The discography page on the Clientele's website lists 15 releases, dating back to 1997-- only one of which is a studio album. They are in many ways the quintessential indie band: intimate in sound, small in number (just three-- singer and bandleader Alasdair Maclean, bassist James Hornsey, and drummer Mark Keen), with songs that seem both somehow private and perfectly suited to 7-inch vinyl. Triangulating from acknowledged inspirations the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Love, and Felt situates the Clientele in the world of distinctive guitar pop. For someone like me, who first connected to indie rock in a big way with Galaxie 500, they were an easy sell.
The Clientele recently left their day jobs to pursue music full time, and they've spent the past several months recording at their studio in Whitechapel just outside of London, where they've amassed roughly an hour of new material. They're momentarily setting aside the tapes from these sessions to record again with producer Brian O'Shaughnessy ("He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the secret underground rivers of London, we went to the pub and quizzed him, he passed the Clientele psychogeographical test," says Maclean), and they home to incorporate string arrangements into their sound.
No firm release date is set, but another U.S. tour following the record is likely. Popular in Europe (particularly Spain) and the U.S., the Clientele receives few notices in England. "We're constantly hopeful that Britain will embrace us like prodigal sons, prophets wandering back in from the desert," says Maclean. "But it ain't happened yet. Of course, there is no desert in Britain anyway, just a hinterland where net curtains twitch."
Alfred Hitchcock said that self-plagiarism is style. With the Clientele-- a band with an immediately identifiable sound that continually inhabits the same scenes and offers variations on the same smeared and hazy nostalgia-- you wonder if they feel hemmed in or afraid of repeating themselves. "I don't worry about these things," says Maclean. "These kind of concerns are too self-conscious for me. It's all like a game: If you repeat the same thing enough times, its meaning changes, disappears, and reappears."
These eternal recurrences are noticeable because the language in their songs is so plain and the images so familiar. A buzzy walk home at dawn after a sexual encounter, a weird scene glimpsed in the corner of an eye and never forgotten, the forlorn look on the face of a man strolling unhappily to work-- it's all fodder for Clientele songs. "Our music has always been about the beauty and the indivisible strangeness of the everyday, the kitchen sink," according to Maclean. "What Erik Satie called 'the mystery and profundity of boredom'. People don't value boredom enough!"
An odd comment from a bandleader, perhaps, but one that gets to the heart of what the Clientele are about. One line in particular from the song "Bicycles" strikes me as a litmus test for potential Clientele fandom, "I remember one Sunday/ Riding through the gate/ Three balloons in a white sky/ 1978" If that line does something for you and you've not yet heard this band, they have some fantastic music for you to discover.
The Violet Hour and Suburban Light are available now on Merge in the U.S. and Pointy in the UK.
