The Clean finally get their definitive story. Richard Langston’s In the Dreamlife You Need a Rubber Soul arrives April 7 via University of Auckland Press, a full account of one of alternative music’s most influential and undersung bands, told in their own words and the words of the people closest to them.
The Clean’s impact runs deep. Formed in Dunedin in 1978 by brothers Hamish and David Kilgour and schoolfriend Peter Gutteridge, the band hit the New Zealand charts for months with a single made for $50, “Tally Ho!,” helped establish Flying Nun as an independent force outside the major label system, and pioneered a lo-fi, DIY approach to rock music that went on to shape bands like Pavement and Yo La Tengo. Ira Kaplan puts it plainly: “I’m a fan of everything they ever did.”
Langston draws on the band’s inner circle to tell the story from the inside out, including fellow musicians Chris Knox, Martin Phillipps, and Graeme Downes, alongside friends, family, pub promoters, and sound engineers. The narrative runs from teenagers in a Dunedin practice room all the way to New York City on 9/11, tracing nearly forty years of music made on their own terms.
Langston is the right person for this. A journalist, poet, and television director who has written about the Dunedin music scene since the 1980s, he edited the fanzine Garage from 1984 to 1986, later published as Pull Down the Shades: Garage Fanzine 1984–1986 by HoZac Books in 2023. This is a book written by someone who was there.