“As We Got Older, We Lost Our Preciousness” The Clientele Interviewed

The Clientele stand shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the greats. The band are set to release ‘I Am Not There Anymore’ later this week – a 19-song, pastoral, reflection-epic that ranks with their best work. Clash spoke to the band’s Alasdair MacLean to discuss technology, imagery and surrealism on ‘I Am Not There Anymore’.

‘I’m Am Not There Anymore’ illustrates a depth of musicianship drenched in care and intimacy. It is an album that meanders but never feels directionless. It is brimful with heartfelt musical diversity. From the album’s opening track ‘Fables of the Silverlink’ you feel as if you are about to embark on a journey drenched in electronic drum patterns, horns and strings. Throughout the album, staunch pop classics such as ‘Blue Over Blue’ stand shoulder to shoulder with experimental reflections such as ‘Dancing In May’ and ‘My Childhood’. Amongst it all, the album contains a number of ‘Radials’ (defined as ‘diverging in lines from a common centre’) to create a musically contrasting theme throughout the record. 

Canonically ‘I Am Not There Any More’ sits amongst rare moments in modest forward-thinking English pop-greats that are united in their ability to capture an artist’s reality in earnest. Others include Ralph Vaughn Williams’ ‘Symphony No.5’, The Kinks’ ‘Village Green Preservation Society’,  XTC’s ‘Skylarking’, The Claim’s ‘Boomytella’, and Blur’s ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’. In 2023, it is The Clientele with ‘I Am Not There Anymore’. The album shows the listener something – sometimes it doesn’t go where you want it to go. But with full reward. When you are truly exploring, you do not know what you can expect, which is why exploration can be so difficult in music. Listeners have predisposed opinions of what they like. The Clientele require you to strip yourselves of such dispositions. They’re taking you with them, whether it is where you expected to go, or not. It is an experience to be cherished. 

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How are you feeling about the new record? 

It’s funny because people seem to be really keen on this record, but we wrote it thinking we’ll just do whatever we want now, that we’re done trying to be accessible. People might want to hear guitar songs, but we decided we were going to have atonal strings, and sub bass. We thought people would probably go “this isn’t the Clientele, this is dance music!” and it has been lovely because there has been a really good reaction to it. We kind of think “why didn’t we do this before?”

‘I Am Not There Anymore’ still feels distinctly like a Clientele record, but with a new sound, was it a conscious decision to be more “experimental”?

I think that as we got older, we lost our preciousness. It was very important for me. Earlier on, when we were making the first Clientele records, we were very focused, and very tight. The music had to be very focused, very minimal, and the lyrics had to be very crystalline; they had to scan in a certain way, they had to say certain things.

We stopped playing after we made a record called ‘Bonfires on the Heath’ and I was really worried about our follow up ‘Music for the Age of Miracles’ because I thought people would think that our time has passed, that we shouldn’t be together and that we were spoiling our legacy. So I was still feeling precious then, because I was thinking about legacy. That record was well received, and that gave me the confidence to think of it in a different way, with more of a long narrative – rather than just thinking about a set of records that sound like a particular band at a particular time. So that really set me free to do whatever I want. I began to work with a lot of technology as well, not so much playing the guitar to write songs, but actually using field recordings to write.

I think that is where it comes from – suddenly when you start to work with these technologies, you realise that you can sample a flamenco rhythm or can score a string quartet or add sub-bass. These were all things we loved since the first record and suddenly, we were able to reach for them, and catch them, and see to what extent we could integrate them into what we do normally, without it sounding like it was all going to fall apart. That was good fun to do. 

In discovering these new technologies, did you feel that it was necessary to exercise restraint?

Well.. yes. The song ‘My Childhood’ came from an art installation that I did years ago. I went to the New Forest and recorded the wind for about eighteen minutes. I was then playing around with Abelton on the computer. There is a thing that Abelton does where it translates audio into Midi. So you can play a simple tune and you will get the Midi pattern of that tune. I thought it was clever and I wondered how it will cope with something completely, tonally indeterminate, like the sound of the wind. It completely freaked out. It came up with all these notes. I looked at the pattern, and thought to split it into four tracks, assigning two violins, a viola and a cello to those notes. I sent through the export to the guy that was helping to score the record, and he said “no one can play this!” So I suggested he score it and tell them to just do their best, which is completely alien to how classical musicians like to work – they like to be precise and do exactly what the composer thought. That is how that string sound came up.

Once I had recorded the string quartet, I took it to the others expecting that they would just throw it out – but actually, they all really loved it. There were plenty of times when I thought that the new record doesn’t sound like the Clientele, like ‘My Childhood’ which doesn’t have any guitar in it. I am not even on it – I just scored the strings. Neither are Mark or James for that matter, so the whole band aren’t on the track. Somehow, it fits together thematically with the record. It’s not easy listening, but it sits alright with the song before it which is a real pop song, and the song after it which is a very tonally stable, three chord song. You kind of go out there, and then you bring it back again, and it seems to work. 

It feels as if there is a real theme to the record, both in terms of imagery and music, and the way that they interact together. Do they inform each other in your creative process? 

All my life I have been getting hypnotised, but not knowing it. When I was three, my mum used to put the vacuum cleaner on and I’d suddenly go into a trance and I would start to sing over it. Then, often, in the early days of the Clientele, the best time to write a song would be when you were really hungover, and you were walking down the street really hungover and you were dissociating, you were not in your own body somehow. You were off with the fairies. I think I have always got these images by going into some weird trance. You always know the image that comes. You always have a sense of whether it is true or not, and whether it has depth or not. Then, sometimes – you can find music that echoes that. From there, the words come, and the words have to echo the music too.

So it is a process from image, to music, to words, but they’re all linked together. It happens almost involuntarily. I know how to play the guitar, and I have tried to write songs by playing the guitar, but they’re never good songs. They are only ever really if they spring from the subconscious. I found out later that surrealist writers would write in that way too – in a trance – and that is really the key to the way that I write songs. It is a bit weird, but it has been completely instinctive for a long time.

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You mentioned surrealist writers – are they a particular lyrical influence?

They are. I began to learn about books and writers in the late 1980s / early 1990s. I was 16 in 1990 and there was a cultural nastiness around. The nastiness of people like Martin Amis, who wrote in a nihilistic and sneering way. I didn’t like it. I thought it was both upsetting and boring. On the other hand, the other option was to explore a more flowery, sentimental culture, which I didn’t like either. I was in a library in Edinburgh University one day, and I got out a book on surrealist poetry. They had very condensed, clear cut images, that they linked in chains which didn’t need to make sense.

In fact, if they did make sense the authors probably wouldn’t have liked it. It spoke to me as it was all based on images. I love the fact that you didn’t need to have a beginning, a middle or an end, that you didn’t need to have any craftsmanship. It was a more primitive way of writing that was based on images. I felt like it was what I had been looking for all my life and that it was going to help me so much. People like Andre Breton, or Paul Eluard, and Robert Desnos. A lot of these people are not as well known as Salvador Dali, but they are so much more interesting.

That was a moment where I thought, this is going to help me put what I am seeing into words, and not feel self conscious or ashamed of it. They have been a continued inspiration throughout my life. But there are other poets too, people like Rainer Maria Rilke, who talks about the way bats fly. He talks about how they don’t fly – they shiver, like a crack in a porcelain glass. When I read these people, I try to misread them, I try to mistake what they are saying, so that I can end up with something that I can steal. 

How did the Radials come into existence? Were they a conscious part of writing the record? Or did they occur quite organically?

Mark, the drummer, wrote them. Mark used to play piano in a jazz band, so he is a really really good pianist. He had been writing them, and when we started to put together songs, he was putting them forward and we all loved them so much, we all love his piano songs. They remind me of something that would come out on ECM like Keith Jarrett, post-minimalist music, like Michael Jon Fink or even Erik Satie. I mean, he knows who Satie is, but I don’t even know if he knows who Keith Jarrett and Micahel Jon Fink are – they just seem to come from him.

So, it is a really beautiful thing. They offer a huge contrast. When you have a big sound with a big horn section, and a big string section, and everyone going hell-for-leather on the end of Fables of the Silverlink, and you go into that first Radial, and you have that very pure single note of piano ringing out, it is a beautiful contrast, and it just brings you back down to earth. That’s my perspective on it, but I didn’t write them, Mark did. We’re men of a certain age in our band, we don’t really talk. So I am not sure what he had in mind. 

There is a pastoral sound to the record, in its reflection, and mentions of country roads. Does that play into the sound much?

We grew up in suburbia, in Basingstoke, Fleet – just down the M4 from London. It was the edge of the countryside; it didn’t take long to get to London, but it didn’t take long to get into the fields either. It was always very confusing, and incomplete, or even real or true. I think that landscape has been reflected in the songs a lot.

A kind of confusing pastoral – not beautiful pastoral, biennial pastoral – image. The boredom of that can be beautiful in itself. The monotony of hearing the motorway, when you go to sleep as a kid and thinking that you can hear the sea, and the waves breaking, but it is endlessly breaking for ever, it is never going into shore. Then I realised it was the cars a mile and a half away. We were so bored that we had to find our own boredom beautiful and magical in a way, that is what people did out there. 

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‘I Am Not There Anymore’ will be released on July 28th via Merge Records.

Words: Arthur Arnold
Photo Credit: Andy Willsher