He didn’t get to bed Angelina Jolie or score a hat-trick for his beloved Coventry City, but otherwise Tom Clarke has just enjoyed the perfect August Bank Holiday Weekend.
“We played Reading on Friday; Leeds on Saturday; what used to be the Millennium Dome on Sunday with the Rolling Stones; and Pentonville nick yesterday, which I can honestly say was the most rewarding gig I’ve ever done.”
And they say rock ‘n’ roll kids nowadays are lazy! That little lot needs teasing out, so let’s start with Tom and his band The Enemy’s festival shenanigans.
“Believe it or not, the first festival I ever went to was Reading last year,” he divulges. “We drove down from Cov in Andy our bass-player’s knackered Ford Fiesta and couldn’t afford a parking space, so to come back 12 months later and ram one of the tents was pretty mind-blowing.”
How does it compare to supporting Mick and the chaps?
“Only slightly less fucking fantastic!” enthuses the 19-year-old singer, guitarist and – judging by the reaction of my female friends – complete “give it to me now, big boy” ride.
“It was like being at a gig in America,” he says skillfully sidestepping that final observation, “because everyone working for them is from there and ultra-efficient, which you have to be at that level or you’ll get killed. It’s easy to make old age pensioner jokes about the Stones, but they’re lovely people and still passionate about new music – hence us getting the gig.
“It meant a lot to me because my parents playing ‘Honky Tonk Women’ on full volume in the kitchen is what got me into rock ‘n’ roll. To be side-of-stage when they played it the other night genuinely brought a tear to the eye.”
There was more manly moistness the following morning when The Enemy played to their most captive audience yet.
“Yeah, we went from the Rolling Stones to prison,” Tom laughs. “Part of you’s buzzing off it and part of you’s concerned because you’ve never been in prison before – honest! – and don’t know what to expect. Normally you judge the success of a gig by the amount of fists in the air and crowd surfing, but the payback this time was the smiles on people’s faces.”
Before A. Cynic of Cavan puts pen to paper, we should point out that The Enemy had a serious reason for being behind Pentonville’s maximum security walls.
“It was to highlight the rising male suicide rates, which are bad outside prison but at epidemic level inside them,” Clarke says with a genuine passion for the subject. “For every young person who dies from taking an E, there are 88 who’ll commit suicide. How fucked up is that?”
Very.
“The original hook for us wanting to play prison gigs was Billy Bragg making a speech at the NME Awards about how 80% of the inmates undergoing a musical rehabilitation programme in the UK never re-offend. That blew me away.”
It’s been something of a slowburner here, but The Enemy’s We’ll Live And Die In These Towns crashed straight into the UK album chart at number one. The cue, you imagine, for much snorting of Class A drugs off of supermodels’ bare midriffs.
“When we heard the news we were in a van, in the rain, en route to a gig in Scotland, so neither of those commodities were forthcoming. Andy was asleep, so I left him a note saying, ‘You’re number one, mate!’ There was a bit of celebrating after the fact, but nothing that’d get us arrested.”
It’s a sign of The Enemy’s own Class A status that they’re joining the likes of Kylie, The Killers and the Foo Fighters on the Radio 1. Established 1967 covers album, which is out in October to celebrate the BBC pop station’s 40th birthday.
“We did Cat Stevens’ ‘Father & Son’, which I make absolutely no apologies for ‘cause it’s brilliant. I remember playing it on the old grand piano they had in our school music department, and some bird in my year thinking I was a Boyzone fan.”
Which doubtless in her eyes made Tom a laughing stock.
“No, she thought Boyzone were great and I ended up pulling her!”
A penchant for early ‘70s soft rock classics isn’t the only thing Tom Clarke has in common with Messrs. Keating, Graham, Lynch, Gately and Duffy.
“I’ve got Irish blood pumping through my veins, same as them,” he reveals. “One side of the family is O’Gara, who have a castle somewhere, and the other is Clarke who are from Drogheda. We’ll have to be like Snow Patrol and have four home towns!”