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Anne Clark was born in Croydon, South London on May 14th 1960 to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. She left school at sixteen. The constraints of her school education however couldn't quash her voracious appetite for music, books,an inquisitiveness and practical need to be involved with the world around her.
She took a number of jobs including working as a care assistant in a psychiatric hospital and then taking a job at Bonaparte Records, a local independent record store and label.This indeed was good timing! The punk rock scene was just about to explode into life in London. With her need for communication and disregard of formal institutions, along with so many people at the time, punk led the way to a whole new approach for dealing with music, arts, society itself.At that time anything and everything seemed possible.
Next door to Bonapartes was the Warehouse Theatre, another independent venture that was constantly under threat of closure due to lack of finances. For 18 months Anne went to them with the idea of putting on shows/acts that were emerging from the punk and new wave scene. Not only bands like The Damned, Siouxsie and The Banshees and Generation X were part of the local scene but there were numerous theatre, comedy,poetry and dance projects filtering through. At first the theatre bosses were terrified of having leather clad, pierced punk rockers swarming over the Warehouse but eventually they conceded and Anne worked as an unpaid administrator there for almost 2 years - selling out nights at the theatre featuring acts such as Paul Weller, Linton Kwesi-Johnson, French & Saunders, The Durutti Column, Ben Watt etc etc...
All the while Anne was experimenting with music and text and made her own debut performance at Richard Strange's Cabaret Futura in London along with Depeche Mode. She was also co-editing Paul Weller's Riot Stories publishing company which the Jam front man had set up to promote the work of young writers who were otherwise going ignored by the mainstream publishing houses. As a result of this the publishers Faber collected an anthology of young writers work and issued it under the title Hard Lines which went on to be re-pressed 3 times.
Anne was also involved in a number of television projects including programmes for the BBC and a film for Channel 4, Sketch For Someone, which she wrote the script for and which contained contributions from Patrik Fitzgerald and The Durutti Column.
Anne's songwriting experiments came to fruition with the release of her first album The Sitting Room in 1982. This featured collaborations with Dominic Appleton, latterly of This Mortal Coil and Breathless.
During her time at the Warehouse Anne met David Harrow, co-writer on her second album Changing Places in 1983, Joined Up Writing in 1984 and Hopeless Cases in 1987. Anne and David's curiosity with keyboards, synths and samplers led them to create songs and sounds that would provide blueprints for the electronic music of the 80s and 90s - Sleeper In Metropolis........Our Darkness...
Never putting limits on her means of expression Anne also experimented with very different sounds, exploring many musical styles, from jazz to folk to classical. These elements play an even greater role in Anne's work today.
The popularity of Anne's work grew and grew in Europe and North America whilst the ideals that had seemed so strong in England either just faded away or were bought out by the multi-national globalisation of the music scene. Europe still (just about!!) manages to maintain a music audience that is not dictated to by the media and where there is room and consideration given to EVERY kind of music.
1985 saw the release of Pressure Points and a collaboration with John Foxx, the founder of Ultravox. In 1986 she began working and writing with classically trained pianist Charlie Morgan and as well as joining her on her first US tour he also co-wrote material for the Hopeless Cases album (1987).
1988 saw the release of Anne 's first live album RSVP.
At the end of 1987 Anne moved to Norway which was to be her home for 3 years. The move to Scandinavia opened up further experiments with sound and music and she began working with Norwegian musicians Tov Ramstad and Ida Baalsrud. Along with Charlie Morgan the album Unstill Life was released in 1991.
Projects begun in 1982 with Charlie had to be suspended in the Spring when he became unwell. By the Summer it was discovered Charlie was suffering from Cancer and in the Autumn it became clear that his illness was terminal and Charlie died in December 1992 aged just 36.
Months of re-assessment and change saw the recording and release of The Law Is An Anagram Of Wealth in 1993. As well as furthering her collaboration with Tov Ramstad, Anne began working with Paul Downing, Martyn Bates and Andy Bell.
With all the many co-writers, the various styles and experiments that have occured during her career, something immediately recognisable and consistent lies at the centre of Anne's work - a uniqueness present in every project which, whilst making Anne never completely acceptable to the mainstream music industry, offers a wholly original artist to the most important element of her work - her audience. An audience from all over the world, from all ages and all backgrounds. This is surely the most important task of an artist - to bring people closer together.
With the collapse of communisim Anne's worked reached an even wider audience. People had followed her career for years via smuggled tapes and distant radio broadcasts in East Germany, Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania. Now her texts are used by students in these countries studying English.
In 1994 Anne decided to take the risk of touring with a purely acoustic band and the successful result of this can be heard on the live recording Psychometry made at the Passionskirche in Berlin in that year.
In 1995 she released To Love And Be Loved, another magical blending of electronics and acoustics featuring collaborations with Martyn Bates, Paul Downing, Andy Bell and Chris Elliot.
At the end of 1996 a number of bands, producers and djs made a document of Anne's material as a tribute to the influence her work has had on so many musicians fro the mid 80s to the present day. Re-mixes of cult tracks such as Our Darkness, Sleeper In Metropolis, Wallies and Virtuality were compiled and released as Word-processing.
In 1998 Anne returned once again to the acoustic and folk/classical influences that have become increasingly important to her expression and, much to the disdain of the major record labels, but the acclaim of her audience and critics alike, she released Just After Sunset - a collaboration with Martyn Bates featuring translations of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.
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Recognized in America for the 1987 modern rock radio curio "Hope Road," Anne Clark's contributions to the alternative genre are often ignored; or perhaps she's too obscure to receive the proper credit. Clark made her debut in 1982 with the album The Sitting Room. A poetic songwriter and gifted pianist, Clark gained a devout legion of fans during the '80s, although commercial success was never within reach. Because of her experiments with both dance music and more elaborate orchestral pieces, Clark won the approval of club denizens and indie purists. However, "Hope Road" was the closest she came to a pop hit. The track is often resurrected by modern rock radio DJs who want to break the monotony of Top 40 new wave on flashback programs, but it doesn't truly reflect Clark's personal, idiosyncratic body of work. In 1994, Beehive released The Best of Anne Clark, a retrospective that, oddly enough, didn't include "Hope Road."
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