The Lightning Seeds Interview

Having battled through a period of hardship, The Lightning Seeds’ Ian Broudie joins Classic Pop to reflect on a career in pop, talks life on the road and the possibility of new music
Words by Jordan Bassett

In 2025, Ian Broudie still hasn’t got round to finishing his breakout song, Pure. The dreamy indie-pop track reached No.16 on the UK Singles Chart in 1989, laying the groundwork for The Lightning Seeds’ place in the Britpop scene of the following decade, as Broudie’s brand of bruised optimism set him apart from the chest-out braggadocio of many of his peers.

“My favourite track that I ever did is Pure,” he tells Classic Pop, “and that’s not even mixed! I haven’t really sorted the solo out – I would have changed the solo in the middle. We never finished it. I said to the engineer, ‘We shouldn’t finish this one.’ He said, ‘I’ll just do a quick rough mix’ – and that’s what came out.”

In his elegiac and often very funny autobiography, 2023’s Tomorrow’s Here Today, Broudie notes that unfinished things have “potential” that can be lost when their form becomes fixed. Although he’s talking about songs (which brings to mind Noel Gallagher’s admission, in 2021, that Wonderwall is “not finished”), he also evokes stories of hope and promise that capture the imagination because we don’t yet know their endings.

Broudie’s book, which charts his early years in the Liverpool music scene, certainly evokes a sense of hope and promise that does come to fruition as The Lightning Seeds capture the zeitgeist and become one of the biggest British acts of the 90s. The sole constant member of the project has been taking stock of late. Speaking from his home in west London, where he’s taken a break from doing a decidedly unstarry deep clean, the singer-songwriter, who turned 67 on 4 August, seems slightly in awe of the Seeds’ longevity.

Lasting Impression

In the 90s, Broudie says, he was an outlier as essentially a solo artist in a world of bands. “You want [your music] to last. At the core of it is your emotions and your heart and soul. If you can get that into it, it should have a timeless quality – but it’s a different thing when it’s four guys in a room.”

With a group, he reasons, there’s “serendipity” and chemistry at work: “It was odd for me just being me, and I basically just had to do it all. But as time’s gone on, that was the future: people sitting in front of a computer [and making music]. So, in a way, the sound of it relates more to now than if I’d had a band.”

During his pomp, from his 1990 debut album Cloudcuckooland through to 1996’s Dizzy Heights, Broudie was set apart from the likes of Blur and Oasis through his use of loops and production effects (those bands explored similar terrain, but not until later on). He never wanted to be a frontman and would have happily ceded the spotlight to another singer – the Mick Jagger to his Keith Richards, as he puts it – if he’d found the right collaborator.

Luckily, having served as producer for the likes of Echo And The Bunnymen in Liverpool in the 80s, he had the chops to go it alone. He entered this scene via Eric’s, the city’s legendary club that became a crucible for punk in the late 70s. Here Broudie helped to form Big In Japan, the art-punk collective for whom he played guitar alongside a pre-fame Bill Drummond, Holly Johnson and Budgie AKA Peter Clarke, who went on to cause sensations with The KLF, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Siouxsie And The Banshees.

King Kingbird

Although they were together for less than a year, releasing just one EP in 1978’s From Y To Z And Never Again, the group has garnered an almost mythic status, given what its members would later achieve.

Still, Broudie says a reunion sounds better on paper than it perhaps would be in real life: “Big In Japan was firstly not very good and secondly only lasted a short period of time. I learnt a lot through being in the band. The only person I’m still close with, really, is Holly – we’re still pals. I haven’t seen Bill Drummond forever. I text with Budgie a little bit. But it’s so long ago and there wasn’t any real artistic value in it, really.

“It was kind of fun and there was an attitude in it, but I don’t think there’s a canon of work where we could reform and go, ‘Here are the songs – let’s bring them back to life!’ It was more about doing stuff at the time and the energy of it.”

At least one connection formed through Big In Japan would prove to be a catalyst for Broudie’s long-term career, as he was asked to produce tracks for post-punk outfit Echo And The Bunnymen and eventually helmed their acclaimed 1983 album Porcupine. Although he’d yet to make a name for himself with The Lightning Seeds, Broudie only agreed to the job under the pseudonym Kingbird as he didn’t want to be defined as a producer. The Kingbird moniker was originally coined by a friend of Broudie’s, who assigned him the name during a chemically enhanced episode in which he predicted a nuclear explosion that they would need to navigate together.

Precious Friendship

A nuclear explosion notwithstanding, it seems extraordinary that Broudie, then only in his mid-twenties, had the confidence and wherewithal to withhold his name from what would seem like such a huge opportunity. Most people would jump at the chance. “I think I had an arrogance that you need to have,” he reflects. “I felt I was gonna do something and I had something I wanted to say. It never struck me that that wouldn’t work out. It’s just the hubris of youth, really.”

Even so, Broudie co-produced the self-titled EP by The Colourfield, the short-lived collective formed by the late Terry Hall after the former Specials singer called time on Fun Boy Three in 1984. “My friendship with Terry Hall is one of the most precious friendships of my life,” Broudie says. “We just got on. We hit it off and that spanned many years.”

It turns out that Broudie has been thinking about his work with The Colourfield due to an upcoming rerelease of the band’s work. “In those days, people would do a couple of tracks with you and if it went well, you’d do an album – and I never did the album.” He adds with a laugh, “I always thought it did work out, but it probably didn’t!”

Man In Demand

The reluctance to be pegged as a record producer has lasted throughout Broudie’s career, though he twiddled knobs for some impressive names. In the mid-Noughties he worked with the likes of Merseyside groups The Coral and The Zutons, while just last year he produced Paul Heaton’s sprightly solo album The Mighty Several. Even when The Lightning Seeds were at their height, he headed into the studio with Sleeper, The Icicle Works (which featured percussionist Chris Sharrock, whose nephew Jim now drums live with The Lightning Seeds) and Alison Moyet – Broudie co-produced the latter’s 1994 album Essex.

What does he recall from those sessions? “I really liked Alison,” he says. “It was probably a funny moment in her career, wasn’t it? She was betwixt and between after being so big with Yazoo and everything that followed. It felt to me like she was still a big star. I was nervous: ‘She’s famous! Oh my God!’”

The sessions went so well that Moyet co-wrote My Best Day, a trippy, breakbeat-led track from The Lightning Seeds’ third album Jollification, an LP which also featured Terry Hall, and would gradually rack up a million sales.

Still Roaring

In his autobiography, Broudie admits that it’s a source of pride, with a shade of sadness, that his best-known song remains Three Lions, the FA-endorsed football anthem he penned with comedians Frank Skinner and David Baddiel for Euro ’96. “It’s a shadow that obscures lots of other things I’m very proud of,” he wrote.

Still, he’s revisited the song a number of times (most recently with Three Lions (It’s Coming Home For Christmas), a fun festive version released for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar) and the track has certainly taken on a life of its own. “It’s funny,” Broudie says, “because every phrase from Three Lions… people just take everything [from it]. Even now, [commentators] say, ‘So, is it gonna come home?’ and ‘Years of hurt.’ It’s really weird.”

“It does occur to me that I never wanted to be the frontperson – I felt like someone else could maybe be a star in front of it – and Three Lions is the only song that I’m not the frontperson for and it’s enormous.”

If there were a “better communicator” upfront for the band, he suspects, it might be easier for him: “Comedians are so great with audiences; they’re so good at connecting the stage with the audience.

“Some people have that naturally. I noticed that with Three Lions; they opened that passageway very much more effectively than I do.”

Tales Told

After Dizzy Heights – The Lightning Seeds’ fourth studio album, released in November 1996 and reaching No.11 on the UK Albums Chart – Broudie’s career stalled somewhat when 1999’s Tilt failed to meet his own and fans’ expectations. In Tomorrow’s Here Today, he admits that he allowed himself to be steered by his record label, Epic, resulting in an unfocused LP.

Broudie wouldn’t release another Lightning Seeds album for a decade, though there was a solo record, 2004’s Tales Told, which was much more downbeat and stripped-back than the music that had made him famous.

The Lightning Seeds broke their hiatus with 2009’s melancholic Four Winds. A beautiful return, the track Said And Done contained the heartbreaking lyric, “Over and over/ Life keeps messing with my plans,” which seemingly summed up this period in the singer-songwriter’s life.

He and his wife Becky had split up, which preceded a string of tragedies: Broudie’s parents both passed away in the early Noughties, his sister Sharon died from a brain tumour in 2005 and his brother Robert took his own life in 2006.

After Four Winds, Broudie didn’t release a follow-up until 2022’s more hopeful See You In The Stars. In a four-star review, Classic Pop’s Jon O’Brien wrote that the LP “plays like an alternative greatest hits”.

The year before that album’s release, Broudie told the NME’s Gary Ryan: “After various personal events in my life, I lost the bittersweet thing I’d always had and my songs just felt like they were sad and I couldn’t reverse that.” How did he reverse it?

“I don’t know if I have, really,” he says. “I had an iron will where I would just sit there for three days and work on a song. I was obsessed with it and I’d think of nothing else. Since that time, I can’t do that. I have to force myself. It’s almost like homework when I make records now. It’s not like homework when I’m writing, I’ll sit at home on the guitar for hours, jamming and write a tune.

“Something changed during that period: there’s a sort of lonely sadness that’s focused and now it makes me not want to do it. I get really down.”

Jollified Pop

You wouldn’t know this from See You In The Stars, of which O’Brien also wrote: “It’s clear from these 10 sharp, sweet tunes that the master of jollified pop has rediscovered his mojo.” Onstage, too, Broudie exudes nostalgic warmth, despite the fact that he long said he found live performance difficult.

His guitar-playing son Riley (about whom he wrote 1992’s buoyant The Life Of Riley before the lad was even born) is now a fully-fledged member of the live band, as well as the Seeds’ manager. “With your children, you want to play them records that are important to you,” says Broudie. “Even when they’re seven, their opinion’s as important as yours; it’s a level playing field.” When Riley began to join him onstage, says Broudie, “it made it a pleasure for me. That was the turning point, really – I realise now as we’re talking!”

Thanks to its cross-generational live members, The Lightning Seeds project is now as strong as it’s ever been. Given that he’s written his autobiography, embarked on a 35th anniversary tour and may soon rework some older tracks, the past few years seem to have been pretty reflective for Ian Broudie. What has he learned about himself in the process?

“Well, I also became a granddad in January,” he smiles, “and that’s really been a big moment for me – much bigger than I imagined, actually. It’s put me in my place in some ways.”

Broudie notes that artists can live “in a bubble” because they don’t experience a lot of the same life markers as other people: “It’s a Peter Pan existence to some degree. Now that’s gone and I’m embracing that… I can’t really finish that sentence, but it’s definitely given me some perspective.”

Having made his point beautifully, he doesn’t need to complete the sentence – after all, some things are best left unfinished.

Purely Following The Music

He might have been looking back of late, but Broudie has recently been working on new material. “I’ve got a few songs, if I can ever get myself to just sit there and put them down, that I’d really like to have in my canon of work − four or five things that I’d really like to do.”

As to the themes of this material, he adds: “I’m trying to purely follow the music and just be oblivious to the world, because the world is such as fucking weird place at the moment. I’m trying not to watch the TV too much and be in a bubble again. As an artist, you have to live in your own universe and follow that through and see where that is and zoom out afterwards.”

After all these years, might he ever go back and finish Pure, the breakout song he never got round to completing in 1989? “And ruin it, you mean?” he laughs. “I’d love to do another version. A lot of people do that reimagining of things and maybe I wouldn’t mind doing a few things like that; it’d be really quite interesting.”

All of this, he suggests, could come together in a shiny new package: “It might be nice to do a bit of a reimagining of some stuff, and four or five news ones, and maybe try to put them together in a certain way.”

So perhaps lightning may strike twice after all…

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Featured image credit: Peter Ashworth

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