Bless the eccentrics. Without them, pop music would be a wasteland of the predictable.
So it is heartening to see the crowd snaking outside La Zona Rosa, one of the biggest rock clubs at North America’s most prestigious musical gathering (the recently concluded South by Southwest Music Conference). The standing-room-only audience is there to see one of the oddest little success stories to emerge from England since Radiohead turned “Paranoid Android” into an unlikely 1997 hit: Clinic, a Liverpool foursome that makes its Chicago debut Thursday at the Abbey Pub.
Four figures in surgeons’ scrubs commandeer the stage. The effect of the uniforms is initially comical, but as the music unspools, the green duds take on a sinister glow. A mournful melodica wheezes as if signaling the onset of a spaghetti-western shootout; an organ drones ominously; cymbals sizzle like rattlesnakes in the brush; a clarinet climbs a wobbly staircase of notes; and the singer hisses through an opening in his mask as though in need of a straitjacket.
The foursome of singer-guitarist Ade Blackburn, bassist Brian Campbell, drummer Carl Turney and keyboardist Hartley swaps a small stockpile of instruments between songs. The atmosphere they create is tense yet tuneful: This is pop with a subversive twist, tightly arranged three-minute melodies that somehow manage to both please the ear and send a chill up the spine.
The show gains momentum as it creeps to a close, the intensity building not because the band is so adept at constructing crowd-pleasing anthems, but because each song feels like a coiled spring, the tension mounting until it becomes nearly unbearable.
“Claustrophobic, knotty, sinister — that’s the mood we’re going for,” says Blackburn in an interview after the Austin show. “It’s good to have something that’s a bit more . . . maybe not confusing to the audience, but thought-provoking. We’ve still got some basic pop-song elements in there, but what we do can’t be easily categorized.”
That peaceful queasy feeling began in 1997, when Clinic entered the UK scene. The title of the quartet’s first single, “IPC Sub-Editors Dictate Our Youth,” refers to the IPC company that owns the trend-spotting musical journal NME.
“If you weren’t playing along with the current trend that they considered fashionable musically, it was difficult,” Blackburn says of the British music business. “I don’t know why a small group of people was able to dictate culture. There’s almost a desperation to create scenes, to generate excitement and sell records, but it kills off bands trying to do something different.”
Blackburn and his bandmates also felt like outsiders coming from Liverpool, where “you’re either cast as Beatles imitators or not being fashionable enough to play with the bands in London.” Clinic’s response was to tune out the industry and build its own following by hooking up with the independent Domino label. Their debut, “Internal Wrangler” (2000), was greeted with ecstatic reviews and healthy sales. The recent follow-up, “Walking With Thee,” is even better, a concise mix of cold-sweat atmosphere, taut groove and simmering melody.
“Our influences — going back to Captain Beefheart and the Velvet Underground — still seem contemporary, because they were ahead of their time and their sound hasn’t been overdone by other bands,” the singer says. “We were intent on making our own version of that music using lots of different instruments, going beyond the two-guitar, bass, drums format.” Though Blackburn is well aware of how fast gimmicks burn out, especially in a UK music scene that is built on myths, fads and make-believe scenes, he has no regrets about Clinic’s sartorial signature, which they will likely be wearing at the Abbey Pub show.
“We like that there’s a visual side to the gigs — it makes them more of an event,” says the singer. “There’s a humorous side to it, but there’s also something a little . . . off.”
