The Clientele
| The Clientele | |
|---|---|
| Origin | London, England, United Kingdom |
| Genres | Indie pop |
| Years active | 1991–present |
| Labels |
Merge Records Pointy Records The Track & Field Organisation |
| Website | The Clientele's Official Website |
| Members |
Alasdair MacLean Mark Keen James Hornsey |
| Past members |
Mel Draisey Innes Phillips Daniel Evans Howard Monk |
The Clientele is a London-based British band with Alasdair MacLean on vocals and guitar, Mark Keen on drums, and James Hornsey on bass.
The band has experienced greater success in the United States, where they are signed to Merge Records, home of bands such as Lambchop and Spoon, than in their native Britain. They have conducted several extensive U.S. tours.
MacLean and Hornsey both grew up in Hampshire, England, and began collaborating musically while still in school, after MacLean saw that Hornsey had written the name of the band Felt on his pencil case. The band formed in 1991, with Innes Phillips sharing singing and songwriting duties with MacLean; their original name was The Butterfly Collectors. The band recorded an album's worth of material but failed to get any label interest. Innes left the band (and would go on to found The Relict); the rest of the group re-formed in 1997, after which they moved to London and released a number of singles that were eventually collected on Suburban Light (2000). That compilation won the band glowing reviews; SF Weekly said the band "offers a brand of appealingly melancholy pop that might just surpass that of its forebears." The Violet Hour (2003) was their first album proper, which again saw great acclaim, but, as yet, little commercial success.
August 2005 saw the release of their second full album, Strange Geometry, the first the band recorded with a producer, Brian O'Shaughnessy, who had previously produced Primal Scream. It was notable for a much cleaner production sound than the reverb-heavy sound that had previously been their defining characteristic; it was also the first time the band had used a strings section on one of their records. The task of writing these arrangements was given to Louis Philippe. Only one single, "Since K Got Over Me", was released from the album, which failed to reach the Top 75 in the UK. Another song from the album, "(I Can't Seem) To Make You Mine", was featured on the soundtrack of the film The Lake House.
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