From The Desk Of Clinic’s Ade Blackburn: Swimmer

A lot has changed since Clinic first shell-shocked the scene in the late ’90s with a waxen trio of blitzkrieg EPs, and the many rave reviews and rarefied Radiohead comparisons that followed its earliest albums, 2000’s Internal Wrangler and 2002’s Walking With Thee. Born during those final twilight hours of the music industry’s money-minting heyday, Clinic has defiantly survived the many upheavals and unthinking revolutions that surround the working band in the internet age. Free Reign (Domino) is Clinic’s seventh album, as well as the most focused and singular of the band’s career to date. Frontman Ade Blackburn will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Clinic feature.

Blackburn: Swimmer was a ’90s Britpop band that wasn’t really Britpop at all. Coming out of London, with a strange amalgam of Syd Barrett, Wire and T.Rex, they should have been serious contenders. The essential “Whippings/Boxes” double a-side, should one day be considered a classic but didn’t sell anything at the time. Their music’s not especially difficult or weird but just too clever or tasteful for general consumption in the mid-’90s. Swimmer’s only album Petit Pois fared even worse and caused the band to split. CD copies can still be found dirt cheap.