Those who know Dr Meaker, know that it always takes them a while to release new albums, this time even as much as eight (eight!) years.
That doesn’t mean they sit still in the meantime, though. The band, and band leader and main producer and songwriter Clive Meaker himself has had releases on labels like V Recordings, Born On Road, and Souped Up among others over the past few years.
“Our singles are more for dancing, and our album tracks are more for listening,” Clive explains. “When I’m writing new songs, any great soulful tracks get put to the side for my albums. I am much more emotionally connected to my album tracks than to my bangers and that’s why it seems like it’s taking me so long to write this album.”
They also created music videos for each of the tracks, to create a full audiovisual story. From travelling to Ghana to climbing up in the attic of Bristol’s famous club Lakota, the band has been shooting videos over the last four years to accompany this album.
Last time we connected with them, the band had just announced their latest album Distorted Sun. Now that the album is out, we felt that this was the perfect opportunity to check back in with Clive and talk about the build-up to the release of the album.
Congratulations on the release of your album. I have to say, Distant City was one of the tracks that stood out to me. Terri Walker’s voice is amazing! How did you meet her?
I heard a song featuring Terri Walker about 10 years ago. This track was called I Know That He Loves Me. It was just brilliant. It’s one of those songs that you hear and just listen to over and over and over again, it really resonated with me. Then I was wondering if I could hit her up, if I could collaborate with her, and she was up for it! She ended up coming down to Bristol, recording the track in this very room I’m sitting in now. That first day was really cool. We sat down and wrote the lyrics together. She came up with the melodies and then we felt out the words and did a mix together. She came back another day, did a few more ad-libs and then we put it to rest for many years until the time felt right to release it. That was eight years ago, and it’s just been sitting on my computer for all that time. This track came together just after the last album, and I knew this would be like a big track for this next album.
The track gives me a feeling of driving through a city, some euphoria almost… What inspired you to invoke this feeling?
We wrote the lyrics together and it was built on a positive feeling. The lyrics are talking about, “Don’t let fear get you.” When you see the bright lights of the distant city, that’s a feeling of optimism for me. I’m thinking about that ‘going out into the city for the night’-type of feeling. I was inspired by an old band from the 70s called The Crusaders, they wrote a track called Street Life with Randy Crawford. The cover art for that release is Randy Crawford stepping out of a New York taxi in the 70s, like a disco queen. Just that image and that song has inspired quite a lot of the music that I’ve created and Distant City has that feeling to it, about going out into the distant city… There’s just something about that city life and a diva stepping out into the night, which is Terri for this song. We tried to capture that feeling in our music video with Terri.
You managed to get that feeling over amazingly. You’re really telling a story with the whole album, aren’t you?
Yes, for sure! The singles that have been out for the last few years are more just about dancefloor vibes. This album is a collection of tracks on which the artists are speaking from their soul. The songs will still stand up in 20 or 30 years’ time. That’s why I compiled them into an album. I’m going to release it as digital downloads, and I’m hoping to press about 100 limited edition vinyls as well.
Any other plans you have for the album, other than limited edition vinyl?
Yes, we’ve created some music videos to go with the tracks, actually. The one for Obayalo was one that I loved particularly. We shot that one in Ghana and it was one of the best days of my life. I’ve never experienced anything like it, seeing a community come together like it did that day. Everyone, from granny to little school kids, were all out all dancing and just really hyped up off the back of the video being shot. It was fantastic.
I’ve always loved being involved in making videos. I’m quite particular in what I want to show in the video as well, because I know the music, and when you put the visuals to the music, I need it to flow. I’m not going to wave something through if it doesn’t feel right. I need to be involved in that process to get it in sync with the music, and I’m lucky to work with a couple of video guys who can put up with me doing that, haha!
How was it to make the videos for this album?
So far so good, I’ll tell you the story behind some of the videos. The first film, for Try, we did was during lockdown, we shot it in the attic of Lakota in Bristol. It literally looks like a bomb has dropped in there and we were trying to create a kind of ‘bombed out building’-effect. We were supposed to be rebel freedom fighters, and filmed it with Satyr Media’s Ross Goatman. It was fantastic. We also filmed a video for Simple Complications a couple of years ago in 2022, on Stapleton Road. For that one, we really managed to capture the community-feeling there, like a stamp in time. Celestine, our vocalist, was walking through and singing the song, and the whole community engaged with it. It was cool to see. The video has got a nice timeless black-and-white vintage vibe about it. The story behind the video for The Flame is also quite interesting. We’ve been working with a Polish animator, and it turned into some kind of lo-fi animation to animate these two asteroids colliding. That took quite a long time to render, and then I added a few more effects afterwards.
Feel Like Giving Up or Pandemic Nights is one we had to go back to and shoot again. Tenisha, the vocalist, walked from Easton up to the Suspension Bridge in Bristol and we’ve documented that journey with her singing it. That was a hard day filming because we walked all the way up there with our gear. Love You Gently, we shot down in Cornwall so we exchanged the inner city urban landscape for a very desolate open Saint Ives and even more remote beaches than that, where it was just very sparse. That’s where Blaze, the vocalist on the song, grew up. We wanted to capture her in her home environment. It was nice to go somewhere different and shoot in that bleak January winter down on the beach.
It seems like you have a different story for all tracks, but one that’s still close to all artists. One city that keeps returning is Bristol, what’s your connection to it?
I live and breathe this city. I walk the streets and see a lot of things. What I do is like a diary, it’s documenting these moments and this city in time. Doing these guerrilla-style music videos, it’s all about real life. There’s no better backdrop, and it’s much better than something that’s staged. You’ve got something to look back on and go, “This person was walking on that street that day, they were doing their shopping that day.” It’s a little stamp in time that you will be able to look back at in years to come and remember how things were. I like documenting history, so I try to capture not just the obvious things but also people struggling, and other real-life things that you only see if you are walking on the streets.
I feel like we’ve filmed enough videos in Bristol now. My plan is to stick with the guerrilla-style music videos, but to start going to other countries and other places. It only costs about £40 to get on a plane and fly to Hungary for instance. We could just jump on with the filmographer, me and the vocalist, and go to different places and do amazing things. One of my biggest inspirations for this idea, is the video for Walk On By by Dionne Warwick. She’s in front of the Eiffel Tower in France and just that alone is an amazing backdrop. You could go to so many places in the world where the backdrop is just there, where you can just put the vocalist in front of it and let them soulfully perform the track.
It’s a bit of journalism almost… Have you ever had people come up to you while you were filming?
When we were filming the Remedy video, there was a little cafe up in Severn Beach which was called Shirley’s Cafe. It’s not famous but it’s a really well-known local little cafe that has been running for years and years. The lady in there was a local hero, but sadly she passed away. Her daughter contacted us and said how happy she was that we caught her mom and that we’ve got that beautiful video. It became something really special to them.
We’ve got a similar story with Waiting. The artist, Paul Xrusade, died two years ago. He became a really good friend, and I’m making sure his family receives all the royalties from his music. I was just speaking to his sister yesterday and she was saying how beautiful it is to have this video of him in his element, enjoying his life with a beautiful song playing. The music videos have added another layer and meaning to the art, for sure. They’re very important to me, which is why I don’t put out any old crap. It needs to resonate and it needs to have a soul, just like the music.
Now that the album is out, how do you look back on the process?
I look back on the process as a labour of love. It took a long time to pull everything together and a huge amount of recording, producing, arranging and tweaking to get everything to sit right. The final month was the most intense but now that I look back on it, I see it as being a part of the process that requires an obsessive and fanatical mindset to get it done. I’m glad I put in the time and effort. It now belongs to the world and I hope they enjoy it whilst I move onto my next project.
Distorted Sun is out now. Buy or stream it here.
