THE ACADEMY IMPERILED: IS THIS THE DREAM?
Nick Laird-Clowes talks a mile a minute. Wearing a black leather jacket, black pants and a light shirt, his below-shoulder-length brown hair falling out from behind his ears constantly with the animation of his discussion that echoes in his mobile face and hands, he projects a decidedly different picture from the serious, near-wistful Nehru-jacketed figure on the cover of the Dream Academy’s first album.
THE ACADEMY IMPERILED: IS THIS THE DREAM?
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Karen Schlosberg
Nick Laird-Clowes talks a mile a minute. Wearing a black leather jacket, black pants and a light shirt, his belowshoulder-length brown hair falling out from behind his ears constantly with the animation of his discussion that echoes in his mobile face and hands, he projects a decidedly different picture from the serious, near-wistful Nehru-jacketed figure on the cover of the Dream Academy’s first album. Looks, and sounds, can be deceiving at first.
To back up a bit, the Dream Academy has a fixed graduating class of three: Laird-Clowes, lyricist, singer and guitarist; Gilbert Gabriel, keyboards and songs; and Kate St. John on various reed instruments from oboe and saxophone to the cor anglais—that is, English horn. The two-year-old English band, available on your radio and TV screen with “Life In A Northern Town” and perhaps “This World,” plays an amalgam of folk-based, classically-tinged, very British-elegant pop music; sort of acoustically-rooted synthesizer music, from a lifetime of influences ranging from the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Love and Buffalo Springfield to Nick Drake and Simon & Garfunkel.