Was I Really on Drugs? — David Cohen

In the beginning was the drone, and the drone gave music sustenance and continuity and definition. And out of its monotone fullness many an ethnic performance has mightily benefited, whether in the weltering of a sitar, the dead pulse of a didgeridoo or a very particular sound indigenous to the garages of Dunedin since the late 1970s. And yea, when it was good the drone was very good: surprisingly fucking good and how.

Most music fans of a certain age know the old joke about how only a couple of hundred punters brought the Velvet Underground’s first record — to all intents the first recorded drone-masterpiece of the modern era — but each of them went on to form a band. But did you hear the one about how only one of those bands ever really gave the Velvets a run for their stash? That the act in question hailed not from the cultural citadels of New York City but one of the world’s most geographically far-flung urban centres — a byword yet for decorous, dour and ever-so-dull Calvinism — is just one of the pleasures to be relished by anyone offering an overdue bow in the music al direction of The Clean.

The Clean is of course the brainchild of brothers Hamish and David Kilgour, who formed the group in Dunedin in 1978, along with bassist Robert Scott, the last and longest standing of an initial flurry of bassists pressed into service by the siblings. And this trio of sporadic semipros from an Anglo enclave so remote it evades all known patterns of formal exhaustion, as the critic Robert Christgau rather nicely put it, could turn anyone into a sucker for that quick, hard and flat — that word again — drone.

I know because it happened to me. I came to the party a bit late — very late, in fact, just a few summers ago, when I joined a few hundred guests one evening at a private function held in Auckland to raise money for the writer Russell Brown’s autistic sons. The Clean turned up to perform a set. My hopes weren’t high, and that wasn’t just on account of a bunch of guys now entering their 50s still decked out in drainpipe jeans and dark glasses (and afro-style wigs — where did they come from?). Oh sure, I’d heard a number of the group’s better-known tracks from a back-catalogue as relatively sparse as it is critically revered. Actually, I’m old enough to remember seeing incessant replays of the band’s earliest hits, the farfisa-propelled Tally Ho! and the spindly Beatnik in particular, on Radio With Pictures, along with slithering instrumental signatures like the wordless Fish. What I hadn’t quite got, though, was that in these and so many of the group’s recordings lay the nucleus of something much larger, specific ideas and soundscapes, which could also be compellingly laid out across the canvas of the band’s on-stage signature, sonic hum.

Long story short: The subsequent 45-minute performance was effortlessly on a par with, and in many respects comfortably beyond, anything else I’ve witnessed on a stage in 30 years of attending concerts great and small, challenging and breaking all manner of unwritten rules (about concision, polish, the three-piece structure, guitars) and forever shutting down any snotty ex-rock-crit type who at the start of the proceeding might have thought he was knowledgably dismissing some long-gone, long-lost hype. Was I really on drugs?

But what lingered the longest for me was the incredible enjoyment of then going on to rediscover afresh the band’s back-catalogue, a body of work that, like the sound I’d suddenly got a whole lot closer to, has been notably fragmented, constituting just a handful of entirely new, original recordings punctuated by long, brooding production breaks and various compilations or live recordings. I now own most of them, and so should you; and we should all be cursing any punter lucky enough in the meantime to catch one of the act’s live sets abroad. The Clean, truly, is the best there was, the best there is and probably the best that ever will be in New Zealand. Long may they drone. 

David Cohen is a Wellington-based writer and journalist.