Artist Biography - English
Anne Clark was born in Croydon, South London on May 14th 1960 to an Irish mother and a Scottish
father. She left school at sixteen. The constraints of her school education however couldn't quash her
voracious appetite for music, books, and an inquisitiveness and practical need to be involved with the
world around her.
She took a number of jobs including working as a care assistant in a psychiatric hospital and then
taking a job at Bonaparte Records, a local independent record store and label. This indeed was good
timing! The punk rock scene was just about to explode into life in London. With her need for
communication and disregard of formal institutions, along with so many people at the time, punk led
the way to a whole new approach for dealing with music, arts, and society itself. At that time anything
and everything seemed possible.
Next door to Bonapartes was the Warehouse Theatre, another independent venture that was
constantly under threat of closure due to lack of finances. For 18 months Anne went to them with the
idea of putting on shows/acts that were emerging from the punk and new wave scene. Not only bands
like The Damned, Siouxsie and The Banshees, and Generation X were part of the local scene but
there were numerous theatre, comedy, poetry, and dance projects filtering through. At first the theatre
bosses were terrified of having leather clad, pierced punk rockers swarming over the Warehouse but
eventually they conceded and Anne worked as an unpaid administrator there for almost 2 years selling out nights at the theatre featuring acts such as Paul Weller, Linton Kwesi-Johnson, French &
Saunders, The Durutti Column, Ben Watt etc etc...
All the while, Anne was experimenting with music and text and made her own debut performance at
Richard Strange's Cabaret Futura in London along with Depeche Mode. She was also co-editing Paul
Weller's Riot Stories publishing company which the Jam front man had set up to promote the work of
young writers who were otherwise going ignored by the mainstream publishing houses. As a result of
this, the publishers Faber collected an anthology of young writers work and issued it under the title
Hard Lines which went on to be re-pressed 3 times.
Anne was also involved in a number of television projects including programmes for the BBC and a
film for Channel 4, Sketch For Someone, which she wrote the script for and which contained
contributions from Patrik Fitzgerald and The Durutti Column.
Anne's songwriting experiments came to fruition with the release of her first album The Sitting Room in
1982. This featured collaborations with Dominic Appleton, later of This Mortal Coil and Breathless.
During her time at the Warehouse, Anne met David Harrow, co-writer on her second album Changing
Places in 1983, Joined Up Writing in 1984 and Hopeless Cases in 1987. Anne and David's curiosity
with keyboards, synths, and samplers led them to create songs and sounds that would provide
blueprints for the electronic music of the 80s and 90s – “Sleeper In Metropolis”........”Our Darkness”...
Never putting limits on her means of expression, Anne also experimented with very different sounds,
exploring many musical styles, from jazz to folk to classical. These elements play an even greater role
in Anne's work today.
The popularity of Anne's work grew and grew in Europe and North America whilst the ideals that had
seemed so strong in England either just faded away or were bought out by the multi-national
globalisation of the music scene. Europe still (just about!!) manages to maintain a music audience that
is not dictated to by the media and where there is room and consideration given to EVERY kind of
music.
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1985 saw the release of Pressure Points and a collaboration with John Foxx, the founder of Ultravox.
In 1986 she began working and writing with classically trained pianist Charlie Morgan who joined her
on her first US tour. Charlie Morgan also co-wrote material for the Hopeless Cases album (1987).
1988 saw the release of Anne 's first live album RSVP.
At the end of 1987, Anne moved to Norway which was to be her home for 3 years. The move to
Scandinavia opened up further experiments with sound and music and she began working with
Norwegian musicians Tov Ramstad and Ida Baalsrud. Along with Charlie Morgan the album Unstill
Life was released in 1991.
Projects begun in 1992 with Charlie had to be suspended in the Spring when he became unwell. By
the Summer, it was discovered Charlie was suffering from cancer and in the Autumn it became clear
that his illness was terminal and Charlie died in December 1992 at the age of just 36.
Months of re-assessment and change saw the recording and release of The Law Is An Anagram Of
Wealth in 1993. As well as furthering her collaboration with Tov Ramstad, Anne began working with
Paul Downing, Martyn Bates and Andy Bell.
With all the many co-writers, the various styles and experiments that have occurred during her career,
something immediately recognisable and consistent lies at the centre of Anne's work - a uniqueness
present in every project which, whilst making Anne never completely acceptable to the mainstream
music industry, offers a wholly original artist to the most important element of her work - her audience
which is an audience from all over the world, from all ages and all backgrounds. This is surely the
most important task of an artist - to bring people closer together.
With the collapse of communism, Anne's worked reached an even wider audience. People had
followed her career for years via smuggled tapes and distant radio broadcasts in East Germany,
Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania. Now her texts are used by students in these
countries studying English.
In 1994, Anne decided to take the risk of touring with a purely acoustic band and the successful result
of this can be heard on the live recording Psychometry made at the Passionskirche in Berlin in that
year.
In 1995, she released To Love And Be Loved, another magical blending of electronics and acoustics
featuring collaborations with Martyn Bates, Paul Downing, Andy Bell, and Chris Elliot.
At the end of 1996, a number of bands, producers, and djs made a document of Anne's material as a
tribute to the influence her work has had on so many musicians from the mid 80s to the present day.
Re-mixes of cult tracks such as “Our Darkness,” “Sleeper In Metropolis,” “Wallies,” and “Virtuality”
were compiled and released as Wordprocessing.
In 1998, Anne returned once again to the acoustic and folk/classical influences that have become
increasingly important to her expression and, much to the disdain of the major record labels, but the
acclaim of her audience and critics alike, she released Just After Sunset - a collaboration with Martyn
Bates featuring translations of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.
2002 marked the return of Anne Clark acoustic, with a re-release of Just After Sunset and a Europeanwide tour with her new acoustic group which featured Murat Parlak (vocals, piano), Jann Michael
Engel (cello), Niko Lai (drums, percussion), and Jeff Aug (guitar). A recording made during the course
of the tour at the concert at the Slovakian Radio studios in Bratislava will be released in September
2003 with the title From The Heart – Live in Bratislava.
Artist´s website: www.AnneClark.com
netMusicZone AG, Weidachstr. 13, 87541 Hindelang, Germany Tel: 0049-8324-933-851, Fax: 0049-8324-933-829
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