The Clientele
"bonfires on the heath"
Location: London
Website: http://myspace.com/theclienteleofficial
Bio: One late autumn afternoon I drank with The Clientele in a dark Kings Cross bar. The red girders and walkways of the gas-works cast huge, ... (more)
crucifix-form shadows on the scuzzy street outside. A time of tapes and typewriters, and the clarity that could sometimes be gained through a hangover. We planned to make a record as gentle and spine-tingling as The Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” We toasted the beauty of last trains. Minutes before I reached the platform, the most beautiful girl of that decade gently took my arm as I crossed the bus lane, her breath frozen in the green neon of the go-sign. Petrol fumes and perfume, tawny curls on a delicate shawl, and a scarred hand. I was terrified and entranced. She was for sale. I kissed her slashed knuckles and told her about the train north. As it sped past the Weetabix factory, I managed to scribble “happy and haywire” in my notebook before sleep took me. I dreamt of pylons surrounded by barbed wire guarding a land of golden cornfields. I still hear their sinister hum. Is this the sound of The Clientele?
Minotaur, their sixth release, does not, as it is so easy to suggest, mark the end of a lost decade, for The Clientele have never been “lost,” nor does it mark a life at the edges of material success or debilitating failure. Through whispers, Minotaur reminds us that The Clientele’s truth waits within a geographic poetry, that The Clientele are of the edges. Minotaur enables us to read their albums as rain-soaked maps from a decade of exploration. A journey into the nebulous, into the eeriness between the edges of the dying village and the new estate, between the unknowable edges of the city and the sanctuary of the marshes, the places where dreams and fears replace street signs and nothing can ever be “ordinary.” If walking, as Iain Sinclair has suggested, across such terrain “confirms identity,” then Minotaur reasserts The Clientele’s skewed, bucolic visions.
The Clientele continue to gather much of their poetry from London’s detritus. There is blinding light filling the top deck of a bus to work; there are walks through unfamiliar parks, lit by “the moon on football fields.” The shadow-play in a shortcut or lonely alleyway can be heartbreaking when “everything cracks like porcelain.” There are afternoons of the fag-end days of your last dead-end job that seem to collapse in on themselves. There are revelations.
These songs, from the caress of the title track through the Television-esque tensions of “Jerry” (“Am I afraid? Are you afraid?”), to undoubtedly one of The Clientele’s most beautiful pieces, “Nothing Here Is What It Seems,” are the falling leaves, the turning ashes of the “Bonfire Sessions.”
Late June rain, “the ghost-dust rain that surrounds all of us, all the time.” Everything a whisper. The latter from the record’s spoken-word piece, “The Green Man,” the terrifying winter counterpoint to that claustrophobic summer narrative, “Losing Haringey.” Seemingly mundane encounters triggering vivid or surreal images of childhood, often painful, sometimes exquisite, perhaps both.
During those months, as I exchanged letters and photographs with Alasdair, I spent most days exploring the lanes, and verges, following what I began to term “the glinting” (it was a tangible presence) to find abandoned greenhouses and fragments of what I realised were myself.
One day in the small town, during the briefest summer you’ve ever felt, you’ll pass the smeared, reinforced glass of the garage shop and, for the first time in your life, you will suddenly see yourself as others might do: fleeting, distorted, fearful, beautiful. This is the sound of The Clientele.
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