The Clientele

The Butterfly Collectors

Alasdair MacLean and James Hornsey grew up in Hampshire and began working together at school; MacLean noticed Hornsey had written the name of the band Felt on his pencil case. As the Butterfly Collectors from 1991 they recorded an album's worth of material that no label wanted. Innes Phillips, who shared the singing and songwriting, left to found the Relict, and the others re-formed in 1997 and moved to London as the Clientele, with Mark Keen on drums. They recorded singles on Pointy Records, among them "What Goes Up" (June 1998), "Reflections After Jane" (March 1999) and "(I Want You) More Than Ever" (February 2000), collected on Suburban Light (November 2000), and then The Violet Hour (July 2003), the first proper album. MacLean's breathy vocals came partly from singing into a microphone plugged into a guitar amplifier, and his guitar style from classical Spanish guitar lessons; he cites surrealism and symbolist poetry, Soupault, Breton and Aragon, as influences, and described his London as the peripheries.

Strange Geometry (2005) was their first album with a producer and a string section. Mel Draisey joined after a US tour in August 2006, the first woman in the band. God Save the Clientele followed in 2007 (produced by Mark Nevers of Lambchop), Bonfires on the Heath in 2009 and the Minotaur mini-album in 2010. An indefinite hiatus was announced on July 6, 2011, during which MacLean formed Amor de Dias with Lupe Nunez-Fernandez. They played a one-off gig at the Bell House in Brooklyn, announced on March 21, 2014, and returned with Music for the Age of Miracles (September 2017) and I Am Not There Anymore (July 28, 2023, Merge, 63:05, 19 tracks; Metacritic 89). Bandcamp says Spoon and Fleet Foxes cite them as an influence.