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Anne Clark
(born 14 May 1960, Croydon, London, England) is an English poet and
songwriter. Her first album, The Sitting Room, was released in 1982, and
she has released over 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.
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.
Anne Clark was born the daughter of an Irish mother and a Scottish
father. 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 perfectly 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. 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), Clark
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 of the 1980s and 1990s. In 1985, Clark
released the album Pressure Points. It was created in collaboration with
John Foxx, who wrote the music and plays on the first five tracks.. 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 on SPV Records.
Tracks included The Moment, Unstill Life, Abuse and Empty Me. This album
was also released in the USA on Radikal Records. During 1992, she
released a non-album collaboration on maxi-CD (SPV) with Ida Baalsrud,
who both played the violin part and co-wrote If I Could; furthermore,
there was also a remix of Our Darkness included on the last track of the
CD. At the very end of 1992, in December, Charlie Morgan unexpectedly
died of cancer 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
(of the band Eyeless in Gaza), and Andy Bell (not of Erasure fame but
talented musician and programmer) and completed a major European Tour.
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-Kreuzberg. 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 regained the rights to
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 recording 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, again released via the
Alfa Matrix record label.
In 2008 Clark was in Germany to record her next album The Smallest Act
of Kindness, which was released in September 2008. At the end of 2010,
Anne Clark released the first chapter of an on-going project Past &
Future Tense, the first release on her own label, After Hours
Productions. In January 2011 Anne contributed an arrangement of the
Charles Baudelaire poem Enivrez-Vous (Be Drunk) to the audio book and
radio play Die künstlichen Paradiese ("The artificial paradises"),
(Hörbuch Hamburg/Radio Bremen).
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Official Homepage: www.anneclarkofficial.com
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