Clientele - Shadows, fog, and suburban pop reflections

Like the phoenix, British pop - periodically declared dead for decades now - keeps being reborn, transforming and enriching itself with voices, styles and elements that suggest the writing of simple yet profound songs, light yet tinged with subtle melancholy, is something almost endemic to the inspired souls of so many young people raised, to the sound of various waves of 'wave', in grey, perpetually damp towns. They might sound like clichés, but these are precisely the genetic elements of Clientele's music, a band whose roots lie in the adolescence of its members, most of whom met at school.

The suburban backdrop and a shared passion for the pop of bands such as Love and Zombies, as well as for the more recent Sarah Records experience, brought together the founding core of Clientele, formed around Innes Phillips and current leader and singer Alasdair MacLean, whose melancholy, eternally adolescent manner would come to strongly define the band's identity.

Indifferent to passing trends and driven by their instinctive pop inclinations, the four lads from Hampshire began playing together almost as a game, detached from any notion of a 'music scene' and drawing on spare stylistic coordinates originally devoted to a spontaneous, timeless understatement.

From the earliest recording sessions - carried out on little more than a home-studio level from the start of the Nineties - numerous singles began to emerge, initially pressed on hand-assembled 7"s with inevitably limited distribution.

Only in the second half of the decade, coinciding with Innes Phillips's departure from the band - who in the meantime had moved on to run his own short-lived solo project The Relict - did Clientele begin to break free of their initial lo-fi, homemade dimension, and between 1997 and 2000 their first official releases appeared in the form of various singles. From the compilation of those singles and the subsequent EP A Fading Summer, which had in the meantime caught the attention of cult indie labels in the indie-pop world such as March, Elefant and Pointy, Clientele's first long-player, Suburban Light, emerged in 2000.

In years when tracking down singles and EPs, especially those put out by niche labels, was still quite difficult, Suburban Light is rightly regarded - much as was the case in the Eighties with the compilations by the Smiths - as a fully-fledged album. And, particularly for those who hadn't had the chance to follow the band's obscure early days, the compilation came as a genuine bolt from the blue.

Track by track, the band's sound reveals itself in all its understated richness, moving from echoes of a certain Eighties jangle-pop, with clear nods to the early Creation bands ("Rain", "An Hour Before The Light"), through an almost Drake-like folk dimension ("Reflections After Jane", "Monday's Rain"), all the way to the 'gentle' psychedelia carried from the Sixties into the new millennium by bands like Felt or Galaxie 500 ("We Could Walk Together", "I Had To Say This"). Over this intricate sonic fabric lies Alasdair MacLean's unmistakable whispery, lightly falsetto voice, often filtered through a guitar amp, lending Clientele's compositions a remote, evocative aura.

Already within the folds of these songs lies all of MacLean's cherished poetics: idle nighttime walks, fog-shrouded suburban fairs, seasons drifting by dull and lazy, leaden and drowsy, as if Suburban Light (remarkably cohesive for a singles compilation) were merely a milky, blurred recollection of a past where sorrow became endearing, defeat almost desirable, and even hope was veiled in melancholy.

Thus, wrapped in an atmosphere halfway between dream and oblivion, Clientele's compositions manage, with seemingly no effort at all, the small miracle of distilling poetry from the most ordinary situations; and although their artistic references are varied and fairly evident, songs like "Reflections After Jane", "(I Want You) More Than Ever" or "Joseph Cornell" (inspired by the surrealist sculptor) reveal an uncommon gift for composition and performance, making Suburban Light a pop work that's hard to pigeonhole and quite singular within the musical landscape of those years.

The full-album format, however, still seemed alien to Alasdair MacLean's band, given that their next release was a twenty-minute EP put out as part of the mini-album series curated with passion and great instinct by the Spanish label Acuarela. The Lost Weekend already marked a small further shift in Clientele's artistic path: across the EP's three songs and two instrumentals (one of which is a simple interlude), the band showed they had gained greater confidence compared to the spontaneous but still essentially unripe pop sketches offered up until then.

Not that this brief release brings any seismic changes, yet the improved sound quality and more elaborate song structures go hand in hand with more direct, assertive performances that nonetheless never shed the gloomy melancholy that had already become the band's stylistic signature. So, while scattered keyboards frame the memories of the opening "North School Drive" and the rhythmic liveliness of "Kelvin Parade" offsets the composed romanticism of the solo piano on "Last Orders", the delightful "Emptily Through Holloway" immediately stakes its claim as a defining track both for the band's rare pop gift and for the whole of Clientele's poetics (“The longing makes you close you eyes/ it’s unreal so unreal/ to walk along these streets/ it’s unreal so unreal/ to close your eyes and breathe”).

Sooner or later, though, everyone's time to get serious arrives. And so, in 2003, a full three years after the Suburban Light compilation, Clientele finally took on the long-player format. Such a test could only be fraught and unsettling. The Violet Hour takes its title from "The Fire Sermon", one of the sections of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land", where the violet hour identifies that passage from the gloomy daytime hours into the vibrant evening air when, freed from the daily grind, humans feel ready to seek out pleasures and emotions. Clientele's poetics is steeped in that light, and their blurred pop manages, even this time, to remain personal and unique despite quite precise sonic references, blending folk, pop and psychedelia in ever-varying doses and through never-obvious formulas.

Indeed, while it's quite evident that even on The Violet Hour the foundations of the English band's sound don't stray at all from their earlier work — with MacLean's sinuous murmur and guitars tracing harmonious, vaguely out-of-focus trajectories — the expansiveness afforded by the album format allows Clientele to broaden their musical spectrum, adding violins, spanish guitar, and delicate field recordings, all elements that will remain permanently organic to the band's sound from this point on.

And it's again the album format that allows Clientele to present, after a brief piano interlude (not coincidentally titled "Prelude"), a sort of miniature album within the album, made up of the two longest tracks of their career ("Lamplight" and "The House Always Wins"), which move decisively beyond the band's classic pop into psychedelia, thanks to a more compact, less ethereal arrangement and sturdy guitar work.

That said, despite small adjustments and a few valid variations on the theme, the songs on The Violet Hour still come across as a collection of polaroids faded by time, memories of past moments always recalled in that strange limbo between dreaming and waking.

And if the violet light of this work alters perceptions, unlike a blinding beacon it does so gracefully, once again infusing Clientele's music with that melancholic, nostalgic patina that suits it so well ("Missing", "House On Fire", "When You and I Were Young").

⟦Q1⟧ sings MacLean. And that's roughly the feeling you get listening to their debut: something familiar yet remote at the same time, which only surfaces when you close your eyes.

A transitional album, in a way, one that certainly doesn't show any particular growth on the London band's part, but which brings their sound, in small steps, closer to a stylistic maturity made up of minimal additions, subtle shifts in register, and a constant emotional searching.

The following year, while working on a new record that already promises to be more elaborate and polished than their past output, Clientele found time to put out a second, concise EP on Acuarela. Inspired by a series of paintings by Giorgio De Chirico dedicated to the myth of Ariadne, Ariadne faithfully translates into music that sense of abandonment and latent unconsciousness depicted in the works the band had the chance to see in person at a London exhibition in 2003. Apart from the engrossing melodic crescendo of the gloomy closing gem "Impossible" — incidentally the last track in their output to be stripped-down and mid-fidelity — the EP presents Clientele in an unprecedented, entirely instrumental guise. Still, only in "Summer Crowds In Europe" can you make out the kind of understated textures ideal as a skeleton for a song not yet written, while the remaining tracks offer a wholly different side of the band, their identity transfigured with a surrealist edge across the more than eight minutes of ambient psychedelia sketched out by a persistent organ drone in "The Sea Inside A Shell", and with exquisite romanticism in the delightful piano piece "Ariadne Sleeping".

The following Strange Geometry (2005) is the first Clientele record to make use of outside production — courtesy of Brian O'Shaughnessy — though this seems to have affected only the clarity of the listening experience, not the substance of the twelve tracks, which remain as ever suspended between delicate melancholy, folk-pop impressions, subtly psychedelic guitars and airy arrangements, courtesy of that little genius of orchestral pop who goes by the name of Louis Philippe. The new songs confirm Clientele as a band with a sound all their own, fresh and distinctive, despite the many possible comparisons to at least three decades of dreamy, refined pop, from the La's to Belle & Sebastian, from the Byrds to Galaxie 500.

The record, remarkably shifting in mood, moves with easy agility from the brisk sixties-style Hammond of "My Own Face Inside The Trees" to the hushed, introspective restraint of "Step Into The Light", from the syncopated groove of "E.M.P.T.Y." to the near-soul feel of "Spirit", on to the existential musings of "K" and "When I Came Home From The Party", and the perfectly faded-photograph imagery of the nostalgic spoken-word piece "Losing Haringey".

A common thread running through the whole album is its heightened immediacy, likely also down to careful, professional production, clearly evident in the track that stands as the emotional peak of the whole record, "Impossible", presented here in a version notably different from the one on the Ariadne EP.

Aside from a few minor formal touches, Strange Geometry doesn't stray from the sound the band had already defined on previous records, losing none of its freshness and lightness of touch — if anything, these qualities are duly rounded out by arrangements built on refined melodies, which, in their classicism, stand as a fitting testament to the healthy state of British auteur pop.

Very shortly after the album's release, almost as if to mark a clean break from their origins, the rough recordings from the 1991-1996 period were gathered into It's Art, Dad, a self-produced collection of sixteen tracks that once again bring back the presence of Innes Phillips, showing, albeit in unfinished form, the embryonic potential that would later blossom in the official albums released up to that point.

Returning to the band's present at the time, two years later God Save The Clientele confirms their quality songwriting, free of overstructuring, its essential elements expressed in a work with a self-deprecating title and content that's new yet tinged with a pleasantly old-fashioned aura, nostalgic and reassuring at once.

What's old — though by no means anachronistic — are the roots, which the London band has never hidden and which trace back through the entire family tree of the last few decades of British guitar pop, without shying away from moderate psychedelic flirtations in the 70s west-coast style. What's (relatively) new is instead a greater tendency toward immediacy in the songwriting, as well as a heightened, more polished and at times overtly "rock" expression, which had already begun to show on Strange Geometry. Thanks to an even more sensitive contribution from Louis Philippe, the subtle melancholy of the lyrics now often unfolds in forms lighter and sunnier than ever.

Though more measured passages aren't lacking, the album's overall mood is mostly light and spring-like, often softened by the sound of violins, managing to balance a poetic sensibility still centred on nostalgic memories ("Here Comes The Phantom") and tales of ordinary loneliness ("Isn't Life Strange?", "The Queen Of Seville"). Clientele's knack for telling simple stories in an elegant, softly blurred pop form plays out in various ways across the fourteen tracks on the album, alternating the brisk pace of delightful vignettes built on old-fashioned-sounding guitars with linear, lulling ballads, in which MacLean's voice turns hushed and persuasive.

Recorded by Mark Nevers (Lambchop) in Nashville, with more relaxed timeframes and access to more refined, modern technology, God Save The Clientele is an album with a more mainstream sound, though, thanks to the extraordinary songwriting skill of Alasdair and his cohorts, it loses none of that subtle, dusty, crepuscular charm found in the band's earlier work.

We're now a long way from the almost homemade recordings of Suburban Light: sunny, sparkling tracks like "From Brighton Beach To Santa Monica" would, until not long ago, have been inconceivable. A breezy, uptempo song like "Bookshop Casanova" probably could never have won over the hearts of the (few but fervent) fans of the Clientele of old.

But this seems to be precisely the effort underlying God Save The Clientele: to let a wider audience appreciate a thoroughly pop album, packed with light and melodies indifferent to the passing of time.

As they'd already done twice before, the Clientele once again fill the gap between two albums with a third EP released by the Spanish label Acuarela. Unlike on previous occasions, the four tracks on the stopgap That Night, A Forest Grew largely continue in the vein of the previous album, further accentuating the direct, lively traits already shown there. The opening "Retiro Park" and the following, exhilarating "Share The Night" display clear sixties ambitions, only slightly tempered by a subtle psychedelia redolent of mid-fi reminiscences, which nonetheless mark, to an equal degree, the distance from the now-surpassed restraint of old, drawing closer at most to a register similar to that of Strange Geometry, as in the closing spoken word piece that gives the EP its title.

The following Bonfires On The Heath, again produced by Brian O'Shaugnessy, is a more intimate, pensive affair than its shimmering predecessor, though with sudden flashes of light and rhythm that occasionally ripple its placid surface.

The light, colourful spirit of recent times, while still present, finds, perhaps for the first time, an ideal balance with the resurgence of stylistic and thematic echoes very close to the band's original ones.

The twelve tracks on the album retain an immediate approach, conveyed through breezy uptempo numbers, bright hammond notes and unexpected electric riffs; and, lending colour to writing that's as usual spare and built on blurred images pervaded by a constant sense of rain, there are strings - this time arranged with sober elegance by the wonderful Mel Draisey - and a distant, melancholy trumpet.

Something intangible still lingers in the Clientele's sound, something that seems to slip through your fingers: whether it's melancholy, nostalgia or pain is, as usual, impossible to say, and Bonfires On The Heath, with its lyrical imagery drawn from dusk and autumn, is no exception: although it contains some of the band's fastest, most rhythmic songs - from "I Wonder Who We Are", enriched by spanish guitar and trumpet, to "Share the Night", with its jazzy guitar and robust trumpet line set against a burning hammond organ and unusual guitar solos, right through to the dazed, disorienting, psychedelic "Sketch" - the album still holds within its folds gloom, shadows, ghosts and a sweet taste of defeat in industrial quantities.

There are, however, no drastic breaks or ruptures, and the songs help build a highly evocative overall picture, one that skilfully functions as a kind of compendium of the long artistic arc of the London band.

That this was indeed the London group's intent is unmistakably confirmed by the inclusion, towards the end of the album, of "Graven Woods", the very first song written and recorded back in their teenage years, reinterpreted here as if to close a circle.

As is their habit, the Clientele once again fill the gap between two studio albums with a shorter work that is, even this time, anything but a stopgap. In the past, it has often happened that the English band's transitional moments were marked by EPs and mini-albums that either hinted at imminent changes or looked back to the unmistakable, hazy, lo-fi melodies of their early days.

Even in the case of Minotaur, a work that, at around twenty-seven minutes, is considerably more substantial than the trio of EPs the Clientele released over the years on the Spanish label Acuarela, the menu is rich and enticing. Although the whole mini-album was conceived and recorded during the making of the band's latest work, Bonfires On The Heath (from which it is separated by less than a year), the Clientele, in excellent form, deliver a batch of songs that it would be truly wrong to dismiss as mere outtakes from the previous record.

This work too, in fact, is entirely consistent with Alasdair MacLean and his bandmates' long-standing approach to music, always driven by a genuine desire to give listeners an assortment of pleasures and pop songs (with a capital P and S!) of absolute quality. And so the eight tracks on "Minotaur" (including a long, spectral spoken word piece, "The Green Man") likewise show a crystalline pop vein, repeatedly conjuring the enchantment of the band's early work through a tasteful variety of instrumental solutions steeped in vintage refinement, and snapshots of wet streets and urban solitude, by now recurring motifs in the English band's poetics and imagery.

In a certain sense, the brief "Minotaur" could even be seen as a kind of summa, or a short summary, of the Clientele's brilliant career: every song has its own personality and ties back, without a trace of reverential fear, to the band's earlier offerings from Hampshire.

So, once again, even in a more compact package, the Clientele manage the difficult feat of delivering new, evocative, enchanting songs, always poised between pop and the most delicate psychedelia, adding one more piece to what increasingly looks like a career entirely free of missteps or dips in quality.

For a full seven years Alasdair MacLean puts the band on stand by, collaborating with Lupe Nunez-Fernandez on the Amor De Dìas project, while waiting to get the Clientele name back on track. The spark for the band's return comes when Alasdair meets his old friend Anthony Harmer, who introduces him to the joys of ethnic instruments and in particular the santoor (an Indian struck-string instrument whose sound sometimes recalls a harp or a dulcimer).

What happens on Music For The Age Of Miracles is a kind of biological regeneration, an epimorphosis that renews the band's primal musical tissue, like a lizard cutting off its tail only to regrow it.

That instant, skin-deep charm that has always made the London band's slightly psychedelic jangle-pop so lovable is still fully intact, and so is the lyrical depth and complexity, confirming that the Clientele's comeback is the result of a spiritual renewal rather than a mere nostalgic, backward-looking choice.

Alasdair MacLean's songbook still flows naturally between Byrds-style West Coast chords and arrangements free of saccharine or superfluous flourishes, while Anthony Harmer's arrival slightly restores the murkier tone of their early days ("Lunar Days"). Like Blue Nile on "Hats", the English band builds up a grand, rich sound only to chisel it down and make it lighter and more balanced; everything is calibrated with patience and without overstatement, and it's from this masterful blend of colours and shades that gems of rare beauty are born, like "The Neighbour", which opens the album with a cascade of harmony and lyricism recalling the Zombies of "Odessey And Oracle".

The vitality of Music For The Age Of Miracles can be felt in every little fragment, from the delightful piano interlude of "Lyra In April" to the sophisticated chamber-folk songwriting touch of "The Age Of Miracles". The refined, literary style of the lyrics also remains unchanged, alternating poetry and restraint in a way that manages to lend warmth even to small everyday stories, as in the winning simplicity of "Falling Asleep".

The impression is that MacLean let the emotions flow without building any banks other than those naturally inherent to their lyrical and harmonic nature, and so comes the small miracle of "The Circus", which treads the same path that led Michael Head and his Shack to the court of Love.

Here and there electronic contaminations surface, alternating with delicate orchestral scores, subtly altering the more folk-leaning traits of their psychedelic pop, and it's from this pleasant hybridisation that the long, elaborate "Everything You See Tonight Is Different From Itself" is born — with its constant lyrical shifts and a nod to the Left Banke, it stands as the most ambitious track on the new album.

Like impressionist painters, the musicians sketch in mildly bucolic sounds ("Everyone You Meet"), more introspective and elaborate pages ("Constellations Echo Lanes") and even brief interludes for piano and strings ("North Circular Days") which, like tapestries, adorn the bittersweet psych-pop ballads, caressed even by the wind off the Kent coast, captured near the home of film director Derek Jarman.

Music For The Age Of Miracles is an album of bittersweet charm, a project whose instant, lightning-quick appeal should be savoured by lingering over every detail, starting with the beautiful cover art by Carel Weight, the perfect calling card for the Clientele's admirable return.

I'm Not There Anymore (2023) confirms an attention to arrangement structure and composition with a noble, cultured, elegant touch. The Clientele celebrate their twentieth anniversary on record with a work that is bold yet never pretentious — indeed, pleasantly dreamlike — and partly free of the suave West Coast leanings of the previous album. It's a choice that sacrifices the fuller-bodied staging of past projects, finding in return that intimate charm which has become a true trademark for the Hampshire band.

The eight and a half minutes of "Fables Of The Silverlink" move between impressionism and drama. Complex, shifting harmonies follow one another, now barely hinted at with a sigh, now steeped in a poetics that smells of unease and gloom. But a surprise always lurks around the corner, right up to the magical finale, which leaves open an infinity of passages and sonic suggestions still to explore — a mini-suite that seems to have sprung straight out of Love's "Forever Changes". And it's only the beginning of a tale with more or less explicit literary contours: Alasdair MacLean, James Hornsey and Mark Keen delight in sifting through corners of memory in search of discord and beauty.

"I'm Not There Anymore" is an ongoing dialogue between routine and fantasy: the piano sometimes creates brief oases where the ever-simmering harmonic daring can rest — "Radial C (Nocturne For Three Trees)", "Radial B", "Radical E" — or where snatches of bossa nova can flow ("Claire's Not Real"), while more sophisticated neoclassical connections offer the groundwork for lustrous orchestral pop ("Garden Eye Mantra") and rhythmic and melodic twists with disorienting ethnic tonalities ("Dying In May").

A key and partly innovative element is the introduction of the computer: it's certainly not the revolution some critics have claimed (with comparisons to Bob Dylan's electric turn, or references to Miles Davis's "On The Corner"), but the addition of further jazz, folk, ethnic, electronic and even hauntology elements is no shortcut to fleeting wonder — it's the fruit of years spent in parallel sonic dimensions (Amor Do Dias) or exploring new sounds (such as a burning passion for an Iranian instrument, the santur).

The English band hands down to history one of the most original art-pop syntheses — I can't imagine a more powerful, seductive song than "Lady Grey", a piece of chamber-folk-pop that Penguin Cafe would love to have in their repertoire, nor a more graceful pop song than "Blue Over Blue", while the fragile, velvety noir sketch of "Hey Siobhan" is pure poetry in itself. Literary references abound, yet are skilfully hidden — sometimes barely a murmur laid over a fabric of strings and piano ("Conjuring Summer In") — but there's no shortage of bolder, more avant-garde explorations either, in the experimental scrape of "My Childhood" (with Jessica Griffin of Would Be Goods reciting verses), a track revisited for the album's closer ("The Village Is Always On Fire") with reversed rhythms, choirs and cellos.

With I'm Not There Anymore, the eighth album of their discography, the Clientele prove they have no fear of crossing genre boundaries, and that they've attained a maturity and mastery placing them at the very top of the most cultured pop music — as well as forerunners of future new wonders.

Contributions by Gianfranco Marmoro (“Music For The Age Of Miracles”, “I’m Not There Anymore”)

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