The Clean - Vehicle

Thu 2nd Jun, 2005 in Music Reviews

Formed in 1978 by the Kilgour brothers (David and Hamish), The Clean are now rightfully considered – twenty-seven years later – the band that started it all for Flying Nun Records. Not long after the brothers began exchanging half-formed ideas they found their missing piece in Robert Scott, embarking upon a giddy couple of years of masterful and sometimes obtuse pop.

Inspired by the strum and drone of the Velvets/Can axis as much as that pure naïve charm you only seem to hear in New Zealand pop (and perhaps it took shape in the Kilgour brothers as much as it did in Chris Knox and The Verlaines and all those bands from the early eighties), The Clean were one of the few Flying Nun bands that you could not pigeonhole.

Between 1981-83 they recorded a couple of eps (Boodle Boodle Boodle; Great Sounds Great, Good Sounds Good, So-So Sounds So-So, Bad Sounds Bad, Rotten Sounds Rotten) and two untouchably perfect singles (Tally Ho; Getting Older). If a deity of your choosing were in the market for a theme song by which to impart their benevolence, Tally Ho would surely be a shoe in. It was, for the band – it seemed – a case of burning out too quickly to be able to control the fire.

Time marched on. Robert Scott went on to spearhead The Bats, Flying Nun’s sombre romantic popsters. The Kilgours dilly-dallied in a band called the Great Unwashed before stepping out of the comforts of the family home. David formed (oddly forgot outfit) Stephen and also released a couple of solo albums that were half excellent and half enjoyable. Hamish picked up stumps and headed for the States, forming a band called Bailter Space (you may have heard of them). And then the calendar told us it was 1989.

Maybe it was the nostalgic mood you find yourself in at the end of a decade. Maybe it was just the right time in the relationship for all parties concerned. With The Clean reputation growing in the middling years – I recall picking up an Au Go Go compilation (a classy primer of their early years, it was entitled just that: Compilation) – London 1989 was to become somewhat of a ground zero for the band. A reunion show led to a New Zealand tour, you don’t fuck with timing kids, and also the recording of their debut (yes! Only eleven years after forming) album.

It is part giddy rush like the early days – the thirteen songs zip by in less than twenty-nine minutes – and part pop genius a la The Bats and The Chills and the dBs and Embarrassment and early The Go-Betweens.

With a more consistent vision than the eps – which managed to go from the drone of Point That Thing Somewhere Else to the What Goes On rip-off of Side On and back again to an amphetamine and coffee-fuelled version of Young Marble Giants (just witness Beatnik among a handful of others) – Vehicle reads like an album which took far too much time to hone into a meisterwerk. Where the earlier recordings were assuredly pop and likewise unashamedly livewire, the Vehicle sessions seemed to be set in stone even before the first red light was lit. Far too much time to mould into a final tome? Think so? Four days in London, July 1989, in fact. Chances are it took less than most of their other works combined. And it is full of pinpoint accuracy: musically and emotionally.

Each song sounds like the best pop song you have ever heard – two minutes from start to finish; a couple of verses, choruses, tiny guitar fills. If Woody Allen is right that ninety minutes is as long as a film needs be, and anything beyond that evidence of either sloppy editing or untidy scripting, then The Clean make a similar case for the two minute pop song. Fifteen years later and I’m at a loss as to how you could improve tracks like Dunes, Diamond Shine and Big Soft Punch. They’re sunny and life-affirming but with that undercurrent that doesn’t make you feel like gagging on the ersatz. For instance, a song like The Blue. A rockin and breezy number with Hamish’s trademark metronomic beat and a whippet-like guitar strum. Essentially it is about how when you swim out to sea “life just passes by”. Because of the beauty of your current situation, you’re missing out on those same moments elsewhere. It is never as easy as it seems with The Clean: you may as well keep swimming and cut your losses.

And then, considering the way they seem to morph into a band every few handful of years, maybe they have it right: that a flexible on/off again programme is what makes their work so essential. Reluctantly you would have to agree. They followed the streamlined Vehicle with further fuller sounding albums. Back to start, it seemed; though lacking the wide eyed innocence of Anything Could Happen.

The other day I was trying to find all The Beatles albums we own and came up with an embarrassingly slim six or seven titles. It was in order to make a compilation for our two year old daughter to listen to in the car. And you know what? In hindsight, they are pretty slim volumes, the lot of them. None of them (let’s be kind and exclude Revolver) have the meats and sweets of an album like Vehicle, though I can appreciate their status in the history of pop’s evolution. None of them reassure you of the beauty of life, of the reason why I devote unnecessary hours to discussing the relative pros and cons of albums; and none of them make me want to sit on the back step with a drink in my hand when the sun lengthens in the afternoon.

I suspect the album is currently out of print, judging by the fact that I recently saw a secondhand copy of it being flogged for $40 (and in New Zealand, no less). We all await the lavish reissue with groveling liner notes by David Fricke or The Shins or some such luminary.