In the antediluvian age of the 1970s, long before the Internet became radicalized and the Worldwide Web was merely a hastily scribbled note on some young British computer scientist’s “To Do” list, teenaged rockers across the “fruited plain” were somewhat limited in our knowledge of the music we loved. You couldn’t look up a band “online” and while publications like
Creem,
Circus,
Rolling Stone, and
Crawdaddy provided a glimpse behind the veil into the mysteries of rock ‘n’ roll, for those of us who were stuck stateside (or didn’t have access to the
New Musical Express), it could take us months…or even years to hear about our “favorite” new band. Word of mouth was the currency of the decade, and we developed friendships with like-minded punters who got their groove on to the Stones, Bowie, Zeppelin, Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, Mott the Hoople, and Alice Cooper.
Records were lent, swapped, and sometimes stolen and we each gradually built up a personal playlist (and absorbed knowledge) of the music we liked. When punk hit the U.K. it took a couple of years to bubble up across most of the U.S. but when records by the Clash, Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks, and others eventually became available, we repeated the cycle of knowledge of our early teens. The 1980s expanded our knowledge even further with MTV, an abundance of diverse music zines, and the growth of something known as “college radio.” By the end of the century, file trading and the web removed any barriers to learning about and listen to just about any band. All of which is to say “mea culpa” and apologies for my ignorance of the existence of a thriving late ‘70s/early ‘80s rock scene in New Zealand, much less of such a groundbreaking and entertaining band as the Clean, until the early 2000s.
Richard Langston’s The Clean: In the Dreamlife You Need A Rubber Soul
New Zealand journalist Richard Langston is well-versed in the birth and evolution of his homeland’s rock music scene as he was involved with it at the time as a fan and zine publisher in the ‘80s. His recently-published tome,
The Clean: In the Dreamlife You Need A Rubber Soul, provides a wonderful and comprehensive oral history of the Clean, from the band’s humble D.I.Y. beginnings until the modern day. It’s a deceptively quick read, and not just because there are a lot of photos and such, but because Langston gets out of his subject’s way and just lets the commentary flow. Save for a few sentences here or a paragraph there to stitch the narrative together, Langston’s brilliance is in getting people talking and then just faithfully recording their memories. The result is a fast-paced story of a rock ‘n’ roll band that doesn’t depend on tawdry debauchery or tall tales to faithfully capture the band’s story.
Formed by brothers David and Hamish Kilgour in 1978 in Dunedin, New Zealand’s second largest-city, the Clean formulated a sound based on ‘60s-era pop, garage, and psychedelic rock blended with then current U.K. punk. The Clean ran through a handful of members, including good friend of the band Peter Gutteridge, before settling on a three-piece lineup that featured David on guitar and vocals, Hamish on drums, and Robert Scott on bass. All three musicians also wrote songs, albeit some more prolifically than others, and they began playing to sparse crowds in Dunedin and Auckland before releasing their debut single, “Tally Ho!” b/w “Platypus” in 1981 on New Zealand’s fledgling Flying Nun Records label. The record was a hit and was quickly followed by a 12” EP titled
Boodle Boodle Boodle. Other seven-inchers and EPs followed, the band’s commercial success boosting Flying Nun’s shoestring operations.
The Clean’s Break-Up & Reunion
After a few years of living in a van while touring Dunedin, Auckland, Christchurch and locations in between these major New Zealand metropolises, the Clean essentially broke up, its members going onto various other musical projects, most notably Scott’s outfit the Bats. But the band’s incendiary live performances and scattering of vinyl was enough to help kickstart the New Zealand rock scene during the ‘80s, eventually taking it worldwide as bands like the Bats, Tall Dwarfs, and the Verlaines found audiences in the U.S. and in Europe. The Clean reunited in 1988 for a show in London opening for the Bats, and began playing and writing together again, resulting in their first full-length album, 1990’s Vehicle.
Tours of the United States, Great Britain, and across Europe followed, as would uniformly-excellent records like 1994’s Modern Rock,1996’s Unknown Country, and 2001’s Getaway. Building a stateside audience that included indie rock fans like Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo and Matt Swanson of Lambchop, the band wrote a successful second chapter to an already influential career. Finding a stateside home with Merge Records (home to the almighty Superchunk!), the label released the exceptionally-comprehensive, two-disc, 46-song Anthology in 2003, introducing stateside fans to the band’s out-of-print early material. Merge also released the band’s final studio album, Mister Pop, in 2009 and they’ve also worked extensively with David Kilgour, releasing several of his solo albums and those with his band the Heavy Eights during the new millennium.
The Reverend’s Bottom Line
This is just a condensed version of the Clean’s story – you’ll have to pick up the book to get the fascinating details – but should it whet your thirst to find out more about this great, underrated band (or the New Zealand rock scene itself), you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of Langstons’ The Clean: In the Dreamlife You Need A Rubber Soul. As a journalist, Langston covers all the bases, speaking with the band members, various friends and family of the band, other New Zealand musicians like Martin Phillipps of the Chills and Alec Bathgate and Chris Knox of Tall Dwarfs, as well as music biz supporters like Geoff Travis of Rough Trade Records and my ol’ “buddy” Gerard Cosloy of Homestead and Matador Records. Langston fills in any empty corners with previously-published interviews, show and album reviews, as well as personal correspondence between the band members, friends and family.
A word, also, about the look of the book…it’s freakin’ gorgeous! The Clean had several photographer friends who documented the band over the years, and the band held onto memorabilia like artwork, posters, and such for decades. As a result, In the Dreamlife is profusely and beautifully illustrated with more cool graphics than a lot of books about better-known artists. Much like the Clean’s music, the book’s layout displays a certain intuitive genius, utilizing various type fonts and sizes to separate the underlying oral history with Langston’s commentary and other text. At its core, however, In the Dreamlife is a story of a rock band that dared to dream, and to do so on its own terms. The Clean were, at heart, a punk band but with a creatively unique sound that forever colored outside the lines and limitations of any genre or expectations. They inspired a generation of indie rockers to follow, and that’s a fine legacy, indeed… (Feral House, published April 7th, 2026)
Buy the book direct from the publisher: Richard Langston’s The Clean: In the Dreamlife You Need A Rubber Soul
