Anne Clark
A poet and spoken-word artist from South London who sets her writing over electronic music, whose "Sleeper in Metropolis" became a club record in Berlin and Chicago and has stayed in her sets for four decades.
Croydon and the poetry circuit
Anne Charlotte Clark was born on May 14, 1960 in South London, to an Irish mother and a father of Scottish and Welsh heritage. She left school at 16 and worked at Bonaparte Records in Bromley as punk emerged. She persuaded the Warehouse Theatre in Croydon to host punk and new-wave acts and worked there unpaid for nearly two years. Early writing appeared in fanzines including Zigzag and Paul Weller's Riot Stories, and from 1979 she performed poetry at Richard Strange's Club Futura nights.
The Spoken Word Archive holds five of her London poetry gigs from November 1982 to November 1983, at the Adams Arms, the Roebuck and the Battersea Arts Centre's Write On festival, and calls her a pioneer of the spoken-word music genre. Early on she performed with A Cruel Memory.
Records
The Sitting Room (Red Flame, 1982) was her debut, and Changing Places (Red Flame, 15 July 1983 by Wikipedia) split the work between David Harrow's electronics on side one and the guitarist Vini Reilly of the Durutti Column on side two. Joined Up Writing (1984) and the single "Our Darkness", which reached number 24 in Germany, came next, then Pressure Points (10 Records, 1985, produced with John Foxx, number 35 in Germany) and Hopeless Cases (1987, number 52). A live album, R.S.V.P., came out in 1988.
She lived in Norway for about three years from around 1987, then made Unstill Life (1991), The Law Is an Anagram of Wealth (1993), Psychometry (1994, live at the Passionskirche in Berlin) and To Love and Be Loved (1995). Wordprocessing: The Remix Project (1997) reached number 51 in Germany and Just After Sunset (1998) set Rilke with Martyn Bates. She worked with Blank and Jones on "The Hardest Heart" (2002, number 22 in Germany) and their 2003 mix "Sleeper in Metropolis 3000" (number 38). The Smallest Acts of Kindness came out in 2008 and she founded After Hours Productions in 2010.
Since 2010
A Baudelaire audiobook with Murat Parlak, Die künstlichen Paradiese, won the Deutscher Hörbuchpreis in 2012. She toured acoustic with Parlak and the cellist Jann Michael Engel in 2015, played Gothic Meets Klassik at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig in 2015 and again on October 27, 2019, and made Homage with Thomas Rückoldt in 2018. The documentary I'll Walk Out Into Tomorrow, directed by Claus Withopf, followed in 2018. Borderland, recorded at Stockfisch with Justin Ciuche on violin and Ulla van Daelen on cello, came out on August 17, 2022.
Setlist.fm has 359 setlists from 1981 to 2025, the latest at Death Disco in Athens on September 21, 2025. Fact magazine in 2014 listed "Our Darkness" among the 20 best industrial and EBM records, calling it an influential proto-house record, and Dark Entries reissued it on March 27, 2026 with an extended "Sleeper in Metropolis". She names Tangerine Dream, Roxy Music, David Bowie and Giorgio Moroder as influences.
Albums
- Changing Places 1983 · Red Flame
Her second album, with David Harrow's electronics on one side and Vini Reilly's guitar on the other.
Songs
- Sleeper in Metropolis Changing Places · 1983
The Changing Places track that became her signature club record, here in a live version.
Sources
- Anne Clark (poet), Wikipedia
- Biography, Anne Clark
- Anne Clark, Spoken Word Archive
- Anne Clark interview, El Garaje de Frank