David Kilgour
Indie Rock / Alternative
David Kilgour’s been changing his mind for a long time, and who can argue with the results? His first band The Clean changed the face of rock music when they kick-started New Zealand’s pop underground in the early 80s. His records — The Far Now is album number six — are monuments to good old-fashioned song craft tinged with a becoming modesty. If you hunger for gorgeous melodies that’ll never make you sick, singing that puts across an emotion without hitting you over the head with it, and guitar playing whose effortless eloquence and virtuosity doesn’t make you want to fine him for playing too many notes, Kilgour’s your man. If you’re looking for a man in single-minded pursuit of rock and roll success, well, that’s another story; he loves music, but he loves life more, and while that attitude hasn’t put his face on too many billboards, it’s probably got a lot to do with why he’s still making records after 25 years.
In the late 70s a teenaged David traded in his surfboard for a guitar.
Inspired in equal measures by the punk rock explosion and their Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Velvet Underground, and Beach Boys records, he and his older brother Hamish started The Clean. After a couple years of unstable line-ups and sketchy gigs (I know one guy who first saw them at a Sunday afternoon youth concert sponsored by the Dunedin police department) the brothers hooked up with bassist Robert Scott (later of the Bats) and got terrifyingly good. “Tally Ho,” their first single, sold thousands in their native New Zealand without the benefit of commercial airplay. But after a couple years that yielded some brilliant homemade EPs and concerts that people still talk about, David got sick of the pressure of being a guitar hero and quit to be a painter. Or something. He’s carried on in an episodic way ever since, fronting some bands (Stephen, Pop Art Toasters) and backing up his friends in others (Snapper, Yo La Tengo), starting and stopping The Clean, and pursuing a solo career.
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