CLINIC - WILD IN THE STREETS - DOMINO

The tenth album of Clinic’s career, Wild In The Streets takes the current temperature of the nation in their own inimitable style. These 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.

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 Liverpool duo of Blackburn and fellow multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Hartley 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. Infectiously wonky lead-off single “You And I”, smothered in distortion and punctuated with space drums, is a stirring example. “That's one of Hartley’s riffs, somewhere between Bo Diddley and reggae,” Blackburn says. “Once we had that, we thought we may as well really go to town with it. We’re genuinely into the old music hall side of things, so there’s some of that in there as well. But it still sounds like Clinic.”

Never ones to take themselves too seriously, Clinic partly envisaged “You And I” as a sardonic commentary on their chosen profession. “There's no business like showbusiness like no business I know,” sings Hartley with an impish wink. “The music and the mayhem then it's back on with the show.” Yet despite its underlying uncertainty, the song is imbued with an endearing sense of optimism, conjuring a romantic idyll of magic, moonlight and the river flowing by. “Even though there’s a lot of weirdness going on, it has an uplifting feel,” Blackburn observes.

The perfomative theme is echoed in the vampy, disorienting “Well Wisher”, with its references to spotlights, laser beams and jumping aboard the merry-go-round. “That one has a music hall influence too, with the old-time keyboard sound and the ascending/descending element,” notes Blackburn. “It was our sort of attempt at doing a showstopper, with a talkdown at the end, then a jazzy finale.”

The title track offers a vivid portrait of youthful days in suburbia, a feral existence filtered through personal recollection. “Wild abandon in the streets / Place your bets take what you feel,” sings Blackburn, rejoicing in “escapades and time to kill.” Yet, rather than mere cosy nostalgia, the song deals in a more disquieting present. “Being out in the street these days seems to be full of fear and paranoia,” he explains, “so it feels different. Ultimately, people want the freedom to be able to express themselves.”

Similarly, the dynamic “Back To Nature” is an allusive discourse on modern-day protest action. Its key line - “Suburban guerilla is settled by the fire” - suggests either an activist in repose or, as Blackburn resignedly puts it, “the ashes of a protest going nowhere.” 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,” he says. “Like a character study.” 

Wild In The Streets throws up surprises on a regular basis. Building from a great blues riff to something altogether funkier, “Energies” is as close to the dancefloor as Clinic have ever ventured. One song features a lawnmower; another begins with a gong. “Hypnotised” is a disarming love song that feels almost subversive in its sheer simplicity. The spacey “(It Was) Heaven” - “Revelations and sensations / New dimensions, it was heaven” – is Clinic’s attempt at “a kind of a dodgy ‘80s chart pop number. That was the foundation of it, but then we went a bit further with the lyrics. It’s great when you can open up a new sort of stage.”

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.”