Safe In The Rain: A Tribute to Hamish Kilgour

Audrey Golden pays tribute to the great musician Hamish Kilgour of The Clean

I read the news on 27 November, the day that Hamish Kilgour was last seen, but I didn’t yet know anything had changed. Several more days would pass before the New Zealand police made their public announcement on 1 December that the musician was missing. I didn’t know Hamish Kilgour personally, but I loved his music. My heart has beaten to the sounds of his drumming for decades, and my imagination has been irrepressibly enriched by the worlds he created through his visual art.

When I read that Hamish Kilgour was missing, I experienced a sensation that most of us feel at one time or another but is difficult to put into words — where your heart seems to have become physically heavy, sinking down into your body while also reverberating outside it. The language that’s used to describe the condition of being missing always feels confounding in its passivity: someone has gone missing, has been missing since some particular day, was reported missing on a Tuesday. That language also underlies the thing that nobody wants to say yet: that someone, and maybe many others, are missing the person who has gone missing, hoping that they are still somewhere, with their heart beating, waiting to be found.

The Clean are probably best known for the song Tally Ho!, the first single they released on Flying Nun Records in 1981. That same year, Flying Nun released the band’s EP Boodle Boodle Boodle, which included a number of songs that would come to define their sound: Billy Two, Anything Could Happen, Sad Eyed Lady, and Point That Thing Somewhere Else.

Writers have described The Clean’s sound as jangle-pop, post-punk, proto-shoegaze, but to be honest, I’ve never thought any of those labels were quite right. They simply don’t get at the singularity of the music — the way the drums and guitar strings come together to create a living thing, or the way the lyrics reveal voices that are just as much in love and enamored with the world around them as they are dismayed and devastated by it. A sense of wonder emerges in songs like the magnificent Anything Could Happen. It’s muddled with a sense of disappointment and loss in tracks such as Billy Two, Side On, Big Soft Punch. That dichotomy grows sharper in I’m In Love With These Times — a track Kilgour wrote with The Clean but recorded with his subsequent Flying Nun band Bailter Space (on their 1987 EP Nelsh Bailter Space, the band’s name at the time).

If you’re looking for the most melancholy and heartrending of all the songs Kilgour created, drummed, and sang on, you’ll want to listen to Getting Older (a 1982 Flying Nun 7” single) and Safe In The Rain (a vastly underappreciated track on the band’s 1994 album Modern Rock).

In 1989, after The Clean reformed following their breakup in 1982, Kilgour spoke to a reporter from The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia about playing live again: “I’m a little nervous, I guess,” he said. Kilgour also reflected on The Clean’s music, and their distinctive sound: “The things we did were very much dictated by circumstances. We tended to do things very economically. Everything was stripped down and minimal. People called that an anti-attitude/anti-rock stardom, which I guess it was to a certain degree. We wanted to succeed but we didn’t want to do it in horrible, crass ways . . . . We showed people in our home town that we could make records, tour, and return to our home town.”

When I first moved to New York City decades ago, I knew Hamish Kilgour lived there, and I wondered if I’d run into him. Maybe at Kim’s, looking for bootleg videos, or maybe in passing on a street in the East Village. I never did pass by him, or if I did, I didn’t realise it. Maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough. When I traveled to New Zealand years later, I rented a car and drove south from Christchurch to Dunedin, listening to The Clean and looking for Kilgour and the band in that landscape, at once gorgeous and inhospitable. I listened to Safe In The Rain so many times on that drive — one of The Clean songs that makes my heart swell — often hitting the track-back button on the CD player to listen to it again . . . and again. That kind of listening-on-repeat gives us a chance to be both outside time and definitively somewhere, all at once.

The state of being missing is one that lies inherently between presence and absence, like a ghost or spectre. It’s at once a condition of nothingness, and a condition of being stuck in the in-between. Kilgour did the artwork for most of the Clean’s records, and those drawings open up new dreamscapes — otherworldly places between the one we occupy and another ethereal plane. I like to think his music still lives in those fantastical spaces.

While I anxiously clicked to refresh news stories about the drummer of The Clean in those first few days of December 2022, I thought about the notion of hauntology, coined by the famous twentieth-century philosopher Jacques Derrida. I looked up this quote, which I was remembering in fragments: “Learning to live… can happen only between life and death. Neither in life nor in death alone. What happens between the two, and between all the ‘twos’ one likes, such as between life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost . . . . The time of ‘learning to live’ . . . would amount to this, to which the exordium is leading us: to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship . . . of ghosts.”

To some extent, the music of The Clean is illusory this way, too: existing between decades, between geographic regions, between genres. First pressings of The Clean’s physical records are so few and far between, like ghosts themselves. And as fans, aren’t our favourite musicians always a little bit spectral for us? I think you know what I mean: Did I catch a glimpse of him? Did I stand in the same bookstore he frequented? Did he hold that record I’ve just picked up? Did he play those drums?

On December 6, 2022, the New Zealand police reported that Kilgour had been found dead in Christchurch. He may have left this world, but I know he’s still living in the images that emblazon the album covers of The Clean and in the distinctive sounds of his drum beats.

Slug Song appeared initially on The Clean’s 1982 Flying Nun EP entitled Great Sounds Great, Good Sounds Good, So-So Sounds So-So, Bad Sounds Bad, Rotten Sounds Rotten!! The physical record itself says, quite matter-of-factly, that “Hammy” contributed “background vocals” to this song. It’s at once playful, but it’s also a deep lament that I hear now as an epitaph for the inimitable Hamish Kilgour:

Said don’t ever change
Or rearrange your mind

Don’t ever go and rearrange
Your mind, your mind, your mind, your mind, your mind, your mind

Well anyway,
Don’t ever bend to the hip
The grip of the insipid

I said well anyway,
Don’t ever bend
Don’t ever change
Don’t ever change

I said don’t
Don’t ever change
And misarrange your mind, your mind, your mind
I said don’t ever change your mind.

~

Words by Audrey Golden. You can follow Audrey on Twitter and Instagram, and you can check out her personal website to learn more about her writing.

Source: louderthanwar.com