Episode #21
With Richard Langston, author of In the The Clean: Dream Life You Need a Rubber Soul
In 1978 in Dunedin, New Zealand, the Kilgour brothers, Hamish and David, and their schoolfriend Peter Gutteridge, got together to form a band called The Clean. When Robert Scott joined in 1980, the band found a combination that endured for nearly forty years. The Clean profoundly changed alternative music: hitting the New Zealand charts for months with a single made for $50, ‘Tally Ho!’; helping establish Flying Nun and a music scene independent of the big labels; pioneering a low-fi, do-it-yourself approach to rock music; and touring internationally to influence bands like Pavement and Yo La Tengo. Raw and immediate, this is the story as told by members of The Clean and their inner circle – fellow musicians such as Chris Knox, Martin Phillipps, Graeme Downes and Ira Kaplan, friends and family, pub promoters and sound engineers, and their good friend, Richard Langston. From teenagers in a Dunedin practice room to New York City on 9/11 – this is the band’s history as it unfolds. "It fell to the men of the Clean – David Kilgour, his brother Hamish, and various associates – to unveil the New Zealand sound in its full shabby glory. They began as rank teenage amateurs, and to a certain extent they stayed that way. Even when David learned to play guitar, he avoided pedantries of exact pitch in his vocals. But the songs had an indelibly catchy lilt, pop glamour surging out of the basement, and David’s hoarsely shouted lyrics spoke to the existentialism of artists on the dole . . . Even though “Tally Ho” and various later efforts climbed into the New Zealand charts, this was a band with which executives were not wont to tamper." – Alex Ross, New Yorker, author of The Rest is Noise Richard Langston is a journalist, poet and television director who has written about the Dunedin music scene since the 1980s. The fanzine he edited from 1984–86, Garage, was issued as the book Pull Down the Shades: Garage Fanzine 1984–1986 (HoZac Books, 2023). He has been friends with the members of The Clean for forty years.
