Dunedin’s David Kilgour has a music career longer than a pro basketballer’s arm. At a guess 90% of you know his backstory, so I’m not going to write it her, just google ‘David Kilgour Clean Dunedin’, and you’ll see he’s been one of the most influential songwriters to come out of Dunedin.
David Kilgour has been creating critically acclaimed beautiful guitar drives pop since featuring at the birth of the 'Dunedin sound', and this new song sounds as fresh as it’s come from a group of young indie pop stars determined to make their mark.
Kilgour continues to ride a wave of musical brilliance.
The video for Smoke You Right Out Of Here was posted to YouTube by Merge records on July 18 and cracked nearly 3000 views in 12 days. One of the great things about social media (conversely it’s also it’s the greatest downfall) is the ability for people to comment on posts. My favourite comment on Kilgour’s newest 2:48 slab of brilliance is “Love it! Every time I hear a David Kilgour song I feel happy! Just pre-ordered the new album”. - Jesse Welbes.
Smoke You Right Out Of Here is David Kilgour and the Heavy Eights in fine form. It has been captured beautifully by southern audio stalwart and long time pal of Kilgour’s, Tex Houston, along with Tom Bell at Port Chalmers Recording Services. If the rest of the album, coming from Merge Records on September 20th, is even a third as good as this tune, it’ll be a killer LP.
The video for this track is beautiful and spectacular; opening and closing with black and white slow motion shots of waves breaking. There are montage shots of cars traveling, nature close ups, and a bunch of post-production trickery on a couple of cinematic sequences of skylines. It’s a very pretty video, for a dreamy pop tune.
One thing's for sure - I'm looking forward to the album.
"I change my mind every day about most things and this LP was certainly a result of that way of thinking."
David Kilgour's been changing his mind for a long time, and who can argue with the results? His first band The Clean changed the face of rock music when they kick-started New Zealand’s pop underground in the early 80s. His records — 'The Far Now' is album number six — are monuments to good old-fashioned song craft tinged with a becoming modesty. If you hunger for gorgeous melodies that’ll never make you sick, singing that puts across an emotion without hitting you over the head with it, and guitar playing whose effortless eloquence and virtuosity doesn’t make you want to fine him for playing too many notes, Kilgour’s your man. If you’re looking for a man in single-minded pursuit of rock and roll success, well, that’s another story; he loves music, but he loves life more, and while that attitude hasn’t put his face on too many billboards, it’s probably got a lot to do with why he’s still making records after 25 years.
In the late 70s a teenaged David traded in his surfboard for a guitar. Inspired in equal measures by the punk rock explosion and their Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Velvet Underground, and Beach Boys records, he and his older brother Hamish started The Clean. After a couple years of unstable line-ups and sketchy gigs (I know one guy who first saw them at a Sunday afternoon youth concert sponsored by the Dunedin police department) the brothers hooked up with bassist Robert Scott (later of The Bats) and got terrifyingly good. 'Tally Ho', their first single, sold thousands in their native New Zealand without the benefit of commercial airplay. But after a couple years that yielded some brilliant homemade EPs and concerts that people still talk about, David got sick of the pressure of being a guitar hero and quit to be a painter. Or something. He’s carried on in an episodic way ever since, fronting some bands (Stephen, Pop Art Toasters) and backing up his friends in others (Snapper, Yo La Tengo), starting and stopping The Clean, and pursuing a solo career.