The Clean “Mister Pop”
In 1961 the city of Austin debuted “The Zilker Eagle,” a pint sized train that rolled around Zilker Park at a max speed of ten miles an hour, relieving exhausted parents and delighting their inexhaustible children. By 2011 The Eagle had been rechristened “The Zilker Zephyr” and, though it had seen better days, The Zephyr still provided hours of locomotive amusement for our young family. More recently The Zilker Zephyr was replaced with an upgraded, but equally slow, choo choo that was re-re-christened in the name of its grandfather (The Eagle). But, to me, it will always be The Zilker Zephyr—a jangly, whistling, out of time caravan that struggled to stay on its tracks but always delivered. Whether you were four or forty years old, you couldn’t not love The Zilker Zephyr.
Ten years before The Eagle was officially renamed The Zephyr, and about eight thousand miles away, David and Hamish Kilgour—co-founders of The Clean—released a bunch of old songs as “The Great Unwashed.” And for reasons that I only recently put together, track ten on that album, “Hold Onto the Rail,” always reminded me of The Zilker Zephyr. Not only for its title, which could double as a safety warning for children or because it includes the word “rail,” but for how it actually sounds. “Hold Onto the Rail” sounds like a cheery, lo-fi, out of time locomotive. Its in tune and then out of tune guitar syncopates to the beat but then loses the rhythm and then heads in one direction before jumping up a key before somehow ending up exactly where it started. It could be a novelty song. It could be a children’s song. It could be a demo. It could be a perfect little single. It might not even be a song at all. But it’s pure glee.
While The Great Unwashed were a willfully unserious side project, their forebear—The Clean—were an absolute miracle. They were a band whose very first single was recorded for something like sixty dollars but which sounds like it should have cost less and which still somehow reached number nineteen on the New Zealand Pop charts. A band who would come to define “The New Zealand Sound.” A band who put Flying Nun Records on the map. A band who made just five studio albums over the course of forty years. A band whose early singles and B-sides were obsessed over by Indie Rock royalty—from Pavement to Guided by Voices—who discovered them through hard to find imports and cassette tapes of those imports and tapes of those tapes of those imports. If The Great Unwashed were intentionally obscure, The Clean were unintentionally monumental.
Years before Guided by Voices and Pavement, The Clean were lo-fi, DIY barely twenty somethings with a knack for melody, an ear for noise and a total disregard for polish. They were at their best when they were simultaneously flying high and falling down. The studio existed not to capture their Cleanliness but rather to document their happiest accidents. Like The Feelies, their antecedents from New Jersey, The Clean were not a band much more than they were a band. Both were prone to extended hiatuses that verged on disappearances. And both were certain that The Velvets were every bit as important as The Beatles, But whereas The Feelies music was obsessive and meticulous, The Clean’s was effortless and unconcerned. The Feelies were from a small Jersey suburb, just a stone's throw from New York City. The Clean meanwhile were born fifteen thousand miles from The Velvets Underground. The Feelies were taut and neurotic. The Clean were loose and bohemian.
The Clean are the only band I know whose most famous album is not—strictly speaking—an “album” but rather compilation of non-album singles and B-sides. And that compilation, cleverly titled “Compilation,” was for many years barely available in America. Throughout the Eighties, The Clean existed somewhere between fanzine rumor and college radio secret. But after releasing exactly zero studio albums during their first twelve years of existence, The Clean released four during the next twelve. “Vehicle” from 1990 and “Modern Rock” from 1994 were of the short and bittersweet persuasion while “Unknown Country” from 1996 and “Getaway” from 2001 were more sprawling and restless. Additionally, this fertile period coincided with a string of solo albums by David Kilgour, a flurry from Robert Scott’s band, The Bats, and even a couple from Hamish’s band, The Mad Scene. Following a decade of fits and starts, The Nineties were an unusually active time for The Clean—a moment wherein audiences who’d not heard them before (i.e. most of the world) finally caught up with the good taste of Robert Pollard, Stephen Malkmus and the good people of Dunedin.
I was one of those not early but also not late adopters who fell in love with The Clean right before they were reclaimed by The Pitchfork Generation. By that point, after years of Flying Nun import hunting, I’d become something of a Clean completist. I’d tracked down all their studio albums, their compilations, seven inches and even their solo records and side hustles. And at some point along the way, after years of obsessive listening and consideration, I had a most unexpected revelation. I realized that the guy who made The Clean “The Clean” was not singer slash guitarist David Kilgour or singer slash bassist Robert Scott but rather drummer slash barely singer Hamish Kilgour.
On its surface, my supposition made very little sense. It flew in the face of established Rock band axioms, all of which state that drummers are never “X Factors” or “MVPs.” Rock bands are defined by their singers and songwriters and lead guitarists and not by their drummers. And why should The Clean be exceptions. After all, Hamish’s songs were always the oddities—the ones you’d skip over if you were short on time. His voice was limited and deadpan. His rhythms were off kilter and unsophisticated. But in the same way that water drains counterclockwise in New Zealand, I concluded that The Clean’s alchemy was counterintuitive. That Hamish was their avant-gardist. That was their inner child. The he was their Great Unwashed. That he was their engine. That was their Zilker Zephyr.
Aside from the occasional concert, I encountered Hamish Kilgour exactly twice in my life. Once was in late 1999 in New York City, when a mutual friend arranged a meeting for us to discuss the possible reissue of The Clean’s catalogue. That day over lunch, I noted his sturdiness—Hamish was built exactly like a drummer should be—while I admired his semi-famously unkempt curls and his severely rumpled dress shirt. Hamish was charming, soft spoken, wry and—maybe most of all—tired. He was forty-two at the time while I was just twenty-five, and to my young eyes he possessed both a wisdom and world-weariness far beyond my years.
The (only) other time I saw Hamish Kilgour he did not see me. It was years later in—of all places—Brattleboro, Vermont. While stretching our legs and grabbing a bite midway through a long roadtrip, I randomly spotted Hamish, with his wife (who I recognized from The Mad Scene) by his side and their child on his shoulders. Brattleboro is a lovely, artsy, unpretentious town, the first taste of Vermont for New Yorkers looking to escape and the first whiff of New York for Vermonters craving stimulation. On that day, in that town, I recall feeling particularly content, having survived the traffic and fled the rat race. It’s the rare instance of a sense memory having sufficiently imprinted itself to stay with me for many years. And though I cannot explain it and though I am most surely projecting, I imagined Hamish feeling something similar.
Obviously, I don’t know that for sure. We did not speak. I didn’t even wave hello. It was just a thought—an impression. But because of that impression I concluded that Hamish Kilgour was a free spirited bohemian. That he was a wake up and let’s pack our bags and get out of the city kind of guy. That he was full of the joy of “Tally Ho” and the buzz of “Hold Onto the Rail.” Maybe I was right. Or maybe I was right on that particular day. But also, more likely, I was wrong. More likely I had a tragically incomplete impression of Hamish Kilgour, who, in late 2022, ten days after he was reported missing on social media, was found dead in Christchurch, New Zealand. The reports did not say as much but the implication was clear—his death was a suicide.
For the next week small tributes trickled out from New Zealand, Indie Rock-dom and NPR-dom. But then came the holidays and then the new year and, by 2023, the public mourning was apparently over. No further details were shared. Just a smattering of kind tributes to his art and then…nothing. On Wikipedia, there was simple but gutting change in verb tense, from “The Clean is” to “The Clean was.” And that was it. The lack of conversation suggested that either the details were too sad to mention (possibly) or that the Kilgours were too private (probably) to comment. I accept either reason, and yet, for the last two years I’ve not been able to get over the death of Hamish Kilgour.
It’s a strange thing really. And I’m not sure I can explain it. But I always held a soft spot for Hamish. He was neither my hero nor (really) my acquaintance. And yet his death cut deep. Was it the loneliness of his final days? Was it how the depths of his struggle betrayed the image I held onto from that day in Vermont? Was it that photo from the cover of “Needles and Plastic”—Matthew Goody’s history of New Zealand’s indie scene—in which young Hamish appears so full of hope and vitality? Or was it that I felt like his passing required a more public reaction? The answers were not clear to me, and in fact are still not clear to me. And so, forlorn and unresolved, I attempted to reconvene with Hamish Kilgour—not through obituaries or interviews or photos, but in the one place where I could always find him—in the music of The Clean.
In part because they released so little music—just five studio albums and two compilations which were combined into one anthology—and in part because I’ve had so much time—thirty plus years—to live with such a small discography, I have committed almost every note from every Clean song to memory. They are among my favorite bands to sing along with because their melodies are so immediate and their singing is so exuberant and—maybe most of all—their rhythms are so basic. But it is also true that over time, as the (geographic) distance between Hamish and David grew, their albums faltered.
In the second half of their third act, The Clean seemed increasingly disinterested in both their legacy and their future. Their first three albums—“Vehicle,” “Modern Rock” and “Unknown Country”—did not suffer from from this malaise. But “Getaway,” their fourth, was a minor backslide. And then came “Mister Pop,” their fifth and (now) final release, which sounded less like an album and more like a collection of lightly polished demos. Before Hamish’s death, “Mister Pop” felt like a footnote in the band’s tiny but seismic discography. Afterwards, though, it feels like a swan song.
Until recently, I believed that “Mister Pop” was an album so minor—so obviously not labored over— that I hesitated to call it an “album.” On the one hand, The Clean were a band both always in a hurry (”Vehicle” is thirteen songs delivered in a Ramones-ian twenty-eight minutes) and with no sense of urgency (five albums released in more than thirty years). In those ways, my perception of “slightness” was not—unto itself—a shock or disappointment. But whereas “Vehicle” felt “tight” and whereas the two and half minutes of ”Tally Ho” felt “bracing,” “Mister Pop” felt rushed. Both “Compilation” and “Oddities” share this “unfinished but also perfect as is” quality. In fact, that was a major feature of their glory—the casual, lo-fi brilliance of their songs. They excelled at a delightful carefreeness that could sometimes be mistaken for carelessness. With The Clean, the line between cassette demo and final product was so thin as to sometimes be imperceptible. And their belief that an unpolished gem could be as lovable as a pristine diamond was perhaps their greatest virtue.
More than any of their previous records, “Mister Pop” tests these assertions. It is at times unpolished to the point of sounding tossed off. Whereas “Billy Two,” which kicks off “Compilation,” races breathlessly from the starter gun, “Loog,” which opens “Mister Pop,” feels like three guys shaking off a hangover while getting (almost) in tune. Not that it’s unpleasant—far from it. But it’s barely a song—just a synth hook, a few chord changes, a tinny metronome and some humming. And yet, because it’s The Clean, there’s a sweetness to its melancholy. “Simple Fix” is “Loog’s” cousin—an instrumental jam composed of rhythmic clicky clack, acoustic guitar explorations and synth beeps and boops. It goes everywhere and nowhere, gradually and all at once. It could be a wordless nursery rhyme. Maybe it’s a Pop song. Or maybe it’s just a dream.
Speaking of dreams, "In the Dreamlife U Need a Rubber Soul" sends me back to the Zilker Zephyr—a sun-kissed jangle that gathers steam and choo-choos its way for three minutes and thirty seconds of pure delight. The beat is rickety but the melody is easy the way life should be but almost never is. Elsewhere, “Factory Man” sounds like The Kinks in paisley—observational and efficient, but also slightly stoned. Compared to Ray Davies, David Kilgour sounds disinterested in British class culture. But he sounds extremely interested in Ray Davies. The Clean have always had a knack for chord progressions that are so simple and so familiar that you wonder, “Have I heard that a million times before or did they really just invent something that should have always existed?” Frequently the answer is yes to both.
On an album of low key highs and minor key lows, however, I found myself most taken by the songs which defy categories. “Back In the Day” is Hamish’s much shorter, less bloody response to “The Gift,” by The Velvet Underground—a deadpan story narrated beneath a melody beneath a drone. “Moonjumper” is a Moogish freakout over an unyielding four/four that sounds like Yo La Tengo at a Mumbai canteen in the late Sixties. And “Tensile” brings back the Motorik rhythms—more Moog, more swirl, more propulsion, and David singing (I think) “the car is somewhere to hide” into a vocoder.
For all their twee-ness, The Clean were always also capable of heads-down, shoe-gazing, mind-blowing jams. But because they were as much legends as they were a working band and because I wanted so much more from them and for them and—most of all—because Hamish died too soon, it’s hard to ultimately say whether they were a triumph or a tragedy. They are adored not by millions, but by thousands. But for those thousands, they are beloved in the way that treasured stuffed animals or prized baseball cards are treasured. They are indelible in the way that parent and child adventures are indelible.