Clinic plays TONIGHT at the Troubador

Listen to "Free Not Free":

About 3 weeks ago we reviewed Clinic's excellent new album, Do It!, and tonight the band plays LA. LAist had a chance to speak to Ade Blackburn, Clinic's keyboardist and lead vocalist as they headed to California:

LAist: There's a kind of calliope, carnaval-esque sound to Do It!, was this a theme you had in mind for the album?

Ade Blackburn: We wanted something more playful, something more fun, more so than the recent releases we had, so that's something we wanted to do from the beginning.

LAist: In finding vintage instruments and using those as an aethetic in your recordings, were you influenced at all by the Dukes of Stratosphear?

Ade Blackburn: Oh yes, they were, that was a fantastic project. It's great to go beyond the standard instrumentation of drums and guitar - to bring in these other elements and sounds. We wanted a human sound, a human element in our recording, to get away from all the electronics that you're hearing.

LAist: How has the tour been going so far? You played the East Coast and are heading to LA now. What can we expect?

Ade Blackburn: It's been going really well. We've played some places we haven't played in a while, we did Minneapolis and now Vancouver, so it's been a different mix of cities which has been fun. What we're doing this time is that we're playing the whole of the Do It! album in one set, and then we do an encore set of older songs, which gives everything a fresh approach.

LAist: So you do the 11 songs from Do It! and then head into your back catalog of 11 years worth of songs to bring out some gems that your fans might be hearkening for? That's commitment!

Ade Blackburn: There's a progression of songs through the album, and the order of them was quite important to us, we didn't want to take the songs out of context, so when I say we play the whole of Do It! we play the album from start to finish. Also, when we did the album we used some instruments that we normally don't play live, like acoustic guitar, and some of these vintage instruments, which really pushes it out for us, so it's something that people might not be used to from us in a live show, it's been fun and people seem to be enjoying it.

Clinic plays tonight at the Troubador