Ian Broudie of the Lightning Seeds: ‘I never really envisioned myself as the singer’

Guaranteed to provoke feelings of happiness and nostalgia – as well as recollections of that golden summer of 1996 when football very nearly came home – the timeless melodies of the Lightning Seeds are still ever present in our lives.

Not only does Three Lions still echo around football stadiums, but other tunes written by the band’s frontman and founder Ian Broudie can still be heard from time to time – not least every month on Match of the Day when The Life of Riley provides the soundtrack to the show’s options for Goal of the Month.

The band, along with special guest Badly Drawn Boy, will be heading to Cambridge in October, in support of their new album See You in the Stars, their first album in 13 years also due for release in October.

“I haven’t had any new music out for a long time,” confirms Ian, who divides his time between London and his hometown of Liverpool, “so just getting used to it again really.”

Why has it taken him so long to follow up the band’s last album, 2009’s Four Winds? “Well, a lot of reasons... I always feel a Lightning Seeds song has to have a certain duality to it.

“I always want it to be very positive and melodic, but they do have a sadness to them, and I think I wasn’t really writing in that way – I thought the songs were all sounding a bit... there’s a lot of music out at the moment that I think’s a bit moan-y and I just didn’t want to join in with that.

“I think the last album that came out, I kind of felt that that was somewhere between a solo album and a Lightning Seeds album and got lost in between those two things, so I was never really that happy with it – so I think it made me nervous about making another record until I felt I had the right songs. That’s a very long-winded answer, isn’t it? I could have shortened that to ‘I didn’t really have the songs!’”

Ian, who was unsure at one point whether he wanted to record any more new music, notes that his friend, James Skelly – of fellow Merseysiders The Coral, one of the many bands that Ian has also produced – was very encouraging when it came to writing the first song to feature on the new album, a track called It’s Great to Be Alive.

“He encouraged me to go up and finish a song with him and record it,” recalls Ian, “so I spent two days in Liverpool with him recording. I left with this song and I felt like I really liked it – so that kind of gave me the nudge in a way to go ahead and get the rest done.

“But it was probably three years before I actually knuckled down to doing that. I wrote a lot of the songs as I was going along – and the last five that I recorded, I wrote and recorded them about two weeks before I delivered the album.

“They were done very quickly at home, which is how I used to work when I was writing Pure and stuff like that. And other bits were done mainly between home and a little bit in Liverpool.”

Another well-known lead singer to contribute to the album was Terry Hall of The Specials, who co-wrote Emily Smiles. “I tend to only work and write with people I know already – I don’t really do writing sessions,” says Ian, 63, “but obviously I’ve written a lot with Terry and he’s one of my close friends.

“So it was nice; we spent an afternoon at my house just having an idea and we kicked it around and got it done and it’s turned out really great, I think.”

Originally known as a producer, Ian, an initially reluctant frontman, made records with Echo and the Bunnymen, The Fall, Shack, and Terry Hall. He later returned to producing in the ’00s, helping The Coral and The Zutons get started.

His best-known songs with the Lightning Seeds – who are essentially him, although he has also released music under his own name – include Pure, The Life of Riley, Marvellous, Lucky You, Ready or Not, You Showed Me and, of course, football anthem Three Lions with comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner.

When did he first realise that he had an ear for writing such memorable melodies? “Well thank you for saying that I can. I think it was to make up for the deficiency of my voice really,” says Ian. “I never really envisioned myself as the singer, I always thought I would be the writing guitar player and there would be someone in front of me singing.

“But I never really found anyone with the right chemistry, it just didn’t materialise, and I remember when Joy Division turned into New Order and Barney [Bernard Sumner] was singing. I really liked it and I thought, ‘He’s not a brilliant singer but if you find a melody that’s good and you sing it, I think you could grow into the part’ – so that was where I started from.

“Obviously that meant I had to try and find great melodies, so a lot of the focus was on getting good melody because I didn’t feel that I was a great singer. I’m not really a ‘front person’ I would say – I’m definitely not Rod Stewart or Elvis.”

He adds: “I often think that the only Lightning Seeds song that’s really had a front person, or two front people, focused on it and doing that was Three Lions, so maybe I should have held out for that fantastically charismatic person to be singing them tunes.”

The amazing success and popularity of Three Lions is still ongoing, of course, and there has been talk of re-releasing it yet again for this winter’s World Cup in Qatar. Does Ian ever get tired of hearing it? “I never tire of hearing other people playing it, if you know what I mean,” he replies, “I don’t sit at home and listen to it.”

I think it’s safe to say that the Lightning Seeds are one of those acts where people often know more of the songs than they think they do. “We get a lot of people singing every word and then afterwards saying, ‘I knew the words to all your songs but I didn’t know that you did them’,” notes Ian.

“So I think on the one hand that’s a real compliment and on the other hand it’s like a real drag! But that’s how it is so you sort of get on with it, and I suppose the world has changed very much and now there’s social media... I probably don’t think that would happen now.”

[Read more: Boo Radleys interview: ‘Every time there’s a sunny morning, that song gets played’, Tim Burgess of The Charlatans: ‘The fact that we’re still making music is an amazing thing’]

The band’s Cambridge gig – at the Junction’s J1 – on Thursday, October 27, will be the first date of a month-long UK tour and Ian says that the bulk of the show will be songs from the past, with “two or three new ones in there that I think everyone will really love.”

He concludes: “I just think it will be a great moment for us; we’re in a real creative vein, the band are great and I just can’t wait to play.”

The new Lightning Seeds album, See You in the Stars, is due for release on October 14. For tickets to their Cambridge show, visit junction.co.uk. For more on the band, visit lightningseeds.co.uk.