The last time Supergrass and The Lightning Seeds shared a bill was probably the summer of Britpop back in the mid-1990s.

While Supergrass, the head- liners for this opening concert of the Arundel Festival, never stopped touring and making albums, Lightning Seeds main man Ian Broudie decided to take a break in 1999 after his fifth album Tilt.

That pause turned into a ten-year hiatus, with only a greatest hits compilation and several re-releases of Three Lions, his chart-topping partnership with Baddiel And Skinner, filling the void.

But now Ian is back, under the Lightning Seeds monicker, with Four Winds, an album of all new material.

“I kind of reached a bit of a stop,” says Ian. “It felt like a pause was needed, I was a bit worn out.

I’d done five albums, written about 70 songs, I felt like I had done what I’d decided to do.”

But it wasn’t Ian’s last dalliance with the music scene, as he found himself producing some of the raft of new bands coming out of his Liverpool hometown, including The Coral and The Zutons. And slowly the desire to make something came back.

“I started picking up a guitar and sitting at home in front of the telly just doodling around,” he says.

“When I started writing songs they felt different from the ones I had written earlier.

“I had a feeling I wanted to record them, then I wanted to release them.”

Broudie’s career as The Lightning Seeds began in 1989, when he broke away from Liverpool bands Big In Japan, Original Mirrors and Care.

His first two albums, Cloudcuckooland and Sense, were completely solo affairs, home to minor hit singles Pure and Life Of Riley.

Broudie only went on tour with a band after his third breakthrough album, 1994’s Jollification.

With singles Lucky You, Marvellous and Change, and the equally successful 1996 follow-up album Dizzy Heights, The Lightning Seeds filled the airwaves throughout the summer of Britpop, finally hitting the top spot with the Euro ’96 anthem collaboration Three Lions.

“My songs were always very personal,” says Broudie. “Life Of Riley was about my son being born. I have always written about things that have happened to me, with the exception of Three Lions.

“As you get older there are different things to write about.”

As he revealed in a Guardian interview earlier this year, a lot of things have changed in the past eight years, with the break-up of his marriage and the deaths of both his parents and his brother and sister.

But he says he doesn’t want to come across as a tortured artist, telling The Guide the difference with his new record is the approach he has taken.

“When I started The Lightning Seeds it was really about my obsession with making records,” he says.

“I had a bit of recording equipment in the house and was messing about with the machines.

“Over the past few years I went back to before then and listened to songs rather than recordings.

“The best way to express it is there is a writer in you and a producer in you and a musician in you, which all take a different part in the hierachy.

“I feel like the songwriter is the main force on this album.”

Support from Idlewild.

  • * Gates open 5pm, concert starts 7.30pm, tickets £26/£30, call 01603 660444