Sounds From The Junkshop #80 - Clearlake

 

"I wish for a nice existence/One with no hard work for instance.." - Clearlake - I Want To Live In A Dream

Although by 2001, it's safe to say that my interest in indie music was very much waning, there was still the odd band who managed to break through my defences and Clearlake, similar to Easyworld and Chris T-T, both of whom we've covered on here in recent weeks, were one of the last few bands of this genre who I genuinely found myself enjoying before I finally gave up on the NME and indie music and wandered off into heavier waters not to return until well over a decade later.

Listening back to their first and best album Lido some twenty years after the fact, it's pretty clear that these Brighton natives weren't really breaking any new ground but there's something about these tales of smalltown boredom that I think I related to back then. As I've mentioned in the last few SFTJ's, by this point I had left university behind and found myself slung back into suburban Leeds while I was saving up enough to move out of my parents' house. As I was working a series of bottom rung of the ladder minimum wage admin, warehouse and factory temp jobs, my wages were literally just to say covering a couple of pints and a takeaway on the weekend plus my costs of travelling to work and getting a sandwich on my lunchbreak meaning any sort of extravagance beyond that like going for a night out in the city centre was largely beyond my means. Because of this, songs like Something To Look Forward To and Sunday Evening really seemed to resonate with me during this period.

Clearlake were also a dab hand at those sort of seaside ghost town laments that I always seem to get drawn to as well. Similar to Ooberman's Shorley Wall or...urgh, much as I hate to give the racist tosser any sort of good press nowadays, Morrissey's Every Day Is Like Sunday or, if you want a more recent example, the Coral's excellent Coral Island album from last year, songs like Winterlight, Jumble Sailing and Daybreaking perfectly conjured up those images of the seaside town in the winter months after the tourists are gone and the place just seems to go into hibernation. Best of all was I Want To Live In A Dream, a near perfect indie-pop song which really should have been a single and I think is one that every early twentysomething stuck in brain-killing menial labour or on the dole and just wanting some sort of break from this terrible mundanity can relate to. I know I certainly did.

Unfortunately, but hardly surprisingly, given that Clearlake were unleashing this none-more-British style of indie right into the era of the Strokes and their ever-growing legion of imitators like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Von Bondies being the "in thing", it sank like a stone despite some good press in the NME etc. The group would release four singles from Lido and all four would breach the Top 100 but the fact that the breathless paranoia of Let Go would give them their highest chart position peaking at a lowly number 83 tells you everything. Again, in another era they might have been on to something (fellow Brightonians the Ordinary Boys managed to get some minor chart success with their first album which wasn't a million miles away from Lido's sound a few years later tellingly) but in 2001 they were pretty much doomed from the get-go.

Surprisingly Clearlake would stick around for a bit after the failure of Lido - they would end up signing to Domino records, who'd just hit paydirt with Franz Ferdinand, for a further two albums in the form of 2003's Amber and 2006's Cedars which saw them heading into darker more twisted waters but with no further chart success. I remember hearing a couple of the singles from them in my reviewing jobs at places like Leeds Music Scene and Sandman but I never got around to checking out the albums - like I said at the beginning of this article, by this point my music tastes were very much diverging away from bands like Clearlake into scuzzier waters. I may well go back and revisit them after writing this though.

Clearlake would eventually split in the late noughties with singer Jason Pegg going on to a solo career which has seen him support Billy Bragg among other things. For me though, I'll always remember Clearlake as that band who very much soundtracked those early post-Uni days in my life with their tales of early twenties mundanity and seaside ghost towns. Maybe you had to be there really but, for better or worse, one listen to I Want To Live In A Dream and I'm right back in that bedroom at my parents' staring out at the streetlights on a rainy Sunday evening and dreaming of better times.