Born in Penny Lane, Liverpool in 1958, Ian Broudie attended his first gig, the Beatles at the Liverpool Empire, when he was six. A member of punk band Big In Japan in his teens with Holly Johnson and the KLF’s Bill Drummond, he went on to produce records by Echo and the Bunnymen, the Fall, Alison Moyet, Texas and the Coral. Recording as the Lightning Seeds from 1989, he has released seven albums, and his 1996 song for that year’s UEFA European Championship, Three Lions, has been No 1 three times. He has just published his memoir, Tomorrow’s Here Today, and the Lightning Seeds’ 35th anniversary tour starts next summer.
Your songs are often tender, melancholic and heartfelt, but your roots are in the flamboyant post-punk scene in Liverpool. How did you fit in?
I was the kid in the jumper and NHS glasses around all these bursts of colour. There was a feral quality, a wildness to that world around Mathew Street in Liverpool, which was a really derelict place. You had [theatre director] Ken Campbell’s Illuminatus! trilogy opening there in 1976 – so much music, theatre, art, I felt like I was Alice in Wonderland. Having always felt like a bit of a misfit, suddenly I was surrounded by other misfits, and even though some of them were larger-than-life characters like Holly, Bill and Pete Burns, I weirdly fitted in.
