Hear ye, hear ye! Roll up, roll up! Welcome to Wheeltappers and Shunters! After an unprecedented seven year break, Clinic, Liverpool's cherished post-punk pop experimentalists return with album number eight. The unusual name is taken from the long-forgotten 1970s ITV variety show The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, compered by Bernard Manning, which recreated the smoky, boozy atmosphere of Northern working men's clubs for a sofa-bound audience."It's been a pisstake thing between us for quite a few years," reveals Ade Blackburn, Clinic spokesman, of the show that the album title references. "Whenever we'd talk about a song sounding too 'cabaret' or too nice, we'd say, 'That's a bit Wheeltappers and Shunters'. This album is neither a celebration nor a denigration of the culture of the era in which Blackburn and his collaborator-in-chief, Hartley, grew up. "It's a satirical take on British culture - high and low," explains Blackburn. "It fascinates me that people look back on the 1970s as the glory days. It's emerged that there was a darker, more perverse side to that time. When you look back on it now it was quite clearly there in mainstream culture."
