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)
A jumped-up pantry boy 
hey, the great day is nigh upon us. Are you coming to the gig on saturday? Is it okay to put these cuttings up on The Claim’s myspace – I’ll include a link to this site?
Hope all’s well. Vic
Nice to see the MySpace up and running, Vic. Happy for you to post the cuttings. They’re 1989 vintage, by the way.
Hope to be there to two-step and foxtrot on Saturday!
I’ve put links to this on the two Facebook sites (There’s a Claim page and a Claim group!) and posted a myspace blog with links to this and your This Pencil downloads page. Cheers!
Excellent work all round Mr Templar – cheers to you!
[…] publicada originalmente en la revista Rockdelux #285, junio del 2010. Y aquí pueden encontrar un hermoso texto de Kevin Pearce, circa 1988, escrito para el fanzine Pantry for […]
[…] No matter what calibre of instruments the two Davids, Stuart and Martin were using, it’s all beautifully played, something fans came to expect of the Claim, having seen so often with our own eyes what a high-functioning, single-minded quartet they were. Here’s how Kevin Pearce, who originally put out the LP on his Esurient label, described it not long after its release, in a piece for my fanzine of the time: […]