You Need A Kleek, Klook

When I was a kid it was the 70s and the era of classic rock and also classic am pop. A very lucky time to be around, so much music in the OPEN AIR. The Rolling Stones and a lot of the British bands always paid props to the people who inspired them. If you liked the Stones you could not know about Muddy Waters or Howlin Wolf. Same with the American bands, really. Hot Tuna had Papa John Creach on violin and Johnny Winter produced and played on those last two amazing Muddy Waters albums on the Blue Sky label. Vintage, African American players and singers were respected and their music was widely available in all kinds of reissues.
I had no real access to live music, an occasional touring band but it was all on the radio or on the tv or in record shops. We listened to music on cassette in cars as we drove aimlessly about , getting stoned on weed and drinking big 750ml bottles of beer. The music really expanded our world, which was very tightly wound.
In some ways, I always had the idea that the party was already over as far as pop went. I was always reading and looking at things that had happened far away and I could not imagine being anywhere cool  myself. The Woodstock movie did the rounds, as did Led Zeppelins "the Song Remains the Same". Jim, was dead, so was Jimi, so was Brian and so was Janice. Even Blind Al Wilson from Canned Heat had copped it.
So I'd be staring at record covers and taking all this information in, hoovering up the faces and names and fonts and dates and times. Lining it all up in my mind.
One of the albums I had very early on, when I was 15 or so, was an old John Mayall disc which mentioned the place it was recorded at. Klooks Kleek.
Sounded impossibly cool to me then it stuck with me.

In late 1983 the Moodists moved from Melbourne to London and most of us lobbed at a squat in the genteel London suburb of West Hampstead. Robert Forster and Lindy Morrison from the Go Betweens had thrown us the keys and we dived into a London life which seemed pretty easy to us. Rowland S Howard and Genevieve McGuckin lived on the top floor. Running water didn't really exist but you didn't really need to wash, and beer - which was our main sustenance -  was very cheap. There was a club up the road we had heard about through news of our friends, the  Birthday Party playing there. The Moonlight Club in West End Lane, West Hampstead.

It turned out that this had been the place where Joy Division had also played their first London shows, also U2 and many others. We were signed to Red Flame, a label run by Dave Kitson, who ran some of these shows and who often talked of a guy called Alan MGee who had a fanzine and a club going and who later started Creation Records (who we also worked with in 1985)


Time goes by and on a  trip to London to play in 2014 we went for a squizz around the West Hampstead area, taking advantage of a new overground railway from South London.

We found the Railway Tavern, which was where the Moonlight Club had taken place, to be boarded up and due for demolition. This was happening all over London.

There was a huge picture of early 60s pop idol Billy Fury near the  pub. I posted a picture online and a fellow responded that he had written a book about the club, which had once been called Klooks Kleek! This was amazing news to me. Turns out it had been a jazz club named after an album by drummer Kenney (Klook) Clarke called "Klooks Clique". It had begun in 1957 and carried through to the late 60s, hosting shows by Cream, Led Zeppelin, Ten Years After, Family and pretty much anybody who was on the scene in that era. This had a lot to do with the fact that Decca Records was just up the nearby lane.

So in 2016 I was, as is my way, thinking on this sort of a portal into time and the kinds of incubators for music that I have been through in my life. Record shops, clubs, pubs and CLIQUES. They're like schools that you go to and you get to be refined as well as pulled and pushed into shape as you move through those joints. Joints that are mostly imagined or fantasies anyway.  They get you to focus your game.

So I wrote this song that is our July release, You Need A Kleek, Klook.
Reaching for a majestic, mythic tone. Twelve string acoustic guitar, bass, piano and synths against a rhythm machine and a heavily reverbed tambourine. Pop music in that Procul / May 68 style and tone, here in 2016.



In the picture on the bottom right is myself and Clare Moore standing outside the Railway hotel. Photo taken by our London friend and artist, Dave Western.


You need a Kleek, Klook
You need a Kleek
people say
How can you happen?
How do you happen, anymore?
You need a Kleek, Klook
You need some weight
wait!
some critical maths
you need a host body
from whence you can dive
You need a Kleek, Klook
You need a push

you need a time and a place and a story
you need to click
you need to slot in and look right at home

you can't just pop
you can't just divide
you need to have happening people around
people need to be dealing with you

You need a Kleek, Klook
You need a Kleek

people need to be dealing with you
like you're a problem
their problem
You need a Kleek, Klook
You need a Kleek

you need to be
boo!
you need to be!
boo!

Upcoming shows

Dave Graney and the mistLY play the Grandview Hotel in Fairfield,Vic
Saturday August 20th

Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes Brisbane Festival (Spiegel tent) September 3rd

Dave Graney And Clare Moore – Bowral Bowling Club September 16th
Dave Graney and the mistLY – Petersham Bowls – September 17th

Dave Graney And Clare Moore – Smith’s Alternative- Canberra September 18th

Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes Semaphore Festival (Adelaide) October 2nd