Anne Clark

There is a common thread linking electronics and words, beats and verses. It is a path that Anne Charlotte Clark has followed with courage for almost half a century. A daughter of the punk and new wave era, the singer-songwriter from Croydon, south London, shaped a distinctive and singular style whose descendants can now be found in spoken word magicians such as Kae Tempest.

Almost a rapper before the term existed, Anne is nevertheless, in every respect, a wave artist, raised on those sounds and that imagery as guiding stars, even if her songwriting evolved over the years, making her the protagonist of performances that fuse music and declamation along new artistic trajectories. But to sketch a portrait of this atypical British chanteuse-poet, we need to rewind the tape and return to the fateful 1980s, when it all began.

Poetry in the clubs

Anne Clark was born in Croydon, London, on May 14, 1960, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father, hence the unmistakably clipped accent that would characterize her declamations. She was a bright and restless teenager, but left school at sixteen, never having truly managed to adapt to the constraints of the educational system. That did not, however, limit her voracious appetite for music and books, nor her curiosity and her concrete need to be involved in the world around her. She held various jobs, including as a nursing assistant at Cane Hill psychiatric hospital and later at Bonaparte Records, an independent record shop and small local label. She also worked as an editor for Paul Weller's Riot Stories publishing house and contributed to the Faber & Faber anthology of new writers, "Hard Lines", which achieved notable success.

It was a particularly fertile moment: the punk scene was about to explode in London, opening up a new era with its communicative urgency, its critical view of institutions, and a completely new approach to music, the arts, and society itself. At that moment, everything seemed possible. So, by combining literary and socially engaged texts with innovative music capable of crossing genre boundaries, Anne Clark moved through multiple styles while maintaining a recognizable identity on every recording. She began organizing events at the nearby Warehouse Theater, presenting a broad range of avant-garde music, poetry, and comedy, filling the venue with artists such as Paul Weller, Linton Kwesi Johnson, French & Saunders, Siouxsie, The Damned, Durutti Column, and Ben Watt, later of Everything But The Girl alongside Tracey Thorn. At the same time she began experimenting with her own music and texts, building a small cult around herself, and made her first stage appearance at Richard Strange's "Cabaret Futura", alongside Depeche Mode, not far removed from her own imaginative world, which, by her own admission, was built around tutelary figures such as Giorgio Moroder, Tangerine Dream, Roxy Music, and David Bowie.

In 1982 she was finally able to release her first album, "The Sitting Room", made in collaboration with Dominic Appleton of This Mortal Coil, the 4AD house supergroup. Its cover bore a Pre-Raphaelite painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the record used sampling in a visionary way, before it had even become a codified concept, along with electronically treated acoustic sounds, to forge a new style suspended between refined poetry and icy new wave. It is a collection of fluid synthscapes, bubbling like lava.

Setting the tone is the magnificent title track, which in little more than two minutes condenses kosmische suggestions, symphonic romanticism, and wave futurism. Other highlights of the album include the tormented musique concrète of "Swimming", the dreamlike ambient music of "An Ordinary Life", the spectral requiem of "Shades", the fragile synth-folk of "Short Story", and the electronic lament of "All We Have To Be Thankful For". A casket of tiny gems, tiny in duration too, shining with dazzling brightness.

A year later came the second act, "Changing Places" (1983), perhaps her masterpiece. The record also marked the beginning of her partnership with keyboardist David Harrow, who would later work with pianist Charlie Morgan, former Ultravox leader John Foxx, Jah Wobble, and Martyn Bates of Eyeless In Gaza. His pulsating synth work gave Clark's songs a sharp and seductive electronic sheen, perfectly in tune with the often alienated tone of her lyrics. It is a record that still sounds clear, inspired, and measured today. Its grace recalls a historical moment when poetry, punk, new wave, and electronics conversed with maximum freedom, before cultural identities hardened into closed and impermeable factions. Thus embryos of rough techno, post-punk romanticism, and spoken word blend together, held by an experimental tension shaped by rigorous minimalism. Eleven tracks outline an urban landscape marked by social fractures and political tensions. Clark observes the world in which she grew up and returns it through dark poems sustained by synthesizers that evoke dystopia and unease.

The record is ideally divided into two halves, marked by the production of David Harrow and Vini Reilly, the mind behind Durutti Column. If Harrow gives the album a jagged electronic edge close to proto-Ebm and urban new wave, Reilly brings a more guitar-based, ethereal, atmospheric touch.

From the first half emerges above all "Sleeper Of Metropolis", one of Clark's best-known pieces: an alienated, claustrophobic anthem that intertwines stern sequencers and synthetic beats with a desolate, estranging declamation. A far-sighted essay in proto-techno and proto-trance, it would become a club classic in Berlin, Chicago, and at Dallas's legendary Starck.

Elsewhere, Harrow softens the rhythmic component: the aching "Poem For A Nuclear Romance" sets up a suspended landscape, with ambient synthesizers recalling certain Berlin-period atmospheres of David Bowie; the text's apocalyptic romanticism, crossed by red skies and creatures re-emerging from underground, reflects the shadow of nuclear annihilation, a constant nightmare in the new wave imagination of the time. But "Poem For A Nuclear Romance" also condenses the mood of the entire album, where hallucinatory visions coexist with images of ordinary daily life. Many of the lyrics on "Changing Places" describe the banality of adult life in the British working class: mediocre men and frustration, the driving "Wallies", casual encounters emptied of meaning in "Lovers Auditions", endless inconclusive parties in "All Night Party". Stories that expose structures of power and mechanisms of exclusion: oppression, misogyny, homophobia. Ordinariness thus becomes poetic material in Clark's writing, always resistant to academic rhetoric and self-indulgence. Her lexicon is born from the concrete experience of everyday life, from social conflict. And she even dares to rhyme, a choice that may seem countercurrent today, but here sounds perfectly natural.

Beyond anticipating later developments in darkwave and Ebm, "Changing Places" documents an era when poetry could still inhabit clubs and not only symposia and university lecture halls. An age of vibrant vitality and omnivorous curiosity that would gradually be lost in the years that followed.

A year later came "Joined Up Writing" (1984), another excellent work built around glacial and threatening synthesizers, with the exception of the opening "Nothing At All", dominated by more complex instrumentation, where even the violins seem to emulate the bleak synthetic minimalism of the synths. Anne shows growth in her spoken word declamation, also mixed more effectively than on her early records, highlighting her sharp timbre with crystalline clarity that emerges from the soundscapes without ever overwhelming them. In "Weltschmerz", a title that refers to the melancholy one feels when the world is not as we would like it to be, the sonic skeleton becomes even barer, with ghostly choirs serving as the almost sole counterpoint to Anne's recitation, until, in "Killing Time", liturgical keyboards rise to accompany her sinister mantra. The declamation becomes almost nursery-rhyme-like in "True Love Tales", trance-like in its reiteration of the lines "Love is just a paradox/ He loves me, he loves me not", before giving way to the new driving beats of "Self Destruct".

"Our Darkness" is the key moment, the imposing and sumptuous closer, with its neurotic and hammering electro-disco synth textures over which Clark's solemn and anguished declamation stands out, evoking new dystopian scenarios, while a lacerating sax solo tears through the electronic fabric. Another ideal anthem for the entire Cold War era.

At the side of The Quiet Man

Thanks to these first three records, Anne Clark's reputation rose rapidly. It is no coincidence that for the follow-up, "Pressure Points" (1985), the producer brought in was none other than The Quiet Man, aka John Foxx, former leader of Ultravox, then engaged in a daring solo career that had begun with the masterpiece "Metamatic" (1980) and that very year was heading toward a dramatic turn with "In Mysterious Ways", an album in which simple pop melodies and acoustic instrumentation replaced the futuristic sharpness and sampling of the earlier works.

On "Pressure Points", Foxx not only produces eight of the nine tracks, but entirely composes the music on side A. And it functions as a kind of perfect counterpoint to his "In Mysterious Ways": as quiet and almost pastoral as the mood of that record is, so tense and neurotically urban is the atmosphere running through the grooves of the English poet's fourth album.

For the rest, the classic Clark formula returns, declaimed texts over electronic backdrops, in the service of a sonic coherence guaranteed by Foxx and tangible from the opening "Heaven", which unfolds through pulsating synths, treated bass, and drum machine, with a final crescendo of piano and synthetic strings erupting into a powerful reverberating riff for a highly theatrical close. "Red Sands" accelerates even further, propelled by pounding drums and the neurotic lines of a nervous bass, while in "Alarm Call" the energy is recomposed into a more controlled structure, sustained by orchestral samples accompanying a more intimate text. "Tide" chooses a slow pace, with piano and muted strings, while the words describe a persistent unease, and "The Interruption" closes side A with a movement that is both martial and minimalist, accentuating its reflective character.

On side B appears a new version of "The Power Game", the only track not produced by Foxx, but among the most incisive of the lot, with an airy string arrangement and an almost chamber-pop imprint. The same path continues with "World Without Warning", with its austere and solemn declamation, before "Bursting" breaks in with unusual euphoria, among programmed beats and rapid hi-hat strikes, matching the sensual charge of the text. The album closes with "Lovers Retreat", whose softer, more muted tones ease the constant tension of the record.

Overall, it is another convincing collection of bitter electronic poems, in which Clark's cutting declamation often spills into invective, sealing that climate of latent tension typical of Thatcherite England in those years. A context in which Anne moves about "frightened by streets that breed malice and hate" ("Red Sands"), in a world that is "an open prison where I walk to and fro/ as if through a tunnel, because there is nowhere I can go" ("Alarm Call"). Relationships with others are also conflictual: "I don't associate myself with all the people I can do without/ those who never leave me a doubt, who care only for their small selfish lives" ("World Without Warning"). And so on.

Two years later came "Hopeless Cases" (1987), in which the formula began to show some strain, especially in passages aiming at greater sonic solemnity, as in "Now", where production emphasis tends to stiffen the emotional framework. Yet in most of its tracks the record retains its charm intact, still offering an engaging listen today, though crossed by a subtle nostalgic patina. Clark moves partly away from the shadowy shores of the strictest coldwave and heads toward a more ethereal and vaporous darkness, as the next album, "Unstill Life", released four years later, would confirm.

"Hopeless Cases" can therefore be seen as a transitional album, with less marked rhythms and lyrics even more central, supported by softer, more downtempo sonorities. A "quiet desperation", to borrow Pink Floyd's phrase, sublimated in the composed unease of a song like "Up".

By 1987, after all, new wave was nearing its end, and the need to take new roads was increasingly felt. Yet there were still fresh successes on the alternative club circuit, such as the urgent "Homecoming", with its danceable momentum and immediate chorus sealing an effective balance between electronic pulse and melodic tension, while "Now" plays with arpeggios and vocal choirs in much the same way the songs of R Plus Seven did. But the album's high point is probably "Cane Hill", inspired by her work at the psychiatric hospital of the same name in London, in which the electronic component becomes more rarefied and gives way to a spectral aura, with Clark's recitation reaching searing intensity as it evokes all the pain of illness and isolation: "Here/ Upon these ghostly shadows/ Of men and women/ There are no smiles/ Singly/ They mingle/ With the greyness of the walls/ And at strange angles/ They travel on/ To nowhere/ Each a nucleus
Of sadness and despair".

A Zen approach

From 1987 onward, Anne moved to Norway, where she spent three years working on various projects with the musicians Tov Ramstad and Ida Baalsrud. And it is precisely the minimalist influences of Scandinavian jazz that permeate "Unstill Life" (1991), the new work created in collaboration with pianist Charlie Morgan, who would die of cancer a year later at just thirty-six.

Anne returned after four difficult years: a forced pause caused by a head-on conflict with the music industry. And because of disputes with Richard Branson, a U.S. tour that should have introduced her art to the other side of the Atlantic also fell through. Inevitably, "Unstill Life" bears the scars of that troubled passage: a record marked by introspection and darkness, but also by fierce determination and strong creative vitality.

The themes of the songs revolve around observation of the surrounding world, its most peculiar manifestations, unease, and other personal states of mind experienced by the author. The result is a new series of evocative declamations, supported by the usual electronic backdrops but also by instruments such as double bass, violin, and cello, creating a new electro-acoustic combination that relaunches Anne Clark's art in the new decade. The outcome is convincing overall, both when negative emotions prevail in the opening compositions and when, with her powerful and evocative voice, the British poet conveys decidedly more optimistic content.

Among the most engaging tracks are "Empty Me" and "Abuse", in which Clark introduces a declamation of particular expressive intensity, while on the title track she opts for a more choral approach, supported by new instrumentalists, and on "Nida" she embraces previously unheard oriental shades.

At the center of everything remain her declamations, which in some respects draw close to those of Laurie Anderson. But whereas the American singer-performer is also an actress and "performs" her texts in an unrepeatable way, Clark favors a more detached and monotone approach, building atmospheres through the accentuation of individual phrases and words. "Unstill Life" nonetheless marks a turning point in her path, sealed by the album's release in the United States through Radikal Records.

The gradual move away from the purist electronics of her early work led Clark to tour in 1994 with an entirely acoustic band, an experience documented on the live album "Psychometry", recorded at Berlin's Passionskirche and dominated by new folk and avant-garde influences.

A year earlier, however, came the studio album "The Law Is An Anagram Of Wealth" (1993), which allowed more spacious sonorities to surface, in some respects close to neoclassical music, although Clark herself specified: "I don't think I'm really akin to those sounds; rather, it's a kind of minimal preference: less is more. We are so overloaded with everything that sometimes I feel the need to reduce things to the essential. To keep them pure and simple, without embellishment. I would describe it more as a Zen approach."

In any case, the classically tinged solo cello introduction to the instrumental "Introduction/ Flight Through Sunlit Clouds" is bound to unsettle anyone who has always filed Clark under "electronics". The cello also returns as a leading voice in two other tracks, "So Quiet Here" and "Come In", as well as in the slender oriental filigrees of "At Midnight" and "Lost To The World".

What is certain is that Clark confirms that the vehicle for her spoken word is not electronics alone, showing herself equally at ease with acoustic instruments and combining both dimensions. If, in fact, for the half of the album made up of readings of poems by Friedrich Rückert, the nineteenth-century German Romantic poet and scholar, she relies mainly on acoustic instruments, in the remaining episodes, which bear her own signature, she turns to a more electronic accompaniment. Supporting her this time is Martyn Bates of Eyeless In Gaza, the post-punk group formed in the 1980s.

The paradox, though, is that the most inspired Clark seems to be the one looking backward: to the most twilight new wave, the aching "Fragility", to proto-techno, the hammering pulses of "The Haunted Road", chosen as a single and remixed several times, and to electropop, with the sinuous cadences of "Nightship" and the even more compelling "Seize The Vivid Sky", almost a new "Our Darkness" urging moral rebellion by expanding the concept behind the album title: "Take in every breath deep enough to fly/ Away from lies these changes/ have forced into our lives/ Up into a tranquil place/ that's constantly denied/ Far from the crushing power/ which brought me to my knees/ Earthbound, justice stays always out of reach/ Disobey/ Defy/ Take your own time/ Fly".
Halfway between these poles stand "That We Have Been Here", resting on a mid-tempo electronic base that is almost atonal, and the following "Longing Stilled", whose radiant melody unfolds among chamber strings, while the closing moments of "I Of The Storm" bring the album to an end in an unpredictable, stormy climax, with the band unleashing chaos and Anne shouting her verses at full volume. Overall, "The Law Is An Anagram Of Wealth" proves to be a surprising record, capable of updating the classic Clark sound for the new decade and revealing previously unheard nuances, even if they are not always fully focused.

After the success of the acoustic tour and her recent projects, Anne entered a calmer phase of life. She moved into a cottage in the British countryside and received visits from friends Martyn Bates, Paul Downing, Andy Bell and Chris Elliot, who helped her write the songs for the new album, "To Love And Be Loved" (SPV, 1995), another blend of electronic backdrops and acoustic sonorities, serving what she described as her "most successful attempt to combine commercial and experimental ideas in a compact work". At the center lies love in its many forms: love for the world and for nature that deserves care, broken love that leaves only tiny atoms of pain, the love of true friendship, perhaps the most important of all, erotic love and love that heals. It is a record steeped in romanticism and enriched by the English poet-songwriter's customary, superb writing.

The sound draws from a wide range of genres: synth-pop, electro, rock, in an atmosphere that remains strongly evocative and highly emotional. Clark's almost dreamlike spoken word reaches a serene culmination in the ode "Mundesley Beach", in the emotional tension of "Longing Harder Makes It Easier", and in the almost indie-like angularities of "The Healing", with light jazz inflections and a sharp pop melody. Anne's declamation becomes increasingly melancholic and subtle, like a shiver in the mind, weighing each word and letting it float in the sonic space.

Elsewhere the album becomes more direct, as in the nearly thirteen minutes of the epic "Elegy For A Lost Summer", which gradually builds layers of melancholy and sensuality, with background choirs adding delicate touches that further enhance Clark's poetic dimension, confirming her ability to fuse poetry and music with rare elegance.

Pastoral elegies

In the 1990s, then, the English poet left her comfort zone in search of new forms of expression and communication through the emotional power of music and language, testing herself as well as her audience. The pastoral interpretations of texts by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke on "Just After Sunset" (1998), created alongside Martyn Bates, represent another unexpected evolution in her path. Working primarily from the English translations of the Anglo-German scholar J. B. Leishman and adapting the texts with care and respect, Clark places Rilke's poems within various musical frameworks, between folk textures and restrained electronic patterns. Thanks to Anne's distinctive poetic delivery and Martyn's intense vocal presence, the compositions offer an intimate and sensitive interpretation of one of the most important poets in world literature.

Musically, there is an almost total retreat of synthesizers, replaced by violin, piano, guitar, viola, cello and a series of other classical instruments upon which Anne Clark erects a very personal monument to Rilke's texts. Against the advance of modernity, the German poet opposed a metaphorical world rooted in nature and in the Romantic tradition, which here finds an effective and penetrating counterpart in the essential arrangements, only lightly veiled by a gentle reverberation. Against this dreamlike backdrop, Anne's clear voice develops a striking expressive force. Whether in the pastoral flute of "Autumn", the moving duet of "From The Book Of Pilgrimage", the almost messianic tone of "To Music" and "Going Blind", or the more sinuous movement of "The Panther", Clark succeeds in giving the poems a convincing voice, occasionally nodding toward the decadent neofolk imagery of groups such as Current 93, Death In June and Sol Invictus.

It was a rather daring experiment in any case, and one that would be republished four years later, in 2002. "It was the most difficult project I have ever undertaken," she later explained. "It was impossible to obtain any form of support. Both the record industry and my publisher wanted nothing to do with it, because it is not a commercial project. For four years I have been working to make my Rilke songs known and to perform them live. Now I have regained the rights to the material, republished the album and added two live videos as bonus tracks. The real reason for the reissue was to make the songs accessible to a wider audience, after the first release had been extremely limited."

After a break devoted to returning to her studies, Clark returned to the music scene in 2001 and two years later added another album to her acoustic series: "From The Heart – Live In Bratislava", recorded with Murat Parlak (voice and piano), Jann Michael Engel (cello), Niko Lai (drums and percussion) and Jeff Aug (guitars) in the Slovak capital.

She also authorized the Belgian electronic group Implant to remix several of her songs, giving rise to a collaboration that culminated in the album "Self-Inflicted" (2005), on which she performs two tracks of her own. The partnership was further consolidated by her participation in two other releases by the Belgian combo, the EPs "Too Many Puppies" and "Fade Away", the latter featuring a duet with Claus Larsen of Leæther Strip, as well as the subsequent album "Audioblender".

Return to the beats

In 2008, after recording numerous live releases, remix projects and interpretations of works by other authors, Clark released her first album of entirely new original songs in more than a decade.

Recorded in Germany with programmer Manuel G. Richter, alias Xabec, as co-producer and dedicated to her late mother Cecilia Ann Picton-Clark, "The Smallest Acts Of Kindness" (2008) also marks a partial return to electronic sounds. It is deeply moving to hear Anne's solemn voice once again declaiming her catalogue of unspeakable evils over the magma of pulsating synths in "Nothing Going On", almost reclaiming her primacy over a style that in the meantime had inspired countless sonic explorers, from Warp Records to UNKLE, from Björk – there was already an "Alarm Call" on "Pressure Points", twelve years before the one on "Homogenic" – to Massive Attack.

Indeed, the pioneers from Bristol come immediately to mind when confronted with the dark and anguished beats reminiscent of "Mezzanine", over which Anne weaves the minimalist prose of this miraculous opening track: apathetic, almost extinguished, always suspended between singing and spoken word. "Nothing Going On" stands as a statement of disillusionment, both intimate and political. Yet the profound humanity that has always animated Clark's verses already surfaces in the following, deeply moving "The Hardest Heart", almost a final cry of hope, punctuated by a beautiful acoustic arrangement for piano and strings:
"Let the morning sun proclaim / The light of the world / Let the golden day unfurl / On every wave, on every hill… / The soul of the world / Ignite a brand new day / Let the morning sun proclaim / A brand new start".

Love and the complexity of human relationships, the madness of a world rushing headlong toward the abyss and chaos, as in the apocalyptic "If", society and religion, in the touching "Psalm", remain at the center of Anne Clark's poetics in the twenty-first century. She expresses herself in prose or in verse, somewhere between poetry and philosophical reflection. The intensity of her declamation, more nuanced and relaxed than in the past, is tinged with bitterness, with an angry sense of impotence in the face of a world in ruins in which she nevertheless continues to believe. Her sonic palette also once again sinks its roots into the synth-pop of her beginnings, as in the fine single "Full Moon", both driving and subtly melancholic.

If in her earlier works the texts never overshadowed the music, now the two dimensions merge with greater harmony, sometimes leaving orchestration to define the environment in which the words move: metaphysical folk with atmospheric piano and string arrangements in "Know", electro-acoustic jazz in "Boy Racing", acid-tinged synthetic funk in the instrumental "Zest!", unfathomable techno in "If", industrial textures with almost metallic riffs in "Prayer Before Birth", subterranean ambient searching for depths already explored in the 1990s by Labradford or The Third Eye Foundation, or more aerial ambient in the manner of Brian Eno, as in "As Soon As I Get Home", a solemn and intense lament over which the deep voice of pianist Murat Parlak suggests a hypothetical meeting between Anne Clark and David Sylvian.

Among the collaborators appear Xabec, Rainer Von Vielen and the Belgian companions of Implant, who occasionally join her live. The result is a surprising album, more melodic and accessible than might have been expected, while remaining as radical as her works of the 1980s: "The Smallest Acts Of Kindness" is a triumphant return.

Two years later Anne Clark released the first chapter of a dynamic and constantly evolving project, "Past & Future Tense" (2010), the first release on her own label After Hours Productions. Rather than offering yet another compilation of her catalogue, she invited young musicians, producers and DJs to work on songs from her repertoire, including lesser-known pieces, not merely to remix them but to reinterpret them entirely. The result is a fresh, stimulating and contemporary perspective provided by a new generation of artists on someone who had in turn influenced their own paths and their way of conceiving electronic music. As hip-hop became a dominant phenomenon in global charts, the pioneer of spoken word would later recount: "When I played in the United States, I was astonished by the number of black spectators present. Mostly young guys who were passionate about rap and hip-hop."

In January 2011 Clark, together with pianist and long-time co-composer Murat Parlak, contributed an arrangement of Charles Baudelaire's poem "Enivrez-Vous" ("Be Drunk") to the audiobook and radio drama "Die Künstliche Paradiese", produced by Hörbuch Hamburg and Radio Bremen and curated by Kai Grehn. The project would later be developed into a live performance at Berlin's Volksbühne in October 2011.

"Die Künstliche Paradiese" won the Deutscher Hörbuch Preis 2012 and, following this success, Anne and Murat were invited again to create arrangements for twelve poems by Emily Brontë for the audiobook and radio drama "Sturmhöhe" ("Wuthering Heights"), which was included in the longlist of the German Audio Book Prize 2014 for best radio drama.

Clark then embarked on an extensive acoustic tour with her long-time collaborators Murat Parlak and Jann Michael Engel under the title "Enough" (2012), also documented by a new live album. As the title suggests, the project reduces everything to the essential: words, voice, piano and cello. It is a path of concentration and subtraction, accompanied visually by an image by Anastasia Tyutikova. "Deeply immersed, like everyone, in the mud of excess and overload, we invite the audience simply to sit and… be… be with us, be with the music, the poetry, perhaps with a special guest. To share a conversation, a few laughs, but above all we ask the audience to be with themselves. That is 'Enough'," she explained. In another interview she revealed: "I would like to collaborate with Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois or David Bowie. It would be interesting." She also joked about being perhaps the only singer who has released records for so long without ever really singing: "It's true. I'm not a great singer. Sometimes I sing to myself, but I never really feel comfortable."

Big in Germany

Alongside her activity with her band, at the beginning of 2013 Anne started a new project with the German musician and producer herrB, returning to her electronic roots with the three-track EP "Fairytales From The Underground", highlighted by the driving dance number "Darkest Hour". It was followed a year later by "Life Wires" (2014), a five-track EP that received an even warmer reception thanks to its effective blend of gritty Ebm in "The Winter Clock", darkwave reminiscences in the austere "Meine Fremde Seele", compelling synth-pop beats in "Whisper Of Shells" and "Form", and evocative atmospheric textures in "A Dream", all serving her unmistakable spoken word.

In 2015 she also participated in the event Gothic Meets Klassik at a sold-out Gewandhaus in Leipzig, performing orchestral arrangements of some of her best-known pieces with the Philharmonie of Zielona Góra. In 2016 she toured Europe again with herrB. The sardonic parody "Donald Trump Praesidend (Quack Quack)" (2017), created with the artist Ludwig London following the tycoon's election, confirmed her enduring irony and political sharpness.

In 2018 she collaborated with the German musician and composer Thomas Rückoldt on the album "Homage (The Silence Inside)", a tribute dedicated to the authors of some of the poems she loves most. Minimal electronics, atmospheric piano and her unmistakable recitation of texts by Alice Oswald, Les Murray, W. B. Yeats and R. M. Rilke, among others, gave life to a work of intense intimacy centered on the power of words.

Germany, by then her "second homeland", also dedicated a documentary to her: "Anne Clark – I'll Walk Out Into Tomorrow" (2018), the result of detailed biographical research by German director Claus Withopf. The film presents episodes concerning the unexpected boom of her success, the context of a London rich in do-it-yourself movements, her turbulent relationship with her family, and her conception of poetry and sexuality. Each chapter is introduced by the listening of a song connected to the theme and by a visual representation of the lyrics. The result offers a curious and unusual insight into the English artist's path.

In 2019 Clark expanded her collaboration with Thomas Rückoldt with a direct and passionate response to the Brexit vote in the single "Stop Brexit", where the slogans of protesters opposed to leaving the European Union merge with Anne's austere declamation and hammering techno pulses, offering further confirmation of her always lucid political vision. In October of the same year she once again took part in Gothic Meets Klassik at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, this time with the Leipziger Philharmonie conducted by Michael Köhler.

The fight against illness

The year 2020 was expected to be one of celebration. After more than forty years of activity as a writer, author and performer, and coinciding with her sixtieth birthday, Anne began preparing a major tour with long-time collaborators Jeff Aug, Murat Parlak and Jann Michael Engel, joined by new members such as Job Verweijen and Justin Ciuche. Writing and rehearsals were already underway when a double blow arrived: the coronavirus pandemic and a diagnosis of ovarian cancer. "I felt as if I were drowning in words: together with the Covid-19 pandemic, the cancer completely changed my life," Clark confided in a moving interview. "As a person, as an artist, I feel weaker, physically and emotionally. But I hold on to my spirit more tightly."

The impact of these traumatic events forced Anne to seek new ways of connecting with her audience. Traditional concerts and recordings were no longer possible. Expanding the concept of "Past & Future Tense", the English artist released a new album of reworked material from her repertoire, "Synaesthesia" (2021). Although lockdown halted live events, it did not stop music from circulating: the album presents heterogeneous interpretations created both by long-time collaborators such as herrB and Thomas Rückoldt and by prominent figures of the contemporary electronic scene such as Solomun, Blank & Jones, Andreas Brecht and Yagya, highlighting Clark's deep and cross-generational influence.

After a particularly difficult year of treatment, Anne began writing again with members of her band. At the end of 2021, together with her friend and violinist Justin Ciuche, she created an inspired and improvisational project with cellist Ulla Van Daelen at the Stockfisch studios under the production of Günther Pauler. The result was "Borderland – Found Music For A Lost World" (2022), an intimate and moving collection of material written during illness and recovery, along with interpretations of poems by W. B. Yeats and Mary Coleridge.

That same year also saw the release of "Mriya An Ode To Ukraine", in which the English artist renewed her political vocation with a moving act of denunciation against the suffering inflicted on the Ukrainian people by Vladimir Putin and his despotic regime. "In the summer of 2019 I had the pleasure of working with the director Jurko Marrow in Kyiv," Clark explained. "Now it is an honour for me to collaborate with him again on a new project, with music by Justin Ciuche and Jann Michael Engel. I wrote the text in English and Jurko not only translated the poem entirely into Ukrainian but also recorded a vocal performance. By combining our two voices with strings and environmental sounds from this unstable landscape, the song was born."

In 2022 Anne Clark finally returned to her favourite activity: touring and performing live. Her remarkable strength of character once again pushed her into the arms of her devoted audience, although she admitted: "Psychologically I am still reliving the trauma of cancer and I face a constant anxiety about its possible return. I am told to move forward and live my life, and I try to do that every day, intensely."

All that remains for us is to thank her for that and for a brilliant career that has crossed genre boundaries and opened the way to numerous sonic hybridizations, from new wave and Neue Deutsche Welle to coldwave, Ebm, hip-hop, industrial and even modern classical. Listening today to the proud and cutting verses of Kae Tempest, one cannot help but think back to that young, angry poet from Croydon who, behind an eighties fringe and a sullen gaze, concealed a vast lyrical and musical universe that remains fertile.

(This article’s English version was produced with AI-assisted translation)