Shortly following the release of their sole long-player, the following message appeared on the home page of their official web site;
“Clor, a band for whom musical differences surely seemed to be the whole point, have nonetheless succumbed to this hoariest of rock'n'roll fates and decided not to be a pop group anymore. Unable to reconcile the yin and yang of wanting to be both wildly creative and chart-bothering, they will leave a big, uniquely C.L.O.R.-shaped hole in the all-too-generic world of guitar/electronic music.”
Five years on, and the NME’s recent ‘100 Greatest Albums You’ve Never Heard” issue has awarded them a flattering reappraisal by placing them at the top of their list of records which were either overshadowed by their creators’ more celebrated work, or that languish at the backs of collections, loved only by a few. Krissi Murison correctly suggests that, by releasing it in the year of the ‘The’ bands, they were crushingly ahead of their time and may have fared better once the likes of Hot Chip, CSS and Klaxons had infiltrated the mainstream. This record was a melting pot of great moments in pop… “Prince, Buggles, Devo, ‘The Pleasure Principle’, ‘McCartney II’, ‘Stop Making Sense’…”
I interviewed them in 2005 whilst writing for Disorder Magazine. The band were a bit knackered and I’d just come back from four nights of sleeping in a field in Berkshire. I had a stinking cold and was out of my mind on a cocktail of Lemsip and whiskey which, listening back to the tapes made me sound (and very possibly resemble) like a phlegm-filled fusion of Mark E Smith and Megan Voorhees on an ‘off’ day. However, we met in a pub near Elephant and Castle and here’s what happened…
“I’ll tell you what I did at Leeds,” says Luke Smith. “I went on the Big Wheel, which was excellent. Lots of double rotation.”
“I went on the springy thing,” adds Barry Dobbin. “You’re up in a crane in an egg-shaped cage held by two bungee ropes. I was in there when I was watching The Pixies… to enhance the experience.”
It’s a sticky late summer’s evening and as the festival season draws to a close, Disorder finds itself comparing bruises from the Carling Weekend with Barry and Luke from Clor. We’re in a pub just a stone’s throw from their South London studio where they spend their days bombarding themselves with bass and perfecting their kooky pop nuggets.
Luke: “The thrill of going on a fairground ride is seeing the poor maintenance that the thing is in. It’s not the views or the speed you’re travelling. It’s seeing that the screws are so badly welded on that they’re just holding on by some miracle and there’s just that little bit of friction… that’s what keeps your adrenalin pumping.”
Since the release of their eponymous debut album Clor’s promotional duties have taken them from playing at the Exit Festival in Serbia (The audience were, Barry remembers, “wanting death metal combos. Instead they got fey English pop”), to performing in front of 4,800 baying Prodigy fans at Brixton Academy (Luke: “Half of them liked it and the other half just wanted to see Keith Flint jump around.”). Then they were lured to Ibiza where this year the likes of Babyshambles and Maximo Park have been jetted in for Manumission’s first weekly indie club.
“We played at half four in the morning and left at seven,” remembers Luke. “After being in a transit van looking at overcast Britain it was amazing to fly over blue water and have people greet you with a full bag of beer ready to take you to the swimming pool.”
This is surely the sort of work you could do with every weekend isn’t it?
“Well, maybe we could do the Brockwell Lido!"
Clor was originally instigated at a club night named Bad Bunny organised by Barry and Luke at The Asylum in Soho. Armed with an esoteric playlist, everything from ragga to Brazilian breakcore to “discordant new American stuff” was played.
Barry: “It was just an excuse for us all to go out somewhere and play records that we liked. There were no rules whatsoever. We wrote two tracks, ‘Making You All Mine’ and ‘Good Stuff’ to have something of our own to play at the club.”
With a suitably fervent reaction to their own material, the pair set about forming a band. They quickly recruited Bob Earland (keyboards), Harry Bennet (drums, “also the bar manager at the club”), and Max Taylor (bassist, who also played in Roots Manuva’s band). Barry: “He played with us first, but we couldn’t afford to pay him and Roots Manuva could.”
At this point we should probably warn any bands that’ve been slogging away on the toilet circuit for years to look away now. Clor got signed after just six – SIX! - gigs.
“I think it was at The Old Blue Last when Parlophone approached us,” recalls Luke. “We were supporting Do Me Bad Things. One of the guys at the label told us he wanted to give us an album deal and we were just stunned. We didn’t know what we were doing really did we? We were just trying to have a laugh, essentially.”
Barry: “And to show off to our friends.”
Isn’t it quite an unusual step for a major to take?
Barry: “I think it’s pretty unique actually. There are no pressures and no guiding hand, which I think is what happens to most new bands when they go to a major.”
Luke: “We did this demo and they wanted to release it as it was (the ‘Welcome Music Lovers’ EP). We assumed they’d want us to rerecord it. They could’ve just popped us in a studio with a producer and we could’ve been a totally different band.”
Barry: “We might’ve been better.”
Luke: “We might’ve been good!”
‘Clor’ sounds like all the best bits of the last thirty years of eccentric pop, without ever ending up like some futile Xerox of anything. It also sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard but without sounding too laborious or impenetrable. ‘Good Stuff’ and ‘Outlines’ are full of pop hooks and upturned melodies but they’re also peppered with darker and more menacing overtones. Unsurprisingly the band members have eclectic tastes in music. Barry has been known to name check Bonnie Prince Billy, Brian Eno and Jim O’Rourke, while “Bob’s really into hip hop stuff and Max is into amazing eighties power ballads. He’s part of the new eighties kind of revival. There’s a brand new generation that just loves it.”
Barry and Luke have taken the critical acclaim in their stride and have maintained their doggedly DIY approach to music making. Barry’s meticulous attention to detail all too apparent if you hit their web site where you won’t find endless photos of pouting musicians. Instead you’re confronted with his darkly comic animations of characters with claw-like fingers and toes and spacemen-like honey thieves.
“We don’t try to sound like anything really,” says Barry. “We just arrive at the things we arrive at because of the things we like doing, and I’ve no idea what kind of track we’ll make next.”
Again, Luke reckons that the freedom granted to them, and significant leaps in technology have helped shape their idiosyncratic style, giving their critics a near impossible task in attempting to pigeonhole them. “The freedom you have now as a musician is broader than it was even five years ago. For years bands had been given a limited amount of time to produce something that’s going to last twenty years, whereas now everyone has access to a home computer and you can get software to do what you want. I think there’s loads of exciting music around and that’s because essentially the recording process is something that’s no longer reserved for major record companies with big budgets. Technology has definitely helped hasn’t it?”
“Yeah definitely,” agrees Barry. Ever since Adamski!”
All of this culminated in Clor’s triumphant appearances at the Reading and Leeds festivals this summer.
Barry: “The music’s been propagated by the whole marketing machine that is at work in the record shops and the media, so people have heard of you. It’s good to know that you’ve made this music in a bedroom in London and somehow you’ve communicated to someone in… Sunderland or somewhere that you’ve never been.”
Whilst ‘Love And Pain’ (an everyday “giant bear meets tiny hairy woman” tale) incited an insatiable desire to pogo at Reading, the tent was overflowing with fans meaning there was no room to imitate the carefully choreographed star-shaped moves from the video.
“I want people to dance though,” says Barry.
“We’ll have to do what Fugazi do,” suggests Luke, “and chuck some people out to make some space.”
“The first time we saw it happen was at The Windmill (South London venue),” Barry recalls. “There was a group of four Japanese girls standing at the front and as soon as we started playing ‘Love And Pain’ they all danced perfectly in formation. They did it much better than it’s done in the video. It was so good that I forgot to sing the words.”
