AAG (All American Girl) are a London based band, and one that I knew very little about, except for one very important factor. So far they have all of seven songs in the public domain, and these include demos and live takes, so there’s huge amounts of not much to go on. The thing I’m alluding to though, that ‘important factor’ is one single song ‘Dark Was The Night’ which had its earworms into me the moment I heard it. Singer Melissa Clarke has a memorable voice, vulnerable and cracking at the very same moment it kicks you in the head to wake you up at 4am. There are lots of girls with great voices though. Well okay, a few: but what set this apart was the way Melissa’s voice is forged and intertwined with the rest of the band sound – jangling guitars, a rolling riff, jazz drumming, and a sense that it could all have been silently back-dropped by some 70’s cowboy film – the american sort, definitely not spaghetti. All of which turned out to be a bit prescient when we finally caught up for a chat.
Photo credit Adam ‘Fish’ Turner
Unusually in these days of post ironic band names, Melissa Clarke really is an all American girl, albeit one that now lives in Dalston. We’ll let her explain, it’s less complicated “…well, my name is Melissa. I generally go under the name of All American Girl which has been an artist name for me for quite some time now. But the band is under the name AAG. Essentially what I’m trying to say is that I was All American Girl before the band project started. Then I met the band and we couldn’t figure out a name that coincided with All American Girl so we kind of decided – why don’t we just use it but put in the form of a logo? That way seemed easier, nobody would question it, and importantly the band would feel they weren’t a backing band of any sort.”
Given that there seemed to be some question of identity, it made sense to let Melissa carry on explaining, and it inevitably led to how the band came about. We were particularly keen on how a Californian singer could apparently just parachute into an existing, tight-knit British band, and how they could ensure that everyone’s input was, ahem, respected. Melissa explained “… essentially I suppose I am a writer and it is my music in that I compose it. But it is so much of their ideas. I don’t tell them what to play. I give them the basic idea of the song, I’ll sing it for them, but then they start putting in their bits. As it evolved, it would not have been right if it was ‘ All American Girl and the Somethings’. And as well, they’re all guys which makes a difference and I knew we just couldn’t work with any sort of backing band idea.”
But you literally are the all-American girl, you’re from California?
Yeah I’m from San Francisco; Silicon Valley, just on the outskirts. I came here in 2006.
Were you All-American Girl then while you lived in America?
No I wasn’t. It was a bit weird actually. I was at university in Santa Cruz. It was quite Bohemian. I was into these jazz players because that was what was happening there at that time. I wasn’t a jazz player and I thought “oh they are so good”.. and they were just banging on all the time about theory and the rest of it. I wanted to learn. I tried to get into all these classes and couldn’t, and in the end I just quit. But I’d got all these songs that I’d written, for years. I wanted to go to Britain, because I’d always associated Britain with a rock ‘n’ roll culture. So yeah, I came to Britain in 2006. But it’s been a really hard process, trying to get the right players in place. And a lot of people are just basically doing this as a part-time thing. It’s hard to find people who are artists, if you know what I mean. Full-time artists who are in it strictly for the art. I was quite lucky. The group I’ve got now, we’ve been together a few years. It’s panned out really well, my partner is one of the guitarists in the band. And then (the rest of the band) was his friends, who were playing together already, back in Norwich. It’s like a family circuit now. I can’t even imagine just advertising and getting somebody off Gumtree classified.
Melissa had some thoughts about what it would be like if it hadn’t all fallen together so neatly, and they had to resort to advertising for musicians, that it can work out great, but also often it can attract session type players, always looking for the next thing.
I’ve also been quite lucky because my partner is a professional illustrator, and his ideas are added to it (the band). So it’s been coming together over the last couple of years. We are at a point now where the album is still getting mixed, which were hoping will be all done in a couple months. As a band, we been doing some promotion on Facebook but we wanted to wait until the point when we have something that’s ready, and that’s what we can call ourselves, our work.
We talked about artists that wait for years until they got a whole album mixed, and I asked her opinion of those who get signed on the basis of one or two tracks on the internet.
That’s mental! If you got only one song, before you can have anything else to show for it, it kind of dies. It would just be about that one song whereas I think, really a lot of artists want to put an album out. I think it’s amazing when you hear about artists putting more than one album out. I know we’ve struggled just for the one. Just in terms of finance, but I’m sure you’ve heard that from loads of other bands, DIY bands. Especially with rock music, I just think there isn’t as much financial backing as there used to be…unless you join a ‘scene’ that that kind of (represents what you do) because you’re part of that scene. And then that can end up watering down who you are, if you try to adhere to that one genre.
Photo credit Becky Ellis
We chatted for quite some time about, not exactly musical influences, but who was doing it for us at the moment. That led us full circle to the current crop of psych bands, originally a Californian phenomenon but latterly breaking out all over the States, Australia and then starting to emerge in the UK. Melissa said that she’d found people trying to put AAG into that same pigeonhole, a comparison she didn’t seem to mind too much. What clearly does bother her, and what she finds inexplicable, is the current obsession as she sees it in trendy parts of London for throwback 80’s electronic music. “Even if I just go into Shoreditch on a Friday or Saturday night, you just see all these people who look like they’re straight from 1986. Then you go in the clubs and all you hear is a lot of 80s new wave. And I keep thinking to myself, you know what, I was a fan of new wave back in the day, but all this electronic stuff happening? And I’m thinking I just want to hear some raw, organic, rootsy rock music. I don’t want to criticise, I mean, each to their own, but…
In terms of your band them, the sound that you’re making now, is that the noise you were looking for, how you imagined it was going to be?
Yeah (emphatically) yeah it was. In terms of vocal sound, given that that’s all I can really control, yes. It’s taken years and years, working with different producers, sometimes making good music with shit vocals because the producer couldn’t get down what we wanted. So it’s taken a long time to get that out of my head and (for it) to materialise. And yeah with the band, I think I always wanted something alternative but organic. And then when I heard the band, I was just convinced. These guys are it, there’s nothing that can break these guys up. They’ve been playing together since they were about 12 years old, and they’ve grown up on the same street together since they were that age. The thing is they’ve never played with anybody else, so they have a particular way that they work. I just felt was something almost holy about them that I just had to get in with them, and let them do the same if that’s what they wanted. I think our main concern is getting this album done, it almost finished, we’ve got the artwork in place. We want to get that out there, and then start working on the next one. We’re working with a great producer in Camden called Giles Waithe. He specialises in a kind of 70s sound, he’s a big Zeppelin fan and I thought I really liked what he was doing with his work, so I asked him to produce mine.
And after that?
And then the next stage after it gets released, I’d really like to get in with a publisher and get some placements in films.
It transpires that Melissa is a huge film buff. More than that though, her idea of sustainability for the band would be to see their music taken up as part of film soundtracks, or even to write all the music for a whole film. When I first heard them and it set me thinking of movie sets, there must have been some hint coming over the ether.
When we emailed, you said you just wanted what any band wants, but I’m not sure that you do?
(Laughs) I don’t know what other bands want. I know that what I don’t want is to feel like I’m in some kind of competition. I mean, I like to get along with other bands, but we don’t want to feel like we are categorised into one scene, and then into some sort of competition within that scene. We just want to be able to say this is who we are and if you like it, you like it and if you don’t, you don’t.
Those seemed to be pretty honest and uncompromising words to end on. The band are Melissa Clarke (vocals,keys) Ben Glister (guitars,effects) David Bushell (Guitars) Daniel Metcalf (Bass) and Francis Martin (Drums). Their debut album is in the can and they expect it to see the light of day in January. Seemingly unfazed by the duality of it all, Melissa is also planning to release a solo EP at the same time.
