United Kingdom
A 30-year-old London-based writer with Liverpudlian roots, I'm the deputy editor at Europe's largest independent culture website The Quietus, and a freelance journalist with bylines for The Guardian, BBC, NME, Rolling Stone, N By Norwegian, Marvin, Yes&No, Metro and DIY, among many others.
My first book, Bedsit Land: The Strange Worlds Of Soft Cell, was published in 2024 by the Manchester University Press. My next book, concerning radical folk music, will be published in 2026.
I've also written biographies for artists signed to labels like Rough Trade, 4AD, Domino, PIAS and Heavenly, and am a corporate copywriter for hire.
In addition, I'm more than happy to offer free advice and mentorship to any aspiring culture writers and journalists to the best of my abilities - don't hesitate to get in touch.
I specialise in (although am by no means limited to) art, culture, politics and opinion. Commission me!
An inspired cast of guests from Nadine Shah to Jim Sclavunos stand in for the late Shane MacGowan in a raucous run-through of the band's debut album and other highlights
No one does it quite like King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: a group of freaky sonic adventurers who’ve moulded success into their own shape and become arguably the biggest cult band on the planet. On 25th (!) album ‘The Silver Cord’, they’re adding yet more unexpected strings to their already-bulging bow.
Patrick Clarke meets Bill Ryder-Jones in his West Kirby studio to discuss how his home town, lockdown and a period of major turmoil informed his new album Iechyd Da
J-pop is riding high in the Western music charts, but when you think about it, Japanese music has been heavily influencing the entire worlds of rock n roll, hip-hop and dance for decades. The Quietus' Patrick Clarke investigates.
Still House Plants speak to Patrick Clarke about growing self-confidence, rethinking the limits of guitar, voice and drums, and taking a “major step forwards” on their third album if i don’t make it, i love u
Having started out playing a twee take on Irish music on a cruise ship, Flynn is determined to fight stereotypes with music that confronts the truth of the capitalist forces ravaging his home city
On the release of a 20th anniversary boxset celebrating The Darkness' extravagant debut album, Patrick Clarke explores a band who married daftness and dedication, found a brilliance in the superficial, and for whom flamboyance was inherent, not an affectation
Having reached a peak of heavy music on last year’s Nature Morte, Montreal’s Big Brave speak to Patrick Clarke about embracing the intensity of quietness on new album A Chaos Of Flowers, and how taking lyrical influence from long-dead poets provided deep political resonance
Patrick Clarke tracks down Martha Skye Murphy to discuss temporal distortion, Cold War aesthetics, and the struggle between revelation and secrecy that defines her debut album UM
Young Fathers stand as one of the most creative, boundaryless bands of their generation. Now, with fourth LP 'Heavy Heavy', they're channelling it into a record that puts human connection at the fore
In their first interview about their fourth album False Lankum, Ian and Daragh Lynch, Radie Peat and Cormac Mac Diarmada speak to Patrick Clarke about Lankum's ever-intensifying extremities, transcendence through music, and their relationship to folk tradition
Across the Mersey from Liverpool, a group of grassroots promoters is trying to avoid that city’s redevelopment errors as they champion a vibrant cultural renewal
It's long been mooted that the fêted producer and The Roots’ lead MC had a stellar collaboration in them. Now 'Cheat Codes' is finally here – and the story is far from over, as Patrick Clarke learns
As Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret turns 40, Patrick Clarke speaks to Marc Almond, Dave Ball, and a number of the other key players who crafted Soft Cell's seedy, sleazy, superlative debut album
Africa Oyé attracts the world’s biggest African artists, inspires local Black musicians and remains free to all. So what next for the community-minded festival that now attracts crowds of 80,000 to Sefton Park?
Kendrick Lamar might not be our saviour, but his headline slot at Glastonbury 2022 is a staggering demonstration of how an embrace of complexity and contradiction can make for an extremely powerful live performance
n air raid siren sounds and bass starts hammering through the subwoofers with convulsive power. The Prodigy arrive on stage and vocalist Maxim clambers atop a speaker stack where he stands statuesque, bathed in strobes. The opening riff of Breathe begins as live guitarist Rob Holliday, in sleeveless leather, starts slinging his instrument around like an out-of-control chainsaw.
The official biography for caroline's much anticipated debut album, by Patrick Clarke
As they return with their first album in a decade, Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala speak to Patrick Clarke about radical reinvention, rage and their roots
Meet the London group reclaiming the radicalism of traditional folk
The New Yorkers have spent 25 years forging the ties that led to new album 'The Other Side of Make-Believe'. It's a union that even a global pandemic couldn't break, finds Patrick Clarke
Kingsley Hall of schriegesang agit prop noisemakers Benefits, puts Patrick Clarke through his paces on a day out in and around his native Teesside
As the band prepare for the release of new album Everything Was Forever, Sea Power's Jan Scott Wilkinson discusses the influence of his "kooky but endearing" family, dropping 'British' from the band's name, and the pros and cons of chaos
Haley Fohr, aka Circuit Des Yeux, tells Patrick Clarke how on her new album -io she drew on deep wells of personal grief and trauma, and emerged with a record of staggering universal scope
Patrick Clarke speaks to a member of notorious Detroit hardcore collective The Armed to discuss the band's cult-like following, how they underwent gruelling bodybuilding diet plans for the sake of art, and how they hope to re-draw the boundaries of hardcore music with new album ULTRAPOP
The official biography for Dry Cleaning's UK Top 5 debut album 'New Long Leg', by Patrick Clarke
Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn have soundtracked divided Britain, in furious, down-and-dirty style, for almost a decade. New album 'Spare Ribs' is their best work yet, reports Patrick Clarke
The artist's latest punctuates intense and dark examinations of contemporary masculinity with moments of breathtaking beauty
Music Words by Patrick Clarke Photography by Tom Oxley The scene is El Paso airport, the year is 2019. British rockers The Vaccines have just wrapped up sessions for their bold fifth record, Back In Love City, a joyous, intense and emotional fortnight spent immersed in the Texan desert before going their separate ways around the world.
On his new album The Ascension, Sufjan Stevens has abandoned his trademark intricacy and found the power in platitudes. He speaks to Patrick Clarke about the making of his "crippling" new LP
The official biography for audiobooks' forthcoming album 'Astro Tough', by Patrick Clarke
New Rough Trade signings caroline speak to Patrick Clarke about how they went from roots in choral music, Appalachian folk and post-punk to creating extraordinarily atmospheric longform pieces
When Mike Skinner reunited The Streets, he could've cashed his cheque and quit. Instead, he's got a mixtape, album and film on the way. We meet the certified legend who's still pushing things forward. "I don't really hang out anywhere these days, to be honest," Mike Skinner deadpans as he sits, a little restlessly, in a busy, hipsterfied Brick Lane coffee shop.
Heavy duo Divide And Dissolve aim to destroy white supremacy through overwhelmingly intense music. They speak to Patrick Clarke about ideology, Indigineity, and inevitable backlash
Toots And The Maytals were not just one of reggae's pioneers; they essentially gave the genre its name. Their 1968 single 'Do The Reggay' is widely credited with popularising the term worldwide.
In the thirtieth entry of 'The Red Hand Files', where Nick Cave answers questions from his fans, he responded to an enquiry as to how his wife Susie was doing, four years after the couple's teenage son was killed in a tragic accident.
Sharhabil Ahmed, the pioneering Sudanese musician and subject of an essential new Habibi Funk compilation, speaks to Patrick Clarke about his long and storied career, from performing for Haile Selassie to being crowned The King of Sudanese Jazz.
On the cover of his fifth album as Perfume Genius, Mike Hadreas stands topless, his toned and rugged physique bathed in dramatic monochrome. In other takes from the shoot he's splayed over a Harley Davidson, or wielding a thick, heavy sledgehammer or a hunting knife, his face muddied with the dirt of hard, manly graft.
One's a stalwart of the scene, the punk poet of the people - the bard of Salford. One's the eloquent singer of Ireland's most literary-minded young chart-botherers. We'll leave them to it...
As they release their fifteenth album Future Teenage Cave Artists, Deerhoof take Patrick Clarke on a freewheeling ride through ten highlights from their career, from doing laundry halfway through a gig to the remote island school that set a ballet to their music
All photos by Jim Newberry Jeff Parker's new album Suite For Max Brown (which placed yesterday at number five in tQ's top 100 albums of 2020 so far), is beautiful. A mixture of sample-based instrumental hip hop, masterly improvisational jazz and astonishingly deft songwriting, taken as a whole it skips from style to style so smoothly that it defies easy categorisation, instead creating something entirely its own.
Photo by Yoshiaki Miura "There's a balance between the brutal stuff and the beautiful bits," Jack Barnett told tQ when asked about These New Puritans' plans for tonight's one-off Barbican show 'The Blue Door'.
Secret Machines have returned with first new music in over a decade. Check out 'Talos' Corpse' below, along with our interview with frontman Brandon Curtis. The cult space-rock band band released three albums together before they split in 2010, a period in which they found fans in the likes of David Bowie, Muse and U2 as well as attracting much critical acclaim.
Photo by Zac Mahrouche Sinead O'Brien's first musical memory is of her mother's Ford Puma. "She'd drive us to school every day and the only tapes she had were The Beach Boys and Vivaldi," she says, sat calmly in a cranny of a hectic Soho pub.
"I kind of like art that is disastrous for the artist," says Dan Bejar. "It's exciting to watch somebody really go for it and come up with something that's interesting but still incredibly flawed."
"I'm just from a different can of worms. I can't relate to people who just write vanilla stuff." This week sees Natalie Mering release her fourth album as Weyes Blood - the colossally ambitious, varied and forward thinking record 'Titanic Rising', driven by a diverse range of inspirations from Enya to The Kinks, from surrealism to 90s movies.
This Sunday, musician Paul Purgas presents a documentary on the extraordinary and overlooked electronic music produced by the students of India's National Institute Of Design in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He speaks to Patrick Clarke about his discoveries
With new album Walk It Dry premiering exclusively below, Sly & The Family Drone leader Matt Cargill tells Patrick Clarke about the traumatic road accident and subsequent recovery that preceded their formidable new record, and the challenges of experimental musicianship during a pandemic
Producer Dan Carey, whose Speedy Wunderground label launched the careers of Squid, Black Midi, Black Country, New Road and more speaks to Patrick Clarke. Plus, the premiere of the next entry in the label's new 'Quarantine Series', feat. Warmduscher's Clam Baker.
tQ finds Baxter Dury in his flat, the windows of its broad, expansive living room offering a calming view of the Thames and Hammersmith Bridge. He's a warm and mellow host, impeccable at small talk and blessed with a sharp, deadpan, often self-deprecating wit.
This week, the brilliant Bill Callahan releases his long-awaited new album 'Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest'. He speaks to Patrick Clarke about the love, loss, birth and death that informed his new record
NME meets the misfits behind a defiant DIY scene that's shaking things up on Merseyside
Photos by Chris Almeida Alabaster DePlume blends in well among the pleasant clutter of the Total Refreshment Centre in Dalston, the beloved creative hub and studio space from which he's worked for the last five years.
Aussie punks Amyl and the Sniffers leave a trail of sweaty carnage wherever they go. We meet the band in Hamburg and try to keep up...
Coral Rose has spent lockdown sifting through the 30 to 40 hours' worth of recordings she's amassed over the last few years. "I've been editing a lot more but writing a lot less," she says on the phone from her shared home in North London when we speak in April.
The rapper has hit the headlines almost as much for his mental health as his music this year, but what's really going on?
Coronavirus-enforced isolation (we speak to the band's five members via Zoom) has been the only real break for Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs in a relentless period of touring and recording since 2017's blistering debut album Feed The Rats.
Pink Industry live at Eric's On July 19 1984 The Mighty Wah! were the opening act on Top Of The Pops. They performed 'Come Back', then at number 28 amid a five-week stint in the Top 40, with bristling energy, a look of frenzy in their eyes and the kind of swagger imbued not just by a band, but by an entire city at its creative peak.
Twenty years on from the arrests of 100 Egyptian metal fans, across a series of interviews across the Middle East Patrick Clarke speaks to metal musicians about their defiance to keep the genre thriving, despite risks of imprisonment, torture, and in some cases, execution.
Photo by Duncan Stafford The narrative surrounding Fat White Family has usually concerned frontman Lias Saoudi and guitarist Saul Adamczewski. They have been considered the central creative partnership of the group, a flawed, frayed and fractious partnership, but central nonetheless.
I get the impression Bradford Cox is a little bit sick of being interviewed about the new Deerhunter record. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia and he's a night owl, so that makes it easier to organise a load of European phone interviews, but tQ is apparently quite far down the queue.
When Janelle Monáe released ' Dirty Computer ' this April, she staked her claim to be the year's most vital pop star. With its accompanying tour, she has strengthened that position. The first of her two dates at London's Roundhouse is both joyous and vital.
For a historic town of less than 200,000 people, Trondheim has a musical calendar that puts cities twenty times its size to shame. Pstereo sits alongside the SXSW-esque Trondheim Calling in February, Trondheim Jazz Festival and the grassroots one-dayer Bakkefestivalen in May, Trondheim Rocks in June (which this year featured Iron Maiden), while the century-old cultural institution UKA (Norway's biggest festival) takes over the whole of October every second year.
Photo by the author It's one of those days where everything's going right, apart from a rail replacement bus from Falmouth. It gets me to Truro just in time for my connection to Plymouth, and the strange man who keeps staring at me and waggling a bottle of wine with a grin gets off before I change onto the final train to London.
Following the slew of allegations made against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, millions of women have been taking to social media to share their own stories of sexual harassment and abuse under the hashtag #MeToo. But sexual abuse is not just a women’s issue and, in response, men have begun sharing pledges to take responsibility under the hashtag #HowIWillChange. Here, freelance journalist Patrick Clarke explains the lessons men can learn from the movement – and how he plans to change...
Ahead of a night dedicated to the label as part of Berlin's Find The File festival, Alan Bishop, one of the founders of Sublime Frequencies, picks ten points of entry into the crucial label's extraordinary back catalogue of sounds from across the globe
Recent reports that streaming is now the 'biggest money-maker' for the music biz have prompted hyperbolic claims that Spotify and co have 'saved the music industry'. In reality, this could not be further from the truth.
Photo by Andrea Gunar That the team behind Carnaval De Bahidorá got their hands on Las Estacas is something of a miracle. It is not just a beautiful site, in the way that Green Man or Festival No.6 are set in beautiful sites, it is a staggeringly pretty place.
With a show at London's Under The Bridge on 5 April, Michael Rother of Neu!, Harmonia, and a newly-boxsetted solo career takes Patrick Clarke through his life in 13 records, from Little Richard to Fuck Buttons, even though he doesn't really listen to music any more
"I'm three and a half pints away from pneumonia," says Adrian Flanagan as I meet him off the train in Sheffield. He's come down with the flu, but hides it well behind his fisherman's hat, dark glasses and coat.
The Manics' five million selling fifth album is still derided by some hardcore fans to this day, which is a shame, says Patrick Clarke, as it remains their most coherent and effective political statement to date
Roses prove to be perennial favourites with greatest hits
In a set that both creates a wonderful new world and re-ignites material from a decades-long career, Björk continues to push forwards and upwards
Le 23 Août dernier, les mythiques The KLF revenaient après un silence de 23 ans avec un happening horsnome. S'aggisait-il d'un come-back foireux? D'un rite païen? Ou de la plus géniale entourloupe de l'histoire de la pop? Notre reporter y était...
The Manic Street Preachers thought they might never make another album again, then along came Resistance Is Futile. Patrick Clarke meets Nicky Wire to discuss a record that's either the start of a great new era or the end of it all
Django Django were on ruthless form during the creation of new album Marble Skies, cutting tracks that were good enough to be hits all for the sake of flow. The result, they tell Patrick Clarke, is their finest record to date.
All photos by Rowan Allen The O2 Arena is the venue for the last of Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds' five UK dates. Such has the reception been to his sets across the rest of the country by the time it comes round - breathless, clamouring effusions of praise, "the best show I've ever seen him do" etc.
Buzzcocks' Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle plus manager Richard Boon speak to Patrick Clarke about the unintentional genius of their landmark debut
When Confidence Man arrived last year, surfing a tidal wave of glistening bangers, it was as if they were a band conjured in some kind of perfect-pop laboratory. They are fronted by Sugar Bones, a muscular hunk in hotpants, and Janet Planet, a woman in a custom baby-doll dress, who perform manic synchronised dances on stage, and backed by two mysterious musicians in black veils (Clarence McGuffrie and Reggie Goodchild).
It's taken over 15 years of constant work for Harrison to release an album that's truly and solely his own, however and IN // PARALLEL is be his debut LP as simply 'Dhani Harrison'.
At Liverpool Music Week 2017, Patrick Clarke looks at the past, present and potentially grim future of a city whose music scene is caught in the flux of gentrification.
There have been many farewells from the more interesting stalwarts of the last decade of the UK indie scene of late, many of whom have played a farewell tour like Wild Beasts'. Take The Maccabees, for example, who ended their run with three consecutive dates at Alexandra Palace.
Radiohead's headline spot was a set of ups and downs, or so our man-on-the-ground Patrick Clarke believed. But the outside world did not agree - so when is a disappointment actually a triumph?
From Herbie Hancock's darkest depths to Brian Eno's anxiety-relieving light, Sean Lennon guides Patrick Clarke through thirteen records that changed his life
As Ray Davies prepares for the launch of the next phase of his colossal Americana project, Patrick Clarke speaks to the Kinks frontman on America, Britain, and why he's never voted.
The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu have begun their chaotic return. Our man on the ground Patrick Clarke reports back from day one of Liverpool: Welcome To The Dark Ages
The Government's recent review of business rates will almost certainly put grassroots and independent venues across the country out of business. Patrick Clarke speaks to venue owners to explore the very serious repercussions.
As The Moonlandingz prepare for the launch of their debut album, Patrick Clarke tracks down Valhalladale's finest to the depths of the Yorkshire moors to talk fact, fiction, and the end of the world