With his new band Yama Rama, Charlie Clark is promising to deliver a sound that’s the unlikely love-child of Fleetwood Mac and the Jesus and Mary Chain.
But while the band’s first single to drop, ‘Influencers Must Die’, with its buzzing 90s indie guitar roots is hardcore evidence that a love of rocking out is always going to be close to Charlie’s heart, the single is not, overall, typical of the band’s ‘Mac influenced direction of travel.
Earlier this year, Clark signed with new management, and grabbed a record deal with Bubblebrain Records, and one might reasonably assume that the Astrid man is working his way back to the forefront of Scottish alternative music. With the release of an earworm of a first single that’s munching up its fair share of the airwaves, that’s pretty much confirmed.
But those local to Clark’s Isle of Lewis roots will know that Yama Rama has risen phoenix-like from the ashes of a horrid year-to-forget for the Hebridean.
Just six months ago, Clark’s world was suddenly thrown into a much darker and unstable phase in its orbit when the new festival he and his business partners had planned for Stornoway went bust just days before it was due to kick off.
A few days back, breaking a six-month silence on social media, Charlie Clark briefly posted about the personal impacts he’d suffered from such a ‘public failure’. But the real point of that post was to spread word about the arrival of Yama Rama, and their debut single. It was clear that Clark’s now digging deep, and writing and recording songs of real personal rawness and poignancy. For Charlie Clark, it matters.
On a bitterly cold day, with an orange sun far off in the south, struggling to break the horizon, I caught up with Charlie and talked all things Yama Rama, Fleetwood Mac, his struggles with addiction and recovery, and the highs and lows of the year that’s passing…
itm?: How did Yama Rama start, where did the name come from?
Charlie Clark: This was less of a kind of set out project, and more of a necessity for my own health. This is all I’ve ever done, and always before, in the face of adversity, I’d either thrown myself into songwriting or into a bottle. So I had two options, and I chose the first, the songwriting, and when I felt comfortable that I had 30 minutes of material that I was happy with, I booked a tour.
I’m 44 years old now, and the life that I’ve had has not been normal by any means, and I thought it’s really time to write about it.
With the name, I’ll be totally honest about it, it’s a dumb name. It’s a stupid name, and it’s fun to hear people say it because the music’s quite heavy and dark, so I wanted to take a little bit away from that. But also, I felt that when I went through all that, a part of me kind of died. I don’t know what it was, but something changed within me.
The festival falling apart was really difficult because of the community that we live in and, despite what people think I’m not that confident. I’m quite a sensitive person. I’m in recovery, and I don’t have the mental health to deal with a community that can be quite vitriolic at times about things. So, it was really difficult to live here, and exist in the community. I suppose I had to go away and do what it is I’ve always done. I’ve never measured music by success. It’s a necessity. It’s always been that for me. so that’s one side of it.
itm?: What’s the significance of the name, it has a definite kind of spiritual leaning to it?
CC: Yama is the Hindu god of death and justice, the Lord of death, and Rama is a holy man, like Ram Dass. I take a a lot of my daily teachings from people like that – Maharishi and Ram Dass – and I’m quite fascinated by the philosophy of East.
I’ve put a lot of those elements into the artwork, they’re in the songs already, but there are those elements in artwork of the band, and there’s some symbolic stuff underneath it all.
itm?: You’re not holding back on the song titles of the band’s first single, with its A-side, ‘Influencers Must Die’.
CC: I was so honestly in such a funk, man, I just needed to have fun as well, and I found the song quite funny to write because, there’s no nastiness in it, it’s just like, when you pick up the paper, or go on your laptop or pick up your phone, and you see someone and you’re just like f**k off and die! But I didn’t want people to be fooled that, like, it’s this harder-edged thing, or some kind of social commentary, which it’s not.
It’s the first Yama Rama single because it shows where we can take it to, if need at some point, we can rock out. But this band is about space and dynamics.
Between May and August I wrote all the songs, and in August I went on tour…Bubble Brain Records offered me a record deal, and the single came out on 23 November.
On the way back from that tour, I met these guys, Christopher Johnston and Shuggy McKay, from Stone Dead Studios in Glasgow, and they offered to do a session for me. I did three songs, and I really love those guys.
I was feeling a bit morose at the time we met, and I said let’s do it at the Glasgow Necropolis, and we went up there with a harmonica and a guitar and we filmed the session.
They were playing in a band called Stone Dead John, and I checked them out and they were like this psychedelic blues band, and when I say “blues” I mean like Peter Green [founder of the original Fleetwood Mac]. I’m talking a blues band but with fuzz and space and that’s exactly what I needed. We had one rehearsal and I was like, these are my guys, and it’s kind of ever expanding now because we’re really excited about recording the next single, and there are other people that I want to bring in from my own past.
I’ve written a duet, and I know my Stevie Nicks is out there! I’ve worked with her before {but won’t confirm the name] – I just need to know if she’s going to be up for doing it! I feel like it’s a natural step for this project.
I’ve been told the band sound like Fleetwood Mac, so I’m kind of putting everything into that. I’m so into it, but it’s unintentional, I mean, there’s so much more sonic stuff going on – if the Jesus and Mary Chain and Fleetwood Mac had a baby, this is what it would be like. But yeah, that’s what folks are saying, and so f**k it, you know what? I’m going to go full Mac! We’re doing the kind of early ‘Albatross’ groundwork just now, and then we’ll hit ‘Rumours’ in a year or so!
itm?: And what about B-side ‘Drunk As Fuck’? That sounds so different from the A-side, almost musically at a right angle to it…
CC: It was written by a friend of mine, Matthew Teardrop. I asked Matt would it be okay if I recorded it. I tried to play that song back in 2012, and I couldn’t sing it. I couldn’t sing it. I had to live it to sing it, and that’s the whole point. I’ve done it all – the jail cells, the booze, I’ve done it all, and that’s why I sang that song.
I was in Los Angeles for 10 years and I was playing in bands that had this sound and I was writing with writers that had this kind of like spacious desert feel, you know, the west coast kind of haunting beauty, kind of thing going on. That’s one of the reasons I chose ‘Drunk As Fuck’ because Matt Teardrop became a huge part of my community, and he became a huge songwriter, and I became part of a community of amazing songwriters. I was part of a really amazing thing, and it’s taken me until now to realise how special it was, and it passed everybody by in Stornoway, and that’s just the way it’s been.
itm?: You sing the song as though it’s your own, confessional statement…
CC: I feel like the gloves are off for me as artist. I just had to die and come back as an authentic artist, and that meant being prepared to go to places that are not comfortable for me. It’s not particularly comfortable for me talking about this stuff, but I’ve done a lot of work on. I’ve done a lot of work on myself, and I still feel like I’ve got so much more work to do.
So, since May I’ve been totally kind of doing this weird isolation thing, and going really deep. It’s just like, all the things that you used to do that were bad for you, you replace them with things that hopefully kind of engage you in making better decisions, and becoming wiser.
As difficult as it, I really want folk to know that there’s a positive message there, you know, and one of the journalists that reviewed a gig down in London recently really put it perfectly because they said that everybody was together in that room, and it’s like no matter how bad things are, see for the next couple of hours. we’re all going to be okay. We’re going to go through it together – and has not music always has been so?
itm?: Is putting this kind of personal music out there about cataloguing a road you’ve been down, or are you putting it out there so that you have to live it, and let it pull you into a future you want?
CC: You can’t walk the walk without backing it up, and I think that’s the thing.
I suppose I’ve always tried to hit the emotion of the solo record, ‘A Bridge To Your Idol’, I did last year. I actually wrote that during the death of my father as opposed to afterwards. I wrote it in the run-up to his death, and the video was made up of the final footage from the last month of his life.
I’m more fascinated by what’s in front of me and tangible, like people and emotions and feelings, and you can’t get the good without the bad. It’s all dependent on how we process and come through the other side. I’ve certainly had enough experience in my life where you know you go down one path and there’s only one way it’s going to end. For me that means, despite how difficult things or challenging life is, I’ve had learn that the only thing I can control is myself. I guess, I’m someone that needs to throw that addiction into something else.
It took me going to a completely different country and opening my eyes up and seeing that ‘West Coast Man’ [of Scotland] might not have the best mentality. I had to deprogram every aspect of my upbringing to be able to be okay with myself.
I’ve used the term “The Dark Night of the Soul” in my music, and I’ve referred to that term on two records. When that happens to you, in yogic terms, you basically stop what you’re doing. You meditate, you fast, you remove all social media, phones, anything like that, and you start looking inside, rather than outside.
As kooky as that sounds, and as weird as it sounds, it works because I’m sitting here talking to you and I’m not six feet under. I always tell my friends I’m doing pretty good for a dead guy.
Yama Rama’s debut single ‘Influencers Must Die’ is out now via Bubblebrain Records – more at www.yamaramamusic.com.
- Charlie Clark - 8 December 2023