Features
David Kilgour: Revisiting The Clean’s ‘Vehicle’
By Doug Wallen
With The Clean’s debut studio album reissued last week, a key piece of the influential Flying Nun sound is finally back in circulation. DOUG WALLEN picks the brain of guitarist/singer David Kilgour about the 23-year-old record.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] David Kilgour calls Vehicle “quite one-dimensional” in our below interview, in the same breath as praising the overall sound and recording of the 1990 album, which was The Clean’s first leap from four-track recording to a proper studio. It also captured the Dunedin trio after a wave of reappraisal that allowed them to successfully tour Europe and sign to Rough Trade outside of New Zealand.
It is one-dimensional, in the sense that the songs are short, fairly simple and not lavishly adorned. The lyrics are mostly straightforward and often romantic, and the drums/bass/guitar/organ approach to each song is very much cut from the same cloth. But it’s all swimming with anxious momentum and glistening with youthful exuberance, as if these very notes and sentiments might slip from the band’s fingers before they’ve got them down on tape. Vehicle’s warm and tousled jangle-pop sound might sound overly familiar in 2013, but that only confirms The Clean’s cross-generational influence in the intervening two-plus decades.
In the Clean discography, Vehicle is less brash than the earlier singles but also tidier and more succinct than some of their subsequent albums. It’s got an eerie purity to it, with nothing getting in the way of the breezy interplay between David Kilgour, Hamish Kilgour and Robert Scott. Whether you think of it as a missing link between The Velvet Underground and The Byrds (among others) and ’90s indie rock greats like Pavement and Yo La Tengo, or simply take it for the sterling collection of pop songs that is, it’s great to have it back in the world.
It’s obviously a more pop record than the records that came before it. Was that a product of you guys being apart and then coming back together?
I’m not so sure it is, actually. I think the earlier stuff is very pop; I guess this was the first album where we went into what they used to call a proper studio, so it sounds slicker than the older stuff, but it’s still pop music really. Still rock ‘n’ roll really. It’s just the sound of us playing live; doing a live gig in a room really.
I think the ‘Tally Ho’-era material is quite noisier, whereas this one is cleaned up a bit.
Perhaps we were a bit noisier. We were certainly more dissonant in the older days. I think there’s always a certain amount of dissonance in The Clean’s music and it’s always been there really, but perhaps it was more prominent in the older days.
“We wrote this stuff really quickly. The fact that they’re quite short makes that quite obvious.”
It also struck me how short the songs are; a lot of them are two minutes long or less. Is that just the length of songs you were writing at the time?
Yeah I think it was really. We wrote this stuff really quickly. And the fact that they’re quite short makes that quite obvious. It was just written really quickly, and there wasn’t a decision to make a pop or rock ‘n’ roll album, or an album full of short songs. It was just the way it happened really.
When you play these songs live now, do you jam them out a bit to make them longer?
Sometimes, yeah. Every night is a bit different with us. But there’s certainly not a lot of jamming on any of our studio records or four-track records really. We always just recorded the songs and the pop stuff pretty straight. We tended to extemporise it more live; always have done that really. The two things are quite different.
Going back to this record, obviously it’s from a long time ago and you guys were younger. Do you regret certain lyrics at all?
Some songs I regret completely! I’m not going to tell you what they are, but the door is open. Oh completely, absolutely.
When you recorded Vehicle, did you all stick to your [main] instruments? I know that you all took turns on lead vocals, but did everyone play their one traditional role?
Bob and I play keyboards a little bit sometimes live. One of us might play guitar or bass and the other might play keyboards, but generally we kept it pretty straight.
“It did feel unusual to be doing it because I never thought that we would be doing it again.”
Was this a strange record? Just for the feeling that it was almost like a reunion or a comeback record?
It all seemed to happen so quickly, and so much of it was by chance, it did feel unusual to be doing it because I never thought that we would be doing it again. But at the same time it was most enjoyable.
I had forgotten that Alan Moulder was involved at all until I read your liner notes. Do you remember which two songs he mixed?
Well, he mixed quite a lot of the album really; we did all of the mixing on the third day and Alan turned up on the third day. I think we were still overdubbing, believe it or not, on that third day with Ken [Kennedy]. So Alan did mix a lot of the record really, but he remixed ‘Some One’ and maybe ‘I Wait Around’ with Geoff Travis [from Rough Trade]. Basically they just beefed them up and turned the guitars up really. I mean, we made the record so quickly. Someone was fixin’ it up after we left because we did it so fast.
And this was the first record you had done that wasn’t recorded on a four-track?
Yes.
Did you have any trouble adjusting, or was that taken care of by the engineers?
It was all just recorded live, which is what we always did really. We didn’t have an issue with it at all. I mean, part of the reason we recorded on two-tracks and four-tracks in the old days was it was very cheap and we had complete control, really, over much of the aesthetics.
From reading your liner notes, it seemed like having Geoff Travis sign you to a record deal really gave the band another lease on life and made this record happen. Is that fair to say?
I think that we would have recorded a new album anyway, because as it said in the liner notes we had a whole new set of songs for the record. So I think we would have ended up making a record anyway, but who knows? It was certainly really encouraging for Rough Trade to do that. We were all very encouraged by it, no doubt about it. As young teenagers we’d listened to a lot of Rough Trade’s music, and Geoff was just very good to deal with.
I found it really interesting when you were talking [in the liner notes] about the time you spent in London and how The Chills were based there. Was it during that time that Chris Knox was along as tour manager?
He was along just supporting us really; playing a set before our gigs at night. He left before we made Vehicle I think. He was already home by then.
And you got inspired by this reception in England to come back and make your solo record [1991’s Here Come the Cars] then?
In some ways yeah. I was really into making it after that stuff. I was encouraged to carry on making music mainly. That was the best thing about the whole experience.
“When we played London, half the crowd would be New Zealanders.”
What was the crowd like in New Zealand at the time? Was it just smaller, or how was it different to the reception in England?
The Clean has always had large crowds; we’ve always been able to tour New Zealand and play to large crowds so that wasn’t a problem. And when we played London, I suppose that half the crowd would be New Zealanders. We did spend a lot of time in Germany and surprisingly we were very popular. We were really just doing the club circuit, but we were playing to packed-out clubs. That was really surprising.
You also did an Australian tour around that time, do you remember how that went?
Yeah, I think we went over there to promote Vehicle, and I remember playing to good crowds. I think we were there for about a week. We might have played Sydney three times.
Do you remember any of the bands that you played with on that tour?
Umm, no.
I read that you guys had a rule of no drinking while you were recording, or smoking pot or anything like that. Was that developed early on, to keep it focussed, especially when you were recording so quickly?
Yeah, for sure. You get more work done properly that way. Marijuana and alcohol … well, for a start, alcohol makes you foggy so you tend to turn everything up loud and monitor it loudly, which is bad. And of course sometimes on marijuana everything sounds great, until the next day. That’s the danger of pot as well. So we were pretty aware of that, even back then.
These songs were recorded so quickly, and they were so short, that people may assume that not a lot of thought went into them, or that you weren’t really fussed about stuff like that. But it’s interesting to know that there was that quality control from the beginning.
Yeah, for sure. We pretty much knew what we wanted to do.
[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]
There’s also the live set [In-A-Live] that’s coming out on the reissue. Where was that from?
It was the second show that we did when we re-formed in the late ’80s. It was in London, at The Fulham Greyhound. I think we were supporting The Bats.
Are you guys planning to tour behind the reissue?
No, I don’t think so. No plans.
Why is that?
Because we’ve made no plans to tour. [Laughs] No-one’s talked about it. I’m sure there’s going to be more over the next year or two, so who knows what will happen.
And are you planning to do a reissue for each record?
I’m not sure actually. I think we’ll just take each reissue as it comes. I think the reason that Vehicle was one of the first was that we had everything ready to go from a few years ago. The next thing will be some kind of reissue of the first two singles and first two EPs. I’m not sure how we’ll do that but that’s the next thing we’re going to do.
“It’s quite one-dimensional but I like the sound of it.”
How do you feel about Vehicle generally, compared to the other records? Do you have favourite records or do you not think of them that way?
Oh, I really like Vehicle. I have always liked the sound of it. It’s quite one-dimensional but I like the recording of it, the sound of it.
Yeah, I love the sound of the guitars and the keyboards.
The engineers did a great job. They really did.
And you’ve got a solo record coming out soon?
Yes, there will be a solo album next year sometime, probably halfway through the year. And that’s the only plan at the moment.
Are you just balancing your solo stuff and Clean stuff as it comes out?
I guess so. The Clean is very much a part-time thing. I mean, who knows if we’ll ever get back together, or when we will. But I’m always doing something at home. I’ve been making new music this year.
Do you collaborate with other artists, separate from your solo stuff?
Oh, every now and then I do that. The last thing I did was an album with Sam Hunt [2009’s Falling Debris], who is a New Zealand poet. We did an album together, just singing poems actually. It’s very acoustic.
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