Anne Clark

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Anne Clark at the Amphi Festival 2013

Anne Clark (born May 14, 1960 in Croydon , South London ) is a British poet , songwriter , singer , pianist and electro - musician who, in the course of the post-punk era in the United Kingdom and the European New Wave / Dark Wave movement gained popularity and is still active today as a musician with her own band .

Clark's first album was released in 1982. In Europe her best-known songs are Sleeper in Metropolis (1983) and Our Darkness (1984), in the United States Hope Road (1987 single). In Germany, the song Our Darkness gained additional fame as the theme melody of the political magazine ZAK, which was broadcast on public television until 1996 .

Anne Clark at the Dortmund concert of the “The Smallest Acts of Kindness” tour 2008 - v. l. To the right: Murat Parlak, Anne Clark, Niko Lai, Jeff Aug, Rainer von Many

Musically, almost all of her works can be classified in the field of electronic music with some avant-garde classical , folk , rock and dance elements. All in all, her work is assigned to the genre " Spoken Word ", which means that Anne Clark does not sing, but rather recites the mostly very poetic song texts, spoken rhythmically. In terms of content, these deal predominantly and critically with the inadequacies of being human, everyday life and politics, which gives the early works in particular a melancholy and melancholy substance, which is referred to in both German and English as " Weltschmerz ".

Life

Anne Clark was born in south London to an Irish woman and a Scotsman. At the age of 16 she left school and took various jobs, including working as a nurse in a psychiatric clinic. Then the future musician got a job at Bonaparte Records , a London record store and independent label with a focus on punk rock. She then worked in the directly adjacent Warehouse Theater , which at the time was a self-financed venue, primarily for alternative theater and music groups in Croydon. Bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees , Generation X and The Damned were part of the local scene and performed there, but also theater, dance and comedy projects and poets. Anne Clark successfully designed the program in the Warehouse Theater for 18 months; she could fill the house with artists like Paul Weller , Linton Kwesi Johnson , French & Saunders , The Durutti Column , Ben Watt, and others.

Even they also experimented with music and lyrics, and first appeared in Cabaret Futura by Richard Strange publicly - together with the newly formed band Depeche Mode . At Paul Wellers Riot Stories - founded to support the work of young writers ignored by major publishing houses - she became co-editor. She was also involved in television projects and wrote the script for the Channel 4 production Sketch for Someone ; she was also engaged in a number of BBC TV productions .

Anne Clark at a concert in 2008

In 1982 the first album The Sitting Room came out. On her next albums, Changing Places in 1983 , Joined Up Writing in 1984 and Hopeless Cases in 1987 , she benefited from an acquaintance at the Warehouse, David Harrow , who acted as co-author. Some of the pieces of music developed by the two of them and primarily produced with keyboards , synthesizers and samplers became milestones in electronic music of the 1980s, for example Sleeper in Metropolis , Our Darkness or Wallies . In 1985 Anne Clark released her fourth album Pressure Points , on which she worked with John Foxx , the founder of the British new wave band Ultravox .

In 1987 Clark went to Norway for three years , where she worked with musicians Tov Ramstad and Ida Baalsrund , among others . A year later she released her first live album RSVP with recordings of a concert on May 5, 1987 at the Utrecht Music Centrum .

Back in Great Britain, she brought out the album Unstill Life with pianist Charlie Morgan in 1991 . Together they worked on other projects, which could not be completed because Morgan died of cancer in December 1992 at the age of 36 . Months of reorientation and change followed. In 1993 the album The Law Is an Anagram of Wealth was finally recorded and released. On this album Anne Clark (like Gustav Mahler at the beginning of the 20th century ) set several poems by the German poet Friedrich Rückert to music . She then continued to work with Tov Ramstad and also with Paul Downing , Martyn Bates (from the band Eyeless in Gaza ) and Andy Bell.

In 1994 Anne Clark toured with an acoustic-only band. The results can be heard on the live album Psychometry , recorded in Berlin's Passionskirche and released that same year . With the following electronic-acoustic album To Love and Be Loved in 1995, Anne Clark concentrated on interpersonal relationships and thus expanded the range of topics in her music. In addition to longing and frustration, joie de vivre and lasciviousness (in the song Virtuality ) also come into play.

Starting in 1996, various bands, producers and DJs - including Aural Float , Hardfloor , Juno Reactor , Mouse on Mars , Pascal FEOS , Saafi Brothers , Sven Väth and The Mover  - put together a tribute album with techno remixes of Anne Clark’s songs, which was released in 1997 under The title Wordprocessing was published and documents Clark's influence on musicians of this genre.

The artist then continued to pursue her acoustic, folk and classical influences and in 1998 released the album Just After Sunset with Martyn Bates with poems by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke translated into English . This album was re-released in 2002 after a “creative break” and a change of record label. Another acoustic album followed in 2003 (From the Heart - Live in Bratislava) , which she recorded with Murat Parlak (vocals / piano), Jann Michael Engel (cello), Niko Lai (drums / percussion) and Jeff Aug (guitar) . It was created on November 17th, 2002 in the radio studios of Slovenský rozhlas in the Slovak capital Bratislava during the European Acoustic Tour .

From 2002 the songwriter devoted herself to electronic music again. From then on, Anne Clark could be heard as a guest singer in songs in several other musical groups. This included 2002 in many Dance - Charts at # 1 increased and thus very successful single The Hardest Heart of the German DJ duo Blank & Jones and two years later the song Hall of Mirrors of the Slovenian band Silence (a cover of Kraftwerk -Originals ).

In the fall of 2003, Clark's book Notes Taken, Traces Left , primarily intended for the German-speaking market, was published . It contains over 300 pages of all the texts of their songs, which have been published since 1982, with translations into German as well as personal comments, interviews and photos. A year later, an audio book of the same name was published in the form of two CDs, on which she recited essential parts of the book.

Anne Clark at the Amphi Festival 2013

From 2004 onwards, her collaboration with the Belgian electrical band Implant was particularly intense , with whom she could also be seen several times on stage, where she and the Belgians presented new versions of their hits. Clark also took over the vocal part for various Implant songs, including a. 2005 for Tune up your chips and circuits and Surface Tension as well as 2006 for Your World and Was it always this way . The duet Was It Always This Way , recorded together with the Dane Claus Larsen, who was also engaged as a guest singer at Implant , gained a certain fame in the electronic scene thanks to the fans of Larsen's project Leæther Strip .

Her studio album The Smallest Acts of Kindness was released in 2008. It was their first album with their own lyrics in twelve years, but Psalm is a cover of Ultra Violent PØP ( No Songs Tomorrow , 1983).

In an interview with Spiegel Online , on the occasion of the release of the documentary film I'll walk out into tomorrow about her life and work in January 2018 , Anne Clark stated : “At the beginning I performed my texts on punk. But I was always a big fan of the German krautrock scene, Tangerine Dream , Kraftwerk - this music had an enormous influence on me and the musicians I worked with. I also like classical music very much [...] I try to bring together very different musical moods. ”In the same SPON interview, Clark also described:“ What I really appreciate about the Internet and the virtual world: I can own 10,000 virtual CDs, or 50,000 read virtual books and don't have to put them in my living room. At the same time, of course, there is a lot more space on the shelf for other crap! We live in smaller and smaller apartments, but we buy more and more. One of the craziest modern phenomena are storage companies that offer you to store the stuff that you don't seem to need that much in a box far away. That has to stop!"

In December 2015, Anne Clark announced that her concert tour with her colleague and producer HerrB, which ended in March 2016, would probably be the last. A performance at the Belgian W Festival was announced for August 2017. A concert tour in Germany announced for 2020 was canceled due to a cancer diagnosis at Anne Clark, as the artist announced on her official website.

Anne Clark lives in Norfolk in the east of England.

tape

A large part of the live band 2008 (from left to right): Jann Michael Engel, Murat Parlak, Anne Clark, Niko Lai, Jeff Aug

Anne Clark has worked with various musicians since the beginning of her career. Your current band (as of 2010) consists of:

Discography

Studio albums

year title Top ranking, total weeks, awardChartsChart placements
(Year, title, rankings, weeks, awards, notes) 		Remarks
DE DE
1982 The Sitting Room -
Recorded at Pathway Studios London, June 1982
produced by Anne Clark, A Cluel Memory and Chris Stone
1983 Changing places -
Recorded at Denmark Street Studios, London, March and April 1983
Composition: Page 1 - David Harrow, Page 2 - Vini Reilly
1984 Joined up writing -
Page 1 recorded at Wickham Studio in Croydon, February and March 1984, Page 2 recorded at Barge Studio in Maida Vale, August 1984
1985 Pressure points DE35 (7 weeks)
DE
Recorded at The Garden Studio London, July 1985 except for The Power Game in March 1985 at The Point Studio London
1987 Hopeless cases DE52 (1 week)
DE
recorded at The Basement, F2 and The Point Studios in London
1991 Unstill Life -
1993 The Law Is an Anagram of Wealth DE81 (6 weeks)
DE
Recorded in Oslo, Coventry and London between July and December 1992
1995 To Love and Be Loved DE54 (6 weeks)
DE
1998 Just After Sunset - The Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke -
Anne Clark & ​​Martyn Bates; Re-release in 2002
recorded at Thein Studios Bremen, February 1998
2008 The Smallest Acts of Kindness -
First published: September 26, 2008
2018 Homage - The Silence Inside -
First published: November 19, 2018, produced by Anne Clark and Thomas Rückoldt

documentary

The documentary I'll Walk Out Into Tomorrow by Claus Withopf was released in German cinemas on January 25, 2018 . Shot over a period of ten years, it contains interviews, gives insights into the artist's biography, shows Clark at work in the studio and during numerous live performances and presents excerpts from music videos.

literature

Web links

Commons : Anne Clark  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Sutton: Anne Clark. Biography . Allmusic . Retrieved April 22, 2012.
  2. ^ A b Anne Clark: Notes Taken, Traces Left. Edited by Jeff Aug, translated by Martin Müncheberg. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-89602-463-9 , p. 271
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h Anne Clark. Biography . anneclark.de. Retrieved April 22, 2012.
  4. ^ Anne Clark: Notes Taken, Traces Left. Edited by Jeff Aug, translated by Martin Müncheberg. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-89602-463-9
  5. ↑ Implant announces new album featuring Anne Clark, EP and gig. side-line.com, October 1, 2004 ( memento of October 19, 2007 in the Internet Archive ).
  6. ^ Discography of the band "Implant" . implant-music.be. Retrieved August 2, 2012.
  7. ↑ Anne Clark and Leaether Strip in duet on new single implant. side-line.com, May 2, 2006 ( Memento from July 19, 2013 in the Internet Archive ).
  8. ↑ Anne Clark returns with first new studio album in over 12 years. side-line.com, December 17, 2007 ( Memento from September 6, 2013 in the Internet Archive ).
  9. ↑ Lyrics Psalm signed by Andy. . uvpop.com. Retrieved August 2, 2012.
  10. ↑ Anne Clark on digitization - "Overwhelmed by cheap scrap" on www.spiegel.de, by Jenni Zylka on January 27, 2018
  11. ↑ Merry Christmas Everybody . anneclarkofficial.com, December 25, 2015; Memento from the Internet Archive .
  12. ↑ concert announcement. w-festival.com, accessed May 29, 2017.
  13. ↑ message on www.anneclarkofficial.com. Retrieved June 2, 2020.
  14. ↑ Chart sources: DE
  15. ^ Anne Clark: Notes Taken, Traces Left . Edited by Jeff Aug, translated by Martin Müncheberg. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin, 2003, ISBN 3-89602-463-9 .
  16. ↑ Claus Withopf's website
  17. ^ Anne Clark: I'll walk out into tomorrow . , IMDb Release Info.
personal data
SURNAME Clark, Anne
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British poet, songwriter, singer, pianist and electronic musician
DATE OF BIRTH May 14, 1960
PLACE OF BIRTH Croydon , South London