Generally speaking, we don’t expect dance producers to sing. Presumably, they have all those distracting special guests and blinding light shows because most of them would sound like a walrus having a colonoscopy if they ever dared to step out from behind their towering banks of buttons and wires. Calvin Harris gave it a go in his early days, admittedly, before correctly deciding that the world would be better off hearing Ellie Goulding, Dua Lipa and countless other glamorous stars singing his songs. But if you ever want to hear The Chemical Brothers or Orbital singing you’ll have to join them in the shower.
So maybe it’s unsurprising that St Albans producer Chris Clark has got into his forties, with over two decades of instrumental album releases behind him, before it occurred to him to use his voice. If anything, before now he’d been sinking even further into the background, entering the world of film and TV soundtracks with recent music for Apple TV+’s Julianne Moore vehicle Lisey’s Story and the psychological horror Daniel Isn’t Real. His more piano-based fare is beautiful but well suited to the kind of music-to-revise-to playlists that are designed to be ignored.
