Page 38 - Zone Magazine Issue 018

anneclark anneclark
| @ Electri_city Conference 2017 [CCD Dusseldorf, Germany] __________________________________________________________________________________
t´s fall again, summer is over and I find myself thinking:“Was there really a summer this year?" Anyway, it´s time for Electri_city for the third time, and when I
first got the schedule, I was quiet impressed and in the same moment it brought me back to my youth. Anne Clark was announced. Well, even if you were born after the 80´s, I guess you will know Anne Clark or at least some of her work. For me she has always been one of the artists that have influenced me most at the time, when I got into music and when I started DJ'ing.
For those who still do not know her: Anne Clark was born in 1960 in Croydon, South London, UK, as daughter of an Irish mother and a Scottish father. She is not only a singer but also a poet, pianist, songwriter, electronic musician and a pioneer of the “spoken word-genre”. I guess you can call her a universal artist in the best meaning of it, always a little bit avantgarde, always innovative, original and with a great personality.
Anne Clark got popular in the post-punk era in UK and in the european New-Wave/Dark-Wave movement. Her best known songs here in europe are for sure “Our Darkness” (1984) and “Sleeper in Metropolis” (1984) and in USA “Hope Road” (1987). I would say that her music could be described as ”Electronic Music with partly avant-garde parts of classical, Folk, Rock and Dance elements”. Over all it is more “Spoken Word” as a genre which she substantially formed. Her lyrics are poetical, always with a deeper meaning, and sometimes critical.
Her Biography reads more like a who-is-who of different musical genres. After leaving school at 16 she worked different jobs. One of those was working in a psychiatric hospital as nurse. After that she got a job at Bonaparte Records, a London record store and independent label with focus on Punkrock. Then she worked in a Warehouse Theater near the neighborhood of the store. The Warehouse Theater was a self-financed stage for alternative music and actor groups in Croydon. Bands like Siouxie and the Banshees, Generation X and The Damned were performing there but also theater, dance and comedy projects as well as poets. She managed to fill the theater with people like Paul Weller, Linton Kwesi Johnson, French & Saunders, The Durutti Column, Ben Watt and many more.
She experimented with music and text and got her first gig Richard Strange´s Cabaret Futura together with the Band Depeche Mode, which had formed a short time before. She joined Paul Wellers Riot Stories, a publishing house for independent artists, where she was Co-Editor. Even for TV she was involved where she wrote the script for Channel 4 production “Sketch for someone,” as well as for a couple of BBC productions.
1982 her first album “The sitting Room” was released. For the following releases she got help from David Harrow, whom she knew from the Warehouse. He was her co-author and they
released “Changing Places” (1983), “Joined up writing” (1984) and “Hopeless Cases” (1987). Some of the songs, which were mainly made with Keyboards, synths and samplers were milestones in electronic music of the 80´s such as; “Sleeper in Metropolis”, “Our Darkness” and “Wallies”. Album number four “Pressure Points” was released in 1985 in which she worked together with John Fox who founded Ultravox.
In 1987 she went to Norway for two years where she worked together with Tov Ramstad and Ida Baalsrund and others. One year after that she released her first live album; “R.S.V.P.” which was a live recording of a concert in Utrecht in the Music Centrum in May 1987. Back in UK she released the album “Unstill Life” for which she worked together with the pianist Charlie Morgan. They had other co-operations running but never finished one of them because Charlie Morgan died of cancer in December 1992, just at the age of 36. Anne tried to find a new direction for a month and finally she recorded and released the album; “The Law is an Anagram of wealth”. In this album she set some poems from Friedrich Rückert to music. Something that Gustav Mahler had done in the beginning of the 20th century. After that, she continued her work with Tov Ramstad and Paul Downing, Martin Bates, (from the Band “Eyeless in Gaza”), and Andy Bell.
Then in 1994 she toured with a pure accoustic Band. The result was the album; “Psychometrie," which was recorded live at the Berlin “Passionskirche”. With the following electronic-accoustic album; “Love to be loved” (1995), she widened her spectrum of thematics. Besides desire and frustration she now added the love for life and some lascivious parts (in the song “Virtuality”).
From 1996 different Bands, producers and DJ's such as Aural Float, Hardfloor, Juno Reactor, Mouse on Mars, Pascal Feos, Saafi Brothers, Sven Väth and The Mover made a tribute-album with Techno remixes of her songs and released it in 1997. This album was called; “Wordprocessing,” and showed Anne Clarks influence on artists and musicians in this scene.
After that she concentrated more on her acoustic, folk and classic Influences and together with Martin Bates she released; “Just after sunset” (1998), with translated poems of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. This album was re-released after a creative break and a change of the record label in 2002.
Another acoustic album; “From the heart – Live in Bratislava," followed in 2003 that was recorded together with Murat Parlak (Vocals/Piano), Jann Michael Engel (Cello), Niko Lai (Drums/ Percussion) and Jeff Aug (Guitar). It was recorded during the “European acoustic Tour” at the “Slovensky rozhlas” Radio studios in Bratislava.
From 2002 Anne concentrated more on the electronic sector again. She had some guest slots with several artists. One of those was the number one chart success; “The hardest Heart,” from the German DJ duo Blank & Jones, two years later the song; “Hall of mirrors,” from the slovanian band Silence (which was a cover version of the original by Kraftwerk).
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