BURIED TREASURE
Blinded By The Light
Bright young things: Sunhouse (from left) Paul Bacon, Rob Brooks and Gavin Clark.
This month’s rock’n’roll salvage: acoustic-electric Midlands folk blues, painfully exposed.
Sunhouse
Crazy On The Weekend
INDEPENDIENTE, 1998
DISINTEGRATING UNDER the pressure of performing in his own home in Shane Meadows’ troubling 2007 biopic The Living Room, Gavin Clark apologises to the tiny invited audience – including his wife and three of his five children. Trembling and so nervous that he cannot feel his hands, he jokes awkwardly: “I fried my head on drugs when I was younger and it’s turned me into Shakin’ Stevens.”
An unguarded writer with a voice like a charity shop trumpet, Clark made ripples after songs documenting his chemical misadventures soundtracked Meadows’ breakthrough films, Small Time (1996) and Twenty Four Seven (1997). His luminous debut with Sunhouse – a trio formed with guitarist Paul Bacon and bassist Rob Brooks – had him cast as a hard-scrabble Nick Drake, a parallel that would dog him until his death in 2015.