Tomorrow’s Here Today

Ian Broudie's revealing musical memoir

Aug 02, 2024

Happy birthday to Ian Broudie of the Lightning Seeds. Ian published a very enjoyable memoir last year, which I reviewed for the Louder than War website. Here’s the review.

Tomorrow’s Here Today by Ian Broudie

Published by: Nine Eight Books

Ian Broudie has had many musical careers: punk guitarist, post-punk record producer, record-breaking hitmaker with Three Lions and frontman with the Lightning Seeds. His memoir takes you through each of these and reveals the personality behind these achievements.

You would imagine that, with his largely “backroom boy” career, Ian Broudie would be quiet and unassuming. He may appear quiet, but it would be wrong to think that he does not have strong opinions. What comes over from this book is how driven he is when it comes to music. And in particular, to songs.

Ian’s life’s work is serving the songs, and the seeds (sorry) were sown early, as he recalls here. Growing up and listening to records in his room: “A lot of the time, a record would annoy me. The way it had been made wasn’t right. The music as recorded wasn’t what the song wanted to be.”

The quest for “what the song wanted to be” is the thread that joins Ian’s various music activities and that runs through his memoir.

The book is written “with John Higgs”, which I presume means they followed the standard process of recording conversations and using them as the basis for the text. This works well because each chapter sounds as if Ian is talking directly to you. He is revealing about his work, sharply observational about the various musical environments he’s been in, and open about his own struggles as a perpetual outsider.

The book covers the main elements of Ian’s career – Big in Japan, the Lightning Seeds, Three Lions and his work as a producer – along with some more personal details like childhood, fatherhood and family. Oh, and football.

It’s not chronological, and that’s deliberate. In the first chapter, Ian makes it clear that he doesn’t want to project a narrative onto his life: “When I look back at my life, I don’t see it as a narrative, I see it in terms of moments.”

So moments are what you get. The moment that kicked off the Lightning Seeds, when Ian realised he’d spent a decade producing other people but still thought of himself as a songwriter. The moment he realised it had worked, when he heard Pure on the radio for the first time.

And, rewinding a few years, the moment the teenage Ian was wandering aimlessly down Liverpool’s Mathew Street and ended up invited to play guitar in an unusual stage play. A lucky accident that led to meeting Bill Drummond and Jayne Casey, forming Big in Japan with them and taking a key role in Liverpool’s emerging punk scene.

If there is any narrative, in fact, it seems to be about accidents. Ian became a producer by accident, because he knew what his friends Echo and the Bunnymen needed. He became a singer by accident, when it came to the Lightning Seeds, because he couldn’t find anyone else to do the job.

From the accident that led to appearing in Illuminatus, directed by the legendary Ken Campbell, it was a small step to the equally legendary Eric’s Club, also in Mathew Street.

The rest, of course, is history. And this book adds another, vital layer to the chronicles of the time.

It’s interesting to read Ian’s memories of producing the first Echo and the Bunnymen album, having read the same story – from a different perspective – in Will Sergeant’s new book Echoes. It will be interesting, too, when Paul Simpson’s memoir Revolutionary Spirit comes out later this year, to see his version of events covered in this book. Fans of Liverpool post-punk will have to get the set!