Lightning Seeds

Supporting Deacon Blue

35 years after the very first Lightning Seeds singles made their way to record shops, Ian Broudie’s obsession with melody and the magic of recording is a matter of… well not just one record, but a golden run of hits which tells its own story: Pure, Lucky You, The Life Of Riley, Change, Perfect, You Showed Me and Sugar Coated Iceberg have long since become modern standards alongside the definitive football anthem Three Lions, whose four spells at number one have made it one of the 30 best-selling British singles of all time. It’s a story which Broudie finally put into words with the release of last year’s acclaimed memoir Tomorrow’s Here Today – which now also happens to be the name of his group’s first ever career-spanning anthology. Comprising twenty fan favourites alongside brand new music, Tomorrow’s Here Today is to be released alongside a programme of long-overdue vinyl releases for classic Lightning Seeds albums, Cloudcuckooland, Sense, Dizzy Heights and Tilt. These will now stand alongside 1994’s Jollification which enjoyed its own 25th anniversary reissue in 2019.

 And yet, at the centre of this extraordinary body of work is a songwriter who stumbled into a solo career with not even a hint of a fanfare. For most pop fans of a certain age, the first time The Lightning Seeds would have entered their radar would have been back on August 3rd 1989. Among the household names jostling for supremacy that week were Paul McCartney and Kylie Minogue and the briefly omnipresent Jive Bunny. Nestled almost apologetically among them was a video from a group who had, to all intents and purposes, appeared out of nowhere. The song was instantly beguiling, a rhapsodic outpouring of romantic idealism which answered to the name of Pure. This most perfect of love songs, released on a tiny independent label had – thanks in part to a couple of plays from Steve Wright on his BBC Radio 1 show – scraped into the lower reaches of the Top 40. But the identity of the man in the video, with his shaggy fringe and stripy top, remained something of a mystery.