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Round these parts, the release of new Clientele songs is always cause for celebration, but especially so in the case of ‘Share the night’, which continues to mine the unlikely seam opened up by ‘Bookshop Casanova’, a sound inspired by Alasdair attempting to write a song with the petit four lightness of Spiller’s ‘Groovejet’.  In terms of underlying pick’n’mix, ‘Share the night’ once again manages a blend which in lesser hands would go horribly wrong, but in the Clientele’s becomes an extension of their very particular sound-world – a seaside pier from which to gaze not only at that alien mass of water that is the past but also at the skies of the future, their blues fringed with (a slightly menacing) orange.

Or, as one member of the Clientele Forum puts it, ‘kind of Sister Sledge meets Orange Juice round at Jimmy Page’s house’.  There’s also a little bit of Dylan in there (although as with earlier Clientele songs, it’s strange how you notice the likeness to Bob of Alasdair’s phrasing less with each subsequent listen).  But it’s that confluence of archetypal seventies and eighties guitar styles, chopping up the groove, and chasing the dragon, which brings ‘Share the night’ home more or less level with ‘Bookshop Casanova’.

The That night, a forest grew EP is out soon on Acuarela Records.

Has anyone noticed the similarity between Róisín Murphy’s video for ‘Let me know’ and the Clientele’s for ‘Bookshop Casanova’?

While Róisín wins on the hat front, the Clientele are the better dancers, obviously.

Apologies for trying to set the record for the greatest number of post titles utilising Go-Betweens songs, but The Clientele’s cover of ‘Orpheus beach’ can now be heard on the Rare victory tribute to Grant McLennan site (as previously mentioned here).

You might also want to get yourself over to Bradley’s Almanac, where the full Clientele set from Boston Museum of Fine Arts earlier this year is available with a quality of sound that anyone who’s seen them in London will not be entirely used to.  On the subject of covers, there’s a great, concise rendering of Television’s ‘The fire’ for one of the encores.

At best, tribute albums are hit and miss; at their worst they are a train-wreck of cherished songs, carriage after calamitously mauled carriage.  I’m hoping that when Love goes on! A tribute to Grant McLennan appears, it has at least some selective repeat play potential.  The Clientele will tackle ‘Orpheus beach’, while Paul Handyside of Hurrah! is attempting – with greater inherent risk – ‘Bachelor kisses’.  No-one appears to have been brave or foolhardy enough as yet to take on ‘Cattle and cane’, but I guess there’s still time for someone to entertain us with that error of judgement.  On the Rare Victory site you can hear what the Orchids have made of ‘Magic in here’ and no less than five competing versions of ‘Love goes on’, the winner being Private Eleanor, although I think the Bank Holidays can count themselves unlucky.  Best of all on current display is ‘The Devil’s eye’ as performed by GB3 and Angie Hart.  GB is Glenn Bennie who recorded with Grant in the year before he died, while Angie Hart was the singer in Frente! who worked similar magic on New Order’s ‘Bizarre love triangle’ back in 1994.  The timbre of her voice is not unlike Grant’s and yet of course it has the advantage over the male interpreter of bringing something other to the song.  Couple this with her perfectly judged phrasing and you have a cover that even the Clientele may struggle to better.

Alasdair’s post for 16th July is obviously a tribute to the new Harry Potter movie and book - he’s J.K.’s biggest fan, you know.

Scroll down for creatures of a more fabulous nature and plenty of evidence for the effects of the myths of the ancients on an impressionable boy’s mind.  While listening to God save the Clientele, of course.

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.