You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June, 2007.
RIP to Tangents, 1996-2007, a fine website. I hope it won’t be long before its editor is back in action, whatever form that may take.
We should set a virtual boat aflame upon an ocean and watch it burn.
His voice has lost its top-end choir boy sweetness, and the bottom-end is rougher than it was, but you can still see performance magic in this clip of Dave Read singing ‘Goodnight’ from a rendering of the whole of the White album at the end of last year. Bob Collins formerly of the Dentists is playing the guitar.
Dave was the singer in the Claim, the best thing to come out of Kent since hops were first harvested, and this is a second echo since they disbanded fifteen years ago, the first being his vocal on ‘My number nine’, a B side by Coax that I will surely write about in my ‘Backed with’ series before long (and mentioned in this piece on the Claim and the Clientele).
It may look like a bloke who’s put on his best shirt to sing karaoke in a boozer, but to anyone who saw the Claim at their peak in London in the late 80s, it’s so much more than that - a touching reminder of the Claim’s ordinary genius. Of course I would rather have stumbled across a clip of Daves Read and Arnold doing ‘God, Cliffe and me’ from that time, but in the absence of that, and the collection that the Bus Stop label is yet to deliver on, it’s something.
The spring that has at times felt dangerously like summer has brought not only a new Sea and Cake but also a fresh set of Clientele songs. The world may have (and can keep) its musical pairings and rivalries, but this is my Beatles and Stones, my Blur versus Oasis. For Everybody the Sea and Cake have given themselves naturalistic limitations to move their sound along (you couldn’t quite say forward, or back) and it will repay the listening that their albums always do, but today it’s the Clientele who come out on top. On God save the Clientele the fear and ghosts of Strange geometry are largely held at bay, even though the opener is ‘Here comes the phantom’; this time the spirits are carefree strollers along leafy and crypt-lined cemetery boulevards. Working within the envelope of mood by which they will probably forever be circumscribed, this is an upbeat album. Happy in its melancholia, in its state of relection. Time is passing in a summer garden, the night is falling, you’re with the one you love, or thinking of her, and there isn’t any other place you’d rather be.
There’s craft and deliberate craftiness in the set that is the sign of a group some way along their path and at the peak of form. There are fewer mid-song surprises but the strength of the new material is that you don’t miss the sharp lefts and u-turns. The songs are rhythmically languid, occasionally upping to a more muscular groove, with James’ bass-playing as melodic as that of the Meters.
Contributors add what is particular to them, without ever distracting the Clientele – assimilating and enlarged by new member Mel Draisey - from the job of being the Clientele. Mark Nevers presents the recording skills that made Lambchop’s Is a woman such a magical mix of sound, reflection and silence. Louis Philippe’s string arrangements blend with the other instrumentation more subtly than before. Pat Sansone of the Autumn Defense and Wilco skims enough accompanying instrumental stones across the Clientele’s waters to be described as an honorary member, while Alasdair surrenders several solo spots to Pete Finney on pedal steel.
As it is with the contributors, so it is with the influences you can pick out – the Clientele’s personality subsumes any inspiration. ‘Isn’t life strange’ sounds like an interpretation of ‘A whiter shade of pale’, whose Hammond organ line is itself famously a variation on JS Bach, but it’s still a Clientele song and no court case should be forthcoming. ‘The garden at night’ sounds like Kevin Ayers fronting the Clientele of ‘I had to say this’. The Bee Gees have aptly been mentioned – the ‘Kilburn towers’ Bee Gees that is, rather than the white-suited purveyors of Saturday Night Fever, although ‘Bookshop Casanova’ has enough string-laden disco flavour that you expect ‘Ring my bell’-style synth drums to explode softly as Alasdair, no doubt wearing sunglasses, wields his Telecaster towards the song’s climax. ‘I said to the people at Merge, ‘This is going to make us millionaires.’ And they just laughed at me’ he has recounted. The drums are not quite as they might be for a dancefloor smash; it would need a remix to turn it into the hit song it threatens to be. Let’s give it to Fujiya Miyagi, or Spiller of ‘Groovejet’ fame. The Clientele’s first release was an EP shared with theaudience and others; who would have thought that they might meet again with Sophie Ellis-Bextor, if only figuratively?
Inspired by Europe, recorded in America and informed and underpinned by not entirely fashionable literary and artistic sensibilities, the Clientele are to my mind British pop royalty. God save them.
