Phrases for Hamish Kilgour of The Clear

Audrey Golden pays tribute to the nice musician Hamish Kilgour of The Clear

I learn the information on 27 November, the day that Hamish Kilgour was final seen, however I didn’t but know something had modified. A number of extra days would cross earlier than the New Zealand police made their public announcement on 1 December that the musician was lacking. I didn’t know Hamish Kilgour personally, however I cherished his music. My coronary heart has crushed to the sounds of his drumming for many years, and my creativeness has been irrepressibly enriched by the worlds he created by way of his visible artwork.

Once I learn that Hamish Kilgour was lacking, I skilled a sensation that almost all of us really feel at one time or one other however is tough to place into phrases — the place your coronary heart appears to have change into bodily heavy, sinking down into your physique whereas additionally reverberating outdoors it. The language that’s used to explain the situation of being lacking at all times feels confounding in its passivity: somebody has gone lacking, has been lacking since some specific day, was reported lacking on a Tuesday. That language additionally underlies the factor that no one needs to say but: that somebody, and perhaps many others, are lacking the one who has gone lacking, hoping that they’re nonetheless someplace, with their coronary heart beating, ready to be discovered.

The Clear are in all probability greatest recognized for the music Tally Ho!, the primary single they launched on Flying Nun Data in 1981. That very same yr, Flying Nun launched the band’s EP Boodle Boodle Boodle, which included various songs that will come to outline their sound: Billy Two, Something Might Occur, Unhappy Eyed Girl, and Level That Factor Someplace Else.

Writers have described The Clear’s sound as jangle-pop, post-punk, proto-shoegaze, however to be sincere, I’ve by no means thought any of these labels had been fairly proper. They merely don’t get on the singularity of the music — the best way the drums and guitar strings come collectively to create a residing factor, or the best way the lyrics reveal voices which are simply as a lot in love and enamored with the world round them as they’re dismayed and devastated by it. A way of surprise emerges in songs just like the magnificent Something Might Occur. It’s muddled with a way of disappointment and loss in tracks resembling Billy Two, Facet On, Large Mushy Punch. That dichotomy grows sharper in I’m In Love With These Occasions — a monitor Kilgour wrote with The Clear however recorded along with his subsequent Flying Nun band Bailter Area (on their 1987 EP Nelsh Bailter Area, the band’s title on the time).

For those who’re in search of essentially the most melancholy and heartrending of all of the songs Kilgour created, drummed, and sang on, you’ll wish to take heed to Getting Older (a 1982 Flying Nun 7” single) and Protected In The Rain (a vastly underappreciated monitor on the band’s 1994 album Fashionable Rock).

In 1989, after The Clear reformed following their breakup in 1982, Kilgour spoke to a reporter from The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia about enjoying reside once more: “I’m somewhat nervous, I assume,” he stated. Kilgour additionally mirrored on The Clear’s music, and their distinctive sound: “The issues we did had been very a lot dictated by circumstances. We tended to do issues very economically. All the pieces was stripped down and minimal. Individuals known as that an anti-attitude/anti-rock stardom, which I assume it was to a sure diploma. We needed to succeed however we didn’t wish to do it in horrible, crass methods . . . . We confirmed individuals in our residence city that we might make data, tour, and return to our residence city.”

Once I first moved to New York Metropolis many years in the past, I knew Hamish Kilgour lived there, and I questioned if I’d run into him. Possibly at Kim’s, in search of bootleg movies, or perhaps in passing on a avenue within the East Village. I by no means did cross by him, or if I did, I didn’t realise it. Possibly I wasn’t wanting laborious sufficient. Once I traveled to New Zealand years later, I rented a automotive and drove south from Christchurch to Dunedin, listening to The Clear and in search of Kilgour and the band in that panorama, directly beautiful and inhospitable. I listened to Protected In The Rain so many occasions on that drive — certainly one of The Clear songs that makes my coronary heart swell — usually hitting the track-back button on the CD participant to take heed to it once more . . . and once more. That form of listening-on-repeat offers us an opportunity to be each outdoors time and definitively someplace, suddenly.

The state of being lacking is one which lies inherently between presence and absence, like a ghost or spectre. It’s directly a situation of nothingness, and a situation of being caught within the in-between. Kilgour did the art work for a lot of the Clear’s data, and people drawings open up new dreamscapes — otherworldly locations between the one we occupy and one other ethereal aircraft. I prefer to suppose his music nonetheless lives in these fantastical areas.

Whereas I anxiously clicked to refresh information tales concerning the drummer of The Clear in these first few days of December 2022, I believed concerning the notion of hauntology, coined by the well-known twentieth-century thinker Jacques Derrida. I seemed up this quote, which I used to be remembering in fragments: “Studying to reside… can occur solely between life and demise. Neither in life nor in demise alone. What occurs between the 2, and between all of the ‘twos’ one likes, resembling between life and demise, can solely keep itself with some ghost . . . . The time of ‘studying to reside’ . . . would quantity to this, to which the exordium is main us: to be taught to reside with ghosts, within the maintenance, the dialog, the corporate, or the companionship . . . of ghosts.”

To some extent, the music of The Clear is illusory this manner, too: present between many years, between geographic areas, between genres. First pressings of The Clear’s bodily data are so few and much between, like ghosts themselves. And as followers, aren’t our favorite musicians at all times somewhat bit spectral for us? I feel what I imply: Did I catch a glimpse of him? Did I stand in the identical bookstore he frequented? Did he maintain that file I’ve simply picked up? Did he play these drums?

On December 6, 2022, the New Zealand police reported that Kilgour had been discovered useless in Christchurch. He could have left this world, however I do know he’s nonetheless residing within the photos that emblazon the album covers of The Clear and within the distinctive sounds of his drum beats.

Slug Music appeared initially on The Clear’s 1982 Flying Nun EP entitled Nice Sounds Nice, Good Sounds Good, So-So Sounds So-So, Unhealthy Sounds Unhealthy, Rotten Sounds Rotten!! The bodily file itself says, fairly matter-of-factly, that “Hammy” contributed “background vocals” to this music. It’s directly playful, but it surely’s additionally a deep lament that I hear now as an epitaph for the inimitable Hamish Kilgour:

Mentioned don’t ever change
Or rearrange your thoughts

Don’t ever go and rearrange
Your thoughts, your thoughts, your thoughts, your thoughts, your thoughts, your thoughts

Effectively anyway,
Don’t ever bend to the hip
The grip of the insipid

I stated nicely anyway,
Don’t ever bend
Don’t ever change
Don’t ever change

I stated don’t
Don’t ever change
And misarrange your thoughts, your thoughts, your thoughts
I stated don’t ever change your thoughts.

~

Phrases by Audrey Golden. You possibly can comply with Audrey on Twitter and Instagram, and you’ll take a look at her private web site to be taught extra about her writing.