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.
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THE ACADEMY IMPERILED: IS THIS THE DREAM?
FEATURES
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.
Through their atmospheric stories, the Dream Academy—-like colleagues Prefab Sprout or Aztec Camera—are trying to stretch what’s commonly known as pop music into new frontiers.
“I’m trying to marry the music and the lyrics for maximum effect, so that if you close your eyes you’ll hopefully get a strong visual image,” Laird-Clowes says, referring to what he’s called a “cinematic approach” to creating songs. “So if you have a big theme to it, you’re singing about This is for all the misunderstood lonely people’ (“This World”), you try and match all those things. You tell a story so you’ve got some sense of what’s going on even if you don’t listen to the lyrics; you’ve got some sense of it by musical devices.”
Much of Dream, Academy’s debut album works by that definition (“Life In A Northern Town,” “This World,” “ Love Parade,” “One Dream,” “The Edge Of Forever”), yet there is still a strong sense of a talented band trying to find a direction. There’s nothing wrong with that— in the old-fashioned music industry, where artist development meant more than one-hit wonders, that’s what first albums were for. But with the added responsibility of a second album (never an easy task under the best of circumstances), the cinematic approach definitely has its dangers, namely selfindulgence, loss of perspective and becoming overly-melodramatic.
“Definitely, definitely,” agrees LairdClowes with a smile, amiably acknowledging all possible pitfalls. “Sometimes I listen to the album and find bits of it we’ve over-arranged. But,” he adds with another smile and a verbal shrug, you have to shoot for the moon and stars.”
Laird-Clowes has been performing for roughly 13 years, starting on an acoustic guitar in folk clubs until the punk explosion caused him to rethink his direction. He formed a “sort of a rock band” called the Act (“punk meets the Byrds”), which recorded one album, Too Late At Twenty (produced by Joe Boyd). One of his fellow Act-ers (doesn’t everybody want to get into it?) was Gilbert Gabriel, with whom Laird-Clowes shared a passion for musical frontiersmanship that resulted in the birth of the Dream Academy (“Gilbert called it the Dream Academy,” LairdClowes says, putting on an exaggerated air of hopelessness, “for real idealistic reasons; the all-encompassing Dream Academy. He’d been reading Herman Hesse, and he’d been in an academy of music, and he wanted no rules. So we kept this idealistic thing—I mean, we’re desperately idealistic about it...”). The Academy, with the necessary addition of the similarly classically-trained Kate St. John (Laird-Clowes, however, is basically self-taught) and three more members, played steadfastly around London for about a year, at which time the attrition rate for band members, due to musical theft by other bands, reduced attendance to the existing trio.
“I love the sound of what people call commercial—I love a good hook. ” —Nick Laird-Clowes
“Life In A Northern Town” finally landed the trio a recording contract, after which point Laird-Clowes’s considerable list of acquaintances came in handy for the production of the LP. He met coproducer David Gilmour on a beach in Greece in 1978 (Gilmour’s brother was in the Act, as well); he met Paul Simon while the Act was still together, and Simon taught Laird-Clowes musical theory after the Dream Academy was born (“He’s an incredibly hard teacher”); and the Act’s producer Joe Boyd even threw in R.E.M.’s guitarist Peter Buck for one track (“The Party”—“He became a 12-string Rickenbacker with legs”).
As much as the Dream Academy is dedicated to pushing back musical barriers and expanding pop’s framework, they appreciate and use said framework as a foundation for their aural pictures. Laird-Clowes doesn’t see any contradiction in wearing Nehru Jackets while playing synthesizers.
“There is a big ’60strend, in away; obviously in music and visuals,” he says, “but it is a sort of ’60s/’80s thing, and I think we’re in both. I would hate to be revivalists—it’s difficult, because where do you go after a certain amount of time? If anything, ’60s psychedelic music at least was throwing the whole thing open, experimenting with Eastern music and classical music. Anything went. So from that point of view, there is a sort of line between that and what the best people are doing now, which is pushing music forward a bit.”
The last song on the LP is the quiet but forceful “One Dream,” which says “I woke up to find/Life was just leading me on, that’s all/Then I found out/That I could reach it all/By just holding that one dream in my life/Right before my eyes...The one dream in my life/That I live for...,” which seems to sum up the spirit that fires LairdClowes’s conversation and the Dream Academy’s conviction.
Knowing full well how this could sound, Laird-Clowes says, “It’s like a spiritual thing for us—it’s life. We’re older than the average pop person, we’re all 28, so it’s important to us to do something with our lives. It’s got to that stage,” he says with a mock-parental laugh. “It can’t just be pop-crap-throw-it-away. I know it is, and ‘just’ pop music as they all say, but it can’t be just that for me. It’s got to be more important. We’re really, really serious about working on it: What can we do with this form? How far can we take this thing?”
Pointing out yet another danger of taking themselves too seriously (as mentor Paul Simon has often been accused of; remember that classic Saturday Night Live skit in which he dressed up like a huge turkey and complained of his l-takemyself-soooooo-seriously image?) proves unnecessary, as Laird-Clowes is again well aware of this particular trap.
“You can take yourself too seriously, and what the danger is is that you stop being commercial, and I love the sound of what people call commercial—I love a good hook. I love form and want to turn things into form and then expand it.”
And Laird-Clowes, having proved himself nothing if not expansive, is whisked away for another interview, function following form following style.
