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Rod Clements is best known as the co-founder of
Lindisfarne and the author of such songs as "Meet Me on the Corner" and "Road to Kingdom Come." As a bassist and singer, he has played with artists and groups as different as
Ralph McTell,
Peter Hammill, and
Pentangle. Born
Roderick Parry Clements in 1947 in North Shields, England, he was an only child, and grew up in a household in which neither parent was especially active musically, though his mother played the piano. His father was a huge fan of classical music, however, and saw to it that the younger
Clements attended numerous concerts. From an early age, he showed an ability to pick up a tune, even on a child's plastic saxophone, and play it. He reached his teens in 1960, as the first wave of home-grown rock & roll in England was about to crest, and gravitated toward the guitar -- he got his first six-string acoustic at age 13, and at 15 briefly took piano lessons at school. His initial inspiration to play music came from the guitar instrumentals of
Duane Eddy and
the Shadows, among others. He also discovered, in the course of singing hymns at services, that he had an innate ability to harmonize a difficult melody.
Those rock instrumentals, in turn, led him to the bass -- as he explained in an interview with
Tom Cunningham that appears on
Clements' own web page, he was always fascinated by the single-string melodies of many of those instrumentals such as
the Shadows' "F.B.I.," which often tended toward the bass strings on the guitar. He also became much more comfortable with and intrigued by the bass parts of the songs played by the various bands with which he sat in, and discovered that his childhood knack for harmonizing transferred very well to his playing on the four-string instrument. Faced with an immediate future as a relatively undistinguished guitar player or a potentially talented bassist, he chose the latter.
There was also a certain consistency in his preferences -- he played in bands with vocalists, of course, but he reserved his admiration for the likes of
Bert Jansch,
Davy Graham, and
John Renbourn, instrumentalists all.
Clements attended university at the insistence of his parents but he devoted most of his energy during those three years to music, and especially to a band initially called the Downtown Faction Blues Band, later shortened to Downtown Faction. Originally known as the Cyclones and then the Wombats, the group had something of a floating lineup --
Clements moved in and out of membership as his time allowed --
Ray Laidlaw,
Ray Jackson, and
Clements' longtime friend
Simon Cowe passed through as well. The group evolved into the Brethren, with
Clements,
Jackson,
Cowe,
Laidlaw, and Jeff Sadler. During this same period,
Clements took up the violin, inspired in part by
Fairport Convention and the album
Liege & Lief -- this fit in perfectly with the Brethren's switch from blues to folk music.
It was at a gig at a folk club that the band crossed paths with
Alan Hull, a guitarist/singer, who joined up soon after and replaced Sadler on guitar. The group changed its name to
Lindisfarne -- which literally means "holy island" -- soon after.
Hull and
Clements dominated the band's songwriting,
Hull writing most of the original numbers and generating the hits "Lady Eleanor" and "Fog on the Tyne," while
Clements provided "Meet Me on the Corner" -- the latter often compared favorably to the classic songs of
Bob Dylan -- and "Road to Kingdom Come," among other songs. Even during this period, in which the bandmembers were presumably working well together,
Clements worked on the occasional outside project, and he and
Jackson both ended up playing on
Fool's Mate, the debut solo album of guitarist
Peter Hammill (who was signed to the same label, Charisma).
The group split up in 1973, amid internal acrimony and management pressures, with the core Downtown Faction originals
Clements,
Cowe, and
Laidlaw going off to form
Jack the Lad in partnership with
Clements' old friend
Billy Mitchell --
Clements only stayed for the group's self-titled debut album, contributing four songs in the process. Rather than attach himself to another group,
Clements chose to try establishing himself as a freelance musician in his own right, and he played on some pretty impressive recordings during this period, including
Ralph McTell's hit version of "Streets of London." By 1978, however,
Clements and the entire original lineup were back together in
Lindisfarne, which began a highly successful second phase of its existence.
Clements lasted with his group into the start of the 21st century, along the way playing with such luminaries as
Mark Knopfler,
Michael Chapman,
Bert Jansch, and briefly joining
Jansch and co-founder
Jacqui McShee in a latter-day lineup of
the Pentangle. In 2000,
Clements released his debut solo album,
Stamping Ground, featuring a dozen original songs authored or co-authored by him, with veteran roots rocker
Sid Griffin included among the musicians, on the Market Square label. He followed it up with One Track Mind on the Resurgent label, a year later. Thanks to his association with
Lindisfarne, and "Meet Me on the Corner" and his other songs, he remains a much-loved music star in England, especially in the group's native Newcastle. ~ Bruce Eder