Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault

Clérambault (1872 - 1934) was a photographer and psychiatrist (apparently he invented, ahem I mean discovered, the concept of erotomania). He travelled to Morocco and obsessively took photos of women in veils. I don't know much more about him; about a year ago I found a book in a second-hand shop that contained some of his photos. They're troubling: the odd, repetitive overlap between woman and apparition. The apparent hint of cruelty and objectification. I wonder what he was doing? what was he looking for in these images?

More about painting

I've been enjoying the British Masters series on BBC4. Oxbridge Art Historian Dr. James Fox stares at symbolically thorny twigs in front of a sunset glow and roves up and down damp northern streets. He also talks about British (for this, read English) Painters of the 20th Century. He sees an unheralded and almost-forgotten 'golden age' of figurative painting stretching from the end of the Edwardian era until the suicide of Keith Vaughan in the late 1970s, taking in Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Stanley Spencer, David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Richard Hamilton and Lucian Freud, after which it all became about pickled sharks, diamond skulls and money.

Cray Fields - Graham Sutherland

Bonfire Night, Hay Bluff I - David Inshaw

(Except that it didn't: Peter Blake, Paula Rego, John Bellany, Stephen Conroy and Stephen Cambell all carried on the painterly tradition that Dr. Fox celebrates, but apparently they don't count cos they're a. women b. Scottish or c. some other reason.)

The Forest - Graham Sutherland

I love the art of most of these artists; I definitely respond to their 'Britishness'. And they deserve more international recognition. In some ways I like Dr. Fox's ludicrousness. I like the fact he flies in the face of received opinion. But his loose way with facts is quite shocking for an Oxbridge professor (e.g. on Keith Vaughan: he didn't kill himself out of despair because the conceptual artists had edged him out, as the program strongly intimates; in fact he had cancer and was at the end of a long and successful career.) Still, nice to see some of my favourite painters on the telly.

The Vanishing Map

This week Amor de Dias are 'editing' the online version of the USA's Magnet Magazine, which means writing 6 or 7 pieces each about some of our favourite things. One of mine is about Ida Ekblad, a Norwegian painter and sculptor, and Julian Hyde, a writer and artist. What links them is a belief in walking and looking, gathering lost objects together and re-presenting them, whether as sculpture, photos or narrative accounts.

Box containing 'Book of Days' and ephemera, Julian Hyde, 2009

Julian's work has been a major inspiration to me over the years. I see him as one of a peculiar breed of English writer-artists who experience something transfixing in the landscape: sometimes beautiful, sometimes unbearable; I'm thinking of painters Samuel Palmer, John and Myfanwy Piper, Paul Nash and the Brotherhood of Ruralists; maybe the tragic poet John Clare. In his work, visions of the woods combine with the liminal spaces where road meets forest,  the edges of private estates, car wrecks in forgotten B-roads.

The Books of Days in paperback form

Julian has most recently written two Books of Days, each detailing a year in his life. I've contributed drawings to illustrate both, along with his own photographs; the second, darker volume, 'The Ecology of Memory' details a crisis of confidence and a slow recovery through the rhythms of nature and friendship. The books are based in Windermere in the Lake District, beauty spot and home of Wordsworth. He finds meaning in walking, looping through the woods and lakes. He sometimes extends these walks into cordoned-off areas, getting up before dawn to witness and photograph the derelict and abandoned places that the authorities have marked off-limits to the public. I think to have a genuine sense of place you need to be aware of these kind of spaces on the margins and refuse to be hemmed in by footpaths and fences. It reminds me of John Clare, and his dismay at the 19th century Acts of Inclosure, which closed off tracts of common land to local people, essentially forcing them out of their own landscape. As I know from my own walks down the Lea Valley by the London Olympic site, this still happens today, and it's every bit as undemocratic and shameless.

Julian collects his impressions in beautiful books of photos and text, lovingly bound, sometimes mounted in Joseph Cornell-style boxes surrounded by the leaves and ephemera that inspired him. They describe a kind of archaeology of the abandoned, objects observed day by day as the year moves on, as well as catalogues of his own emotions and political observations, and not least, unforgettably vivid and real portraits of the people and places around him. His small town world is genuinely and convincingly described, a true testament to a life lived in England in 2011, with all its beautiful and depressing minutinae, and all its fetishistic details.

Page 7, 'The Ecology of Memory'

Incidentally, and much less importantly, 'The Ecology of Memory' also contains a CD with a classical guitar piece by me, called 'The Secret Commonwealth'. Julian’s books are labours of love and, as such, aren’t produced in large numbers. In fact, I don't even know if they are for sale, or whether he just sends them to me and a group of like-minded people. He has no web presence, except this Flickr page, which he can be contacted through. He's one of the very few genuine artists I know.

Liverpool

On Friday, Amor de Dias played at the Scandinavian Seaman's Church in Liverpool. It was magical. We played in the church itself, a whitewashed room with lovely natural reverb. If you got bored you could go downstairs to the lounge where the church staff served soup and home-made bread, and the walls were covered with nautical engravings. There was no bar, so everybody brought their own alcohol. We ended up sleeping on bunk beds in the basement.

Harvest Sun, the promoters of the show, seem to specialise in finding unusual and fascinating places to play around the city. A year ago, they put The Clientele on in the Williamson Tunnels, a warren of unearthed Victorian tunnels which were commissioned and dug by the tobacco merchant Joseph Williamson for no apparent reason. Our backstage space was the tunnel museum! The Williamson Tunnels show also ranked as one of the Clientele's favourite outings.

Above is a video of Amor de Dias playing Harvest Time at the Scandinavian Church. The wonderful Seek Magic blog has footage of a lot of the other songs we played. Thank you to Wally for filming it, and Harvest Sun for putting us on. It was one of my favourite nights of music ever.

O you brittle concrete swans

I tried to put my heart and soul into every Clientele record (succeeded with some more than others I expect). Maybe one day we'll make another record. I hope so. But for now we are resting, an ageing actor, a monstre sacré killing time at the Cadogan Hotel, ignoring the cards left by the young acolytes in the Beatles wigs.

I like the idea that any group of people in suburbia, who had encountered the same books and records we did at the same times we did, could have formed The Clientele themselves.

Meanwhile, if you're interested, I am working on a few new things. The main one at the moment is Amor de Dias. You can read about that on the Merge website, but it's a slightly different kind of band, more acoustic and formed around different kinds of rhythm (literally and metaphorically). I write half the songs and Lupe Núñez Fernández of Pipas writes the other half. Our first record is out on May 17th and we're touring the US with Damon and Naomi around that time.

I've been playing guitar with a few people - I did a bit here and there on the new Comet Gain record, which is called 'The Howl of the Lonely Crowd' and comes out soon. I'm also playing in uncle Louis Philippe's live line up at the moment, with gigs coming up in London and Madrid. It's a lot of fun.

Also, I'm trying to write something. A truthful account of what it was like to be young and directionless in the mid 1990s in England. Maybe I'll have some progress reports here before long. It's humbling how hard it is to write interesting prose at any length. So on that note... see you soon.

Totes Meer

I designed this rabbit tote bag for Merge Records the other month, and now they have some for sale. It'll carry vinyl, groceries, or a brace of weasels.

Two Songs

I have been listening to two very beautiful songs this week, over and over again: California Lullabye by Spectrum, and Water Wolves by the Chills. That is all.

duh duh duh duh duh duh duh

I finished a song earlier, my first in about 18 months. I'd been feeling really inspired to pick up a guitar by the Clientele's very pleasant trip to Liverpool at the weekend, listening to lots of Shack and the La's. Anyway, as I was walking down Lower Clapton Road I had it playing in my head, no words yet, just a tune that went duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.

To my complete astonishment, a pub on my left was playing my tune through their loudspeakers, I could hear it from the pavement. It sounded fantastic. I was puzzled and alarmed. Then I had one of those melancholy moments of realisation. I had written "I Feel Fine" by The Beatles.

Confused but grateful

We're all home safe and sound from our US road trip now, except for the sneaky feeling I have that my apartment, ahem I mean, flat, is perambulating up some American freeway.

This tour was the biggest and best we've ever done, with some wonderful opening bands (the elegance, restraint, and musicality of Vetiver in particular, while initially inspiring, slowly became breathtaking as the nights wore on). But everyone we played with was great; we were extremely lucky to have Field Music and The Wooden Birds; and I still can't believe Liam Hayes opened for us in Chicago, as well as The Mad Scene in New York. We also got to be on TV, caked in make up and hair wax - it was like Romo had never gone away.

So thank you for coming out, if you did come out. We'll hopefully see you again before too long.

And now to mail order a breakfast burrito, as well as vow in writing never to fly Delta Airlines again (I hope we get a decent royalty for the fact they use our music as in-flight entertainment, it may offset how badly they gouged us on every charge they could invent, in both directions)

ps the silkscreened poster above, inspired by the song 'Harvest Time', is available from Piecemaker Design

We Are Making a New World

Landscape of the Vernal Equinox by Paul Nash.

I snuck in a visit to the rather snooty Dulwich Picture Library just before leaving to tour the USA for a while. They have a Paul Nash exhibition on; judging by the ecstatic reviews it appears to have resurrected his reputation as a major British painter, a worthy addition to the line of Blake and Palmer, a key mythologiser and re-imaginer of the ley lines of the English landscape. In fact, all the things I wish people would say about me. But, er.. maybe there's some more work to be done there.

I thought it was incredibly inspiring, almost physically affecting at times. The last room brought a tear to my eye. See it if you can. Surrealism in Swanage: sign me up!

Haunted Weather

"I had set up my recording equipment on the edge of a clearing, with the microphones pointing up the hillside. As the light faded, the distant roar of stags rolled down through the forest and into the clearing. It began to rain. As usual I had heard the rushing sound of the wind blowing down the glen and across the canopy, but just at the point when the light was almost gone, the wind changed. The effect was dramatic. The atmosphere changed very quickly, as did my mood and perception. I can honestly say that I felt something blow down that hillside and into the clearing - the quality of the sound changed, the deer seemed to stop calling, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck - what few I have - stand up. I packed up as quickly as I could, and I left. Over the next few days I went back there to similar locations and made a series of successful recordings without ever feeling the same effects."

- Chris Watson, of Cabaret Voltaire on making field recordings in Glen Affric, Scotland.




Felix Hess, on his work with infrasound microphones, recording the inaudibly (to the human ear) low frequency sounds of air pressure fluctuations:

"Using a time compression factor of 360, one hour of audible sound on a CD represents 15 days and nights of recorded infrasound, originally in the range between 0.03 Hz and 56 Hz. {note: the human ear tends to hear between 20 Hz and 16,000 Hz} The sensation of hearing this … is deeply strange, like being buffeted by a high wind and at the same time hearing the extreme high frequency activity of neural processing. ‘One hears high-pitched whistles, beeps and insect-like buzzes’, Hess writes, ‘which come from the deep rumbling of factories, trains and trucks, and other motor cars, or even nearby washing machines. The opening and closing of doors gives rise to countless tiny clicks, which may add up to form a sound like soft rain on autumn leaves. Finally, an extraordinary presence: a rich, deep drone, originally at 0.2 Hz, audible like a multi-engined heavy airplane in the distance. This deep droning sound, at times all but inaudible, is formed by oscillations in the atmosphere – microbaroms – caused by standing waves in the Atlantic Ocean, far away.' "


Both quotes taken from David Toop's fascinating (and occasionally infuriating) Haunted Weather. Seascape Photo by Hiroshi Sugimoto.

A New York evening of music and laughter with The Clientele's Alasdair MacLean

I remember a friend of mine once telling me that her friend Stephin Merritt was being flown from New York to London solely to 'do press'. This seemed impossibly glamorous to me, I mean they fly you to a different country and put you in a hotel just so you can talk to people… about YOURSELF! You must have some weighty pronouncements to make to the world if that’s how you’re being treated, better greet the journalists with a faintly melancholy smile (oh, the loneliness of genius, the weight of one's towering intellect) and an honest, if distracted, handshake.

Anyway every dog has its day, and they’re flying me over to New York this week to 'do press'. And a bit of radio, and a seated show at Joe's Pub where I hope to have a pleasant stroll down memory lane / through the Clientele’s back catalogue. So this is the bit where I plug the show. It's on October 29th. The press, containing my views on all the important matters of our times, will be forthcoming.

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises

After a cold, bright weekend, we’re in the middle of a dark and drizzling week here in London, a week which sees the new Clientele LP released in the USA. Many people advised against releasing it this late in the year, but I don’t really mind how this one sells, and I love the feeling that everyone is experiencing these Autumnal songs together as Autumn really kicks in (unless you’re Australian of course). Also great from the limited amounts of press I’ve read that people are finally beginning to appreciate the mental distress and paranoia behind my work.

Unfortunately we couldn’t rush-release the European version (preorder it here) for October – although I was hoping for a Bonfire Night release on November 5th. But let’s hope it’s a mild early winter and November 30th still hits the spot. Don’t forget I’m playing at Joes Pub in New York on the 29th Oct, and that there are at least two full band Clientele gigs before the end of the year. And if you buy the record, thank you very much indeed.

John Clare in Hiding

It was often the fate of the religious
who went to hear God in desert silences
to hear instead some other, unbearable, voice.

- Ronald Blythe

Amor de Días, Damon and Naomi: it's summer duo madness!

Next week sees the return of Amor De Días, the new psych-folk / tropicalia duo I play in with Lupe from Pipas, opening for Damon and Naomi at the Dulcimer in Manchester on 3rd September and Café Oto in London on the 4th. And no, we will not cancel this time. Excited to be sharing the bill with the Left Outsides in London too!

Manchester tickets
http://www.heymanchester.com/upcoming/damon-naomi

London tickets
http://www.wegottickets.com/event/54864

We’re also much closer now to finishing our record, hopefully we will be able to unveil some tracks soon. Watch this space, or see you in Chorlton or Dalston. The choice is yours.

Don't Look Now

As the last post on the Victorian spiritual underground helped connect some people to Samuel Palmer’s art, let’s have a look at a Victorian painter of a very different character. I first encountered Atkinson Grimshaw’s work on the dust jacket of a collection of M.R. James’s ghost stories.

Grimshaw was initially a railway clerk, but abandoned his day job to become a painter of moonlight scenes and rainy nightscapes in northern English towns. It appears he’s remembered now for the very good reason that there was pretty much no one else like him, although there are parallels with Arnold Böcklin and Caspar David Friedrich. His pictures may have been meant to communicate a kind of idealised rustic beauty, but to modern eyes the best of them come across as essays in loneliness, a wintry counter-argument to Palmer’s ecstatic landscapes.

His pictures perfectly compliment M.R. James’s stories, and they echo Jonathan Miller’s 1968 BBC Omnibus treatment of James’s most famous (and terrifying) story “Oh Whistle and I’ll come to you” in which a pompous academic on holiday in Norfolk discovers an ancient whistle in the sands with the words “And who is it that is coming?” inscribed in Latin. He blows through the whistle, and soon, in the indistinct horizon where the sea meets the sky, he sees a figure running, unreally, towards him….

Miller’s only other film project of this era was a version of Alice in Wonderland (1966) starring Peter Sellers and Peter Cook. Unfortunately neither of them are very funny in it, but it doesn’t matter, as the project is saved by a slowly building, beautifully hallucinatory ambience, centred around Anne-Marie Mallik as Alice, and the English woods and trees she drifts through, in floods of sunlight, at the height of summer. To the sound of none other than … Ravi Shankar.

When Peter Blake was a member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists he painted some very similar depictions of Alice, which reminds me to note that the Brotherhood (and sisterhood) are still active, and still exhibiting in 2009. And there was recently a monograph on Atkinson Grimshaw published in the UK. I just wish Jonathan Miller would make another TV film.

England's Lost Eden

The original, archaeological site of the Garden of Eden is believed by the members of the Panacea Society to be at 18 Albany Street in Bedford. This is so obviously a delightful idea I hardly need to expand on it; God and Adam arguing on a suburban lawn, sprinklers twitching over the grass. Then the Fall and the Exile, or more specifically the beginning of life at no's 16 and 20. As cults go, the Panacea Society seem like quite nice people, they take their creed from an 18th Century 'prophet', Joanna Southcott, who, like some other very interesting ranters, shakers and jumpers who formed a religious subculture in the 18th and 19th centuries, believed she was receiving messages directly from God, and that the end of the world was close. Jesus would re-enter triumphantly through the streets of Bedford. I can very vividly imagine this, perhaps cos there is an early Peter Blake painting of a similar scene, called Christ Entering Venice:






















He painted it while studying at the Royal Academy. Much later, after Sgt Pepper and the swinging 60s, Peter Blake becomes part of the Ruralist Brotherhood, and his paintings take on a beautiful folkloric feel. He reaches back to the art of Samuel Palmer and William Blake, tapping into a sense that the land itself is sentient in some mysterious way. I love Samuel Palmer's eerie paintings of fields at night with the harvest moon hanging over them, ghost-figures walking through the furrows. Seeing an exhibition of his work at the British Museum a few years ago, I was struck how hugely ahead of his time he was. Sadly, the death of his son, Thomas, chastened him, and he abandoned or lost his original ecstatic vision and ended up as a Victorian academic painter, forgotten for many years after he died.






















18 Albany Street, The Site of The Original Garden of Eden, was eventually bought by the Panacea Society, and is now rented to non-religious tenants, apparently kept on two months notice should anything of a millenarial nature happen. A Channel 4 documentary crew recently filmed the inside of the house. Alas, God's signs and wonders kept themselves under wraps. But I love the idea of people still re-imagining the English suburbs and countryside as a kind of sacred, prophetic landscape. It's part of the Blakean tradition still alive in 2009, however eccentric it seems, however ironically distanced from it we've become. This magical sense of symbols being hidden in the everyday: symbols of the ancient, of the sacred agrarian, old as history itself. You can find them in the corners of suburban cul-de-sacs as much as in the fields themselves. Our forgotten Gods waiting for us in the long grass, just behind the forecourt of the empty shopping centre, as a long evening begins to fall.

More on this in England's Lost Eden, Adventures in a Victorian Utopia by Phillip Hoare.

For future tribute bands

I have to admit, this has made me happier than any press on the Clientele I have ever read. Guitargeek made a picture of my "rig"! It must have taken hours!

Psychedelic Werther

Poor Werther, on top of all his other problems, in this 1960s paperback edition of his tragic story, he don't know whether he's in Picasso's blue period or his pink! What's a boy to do? Actually, don't answer that one.

I got this from the Oxfam book shop in Strutton Ground, Victoria, which is one of London's best-kept secrets. The key to its magnificence is the type of people who live nearby and donate their libraries to the shop when they move on or die. So close to Whitehall, they're all ex-civil service, ex-MI5, Chelsea aristocrats or Communists (generally donating militant pamphlets from 1920-1950), or all four put together, and the books they leave behind are fascinating.

DJ set at the Hangover Lounge this Sunday

Hello campers, Lupe from Pipas and I will be spinning some tunes at a club called the Hangover Lounge on Sunday (29th March) from around 1pm. It takes place at the Salmon and Compasses, 58 Penton Street, London N1 9PZ (Corner of Chapel Market) and it's free. I'm not sure what we'll play, but apparently all jazz is banned there, so in revenge I'm thinking maybe some Flamenco and Argentinian Folkloric music, as well as the usual Psychedelic, Soul, Flying Nun etc. etc.

ps the Smiths count as Jazz, sorry

Shell, (charcoal/pastel on conte paper) 240mm x 320mm, £50, $85, (email theclientele@yahoo.com for details) (SOLD)

Hampshire Woods (pastel) 240 x 320 mm, £50, $85 (SOLD)

Masquerade

When we sat, aged 17, by Tundry Pond
and talked and smoked, there was
a stillness; enveloping leaves;
nature seemed to open, briefly
the edges of things transparent
brittle as glass,
as focus sharpening in a camera
and I realised that perhaps there was
something else behind the world.

A car sighed through the far-off A-road
and with that gentlest of noises
the pattern fell apart
I swear the suburbs
were gathering us in like a parent
but we clutched our proof
through swaying heads of corn
the reiteration of our nowhere-ness
struck like a bell
neither in the world
nor quite out of it
and we knew:
we are NOT here
this is NOT now
I am NOT me.

it was a mystery
which we both shared
perhaps only I remember it now.

Amor de Días live in London

Another rare opportunity to see Amor de Días , the secret psych-folk / tropicalia supergroup formed by Lupe from Pipas and Alasdair from the Clientele, presents itself this Sunday afternoon (25th January), at Islington's Salmon and Compasses pub. The show is hosted by the Hangover Lounge, where DJs spin beautiful country and pop records, and the punters drink themselves into denial that the next day is Monday, or spend their giros on fancy cocktails, depending on how cruelly fate has treated them lately. The show will be upstairs, totally unamplified, and free to all comers. Our set begins at 5:30, before Darren Hayman and after the Vatican Cellars.

Dreamed conversation of 12th December

-Did you ever wonder if a building could be ill?

-In the sense of dry rot, collapsing floors?

-No, on a different level. The feeling that a certain part of a structure is working in opposition to the other parts, that somehow the equilibrium, the purpose of the building is being subverted by something within.

- Two men used to work on renovations in the church by the river. I remember them walking past most of that summer and each time I saw them they were a different age. Sometimes teenagers, sometimes old men. The same two guys.

Once I went in to watch them working; they were chiselling away at large, dank stones in the wall. For a week afterwards, people called at the house. People from different times. I remember men with sallow faces and greasy hair, odd accents and car tools in their hands. Faraway eyes. They were there but not there, and I think it all came from the church, there was something catching there, some contact was missing its mark.

One night, outside in the garden, a creature spread itself like a sheet over a long expanse of grass towards the back of the house. It was under the washing line, and right up against the fences. Indistinctly in the darkness, I could make out a breathing mouth, and eyes in the middle of the lawn. It reminded me of a time I had been walking towards an intersection on Shaftesbury Avenue as a bus swept round the corner. I caught a quick glimpse of a woman sitting on the near side, staring at me, utterly absorbed and fascinated in the contemplation of my face; I had felt shaken and upset, totally objectified by that split second’s exchange of glances. The same thing was happening here. In the morning, the creature had gone.

I spoke to the renovation workers, who were perfectly ordinary in every other way, and they were also convinced it was the building, that the building was ill, at odds with itself; they even went as far as to say that anything could malfunction in this way, any physical object, in fact even any proposition or idea. They said they’d seen it before, that it happened all the time in nature, just on the verges of our sight, and if you were patient you could see it everywhere.

Damon and Naomi show

I will be playing guitar with Damon and Naomi this Sunday (12th October) at Rough Trade East. Address is Dray Walk, Old Truman Brewery, 91 Brick Lane, London E1 6QL. It's free, but you need to show up to get a stamp or something and it's first come first served. There is a nice coffee shop and tons of great records for sale, including a D&N exclusive Christmas CD! Show starts 7 PM sharp.

Trees for Cities

The last time I ran with any seriouness was immediately after throwing up on a policeman in trafalgar square, new year's eve 1998. In order to recapture the thrill of that wild, mercurial chase through London's backstreets at the height of the Britpop era and also to do something for a good cause, I will be running around Battersea park for the Trees for Cities Charity this weekend.

Any sponsorship donations are more than welcome!

`It's gone!' sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. `So beautiful and strange and new. Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever. No! There it is again!' he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound.
…....

Breathless and transfixed the Mole stopped rowing as the liquid run of that glad piping broke on him like a wave, caught him up, and possessed him utterly. He saw the tears on his comrade's cheeks, and bowed his head and understood. For a space they hung there, brushed by the purple loose-strife that fringed the bank; then the clear imperious summons that marched hand-in-hand with the intoxicating melody imposed its will on Mole, and mechanically he bent to his oars again. And the light grew steadily stronger, but no birds sang as they were wont to do at the approach of dawn; and but for the heavenly music all was marvellously still.

On either side of them, as they glided onwards, the rich meadow-grass seemed that morning of a freshness and a greenness unsurpassable. Never had they noticed the roses so vivid, the willow-herb so riotous, the meadow-sweet so odorous and pervading. Then the murmur of the approaching weir began to hold the air, and they felt a consciousness that they were nearing the end, whatever it might be, that surely awaited their expedition.

The Wind in the Willows - Chapter 7; The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

Jewels / Bay view Collage