there, but it's a pensive start and there's not much movement at all in the organ. It's very still, then it just opens up into this beautiful, beautiful thing. I really like the contrast.

"It was around in my head for a while, but the first time I shared it with anybody was with the band in January, a year ago.... It was like, 'There's only four of us [after Jon's death], what's going to happen?'. Mark started playing drums, I was on guitar, Martin on bass, Tony on keyboards. And we did it. We recorded it like that.

"Mark obviously went back and did my guitar again, and we eventually got Pete [Salisbury] to come in and play the drums. But that was it, and that was how we went about that, which is a great thing. We have to get this done and we worked it out, the four of us like that.

"'Wow, so what?' - I bet everyone's thinking. But we'd always spin off and did stuff on our own or me and Mark and would go off and do something. This whole album was about the four of us being together and getting over what we had to get over and out of that bringing something really, really beautiful."

The Charlatans' 12th studio album Modern Nature is released on January 26.

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