Clinker

Summary: Peter Jordan from the London-based psychedelic rock band Clinker is interviewed about his musical journey. Clinker, a duo formed in the late 1990s, has released numerous albums and EPs with a mix of rock, electronic, and experimental music. Peter is also a live sound engineer and music production tutor. He talks about his early involvement in the Medway scene, his move to London, and his experiences in different bands. The interview touches on various topics such as Clinker's live-streamed concerts during the pandemic and Peter's musical influences. The conversation also mentions Peter's memoir and the challenges he faced, including a fire that destroyed his flat and belongings. The interview also touches on the band’s vast discography, the early days of file sharing and the band’s unique approach to sampling. Transcription: Hello, you're listening to the audio.com podcast, where we talk to artists, musicians, authors, curators and other practitioners about their work with sound. I'm Ilia Rogachevski and my guest today is Peter Jordan from the London-based psychedelic rock band Clinker. Clinker has been going for almost a quarter of a century, starting in the late 1990s as a solo project, before developing into a duo with Tomoko Matsumoto in the early 2000s. The line-up has expanded and contracted over the years, but the core two members have remained the same. The band has self-released countless albums and EPs, each one with a slightly different take on their often humorous and quirky songwriting. Their sound often mashes together elements of rock, electronic and experimental music, with firm roots in the UK's infamous punk and dance scene. Peter and I have known each other for over a decade, playing in local bands and composing music together. However, I was interested to find out more about his life, starting with his involvement in the globally influential Medway scene, most famous for its punk and garage rock bands like The Prisoners and Thee Headcoats, his move to London from Rochester, Kent, and active participation in the capital's DIY underground rock scene. I've seen Clinker play many times over the years, and it's always an exciting spectacle. During the pandemic, they organised several live streamed concerts from their living room to try and keep everyone in their network connected to live music. Peter also works as a live sound engineer and as a music production tutor for the mental health charity Core Arts. The interview took place at Peter's home studio in North London. Peter and I have known each other for over a decade, playing in local bands and composing music together. You are one half of Clinker, a psychedelic, avant-garde, electronic indie band from North London? I'd like to talk about Clinker. It's a long-running project that's been going on since 1999, but I'd also like to talk about your life as a musician before that. Maybe we can talk a little bit about the Medway scene in Kent? Well, apparently, wherever you go in the world, there's a Medway section in record shops I've heard. Oh, that's true, actually. It was very big amongst the grunge scene in the US, wasn't it? Yeah. Kurt Cobain picked up an album that I wrote one song on, apparently. Which album was that? That's The Craving A's. I wasn't in them, but it was a song I brought to The Offbeats, which was one of the first bands I played live with, and we used to rehearse it, but then we split up shortly afterwards. I liked the basses of it, added a few bits more, and played it in Craving A's. So, seeing as we started with Kent, can you tell me a little bit about what your early life was like? What your first musical memory was? I can't say that the records that I bought were good, because they were terrible. I liked things like Donny Osmond, Bass City Rollers, Shawaddy Waddy, but I guess I just liked melodies, so I was attracted to the melodies of the songs more than anything else. Yeah, I started probably when I was about 1973, learning piano, and then around 78, we formed a band called The Psychos. I was going to play keyboards. They were like, no, we need a bass player, so learn the bass. So I got a bass guitar. My dad sort of paid for it, but he may have been paying back for my pocket money when I was 13. Yeah, The Psychos thing was just rubbish, really, but it's a start, isn't it? And how did you start playing in Offbeat Studs, your beat band project? I used to hang around in a second-hand record shop, and I used to see this guy called Glenn Prangnell. He used to come in looking for Beatles rarities and what have you. I heard through the owner of the shop that he was looking for a bass player and a drummer, so I got in the band, and then I got my friend, Ian Harris, to play the drums as well. I phoned him from Glenn's house and said, do you want to join this band? And then we rehearsed for about six months, and then we started playing gigs. I mean, now it gets looked at as we were part of the big Medway scene, the Billy Childish's and the Prisoners and what have you. But really we weren't totally part of that scene. We were a bit outside of it, cause we were too, that was more, had a punky edge to it, and we didn't. We were just like the Beatles. We released an album, and recorded a second one, which we didn't finish before we split up. But there was talk of it coming out on a label, Spin Out Nuggets, but as things go, it seems to have fallen apart. Do you have any other memories of the Medway scene? Have you run into Billy Childish or any other big players? Yeah, I obviously knew them. Bruce Brand from the Milkshakes, which is Billy Childish's first band, he ended up joining the Offbeats for a while, and one of the Prisoners offered to produce the second album, though we didn't go with it. After the Offbeats finished, I joined a sort of post-punk, avant-garde, kind of Cabaret Voltaire kind of thing, which was more up my alley at the time. I mean, I grew up loving the Beatles, but I'd moved on. Well, in 1979, I think Death Disco by Public Image Ltd. changed my life, so I was more into experimental, different things. I mean, I didn't realise at the time that pill sounded like can, but it was all new to me. So I did that for a while, and then I teamed up with another guy, Nick Hughes, to form my band, and we were together for quite a long time, on and off in different bands, but he was like a local-style kind of thing. He could attract an audience. Then we sacked him. Sacked Nick Hughes? Which no-one has ever done, cos it's just like, you don't sack Nick Hughes. He got bored with playing his songs, and then I became the singer. The drummer said I was singing along to a Faith No More song, Surprise You're Dead, in the car, and he said, oh, you should sing. If you sang, I would have been in that band, and that's where the thought came into my head. I mean, Jesus, I'm not a great singer particularly, but I thought, why not? After that, we did Reg Varney Trio, which I was in for about four years, which was me, Sean Stevens and Marcus Moy. It was kind of what was, what was back then, and it was a bit of a different kind of thing. I stayed at home, and I stayed at home, and I stayed at home, and I stayed at home, and I stayed at home, and I stayed at home, and I stayed at home, and I stayed at home, and I stayed at home, and I stayed at home, and I stayed at home, and I stayed at home, and I stayed at home, and I stayed at home, and I stayed at home, and I stayed at home, and I stayed at home, and I stayed at home, We started out as a grungy kind of band, but as we went on, we developed more sounds, different sounds, which I'm very sad that we didn't record it, because it was much better later on than it was in the early days, even though I liked the early stuff. Some of it on your clinker band camp, I think. Yes, yes, we did a live recording at a studio, Red Studios, in Kent. We were going to release a single, but we split up. Marcus and I moved to London, he had college, and I moved to Bath, which was crazy, and I said, oh, that's it then, forget it, let's just call it a day. Maybe this is a good opportunity for me to say that you've also written a memoir of sorts, which you published as a PDF online about 13 years ago. Yes, it starts from that point. Yes, so it kind of charts the beginning of Clinker, the first 10 years or so. Clinker has been going on since 1999, and right now it's 2023, so how many years is that? 24 years? Yes, 24 years, my God. Let's talk about this project that's been happening more or less continuously since the late 1990s. So you moved to London, and you have no band. What happened next? I burnt my flat down. Oh yeah, can you tell me more about that? That's how the memoir opens. Marcus, the drummer, he lived just down the road from me, and we went to his house for a barbecue. We were struggling to light the barbecue, but suddenly there was fire engines roaring past his house, and we were laughing and joking, saying, oh, someone's barbecue's got out of control. And then it wasn't until I left and went home that I realised those fire engines were for my flat. It was a big fire. It was quite traumatising. I lost a lot. A lot of equipment and records. Yeah, the records got somehow built up. Collections of Sonic Youth. I had everything, you know, including some bootlegs, and I lost all of them, because they were all in the front. Everything that was in the front room, basically, was destroyed. Heartbreaking when I think about it, but I don't think about it too much these days. It was a long time ago. How to describe your first album, which is called Clinker Schminker? We did Opera Dog first. Oh, OK, well. 1998. Do you want to talk about Opera Dog? It was kind of more breakbeat kind of mash-ups, even. Mixing tunes and samples and there's a few songs on there. Is this when you were sampling with a microphone up to the... Yeah, it was very primitive. I didn't know how to properly sample the computer. I'd only just got a computer and I didn't have a clue how to use it or what to do. So I just used the mic speakers and used Windows 98 Sound Recorder, which is really just primitive. I think it could only record 60 seconds of audio, something like that? You can exploit that, because you can slow it down, and therefore it expands to whatever length you like. Quality drops, but quality is shit anyway, so it doesn't really matter. But at least I got the ideas down. And, you know, skipping past the dog, you know, that first album, that's one of Tomoko, who's my musical partner, and my wife. It's one of her favourite albums. We were going to record the whole thing, re-record the whole thing, but we ended up doing kind of half of it and half of new tunes for a later album. Sheminka remains the same. Because some of the times you do re-record your old stuff, so the same songs appear on different releases. Yeah, it's just because they were... We like the songs, yet they were recorded badly, so we don't want people to have those versions. We'd rather do another version. And I think, pretty much, it's been successful. Sometimes you do re-record things and you think, oh, that's not as good as the original, but we've managed it. We've tried a few times with one song, Sega, but I think the only time I know of it was on one of my solo albums. Were you on your own recording stuff? Or were you collaborating at this point? First two albums, I did it all on my own The first two albums are Clinker Shminker, 1999 and then Up Chunky! in the year 2000 Yep And then The Truth About Nuts Truth About Nuts Came out 2002 I met my wife, future wife Tomoko and she started to get involved and she's more She's more technically minded than me She's from Japan She showed me how to sample better I mean, it's still raw as hell and we used to call it no-fi She's one below lo-fi. How has Tomoko's role developed in the band since you met in 2001? Oh, hugely On the Truth About Nuts I think she co-wrote two songs, I think She wasn't really totally committed She wanted to be a theatre lighting person, but I stupidly convinced her to follow a path in music because she's classically trained She can play violin, piano She even performed and conducted her own music when she was 12 And also the technology She really upgraded all our technology so that I get better recordings, starting with Audacity and then we were using Nero editor and then we moved to Ableton So now it's not my project, it's our project and that's kind of changed more and more over the years to the point where one of our albums, she produced it and I didn't produce it at all which is one of the ones I can't remember Roots a Tribe St&, that's it. A lot of that's remixes and re-recordings I really like that one You used to give your music away for free on the internet. I remember downloading your whole back catalogue from Mediafire, back before the days of WeTransfer and things like that But you were there for Napster, MySpace, Reverb Nation I don't think we did Napster I don't think you did Napster, but you were present for its launch and the way that it changed the music industry in the early 2000s You know, that whole shift from physical music to sharing files online That was the beginning of that MySpace played a big role for a lot of people I think it launched in 2003 So I'm interested in your thoughts about how music has changed over that time. I really liked the early MySpace days It was great with all the blogs and became friends with a lot of people and some of them are still very good friends like Mark from The Girobabies and Beverly of Scotland Initially we stuck our music up on Mediafire but we also used Torrent sites which was really helpful in getting our music out there I mean, we ended up having about 150,000 downloads and I can remember telling our saxophone player there who didn't get paid apart from a share of whatever we got paid for a live gig and he was quite angry He said, my God, if you'd charge just £1 you'd be rich If you charged a pound then nobody would download it. Yeah, that's the problem. So I did start thinking, well OK, we'll charge a little bit or at least make it optional Charging definitely had an impact You know, we could still possibly make £300 on an album but that's come right down now. Your project Opera Dog also did mashups Yeah When that was a big thing in the early 2000s and you still have the videos up on YouTube like Daft Punk mixed with Gorillaz's Dare. Yeah, that's had a serious amount of views Someone liked it so much he nicked it and claimed it as his own and we did the Ting Tings mixed with Austin Powers theme tune, and the Ting Tings really liked it and they put us on the guest list for their gig at Brixton Academy and bigged it up in an interview as well I found So it was more involved than me, to be honest I instigated some but Tom would go normally to finish the idea Yeah, it got to the point where we were just like, we've got to stop this now and we've got to start doing Glinka again So we come to a point where we just thought OK, we'll do one more and we did a ten minute mega mashup which mixed loads of things together Brahms Dreams, Chic, all sorts of stuff but that was about ten minutes long and I knocked it on its head. Where does Opera Dog end and Clinker begin? It used to be that Opera Dog was dance music and Clinker was songs but it's kind of blurred now because Clinker can be anything and we've strayed into dance music as well, so but I would still say that Opera Dog is 100% definitely dance music. You've also done soundtrack work for theatre, for director Nick Brown, but also you did a play for Peter Maddock. Yeah, that was Charlie and Henry. How does writing for theatre compare to writing for yourself? It's different in that what I do is I read the script and then get inspired by the script and we just create whatever we feel the script needs The music's created before we've even seen people act it I mean the Charlie and Henry one was kind of a bigger thing I got paid proper money for that Tomoko works sound and lighting for that as well and I was at rehearsals and things like that It's written based on his life experiences with heroin and cocaine basically. In high society... High society, yeah, Belgravia comes into it. You also booked bands towards the end of the 2000s, early 2010s, you were kind of a club promoter. Yeah, there was a group of us that did it, John Clay Rob Homewood Yeah, the Champions of the Empire we did, and the idea was to put on gigs, and it started off really well. The first night we did was absolutely rammed and the second night as well and Clinker always played and John Clay's band, Colossus, always played and then we had a couple of other acts as well. You know, we had nothing in common with one another musically but that was kind of the point It was more about music is music I don't even think that was a good idea but it did work for a while but then they started to go down one road like rock and the wheels started to fall off because I think it worked better when it was actually a mixture of things. How has your impression of the live music scene in London changed over time? And we're talking about sort of the underground, where you're maybe playing not to a very large audience but the bands are still very committed and the audiences that do come, they're committed. I don't know, because I have ups and downs with it. Sometimes I'm not particularly... I mean I haven't played live outside the house for quite a long time now probably 2016, and we did three lockdown gigs, which was very enjoyable and we did intend to keep the momentum going and maybe do some gigs, but we haven't, we've dropped off I don't know There's been like scenes, there used to be a Stoke Newington kind of scene that was kind of built around Lee Gorton, the Salford guy, and Pete Dablo, they were kind of the instigators I think of the scene but that was a good little scene but that dies, and these little scenes pop up and then they fade away. I remember when we used to play music together, there was a lot of promoters who would encourage you to bring as many people as you possibly could so that the promoter could make as much money as they could and still pay you nothing. And pay you nothing I dealt with them in my own way. I mean we did one we played water rats for the Monto people, that was our first ever clinker gig but after that and learning the way they operate, I used to treat all of those promoters the same way. They would say, do you want to play a gig? I'd say, yep our fee is this much however much, 150, 200, whatever and that's the end of the conversation basically I remember a mutual friend, Will he had a water rats story as well where the promoter asked him to play, he asked Will how many people can you bring? 150, 200, easy and he got really really excited and Will just had no intention of ever turning up which he didn't I don't know if it lost the promoter a lot of money I guess it made him very irate at the very least Yes, I would imagine so he probably realised he'd been done Knowing them, probably not the first time I'm sure many people have done it. So coming back to Clinker, how has your sound changed over time? I like to think every album sounds different, I don't think we've ever repeated ourselves So it's gone all over the place I think, gone from first one which is a bit strange, second one was more poppy third one was I was kind of going for an Abbey Road kind of feel fourth one is quite experimental, that's When I Grow Up I Wanna Be A Space Cadet and it's around that time we started to think about playing live but playing those songs live was pretty impossible so that's why I ended up doing an album called Clinker which was like a lot of it was re-recordings of old tunes plus some new tunes that we could play as live that's why I called it Clinker, because it's like a band, because we were a band, we were drums, bass, guitar keyboards and vocals. And then from there we went to kind of shoegazey Thru the Fly Machine that's when we ceased to be a band and we were down to mostly just the two of us but sometimes there was three of us and then eventually four of us because we had Ichiko on keyboards Tomoko on guitar Ian on guitar and Saxophone come violin player, come whatever he decided to bring to the gig when we played as a duo we were kind of like no other duo because we were quite full on loud but we were only a duo so after through the fly machine what came after that? Good trip, bad trip and that was kind of a lot of long jamming songs, most of it quite experimental it's one of my favourites then it was Dream Pop, A Distorted Image, that was kind of dream poppy and I really liked that album as well and I think we over compressed a lot of it after that came Tickety Boom, which was more or less an album that came about through a depression era when I was in deeply depressed, so a lot of it's about that even though I wouldn't say it's a miserable album in some ways it's full of hope as well but it talks about a lot of problems and sometimes it's problems that everyone else goes through as well and then The Schmincker Remains The Same which was a lot of it's re-recordings of the first album plus some new tunes. Dr. Goon Phase was next was it? Originally I wanted to create an album a bit like Brian Eno in the mid 70's like Another Green World kind of post glam but heading towards more ambient stuff but still songs that was the goal and using old style rhythm generators and oh my god House Of Mr. Fruity I wanted to do something like The Residents and so I created a character Mr. Fruity some of that comes from Tomoko's Scrapbook I mean that was a picture in her Scrapbook House Of Mr. Fruity and then I just created a concept around it of a serial killer some of it's not at all like The Residents and it's quite mellow and calm but the initial feeling was that and it's the same with anything I originally start with a plan and then I veer away a bit.