“It’s about conviction. I don’t just want to be another Instagram personality trying to get likes as clickbait. The way I am wired, I want there to be substance. I want there to be art attached to everything I do.”
Under the shadow of the former Central Bank and what seems like its eternal facelift and refit, Greg Clifford is gearing up for a gig. A morning of guitar teaching was followed by an afternoon of rehearsal. He is a jobbing pragmatist, a multi-instrumentalist and video maker also engaged in art performance pieces.
Lines of Desire is his latest release: a hugely ambitious, three-pronged, cross-media endeavour comprising a CD, a book and a video documentary. Lush, sophisticated pop is articulated in each song. All manner of musical interplay engages the ear – with some sampled wisdom by Alan Watts to set it all off on Ambiguity, the opening track. The album’s complex instrumentation is a platform for deft musicianship, catchy melody and arresting words. This is a rich soundscape: saxophone, flute and cello weave across its guitar, drum and bass. The result is dramatic and striking: it sounds like music you may have heard before but somehow have forgotten, like songs around for years which have eluded you.
“The essence of Lines of Desire is to be uncompromising, unadulterated and authentic, to trust impulse and intuition – that’s the aesthetic of the work. Pop music is churned out so much and it’s generally formulaic. Lines of Desire is me setting out to make my own amalgamation of my own melting pot, with accessibility for the audience and musical integrity and richness, with time changes, diminished chords and orchestration.”
Recorded in Dublin’s Sun Studios and London’s Musicland in late 2019, the album was poised for release in early 2020. “It was horrific to lose out on gigs to the pandemic – it was my chance to start touring and move around Europe. The brakes got put on and the rug was pulled out. I needed something to keep me sane.”
A defiant act
Clifford decided to write a short book to go with the CD. This was “greatly cathartic” as he had time to ponder personal issues and channel his thoughtfulness into a commentary on his own work. “It is the concepts and philosophies behind the songs and it helped me reaffirm my beliefs and approach to life. There’s also studio anecdotes and music theory – I studied classical music and have a great love of it. It was also a chance to do what other DIY artists are simply not doing: to throw myself out there and display myself as an artist. It’s quite a defiant act. A crazy undertaking.”
Clifford is exceedingly affable, a friendly, charismatic guy focused on music, books and film. His conversation is peppered with clear nuggets of philosophical reference – Socrates, Camus, Nietzsche. To stimulate lyrics for the track Redemption, he took three books down off his shelf: The Conquest of the Useless by Werner Herzog, The Age of Absurdity by Irish philosopher Michael Foley, and Exile and the Kingdom by Albert Camus. “I started flicking through passages almost in a Dadaesque cut-up technique and I combined them, and the lyrics just started to pour out of me.”
He exudes a confidence that he is aware may be mistaken for borderline arrogance. But mastery of craft permeates his work. He merits space for self-reflection as one of a coterie of talented artists whose essential purity may corral them criminally at the margins.
“I have always resented the term singer-songwriter. It once meant Dylan and Cohen, but now we are in the time of X Factor and Simon Cowell. I don’t fit into that mould. There’s a song on the CD, I Will Make This Up to You, that has descending chromatic basslines, some dissonance, harsh electric guitars and changing time signatures like seven/four into five/four and four/four. That can be confusing for an audience member. Unless you find the right audience member.”
Clifford’s book of essays illuminates each track by shading in mood, anecdote and influence, as well as personal circumstance and musical and production dilemmas and their resolution. It reveals a man of 34 who is both fragile and confident of his patch.
Enigma and ambiguity
Packaged with the CD, the text elevates music beyond the bland tunes we have allowed engulf us and clog up our radio and internet feeds. It reads as a set of enlightened instructions and mission statements, as both a menu for each song and a recipe for its active ingredients. But is there a danger such exposition of artistry demystifies the work? Does this render it too easy to understand when enigma and ambiguity are often the magnetic core of a song?
“People don’t always look beyond the songs to delve into the lyrics to demystify them for themselves. With Radiohead or Beck, I always wanted to know the music and lyrics and be part of it the best I could. But do people have the time now to dedicate themselves to music as an activity? It has become an accompaniment to daily life in the car or the supermarket. But maybe the fact there is a book will motivate people to listen at a deeper level – the music may even strangely become an accompaniment to the book.”
The third prong of Clifford’s Lines of Desire project is a 40-minute film: a further insight into the recording of the album and the thoughts, impulses and goals of its creator.
Shot entirely in Sun Studios, it is a democratic capture of the effort and often apparent ease of recording music. It presents Clifford in the guise of musical director, his individual vision being imparted to a team of skilled and constructive instrumentalists and backing vocalists who conspire with him to deliver the goods. He straddles roles as team player and leader, as bit-part actor and star, to coax out the talent and idiosyncrasy of all assembled. Engineer and co-producer Ian Flynn is always at his side, advising and suggesting, guiding the whole project forward.
Telepathy of musicians
A 1979 studio-based video by Gerry Rafferty was once dismissed by some sneering over-literate hack as being of the “real musician” genre, all microphones and swaggering, headphoned players hunched over instruments. But Clifford’s film avoids any sense of being a backstage parade. Its currency is delighted smiles, eye-to-eye contact and the intense telepathy of musicians. A pair of hands moves across a keyboard and a click track makes you believe this is effortless if not actually easy.
Edited by Greg and shot by his father, Dave Clifford, it documents the Lines of Desire sessions while also being something of a paean to the carpentry of acoustic instruments: to the bow, string and the bridge. It captures the industrial gleam of the flute and the saxophone and the mackerel-skin shimmer of high-hat drums on stainless-steel holds. A close-up of a coiled guitar cable makes it a vital spring, a key piece of suspension, a shock absorber on which sits the whole magnificent musical superstructure. Bridging transitions, last-minute musical phrases and happenstance solutions are devised and caught on camera. Delicate moments build into an overall sense of accord as a dense periodic table of musical elements are brewed into magical melodic formulas. The film makes you want to hear the album. And read the book.
Greg Clifford launches Lines of Desire at The Wild Duck on April 7th
gregcliffordmusic.com
Clifford Clifford Productions: Enthusiasts of artistic insight
A tight two-man film crew shoots close-ups and cutaways. That’s them there at recent gigs by The Lee Harveys and TV Smith. That’s them downstairs in the Thomas House interviewing people for a forthcoming film about Dublin punk stalwarts Paranoid Visions. These are the Cliffords, father and son.
Dave Clifford is an inspirational character whose legacy includes Dublin’s Vox fanzine in the 1980s. A performance artist and graphic designer, he is an enthusiast of artistic insight. He has shot many films and videos, some of which feature Greg. The fly-on-the-wall intimacy of Lines of Desire was afforded by their bond.
Greg shot the video for Brontide, turning the camera on his father as they cleared out a relative’s house in Sligo. The video marked Clifford senior’s return to performance, years on from A Dark Space at the Project Arts Theatre in 1979 in which he was cemented into a wall before then bursting free.
