From Brighton Beach to Santa Monica

Haunted Weather

2009-11-05T15:11:00.004Z

"I had set up my recording equipment on the edge of a clearing, with the microphones pointing up the hillside. As the light faded, the distant roar of stags rolled down through the forest and into the clearing. It began to rain. As usual I had heard the rushing sound of the wind blowing down the glen and across the canopy, but just at the point when the light was almost gone, the wind changed. The effect was dramatic. The atmosphere changed very quickly, as did my mood and perception. I can honestly say that I felt something blow down that hillside and into the clearing - the quality of the sound changed, the deer seemed to stop calling, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck - what few I have - stand up. I packed up as quickly as I could, and I left. Over the next few days I went back there to similar locations and made a series of successful recordings without ever feeling the same effects."

- Chris Watson, of Cabaret Voltaire on making field recordings in Glen Affric, Scotland.

Felix Hess, on his work with infrasound microphones, recording the inaudibly (to the human ear) low frequency sounds of air pressure fluctuations:

"Using a time compression factor of 360, one hour of audible sound on a CD represents 15 days and nights of recorded infrasound, originally in the range between 0.03 Hz and 56 Hz. {note: the human ear tends to hear between 20 Hz and 16,000 Hz} The sensation of hearing this … is deeply strange, like being buffeted by a high wind and at the same time hearing the extreme high frequency activity of neural processing. ‘One hears high-pitched whistles, beeps and insect-like buzzes’, Hess writes, ‘which come from the deep rumbling of factories, trains and trucks, and other motor cars, or even nearby washing machines. The opening and closing of doors gives rise to countless tiny clicks, which may add up to form a sound like soft rain on autumn leaves. Finally, an extraordinary presence: a rich, deep drone, originally at 0.2 Hz, audible like a multi-engined heavy airplane in the distance. This deep droning sound, at times all but inaudible, is formed by oscillations in the atmosphere – microbaroms – caused by standing waves in the Atlantic Ocean, far away.' "

Both quotes taken from David Toop's fascinating (and occasionally infuriating) Haunted Weather. Seascape Photo by Hiroshi Sugimoto.

A New York evening of music and laughter with The Clientele's Alasdair MacLean

2009-10-23T10:18:00.003+01:00

I remember a friend of mine once telling me that her friend Stephin Merritt was being flown from New York to London solely to 'do press'. This seemed impossibly glamorous to me, I mean they fly you to a different country and put you in a hotel just so you can talk to people… about YOURSELF! You must have some weighty pronouncements to make to the world if that’s how you’re being treated, better greet the journalists with a faintly melancholy smile (oh, the loneliness of genius, the weight of one's towering intellect) and an honest, if distracted, handshake.

Anyway every dog has its day, and they’re flying me over to New York this week to 'do press'. And a bit of radio, and a seated show at Joe's Pub where I hope to have a pleasant stroll down memory lane / through the Clientele’s back catalogue. So this is the bit where I plug the show. It's on October 29th. The press, containing my views on all the important matters of our times, will be forthcoming.

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises

2009-10-07T13:46:00.004+01:00

After a cold, bright weekend, we’re in the middle of a dark and drizzling week here in London, a week which sees the new Clientele LP released in the USA. Many people advised against releasing it this late in the year, but I don’t really mind how this one sells, and I love the feeling that everyone is experiencing these Autumnal songs together as Autumn really kicks in (unless you’re Australian of course). Also great from the limited amounts of press I’ve read that people are finally beginning to appreciate the mental distress and paranoia behind my work.

Unfortunately we couldn’t rush-release the European version (preorder it here) for October – although I was hoping for a Bonfire Night release on November 5th. But let’s hope it’s a mild early winter and November 30th still hits the spot. Don’t forget I’m playing at Joes Pub in New York on the 29th Oct, and that there are at least two full band Clientele gigs before the end of the year. And if you buy the record, thank you very much indeed.

John Clare in Hiding

2009-08-28T20:15:00.001+01:00

It was often the fate of the religious
who went to hear God in desert silences
to hear instead some other, unbearable, voice.

- Ronald Blythe

Amor de Días, Damon and Naomi: it's summer duo madness!

2009-08-25T12:15:00.003+01:00

Next week sees the return of Amor De Días, the new psych-folk / tropicalia duo I play in with Lupe from Pipas, opening for Damon and Naomi at the Dulcimer in Manchester on 3rd September and Café Oto in London on the 4th. And no, we will not cancel this time. Excited to be sharing the bill with the Left Outsides in London too!

Manchester tickets
http://www.heymanchester.com/upcoming/damon-naomi

London tickets
http://www.wegottickets.com/event/54864

We’re also much closer now to finishing our record, hopefully we will be able to unveil some tracks soon. Watch this space, or see you in Chorlton or Dalston. The choice is yours.

Don't Look Now

2009-08-14T21:34:00.011+01:00

As the last post on the Victorian spiritual underground helped connect some people to Samuel Palmer’s art, let’s have a look at a Victorian painter of a very different character. I first encountered Atkinson Grimshaw’s work on the dust jacket of a collection of M.R. James’s ghost stories.

Grimshaw was initially a railway clerk, but abandoned his day job to become a painter of moonlight scenes and rainy nightscapes in northern English towns. It appears he’s remembered now for the very good reason that there was pretty much no one else like him, although there are parallels with Arnold Böcklin and Caspar David Friedrich. His pictures may have been meant to communicate a kind of idealised rustic beauty, but to modern eyes the best of them come across as essays in loneliness, a wintry counter-argument to Palmer’s ecstatic landscapes.

His pictures perfectly compliment M.R. James’s stories, and they echo Jonathan Miller’s 1968 BBC Omnibus treatment of James’s most famous (and terrifying) story “Oh Whistle and I’ll come to you” in which a pompous academic on holiday in Norfolk discovers an ancient whistle in the sands with the words “And who is it that is coming?” inscribed in Latin. He blows through the whistle, and soon, in the indistinct horizon where the sea meets the sky, he sees a figure running, unreally, towards him….

Miller’s only other film project of this era was a version of Alice in Wonderland (1966) starring Peter Sellers and Peter Cook. Unfortunately neither of them are very funny in it, but it doesn’t matter, as the project is saved by a slowly building, beautifully hallucinatory ambience, centred around Anne-Marie Mallik as Alice, and the English woods and trees she drifts through, in floods of sunlight, at the height of summer. To the sound of none other than … Ravi Shankar.

When Peter Blake was a member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists he painted some very similar depictions of Alice, which reminds me to note that the Brotherhood (and sisterhood) are still active, and still exhibiting in 2009. And there was recently a monograph on Atkinson Grimshaw published in the UK. I just wish Jonathan Miller would make another TV film.

England's Lost Eden

2009-07-24T22:07:00.003+01:00

The original, archaeological site of the Garden of Eden is believed by the members of the Panacea Society to be at 18 Albany Street in Bedford. This is so obviously a delightful idea I hardly need to expand on it; God and Adam arguing on a suburban lawn, sprinklers twitching over the grass. Then the Fall and the Exile, or more specifically the beginning of life at no's 16 and 20. As cults go, the Panacea Society seem like quite nice people, they take their creed from an 18th Century 'prophet', Joanna Southcott, who, like some other very interesting ranters, shakers and jumpers who formed a religious subculture in the 18th and 19th centuries, believed she was receiving messages directly from God, and that the end of the world was close. Jesus would re-enter triumphantly through the streets of Bedford. I can very vividly imagine this, perhaps cos there is an early Peter Blake painting of a similar scene, called Christ Entering Venice:

He painted it while studying at the Royal Academy. Much later, after Sgt Pepper and the swinging 60s, Peter Blake becomes part of the Ruralist Brotherhood, and his paintings take on a beautiful folkloric feel. He reaches back to the art of Samuel Palmer and William Blake, tapping into a sense that the land itself is sentient in some mysterious way. I love Samuel Palmer's eerie paintings of fields at night with the harvest moon hanging over them, ghost-figures walking through the furrows. Seeing an exhibition of his work at the British Museum a few years ago, I was struck how hugely ahead of his time he was. Sadly, the death of his son, Thomas, chastened him, and he abandoned or lost his original ecstatic vision and ended up as a Victorian academic painter, forgotten for many years after he died.

18 Albany Street, The Site of The Original Garden of Eden, was eventually bought by the Panacea Society, and is now rented to non-religious tenants, apparently kept on two months notice should anything of a millenarial nature happen. A Channel 4 documentary crew recently filmed the inside of the house. Alas, God's signs and wonders kept themselves under wraps. But I love the idea of people still re-imagining the English suburbs and countryside as a kind of sacred, prophetic landscape. It's part of the Blakean tradition still alive in 2009, however eccentric it seems, however ironically distanced from it we've become. This magical sense of symbols being hidden in the everyday: symbols of the ancient, of the sacred agrarian, old as history itself. You can find them in the corners of suburban cul-de-sacs as much as in the fields themselves. Our forgotten Gods waiting for us in the long grass, just behind the forecourt of the empty shopping centre, as a long evening begins to fall.

More on this in England's Lost Eden, Adventures in a Victorian Utopia by Phillip Hoare.

For future tribute bands

2009-06-23T10:44:00.003+01:00

I have to admit, this has made me happier than any press on the Clientele I have ever read. Guitargeek made a picture of my "rig"! It must have taken hours!

Psychedelic Werther

2009-05-02T23:15:00.006+01:00

Poor Werther, on top of all his other problems, in this 1960s paperback edition of his tragic story, he don't know whether he's in Picasso's blue period or his pink! What's a boy to do? Actually, don't answer that one.

I got this from the Oxfam book shop in Strutton Ground, Victoria, which is one of London's best-kept secrets. The key to its magnificence is the type of people who live nearby and donate their libraries to the shop when they move on or die. So close to Whitehall, they're all ex-civil service, ex-MI5, Chelsea aristocrats or Communists (generally donating militant pamphlets from 1920-1950), or all four put together, and the books they leave behind are fascinating.

2009-05-02T21:24:00.002+01:00

Perhaps it has occurred to you
to compliment God
on the mysteries of the set
He designed
for you in particular:

hum drum afternoons
on the gravel and astroturf
of a wintry, luminous suburb

oceans of trivia break across the airwaves

to call this ‘home’;
it's hardly believable.

Who could ever have invented
such an illusion-like illusion?

DJ set at the Hangover Lounge this Sunday

2009-03-24T11:13:00.002Z

Hello campers, Lupe from Pipas and I will be spinning some tunes at a club called the Hangover Lounge on Sunday (29th March) from around 1pm. It takes place at the Salmon and Compasses, 58 Penton Street, London N1 9PZ (Corner of Chapel Market) and it's free. I'm not sure what we'll play, but apparently all jazz is banned there, so in revenge I'm thinking maybe some Flamenco and Argentinian Folkloric music, as well as the usual Psychedelic, Soul, Flying Nun etc. etc.

ps the Smiths count as Jazz, sorry

Shell, (charcoal/pastel on conte paper) 240mm x 320mm, £50, $85, (email theclientele@yahoo.com for details) (SOLD)

2009-03-04T18:39:00.003Z

Hampshire Woods (pastel) 240 x 320 mm, £50, $85 (SOLD)

2009-02-23T10:02:00.003Z

Masquerade

2009-02-07T21:15:00.005Z

When we sat, aged 17, by Tundry Pond
and talked and smoked, there was
a stillness; enveloping leaves;
nature seemed to open, briefly
the edges of things transparent
brittle as glass,
as focus sharpening in a camera
and I realised that perhaps there was
something else behind the world.

A car sighed through the far-off A-road
and with that gentlest of noises
the pattern fell apart
I swear the suburbs
were gathering us in like a parent
but we clutched our proof
through swaying heads of corn
the reiteration of our nowhere-ness
struck like a bell
neither in the world
nor quite out of it
and we knew:
we are NOT here
this is NOT now
I am NOT me.

it was a mystery
which we both shared
perhaps only I remember it now.

Amor de Días live in London

2009-01-22T11:53:00.006Z

Another rare opportunity to see Amor de Días , the secret psych-folk / tropicalia supergroup formed by Lupe from Pipas and Alasdair from the Clientele, presents itself this Sunday afternoon (25th January), at Islington's Salmon and Compasses pub. The show is hosted by the Hangover Lounge, where DJs spin beautiful country and pop records, and the punters drink themselves into denial that the next day is Monday, or spend their giros on fancy cocktails, depending on how cruelly fate has treated them lately. The show will be upstairs, totally unamplified, and free to all comers. Our set begins at 5:30, before Darren Hayman and after the Vatican Cellars.

Dreamed conversation of 12th December

2009-01-11T17:52:00.003Z

-Did you ever wonder if a building could be ill?

-In the sense of dry rot, collapsing floors?

-No, on a different level. The feeling that a certain part of a structure is working in opposition to the other parts, that somehow the equilibrium, the purpose of the building is being subverted by something within.

- Two men used to work on renovations in the church by the river. I remember them walking past most of that summer and each time I saw them they were a different age. Sometimes teenagers, sometimes old men. The same two guys.

Once I went in to watch them working; they were chiselling away at large, dank stones in the wall. For a week afterwards, people called at the house. People from different times. I remember men with sallow faces and greasy hair, odd accents and car tools in their hands. Faraway eyes. They were there but not there, and I think it all came from the church, there was something catching there, some contact was missing its mark.

One night, outside in the garden, a creature spread itself like a sheet over a long expanse of grass towards the back of the house. It was under the washing line, and right up against the fences. Indistinctly in the darkness, I could make out a breathing mouth, and eyes in the middle of the lawn. It reminded me of a time I had been walking towards an intersection on Shaftesbury Avenue as a bus swept round the corner. I caught a quick glimpse of a woman sitting on the near side, staring at me, utterly absorbed and fascinated in the contemplation of my face; I had felt shaken and upset, totally objectified by that split second’s exchange of glances. The same thing was happening here. In the morning, the creature had gone.

I spoke to the renovation workers, who were perfectly ordinary in every other way, and they were also convinced it was the building, that the building was ill, at odds with itself; they even went as far as to say that anything could malfunction in this way, any physical object, in fact even any proposition or idea. They said they’d seen it before, that it happened all the time in nature, just on the verges of our sight, and if you were patient you could see it everywhere.

Damon and Naomi show

2008-10-07T09:28:00.001+01:00

I will be playing guitar with Damon and Naomi this Sunday (12th October) at Rough Trade East. Address is Dray Walk, Old Truman Brewery, 91 Brick Lane, London E1 6QL. It's free, but you need to show up to get a stamp or something and it's first come first served. There is a nice coffee shop and tons of great records for sale, including a D&N exclusive Christmas CD! Show starts 7 PM sharp.

Trees for Cities

2008-09-17T09:35:00.000+01:00

The last time I ran with any seriouness was immediately after throwing up on a policeman in trafalgar square, new year's eve 1998. In order to recapture the thrill of that wild, mercurial chase through London's backstreets at the height of the Britpop era and also to do something for a good cause, I will be running around Battersea park for the Trees for Cities Charity this weekend.

Any sponsorship donations are more than welcome!

2008-09-05T12:00:00.002+01:00

`It's gone!' sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. `So beautiful and strange and new. Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever. No! There it is again!' he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound.
…....

Breathless and transfixed the Mole stopped rowing as the liquid run of that glad piping broke on him like a wave, caught him up, and possessed him utterly. He saw the tears on his comrade's cheeks, and bowed his head and understood. For a space they hung there, brushed by the purple loose-strife that fringed the bank; then the clear imperious summons that marched hand-in-hand with the intoxicating melody imposed its will on Mole, and mechanically he bent to his oars again. And the light grew steadily stronger, but no birds sang as they were wont to do at the approach of dawn; and but for the heavenly music all was marvellously still.

On either side of them, as they glided onwards, the rich meadow-grass seemed that morning of a freshness and a greenness unsurpassable. Never had they noticed the roses so vivid, the willow-herb so riotous, the meadow-sweet so odorous and pervading. Then the murmur of the approaching weir began to hold the air, and they felt a consciousness that they were nearing the end, whatever it might be, that surely awaited their expedition.

The Wind in the Willows - Chapter 7; The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

Jewels / Bay view Collage

2008-05-16T14:11:00.001+01:00

The Street of the Love of Days

2008-04-22T11:05:00.001+01:00

Amor de Días means "love of days" in Spanish. One day last year I was walking through Madrid's fashionable Central Madrid district looking for a restaurant, and I spied a street sign that made me smile with lighthearted wonder at the strange poetic ways of foreigners. It said "Calle del Amor de Dios", which my pidgin Spanish translated as "the Street of the Love of Days". (Of course anyone with half a brain will tell you that I'd got my dios and dias mixed up, and what it actually said was "the Street of the Love of God", which is after all a very common street name in Spanish towns.) However the original and misunderstood name stuck and I thought, what a beautiful name, what a beautiful and mysterious street.

Amor de Días has since become the name of a musical project I'm working on with Lupe from Pipas, which has so far come up all Spanish guitar, with a bit of Satie, and Beach Boys. I don't have any sounds to put up here cos nothing is finished, but we are making a record. And playing a very very rare show with our friends the Ladybug Transistor on Monday 28th April at the Luminaire in Kilburn.

I doubt even God would be able to transform Kilburn High Road on Monday night to a street of the love of days, but we will try our best.

Perfection Pop

2008-02-08T14:45:00.000Z

I aint no music reviewer, but as no one else seems to have mentioned The Pale Fountains one off 25 year reunion gig at Shepherd's Bush Empire last Sunday, and as I was there, I should say something. They took the risk of playing most of Forever Changes over the PA before taking the stage, and then…..

There's a lightness of touch in their songs which is superb, all taut edges and perfect balance. The words are beautifully written too, simple and elegant, sort've cinematic and imagistic without being self consciously poetic. I honestly don't think any other guitar band from the 80s could touch the quality of those songs, they were that good. Felt and Cardinal have the same mysteriousness, Galaxie 500 have a greater sense of sonic depth and colour, but no one created such brilliant songs so effortlessly. Each one of them was like a restless breeze – ‘Jean’s Not Happening’ and ‘Just a Girl’ were the highlights: you can hear Love in them, but the Pale Fountains filter those rays of sunshine and Spanish chords through washed out skies and rainy days. This is what British guitar music is best at – nicking from America and bringing it back home, capturing California’s mythos of beauty and dread and sticking it right into the Norfolk Broads, if er.. you see what i mean.

Mr. Head appeared to be dressed in white pumps and a black Pale Fountains-branded tracksuit, he didn't seem to much care how it all went, whether it was in time, or even audible; the sound guy was half asleep anyway, fading up John Head's guitar solos a few seconds after they'd started. Arthur Lee must have given them some pointers in terms of trashing their legacy. None of it mattered that much - it was a shambles, but beautiful. In the right venue and with some rehearsal it would have been transcendent.

Unfortunately the big, half-empty hall, the pointlessly enforced house rules, the unpleasant security and the poster that announced the return of the "PALE FOUNTIANS" all contributed to the usual atmosphere of apathy and barely repressed nastiness we've come to expect from larger venues in London, but most of all the lack of crowds was a reminder that this type of baroque pop, which I love so much, only ever had any commercial bite for a few years in the 60s, since then the critics have raved but nobody buys it. The fact that no one knows that fantastic record by Mick Head’s other band, the Strands, (which, as I think someone said once, is like a collection of songs Robin Hood and his merry men could have sung in Sherwood Forest, as well as being like a beautiful Stephen Conroy painting - all ships returning home under dark skies) still baffles me.

They referred to themselves as ‘the Paleys’ too, which was endearing.

And for 20 points, guess which Clientele song 'Jeanne's Not Happening' um.. inspired?

The surviving dust of 1978

2008-01-22T20:30:00.022Z

He was already drunk, and becoming slightly pompous; the pub jukebox blared in the corner, and outside, crowds flowed with supernatural ease through the Green Park arcades, and downhill to the river, sifting through glass-fronted boutiques, leaving for Metroland and the Christmas break. I listened because I had nothing better to do: all my friends had gone, and he'd bought me a drink.

"That winter," he said, "I went back to the family house, which was then at the edge of a large and half-finished estate. It was still and quiet, backing onto a copse the bulldozers had missed when they levelled the heath. The drab light lent everything an insubstantiality, intensifying the curious end-of-term feeling I had, the sense that the days themselves were somehow exhausted.

Three windows took up one side of the dining room, with a steadily murmuring radiator underneath. Enamel paint curled away from the window frame in flakes and peels, and the hot metal in the room gave off its alienating, faintly acidic smell. I remember clouds drifting in, and I watched them pick up the red flare of the streetlights."

This last point emphasised by a moment of silence, which he filled with a look around the bar.

"Late one night a figure appeared in the garden. It was almost pathetic; hungry-looking. boss-eyed and twisted. Under the faint light that the room cast over the gravel, I could see that its skin was made of flowers. It was hollow. It shied like an animal, and disappeared into the wood.

I knew it - you would have too, if you'd been there; it was a figure I’d glimpsed in a car park as a child; an expression crossing the face of a stranger late one night at Waterloo Station as I hurried for a train with my parents; a carving in the portico of a mediaeval church. In some nightmarish way it was particular, and it was also infinite. It was itself, it was the wood, it was the last roses in the garden, and yet it was also a wider sentience, perhaps best described as the feeling that the trees and fields we look at have always secretly been looking back into us.

The air felt charged, somehow electric, and as I stared at the place it had been, I became aware of a smell of dust. I smelt the billions of falling microscopic specks, the ghost dust-rain that surrounds all of us, all the time. For one moment of hyper-awareness I could read its mixtures and vintages, the histories and provenance of each particle of dust in the room. And faintly, hauntingly, somewhere on the edge of all the others, I smelt the surviving dust of 1978.

It was a dust of forgotten piano lessons; church halls; school gatherings in terrapin huts. Back then, to a child's nose, even the smell of glass differed from room to room, and for one second I could smell all the mirrors and the windows of those lost days, the unbounded spaces between them; it was a dust of the exhaust fumes of Austin Allegros, the naked wooden floors of a new house, bike tyres and long-discontinued cigarette brands. A dust that conjured pools of evening light, mysterious journeys, finished lives, dreads and hopes of an almost atavistic intensity.

I blinked, I seem to remember I was terrified, but at the same time so surprised, so overwhelmed with longing, with love for the past, love for the dead, that at that moment fear had no real meaning: I inhabited a bright, blank space that I'd encountered once before when I dislocated my knee on a rugby field.

Then neither quickly nor gradually, it was gone. The room returned, and with it the seamlessness, the ordinary loneliness of the night. I never saw that figure, or anything like him, again.

Days later, when the weather had broken, I looked over the hill, past the woods, and the developer's tracks and pylons. The freezing air seemed to distort the sounds of the construction vehicles, and their bleeps and revs sang like human voices. I remember thinking, 'If the world was one degree stranger, one degree more fluid, I could have escaped and joined myself back there, I could have disappeared forever. But it isn't, and I’m stranded here, split into two, getting ready for bed in a dormitory town.' "

He drank. Dark had fallen; the world was moving forward confidently, tangibly.

Wishing you a mysterious shadowy Christmas

2007-12-23T12:50:00.000Z

With this study of Odilon Redon's Virgin with Halo. See you in 2008!

Thank you

2007-12-09T16:42:00.000Z

Thanks to the people who’ve been in touch about recording and buying artwork. There are now some cheaper drawings for sale here. If anyone wants them, just write to the usual address – theclientele@yahoo.com

So from now on I will farm all this ridiculousness off to the other blog, and only use this space for the usual paranoid and drunken rantings from tour.