• News

• All

Apr 08, 2019 By Christopher Roberts Clinic

Liverpool post-punks Clinic are releasing their first new album in seven years, Wheeltappers and Shunters, on May 10th via their longtime label Domino. Previously they shared a video for its first single, “Rubber Bullets,” which was one of our Songs of the Week. Now they have shared another song from the album, opening track “Laughing Cavalier,” also via a Joseph May-directed animated video. Watch it below.

Singer Ade Blackburn sings in the song: “All the fun of the fair/Lap it up without a care…All the fun of the fair/Are you really all still there?”

Blackburn had this to say about the song and those lyrics in a press release: “One of my favorite things is those contradictions. Having the rug pulled from under you. I think that’s exciting - where you think you’ve got the measure of something but then that shifts. It’s not just about the double meaning with a line, it’s also about the way it’s sung. You can interpret something in the opposite way just from the delivery.”

The band’s last album was 2012’s Free Reign. “We’d released albums like clockwork every two years, so it seemed natural to have a break,” explained Blackburn in a previous press release about the long gap between albums. “It allowed everyone to do some quite oddball stuff, away from Clinic. I think we all wanted a bit more freedom.”

Wheeltappers and Shunters’ album title is inspired by a 1970s British variety show The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, which was hosted by Bernard Manning and according to the press release “recreated the smoky, boozy atmosphere of Northern working men’s clubs for a sofa-bound audience.”

“It’s been a pisstake thing between us for quite a few years,” Blackburn explained. “Whenever we’d talk about a song sounding too ‘cabaret’ or too nice, we’d say, ‘That’s a bit Wheeltappers and Shunters.’”

Wheeltappers and Shunters looks back on the culture 1970s era Blackburn and “his collaborator-in-chief” Jonathan Hartley grew up in. “It’s a satirical take on British culture - high and low,” Blackburn said. “It fascinates me that people look back on the 1970s as the glory days. It’s emerged that there was a darker, more perverse side to that time. When you look back on it now it was quite clearly there in mainstream culture.”

The previous press release set the scene for Wheeltappers and Shunters: “The Great Britain that Clinic are evoking is not that ancient, bucolic past of village green cricket, half a mild and hanky-waving Morris Dancers that many seem so determined that the country should return to, but a rather more sleazy past. Clinic’s reverie is for a time when Blackpool was the pleasure capital of the kingdom and the public was kept entertained by traveling circuses and the dirty glamour of the funfair; tacky end of the pier merriment and enforced fun at Butlins; when bell-ringing town criers bellowed their nonsensical broadsides into the ether.”

The album was recorded last year at Hartley’s Liverpool studio. Then Dilip Harris (King Krule, Sons of Kemet, Mount Kimbie) mixed the album. “We thought it felt right to make a fun, dancefloor album in these dark and conservative times,” said Blackburn

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.