So you're not feeling so good, so you go to the clinic. So you meet the
four wise men, tell them the problem, that you're hurting, you feel like
everything's rotten inside. So they adjust their masks, pick up their
instruments, tell you everything's going to be alright, they just need to
take a little look around. The last thing you remember as you slide away
into somewhere else is a voice, saying, 'This might hurt a little bit.'
It's the year 2000, and pop music's in a bad way. Seems like it was ever
thus. But there's no need to worry. It's not a terminal case, merely in
need of a refit, a period of examination, a spell of detoxification... some
quality time at the Clinic.
Clinic opened for business during 1997 in the city of Liverpool. Ade
Blackburn and Hartley emerged from the remains of a previous practice they
remember as 'quite ridiculous but also quite rock 'n' roll'. They recruited
Brian Campbell and Carl Turney, donned outfits of surgical green and got to
work. The first incision cut deep to the root of the patient's bloody
malaise. 'IPC Sub-Editors Dictate Our Youth' was a twitching, urgent
broadside on reductive conformity, a splenetic knee to the establishment's
flabby underbelly and, as it happens, the smartest pop debut of the year.
Released in the autumn on the group's own Aladdin's Cave Of Golf record
label, it was voted into the Top 10 of John Peel's Festive 50 and set down
the Clinic prescription in vivid detail: seize the past, dissect,
rearrange, insert wit and paranoia, add lashings of Burroughs and
Spector... above all, make it groovy. Things were looking up already.
The second cut went deeper still. With its prehistoric disco boots working
in full effect, 'Monkey On Your Back' shook the hips out of their arthritic
despair. Hey, now the patient was moving around, a little wobbly, true, but
feeling the benefits of Clinic's head-to-toe tonic juice. 'Get in the
swing, boys, get in the swing...' The patient repeated these words over and
over, a mantra for a new state of body and mind. It was the spring of 1998,
palms were getting moist. Well, alright.
Summer saw our four surgical spirits quite literally getting to the heart
of the matter. A third dose, 'Cement Mixer', shocked the patient's internal
combustion engine back into action and prompted that notorious IPC magazine
NME to declare it Single Of The Week (as, indeed, its predecessor had,
too).
Hooking up with the Domino Recording Company, who promptly released the
first three singles as a compilation, Clinic embarked on the final, most
important, stage of the operation: restoring the patient to full health,
fit to return to the unreal world, this time better equipped to survive. In
order to do the job properly, they travelled the cognitive globe searching
for magic potions and long-forgotten ancient remedies. They went to New
Orleans to touch the voodoo and march in the jazz funeral. They went to New
York City to collect some uptown glitz and then some underground grime. And
after a long while they returned to Liverpool, armed with a lifetime's
worth of trash heritage. In the summer of 1999, they made one last
incision, 'The Second Line', just to confirm the accuracy of their
diagnosis, then stitched up the patient and sat back to wait.
The results of their work are finally here for all to see. 'Internal
Wrangler', the debut album by Clinic, shows just what can be done for pop
music by avoiding not just the middle of the road but the whole road
entirely. Clinic have found stuff that's been lying around on the verges,
marginalised and overlooked, and pushed them to the forefront of their
newly patented cure. It's a unique synthesis of everything that's been good
about music for the past 500 years. You'll hear and see people you know
you've heard and seen before, but never quite like this. Everyone's met the
protagonist of 'The Return Of Evil Bill', they just can't place him. You
thought you knew what country music was until you heard the cosmic campfire
epiphany of 'TK'. And yeah, you know you've danced a '2nd Foot Stomp'
before, but you never knew that's what it was called, nor that it would
feel this good.
Noise, silence, peace and violence, they're all here. 'Internal Wrangler'
speaks for itself: it's medicine for the soul, a love transfusion service,
the kindest of all cuts. It's Clinic, down at the funky hospital, bringing
us back to life, getting better all the time.
Trust them - they're a doctor.
Keith Cameron
March 2000
