No one casts a bigger shadow over pop music than Clint Boon. This has less to do with his former band Inspiral Carpets' wistfully charming songs than Clint's enormous mushroom cloud of a bowl cut, a preposterous barnet that once loomed so ominously that passers-by would dive for nuclear shelters.
The Carpets are long gone now, and for his solo re-emergence it seems Boon is attempting a sort of reverse Samson effect. He's almost shorn, as if to prove that along with surviving without the band (notably the soaring baritone of their vocalist, Tom Hingley) he can do without the hair. Still, for spiritual support as well as for old time's sake, he's still wearing the sort of appalling, loud red shirt that will presumably attract the attentions of anti-vivisectionists.
In many respects, Clint is a man liberated. Where in the Inspirals he'd sit sidestage behind his tremendous organ (a sort of Ray Manzarek figure, only on Lemsip), he is now one of pop's few keyboard-playing frontmen, the possessor of a fine voice that almost rivals Hingley's. He's also unveiling a talent as a raconteur. His backchat with the crowd (some of whom chant "Boon Army!", others "Where's your mushroom?"), becomes an appealing sideshow to the main event. Complete with organ festooned with fairy lights, a cardboard cut-out of Clint and a disco ball hanging from what appears to be a coat hanger, you almost expect Eric Morecambe to appear behind him doing a silly dance.
In bizarre, rambling introductions, Boon displays an almost fetishistic reverence for the word "tune", and yet he's right. These are tunes rather than songs, spiralling, spiffing melodies that sound like something between Scott Walker and Telstar by The Tornados. It's very, very cheesy (underlined when the bass player produces a Kodak and asks the crowd to say "Cheeeeese!") but also oddly moving. Somewhere, beneath those ocean waves of organic sound, Boon has rediscovered pop's dewy-eyed innocence, all but lost in the mass-marketing era. If there's a sting in the tail it's in the lyrics of "choons" like You Can't Keep a Good Man Down, which suggest that the post- Inspirals years have not been without struggle.
Where Boon can go with all this is anyone's guess, but there's a TFI Friday appearance this week and with the pier-end psychedelic White No Sugar he might just have a hit. If all else fails, he can always dig out the old barnet. Infinitely wisely, he keeps it at home, in a box.
