“I thought it was fantastic and I very much appreciate being thought
of.”
Martin Clarke has been around for a long time and has watched Perth and
its music industry change and evolve for the better half of the twentieth
century. As the founder of Perth’s first record label Clarion he has been
instrumental in, not only the success of countless local artists including
Johnny Young and The Valentines, but the development of the Perth music
community into a functioning industry. Clarke’s career is a pivotal point
in the founding of the local music industry and for this he was inducted
into the WAM Hall of Fame in 2005.
Born into a musical family, in 1940 Clarke was an avid radio listener,
expressing a keenness for both music and drama. His favourite radio shows
were serial dramas, which he eagerly listened to on a regular basis;
“Australia had some of the finest [dramatic] programs.” Like most of the
inductees from the 60s era, Clarke’s interest and pursuits in the music
industry began by current standards very early, at age twelve he was
already seeking work in radio broadcasting. After expressing his desires
to his mother she promptly recruited the help of a friend, owner of AM
radio stations 6PR and 6PI. Clarke was soon directed to the manager of 6PR
who promised him a job as soon as the pre-adolescent turned fifteen.
Luckily for a young Clarke, he kept to his word three years later, in
1955. Clarke commenced work in the control room of the 6PR radio station,
while continuing his studies at Scotch College; “That was the last school
I went to, and then I went out to work.” With 6PR he was charged with the
responsibility of cueing and playing thirty second, 78-speed vinyl
recordings of hundreds of commercials sent out from Melbourne and Sydney;
“In those days it was quite a different thing to what it is today… the
announcer, or the disc jockeys as you would call them, didn’t play them.
That was our job.”
After a year with 6PR Clarke moved on to 6KY where he worked in the office
and by the time Clarke ended his internship he had already decided he
wanted to build and run his own studio in Perth. He thus set out to save
money and learn as much as he could about radio and recording methods; “An
actual recording studio doesn’t mean just sticking a microphone up and
hoping for the best, though I think sometimes that does work.” Always a
lover of drama, Clarke later began working for the National Playhouse
Theatre where he took part in a number of ‘fine’ productions including
Pygmalion, Cyrano de Bergerac and Aunty Mame.
At the young age of 21, Clarke was already making his dream a reality,
securing the funds and the freehold of an old house on 272 Hay St, East
Perth which he knocked down and replaced, from the ground up, with a
purpose-built recording studio; “The studio was what we call a room within
a room, the ceiling was high, it was 26 feet.” However, it wasn’t until
1966 that the Clarion label was really up and running. Clarke says that it
was simply impossible to set up a label straight away so he was available
for any type of recording; “I wanted to get into recording, not only
music, but everything”; so he did just that, recording choirs, bands and,
of course, his own beloved dramatic programs, one of which was called
‘Deadline Plus Five’, “all the action had to be finished within five
minutes.” What makes Clarke’s accomplishment more incredible is that
during the 60s most recordings, which were played on the less than 150
existent commercial radio stations Australia-wide, were coming out of
Melbourne and Sydney.
In his studio, Clarke had something else which was totally unique, a
Neumann lacquer-cutting lathe he had bought in Germany and is known as the
best vinyl cutting head in the world. This allowed Clarke to oversee the
production of the vinyls themselves, rather than risk the original masters
being destroyed on transference to the factory and giving him total
control of the final sound; “No one in Australia did that, it hadn’t been
done before and hasn’t been done since.”
Specifically, Clarke cites Johnny Young – whom he met at the latter’s
weekly TV show Club 17 on Channel 7 – as his favourite recording artist
and the key to his success; “We just got together and he said he wanted to
make a national hit and branch out, he was very ambitious.” That’s
precisely what the pair did and Clarke, armed with his recordings of
Johnny Young, went to Sydney and secured a deal with Festival Records to
have the Clarion label manufactured and distributed throughout Australia.
Among others, Bon Scott’s original Perth-band The Valentines are also a
band Clarke recorded and views with esteem, “they got off their backsides
and went to the East which was important.”
In its heyday, which lasted almost three decades, Clarion was doing up to
five releases a week. Apart from very occasional recordings with the
symphony, it was mostly players from pubs who recorded on Clarke’s label.
He attributes being at the right place at the right time; “It just
happened that all the talent was in Western Australia at the time…because
the hits that we made weren’t just hits in WA, but hits in every part of
Australia.”
It was Clarke’s success in, not only producing the records he did, but
being able to distribute them nationwide that made Clarke and Clarion’s
contribution to the Perth music industry so important; “Good, bad or
indifferent, it was nice to be able to be the first that really made
successful recordings in Western Australia. People had been making all
sorts of records in Perth, which never saw the light of day. The Clarion
label brought it into the national and even international scope.” Clarke’s
success not only extended to the Australian market, but the international
one also, making trips to the US at least twice a year, for months at a
time promoting Perth-based artists.
In 1989, Clarke felt he had gone as far he could go (“as the song says”).
His mother, the last of his family in Perth, had passed on in 1985 and he
too decided it was time to move on; “the world was changing, as it always
does, and music just keeps moving on.” Having already seen the world
thanks to his success with Clarion, Clarke finally made the decision to
move to England, where he still had family connections, and branch out in
the music business abroad; “There’s nothing wrong with Australia, I love
Australia.”
Currently, Clarke dabbles in publicity in London, and always has his ears
open for new talent; “Just to keep an interest in listening. That’s what
keeps me going.” The Clarion studio was “built to last” and still stands,
although, last Clarke heard it was being used as an office building. As
for his recordings, Clarke recently licensed off the rights to English
label Cherry Red which has released thirty tracks in a retrospective
compilation of Clarion recordings; “So Clarion is still around in the
name, but it’s not running.”
Clarke believes that the period in which Clarion was operational,
especially during the 60s and 70s, was a time when it really happened and
there was always work around for people with talent; “You couldn’t stop
it, it was just happening… that to me was the age. But as far as product
is concerned, I think there are good things still to come.”
