INTERVIEW: Alasdair MacLean of The Clientele

With five records to their name and over two decades of experience in penning sublime, moonlit psych-pop, we spoke with Alasdair MacLean of The Clientele to discuss their recently released career-spanning compilation Alone & Unreal, how they’re free from the dying breed of rock ‘n’ rollers and the boundary-breaking magnetism of music.

Congratulations on the release of Alone & Unreal: The Best of The Clientele was it difficult to pick your favourite songs for the compilation? Did this differ a lot between band members?

Yeah, we always have completely different lists, so it’s always a bit of a fudge really. My favourite songs are never anyone else’s favourite songs; I don’t think we agree on anything in this band.

Alongside the release you also gave away The Sound of Young Basingstoke – you’ve mentioned in the past it’s sort of “the lost line-up” and that you felt you should have released it as your debut. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Well I think really all the best bands formed at school, they were school friends you know? So they weren’t advertising in Melody Maker, on notice boards at record shops, they were just good friends, who said: “Ok, you’re going to play the drums. I’m going to play the guitar. Now we’re going to learn our instruments” and that’s what that line-up was. For years we were generally terrible, but we were just getting good around that time when we made those recordings. So for me that was the lost line-up.

It features early versions of ‘Saturday’ and ‘Rain’, which sound fairly refined, as if your overall sound was realised by that point. What made you release it now?

We just found it again I guess. When we reissued Suburban Light we went through all the historic tapes, as we had to look for bonus material. And that session is just one we found. It’s just left as it’s recorded; in the order it was recorded in, very quickly mixed. It just seems to flow. It has that very natural ease to it. In my experience that marks when something has really worked, it’s actually really easy, you don’t have to do anything with it.

When Suburban Light was released you mentioned you didn’t feel you had many musical contemporaries at the time. Do you think this was due to your musical/literary influences or do you feel you just occupied a completely different space entirely, where you were just separate from the scene?

I think that when we first formed in the suburbs in Hampshire the nucleus of our sound was just there and it never changed. It was at a really different time from now, even a really different time from the year 2000. I mean the things that we liked were in the wilderness. I mean nobody cared about Galaxie 500, the 13th Floor Elevators or The Left Banke in 1995. So we had this sort of bunker like mentality that formed then that we kept. So during the following years we didn’t pay that much attention to other Indie music going on; we just had our own DNA.

That’s why we never really felt like we had peers, I mean there were definitely bands around that we admired: Plush, Destroyer and Boards Of Canada. But generally speaking we just felt we were on our own voyage really. I think we kind of mirrored the reaction to people in Britain that were like: “Ok, it’s not Gay Dad so we’re not going to write about it y’know?”

You mentioned 13th Floor Elevators, what do you think of bands becoming increasingly popular decades after their inception?

Well, I mean it’s kind of cool isn’t it? Well I don’t think they were necessarily lost, I think just now more people have got to know about them. I feel like we were involved in a lot of battles with music and culture – not that we were in any way a kind of significant force in it or that we decided anything – but a lot of the stuff that we fought for back in the 90s have now been won.

So there’s a place in the pantheon for 13th Floor Elevators, Arthur Lee and Galaxie 500. That was by no means assured in those days, it was just a very different time and culture. In a way I feel like the things we backed and betted on were the things that eventually came around, they were the things that had longevity.

You’ve also mentioned as teenagers, yourself and Innes Phillips “inhabited the books you read and you lived them”. Do you think these imagined stories and settings you found yourselves in fed into the atmosphere of your songs?

Absolutely. Again it was very much our decision to say, we get as much from different types of art, as we do from music and if we can combine that, well that’s like the coolest thing in the world. We lived for it.

I was talking on the radio the day before yesterday (The Clientele’s BBC 6 Session with Gideon Coe) and I was asked “You’re band sounds autumnal”. I was trying to answer but I couldn’t really articulate what I meant. I meant to answer: “Yes, we do. But the reason we do is because we try to articulate that change in the air that happens when autumn comes. But it’s not a verbal thing; you can’t really express it properly with words. You can express it with music and atmosphere.”

 That’s the kind of thing we wanted to do. If you wanted to put your finger on it, that’s the thing our band has always wanted to capture. It’s important to do that with music because you can only go so far with words. So in terms of surrealist literature and surrealist writers which is really important to us, we had our own path to follow where we were taking the same kind of atmosphere that they were writing about, but we were doing it with music. Does that make sense? Does that sound pretentious?

No, not at all. There’s a guardian feature where Robert Macfarlane talks about the eeriness of the English Countryside, and he says that behind these pastoral scenes lie suppressed forces and the feeling as if one is being observed – this reminded me a lot of your music and it’s certainly something you’ve spoken of in the past – there’s the immediate charm and then the sort of mysterious atmosphere and the darker undertones, wrapped up with all the imagery. Is this something you actively aim for when writing?

I think it’s something that’s felt and it’s interesting so many people nowadays do feel it. But I do think the more it’s written about in that way the more it becomes unreal and it just becomes a “thing”. It goes back to what I’m saying about there’s things you can’t verbalize, you can’t explain in normal means and I think that’s definitely one of them. The fact that it becomes a hipster thing along with pulled-pork and craft beer is a bit of a shame. As I feel it’s something that you can only see out the corner of your eye.

There’s a brilliant example of a writer who does this kind of stuff: Alan Garner. He’s famous for writing children’s books but he’s written a lot of adult books in the last few decades. One of the themes he writes about he talks about a kid sledging down a hill in Cheshire and the sledge is made by his Granddad, so there’s this element of craftsmanship. But the sledge is finding this line and he’s building up momentum, going faster and faster. The line that he finds gives him immense satisfaction and he can do things with this sledge that the other children can’t. I think it’s just a beautiful way to describe a lay line. Again it’s from the corner of the eye; it’s not straight on. The minute anyone tries to deal with this head-on I think it’s going to be cheapened. I think that’s what’s happening unfortunately, I don’t know if that’s me rambling again.

No, again that completely makes sense. I was reading an interview with Julia Holter where she’s discussing Maggie Nelson’s book, Bluets, and the quote being discussed was “I’m trying to talk about what blue means to me, apart from meaning”.

That makes perfect sense to me. I think it ties in. There’s no ancient Greek word for blue, it ties in with what we’re saying. In Homer when they talk about the wine dark sea”, the same famous phrase, it’s always puzzled people – “Well what colour is their wine?” – as they didn’t have a colour for blue, so they called it that.

We’ve talked about the sound and atmosphere you create as a band and you’ve mentioned that with each album you’re trying to refine that sound and get at the essence of it. Some critics have a tendency to accuse acts of rehashing old songs. What’s your opinion on that?

I think that I completely understand why people would say that about The Clientele, as they’re viewing us in 2015 as a Rock ‘n’ Roll band. The kind of rock band that has to focus on reinvention, this Miles Davis or Picasso styled reinvention. But in 2015, Rock ‘n’ Roll bands don’t mean anything and The Clientele isn’t one; they’re an art project. Again I know that sounds aggressively pretentious.

What it is it’s a refinement of a certain idea and it’s something that’s lasted a couple of decades and a lot of people have contributed to it. So you shouldn’t expect a Kid A from us or a Screamadelica. That’s all bullshit now anyway. I don’t think it matters now, I don’t think it has any meaning anymore. What we’re doing is just rumbling on with this art project that’s been going on since the ’90s.

Our whole aim and our whole methodology is separate from what they’re looking at, what their expectations are. We don’t have that idea of the difficult third album, that’s foreign to what we do.

So now you’ve got the upcoming gig at Islington Assembly Hall, how are you feeling about the performance?

I’m looking forward to it very much. We toured in America last year and we rehearsed then. I don’t think we’ll be doing any more shows for a long time. I think our sole focus now is on recording, is we do work on it at all. I think that this will be the one and only gig.

So I heard recording-wise you’ve got around 20 minutes of an A-side, are you still working on new material?

We’re trying to. When The Clientele stopped making music, around Bonfires on the Heath, it was because I felt like it had gone out of control. It had gone from being this interesting, heartbreaking art-project to starting to threaten to sound like a normal band and I really didn’t want to be a part of that, so we stopped it. That was just one of the many reasons.

For me it has to not sound like a normal band, it has to go back to the vividness and the inspiration of before. And actually what we’ve done does sound like we have that. So as long as we carry on having that, we’ll carry on and make another record. If not, we’ve made five records and five records is enough for any band really. Unless you’re Robert Wyatt. By that point you’ve got your message out, so you don’t want to carry on and ruin your reputation. So we’re at this point where we want it to feel worthwhile, so if it doesn’t we’ll just step away from it. It’s a great position to be in.

Do you think that you’ll be going back to your roots or do you think you’ll go off on a tangent?

Well the recordings we’ve done are sounding quite Arabic influenced almost, but that stems again from my classical guitar training and also one of my collaborators who plays the Persian Dulcimer. I mean there’s a lot of talk about it, whether to do it with lots of brass and strings like Forever Changes or strip it all down like Delta Blues. You never really can tell until you try it out.

I’ve also read you’re half way through writing a novel, any advances on that?

Yeah, that’s true. I’m about two thirds of the way through it now. I was playing in New York and I got approached by a literary agent out there, who asked if I’d ever thought of doing it. I had questions I had to ask like “Well do all writers have a storyboard like Charles Dickens, where they know what will happen before they start writing?” and he said “No, no, no. Just start writing”.

So I just started to write. It’s sort of like the literary equivalent of Suburban Light; it’s about the suburbs and a particular time in the suburbs. It’s kind of a retelling of the Orpheus myth set in the 1990’s. For all I know it could be complete crap! I don’t want to say anymore than that!

Well I’m sure it isn’t. I won’t make you give away the ending though.

Alone & Unreal: The Best Of The Clientele is now out on Pointy Records. The Clientele will also play a one-off show Islington Assembly Hall, London on 23 October 2015.

David Weir