The Clientele

"[This is an image of] Fleet in Hampshire, which is the commuter town I grew up in. It was taken on a winter night 2 years ago and I think it reflects the innate eeriness of the place; you have the isolated house and the sodium lamps in the foreground, and behind and all around is what seems like a huge, empty nothing. That suburban feeling of isolation but simultaneous magic is what a lot of my songs are all about.

[On releasing Bonfires on the Heath in the fall]. I think once you release a record it has to live inside other people's spaces, and it's theirs to make of it what they will. Having said that, it was cool that this record came out round about the time of year which a lot of the songs are lyrically referencing - I get a sense that everybody in the northern hemisphere is on the same page, and that really, genuinely delights me, it's like an experiment which worked, for once!


[On the “heath” in the title] There's a kind of desolate, blasted heath called Blackheath, in London, a few miles walk from the light and civilisation of Greenwich, which always seemed like the end of the world to me. And there's Hampstead Heath in London too, which I visited before writing the songs on this album, one very bright summer day, trying to shake off the effects of a very long-lasting acid trip. I guess all those places combined in my head. Really to me, it's just a haunted space, a waste ground, somewhere large and empty, a lonely place.


[On the inspiration for the songs on the album]. I vividly see the landscape of the countryside and the suburbs in Hampshire, where I grew up, in these songs. These strange in-between places where you can imagine uneasy sort-of faultlines running through the land, mysterious fractures in the continuum. There's a restlessness in that landscape, nothing is permanent, little patches of woods, little streets of new-build houses, and because you can't really seem to grasp anything or divine any real character in these kind of places, you have the perverse impression of them being hyperreal, more real than reality, they're bigger than you can get your head around. I've always said the suburbs were magical, and not in a patronising way, because that's where I'm from and I genuinely love them, but they have a type of weird environmental intensity that's often missing in the city itself.


[On the track, “Losing Haringey]. The events in Losing Haringey pretty much happened to me word for word as they appear in the story, except obviously I did not find myself trapped in a phantom photo - in reality the things around me just inexplicably reminded me of that photo (which does exist in a photograph album I once saw). The benches and the road in the story are just off Wood Green High Road in North East London - the last time I was in the area they were still there, although quite dilapidated now, and the bushes with the pale yellow flowers still grow all over the hill that leads West to Alexandra Palace.

I'm not sure how memory and place interact. Maybe that song was an attempt to explore it somehow, how perhaps memories and places are not stable, they can recur over the years, overlap, or lead back, like snakes and ladders.

[On the best places to listen to music]. I like listening to music on the train, watching drab South London scenery fly by. Especially at this time of the year when there's no light. The feeling of moving past and out of it all -of escape- is very comforting while it lasts.

[On favourite venues]. Floods of sunlight on an outdoor stage at Farnborough 6th Form College, summer 1992. We played to our schoolfriends, it was one of our first gigs and, astonishingly for that time, it sounded terrific. I'm sure we had a go at Graven Wood that afternoon. Over the years the memory of the space and the light has become so idealised in my mind that I doubt I'd recognise it now if I went back to look at it.

[On inspirational places]. One example is Dulwich Wood. This is the wood near my house, which I often run through in the mornings. It’s not that big, but it’s very old, the last remnant of the Great North Wood which once stretched all around South London. It has Victorian ruins, a hidden pond, and lots of criss-crossing trails. Oak and Hornbeam grow there, Byron and Samuel Palmer loved to walk there. I’ve seen it in all seasons and I think it has an objective spookiness. I wrote Harvest Time and Bonfires after walking in this wood. I’ve often had the irrational feeling of being watched there; I’m being melodramatic of course, but it’s a sinister place.

[On whether the recording environment effects the recording]. I tried an experiment with this album, which was to record at a very dead time of year, between Xmas and New Year, when there's no light and everything and everyone is exhausted. I wanted to capture some of that enervated, weightless, strung-out feeling in the music, but I don't think it made any difference. Once you're in the imaginative space you want to be, where you actually are doesn't matter so much.

[On the best environments for writing]. I can write anywhere; again I think once you've got to the mental place where you're inspired and having ideas, your surroundings aren't important. In a way that's the beauty of it, that you can escape from the world for a while, you can negate the world around you."

Thanks to Alasdair for the interview.