Clinic releases their tenth album ‘Wild In The Streets’ today. Which takes the current temperature of the nation in their own inimitable style. The dozen songs are marked by urgency, surreal wordplay and trademark wit. For a band determined to chart their own course (“We’ve always run in the opposite direction to what’s happening,” asserts Ade Blackburn. “So if anything gets too close to sounding like something else, then we’ll take a different route”), Clinic continue to push forward in new and unexpected ways.
Photo Credit: Mia Lou
Skewed pop and colourful acid-punk form the heart of Clinic's music - pumped by exotic keyboards, guitars, bursts of pan pipes and rickety percussion – but the two-piece are forever alive to fresh ideas. “Something we’ve got into more recently is exotica,” explains Blackburn, “especially the colourful percussion. People like Martin Denny and Les Baxter. Some of that stuff is amazing. For what was often considered easy listening music, it has some very strange undercurrents. We’ve also been listening to dub reggae and things like Cabaret Voltaire. And a lot of early rock‘n’roll, for that immediacy. For many of these songs, we wanted an extra sense of propulsion, so we’d sometimes take out a whole verse to push it along.”
Indeed, most songs on Wild In The Streets dip under three minutes and the record throws up surprises on a regular basis. The perfomative theme nodded to on “You and I” is echoed in the vampy, disorienting “Well Wisher”, with its references to spotlights, laser beams and jumping aboard the merry-go-round. Elsewhere, the title track offers a vivid portrait of youthful days in suburbia, a feral existence filtered through personal recollection whilst, the dynamic “Back to Nature” is an allusive discourse on modern-day protest action. The nervy, Suicide-ish “Model Citizen” is another album highlight. A tale of deceit, cardboard cut-outs in the shops and hollow political promise, it’s underpinned (as with most things Clinic) by a playful sense of the absurd. “We just wanted to do something in a funnier, Kinks type of way,” Blackburn says. “Like a character study.”
Nearly 30 years since they first founded Clinic as a quartet, Blackburn and Hartley’s chemistry remains as potent as it ever was, perhaps even more so. “We’ve known each other since school,” says Blackburn. “Hartley was always interested in electronics and drum machines, even as a teenager. He’s into rhythms, whether it’s reggae and funk or more conventional guitar music, whereas I was always into songs and melodies. I think that's why Clinic works so well.”
Wild In The Streets is now set to take its place beside past triumphs like 2000’s Internal Wrangler, 2006’s Visitations and 2012’s Free Reign. “We’ve always had this absolute faith in what we do,” Blackburn adds. “It’s relatively outsider-ish music, but that’s something that’s motivated us to keep going, because it’s good to have things that are a little out on the fringes. There’s just not enough of that kind of music these days.”
