Four flowers drift across an off-white field without stems, leaves, soil, vase, title, artist name, or any other explanation. Their outlines are loose and uneven. Red, orange, magenta, and white areas overlap imperfectly, leaving stains and secondary shapes where one layer has slipped beneath another. One flower is cut off by the left edge, another by the right, and a red patch enters from the upper corner like paint spreading from a neighboring image. The cover looks clean from across the room and increasingly unwashed as one approaches it.
That visual contradiction introduces the record perfectly. The Clean had become the Great Unwashed, but the change was neither a descent into ugliness nor an aggressive rejection of beauty. The flowers remain bright, simple, and immediately lovable. What has changed is the treatment of their edges. Registration is loose, surfaces show pressure, and no attempt has been made to conceal the physical process that placed color upon paper.
Clean Out of Our Minds extends the joke until the joke becomes philosophy. The Clean are supposedly cleaning something out, yet what must be removed is the mind itself. Thought, expectation, professionalism, ambition, reputation, and the burden of deciding what a successful band ought to do next are all invited to leave. The resulting music is not mindless. It is music trying to get beneath the layer of consciousness that begins correcting an idea before the idea has finished appearing.
The Clean had achieved something few New Zealand underground groups could have expected at the beginning of the 1980s. “Tally Ho!” had entered the national charts, Boodle Boodle Boodle remained there for months, and a newly established label had discovered that records made far from the recognized centers of the music business could travel widely. Success should have confirmed the path ahead. Instead, it produced uncertainty.
Hamish Kilgour later described feeling an increasing responsibility toward the audience and toward his own ideals. Popularity made every next action appear heavier. The band that had created excitement by acting before permission now faced the pressure of becoming a public version of itself. The Great Unwashed was a way to step sideways before that version hardened.
Robert Scott’s absence changes the internal physics immediately. The Clean’s classic trio generated extraordinary propulsion from Scott’s melodic bass, Hamish’s loose but urgent drumming, and David’s guitar moving between riff, drone, jangle, and damaged lead. On Clean Out of Our Minds, the Kilgour brothers must invent whatever ensemble each song requires. They pass instruments between themselves, work alone when necessary, and accept that a home four-track cannot reproduce the Clean’s live chemistry.
Instead of treating that limitation as a deficiency, they construct another kind of band. Parts feel discovered in sequence rather than negotiated simultaneously. A guitar may establish the room, then bass enters as a later thought, percussion appears as a practical solution, and a voice arrives without pushing the other elements aside. The brothers are not documenting a stable lineup. They are assembling temporary populations.
“Hello Is Ray There?” opens with one of the most ordinary questions imaginable. It belongs to a telephone call, doorway, workplace, shared house, pub, or message relayed through whoever happened to answer. Yet the song does not identify Ray, explain why he is being sought, or establish whether he will ever arrive. An album has begun by asking for someone who is absent.
This makes the listener resemble the person holding the receiver. We have entered a conversation without knowing its history and must decide whether the question is practical, comic, worried, or metaphysical. Is Ray merely in another room? Has he moved away? Is he avoiding the caller? Has something happened that nobody knows how to state directly?
The brief music preserves that uncertainty. It sounds less like a formal opening statement than a fragment overheard while passing a room. Most bands begin an album by announcing who they are. The Great Unwashed begin by looking for somebody else.
“Meanwhile” is an equally peculiar title because it is not normally a complete thought. Meanwhile, something occurs elsewhere. The word joins parallel scenes, allowing a story to leave one group of characters and reveal what another has been doing during the same interval. Here the second scene appears without the first. The song is all elsewhere.
That is one of the record’s characteristic pleasures. It feels filled with music happening beside other music we cannot hear. A melody sounds as though it began before the tape started. A lyric appears after the event that would have explained it. Songs finish while their worlds continue. The four-track does not capture an entire reality. It opens small holes through which portions become audible.
“Small Girl” reduces scale without reducing significance. The title could be affectionate, observational, protective, or a memory of someone whose physical smallness made the surrounding world enormous. Childhood enlarges rooms, adults, trees, roads, distances, noises, and ordinary dangers. The cover’s flowers have a related directness, shapes simple enough to seem childlike while their overlaps reveal adult uncertainty.
The song’s size is part of its meaning. It does not demand that the figure become representative of youth, innocence, femininity, or loss. She is allowed to remain small, a presence held briefly inside two minutes. The record repeatedly refuses the idea that importance must be demonstrated through enlargement.
“Thru’ the Trees” begins from what Hamish remembered as an excellent Christchurch day and the thought that people can experience difficulty, pick themselves up, and keep moving. That origin matters because the resulting optimism is not delivered as motivational instruction. It passes through trees, light, weather, and motion rather than standing on a platform to announce resilience.
Moving through trees differs from looking at a forest from a distance. Branches interrupt vision. Light arrives in changing fragments. The destination may remain hidden even while forward movement continues. The song suggests that carrying on need not require complete knowledge of where the path leads. Sometimes movement is the knowledge available.
The abbreviated “Thru’” suits the home-recorded method. Language is shortened to the form required for passage. Nothing ornamental is allowed to block the route. The apostrophe is a tiny stump left where letters were removed.
“Yesterday Was” leaves its sentence unfinished. Yesterday was what? Better, worse, real, lost, ordinary, unbearable? Grammar expects a description, but the song offers only the completed existence of the past. Yesterday was. Today is the place from which that fact can be stated, and tomorrow will reduce today to the same two-word condition.
This incomplete phrase captures how memory often appears before interpretation. A room, face, weather pattern, or sound returns with great clarity while its meaning remains unavailable. The event insists that it occurred without explaining why it continues to matter.
The Great Unwashed’s home recording intensifies this sensation because tape is memory made mechanical. It preserves vibration after the room has stopped producing it. Playback allows yesterday to become temporarily present, but never restores the people who occupied that moment to their earlier selves. The brothers hear the song after recording it and are already listening to people they have ceased to be.
“Toadstool Blues” steps into damp psychedelic undergrowth. A toadstool can be harmless, poisonous, hallucinogenic, fairy architecture, decaying matter’s companion, or simply a fungus whose common name carries more narrative than its biology requires. “Blues” brings another inherited form into the forest, but the song has none of the heavy-handed authenticity through which musicians sometimes prove they have earned the word.
The title instead makes sadness organic and slightly ridiculous. The blues has grown beneath a tree after rain. It has no commercial ambitions, no concern for genre correctness, and no need to separate melancholy from spores, dreams, jokes, or rot. Decay becomes productive because fungi break down what has finished living and redistribute its material.
The Great Unwashed performs comparable work upon the remains of the Clean’s first life. The brothers do not throw away the pop instinct, repetition, drone, or economical songcraft. They allow those materials to decompose into something softer and stranger, then grow new forms from them.
Track seven is commonly called “Untitled,” but the master-tape paperwork reveals “Can You Hear Me?” The name vanished from the artwork by mistake, and the group liked the omission enough to preserve it. This may be the most perfect accident anywhere on the album. A song asking whether it can be heard loses the written information required to identify it.
Communication occurs, but its address has been erased. The listener hears the track while being told, through the sleeve’s silence, that nothing is there. The omission makes the question active across every later pressing and digital file. Can you hear me even when nobody tells you my name?
The episode also captures the Great Unwashed aesthetic better than any declaration could. A professional production process would correct the artwork, restore the title, and make every element agree. The brothers recognize that the mistake has generated a relationship between form and meaning more interesting than accuracy. Error becomes authorship after someone decides not to remove it.
“What You Should Be Now” introduces the pressure from which the project appears to have retreated. “Should” is the voice of expectation, arriving from parents, friends, audiences, critics, institutions, former selves, and imagined futures. It compares the person who exists with another person who was supposed to have appeared by this point.
For the Kilgours in 1983, that question had a public version. What should the Clean be now that people were watching? Should they tour more, record more professionally, become career musicians, represent Dunedin, satisfy Flying Nun’s growing audience, or repeat the qualities that had made the early records successful?
The Great Unwashed answers by declining the grammar. Rather than becoming what they should be, the brothers become something whose name advertises social disapproval. “The great unwashed” historically refers to ordinary masses viewed from above as dirty, uncultivated, and insufficiently refined. Adopting the phrase turns insult into population. The band no longer has to remain clean enough for inspection.
“It’s A Day” was one of the songs Hamish remembered catching spontaneously while the idea remained fresh. The title refuses to declare the day exceptional. It is not the best day, last day, judgment day, or day everything changed. It is a day, one unit among thousands, sufficient by virtue of having arrived.
That modesty is central to the record. A song does not need to justify its existence by documenting a major event. The fact that a melody occurred in a room may be enough. Recording is an act of attention through which an ordinary day receives a small durable body.
Four-track technology encourages this intimacy. Setting up an expensive studio session creates pressure to arrive with material worthy of the clock. A machine at home permits the song to be captured before its maker knows whether it deserves preservation. The distinction between composition and experiment becomes pleasantly weak.
“Hold On to the Rail” brings danger and support into the same object. A rail exists because movement, height, stairs, trains, ships, platforms, bridges, or unstable footing has made falling possible. Holding it does not stop the journey. It allows the body to continue while acknowledging vulnerability.
The phrase also resembles practical advice offered during a period of rapid change. The Clean’s first rush had moved faster than its members could comfortably organize. The Great Unwashed does not leave the vehicle completely. It finds a rail and changes posture.
Musically, the album’s repetition often functions as that rail. Patterns remain simple enough to grasp while voices, reversed guitar, percussion, and imperfect synchronization alter the scenery. The listener is not given polish, but is given something to hold.
“What You’re Thinking Now” approaches the impossible desire to know another mind at the exact instant thought occurs. Conversation always arrives slightly late. A person experiences something internally, translates it into language, decides what can be admitted, speaks, and is interpreted through another person’s history. By the time thought becomes public, it has already changed.
Brothers may possess unusual confidence that they understand one another, especially after years of shared rooms, records, jokes, arguments, family history, and musical work. Yet familiarity does not remove privacy. Playing every instrument between two people can create remarkable closeness while revealing how much remains inaccessible.
The album’s quiet vocals reinforce this boundary. Words are often audible without becoming fully exposed. The listener must lean inward, but proximity does not guarantee possession. The voice can share a room while keeping part of itself behind a wall.
“Obscurity Blues” is the project’s hidden manifesto. Obscurity would normally be the condition an ambitious band seeks to escape. The Clean had escaped it enough to discover that recognition creates its own discomfort. The Great Unwashed turns obscurity into a musical form, but not through bitterness at being ignored. It sounds closer to relief.
To choose obscurity after receiving attention differs from never having been noticed. It becomes a temporary clearing where experimentation can occur without every gesture being measured against a public identity. The brothers can make skeletal songs, mix vocals too low, leave accidents intact, and construct an LP that feels closer to correspondence than product.
The title contains another joke. Blues traditionally gives suffering a public form. Obscurity Blues makes a public song about the wish to escape public consequence. The act of recording contradicts complete disappearance. They want the freedom of invisibility while still sending the evidence outward.
Flying Nun itself lived inside this contradiction. The label made remote, inexpensive, locally particular music available beyond its immediate surroundings, thereby creating the attention that could alter the conditions under which such music was made. Success provided resources and connection while threatening to turn an accidental culture into a recognizable style.
Clean Out of Our Minds resists becoming a standard of “the Dunedin sound” even though it would later contribute to how listeners imagined New Zealand independent music. It is too acoustic, hesitant, psychedelic, domestic, and internally varied to function as a neat genre specimen. Its importance comes partly from declining to sound important.
“Quickstep” is the album’s longest piece and the one whose construction Hamish described in greatest detail. The brothers spent an afternoon experimenting with backward guitar, while the lyric gathered images from walking home late at night through Dunedin. A picture theatre and newspapers moving around the walker’s feet become fragments of a city experienced after ordinary public activity has receded.
A quickstep is a dance, but walking alone at night produces another form of choreography. The body adjusts to pavement, wind, passing cars, shadows, paper, shop windows, uncertain figures, and the private rhythm of thought. The city becomes partner and observer.
Backward guitar makes memory audible as disobedient time. The sound possesses a peculiar inhaling shape because its natural decay has been reversed into approach. What should fade instead gathers toward impact. This is how a remembered walk can behave years later. Minor details become stronger while the destination disappears.
Hamish noted that the song’s two narrative sections originally had endings, but both were accidentally cut off on the record. The low vocal mix further hides the story, although he joked that it becomes clearer on headphones. Once again, technical failure strengthens the subject. A late-night walk is preserved through incomplete testimony, words partially buried beneath the atmosphere they were meant to describe.
The album closes with “What Happened Ray?” The person sought in the first track has not merely failed to answer. Something has happened. The telephone question has become concern, rumor, accusation, or bewilderment.
No explanation follows. Ray remains outside the record, defined through the questions others ask about him. The first song wants contact; the last wants history. Between them lie the ordinary days, trees, thoughts, rails, fungi, memories, and obscure streets through which a person may quietly disappear from one version of life.
The bookending gives the album more structure than its casual surface initially reveals. “Hello Is Ray There?” opens a door, and “What Happened Ray?” returns to discover the room empty. Every song between them can be heard as possible evidence, although none solves the mystery.
Ray may not need to be one literal person. He can represent the Clean, the absent bassist, the earlier self, the missing part of a friendship, or anybody whose presence once seemed stable enough that nobody thought to record an explanation. What happened? Success happened. Exhaustion happened. Time happened. Another band happened.
The four flowers on the sleeve now resemble four attempts to print the same simple life. Each possesses roughly the same shape, but color, position, outline, and relation to the page differ. One remains mostly white, one magenta, one red, and another partly obscured by overlapping ink. Repetition has produced individuals rather than copies.
That is also the Kilgour brothers’ great subject. A few chords, a beat, a voice, a small organ figure, or a guitar line can be repeated endlessly without becoming identical because the people playing them are moving through time. Looseness is not the absence of discipline. It is the space within discipline where life remains visible.
Later generations would turn bedroom recording into an international aesthetic, and bands such as Guided by Voices would demonstrate how fragments, fidelity shifts, and miniature songs could imply enormous imaginary catalogues. Clean Out of Our Minds already understands that a home recording need not apologize for failing to become a studio recording. Its apparent incompletion can be the precise form in which the idea remains alive.
The album does not sound poor. It sounds close to the moment of decision. One can almost sense the brothers choosing whether another part is necessary, whether a mistake should remain, whether the voice is loud enough, and whether the song has said everything it knows despite lasting ninety seconds.
Professional production often conceals these decisions by making the completed object appear inevitable. Here the seams remain, and every seam tells us that the song could have become something else. Listening means standing near the branching point.
The Great Unwashed lasted only briefly, then changed personnel, became louder, and disappeared. The Clean eventually returned, proving that stepping away had not destroyed the earlier bond. This record survives between identities, neither the final Clean statement nor the beginning of a stable new career.
That in-between quality is its durable freedom. It does not know it will become an archival classic, a collector’s object, an influence, or one half of a later compilation. It behaves like two brothers at their mother’s house trying to find out what remains after expectation has been cleaned from the room.
The answer is fourteen small songs, one of which lost its name and became more itself because of the loss.
Can you hear me?
Yes, but not cleanly.
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