Clinic at the Disco

“We’ve always been a bit at odds with what’s going on around us,” admits Ade Blackburn, singer and keyboard player with Liverpool garage rock medics Clinic. “And we still feel as much at odds with things as ever. Nowadays seems like a bad time for mainstream indie music, to me. There’s a lack of people doing something which genuinely goes against the grain. And when we started the music scene was all stuff like Starsailor, stuff that hasn’t really lasted or stood the test of time. We were into things like the 13th Floor Elevators, and punk stuff like The Germs, and even people like Tim Hardin.”

And their obscure tastes led to an unconventional approach to the “industry”.
“When we started we released three singles on our own label and decided not to go the usual route of playing gigs in the home city and then going to London,” he says. “In fact we didn’t play any gigs at all in the first year. We’re more like producers than musicians a lot of the time and none of us were desperate to get on a stage and play the songs to people. It was more about putting music together and recording it. And because that wasn’t what was expected of us, because as a new band you’re meant to do loads of gigs, it sort of attracted people. There was some sort of reverse psychology there which we never really intended. Then John Peel got hold of one of our singles and it really took off.”
And then, when Clinic did play their first gigs they cut quite a dash, dressed as medics with identity concealing surgical masks – a look they’ve sustained to this day. “It was meant to be more funny than scary,” says Blackburn. “It came from bands like The Residents and Crime. There was a bit more humour to it; a tongue and cheek reason for doing it. And we’ve always done it differently with each album. We’ve had the masks with Edwardian clothes, and this time it’s with Hawaiian shirts... because we see it as a summer album. I think a lot of people take the look to be something really sinister, which was never the idea behind it. It was just about getting away from the standard indie uniform. And then because we all have this gear on, it’s also much more democratic. There’s no sense of there being a front person, it’s just all of us there making music. There’s no sense of hierarchy. There’s an anonymity to it. It removes the ego.”
Anyway, Do It, Clinic’s new album of folky, garagey, psychedelia (their fifth) ends on a strange coda (called ‘Coda’) in which Blackburn invokes a mysterious phenomenon called the Bristol Charter in ominously deadpan spoken word. What’s that all about? He laughs.
“The Bristol Charter is something to do with that town’s history as a port. The anniversary was in 1973. I thought it was a good pisstake to have it in there. It was culture year in Liverpool, you see, and we thought we’d go the other way and have a celebration of Bristol.”
Such wilful obscurity certainly fits with the wider Clinic worldview. They record their own music, make their own record sleeves, and are generally a pretty self-contained unit with their own distinct and idiosyncratic vision.
“We want the band to exist in a different universe, in the same way that something like Captain Beefheart does,” Blackburn explains. “Because that’s what creativity should be about – the freedom to create your own world with music. I’ve never understood why a musician wouldn’t want to do that.”

Clinic’s new single ‘Tomorrow’ is out now on Domino Records