The best known hit of his band begins with "Everything is wonderful / being here is heavenly..." and perhaps no line better sums up the experience of hearing a song by Gary Clark. The Scottish singer/songwriter formed the trio Danny Wilson with his brother Kit and bassist Ged Grimes in the mid-'80s, eventually scoring a hit on both sides of the Atlantic in 1987 and 1988 with the sublime "Mary's Prayer."

While it's easy to place Danny Wilson in the same British sophisti-pop continuum that yielded records by the likes of The Blue Nile, Prefab Sprout, Swing Out Sister or Matt Bianco, nothing about the trio ever felt like a genre exercise. Dancing on a knife's edge of kitchen-sink musicianship and genuine warmth out from polished studio consoles and electronic augmentation, their debut Meet Danny Wilson is one that's felt long ripe for rediscovery.

The irony, of course, is Clark has been hiding in plain sight ever since Danny Wilson ran its brief course. After releasing some material as a solo artist and in cult bands like King L and Transister, he managed to find a sterling career as a songwriter and producer who's put his mark on works by Natalie Imbruglia, Liz Phair, Lloyd Cole, Alison Moyet, Demi Lovato, The Veronicas, McFly and others. Perhaps his greatest achievement of late is a lengthy collaboration with Irish writer/director John Carney, who tapped Clark to help pen the songs to 2016's Sing Street, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age comedy about boys whose lives are changed by starting a band against the backdrop of the early-to-mid '80s pop scene.

A modest hit upon release, a cult has developed around the story and music of Sing Street among generations who can't even recall a time when MTV played music videos. Following an off-Broadway adaptation of the film, a production was fast-tracked for Broadway, which had the tremendously unfortunate timing of planning to start previews in late March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic stopped the entertainment industry (among others) in its tracks. But you can't keep a good show down: Carney and Clark have been hard at work tweaking the show, which will make its West End debut at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre on July 9. (And it's one of two shows Clark is busying himself with, also workshopping an adaptation of the British film series Nanny McPhee alongside the movie's star and screenwriter, Emma Thompson.

With all this and much more on the horizon, Clark has also taken the time to help bring Danny Wilson's material into a rightful place of rediscovery. With his bandmates, he's blessed Complete Danny Wilson, a 5CD box set from Cherry Red that will feature the band's two albums (1987's Meet Danny Wilson and 1989's underrated Bebop Moptop), two discs offering every B-side and non-album track, and a cracking 1989 live gig that's partially previously unreleased. The Clarks and Grimes - now the bassist for another Scottish rock giant, Simple Minds - also sat for a rousing conversation replicated in the set's liner notes, offering vivid memories of making magic from the studio to the stage. (Danny Wilson's two albums and the Sweet Danny Wilson hits-and-rarities compilation were also recently made available to stream worldwide, offering new fans a chance to dip their toes even further into the new collection.) The box has been delayed several times due to manufacturing issues, but Cherry Red promises us a release date of June 6.

Back in March, Clark took time out of his busy stage schedule to call in from his home in Dundee, Scotland to share his memories of Danny Wilson, how the Complete set came together, behind-the-scenes nuggets about being on the other side of the boards, and confirmation of his next project with Carney, which might make it to a theater near you by the year's end.

Let me take it to the beginning for my first question. Was there a first realization for you, when you were young, that music was the thing that you wanted to do? 
Was there a particular galvanizing moment for you?

I don't remember a time when music wasn't my obsession. My family are Irish Catholics, and when they'd get together for a New Year's party or birthday party, it would inevitably end with people singing songs and my granddad playing the accordion and all that. A lot of them would sing songs completely a cappella. And most of them were plumbers and bricklayers and nurses. They weren't singers. but they had this love of music.

Also, the songs that they would pick would just tell stories: my grandma used to sing these old Irish rebel songs, or my Aunt Margaret would sing '50s pop hits like "Lipstick on Your Collar" and "Second Hand Rose." They all have these incredibly strong stories inside the song, so you had two minutes to do this whole thing. It was amazing. And my dad was a huge fan of the Great American Songbook. 
So he would always be talking about Cole Porter and all those incredible writers with such respect that I thought, "Well, that's a legit thing to be a songwriter." I got my first guitar when I was eight, my first electric when I was 11, and I think I wrote my first song when I was about 12. I was just obsessed with it. I can't remember a time when that wasn't what I wanted to do.

You mentioned the Great American Songbook, and Danny Wilson has been compared to Steely Dan, and you guys covered "Knowing Me, Knowing You."
Your tastes are so eclectic - there's not really a genre that you've really shied away from. Would you say that just kind of comes naturally?

In an album, it's so difficult to sort of go, "Look at all this amazing stuff that we're so excited about!" There's only so much you can do. And when I started to branch away from that and into recording and producing other artists, at that point your eclecticism is set free. Even though I would say commercially, probably, people love to be able to pigeonhole you - "You're the guy that does that."
I've never really been like that. I love to sit with the artist and figure out what they wanna do and what they're listening to.

I would say that, if you think about the music that I was exposed to - that's a really special time, from 12 years old to about 18. The music that you encounter has this massive effect on you. Well, that is really wide for me, because of what was playing at home. My dad played all the big band, swing Sinatra, Great American Songbook type albums. My mom was into a kind of soft rock, but when I say that, a lot of it was really great quality. She loved The Beach Boys and the Carpenters and Barbra Streisand, so you got a bit of that as well. And then at school, when I was around 14 or whatever, it's glam rock, it's David Bowie, Elton John. And then punk happens in 1977, so I was 15. And somewhere around that time, I was introduced to Steely Dan; for me, Steely Dan had all the richness of my dad's music and my mom's music - that kind of California sound. Pretty eclectic - if you go from the first Steely Dan record to Aja, it's mind bending! A lot of ground covered.

In the liner notes for Complete Danny Wilson, you talk about how, when you first came to London - before Kit was working with the band - the labels were looking for a sort of post-punk sound or material. It mentions that you tried to pursue that.

It was still stuff I loved. I loved Television and Talking Heads, stuff like that. Also, your band has a big influence on stuff as well. Ged Grimes, who became Danny Wilson's bass player, now plays with Simple Minds. And that's what he played all the time!

We became a three-piece overnight - our keyboard player left - and it made us rethink the sound. So for about two or three years in London, we were kind of making this spiky post-punky kind of sound. I think I say this in the liner notes - I was sort of looking for something deeper, song-wise and ended up writing bunch of things that ended up on the first album. One of them was "Mary's Prayer," one of them was "Davy," I think "Broken China." Those songs that were written at that time kind of opened up for me again. I thought, "I think I can do something really modern, with what I grew up with and what I really absolutely love."

Had you tried any of those songs in more of that sort of "spikier" style?

There is a song on this compilation called "Living to Learn" which is kind of a hangover from that time. I think we jammed it with that early band. We never recorded it, but I remembered it when we were looking for a B-side at some point. But obviously that was filtered through Danny Wilson, and so it doesn't sound exactly like what that band sounded like, but you can kind of hear in the song. It's a bit more...I don't know, maybe New Wave, I guess. '80s!

Danny Wilson signed to Virgin around 1985, and the first record came out in '87. In retrospect, did it feel like a long time to work on, or wait for people to hear the fruits of that partnership?

There were some releases in '86, I think. But the process was, at that time, the most exciting thing of my life. We went to a residential studio in Denmark and just immersed ourselves in the making of the record. For me, it was the most exciting thing, finally getting to do what I wanted to do with all this amazing equipment. It felt legit, you know?
We made the whole album in Denmark and took it back. And Virgin felt that half of it was right - I think [their decision was] 100 percent right - and that we'd missed some other tracks. I think I did a little bit more writing as well. So we went into the studio in London, mainly with Dave Bascombe. Things like "Mary's Prayer," we'd kind of drifted off; that's on the compilation, as "Mary's Prairie." Honestly, it was just because we played it so many times by then. We'd thought, "Let's play with it." We had a pedal steel guitar player in the the studio, and I ended up impersonating George Jones. We get it back, and [Virgin] was like, "What have you done to your single?" Quite rightly so! So Dave's task, really, was to get it back to where it was when it was a demo.

Speaking again to the eclecticism, one of the more endearing qualities about the band - and this was something I guess it had not really registered to me until reading the liner notes and sort of immersing myself in this set - is what I guess you'd call an "anything goes" nature. You guys had base instruments - you would play guitar - but there was room for anybody to sort of play anything, borne out by recording where you were and getting to experiment with the studio. I think about when it sounds like people are working together in a studio; that's the kind of stuff I like to hear the most. That's why I keep coming back to these records, because there's a lot of, "Well, what if we tried this?" You're also on the cusp of the technological revolution of the mid-to-late '80s, Fairlights or Syclaviers, but it also does feel very organic and very played. Was all that a conscious decision?

There was a studio in Dundee called Inner City Sound, which I think we mentioned in the sleeve notes a few times.
It was quite important. When Ged and I got back from London, our drummer left - he ended up playing with Del Amitri - and Kit joined the band. We had some "deck" drummers when we did some gigs and things, some "deck" keyboard players. But really we found ourselves just the three of us. And in exchange for us playing on sessions in the studio for other people's demos and jingles, they let us use the studio through the night. Even though it wasn't as sophisticated a studio as the ones that we'd work at in Denmark and London, the basics were still the same. So it was borne out of necessity: the three of us were just in that studio through the nights, working out how to do "Steamtrains to the Milky Way" and stuff.

We did bring in drums and brass and things, even in those early days. We'd bring people in to do things that we didn't do. But in general, it was just the three of us - sometimes three hands on one keyboard! Before the sophistication of automated mixes, I can remember us mixing stuff as "I'll take these five faders, you take these five faders, and we'd literally be like 'Drums coming up at the chorus!' learned to work the studio as another instrument.

So Puk Studios in Denmark was a big version of that. A big, beautiful studio; big, beautiful spaces; beautiful piano. And the Danish National Orchestra left behind, from a big session, this incredible array of percussion instruments, marimbas and drums. We basically asked the studio manager if we could use them, and he said, "I'm sure if I speak to them, we can rent them." And so we rented them for a nominal amount, and that's a big part of the sound of that stuff.

Parts of the record were recorded right here in New York - the brass and stuff. I imagine you were present for that?

Yes. It's kind of a mad story. This was way pre-9/11, when Richard Branson, who still had shares in Virgin - he was pulling away into Virgin Airlines. They had this crazy idea to have performers on the flights. So they had magicians and comedians walking up and down the aisles. We were told by the record company that we were too near the end of our budget and we couldn't afford to record in New York. And we basically volunteered to busk, to play on the plane! We paid for our own flights. We had to go into this office at Heathrow Airport just before the flight, maybe four hours before the flight, and audition for the entertainment manager or something. Ged had a tea chest bass, and they said "You can't take that on, it's going to block the aisle." Ged says, "Well, can I keep my string and my pole?" [laughs]

When we got on the plane - this is how pre-9/11 this is, it's incredible - we said, "Have you got anything that he can attach the pole in the center?" They gave him one of these metal food compartments for keeping hot dinners in. It had a little metal handle, and he tied the string around the metal handle and walked down the aisle. Imagine the jet engines roaring! It was insane.

And when we landed in New York, Virgin had sent a limo for us. We'd never seen a limousine in our lives. I just remember that weird feeling waiting for Ged's pole to come out of the baggage claim, getting into this limousine and driving off.

And you had to audition?! You couldn't just say, "You know, we are Virgin recording artists"?

The thing was it wasn't the same company, even though Branson had shares in both. [pauses] I think there were some favors done. I don't think you could just walk off the street.

That must have been your first time in America?

[thinks] Yes. I had to think about it because I've been so many times.

What did that feel like, especially being so influenced by American music?

It was incredible. If I'm correct, don't you see signs for Hoboken when you come to Newark Airport? Frank Sinatra's hometown! I remember looking out the window of this limousine, sort of thinking about Frank. And nothing can prepare you for the sight of Manhattan in the early evening, all lit up. I remember seeing Radio City Music Hall lit up, and that of course reminded me of Steely Dan['s "Bad Sneakers"]: "Stompin' on the avenue by Radio City." And I was a huge fan of Woody Allen films, So again, it was like being in a movie. There's a photograph in the liner notes of Kit and I walking down the street - we went to Madison Avenue to buy hats. It was really special.

I'm gonna jump ahead just because you brought it up: you had hats like few frontmen at the time. Was that a Sinatra influence? What was the impetus?

Even before we had record deals, that was kind of how our little tribe would dress. We'd buy stuff from secondhand stores. It's so weird:
I don't know why this came to me, but I was thinking about it recently. We just happened to land at a really funny time when a lot of the people who were, I guess, passing away [and having] house clearances would have been teenagers in the 1940s and '50s. So incredible like suits and hats and shoes were coming into these stores. You can't find them anymore. It was a different time. That was kind of a cheap way of dressing fancy. Also, we were influenced by all those movies and that music of that period, in the jazz age.

The '80s really was about dressing up as well, wasn't it? The place that we all used to go was called Fat Sam's; we saw so many amazing bands there on their first tours, like Prefab Sprout. That place was a real eclectic mix: some of the girls would be dressed like Madonna, and some of them would be in the '50s gear; some of the guys would be dressed like punks with big cockatoos and some of them would be like us with the Sinatra sort of vibe. But everybody dressed up to go down there on a Saturday night.

Meet Danny Wilson came out at a time...I think a lot of people now talk about 1984 as like the big nexus for pop music in that decade? I do not think we should count out 1987, because you have - beyond you - you have George Michael's Faith, you have Sanada Maitreya's Introducing the Hardline..., you have INXS' Kick, Crowded House was starting to break at that point, or the sophistipop boom.
In retrospect, it felt like there was a big groundswell coming from '87. At the time, did you feel like you were part of something, or do you remember what was on your radar at the time?

It's interesting. We didn't feel like we were musically akin to any other band, and we certainly didn't follow trends, because we learned that the hard way back in London. We were working hard and pretty obsessed with each next record and each next song through that period. So you didn't really take your head up out of the sand too often. It's only from this perspective that I can look at it and go, "Wow, what an incredible time! Look at the records. look at the charts. It's insane, you know?" So much great stuff.

We were always listening to records and playing music. But I just don't think I was aware of the moment in time. When you look at now - not just '87, that was a really powerful year - but that whole '80s period, of the moment, is quite interesting.

John Carney thinks it was the last creative decade in music. He's argued, quite vehemently. And John can argue. He's a very, very clever man. Don't fight with him! But he really believes that there was something in the '80s that was the last great creative period. Whether that's true or false, I don't know. I think there's been incredible things, particularly in different genres like hip-hop.

But I do think that we had freedom. It was that CD era for the record companies. And they forgot to tell anybody else, but they were absolutely making a fortune. It was costing them next to zero to print these things, and they were charging the artists for packaging deductions that were designed in the 1960s - triple gatefold albums. But I think it bled into the whole industry, and that they were just a lot more [likely to] take a chance. Why not?
I mean, from our perspective, we weren't told what to record or what to write. And we had budgets: if we wanted to to do something, generally we could persuade them to give us the money to do it.

"Mary's Prayer" was a minor hit in America before it reached its biggest crest over in Europe. Is that correct?

Yes. It had been released a couple of times to radio in the U.K. The trajectory of a hit record in the U.K., even if it's a big hit record, you're lucky to get two or three months. It's a very short trajectory. Whereas in the United States, you break it territory by territory. I learned it just by doing it, but I was lucky enough to have a manager who kind of knew the ropes. He worked on a few hit records before. So he understood the slow build of American radio and territories - you'd go from, I think they called us "adult contemporary" or something like that, then you break (if you get enough radio play mixed with sales) into Top 40. So it's a long, slow, six month, eight month process. Whereas in the U.K., if you don't have a hit, it's literally two weeks and it's gone.

They'd done that a couple of times while the trajectory in the U.S. was still going up the way. The first time, I think it was outside the Top 40 - 83 or something. [He's close - it first peaked No. 86. -MD] And then the second time it was - I don't know, I'm guessing here - but maybe No. 30 on the chart. [Close again! It just missed the Top 40, landing at No. 42. -MD] Then at the end of '87, Radio 1, which is the big, most influential BBC station, which is the most influential station, did an end-of-year pole to ask listeners what records should have been hits. "Mary's Prayer" won by some massive margin, and Virgin Records said, "There's still an appetite for this song. It's getting to people, but it's a slow burn. We've got to go with it again."
So they went for it in early '88 and that time it was No. 3 here. It never got to No. 1.

When you turned the album in, did the three of you at the time think that that could be the one? Do you just sort of trust the process?

There was a general consensus among manager and record company that "Mary's Prayer" was the strongest single contender. And that was backed up by American radio supporting it. That helped as well, I think, with the long game, in the sense that the record company didn't give up. They kept on going. Which I have to say: nowadays, I know a few young bands who've been signed to major record labels. They're lucky if they get two singles, and it's goodbye if you don't [get a hit].

Also, when they talked about us, they talked about us as an "albums band," which I don't think you're even allowed to be anymore!
But that was part of the vernacular of the time: The Cure would be an album band, even if they had singles. Everybody was waiting for the album. Steely Dan, definitely an album band. And that was kind of a mark of a little bit more serious, artistic band. You don't worry about these singles! Of
course, you did. [laughs] But that was something to do with that period that I talked about before that the record companies were freer to gamble. There wasn't a sense of massive pressure to have a hit.

Of course, you do have a hit, and then you're able to do the second record. And I'm really glad that Cherry Red elected to do a complete set as opposed to just thinking, "Oh, Meet Danny Wilson, that was the better known one. Let's do a deluxe version of that." This material is really given its chance to shine. And I hope you feel the same way, because there's really a lot to enjoy about this record that is sort of perhaps hidden in plain sight.

There's also, I would say, a different perception of that record in Europe than in the U.S. I don't even know if it was released there. But in the U.K., that one did just as well, maybe even slightly better than the first. A lot of people in the States only know the first album. I know that just from talking to people. So it is great, from our perspective, just to show it to more people, really.

Was there a moment in the wake of the second record, that you knew that Danny Wilson had sort of run its course?

You know, I don't live in regret, I don't have regrets. And also, all of us have had really impressive and varied careers and continue to make music. But there's a bit of me that goes, "If we had just taken a break and let the steam out a bit, I think we would have continued to make Danny Wilson records for a long time." But the pressure had been such that - particularly once we had a hit, interestingly enough - the amount of promotion that has to get done really overshadows the amount of music that's getting done.
When you've had a hit, suddenly there's more pressure to have a hit. It would be so much promotion to do that they started to split us up: they'd fly me to Germany and they'd fly Kit to Ireland and fly Ged somewhere else. It was a kind of perfect storm of a lot of things going on.

[And it was] amplified by when we got together to talk of the album three. Ged and Kit had been writing a lot more. I remember meeting those guys in a coffee shop in Dundee. It felt like an ambush, if I'm really honest, because they both happened to have all these song titles written down. So I said, "Is this gonna be a quadruple album? Because I don't wanna shrink what I do." So that was playing into it. Kit was starting to talk about making a solo record. There was all this stuff brewing. And instead of being adult and going, "Let's take a break, let's walk away from this for a year," 
We just went [mock yells] "No! Fuck you! I'm leaving the band. No I'm leaving before you!" [laughs] I'm joking to make a point, because it never got feisty or anything. It really never did.
I mean always remained really great friends.

We have seen, in the last 20, 25 years or so, where it seems like any band can reunite and perhaps will. My take often is that if that's what they want to do, if the band wants to do that, that's great. But I've also been heartened seeing Talking Heads promote the Stop Making Sense reissue, where they didn't perform together, but they all sat together and did interviews. If you think of a band breakup, like a literal divorce, your albums are your children, your songs are your children.

There's an element of that. You have to split up the keyboards!

But I would always rather see a band look back on what they did with pride and warmth and happiness and care for each other, even if they don't see the need or don't want to perform. I mean, obviously, the three of you have done it a little bit here and there. But for me, I think that's really important, and I think in some ways, especially going through this compilation and reading the liner notes: did you guys all sit together to do those notes?

Yep.

Because it comes off the page that the three of you still...well, I mean, one of them is your brother, so...

And also, Ged and I have been friends at school since we were 14. So there's a real friendship in both cases. Interestingly, with the liner notes, we compiled them and handed them in, and Cherry Red tidied them up in a way that it looked more like an interview. And we went, "No, you're kind of missing this point." If I was a fan of the band, I want to feel like I'm sitting in the room with them talking about the record. And that's exactly what we did, and that's what we wanted to come across as.
So I'm really glad you're saying that, because we had to have a little bit of a tussle.

When and how were you approached to participate in this set? What was that process like?

Well, interestingly enough, pre-COVID, we had been talking with a music manager here who used to work for Universal. We had a few meetings about licensing our stuff that was on Virgin Records, now owned by Universal. We even got to the point of talking to them and negotiating usage of stuff - we wanted to make vinyl, and we even talked about possibly doing some new tracks, and possibly some shows around it. And then COVID hit, which sent that way off the rails. And it kind of just went on the back burner.

When everybody started to come out of COVID lockdown - I was kind of lucky. because I ended up scoring a TV show through the whole thing, so it was relatively pain free for me - but Ged makes his living on the road with Simple Minds. So it was a period when people started to get back to work again. We never really talked about it again. And then Cherry Red - unbeknownst to us, somebody there was a fan and had been negotiating. That's what they do. they license.

To be honest, we may have ended up going to Cherry Red anyway. We were only in the early, talking stages. So the intention was there - and then, when they came to us and said, "We got the license to do this and we would love your participation," we thought, "Okay, we don't want it to be shit, so let's it's really work with them and and try and make it what we would have wanted it to be."

In going back, between the albums, all the B-sides and stuff, was there anything that really jumped out at you? Whether you forgot that it existed, or was better than you remember?

They tend to be funny things that you haven't listened to for a really long time. You have really strong memories attached. There were a bunch of songs - we rented, after spending inordinate amounts of money on hotels, we eventually persuaded Virgin to rent us a flat in West Hampstead in London. And it had to accommodate the whole seven-piece live band, but there were only three of us signed to the label. So when the whole band was there, they'd stay there - but very often it would just be me, Ged and Kit in a big, empty, really lovely apartment.

One of my great memories there was with the second album, the summer that it came out, in 1989. The single was "The Second Summer of Love," and I remember my bedroom looked onto the main road where all the cars were. Everybody would drive to work, and it was the summer, so all the roofs were down. I remember getting up in the morning to "Second Summer of Love" blasting down the street, which was really cool.

When the band arrived, we always needed B-sides and extra tracks. So we got our engineer friend Alan, who had Inner City Sound in Dundee, to come down with some mics and things. We recorded a bunch of things that way. One of them was Kit's song, "Growing Emotional." There were a few covers - we did "The Lonesome Road," a Sinatra cover. But when we listen to them they just immediately had the feeling and the sound of that apartment, and you're just instantly transported back. That's kind of wild. It was little things like that, particularly things you hadn't listened to for a long time. Music's a powerful memory jogger like that.

Was there anything that you hoped to include in the set, things you couldn't find? I think you got everything that you released.

There was a song on the second album called "I Was Wrong." We did a preliminary version of it with Phil Thornalley. And for whatever reason, I don't know if we were going on the road...we just never finished, but we know we got to a point of there being a rough mix. I remember playing it to people.
I couldn't find it. We contacted Phil; he couldn't find that. We trawled the Universal vaults for it. But that was the only thing.

The live disc is terrific. It is as worth the price of admission as anything else. Do you have any favorite memories specifically of that Town and Country Club gig or just that period?

We had two slightly different bands for album one and album two. The Town and Country gig is the first album band, if I'm not mistaken. We had toured with that quite a lot. We did a big, long American tour opening for Simply Red. Like, months and months and months. 
And so, by the time we got back to the U.K., we were really in good shape and it was a great band. So it's just really lucky that they captured that and it got recorded in a decent multitrack situation.

Have you talked to Cherry Red, or is there any interest on your end of taking a similar approach to your post-Danny solo material? Ten Short Songs About Love or King L or...?

Weirdly enough, I've had somebody else approach me about that, in the last week or so, with some ideas. So you never know, it may happen, but Cherry Red haven't mentioned it. I think that's a bit more of a labor of love because they certainly didn't sell as many records as Danny Wilson.

For the last 25 years or so, you've been a terrific collaborator - songwriting and producing other people. I'm going to name a couple of people, and if you just want to give a little memory or thought you have about them.
So first, we'll say Lauren Christy. [Clark and Christy co-wrote much of her 1997 sophomore album Breed, after which she moved into songwriting and production as part of the team known as The Matrix, who collaborated on hits by Avril Lavigne, Jason Mraz, Liz Phair, Shakira and others. A long-unreleased album, recorded in 2002 and meant to be credited to them, featured vocals from a then-unknown Katy Perry.]

Oh my God. Lauren is still probably one of my all-time favorite collaborators. She's just a wellspring of amazing ideas. Sometimes I like joke with her that you've gotta catch her ideas before they're flying past you and she's on to the next one. Beautiful person, just an amazing songwriter. I met her when we were really young - well, she was a lot younger than me - but she was working on her first album. and we did a couple of songs, and then we went on to do other things for other people. I love Lauren.

Natalie Imbruglia. [Imbruglia and Clark collaborated on the bulk of 2001's White Lillies Island, including the hit "Wrong Impression." He received credits on her next two albums, as well.]

I'll be forever grateful to Natalie, because she was the first production/writing gig I got that was for a serious artist who was doing really, really well. I'd done a few things with lesser-known artists, but she was the first person to have faith that I could actually do it coming off the back of what was a massive record with "Torn." So I think against a lot of pressure, she kind of really loved working with me, and we continued to work together on a number of records and we still really good pals.

I love Natalie. And an underrated vocalist - I would say her vocal is one of the most unique, beautiful sounds, ever. The first song we wrote together was "Butterflies," from White Lilies Island. We recorded it in the same room, so I had to put headphones on. I was facing the computer and she was behind me, and the intro comes and she started to sing. I just got shivers. It instantly sounded like a record - she's got that tone.

Liz Phair. [Though her polarizing self-titled album in 2003 was overshadowed by "Why Can't I," an unlikely Top 40 hit written with The Matrix, it is mostly full of self-penned, contemplative material produced by "No Myth" hitmaker Michael Penn. The emotional "Red Light Fever" is the album's only other co-writing credit, with Clark.]

Ah! Another genius - you're naming all the geniuses. Liz is...what joy it was working with her and writing songs with her. She just has this energy; she writes everywhere, all the time. 
So basically, I was in a rented apartment, and she'd be writing lyrics up the wall, or on a napkin. Just this constant flow of energy. My wife remembers coming back in, she'd been out doing something and came back into the apartment, and I was playing this riff and Liz was dancing around the room, getting an idea of this song. And she just yells, "Keep going, keep going!"

I actually wrote a lot more for that record that Michael produced. This happens a lot with records: the whole gets handed in, and the record label is so used to it by that time, that it almost doesn't matter how good it is. They're kind of like, "No, we need this fresh concept." To be fair to them, it worked amazingly, and Lauren and Graham [Edwards, of The Matrix] are my best friends; we go way back, so God bless them.
But basically, when they brought The Matrix in, they ended up re-cutting and rewriting half of the album. So a lot of my stuff hit the cutting room floor. I haven't even heard it to this day.

Okay, here's one that you might not get asked a lot about: The Xcerts. [Clark co-produced this Aberdeen-born band's Hold On to Your Heart in 2018, co-writing a few tracks as well. To this listener - who was recommended the album by a friend and only then discovered the connection to Clark - it sounds like if Danny Wilson had indeed gone in a more alt-rock direction.]

They were amazing. I met their manager at some kind of music business conference, on a panel or something. It turned out he was a really big Danny Wilson fan - he got into a lot of the obscure stuff. He was talking to me about a demo that became a B-side called "Pleasure to Pleasure." Oh, he knows that! 
He said, "I've got this band from Aberdeen - [frontman] Murray McLeod is a great writer, but he really needs to try writing with some other people. Would you be up for the session?" Murray came up from Brighton, and I instantly loved him - but I've never seen anybody so nervous!
His hand was shaking when he picked up the guitar. After a day, we were just cruising, having a blast, and he was loving the process.

I have this secret love of getting songs onto formats where nobody would ever figure, "That's a Gary Clark song." There was a rock show on the radio here - I can't even remember the name of it, to be honest, because I'm not a big rock superfan - but they got record of the week. They were on the cover of Kerrang! That's so cool.

And then finally: Julian Velard. [This New York-born, L.A.-based singer/songwriter co-wrote a an underrated one-off single with Clark called "Tiny Aeroplane." Incidentally, he is a close friend and collaborator whose last several bios and liner notes in albums have been written by the author.]

He is absolutely just a powerhouse songwriter and performer. He's just amazing. I get this thing with Julian: I think his real time is still yet to come. He is so good and so consistent, but he's never been quite in step with the times. But I just think he's the real deal. It's some kind of mixture of theatre or film or something that's going to bring his music to people. He deserves it so much.

"Tiny Aeroplane," we met doing that song. He was in a session with a friend of mine, Martin Brammer.
I'm not sure it was going well: my phone went off at three in the afternoon and Martin said, "I'm in a session with Julian, he's feeling a bit down in the dumps. Have you got time?" And I said, "Yeah, just come over." They came over and we wrote the song that day and recorded it the next day. It's terrific.

How are things with Sing Street and also Nanny McPhee?

Sing Street, we know for sure, is going on, at the Lyric Hammersmith, in July. Nanny McPhee is probably gonna be next year, but there's a lot of workshops and stuff going on throughout the year, and they clash quite a bit with my Sing Street dates, so it's been a bit of a juggle.

The crazy thing about Sing Street is even though it's based very much on John's experience growing up as a kid, so much of it is parallel with my own, even though it was in Scotland. I was at a Catholic school and had a school band. There's so much in it that I recognized. It was a joy to do from start to finish.

Hopefully we'll get this back to New York! We've been tweaking it quite a lot since you saw it. In general, after the New York Theatre Workshop performance - it was gonna go on Broadway, and then the pandemic closed it down; we actually were in the theatre to do tech and stuff - but the general consensus among the producers and feedback from the audience and stuff which we we wanted to get it back closer to the film in a number of ways. We've just been gradually tweaking it towards that, and I think this is probably gonna be the closest version.

That's great, because people are such evangelists for that movie. Nobody just likes that movie, They see it and, I think, feel something quite profound. And what better way to experience that than with other people in a communal setting?

When it first came out, it didn't do too well at the box office. It was one of these things. And John sounded really disappointed on a phone call one day. And I said to him, "I don't know, John. I've got a feeling about this film, that it's just gonna be one of those things that people are gonna share with their friends."
Easily six or seven years after that conversation, I was talking to my friend in L.A. and she was telling me that her kids, who at that time were teenagers, were having Sing Street days at school. They would go in dressed up as The Cure. [laughs] So I was actually right for a change! It's that thing - I don't know if you want to call it a cult or whatever - but it has its own personal groove.

I think John also has this gift. I remember seeing Begin Again; the song at the end of that, "Lost Stars."

Beautiful song.

I love Gregg Alexander! I'm a huge, huge fan of his work. And it's great, because he's a guy, like you, I think, for the public to think, "Ah, yes, here is a great songwriter." I'm glad that he picked you to work on that movie. My hope is that, for people like myself, it's like, "Oh my gosh, it's Gary!"

Thank you, Mike. It's been totally wonderful for me, because it's opened a whole new life in film and theatre and stuff.

Even more than when you lived in L.A.!

That's the great joke - that I moved from L.A. to Dundee to get into the movies!

Sing Street has been part of your life for a decade. Is there a secret to sticking with that project for ten years? This is something that you've been an active participant in for some time.

It's honestly a love for the piece. It's a mixture of what Sing Street has given me, and also we have great producers who asked me to get more involved after the New York Theatre Workshop, which I wasn't as involved in. John wanted to pull it closer to the spirit of the movie, and I suddenly had the opportunity to be involved in putting up a Broadway show. I knew that, had my dad been still around, he would have been over the moon. Even though that Broadway show was shut down by COVID - and I couldn't make it to Boston [where another revision was performed in 2022] - this is an opportunity for me to tap back into it again.

We've written some new songs [for the West End]. Through that and Nanny McPhee, I'm learning so much about writing for theatre and putting on a show, so I want to be plugged in and hands-on. Maybe there'll come a time I just want to go and write something else, [but] at the moment, I want to be in the room. I'm involved in all the processes from auditions to rehearsals, teaching people music.

Is it awakening anything within you that after these happen, maybe you'll do one of your own?

Definitely. I'm excited by theatre. I'm excited by film, as well. These mediums allow songs to live in a really unique space where they get all this support from everything else, and yet they exist in their own little bubble inside this thing. 
I think it's a unique opportunity for somebody who loves songwriting as much as I do to write in an eclectic space, and to still be really creative at this point of my life. I'm super excited over it, to be honest.

After Sing Street, you collaborated with John Carney on Modern Love [an Amazon Prime Video series based on the New York Times column of the same name] and his next film, Flora and Son (2023). He's working on a new one called Power Ballad with Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas. Are you involved?

Yes! John and I have done all the music together. I am the executive music producer, I was actually talking to him this morning. Obviously, you have to do the songs up front, because people have to perform all the songs. So you need them in at least a certain degree for people to be able to lip sync to them. We had all the songs recorded...it must have been last summer. And they went into the shoot, and they're editing now. So I've been on ice until this week; it's all kicked off again because they're close to locking the picture, so I can start scoring. It's fun, because I'd worked with Nick Jonas before.

Oh, did you write on one of his solo albums?

This is a bizarre story: I was on a writing retreat in Bali that my publisher at the time had set up. Because it was near Australia, you got a lot of Australian artists on these things. And Nick was dating Delta Goodrem at the time, who I had already worked with. I think we wrote two songs for her. I was living in L.A., but I met him in Bali. Very glamorous!

Musically speaking, you've done so much. When they write the book on you, so to speak, how would you like to be remembered?

I suppose, if anything, I just would like some songs to still be hanging around when I'm gone. It'll be nice to think that the music lives a bit longer than I do. [laughs] Other than that, for me, I still get the joy out of music that I did when I was a kid. It's a thrill for me. I'm quite a private person - I never craved the fame element, being in the spotlight. I actually love being in the studio and collaborating with people and working on all these different projects. 
I get to do what I love doing; not many people can say that.