INTERVIEW: Clint Boon speaks!
Shiiine On blog sat down with keyboard wizard Clint Boon for a good chat about all things to do with Inspiral Carpets, including the bands forthcoming new music, bowl haircuts, Craig Gill and their eagerly anticipated featured slot at Shiiine On 2025!
Shiine On
Hi Clint, how are you and life with Inspiral Carpets at present?
Clint Boon
We did a couple of gigs over the weekend, the Inspirals are doing well. We're sounding great live and we’re working on new music.
SO
How’s the new music coming together?
CB
Yeah. Amazing. We've got probably seven or eight new songs that are pretty much complete. Some of which we've started doing live, but not at every gig. We're just doing a couple of new tunes at each gig, one in the set, one in the encore sort of thing.
SO
Oh, wow.
CB
We're just going to build a stockpile of new music. And at some point, probably early next year, compile an album and get it out. We've got a single in the can that's going to come out later this year.
SO
Wow. How is the new music sounding?
CB
There's quite a lot of diversity with the music we create in our group, I don't think we get a lot of credit for that, but there is. In the first six or seven new songs, the styles are completely different. There's a lot of New Order, Depeche Mode sort of vibes, and then the quirky stuff that were more famous for.
SO
So there’s a bit of a diversion from the previous album that you did on Cherry Red?
CB
There are still elements of that, so some of the darker stuff as I call it. The ‘comeback’ single is called Drag the Bag. You can tell it's us, but it's quite different. It's very quirky.
G
You've played that some of your gigs?
CB
We've been doing Drag the Bag at almost every show this year. It's going down well during the gigs. It is a proper single, a catchy tune. And then the other new tunes are all great as well. So that side of things is looking good, the Inspirals side of everything is nice right now.
SO
I think all the Insprials material has always been a joint effort kind of thing. Is that the same with this new material?
CB
Yeah. We keep it very communal. Usually, it's one person that brings the idea in and that can be in various stages of completion. I've got a little studio set up at home so I'm able to come in with ideas. Kev (Clark) the drummer, brought in a tune that he'd written, a backing track and chord progression sort of thing, and we built a song around that. He didn't do any lyrics for that one; he just created the music. Steve (Holt) put some lyrics on it that he'd written. So, it's very much like that where it’s a team effort. We want to do it as a band. We don't want it to be one guy writing all the songs, which I know a lot of bands do, and that's the norm, but you can end up with an album full of songs that sound like one guy's written them all.
We all bring different things. There's elements of songs that Martyn’s (Walsh) written where I might not have written in that style, but then the keyboards that I've put to Martyn’s songs are some of the best keyboard riffs I've ever done. I'm not saying they're complicated or anything! I'm doing my best for the band and for the record. So, that's our mentality on it, it’s a real band. It's not like, “Me, me, me, me, me!”, we're a team. It's a band. It's a gang. And I think it's one of the things that we've been quite good at over the years. We've always treated it that way. We've always split the royalties five ways. We've always been adamant since day one that we're going to split the songwriting credits and the royalties five ways. I think that's why we had such a generally happy relationship all the way through those 30 years, including with Craig. Craig wasn't a songwriter as such, but he got every penny out of it that the rest of us got. And it meant that we had the happiest drummer in Manchester!
SO
You could always sense that in terms of the formula with the band and how Inspirals played and how you looked also, you could see you were a solid unit. And like you say, there wasn't that one focal point who's the number one, or whatever you want to call it, that kind of thing.
CB
Yeah. That's true. I used to get a lot of attention because of my hairstyle, the electric organ and my name (because people thought it was a stage name!). But yeah, I think it's always quite obvious we're a gang. We've always been like that. We're a very close bunch of people. We are friends outside of the business. I know some bands that just don't get on anymore, and they don't communicate outside of being on stage together. There's quite a few bands that are performing like that these days. I can't think of anything worse to be honest with you.
SO
Yeah, I think it's like me with my nine to five job kind of thing. I've been in jobs before where I've hated it, and I'm fortunate now to be in a job that I really enjoy, and I really love. I wouldn't like to be in a job or relationship with people who I don't enjoy kind of thing.
CB
I know we lost Craig, and Tom left in 2011, but it's still very much a band. We're including Kev in the song writing, it would've been easy for us to just, you know, treat him as a session man but we're including him in the song writing. He's now a five-way writer on our new music. That's what we think is best for the band.
SO
Yeah. It’s great you have included Kev as an equal member of the band. I wanted to take a sideways look at the band. I remember your hair back in like the late eighties. I wanted to ask you a bit about your hair. Who influenced you to have your hair cut back in the day?
CB
Back in the day it was mainly the obvious influences, Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones. The Byrds, The Ramones, and Joanna Lumley (as Purdey)! It was just that classic bowl haircut.
SO
Yeah. I can imagine you walking around and people like, or whatever, not knowing where to look.
C
I had the hairstyle from late ‘83, early ‘84, before I was in the band. I’d walk through Royton, which is where I lived at the time, on my way to my girlfriend’s, she lived at the other side of town. There was a couple of banks at the junction in the town centre. The local lads would stand in the bank doorways at night just smoking and drinking. I remember every night when I'd walk past, they'd be laughing at me, taking the piss, never anything aggressive, just banter sort of thing and then within two years the lads in the doorway had the same haircut, you know what I mean? Those same lads would then recognize me during my early days with the band, so it was quite nice. I think in some ways I did bring that haircut back into fashion, certainly in the Manchester scene.
SO
I think the only other person from the Manchester period who kind of had that haircut, not as similar to yours, was John Squire, he’s always seemed to have that bowl haircut.
CB
His was a bit more unkempt than mine. I used to have to wash and blow dry mine twice a day, especially when we were on tour. It was a pain in the arse because I’d get up in the morning and do my hair and by the time we’d soundcheck it'd be starting to curl. So, it was a very high maintenance hairdo. And then at some point in the mid-nineties, I got rid of it and just went for something more conventional.
SO
I don’t know if you remember there was a guy called Jon Baker who used to play for The Charlatan's on guitar and then funnily enough Craig Gill who had a similar tinge of hair to John Squires, plus your guitarist Graham (Lambert) had huge hair in the 90’s, you all influenced me to grow my hair into a bowl haircut. And then, like you say, a couple years later after everyone had cut their hair short, but then the bowl haircut made a comeback. I'm like, what's going on?
CB
It fed on into the next generation. There's some great pictures of Liam Gallagher with a belting bowlhead. But it's funny, it's like you say, you take influences, and I was harking back to some of my biggest influences, The Byrds particularly.
G
The Seeds?
CB
The Seeds, yeah. All that. The bowl cut served me well. And it's nice that 30 odd years later we're still talking about it!
SO
It’s an iconic haircut, it still looked iconic. There’s a newish band, Smoove and Turrell who have a keyboard player who has that bowl haircut.
CB
He's a good mate of mine, Mike Porter. If you ever talk to him, he'll tell you that’s my haircut! He's based that on mine. He's got the same organ too. He plays a Farfisa. He's a good friend of mine, and he’s the only person that I've ever let stand in for me in the Inspirals.
SO
Really. Wow. I didn't know that.
CB
I started DJing in Newcastle every Friday night back in the mid 90s. I met Mike and the band that he was with at the time. They had a band called The Kustom Built. The Kustom Built with a ‘K’. Mike was a big Inspirals fan who used to write to me in the early 90s. I used to write back, and we became ‘pen-pals’! When I started DJing in Newcastle, he introduced himself. We got to know each other really well, and we became really close friends. We're pretty much family now.
In 2012, my wife Charlie and I lost our baby, Luna. There was an Inspirals gig that we couldn't cancel. We couldn't move it. It was on the night of Luna's funeral. We arranged to get Mike to play in my place. He came to the funeral and shared the day with us, then went off with the rest of the Inspirals and did the gig. He’s the only person that's ever stood in for me. He played at our wedding as well, when me and Charlie got married. He played the organ at the wedding. He's part of our family, so are his band, great band. A great soul band.
SO
That's really cool. I wanted to ask you about Kev as well, about how it felt to continue the band with Kev, because obviously you played with Craig since he was like 14. I’m still devastated that he's not here.
CB
To answer your question, it was profound (losing Craig). That's probably the best word I can pick to describe it, because we lost Craig totally unexpectedly. For years after Craig died, four or five years, we all thought we were never going to work together again. We didn't want to. I kept saying to people, “I can't visualize working with the Inspirals if Craig's not behind us on the kit”. I think we all just settled into that way of thinking. “That's over. It's finished”. And then we got an email in the summer of 2022 saying, “Do you want to go out and tour with the Happy Mondays?”
It didn't mention money whatsoever. It was just “These are the dates we're thinking of”, and it would've been a tour in the spring of 2023. As soon as I read it, I could feel myself coming alive, I could feel the goosebumps and the hairs on my arms standing up. It just literally was like, “Whoa! I can feel it. I can imagine it.” Graham felt the same. Steve felt the same. Martyn was reluctant. He pretty much said, to his credit, “I'm not ready for it but you guys feel free to go on without me”.
SO
Were Martyn and Craig quite close?
CB
Yeah, they were close, we were all close. Martyn lost his father as well recently. His father was poorly at the time when we were getting back together. So, he opted out and he completely gave us his blessing to carry on until he was ready. We made sure that Craig's family were aware of what we were doing and were supportive of it, which they were. So, it was a case of finding a drummer at that point. We all knew a few drummers that were up for it and wanted to try it. Kev was the first one that we auditioned, because Kev had worked with Steve in The Rainkings.
SO
I wondered where the connection came from.
CB
Kev’s got a great reputation in Manchester. He's been in a lot of bands, a lot of great bands. He was in Dub Sex for years. I wasn't really that familiar with him, but he came along to rehearse. I’d say he's a master of his instrument, a scientist even. He understands the maths of drumming. He reads the music, the notation, he knows all that stuff.
SO
I love the videos that he shares. I love hearing the Insprals as a complete band but just hearing him playing I love those kind of things and to see him close up, he’s brilliant.
CB
Kev was a massive fan of Craig’s, his Mum and Dad were massive fans of the Inspirals too. So, he knew our music, the first rehearsal was like, “This man's nailed it. He's absolutely got the gig!”. We were due to audition another friend of mine the night after and it was just like, “There's no point. This fellah's got the gig!”. I'd say the most emotional moments were the first few rehearsals with Kev. We deliberately didn't do it in our regular rehearsal room. There's a place that we've rehearsed at for years and years. It's in an old mill up by a canal in Diggle.
SO
That's not T’Mill where you played with Mani and Chris Goodwin?
CB
No, that's a different mill. There's a lot of mills in this part of the world, and a lot of rock, and roll is based in mills! We didn't want to go back in immediately, because we knew it'd be hard without Craig. It had always been Craig in the corner on the little stage with his kit. So, we had some rehearsals with Kev in a different place completely. And then eventually we moved into the Warth Mill, back into our regular room. That was emotional. Seeing Kev on Craig's stage pretty much playing note for note the beats that Craig had created, was very emotional but quite joyous as well, knowing that we've got our machine out again.
I was overjoyed that we were getting back out there, albeit without Craig. It would've been nice if he was still there, but it still feels like he's here with us. We still talk about him a lot. If it's not in musical sense to do with the songs that we're working on, it's his catchphrases. His humour is still with us. And his music. His spirit as well.
SO
Kev's not as naughty as Craig?
CB
No. Kev is the most sensible member of the band. He definitely is! He doesn't drink. He's younger than us. He is in this weird environment with a load of blokes, some of us 30 odd years older than him!
SO
I interviewed Kev once and you could tell instantly he knew his craft inside out.
CB
His knowledge of music in general is great. It's not just drums either. He can play guitar and bass. We’re still, me, Graham, Martyn and Steve, very much of the punk generation. I've never tried to push myself as a musician. I don't sit and rehearse every day. I play when I need to. If I need to write a song, I'll sit and play my keyboards, or if I need to do gigs, obviously or rehearsals. I don't think we've ever really pushed ourselves as musicians. None of us want to be the best guitarist or the best keyboard player. We don't understand a lot about the theory of music. Sometimes we'll struggle to work out, what a bar is! We always thought a bar was just somewhere to go for a decent drink after a gig or something, but Kev’s like that, “No, that's four bars that, and then, that's a minor there, and then it's a key change!”. We’re like “What’re you on about?!”
SO
Yeah, I get what you’re saying
CB
It’s another massive rock and roll cliché, but having some new blood in the band is refreshing as anything. When we had my son Oscar on bass, when Martyn didn't want to come back, he was only 18 at the time, and he climbed on the tour bus at the beginning of the tour and absolutely smashed it. That year and half with Oscar, for me as a dad, it was lovely. Oscar was at university studying to be a session bassist. That’s been his ambition from being 12 years old. And here he was traveling the world with the Inspirals. He ended up doing Spain, Australia and New Zealand and all that.
SO
He looked amazing on stage with the band. He sounded incredible as well.
CB
Yeah. He's a phenomenal musician. Seeing him and Kev in the band at the same time was funny because them two are on the same wavelength in terms of music knowledge. Then there’s the rest of us, lumbering along the best we can!
SO
Yeah, trying to keep with the young upstarts?
CB
I'm not putting us down. We’re good at what we do. We put on a good show and to still be doing it at this level is special, I mean, you've seen the size of gigs we're doing. And to be putting a new record out soon and probably touring Australia and New Zealand again next year. We’re doing all this 35 years or so after we started our band! It's pretty incredible really. Some days I wake up and I can't believe it. We’re seeing a much younger audience now too.
SO
My 17-year-old son, he's really big into his music, it's great for him to come along and be with me at gigs. I just love that kind of thing, and that it revolves, I just wonder if the Inspirals might be the Indie Rolling Stones or not?
CB
Possibly. Bands do drop by the wayside don't they? We’re still here at the moment. I like that. I do like that. It's all right for us to get old these days, isn't it? I've always said for like 20 or 30 years, since when the Rolling Stones started getting old, it's all right for bands like us to get old too and keep on doing this kind of stuff.
I don't see any end to it yet. The way it's feeling in our camp at the moment, I don't see any end to it. I see it going on. Not every weekend though! People would get sick of us! We’re doing a UK tour at the end of this year, so we probably won't do a UK tour next year. We’ll put an album out at some point in ‘26. I'm happy to do this for the rest of my time alongside the other things I'm doing. Obviously, I don't just want to only do the Inspirals, I dip in and out of other projects and I've always got other things on the back burner as well. But yeah, at the moment I feel like we could have another five or ten years out of this easily.
SO
I look at people like Peter Blake, he's still doing stuff in his 90’s. He’s called an artist. But then I see musicians as being artists as wel.. So, If he's doing stuff in the 90’s, why should the Rolling Stones pack up when they're in the seventies or the eighties or whatever? Yeah. Why should the Inspirals pack up?
CB
Yeah. And we're getting on, we still get on. We enjoy it. I still love climbing onto that tour bus at the beginning of a run gigs. I always bring my own pillow with me! The big sleeper bus with the kitchen in it, a couple of lounges, and our crew. It's a different world. I absolutely love it still, and we're not going away for weeks or months on end these days which makes family life easier.
I think because I had all those years of thinking it's never going to happen again, I treasure it more than ever because this MIGHT be the last time we do it. It's nice when we're on the road, we've got our crew, which at the moment is probably six, maybe seven people. They're all, literally, family and friends that we've worked with for years and years. There's the guy that sells our merch, Dave, I've known him since we were 17. We were bikers together. The team isn’t just the band members, it's the band and the crew. There are no big egos and there’s no drug issues or anything to worry about. It's just joyous.
SO
That's good. I wanted just to jump back just a little bit, I remember you talked about punk influences. I grew up flicking through the likes of Smash Hits magazine, looking at pictures of like Mel and Kim and all these kinds of things at the time when I was like 12 and 13 or whatever. But the thing that that changed was seeing a short clip of The Stone Roses on a show called The Chart Show on ITV, then from there I discovered Inspirals, Happy Mondays etc. that moment changed me as an individual in terms of my music taste and also changed me altogether. Do you remember a specific moment in time where you experienced something similar?
CB
Transitional moments? Yeah, definitely. Some of my earliest memories were seeing the effect that music, pop music or rock and roll music, had on my mum and dad. Seeing my dad watching Tom Jones on the TV the first time he ever appeared on it. The following day, I remember watching my dad and his mate build a shed or a big garage that somebody had given them. They were building it just down the street from where we lived. I would've been five or six. I remember my dad just going on and on and on and on and on about this bloody Tom Jones fellah that had been on TV the night before. The same with The Rolling Stones as well. So, early memories of seeing the effect music had on my mum and dad. And then, later on, I remember hearing David Bowie presenting a one-off show for Radio One, I can't remember what it was called, but it was Bowie playing loads of his favourite records. He played 96 Tears by Question Mark and the Mysterians. It became one of my favourite records of all time.
SO
Wow.
CB
I would've been probably 14 or 15, at this time. I'd grown up wanting to be a pop star but not doing anything about it. Probably knowing it was never going to happen because I never even learned to play an instrument. But then when punk happened, and listening to the stuff that John Peel was playing, it all changed. I was at art college when Punk happened, so I was in exactly the right place to be part of it. I was 17. I saw The Pistols at the Electric Circus in Manchester in December ‘76. That was the Anarchy Tour.
SO
What was that like?
CB
It was like being born but being aware of everything that's going on in the world! Because you don't remember being born, do you! Because you're born and you're just a blob!
SO
Do you remember much of the gig?
CB
I remember Johnny Rotten was really upset about people spitting at him, really just not having it. He was sat on the floor sulking through a lot of the gig, “Stop spitting or we're getting off!”, I remember that. I remember the vibe in the room because it was like the 24-Hour Party People scene where they’re watching the Lesser Free Trade Hall Sex Pistols gig. There was a lot of hippies in the room. There was still a lot of hippies and rockers because it was a rock venue before they started having Punk gigs there. It was a very, very ramshackle place. The owners or the promoters were some of the only people in town that let Punk bands play. Quite open-minded compared to a lot of the other city centre venues at the time.
It was a sticky, smelly place. I always had Newcastle Brown when I was in there. That was my drink of choice at the time. But the Pistols gig, I remember it vividly, that was the night where everything I thought I was going to do with my life just changed in a moment. I'd grown up loving music and wanting to be a musician or a ‘pop star’, as we used to say in the sixties and seventies. But it was never going to happen to kids like me because you'd watch bands on Top of The Pops or The Old Grey Whistle Test, and they were all good musicians, you know what I mean? You never saw a bad bass player or a dodgy drummer. They were all great musicians. So I thought it was never going happen to me. I couldn’t even play an instrument at the time. But seeing the bands that night, The Pistols, The Clash, Buzzcocks and Johnny Thunders Heartbreakers, and seeing the level of (or lack of) musical proficiency, made me see that I could probably do this. And you didn’t need to be a great singer. I thought “I can do that!”
SO
I think that's what it was like seeing like the Roses, Inspirals and the Mondays. You looked like kind of normal people. Not people that have had hours of makeup or whatever.
CB
Yeah, I think a lot of it was that, we didn't look like we were stepping into a costume to be on TV or on stage. Even though to this day we are one of those bands that do change our clothes before we go on stage. I don't know if it's a mod thing or whatever, but we do, even though we look smart through the day! It's just our tradition when it's getting to gig time. We change our shirts, we change our jeans, put better shoes on, we still look smart. I think back in the 70s and 80s it was normal for bands to slip into sequinned outfits or whatever glam stuff was going on at the time.
SO
Talking about band members who look smart, funnily enough Chris Goodwin messaged me last night? He's been writing some material.
CB
I saw that he was producing stuff now. It’s nice to see him experimenting, but I've not heard it yet.
SO
His material is really good.
CB
Chris features prominently in my book. Because we were close friends for a few years.
SO
He was in the Inspirals for a bit wasn’t he?
CB
He had a brief stint. But before I joined. He played drums for the Inspirals for a while before I joined.
SO
Yeah. I think he played maybe one rehearsal for The Stone Roses as well, or something like that.
CB
He did. They had a band called The Waterfront.
SO
When's your book coming out?
CB
It is probably going to be a spring of 2027.
SO
What kind of book is it? Is it an autobiography?
CB
It is autobiographical, but it's just the middle chunk of my life. It's from me seeing the Pistols in ‘76 through to sometime in the 2000’s. I've just got to work out where to end it! Then there'll probably be another book at some point down the line. That'll be the first part of my life, the growing up, my youth and all that.
SO
Amazing.
CB
It's a nice feeling writing. It's quite therapeutic and good for the soul, you know what I mean?
SO
Yeah absolutely. So just fast forward a little bit, just in terms of Shiiine On festival, I think you played the first year of the festival?
CB
I think we did. Actually, the very first event that James O’Mullan (Shiiine On co-creator) ever put on was a Clint Boon Experience gig. There's a really unusual venue called Fort Perch Rock in Merseyside. It was built as a military sort of outpost back in the 1800’s, the gig happened around 1999 or 2000, probably ‘99, James put a gig on there, and he did it under the name ‘Cooking Soup’, and he put my band on. I think it's fair to say he's probably still the biggest Clint Boon Experience fan in the world! He just name drops them every time I talk to him or every time I text him.
I'm glad we're talking about Shiiine On because of all the festivals that I'm aware of, even though it's a mainly indoor festival, if I wasn't in a band, if I was a punter and I wanted to go to a festival, that's the kind of festival I'd want to go to.
You've got your cabin or hotel room on site. In between watching these amazing bands, you can just nip back to your room if you need. The line-up’s always brilliant and some bands that you've not heard of for years and years pop up and play. They're persuaded to come out and get back on stage. It's just pure passion what the Shiiine team do.
SO
Exactly. Yeah.
CB
I think if they just wanted to make bigger money, they could probably do it in a different way. But it's almost like they’re keeping the music alive and they're protecting bands like us. They're protecting our heritage and spreading the word; I do love what they're all about.
SO
Yes I totally agree.
CB
Other festivals do similar things, but that's the one that I've had the most personal experience of. I've been there as a DJ, I played with the Inspirals and it's a great thing Shiiine. I'm really excited to play there again in November.
SO
Are there any bands that you'd like to see?
CB
Jesus and Mary Chain, Ash, I've always liked what Ash do. Cast are brilliant. Unkle, I’ve never seen Unkle live, I wouldn't mind seeing them. And then our friends, The Bluetones. Orbital are always great. Orbital are brilliant to watch. There was a Shiiine On event in Birmingham, about 3 years ago and they headlined it. I’d been DJing earlier in the evening. I was up on the balcony watching them; it was an indoor event. I was stood up just going for it. The security kept coming to make me sit down. I think I might've said, “Do you know who I am?”! I sat down eventually.
But that's what it's all about, Shiine On, it's for people like us, we can still go out and celebrate. I'm not just on about me as a musician. As a fan, it's nice to relive it. Not just the bands you love, but how you want to be as a person. If you want to get off your nut and dance, do it! You know what I mean? Doesn’t matter if you're in your 40s, 50’s or 60’s.
SO
I think I saw you are releasing some vinyl at some gigs?
CB
Yeah, there's a couple of things coming up. So one is that we're playing Kendal Calling on the Friday. We're going to record that set. And we're going back to Kendal on the Sunday to play the Parkland stage, one of the bigger stages. On the Sunday, you'll be able to buy a vinyl version of the recording that we're making on the Friday.
SO
Sounds brilliant.
CB
You can buy that on site, and we'll be there to sign it. Which is pretty good, a 48 hour turnaround on an eight song 12-inch vinyl record!
SO
Will it only be available at the gig, or will it be available afterwards as well?
CB
If they don't all sell out at the gig, we'll probably sell the rest online later. We've got a UK tour at the end of the year. We're doing VIP tickets where you can watch the soundcheck in the afternoon. You'll also get a little goody bag as part of the VIP deal containing an exclusive seven-inch record. A two-sided, seven inch single. And there’ll be an official new single which will be available on the merchandise stand throughout the winter tour and then on general release.
SO
I like things like that because It's unique.
CB
Yeah. All of us in the band are still big vinyl fans. I'm actually looking at some of my records right now. We all still get very excited about the vinyl, the sleeves, the sleeve notes and all that stuff. Also, I think there’s an element of fans wanting to support us and keep things going so we put out these little vinyl gems for them to collect.
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