Hamish Kilgour (1957 - 2022)

The Clean were my Ramones. Their album Vehicle, my Rocket to Russia. 13 tracks, only two of which exceed three minutes. The Ramones were from Queens and so was my mom which meant they could never be that cool. I was politically, intellectually, and affectationally internationalist. The Clean were not just from New Zealand, but from the South Island. I didn’t know what that meant, but it sure sounded more alluring than Forest Hills. Sometimes engaging the unfamiliar is the only way to determine what you're about.

 

Vehicle was released in 1990, just as I was settling in to my first real band, playing shows in Chicago and writing, writing, writing songs. I tried to make them sound like Mission of Burma, Alex Chilton, Elvis Costello, Eleventh Dream Day, Lou Reed. And I tried to make them sound like the Clean. The Clean’s were open-hooded affairs. When their motor hummed, you could see the pistons pump and the belts turn. There’s no subterfuge in those songs. They tell you how they work while they work. And work they do. Their strumminess shouldn’t be confused for jangliness. If jangle originates with the Byrds, the kind of strum employed by the Clean started with the Velvets. Pumping downward through layers of silt with purpose: cleansing purpose, constructive purpose.

 

The downward stroke, of course, was provided by Hamish on the snare. He played unconventionally without crossing his hands, left on the hi-hat, right on the snare. He was, in that sense, more open to his audience; open and available. All the obits for Hamish talk about the America bands influenced by the Clean. My band was one of those. We studied those songs. We covered them. They were deceptively simple. But their straight-aheadness wasn’t so straight: a little skip in the rhythm, a crucial creak in the voice, a plaited seventh dropped into an otherwise unperturbed chord. From the Clean we learned how to make the simple not so simple.

 

While Hamish’s brother, David, was a kind of suburban-basement Ray Davies, keening and careening through single-bore melodies, Hamish, as a singer, offered a counterpoint: breezy and vulnerable, sometimes barely there. On the driving “Diamond Shine,” his vocals sound like the echo of someone else’s vocals for some other song. Hamish was handsome, but he still gave off the feeling of someone who’d rather you didn’t notice him. He just wanted to make songs, clean songs; Clean songs. He played in other bands too: most notably the Great Unwashed (get it?) and The Mad Scene. But he’ll forever be remembered for the Clean and what they did for New Zealand music, for American music, for indie music, for kids who just wanted to make songs.