ONCE upon a summertime, there was a bittersweet Nottingham band called Sunhouse.
Midlands movie auteur Shane Meadows loved them, regularly appropriating Gavin Clark's melancholia for his blue-collar melodramas, but sadly Sunhouse faded away.
Clark bonded with Red Snapper's Ali Friend and Ted Barnes from Beth Orton's band to form Clayhill, and Meadows still loves him, using Clayhill's Northern Soul in the short film of the same title and Afterlight on his Dead Man's Shoes soundtrack. Both elegiac tracks re-emerge on Small Circle, Clayhill's first full-length release after last February's lovely introductory sampler.
Clayhill are as soulful, woody and acoustic as Beth Orton at her most mournful but they are also grizzled and blissed out like the sadly departed Beta Band.
Don't let the sun go down on Clark again.
Updated: 10:23 Thursday, January 13, 2005
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