A collection of songs recorded between 1994 and 2016 (with three non original songs omitted)Chasing Shadows was written about the 1999 eclipse and the celebrations for the Millennium. It also celebrates life between two rivers, and when I perform it nowadays I replace “…from Crouch to Blackwater” with “from the Severn to the Wye. WYSIWYG stands for ‘What you see is what you get’ and the instrumentation was inspired by listening to the Boo Radleys. Mathematics is a song about making the most of life and calculating what to do with whatever precious time you still have. After Summer  was a reworking of the song After Supper, recorded for a Saint FM competition. June 4th was written by Greavesy about the Tienneman Square events in China and I was challenged to record a version of it. Between the Lines Remix was as it says a remix of the love song on CMC8, with added vocals and harmonica. The Wicked Gate is a forest fantasy, a sort of Forest of Dean meets The Blair Witch Project. The Darkling Thrush puts to music the well-known poem by Thomas Hardy which tells the story of an optimistic thrush looking at the world during a period of bleak winter. Big Issue draws on imagery and words from Streets of London but basically tells the story of the 2010 street riots from the viewpoint of a homeless rioter, although the harmonica at the end of the song is meant to represent a police siren. What About Something? Is another song about the choices that we can make according to the opportunities that life deals out to us. Water Doesn’t Hurt explores the elements of Air, Fire, Earth and Water and how they can do us both good and harm. The Ballad of the Plump Hill Miners tells the story of Westburybrook Iron Mine (aka Edgehills mine) and the victims who lost their lives their during the tenure of mine manager William Henry Merdland Phillips, who lived in the very house that we now occupy. Frying Chicken Wings is a spoof version of Westlife’s Flying Without Wings, inspired by a dreadful case of campylobacter which put me and three friends out of action after a curry meal in a Burnham restaurant. Nowhere as Grand and Disassociation were originally put on this recording as two bonus live tracks – the former is a homage to the Forest of Dean and the latter is a reworking of the last part of Caravan’s ‘Nine Feet Underground’ with a folky alternative ending. These were performed and recorded live in 2016 at Mitcheldean Festival. They are now placed on CMC 13 (see below)

The Clint Mann Collection: Volume 10 SHADOWS AND FOREST

A TRAP OF ANAGRAMS  With a combination of instruments and multi-tracking devices, along with the opportunities created by DJ media mix features, I experimented with a number of purely instrumental recordings, which have the advantage of the absence of tuneless vocals. These range from guitar duets (Cottam Picking features Andy Cottam, folk style tunes with mandolin or guitars (Downtown, Manndolins and Betablockers), discordant and wild prog style guitar thrash (Aracheter, Plonking, Philip the Gap), mellow guitar reflections (Jangling, The Twin Towers – composed on the settee when I came home from school to witness the 9/11 destruction in the USA), keyboard tone poems (Intervalude), mix tracks a la Techno (Fear of Flying, Twang) and Marshlands, a fourteen minute extended guitar/harmonica tune about the imagined death, at the hands of the secret services, of a Polish girl, her boyfriend and her family off the southern sandbanks of the River Crouch).

The Clint Mann Collection  Volume 9: A Trap of Anagrams

At the time of writing, the ‘Window for the World’ collection is a work in progress; a number of new tunes and songs have been recorded but are yet to be put onto CD. Nonetheless the last five years have been musically an exciting time. The songs have explored the history of and life within the Forest of Dean, whilst other songs have celebrated Gloucestershire culture. But perhaps most importantly my most recent music has reflected the harm that is happening to our world, one in which where our politicians are falling to heed calls to protect the environment and reduce the amount of plastic waste in our oceans. It seems so sad that thirty or so years on from the optimism that came with the demolition of the Berlin Wall, we have now entered a decade in which industrial greed, curtailment of civil freedoms and rights, oppression (both deliberate and subconscious) of black and ethnic minorities, and growth of population and pursuit of capital gain seem to be the primary goals of heads of state who increasingly employ the methods used by dictators and oligarchs.  Chinese Whispers echoes the way in which attempts to control the outbreak of coronavirus have been confused, misleading and knee-jerk responses to another danger which threatens us all. Happy Days!

The Clint Mann Collection  Volume 13: WINDOW FOR THE WORLD

Interview with Pauline Hallanzy on the occasion of the St Peter's High School 50th anniversary events

FEATURE Pauline Hallanzy - Clint Mann - St Peters 50th.WAV

This song combines a reflection of the consequences of warfare for the people of Afghanistan and Ukraine with the titles of 50 or so songs and albums which form the lyrics. You might like to listen and guess which ones you recognize but here below are the lyrics:

Refugees in transit on the road of bones
Searching for an exodus from a game of thrones.
Exile on a main street, exit just in sight
The fearless must endure a hard day’s night.

Living in a glass house on the eve of wars
Human desperado, clutching at straws.
Night spent in absentia, too late for the sky;
Days of future passed, ready to die.

Too late registration, doomsday afternoon,
Living in the past upon the dark side of the moon.
So here come the warm jets, brothers in arms
Ranks of Eden louder than the bombs

The power and the glory, the end of innocence,
There’s a riot going on, things stop making sense,
In a downward spiral, lost in search of space,
Rock bottom where the hand cannot erase.

MPs talk of queues and cures with images and words,
Hot rats, midnight vultures – evil nightbirds.
We’ll talk about it later – you can dig me out
Meddle in a foxtrot roundabout

In a misplaced childhood, many nursery crimes,
Car wheels on a gravel road, sign of the times,
False romantic warrior stirs a bitches brew;
Violator turns a baby blue.

Pawn hearts of betrayal, each a talking head,
Blind faith that all things must pass when the queen is dead.
Once progressive forces see their passion play:
On the road to nowhere, in a silent way.

Window for the World

Progressive Forces

This song tells the story about the 1932 Kinder Trespass and appeals for the right to roam freely in the UK countryside. Listen out for the instrumental fight sequence in the middle section. This is a first draft version of a song whose recording is still to be finalised.

A Right to Roam

Close to Hadrian’s Wall once stood a sycamore tree that was probably about 200 years old and a prominent feature on the landscape. I first saw this when walking the Pennine Way in 1978 and became increasingly aware of how it became loved by so many – people communed there for feasts, sheltered under its branches and even made proposals of marriage. In 2016 it was voted “Britain’s Favourite Tree”. Sadly on 26th September 2023 it was chopped down by persons unknown; the incident is still being investigated. Many expressed outrage and sorrow but from its remains there derives some hope. The stump has been preserved and seeds taken from the tree’s remains have now germinated into small saplings in a secret Devonshire laboratory. It is thus hoped that some time in the future a new tree will grow in the same location, cultivated from the remains of the parent tree.
Living in the Forest of Dean one bears witness to the changing landscape with the planting, felling and regrowth of trees. 2023 marked the passing of the great Dick Brice, and a community of his friends, family and fellow musicians have endeavoured to preserve his legacy and keep alive his wonderful music. I felt that in one sense the story of The Sycamore symbolised something of this process: a community’s sadness for an untimely loss, creative preservation and hope for the future. A kind of family tree.

THE SYCAMORE

First raw single track phone recording of a new song to be edited and worked on over the coming weeks.

The Wheel of Fortune.m4a

The Wheel of Fortune Take 2 for laptop WAV

Remix of live  performance at Jolter on 28th June

THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE Remix.mp3

The title track of the Chasing Shadows CD, written and recorded in the year 2000 about the 1999 eclipse and the celebrations for the Millennium. The version I currently perform live has replaced Essex locations (ie Crouch & Blackwater) with those in Gloucestershire (ie Severn & Wye) and now refers to the 2015 eclipse! 

Chasing Shadows

This is a remixed version of Oceans of Plastic, a song I wrote a year or so ago about the dreadful way we are polluting our seas and endangering species. The original recording was made by Dave Stephens at Mitcheldean Festival and I have remixed it and dubbed some vocals and effects.

Oceans of Plastic

A song from 2019 to join in the clamour for action to combat climate change.

CMC 10 Shadows and Forest

WYSIWYG

A reworked version of an older song called "After Supper". Features harmonica, guitars and vocals.

After Summer

Mathematics

Red Nose Day

Tells the story of Westburybrook Iron Mine (aka Edgehills Mine) which was managed by William Henry Medland Phillips in the second half of the 19th century. It was the scene of a number of fatal accidents. When we moved into the house where he lived we researched the history of the area and facts and people we learnt about feature in this ballad.

The Ballad of the Plump Hill Miners

CMC 09 A Trap of Anagrams

Cottam Picking

Trap of Anagrams

Jangling

Intervalude

Aracheter

A song about coronavirusisolationsyndrome

Chinese Whispers

Around 1979 I got together with a group of lads at The Vale of Ancholme School to play some rock music. We rehearsed in the school hall and played at first in one of the assemblies, introduced amusingly by headmaster Mr Price as “Mr Mann and the Mr Men”! The music evolved and the group’s name was christened Denim. (Not to be confused with another later more successful act which recorded music in the 1980s). The group comprised keyboard player Peter Jacklin, guitarist Dean Wattam, bass guitarist Neil Atkin, Pete Watson on drums and myself on rhythm guitar. I cannot recall how many performances we made live – there were not many – but we did play in a local pub or two and at Murray Basingthwaighte’s engagement party. Around the time that Tom Jones was performed in Brigg (in which I played the part of Mr Blifil) we rehearsed with a guest female singer. The cheapo cassette recorder that accompanied these rehearsals was put to use in those sessions and the end product was a collection of tapes of music recorded with poor sound quality but which reflects the nature of what we were playing, covers of well-known chart material, numbers such as Shaft and A Whiter Shade of Pale that showed off Pete Jacklin’s keyboard prowess, and a few self-penned numbers, of which Time Creeps (upon you) was probably the favourite, with two versions on this collection, and a different recording by Rizlahead fourteen years later. Most of the group still live in the Brigg area although Pete Watson sadly died from cancer at the young age of 51.

The Denim Tapes

I Need You

The music on the 25th Anniversary Box Set was recorded by Rizlahead on various occasions between the two Decembers of 1990 and 1991, mostly on audio cassette using a Fostex 4 track recorder, though occasionally edited in the Headloss Studio or recorded live. The tracks here are those selected by Clint in 2016, chosen to represent the best (and occasionally the worst) of the plethora of music available. Apart from those on Volume Three (The Woman in the Moon) the names of the tracks are mostly afterthoughts, either those originally listed on the Spontaneous Welcome and A New Welcome audiocassettes that were briefly available on sale at Back Cat Records in Burnham, or titles given more recently to minimise confusion during digital remastering. Using Audacity, this process has involved some ‘cleaning up’ of the material through normalizing, equalizing, reducing hiss and noise, and stereo splicing, with some stop/starts edited out. The end product is not by any means perfect but we hope that it is (mostly) listenable and indeed enjoyable.

The Rizlahead Tapes Vol 1 Beginner's Luck

Time Creeps

Using mainly material from the audio-cassettes, in 2017 I evolved into the world of CDs and digital technology, employing Audacity as a tool to edit and remaster some of the older scratchy material. It allowed me to enhance the music if not improve the tonal quality of my singing. The end product was the collection of CDs of which ‘Light and Shade’ encompasses many of the songs from around 1987 to 1996, mostly songs about relationships, love, loss, pastimes and entertainment.

CMC 08 Crimson Red

Proud to be an Atheist

Clint Mann 2019

Pebble on a Beach

Tells the story of the 1872 tragedy at Dolomite Quarry on Plump Hill when four local men were killed by poison gas following the detonation of a charge, watched on the surrounding hillside by hundreds of onlookers.

Lyrics:
There lies a limestone quarry, not far from Mitcheldean
Where pampas grass and purple orchids grow.
But in the crags above, traces may be seen,
Tragic scars of many years ago.
At Quarry House, carved in stone, initials can be seen:
The name of Aaron Symonds set on high.
A quarryman who made a plan and told all Mitcheldean
He’d blast the limestone face into the sky.

Set the chamber charge and blast the quarry stone
Witness there a great explosion loud!
Dynamite and sulphur, four men overthrown,
Poisoned by the gas before a crowd

People came from miles around to see the great event
And sat upon the hillside far and near,
They waited long past six o’clock, impatient and intent
Until they saw a flag of red appear.
The chamber fuses then were lit and some men moved away,
And fifteen minutes later came a sound;
A mass of rock was lifted up, from side to side was split,
Limestone boulders crashing to the ground. 

CHORUS

A great Hurrah was shouted out from folk up on the hill,
Who to the quarry hastened then to go,
The quarryman who lit the fuse lay fallen down and still,
His body down among the fumes below.
Three men attempted rescue but were cut down by the gas
And in a lifeless state their bodies lay.
Remedies attempted on the four without avail,
Relatives and women cried away.

CHORUS

The jury at the inquest gave a verdict that the gas
Had caused the deaths of all four men the same.
The coroner Mister Carter after witnesses were called
Exonerated Symonds from the blame. 
John Griffiths, William Tomlin, Hiram Bayliss, Thomas Goode,
The heroes of the Dolomite we name;
Working men and rescuers who did the best they could,
Whose lives were lost so needlessly in vain.

Heroes of the Dolomite

Xmas song for 2020 sung by Clint and Jean Mann

The Christmas Song

2020

Shite Xmas

Clint Mann is a singer/songwriter who lives in the Forest of Dean. His music is grounded in Prog rock but is also inspired by the history of the local area and contemporary issues affecting our environment. Original compositions are driven by vibrant guitar playing with varied chords and complex time changes. Think 'Genesis' meets 'Roy Harper' meets 'Big Big Train' and you'll get the idea. Hear Clint at events and festivals around Gloucestershire or at Mitcheldean Folk Club on the 2nd Thursday each month. 150+ original composition are available online at Soundcloud. 
For direct contact, email to: mannclinton0@gmail.com

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