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Everything here has a place and a time
We’re only passing through
It’s no longer allowed in this country, no doubt for good reason, but back when I was a boy working on a farm over the summer, great excitement met the days when we would burn the stubble in recently harvested wheat and barley fields. There was an art to it, setting the fire according to wind direction, pitchforking the discarded stems to keep the fire moving along the harvested lines – and making sure that the fire didn’t jump up trees or into neighbouring fields or properties. Scorched by sun and fire, we youngsters – authorised fire raisers! – couldn’t get enough of it. The old boys would come down to lean on their pitchforks, quiet satisfaction in their eyes. I suspect that even before it was banned, farmers knew it didn’t add that much more to the soil than you would get by ploughing the stubble back in; but it was a seasonal ritual and joy to observe the leaping flames and, once they’d moved on, the blackened, smouldering earth left behind.
It’s one of the images I hold in mind as I listen to Bonfires on the heath, the new Clientele album, a personal conflation of its themes of harvest and bonfires. You have to hand it to Alasdair MacLean and the Clientele. For the fourth time in a row, they have written a set of songs and unified them across an album so that a discarded image or sound in one song is taken up and explored in greater detail in another. This time around it’s a return to nature, a reconnection with the seasons. Bats flit across moonlit skies, and from ‘Harvest time’ to ‘Share the night’; bonfires burn orange against the black of a moonless November night. Summer comes and goes, harvest festival marking its end, mostly unobserved, though in Alasdair’s lyrics and themes there is perhaps a tacit recognition of a secularist’s debt to an Anglican upbringing mixed in with the ghosts and pagan celebration. All that’s missing is pumpkins.
The opening trio of songs form the album’s core, leaving it a little top heavy. For ‘I wonder who we are’, they have infused the lightness and deliberately banal joy of a Tropicália-era Caetano Veloso song with their hallmark shot of estrangement. Then come those hues of autumn. ‘Bonfires on the heath’, as languid as anything the Clientele have recorded, though again, not without an underlying edge of restlessness – ‘how’m I going to get myself to sleep?’ ‘Harvest time’ is the dreamy psychedelic folk equal of the haunting song of more or less the same name on Michael Head’s The magical world of the Strands. The Clientele’s song searches for the point at which the impermanent – us human beings – meet with the permanent (or the more permanent) – the soil and the seasons – a point encapsulated in Alasdair’s image of watching scarecrows.
Beyond these three, ‘Sketch’ allows you to construct your own connections out of a whispered lyric of 25 apparently random words; the Clientele’s version of the tarot, perhaps. It’s a pity the music is so obviously redolent of sixties Hammond groove – with less archetypal musical accompaniment, we might have had a defining moment in the Clientele’s discography. ‘Three month summers’ is on the other hand gloriously archetypal Clientele, shot through with suburban light, the mood of the violet hour and plenty of strange geometry.
Bonfires on the heath has been billed as a return to the Clientele’s roots, which to some extent is true. Here’s ‘Graven Wood’, an early song written by Innes Phillips while he was still in the band, recast with added drone. The lyrics throughout are simpler, more youthful, less inclined to the abstract than Strange geometry. The closing song even begins ‘I’ve been walking in the park…’ which is to Alasdair MacLean as ‘Woke up this morning…’ is the to the blues. But this is a group who’ve written strings of musically rounded songs, and they cannot replicate the narrowness nor the edge of the three piece as it was when it first came to musical maturity. So the songs are softened by musical and lived experience – and by the presence of the member who wasn’t there at the outset. Mel’s teardrop piano, gently bowed violin and backing vocals soften the sound, and make it impossible for the Clientele to rediscover their jagged edge. The vast improvement in the way they have recorded their music over the years has allowed us to enter a sound world of compensating and rarely matched distinction, so that I tend not to miss Alasdair’s guitar heroics. Yet while this is again a beautifully recorded as well as perfectly autumnal record, it’s not one I feel quite able to set it alongside XTC’s Mummer, or The magical world of the Strands.
Alasdair has spoken of his doubts about the future of the Clientele. Despite the heights it reaches, Bonfires on the heath as a whole is slighter than the group’s previous albums. Maybe they have run out of ideas, and steam – a cover and the return to two earlier songs suggests that’s the case. I applaud any group who re-record an earlier song in an attempt to get something more or different out of it, but I don’t think the Clientele have succeeded with their second go at ‘Share the night’. Problem is, they nailed it first time around. I find myself wishing that they’d kept back the other songs from the That night, a forest grew EP for this LP, rather than nobly honouring their promise of three discs for Acuarela.
The last words of that closing song, ‘Walking in the park’, are: ‘With the darkness coming down / I don’t know what more I can say / what I can say’.
- ‘Bonfires on the heath’ – great film of the song played acoustically
- Bonfires on the heath – stream and US release (Merge)
- Bonfires on the heath – UK release (Pointy)
- The Clientele – MySpace
28th September 2009. Set your faces to stunned and make a note of the date in your diaries, for that’s the day on which the Claim finally make it onto CD with the release of Black path: retrospective 1985-1992. Who’d have thought that in 2009 they would be releasing a record within eight days of the Clientele, whose Bonfires of the heath is out on 6th October; another astonishing preview track (‘Harvest time’) is available here. (I first hitched the two groups together for this 2001 piece for Tangents.)
To celebrate, here – courtesy of the Right Honorable Vic Templar – is a link to a YouTube outing of one of the previously unreleased songs on the retrospective, the not entirely typical ‘Between heaven and Woolworths’.
And here are the pages from Pantry For The World which celebrated the Claim’s Boomy Tella (‘the best LP of 1988’) and their subsequent singles for Esurient. The quote about the Claim live came from a letter written by one Richey Edwards, whose group had just made their London debut supporting the Claim.
Here also is one half of the Pantry For The World supplement, featuring a piece about the Claim by Kevin Pearce, who wrote about them with the appreciation and bias appropriate to the man who was releasing their records.
Black path tracklisting:
Picking up the bitter little pieces
Birth Of A Teenager
Plastic Grip
Say So
Mike The Bike (Featuring Vic Templar)
Sunday
Being A Minor
Between Heaven And Woolworths (For Brian Patten)
Gullible’s travels
Not So Simple Sharon Says
Christopher
God, Cliffe And Me
Ernestine
Sporting Life
Dear
Mrs Shepherd
Treasurehunting
Do You Still Feel?
Down By The Chimney
Lonely Tarts
Love Letter
Wait And See
Mary Stavin
Seen And Done It All
Loser’s Corner
That’s one half of Boomy Tella by my reckoning, and sadly means no room for the trombone-fuelled knees-up of ‘Beneath the reach’ or ‘All about hope’, on which the Claim were at their most exquisitely pastoral. Fingers crossed Boomy will before long get a release in its own right. Neither ‘This pencil…’ nor ‘Another yesterday’ feature – they can be downloaded here.
There is also at least one live date confirmed at the Royal Function Rooms in Rochester on Saturday 19th September with the possibility of a London appearance.
- The Claim (MySpace)
With this fourth and final Pantry fanzine, I finished the journey on which I had embarked in issue 3, and cast myself away on a desert island, thoroughly isolated. But having recognised the need to stand free of my influences and heroes, I wasn’t quite able to define myself with as much weight and clarity. It was summer 1989, and I was on the dole after finishing my third year exams; the Berlin Wall had not yet quite come down, and under the weight of the third Thatcher government and the all-embracing influence of situationism (it was even the subject of my dissertation), I did not feel free. So I roamed – as the Clientele song has it – emptily through Holloway, seeking solace in the streets, in the messiness of overlapping relationships, and – as ever – in music. The last being the simplest thing to hold on to and examine, as I turned life over in my hands. So that – no surprise – was what Pantry for the world was about. Not that you’d know from the cover, which with highly refined indifference gives no indication of the contents. Instead simply that arch and ironic title, whose grandiloquence is softened once you register that it’s a tribute to the Isley Brothers’ ‘Harvest for the world’, which I had grown to love that summer.
The photograph is of the house that stood opposite the point at which Hertslet Road was met by Roden Street, where I lived. The house never recovered from its state of disrepair. Not long after the photo was taken, work began on the Nags Head shopping centre, which also erased Bovay Place and the squatted red brick building that stood there.
But while I stop here with my thoughts awhile, mourning lost streets of London, why not hurry on over to The London nobody sings? The party’s in full swing, and it surely won’t be long before the scribe behind Your heart out posts a song which celebrates the part of London that you know and love best. (The same scribe, I should add, who twenty years ago contributed a piece to Pantry for the world, as we shall soon reveal.)
Great to to see residents of the Five Boroughs taking up the challenge to bring us The New York nobody sings as well. Just need Paris and Munich now.
We are the Clientele, and we are on top form, if the lead-off track from Bonfires on the heath is anything to go by. For ‘I wonder who we are’, they have infused the lightness and deliberately banal joy of a Tropicália-era Caetano Veloso song with their hallmark shot of estrangement. You can download ‘I wonder who we are’ here or here (where you’ll also see the album’s artwork). Bonfires is due out in October on Merge, just in time for us in the UK to use it as the backdrop to our celebrations of Guy Fawkes’ honest intentions.
‘Share the night’ from That night, a forest grew reappears on Bonfires on the heath, which allows me to mention that I think I’ve chanced upon the source of that EP’s title – the children’s book Where the wild things are by Maurice Sendak (1963):
That night in Max’s room a forest grew
and grew–
and grew until his ceiling hung with vines
and the walls became the world all around
To put it much more bluntly – you just wonder why you bothered. You just wonder whether the choices you made – to be an artist and make music on your own terms – trapped you. The deeper you go into yourself, the more chance you have of becoming lost, and I think that’s something that plays out throughout this record.
As we await what may or may not turn out to be the final Clientele record, Bonfires on the heath, here are some thoughts elicited from Alasdair MacLean by Ryan Dombal of Pitchfork.
The Clientele’s That night, a forest grew EP is finally available for purchase (you can hear it in full here). Already discussed in these pages, ‘Share the night’ is the stand-out song of the four; once again Alasdair languidly tosses out fragments of which poets would be proud (‘as the baby bats fly through the porcelain cracks’) above music which sounds like Greeting from LA-era Tim Buckley informed by three subsequent decades of dance music. ‘Retiro Park’ runs it close with its somnambulant vocal, blurred at the edges, melting like candle wax. In keeping with groove the Clientele have found within themselves, Mel has downed the fiddle and scraper to add piano and organ to this and the other songs. ‘Retiro Park’ shares its Northern soul stomp and glide with ‘George says he has lost his way in this world’, a title which allows us to hope that we might have a Freshies thing going on here. Younger readers may not be aware of Chris Sievey’s group, whose singles – before Chris turned into eyeball-headed Frank Sidebottom – included ‘I’m in love with the girl on the Manchester Virgin Megastore checkout desk’, and ‘I can’t get ‘Bouncing babies’ by the Teardrop Explodes’. As I recall the latter was extended parenthetically outwards by a further factor of one: ‘I can’t get ‘I can’t get ‘Bouncing babies’ by the Teardrop Explodes’ by the Freshies’, only my memory can’t dredge up the name of the smart alecks responsible.
The George in question in the Clientele song is George Henderson of Dunedin-based Flying Nunsters the Puddle. ‘I’ve lost my way in this world’ appears on their recent LP, No love – no hate, which is well worth the price of admission, with meandering guitar lines that teeter thrillingly on the edge of disaster but just about keep their balance. George reveals himself to be the missing link between another man who lost his way in this world before finding it again – Vic Godard – and Guided By Voices’ Robert Pollard, whose state of certitude about his place in this world I’m not qualified to comment on. Obviously I would like to prevail upon someone to progress this Puddle-Clientele chain one further step by penning ‘The Clientele say that George says he has lost his way in this world’.
There is still another joker on the new Clientele EP in the form of the title track, a spoken word companion piece to ‘The garden at night’, with a spiral staircase of guitar whose spirit if not actual hook I would wager has been borrowed unwittingly or otherwise from ‘Ten feet tall’ on XTC’s Drums and wires.
Clientele completists can also (and again at last) grab the download-only Bookshop Casanova EP, featuring their cover of Television’s ‘The fire’ and ‘The girl from somewhere’ – a song which would have fitted comfortably on either The violet hour or Strange geometry – from a variety of outlets (listed here on the Clientele’s forum), a number of whom rather charmingly describe the girl as being from ‘nowhere’ rather than ‘somewhere’.
There’s another Clientele cat to bag while you’re at it, and that is their ‘Your song’ from film musical The bigtop, and its accompanying and cunningly titled soundtrack album Songs from the bigtop. As far as I can tell the movie hasn’t seen the light of day. All of the songs for the film were written by its director, Devon Reed, who then collaborated with the group for whom he had written the song, so if nothing else you can rest easy in the knowledge that the song is not a cover of the old Elton John chestnut. It is in fact a rather lovely miniature to stand alongside ‘Bicycles’, and the Clientele inhabit the song to the extent that you would swear it was a MacLean original.
Last but not least, there is Country music: songs for Keith Girdler, Keith being the erstwhile singer for Blueboy who sadly died last year. The Clientele have contributed a re-recording of ‘Breathe in now’, a song demoed prior to Strange geometry, alongside tracks by Trembling Blue Stars, the Would-be-goods, and Biff Bang Pow!, as well as Blueboy’s fellow Sarah stalwarts St. Christopher, the Wake, and the Orchids. Released by Siesta, the proceeds from the album are being donated to the Martlets Hospice in Hove.
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 reflection. 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.
