the clientele

gail interviewed london's masters of understatement -- alasdair, james, and mark -- at some awful irish pub in north london in march 2000.

chickfactor: when was the first clientele gig?
alasdair: it was at the railway tavern in winchester supporting some student friends of my sister, and it was a very drunken affair. it was four years ago.
cf: what was the clientele called before it was called the clientele?
james: that's a secret, isn't it?
cf: you have to give it up to chickfactor.
james: oh, I don't know about that.
cf: oh jesus, it can't be that bad.
alasdair: we were called the butterfly collectors.
cf: no you weren't. really?
alasdair: yes we were really!
james: and that's the best of the three names we actually had.
cf: what were the other names?
alasdair: no, we were only a serious band when we were -- we were about 16 and we were called the butterfly collectors and then we changed our name because everyone said it sounded too indie. you should ask why we're called the clientele as well.
cf: doesn't everyone ask you that?
alasdair: but we don't give everyone the true story.
cf: why are you called the clientele?
alasdair: I had a girlfriend in edinburgh who suggested the name because she said it was posh yet sleazy like me.
cf: what did the band sound like when you guys were 16?
alasdair: exactly the same as now except without decent songs.
cf: who was in the band then?
alasdair: me, james, innes, and a guy called daniel evans.
cf: what's the most preposterous thing you've been compared to?
alasdair: gilbert o'sullivan.
james: belle and sebastian.
cf: you haven't even heard them.
james: I've heard a couple of songs.
alasdair: I haven't heard them. I have a tape I'm going to listen to. so many people, like robert forster says he really likes belle and sebastian and he's got no need to say it if he doesn't mean it, has he?
cf: do you think being held up as some sort of belle and sebastian thing has helped you or hurt you?
alasdair: we haven't got anywhere so... it's hurt us in the sense that we've had a bad review about it. we don't want to mention that here.
james: I think it's misleading.
alasdair: as I say, I don't know them, but I think there's different preoccupations in what we're doing.
cf: well, I think the belle & sebastian thing makes a lot of people go see you.
alasdair: yeah, I suppose it helps in that way, but people get disappointed when we aren't the next belle and sebastian or whatever. cause we look nothing like them and there's only three of us. what do they sound like?
cf: you sound nothing like them. the only possible link is that you've listened to the same records but that's probably true of a hundred million bands. what's the best pub in london?
james: this one. [laughter all around]
alasdair: the great northern railway tavern in hornsey high street. the pier tavern in docklands, that's the best pub in london.
james: rose and crown in greenwich.
alasdair: these are all pubs we've just completely humiliated ourselves at.
cf: doing what?
alasdair: in the rose and crown it was staring into the toilets through a hole. staring into the gents and being caught by the barman.
cf: what makes a good pub?
alasdair: late opening hours, good music, and beautiful decor. the great northern railway tavern has such amazing edwardian decor but it's not poncefied, you know, it's just full of ordinary drunks. full of fat, ignorant drunks like tim hopkins.
cf: how did the clientele get their namby-pamby image when they're clearly a bunch of drunken thugs?
alasdair: I don't know. I guess we let some people off their debts when we were collecting debts in the east end. james eased up on a few people in the boxing gym.
innes: when we started up, it was very quiet stuff...
alasdair: it still is quite quiet, it's still gentle. and it was the nme as well, they were in their music-doesn't-have-to-be-intelligent-or-sensitive phase.
cf: why don't think you've gotten much notice in britain?
alasdair: because it's evil, the music business in britain is evil. it's really cliquey, it's really elitist, and it's just a herd mentality. at the moment in britain they're either doing '70s kitsch retro pop bands like gay dad or else postrock -- postrock is what's selling. there's nothing going on with guitar bands in the mainstream at the moment in britain. it's just really unhealthy.
cf: do people really like gay dad here?
alasdair: gay dad are titans here. gay dad were seen as the saviors of pop music. they're awful, absolutely dreadful.
cf: what kind of drunks are you?
james: mean, very mean.
innes: mean and bad. no, none of us have got strong heads but we always drink like we have so we get drunk after 4 or 5 pints.
alasdair: within 4 or 5 minutes. I don't think we're mean drunks. we're emotional, happy drunks... sentimental with foolish outbursts.
innes: when we were younger, pubs were like a sanctuary where we could relax, when we couldn't relax at home.
alasdair: we would all get together and plan what we were going to do with music or whatever in the pub. we were far more used to going to the pub and talking than to going to a club and dancing.
cf: have you ever been in a brawl?
innes: no, we did steal some cigarettes once though.
alasdair: we tend to steal things rather than brawl. if our backs were against the wall, we'd brawl. if we had to give the cigarettes back.
cf: what's the best fan gift you've received in the mail?
alasdair: I got a handbag from a japanese girl. it had a cartoon version of a small baby embroidered on it. it was made of denim.
cf: what song do you wish you wrote?
alasdair: I wish I'd written "you set the scene" by love, "pretty ballerina" by the left banke, "another day" by galaxie 500. "wichita lineman," "macarthur park." "beechwood park" by the zombies, "transparent day" by the west coast pop art experimental band. "caroline no" by the beach boys.
cf: are there karaoke bars in london?
alasdair: there aren't any where you hire rooms like in new york. they're just awful places where drunk 17-year-old girls sing whitney houston songs and everyone has to listen.
cf: you write hard vocal parts.
alasdair: I like to have big jumps and jump around through different notes and different octaves and, yeah, it is quite hard to sing it. I can sing it better with a nylon-string guitar quietly so in the actual process of writing the song it will have been written so I'll think it's a shame to not actually use it. because maybe if we record it, I can sing it properly, and live it's more difficult to sing. but I just like songs that jump around and surprise people with the melodies, so that it doesn't get predictable.
cf: would it be hard on your voice to tour and play every night?
alasdair: it would probably not be, it would probably be all right...
cf: if you weren't a chainsmoking maniac?
alasdair: I would probably be able to sing better then.
cf: do you have a preshow ritual?
alasdair: an argument normally.
cf: about what? the set list?
alasdair: little bits of equipment, who's got this? who's got that?
cf: what's your worst soundman experience?
alasdair: the guy at brownies threatened to beat up our manager if he told him to change one more thing. that was a man who either couldn't speak english or didn't really want to do his job.
cf: what's the most embarrassing thing you've done onstage?
alasdair: when I pitched headlong into the drums last thursday. [laughter all around] that was hand over foot the most embarrassing thing I've ever done onstage. once I had an electrocution through my teeth through the microphone, which made me flinch very strangely and sing very far away from the microphone afterward. one time someone said to us that we had too much change in our pockets when we were onstage.
innes: that was me.
cf: what's the harshest bit of heckling you've ever had?
alasdair: "more reverb."
innes: this is england, you get indifference. people walk away, they don't say anything.
alasdair: someone started dancing quite stupidly at our boston gig and said "play something fast."
cf: what do your fans look like?
alasdair: they're a broad spectrum between the glamourous and the nerdy. they generally look slightly drunk.
cf: where do they all come from?
alasdair: new york.
james: and greenwich.
alasdair: south london.
cf: what's your lucky stagewear?
mark: I played with a big pink feather boa.
alasdair: black rollneck, to become the jean paul sartre of pop.
james: an untucked shirt.
cf: what would you like to say to your critics?
alasdair: it's okay, you don't need to try to be so macho, we still like you. [one critic] quoted the thing about butterflies from "reflections after jane" as a really bad lyric and it's verbatim from the end of king lear. so, I'm on shakespeare's side with that one.
cf: what do you read?
alasdair: surrealism. latin american literature. loads and loads and loads of kafka. shakespeare. italo calvino.
james: similar sort of thing for me, surrealist writers.
cf: what's driving you mad?
james: work.
alasdair: people who sit in smoking carriages in public transport and then complain if people smoke because they haven't read the signs properly.
cf: what's the last record you played?
innes: west coast pop art experimental band, and you were there so I can't lie.
alasdair: glen campbell sings jimmy webb.
james: the mekons' new album.
cf: do you get writers' block?
alasdair: no, I don't. as long as I'm playing the guitar regularly, I write songs. but I don't always have time to play the guitar regularly.
cf: what spanish guitarists inspire you?
alasdair: a lot of bossa nova like vinicius de moraes. paco de lucia -- he does fantastic gypsy love songs and flamenco guitar and it's really, really, really beautiful. that really, really inspires me. it doesn't sound anything like the clientele obviously. I've asked spanish friends to translate the words for me and they've never really bothered but just that it's about longing and you can hear that anyway. really beautiful.
cf: do you regret not playing the trumpet?
alasdair: bitterly.
cf: what other instruments do you play?
james: mark plays the piano very well.
cf: do you write with melodies or words first?
alasdair: melodies. words are secondary in my opinion and I like the idea that music doesn't actually have to mean anything. it's incredibly liberating because it doesn't have to have a meaning, it can just be music. and that is almost a way to escape words, you know?
cf: would you ever print a lyric sheet?
alasdair: no, because the lyrics don't make any sense without the music. so many people do and it's just so lame unless they're fantastic lyricists. we might print excerpts here and there but not a whole song because it's just a mess. it would be a mess without knowing the melody and the rhythm; it just looks scruffy.
cf: the other night we were talking about how your lyrics are the same in every song. do you think that's true?
alasdair: yeah. deliberately.
cf: are there any direct lifts you regret?
alasdair: I pretentiously put in a few lines from the waste land into a song and it fitted well but it's leaving me open for a barrage of abuse.
cf: what's an essential men's fashion accessory?
innes: corsets.
alasdair: pants.
cf: there's a volkswagen commercial on tv in the u.s. that uses "pink moon" in it. what do you think of his sister using his music for that? if you died and your sister sold your songs because the family needed money...
alasdair: I don't see that there's a problem with that.
cf: would you sell your songs to volkswagen right now?
alasdair: no.
cf: is there any product you would get behind if they wanted your music?
alasdair: no, not personally. it would be a band decision but I think that selling music to advertising is kind of immoral. it's just boring, it's lame.
cf: what if someone wanted your music for a film you hadn't seen?
alasdair: depends who it was. we'd read the script, edit it, and send it back to them. and see if they still wanted to use the song.
cf: whom would you make an exception for?
alasdair: orson welles.
cf: was cry me a liver your first official release?
alasdair: it was indeed. dreadful, grotesque compilation.
cf: how did that happen? it's such an ugly cover.
james: we had no say in cover art.
alasdair: we had no say in anything. fierce panda offered us a track on a compilation single and it's normally the route toward getting some sort of recognition in britain so we had no choice.
james: it was a step up for us because we'd not had any offers for anything.
cf: why didn't you put something out yourself?
alasdair: too tightfisted.
james: we didn't have a clue how to do it really. didn't think anyone would buy it.
alasdair: it is a lasting embarrassment.
cf: well, no one can get it anyway.
alasdair: good. it's a good song, but it's a terrible, terrible compilation.
cf: when did you write your first song?
alasdair: when I was about 7, on a child's piano. I can't remember what it was called, I think it rhymed "sighing, dying, and crying" though.
cf: why did you write a song?
alasdair: because I was so uplifted and enthusiastic about hearing "please please me" by the beatles every dinnertime which my dad used to play for some reason.
cf: do your parents play music?
alasdair: mine don't.
james: my dad plays ragtime, scott joplin, the same pieces again and again.
alasdair: my dad's a mathematician, but he loves music.
cf: are you good at math?
alasdair: terrible. I'm a great disappointment I'm afraid.
cf: paul verlaine thought that poetry should be music; do you think music should be poetry?
alasdair: I think it's very similar. what I get from both is fairly comparable, but it's just sounds and it doesn't need to make sense. it just needs to be ravishing.
cf: what line of poetry sticks in your head?
alasdair: it's from "the nightingale" by borghese, and it describes the song of the nightingale and he says "you burn with love and die in liquid song."
cf: would the surrealists approve of a band that's so retro?
james: they didn't like music. they hated it.
alasdair: they were very retro themselves. they were into fairytales and gothic tales and rewriting traditional narratives. that's kind of what we're doing with music.
cf: you don't think you're throwbacks?
alasdair: a song's a song, isn't it? if people could write songs as good as jimmy webb or burt bacharach, then they would have done it ad nauseam by now. it's not that easy to do, and there's room for it. I think we have contemporary influences anyway.
cf: what musical revelations have you had lately?
james: robert wyatt. second one on the work in progress ep.
alasdair: plush's album. all of pam berry's stuff. she sings like an angel.
mark: playing music again.
cf: what record would you like your debut album to sound like?
alasdair: on fire by galaxie 500. odessey and oracle by the zombies.
cf: where do you write?
alasdair: in privacy, in deserted rooms, preferably where no one can hear.
cf: why is north london better than south london?
alasdair: things happen here. the record shops are better. the gigs are better. the architecture is better. the transport's better. it's more centralised. it's just so much better. CF