Review: The Clean; In the Dream Life You Need a Rubber Soul

Anyone with passing interest in this country's popular music would acknowledge the prime position held by The Clean out of Dunedin. Their cheaply recorded 1981 single Tally Ho! – just $50, done in half a day – ran counter to the prevailing styles of slick pop, reggae and mainstream soul-pop.

It was thin, repetitive and unashamedly lo-fi. But it was embraced by an audience hungry for something fresh, with its exciting amalgam of nagging, left-field psychedelic Sixties pop, the minimalist reductionism of Velvet Underground and its sheer energy, and Tally Ho! with the young Martin Phillipps playing cheap organ. It went into the top 20, much to the band's surprise.

They'd already recorded their Boodle Boodle Boodle EP (taking two days) which confirmed their status with the songs Anything Could Happen and the extraordinary droning Point That Thing Somewhere Else. They were in the vanguard of ‘the Dunedin Sound’, as media shorthand would have it, and propelled the emerging Flying Nun independent label into local and then international attention.

Comprised of brothers Hamish (vocals, drums) and David Kilgour (guitar, vocals), and bassist Robert Scott, The Clean could record quickly and soon enough there was the Great Sound Great EP, the Getting Older single and then they quit, less than 18 months after Tally Ho!

Thereafter followed decades of solo projects, short-lived bands, reunions, tours and international acclaim when hip American groups like Yo La Tengo, Lambchop, Pavement and Sonic Youth, as well as music writers and far-flung fans in Europe and Britain, discovered the Clean's unique sound. The story is complex with characters moving in and out of the frame.

Richard Langston, a friend of the band for four decades, astutely lets the protagonists speak for themselves through a chronological oral history, diary entries (the Kilgours were assiduous letter writers, and Hamish a diarist) and brief linking text. Langston’s an established author whose fanzine Garage became his 2023 book Pull Down the Shades: Garage Fanzine 1984-1986.

In the Clean's cultural clique were numerous photographers (Craig McNab, Terry Moore, Reg Fuez, and Jeff Batts among them) to capture their rise, and with band members all creative in the visual arts, the book benefits from photos and reproductions of their idiosyncratic album covers and posters. Langston interviewed dozens of people, among them David Kilgour, fellow travellers like Alec Bathgate (Tall Dwarfs), Graeme Downes (Verlaines), Phillipps (Chills) , band members' girlfriends, longtime partners and many more. The resulting book sings off the page with a rush of youthful enthusiasm as the band feel their way towards a sound. These pages will delight.

Then the pleasures of touring are eroded and, somewhat unexplored although acknowledged, there's the often tetchy relationship of the brothers. If the songs aren't forensically examined as some might want, the voices recorded here drive you into discovering them for yourself. And they are still quite a discovery.

In the Dreamlife You Need a Rubber Soul, with the title coming from a late-period Clean song, is a remarkable account of a band, the people in and around it, the country's cultural shift in the 1980s and the tragedies that befell many. Here are the voices of some since passed: promoter Doug Hood who sang with the Clean early on, Martin Phillipps in and out of their circle, as he helmed the Chills, and others.

There's the especially sad decline of Clean co-founder Peter Gutteridge (Snapper and a solo career) and the creative Hamish Kilgour, latterly pulled between his home in New York City of 30 years and the remote farm near Cheviot, and Dunedin, where he spent his formative years. These pages may move you to tears.

Langston's focus is the Clean. Side projects such as other bands that emerged for those at the centre (the Bats, the Great Unwashed, Mad Scene, Stephen, Snapper) and solo careers are mentioned, but he draws the noose tight around the long, distinguished and enormously influential career of Scott and the Kilgours, when together they shifted the dial of local music and took it, and others in their wake, to the world. 

An essential book, even for those with just passing interest in this country's popular music.