Book of the Week: The Clean: In the Dreamlife You Need a Rubber Soul

Richard Langston, Auckland University Press, 2026

Reviewed by Scott Hamilton

'Trapped in Amber'

Richard Langston's new book is a triumph. He has orchestrated dozens of voices to create a narrative of The Clean's long but intermittent career. Some of his material comes from his own interviews, but he has also mined newspapers, magazines, and the diaries and letters of Hamish and David Kilgour and their mother Helen.

Langston has loaded his book with weird and fascinating details. On page 270, for example, we learn that the band recorded their classic song 'Stars' at a Waiatarua house that had been owned by Brian De Palma. According to David Kilgour, the famous director had been 'trying to invent a perpetual motion machine' there.

When The Clean found a groove they resembled a perpetual motion machine. The night before that recording session at Waiatarua the band had played at Auckland's Kings Arms pub. I was there, and I remember David Kilgour and bassist Robert Scott leaning conspiratorially over Hamish Kilgour's drumkit during the long jams 'Fish' and 'Point that Thing Somewhere Else'. It was as though they were conferring over some urgent secret. Their bodies and heads were still but their hands were a blur. The songs went on and on, endlessly different and endlessly the same, as they gave a few chords new and rich intonations. The Kings Arms was packed, but no one was buying at the bar: all eyes were on the laconic drama on the little stage.

By 2000, when they played that gig, The Clean already had a secure place in the history of our music. The albums and tours they made every few years seemed like gifts.

Waiatarua is a tiny village built where Scenic Drive crosses one of the Waitakere Ranges' highest points. Like the nearby suburb of Ranui, it has a faux-Maori name dreamed up by developers.

The Clean may have been happy to head out of Auckland and into the hills on the day after that Kings Arms gig. In a 1994 interview David Kilgour contrasted Auckland negatively with the 'old New Zealand' he felt had survived in Dunedin. The 'new New Zealand', he said, was hyper-commercial and philistine; a more relaxed and authentic way of life persisted in the south. (The late Brian Turner, another great southern creative, made the same contrast repeatedly and more pungently in interviews during the nineties. In one interview Turner even said he had 'given up' on Auckland, and no longer considered it part of New Zealand.)

In the 1930s the Waiatarua Boarding House catered to a few long-term residents and to tourists from Auckland. In the autumn of 1937 Robin Hyde turned up at the boarding house. She had just left Auckland mental hospital, where she had lived as a voluntary patient for four years. Hyde stayed in a hut owned by the boarding house for weeks, knocking a hundred page manuscript that would not be published for thirty-seven years. 

A Home in this World was an extended improvisation, typed at a speed Jack Kerouac would envy. It told the story of Hyde's life, without worrying too much about the order in which events occurred. Hyde also riffed about world politics and the future of publishing and anything else that crossed her mind. 

Sixty-three years later, The Clean made their own improvisation across the road from Hyde's old boarding house. Ed Cake had never worked with The Clean before he produced the session at Waiatarua. Langston gets him to remember the setting:

The studio was at the highest point in Auckland; you could throw a dart off the back of the property and it would go on forever in this valley...I did a rough mix...

Another band might have taken the mix tape Cake gave them away and worked on it, adding overdubs and editing out errors. But The Clean were happy with what Cake had considered a very unfinished track. To work on 'Stars' in another place and on another day would risk removing what they had achieved at Waiatarua. Like Hyde's manuscript, the mix tape had to be left unaltered.

The Clean may not have not known that Robin Hyde had gotten to Waiatarua before them. But Langston's book makes it clear how important the music, art, and literature of their native south was to them. Their best songs are now part of the palimpsest that artists like Colin McCahon and Ralph Hotere and writers like Ruth Dallas and Hone Tuwhare have made over the southern landscape. The 1990 track 'Dunes' belongs to the Otago peninsula as surely as McCahon's famous painting of the place. 1994's 'Valley Cab' conjures Dunedin's steep streets and windy gullies as vividly as a poem by Dallas.

'On Again/Off Again' 

Langston shows how difficult the Clean found their early years playing in Dunedin. Pubs didn't want them; music industry insiders claimed they had no future; during a gig at Otago University an elderly professor condemned them for interfering with his digestion. And yet the band steadily won followers, and their first release became a shock hit single. 

It is very difficult to give a sense, in mere words, of the euphoria that The Clean gave their listeners, especially when both the musicians and the audience were lost in long jams like the ones they played that night at the Kings Arms. Alistair Galbraith felt the euphoria when he saw The Clean play at Dunedin's Coronation Hall one Sunday afternoon in 1980:

The Clean blew my mind open...I stood adrift on a sea of wooden floorboards, drinking classic clanging brilliant amp sound, guitar notes shimmering all around me like scattered metal hail...Growing up through the TV '70s, I'd seen rock as pose, clothes, attitude, whippin' up the mad crowd. But The Clean put on no show at all and eclipsed the lot...The Clean delivered raw current with laconic beauty. I'd never known anything like it. It made me ecstatic. It proved other worlds. Sometimes I stopped seeing, just stood and rang in a vast brilliant vibrating globe, utterly beyond time...

Commentators have linked The Clean's sound to their heroes the Velvet Underground and to their friends Yo La Tengo, but all three members of the band are visual artists as well as musicians, and for me it is a painter who provides an analogy for the magic of their music.

The Clean's combination of repetition and variation reminds me of Allen Maddox, the British-born painter who spent decades in Aotearoa putting Xs on canvases. Maddox associated the shape with his Liverpudlian ancestors, who used it as a signature on legal documents, and with his Christian faith. Maddox painted thousands of Xs, yet his work never became boring. 

Maddox found one variation after another. Some of his Xs were black; others burnt with colour. Some had sharp outlines; others were splotched and leaky. When they're gathered together in a room, Maddox's paintings become hypnotic euphoriants. The constant repetition of the pattern and the constant variation of it work on a part of the mind that is normally unengaged. Like The Clean on their long songs, Maddox's paintings are constantly the same and constantly changing.

Perhaps it's not surprising that The Clean are making me think of painting. All three members of the band were artists, and Langston shows us dozens of the posters and covers they created. It would do the images in the book a disservice to call them illustrations: they are as important as the text Langston compiles. Sometimes a drawing or painting will underline a point the text makes; at other times it will add a dab of irony. How did the Kilgours and Robert Scott find the time to create such a feast of art as well as all that music?

'Changing Your Head'

Writers have pointed out the influence that sixties American bands like The Velvet Underground and The Byrds had on The Clean, and have noted the relish with which they adopted the do it yourself approach of punk. But the band's work also seems to me to have an affinity with much older ideas and practices, ones that can be found in the indigenous cultures of the South Pacific.

Craig McNab photographed The Clean early in their career. He talked with Richard Langston about the importance of improvisation to the band:

I love David's guitar playing because he's loose, and it was the same with Hamish's drumming because he's a maniac really...What I loved about their playing was that it was not overthought, it all felt intuitive, they just did it. It's the same with photography - you can't think too much, you've just got to go and do it. The moment you start thinking about it you get self-conscious, and it doesn't work.

The Clean were careful not to be too careful: they never made technique an end in itself. The unconscious plays a vital role in creation, but a mind that is too knowing, too crammed with preconceptions and guidelines, can shut out its unconscious part.

The Clean combined improvisation with an intense awareness of place. They made their music an expression of the southern landscapes and communities they loved. In an entry he made in his journal in 1986, during a sojourn in London, Hamish Kilgour described the pull of place:

At a concert on London...I am in jeans and a warm NZ jersey amongst young English people dressed in psychedelic/mod type clothing...I feel a bit like the proverbial fish out of water, a New Zealand specimen at that, standing here halfway around the world. I think of river, bush, old totara fenceposts. Kauri!

That last, one-word sentence sends a shiver down my spine. It is a cry of longing - and also, perhaps, a battle cry. Kilgour had learned something at the other end of the world. Like Robin Hyde and Frank Sargeson and so many other Pakeha, he had to visit Britain to realise he belonged in the South Pacific:

I am a third generation New Zealander and when those thoughts come to you, you realise these islands in the South Pacific are your home. Britain has no more roots for you than the Chinese plains or the French coastline...

I think it is significant that Hamish writes here in the second rather than the first person. He believes he has grasped something that is true not just for him, but for other Pakeha. In an epistle to Martin Phillips written in 1987, Hamish's brother makes the case against expatriation, in language that recalls the defiant letters that McCahon and Sargeson and Angus wrote decades earlier:

It seems by your letter you go to London to live. It disturbs me greatly...I'm sure success awaits you in some form but is IT worth IT? I just think it is real important for all of us to keep in touch with New Zealand. Like physically. It's bad enough you being in Auckland and out of touch with the landscape...

The Clean found a way of improvising music and lyrics in response to the places where they recorded. I see a link with the way many indigenous artists work in the South Pacific. A tohunga whakairo will recognise that the figure they seek is already implicit in the tree they harvest and strip. Carving is a matter of working with the wood, of bringing out what it conceals.

In the same way, a musician can try to channel the place where they create. Rob Thorne, for example, often plays traditional Polynesian instruments outdoors, in settings as different as Te Ika a Maui's cold central plateau and the Hauraki Gulf's forested motu Tiritiri Matangi. His performances are improvised - a response, he says, to what the place is saying to him. The Clean's music, too, is partly site-specific, a response to place.

'Mudchucker Blues'

In his review of Langston's book, Philip Matthews suggests that 'only diehard fans will want to know about the details of recording Modern Rock', The Clean's second album. I have to disagree. I think the way that The Clean made their second album has a lot to teach not only musicians but writers and artists as well. 

After splitting in 1983 The Clean reunited at the end of the decade. Their early recordings had won fans in Europe and America, and their first northern hemisphere tour in 1990 was a triumph. At the end of the tour they cut their first proper album, Vehicle, in a London studio. The band could have settled in the northern hemisphere and done more touring and recording there. But they returned to Aotearoa.

When they eventually recorded another album, the Kilgours and Scott spurned the bright lights of London or New York, heading instead to Hoopers Inlet on the Otago peninsula, where they hired the local hall and set up a makeshift studio. The Otago peninsula has the same relationship to Dunedin as the Waitakeres do to Auckland: it is a wild place close to a city, a place for escape and experiment. 

The Clean's members had often visited the peninsula. Robert Scott wrote the song 'Dunes' after he dropped acid and tried to trek through a gale to a natural pyramid on the isthmus. Scott and the Kilgours loved the paintings and drawings that Colin McCahon, Rita Angus, and Jeffrey Harris had made of the peninsula, as well as the poems that James K Baxter and Sam Hunt had written about the place. The middens that lay like hoards of coins on the hills behind Hoopers Inlet reminded them of an older culture that was still at home on the peninsula. 

'We've always been obsessed with the peninsula' David Kilgour told Langston. 'It's got a certain vibe to it.' It was this vibe that The Clean wanted to put onto Modern Rock. 

When they weren't jamming in the hall, band members went flounder fishing by torchlight in the bay and wandered through the paddocks and over the hills. Friends who dropped by the hall were sometimes asked to play on a track.

Robert Scott's daughter got in on the act, composing and singing a piece called 'Ginger Ale'. 

The band members were so intent on expressing the mauri of the peninsula that they made field recordings. They put a microphone next to the fireplace in the hall, for example, and then poked at the fire to get the sound of wood crackling and popping.

Modern Rock vindicated The Clean's methods. The album's songs make its title ironic. They sound fresh and yet old, part of a tradition that the band has somehow invented and backdated. Modern Rock is Aotearoa's Basement Tapes. 

Reviewers used adjectives like 'spacious' and 'pastoral' to describe the album. Nothing could sound less like the dark, urban, claustrophobic grunge sound that was spreading from Seattle through the world in 1992.

'Neck of the Woods'

Martin Phillips was a close friend of all the members of The Clean and played an important part in the band's emergence. He accompanied them on their early forays out of Dunedin, and played keyboards on 'Tally Ho', their first release and shock hit single. But Langston's book shows that Phillips and the Kilgours argued about how and where the band's music should be recorded. 

Phillips left Aotearoa relatively early in his career and made album after album overseas. He was a self-described perfectionist, tinkering with songs for years and recording them painstakingly. Langston  shows how the Kilgours distrusted not only Phillips' expatriation but his perfectionism, worrying that it robbed songs of spontaneity.

At about the same time that The Clean were recording Modern Rock in their Otago hall, Martin Phillips was in a Los Angeles studio. Phillips laboured under the supervision of a producer his record company had chosen. Men in expensive suits dropped by uninvited, and reminded Phillips of the need for a hit single.

The album that come out of that studio was called Soft Bomb. It cost more than a quarter of a million dollars, left Phillips with a massive debt, and helped give him a life-threatening drug addiction. I wish that The Chills had recorded in Hoopers Inlet rather than California.

'Mushroom Blues'

The argument that music flows out of a landscape and a community, and that the musician channels as much as creates, was articulated especially strongly by Peter Gutteridge. He was an early member of The Clean, and wrote the riff for what became their signature song, 'Point That Thing Somewhere Else'. Gutteridge played with the Kilgours in The Great Unwashed, the band they formed after giving The Clean a rest in the mid-eighties, and remained a friend of all three band members until his death.

Gutteridge's drug addiction and lack of interest in a commercial music career limited his output, but not his importance. It might not be going too far to say that he was to The Clean what Syd Barrett was to Pink Floyd, or what Angus MacLise was to the Velvet Underground: a symbol of integrity and a victim of genius. An inspiration, but also a warning.

I was moved by the respect that Richard Langston shows to Gutteridge throughout In the Dream Life You Need a Rubber Soul. Even before his suicide in 2014, Gutteridge was suffering what EP Thompson called 'the enormous condescension of posterity'. Both journalists and memoirists have depicted him as a wrecked, pathetic figure.

Flying Nun founder Roger Shepherd draws a cruel portrait of Gutteridge in his autobiography In Love with These Times.

Shepherd describes Gutteridge's lack of hygiene, and claims that he used to meet the musician in parks to minimise his offensive body odour. Shepherd mocks Gutteridge's ambition to tour Germany, saying that he knew Gutteridge was too dysfunctional ever to make such a trip.

Gutteridge's drug-taking distanced him from society and damaged his health. But it was not about mere dissipation or distraction. He believed that psychedelic drugs, especially, opened the doors of perception and put him into contact with the latent reality that was the source of all music. After ingesting magic mushrooms, he tried to hear the music of the place where they had grown. 

In Vanuatu I have met songwriters who seclude themselves in the forest for days to compose. One of them talked of visiting a clearing where legendary composers of the past had been buried. He went at dusk, the time when the spirit world sends its shadows into the human realm. He drank kava in the clearing because the drink can open the channels between living and dead. He would wait for a spirit to send him a song, in the same way, perhaps, that Gutteridge waited for a musical message after eating a mushroom on the Otago coast. 

Both Gutteridge and his counterpart in Vanuatu had a pantheistic view of the universe, and both saw creation as a gift received from elsewhere, not the outcome of a purely internal process. 

Gutteridge also saw music as a way of connecting different places and cultures. Langston quotes his discussion of 'Point That Thing Somewhere Else':

'Point' is like a god chord...simple, but you can move out and extrapolate easily. I was influenced by things like the bagpipes from an early age. It goes way back, it's a very old music. We're talking about Arabia and much earlier. I've always been fascinated by the universal drone...

Like George Harrison and La Monte Young, Gutteridge loved the drones of Indian music. His contribution to 'Point That Thing Somewhere Else' might have come from an Indian raga. His sense that a 'universal drone' lay somewhere under all the musics of the world, from Scotland to Arabia to India, allowed him to cross cultural borders with an unusual freedom.

Gutteridge's universalism, and his delight in exploring different musical streams, reminds me of a quote by the great Tongan classicist and educationalist Futa Helu, who dreamed of the South Pacific becoming a region where all of humanity's artistic heritage could be shared and enjoyed. 'The ocean of humanity', Helu said, 'is fed by the rivers of all cultures'. Gutteridge swam in many rivers.

Reading Langston's book we can see that, far from being an incoherent casualty of drugs, Peter Gutteridge was both a visionary and coherent thinker. Pakeha artists, writers, and musicians have often struggled to work out how to relate the local and the international. There have been long and often futile arguments between 'nationalists' and 'internationalists', as well as confusion about how to respond to the indigenous culture of Aotearoa. Gutteridge was able to find both a way to plug into indigenous practices and also to balance an obsessive interest in what Allen Curnow called 'the local and special' with an awareness of what is universal to all cultures. He deserves the respect that Langston shows him. 

'Outside the Cage'

Matthew Bannister was the singer and songwriter for Flying Nun band Sneaky Feelings. In his entertainingly grouchy memoir Positively George Street, he complained that Clean songs were not 'about' anything. 'Getting Older' was the only Clean track where Bannister found a coherent message. The rest of their songs, he claimed, had meaningless lyrics.

The Clean's lyrics certainly have an abstract quality, but they share that with some of the best poetry written during their era. John Ashbery, who was beloved and deplored for writing poems that were not 'about' anything, once gave his readers some advice. He said that they should read his poems as though they were sitting in a busy restaurant, hearing snippets of conversations from several tables at once. 

Like Ashbery's poems, the lyrics of The Clean often have a surfeit rather than a shortage of meaning. Instead of a linear narrative or an unambiguous message, listeners get scrambled plots, questions without answers, contradictory claims. Bannister felt that this sort of obscurity locked out listeners. I think, though, that the obscurity allows listeners in, by asking them to interpret and complete the songs. And, like the crowded, cryptic, psychedelic artworks they made for their covers and posters, The Clean's lyrics create atmosphere and mood not despite but because of their obscurity. 

The lyrics were also often composed on the spot, in response to the music that was developing around them. Langston's book doesn't give us a look into that process, but in an interview that he did to promote Sugar Mouth, his second solo album, David Kilgour explained and defended lyrical as well as musical improvisation. Kilgour said that '1983', one of the songs on that album, was composed and recorded very quickly after he looked at an art magazine that had been lying around the studio. He opened the magazine, found an article describing an art installation, and started turning its paragraphs into lyrics. Those lyrics seemed to suggest some chord changes, and the song was ready to record.

'Clarifying' The Clean's lyrics - giving them a central, simple meaning - would be as inauthentic as scrubbing the rough edges off the band's sound. The lyrics, like the music that accompanies them, emerged in a unique place, at a unique time, and that particularity has to be respected. 

'Champagne & Misery'

In his review of Langston's book, Philip Matthews talks about how difficult it was for members of The Clean to make ends meet. Living the 'dream life' of a creative, they needed a 'rubber soul' to survive poverty and public incomprehension or scorn.

In Positively George Street Matthew Bannister remembered that many members of the Dunedin music scene lived on the dole, which they saw as a kind of benefit for creatives. David Kilgour survived for parts of the eighties on the Project Employment Programme, a public work scheme set up after the return of mass unemployment to Aotearoa in the seventies. (I recently interviewed the writer and dramaturge Murray Edmond, and he remembered also living on the PEP during periods between acting drama and teaching jobs in the eighties. Read it here.) David also turned to the dole and to fruit picking to make ends meet. An Accident Compensation Corporation payout to his partner helped fund a visit the northern hemisphere and restart The Clean at the end of the eighties. 

Ruth Richardson's 'black budget' of 1991 cut dole payments by a third, and in the twenty-first century the cost of housing in Dunedin and in other large New Zealand cities has risen to absurd levels. The material conditions that made the music boom of the eighties possible - cheap living in inner cities, relatively generous benefits with little oversight - have vanished. An increasing number of Aotearoan creatives are moving to small towns, where rents are cheaper, and places like Whaingaroa/Raglan and Turanga/Gisborne have developed interesting music and visual art scenes. 

Some of the most extraordinary contemporary music and visual art is coming from island societies on the fringes of capitalism like Vanuatu and Tonga. Both Nuku'alofa and Port Vila have produced a series of brilliant painters and sculptors, as well as some important hip hop and reggae. Nuku'alofa's Seleka Club has brought artists together to drink kava and paint.

Like many of the Flying Nun musos of the eighties, the Tongans have been able to devote themselves full-time to their art. Their housing costs are minimal, and they are fed by family plantations. Only a small minority of Tongans work for wages or salaries, and the pace of life there is relaxed. Unlike their counterparts in Aotearoa, Tongan creatives have not faced societal and family pressure to get ' a real job'. Critics in Aotearoa should keep an eye and ear out for what is happening away from our big cities.

'Born in the Wrong Time'

The last part of Langston's book makes upsetting reading, because it describes the mental deterioration and early deaths of Peter Gutteridge and Hamish Kilgour. Substance abuse and mental health problems are part of the story of their decline, but not all of it.

 

Both men were anguished by the gap between their expectations for music and the mores of what has come to be called the 'music industry'. 

After Flying Nun was swallowed by larger companies Hamish Kilgour was alienated by what he saw as its preoccupation with branding and  profits. He also had a sense, rightly or wrongly, that some old friends no longer shared his values:

I've had constant issues with the way my music and art is used...I still hold what I would perceive as my punk ideas and ideals. It gets me in a lot of trouble with other people because you're supposed to act in a certain way.

Peter Gutteridge seems to have felt a similar disenchantment. His belief that music was a sacred and subversive practice was hard to reconcile with the demands of record labels and commercial studios.

The Clean's success helped create an infrastructure for groups that came after them, and today the band is a national institution. A former deputy Prime Minister took the title of his autobiography from a Clean song; their recordings are archived at our national library.

It is still hard to make a living from music, but today musicians can play and study at universities, release their work on a wider variety of labels, try to access state funding ringfenced for local music, and use the internet to be heard on the other side of the world.

And yet there's a sense that young musicians face obstacles as formidable as the ones The Clean encountered nearly half a century ago. At university young musicians learn to pick and analyse melodies and lyrics, and encounter schemas that purport to show them how to write good songs. State funding comes with paperwork and demands that its recipients quantify their music's 'outcomes'. The internet presents a bewildering and potentially overwhelming array of music, much of it removed from the historical and geographical contexts that gave it meaning. The same digital technology that makes recording and mixing music vastly cheaper and easier can rob that music of its sonic subtlety. 

Is there a place, in 2026, for Peter Gutteridge's dream of a music that taps into the universe's secret energies and channels the spirit of place? Is there room for musicians who improvise and let their subconscious minds loose, rather than follow someone's schema?

The Clean should be celebrated not just for the music they made but for their methods and for the worldview that lay behind those methods. Even if their oeuvre has been assimilated by mainstream culture, their risky spontaneity and their defiant attachment to place remain subversive and instructive.

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