In our latest band spotlight, we chat to Clever Thing’s Rich Fownes about new music, and the pair’s latest inspirations.
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S] What inspires the work of Clever Thing, outside of music?
Congratulations on the toughest question of all time. I’d have to say fear, coffee & Harry McNally’s neckerchief. All of those things make me run home to write sweet, sweet music.
S] Rich, how do you look back on the success of Bad For Lazarus now?
Success? Well it was an incredible learning experience from top to bottom…but that term suggests that we at least made asome kind of difference we intended to make; which we did not.
The success is where we are now. Everyone is making music so far advanced and more palatable than where we left off in Lazarus, and we all learned together there, so I guess it was more of a longterm, personal and internal success for us all…but unfortunately not one in terms of heritage.
I’m not undermining it as there were certainly great moments and only now have we become close friends again. If you knew how messy things got in that band you’d know how much of a success THAT is.
S] Talk us through the inspirations behind ‘Fixer Upper’?
Musically it’s a blend of Beastie Boys, James Brown, Mastodon, and Harry Belafonte. With Slipknot kegs. To us it all seemed quite obvious at the time, but reading that back it sounds like utter madness.
S] What are your major plans for the rest of the year?
We’ve just finished a group of recordings with our production dream team of Alex Newport & Ally Jowett. We’re going to be dropping these regularly with bespoke release shows full of our friends, peers and arch enemies. We’re just gonna carry on trying to invent fun out of nothing.
