For other persons named Anne
Clark, see Anne Clark
(disambiguation).
Anne Clark live in concert (M'era Luna Festival) in Hildesheim
(Germany) 2004
Anne Clark (born Croydon, London, England, 14 May 1960) is an English poet and
songwriter. Her first recording was The Sitting Room
in 1982,
and she has released about a dozen albums since then.
Her experimental music occupies a region bounded roughly by electronic,
dance
(techno
applies on occasion) and possibly avant-garde genres, with varying hard as
well as romantic and orchestral styles.
Clark is mainly a spoken word artist, but she also plays
piano and occasionally accompanies herself, with piano and voice mixing
in a somewhat atypical New Wave style. Many of her lyrics
deal critically with the imperfections of humanity, everyday life, and
politics. Especially in her early works she has created a gloomy, melancholy
kind of atmosphere bordering on weltschmerz.
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Contents
- 1 Life
- 2 Band
- 3 Discography
- 4 External
links
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Life
Anne Clark was born the daughter of an Irishwoman and a
Scotsman. At the age of 16, she left school. She took various jobs, one
of which was as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital. Clark then got a job
at the local record store (and label), Bonaparte Records. Punk rock
was finding its way into London's music scene and totally matched Anne
Clark's emotions.
Clark soon became involved with the Warehouse
Theatre, an independently-financed stage for bands, that was always low
on cash. Although the theater's owners initially objected to the
strange, pierced punk scene characters and their
leather outfits, Anne was able to successfully arrange the program.
Bands like Siouxsie and The Banshees,
Generation
X, and The
Damned belonged to the local scene and performed at the
Warehouse in addition to besides theatre, dance, comedy and poetry
projects. Anne Clark managed to fill the theatre with artists like Paul
Weller, Linton Kwesi Johnson, French
& Saunders, The Durutti Column, Ben
Watt (who is now a member of Everything But The Girl),
and many others. She experimented with music and lyrics herself and
first appeared on stage in Richard Strange's Cabaret Futura
with Depeche Mode.
In 1982, Anne Clark published her first album, The
Sitting Room, with songs written by herself. On the following
albums, Changing Places (1983),
Joined up Writing (1984)
and Hopeless Cases (1987),
Anne benefited from an acquaintance from the Warehouse: keyboardist David Harrow contributed as the
co-author. The songs created by this team, such as Sleeper in
Metropolis, Our Darkness and Wallies
have since been considered milestones the 1980s and 1990s.
In 1985, Clark released the album Pressure
Points. It was created in cooperation with John
Foxx, who had founded Ultravox.
In 1987, Clark went to Norway for three years, where she
worked with Tov Ramstad and Ida Baalsrud, among others. In
cooperation with Charlie Morgan, she released the album Unstill
Life in 1991. Morgan died of cancer in December 1992 at the
age of only 36, which caused many planned collaboration projects to be
abandoned.
After several months of reorientation, Clark eventually
released The Law is an Anagram of Wealth in 1993,
once again in collaboration with Tov Ramstad; the other musicians
involved were Paul Downing, Martyn Bates, and Andy Bell.
Just one year later, in 1994, Anne Clark ventured into a style
that she had not experimented with before: acoustic music. This
eventually culminated in the release of Psychometry
(1994), which featured a concert recorded live on stage in the
Passionskirche in Berlin.
Continuously, Clark went on following her musical roots and
the influences of folk and classical music. Her 1998 album, Just
After Sunset, a collaboration with Martyn Bates, featured poems by German
poet Rainer Maria Rilke translated
into English. This album was re-released four years later in 2002 when
Clark got back the rights on the album. The re-release included some
additional video footage, although it was of rather poor quality.
In 2003, another album joined her series of acoustic albums: From
The Heart - Live In Bratislava, which she recorded together
with Murat Parlak (vocals/piano), Jann Michael Engel (cello), Niko Lai
(drums and percussion) and Jeff Aug (guitars) in Bratislava, Slovak
Republic.
In 2005, Clark joined up with the Belgian act Implant for the
album Self-inflicted, on which she delivered guest
vocals. The album was released via Alfa Matrix Records, which in the
meantime had become her home label outside of Germany. She also
appeared on the Implant EP Too Many Puppies.
2006 saw Clark back again in the studio with Implant for the
EP Fade Away, on which she delivered guest vocals
and performed a duet with Leæther Strip's Claus Larsen. And she
also appeared on the album Audioblender by Implant
as well, again released via the Alfa Matrix label.
At present, Clark resides in Norfolk, England, United
Kingdom.
Band
- Anne Clark, Vocals
- Jeff Aug, Guitarist (and Booker)
- Niko Lai, Drums & Percussion
- Murat Parlak, Piano
- Jann Michael Engel, Cello
Discography
- The Sitting Room (1982)
- Changing Places (1983)
- Joined Up Writing (1984)
- Pressure Points (1985)
- An Ordinary Life (1986)
- Hopeless Cases (1987)
- R.S.V.P. (1988)
- Unstill Life (1991)
- The Law Is An Anagram Of Wealth (1993)
- Psychometry (1994)
- To Love And Be Loved (1995)
- Wordprocessing (1997)
- Just After Sunset - The Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (1998)
- Just After Sunset - Re-release (2002?)
- From the Heart (2003)
- Notes Taken Traces Left (2004)
External links
