Angry as The Jam and more astute than Oasis, The Enemy are the best thing to come out of Coventry since Robbie Keane. Lead singer Tom Clarke mouths off to Laurence Mackin
TOM Clarke is very excited about the prospect of going to prison. Now, you might doubt his motives, given that he's one-third of British rock band The Enemy. The notoriety of a spell in the slammer works wonders for record sales and image (second, perhaps, only to that most beloved of PR stunts - the spell in rehab). But in this case, Clarke's motivations are purely altruistic.
Clarke and his band spent months trying to organise a gig, with former Libertine Carl Barât's Dirty Pretty Things, in north London's Pentonville Prison. The show was in support of Wasted Youth, a campaign to highlight the shocking rate of suicide among young men, which is particularly high in prisons.
"I saw Billy Bragg get up and talk about a prison rehab programme, where they take guitars into prisons and roughly 80 per cent of those involved in the programme don't go on to re-offend. The logistics of actually being able to go in and play a prison gig are a nightmare, so when we found out about this opportunity, we jumped at it.
"I think people in prison are forgotten about," he adds. "You cannot lock someone up and then just expect them to reintegrate themselves; just because they are in prison doesn't mean they aren't a member of society."
Clarke delivers all of this in a bullet-speed Coventry burr, passion pinging off each word. Much like Bragg, he comes across as genuine, effortlessly articulate and with razor-sharp smarts. "We did find it quite ironic that we spent most of our time trying to avoid prison, and then we end up spending so long trying to get into one," he chuckles.
Clarke is more interested in talking about his imminent stint in the slammer than pushing the band's debut album, We'll Live and Die in These Towns, a polished, angry package of British rock that borrows heavily from The Jam and Oasis, but with a more astute message than the latter's lyrics.
The Enemy's tracks and lyrics crackle with intelligence as they question the small-town mentality that is the bedrock of Britain. But Clarke seems terrified that anyone would think he looks down on the band's native Coventry.
"I absolutely love Coventry to bits, and the whole time I'm away I want to get back there. But there are problems with places in the UK that we can't just ignore. When we went on tour around the UK we saw all these towns that used to rely on shipbuilding and the steel industries and now they are ghost towns, with loads of skilled workers stuck in call centres.
"The first songs that were written about Coventry were quite negative. It's Not OKwas written in the week that the Peugeot factory closed. It wasn't a political song, it was just based on what was going on around us, the experience of people and our friends directly affected by it."
'Tis far from Coventry the band are touring now, and preparing for their upcoming Dublin gig must be a breeze compared with their previous dates in Japan and on tour with The Rolling Stones. So, do The Enemy want to stay on tour as long as rock's greatest living legends?
"In the back of your mind, you do wonder when will I have to stop this, but then you look at them doing it. They are an inspiration, and as long as you can walk on stage and have some sort of health . . . " Clarke trails off, but you can feel his grin on the other end of the phone.
As for Japan, how does that compare to Coventry? "It's utterly amazing. I think it was one of my favourite gigs ever. We played a baseball stadium - I'd never even seen a baseball stadium before - with Kasabian and The Twang. Going to Japan is like stepping eight years into the future; we're heading back in December and I can't wait."
Back on home territory, The Enemy consistently draw comparisons with The Jam, thanks to the political content of their material, but Clarke says it's little more than coincidence. "I never listened to them the whole time we were recording. We are just writing songs about what inspires us; we don't sit down and intentionally write stuff that's political."
The suggestion that it was easier to kick against the pricks when Thatcher was in charge, rather than now, gets short shrift: "It's the exact same prime minister, but with a cock."
If he is belittling of politicians, Clarke is effusive in his praise for other musicians, particularly Reverend and the Makers. "I really like what John [ McClure] is saying - it strikes a chord. There are not that many bands on our wavelength. There's a band in Manchester called Lowlife. They've literally played a handful of gigs, they sound like Joy Division mixed with Primal Scream, and they really deliver live. I'm always banging on about them."
As musical tributes go, though, The Enemy's cover song for a CD celebrating 40 years of BBC's Radio One is a little off-kilter: Father and Son. But Clarke is, of course, taking inspiration from the Cat Stevens original, not the Boyzone butcher job. "In a way, I've got a hankering for that song, because it helped me pull a bird in year nine. She knew the Boyzone version and I knew the Cat Stevens one."
He might be every inch the mouthy musician, but Tom Clarke and his band have the intellect and charm to back it up, and he seems to cling as tightly to his roots as to his dreams. He will admit that if he wasn't in The Enemy, he'd be "back in the Co-op selling CDs."
"Who knows, maybe I would be a deputy manager earning £6.80 an hour and hating every minute of it. The most important thing, I think, is to remember where you're from and who you are. You're not a fucking superstar, you're the same person and should earn the same respect. Hopefully we'll never become arseholes."
At the moment, that seems about as likely as Clarke getting banged up for real.
