Album Review: Clinic, Wheeltappers and Shunters

Times were bad in the ‘70s. Wheeltappers And Shunters Social Club was typical televisual horror-show fare. Watched by millions, not because it was any good, but because there was nothing else on. It may well have been an experiment in mind control, and if TV was the opiate of the masses, then W&SSC was pure Fentanyl.

I have Clinic to thank for dropping me off on this long-forgotten dusty stretch of memory-lane. It’s a bleak and inhospitable place, and injury is further insulted when they also supply the perfect soundtrack. Clinic have been perfecting their haunting style for over 20 years now and it never gets old. Ade Blackburn whispers like a psychotic mental-home inmate, rocking back and forth to spare blues lines and eerie refrains that only he can hear. Except that somehow we hear them too. Spooky! On ‘Be Yourself/Year Of The Sadist’, they put in a convincing audition for house-band at the Overlook Hotel, before riffing on The Electric Prunes’ ‘I Had To Much To Dream Last Night’ with a fluttery ‘New Equations At The Copacabana’.

Bolstered by mirthless chuckles on ‘Laughing Cavalier’ and a “joining the circus” refrain on ‘Tiger’, the abiding sensation, as listener, is one of a dawning awareness that you’ve become the central figure of Herv Herkey’s paranoid cult classic Carnival Of Souls, while Pennywise the clown shadows you in ever decreasing circles. On the face of it a disquieting situation, but somehow incongruously homely.

7/10. Out now