Anne Clark (born 14 May 1960, Croydon, London, England) is an English poet and songwriter. Her first album, The Sitting Room, was released in 1982, and she has released over a dozen albums since then.
Her experimental music occupies a region bounded roughly by electronic, dance (techno applies on occasion) and possibly avant-garde genres, with varying hard as well as romantic and orchestral styles.
Clark is mainly a spoken word artist, but she also plays piano and occasionally accompanies herself, with piano and voice mixing in a somewhat atypical New Wave style. Many of her lyrics deal critically with the imperfections of humanity, everyday life, and politics. Especially in her early works she has created a gloomy, melancholy kind of atmosphere bordering on weltschmerz.
Anne Clark was born the daughter of an Irishwoman and a Scotsman. At the age of 16, she left school. She took various jobs, one of which was as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital. Clark then got a job at the local record store (and label), Bonaparte Records. Punk rock was finding its way into London's music scene and totally matched Anne Clark's emotions.
Clark soon became involved with the Warehouse Theatre, an independently-financed stage for bands, that was always low on cash. Although the theater's owners initially objected to the strange, pierced punk scene characters and their leather outfits, Anne was able to successfully arrange the program. Bands like Siouxsie and The Banshees, Generation X, and The Damned belonged to the local scene and performed at the Warehouse in addition to besides theatre, dance, comedy and poetry projects. Anne Clark managed to fill the theatre with artists like Paul Weller, Linton Kwesi Johnson, French & Saunders, The Durutti Column, Ben Watt (who is now a member of Everything But The Girl), and many others. She experimented with music and lyrics herself and first appeared on stage in Richard Strange's Cabaret Futura with Depeche Mode.
In 1982, Anne Clark published her first album, The Sitting Room, with songs written by herself. On the following albums, Changing Places (1983), Joined up Writing (1984) and Hopeless Cases (1987), Clark benefited from an acquaintance from the Warehouse: keyboardist David Harrow contributed as the co-author. The songs created by this team, such as “Sleeper in Metropolis,” “Our Darkness,” and “Wallies,” have since been considered milestones of the 1980s and 1990s.
In 1985, Clark released the album Pressure Points. It was created in collaboration with John Foxx, who wrote the music and plays on the first five tracks..
In 1987, Clark went to Norway for three years, where she worked with Tov Ramstad and Ida Baalsrud, among others. In cooperation with Charlie Morgan, she released the album Unstill Life in 1991 on SPV Records. Tracks included The Moment, Unstill Life, Abuse and Empty Me. This album was also released in the USA on Radikal Records. During 1992, she released a non-album collaboration on maxi-CD (SPV) with Ida Baalsrud, who both played the violin part and co-wrote If I Could; furthermore, there was also a remix of Our Darkness included on the last track of the CD. At the very end of 1992, in December, Charlie Morgan unexpectedly died of cancer at the age of only 36, which caused many planned collaboration projects to be abandoned.
After several months of reorientation, Clark eventually released The Law is an Anagram of Wealth in 1993, once again in collaboration with Tov Ramstad; the other musicians involved were Paul Downing, Martyn Bates (of the band Eyeless in Gaza), and Andy Bell (not of Erasure fame but talented musician and programmer) and completed a major European Tour.
Just one year later, in 1994, Anne Clark ventured into a style that she had not experimented with before: acoustic music. This eventually culminated in the release of Psychometry (1994), which featured a concert recorded live on stage in the Passionskirche in Berlin-Kreuzberg.
Continuously, Clark went on following her musical roots and the influences of folk and classical music. Her 1998 album, Just After Sunset, a collaboration with Martyn Bates, featured poems by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke translated into English. This album was re-released four years later in 2002 when Clark regained the rights to the album. The re-release included some additional video footage, although it was of rather poor quality.
In 2003, another album joined her series of acoustic albums: From The Heart - Live In Bratislava, which she recorded together with Murat Parlak (vocals/piano), Jann Michael Engel (cello), Niko Lai (drums and percussion) and Jeff Aug (guitars) in Bratislava, Slovak Republic.
In 2005, Clark joined up with the Belgian act Implant for the album Self-inflicted, on which she delivered guest vocals. The album was released via Alfa Matrix Records, which in the meantime had become her home label outside of Germany. She also appeared on the Implant EP Too Many Puppies.
2006 saw Clark back again in the recording studio with Implant for the EP Fade Away, on which she delivered guest vocals and performed a duet with Leæther Strip's Claus Larsen. And she also appeared on the album Audioblender by Implant, again released via the Alfa Matrix record label.
In 2007 Clark was in Germany to record her next album The Smallest Act of Kindness, which was released in September 2008. It is her first album with original material in 12 years. The album was released in a luxury digipack, a high quality CD album jewelcase-size hardbound book with a fine 4-color matte finish on its cover. This digipack book contains the lyrics for all of the album's songs, as well as over 25 full color photos by the Hubble Space Telescope (NASA), Sofia Papathoma, and Andy Bell, on over 30 high grain pages.
At present, Clark resides in Norfolk, England, United Kingdom.
1988 — R.S.V.P. (UK: Ten; Germany: Virgin Schallplatten, later: Virgin/EMI; LP — recorded live at the Music Centrum, Utrecht, Holland, 1987)
1991 — Unstill Life (SPV, later: Virgin/EMI; LP/CD)
1993 — The Law Is An Anagram Of Wealth (Germany: SPV; CD)
1994 — Anne Clark and friends: Psychometry (SPV, later: Virgin/EMI; CD — Live at the Passionskirche Berlin)
1995 — To Love And Be Loved (SPV, later: Warner Chappell; CD)
1997 — Wordprocessing: The Remix Project (Columbia Europe/Sony BMG, later: Warner Chappell; CD)
1998 — Anne Clark & Martyn Bates: Just After Sunset — The Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (Labor/Indigo, later: Warner Chappell, re-release 2002: netMusicZone; CD)
2003 — From the Heart — Live in Bratislava (netMusicZone — Recorded at the studios of Slovak National Radio Broadcast during the European acoustic tour on 17 November 2002)
2004 — Notes Taken, Traces Left (netMusicZone — Audiobook, song lyrics and commentary from Anne Clark's book)
2008 — The Smallest Acts of Kindness (netMusicZone)
Singles
1984 — Sleeper in Metropolis (Rough Trade Germany)
1984 — Our Darkness (miscellaneous, licensed from Red Flame)
1984 — Self Destruct (Germany: Ten)
1985 — Sleeper in Metropolis (Remix with David Harrow) (UK: Ink)
Anne Clark: Notes Taken, Traces Left. Fotografien — Texte — Interviews. Edited by Jeff Aug, translated by Martin Müncheberg. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 2003. ISBN 9783896024633. (328 pages, in English and German)
Homesteading in Urban Usa[Praeger special studies in U.S. economic, social, and political issues](Hardcover) ISBN-13: 9780275240608 ISBN-10: 0275240606
