Burgess Tim. The Listening Party: Artists, Bands And Fans Reflect On 100 Favourite Albums

DK Publishing, 2021. — 304 p. — ISBN 9780241514894.Jim Morrison sang these words on a song called "When the Music’s Over" on the album Strange Daysin 1967. Fast forward 53 years and I’m sat in my studio in the middle of a global pandemic. Strange days, but the music’s not over.
In February 2020 I had just finished a European tour with Liam Gallagher, playing to thousands of people each night in arenas from Scandinavia right down to Italy and back up again, ending in Paris at the end of the month. COVID-19 was following behind us throughout Europe, I think it really hit Italy just after we left and the country went into a full lockdown, and by the time we landed in the UK cases were on the rise here too. Then we went into lockdown in mid-March, which saw shops close, venues close, workplaces close, and schools close.Around the 20th of March, Tim Burgess texted me to say that he was doing some listening parties on Twitter. I’d seen he’d done a few Charlatans ones a couple of years earlier, I’d listened in at the time, pressed play and followed the tweets as we listened back in real time. Now we were in the middle of a full UK lockdown and he asked would I do a listening party for Definitely Maybe, he’d already done one with Franz Ferdinand and I think the next one was with Dave Rowntree for Blur.
We set a date for the Definitely Maybelistening party sometime towards the end of March, and I had no idea how it would go. Thousands of people joined in on the night, and it was the first time I had listened to the album in full from start to finish since probably 1995. The reaction was mind blowing. I was listening back to the album with thousands of fans in real time, memories of recording the album came back, which I tweeted, people replied, people cried, people danced, people laughed.
Tim texted me next day and we were talking about the reaction to the night before, he was asking who else might be up for doing one. I suggested Ian Broudie from The Lightning Seeds; I texted Ian and he was up for it. I’m not sure if Tim expected the listening parties to last more than a couple of weeks, but over a year later they are still going strong and the list of bands and artists is unbelievable. Sir Paul McCartney, David Bowie, New Order, Love, The Communards, Sleaford Mods, Liam Gallagher, The Charlatans, Adam and the Ants, Tears for Fears, the list goes on and on and on.