Tut's: Ross Clark
armed with only a mop of hair, an acoustic guitar and huge NHS specs, Clarke is a beguiling, captivating figure
| 14 Aug 2006
The romance seems to have disappeared from band-forming. Instead of bonding up trees during childhood summers or shooting up in doss houses, bands these days seem to rely on a more efficient vetting process. Realising that your friends might not cut it in your world-beating band/business, all the smartest go-getters trawl the internet and NME classifieds to find that elusive member. Drummers seem to be the hardest people to find, both Bloc Party and Razorlight found theirs lurking in the classifieds; some bands, like new bunch Fields, are completely manufactured from the ground up by a shadowy svengali.
No such problems for Ross Clark. Without a band, a decision based on not wanting to "make his friends' lives any harder," he plays acoustic music as if he was fronting a rock group. Eighteen, young enough for the listener to wonder quite where his fantastic lyrics come from; on stage armed with only a mop of hair, an acoustic guitar and huge NHS specs, Clark is a beguiling, captivating figure. Resembling Elvis Costello, although insisting he's "more like a proclaimer," his coruscating take on folk shows as much influence from punk as it does from the seminal American label Saddle Creek. Believing that too much acoustic music is performed in a "static" manner, too torpid to be truly involving, Clark's showmanship, dropping to his knees for a particularly complicated chord or running from the venue to play on the street outside during a song, brings an unexpectedly thrilling passion to his performance.
The trick to song-writing, he claims, is realising that "it's meant to be about words and music, not one or the other." Rather than mumbling like Jose Gonzalez or over-emoting like any number of chart-toppers, he croons, shrieks and chirps his eloquent, poetic lyrics over his intricate picked or bashed guitar playing. Whilst he insists his music is "a-political, just about balance between song and lyric," his bizarre imagery, which has the sheen of the very best poetry, and naïve, occasionally arch wit evidences a strange, fertile muse. Young, but certainly not doomed, there is a romance about Ross Clark quite unlike any other musician in Glasgow.
No such problems for Ross Clark. Without a band, a decision based on not wanting to "make his friends' lives any harder," he plays acoustic music as if he was fronting a rock group. Eighteen, young enough for the listener to wonder quite where his fantastic lyrics come from; on stage armed with only a mop of hair, an acoustic guitar and huge NHS specs, Clark is a beguiling, captivating figure. Resembling Elvis Costello, although insisting he's "more like a proclaimer," his coruscating take on folk shows as much influence from punk as it does from the seminal American label Saddle Creek. Believing that too much acoustic music is performed in a "static" manner, too torpid to be truly involving, Clark's showmanship, dropping to his knees for a particularly complicated chord or running from the venue to play on the street outside during a song, brings an unexpectedly thrilling passion to his performance.
The trick to song-writing, he claims, is realising that "it's meant to be about words and music, not one or the other." Rather than mumbling like Jose Gonzalez or over-emoting like any number of chart-toppers, he croons, shrieks and chirps his eloquent, poetic lyrics over his intricate picked or bashed guitar playing. Whilst he insists his music is "a-political, just about balance between song and lyric," his bizarre imagery, which has the sheen of the very best poetry, and naïve, occasionally arch wit evidences a strange, fertile muse. Young, but certainly not doomed, there is a romance about Ross Clark quite unlike any other musician in Glasgow.
Ross Clark plays Oran Mor, Glasgow on August 9.
http://www.myspace.com/electricpolyester