Livid Film Productions Rod Clements

Lynne met Rod Clements when she interviewed Rod, Billy Mitchell and Dave Hull-Denholm ( Lindisfarne 2002 ) for Rogues and Vagabonds. She interviewed many people from the arts around that time but Rod and the boys stayed in her mind. With one of the characters in TRAMLINES being a folk music presenter she immediately thought of Rod Clements to be a cameo in the film. For more information on Rod Clements and current tour dates please go to Rod's web site www.rodclements.com.

Born in 1947, Rod Clements was an only child brought up in North Shields, North Tyneside. At 12 he was sent to boarding school in Durham, and found an escape from its rigorous regime in the guitar-based pop music of the time. Hammering out Duane Eddy and Ventures tunes on borrowed guitars, Rod soon formed his own group (to the horror of the school authorities, who confiscated his first guitar when he was caught playing it during a study period). By the time he left school in 1965, his group the Downtown Faction were playing R&B standards at local dances and parties.

Though Alan was Lindisfarne’s principal songwriter, it was Rod who provided the band with its first hit in Meet Me On The Corner which reached the top 5 in March 1972, won Rod a Certificate of Honour at the Ivor Novello awards, and paved the way for the band’s chart-topping Fog On The Tyne album. Over thirty years on, Meet Me On The Corner still gets regular radio play, and instantly evokes its time, as when it was recently used by the makers of the BBC-TV drama Life On Mars.

During Lindisfarne’s long career, Rod gave the band many much-loved album tracks and stage favourites like Road To Kingdom Come and Train in G Major. Following Alan Hull’s untimely death in 1995 Rod became the band’s main songwriter who, in partnership with producer & co-writer Nigel Stonier, provided the bulk of the material for Lindisfarne’s two last critically acclaimed albums Here Comes The Neighbourhood and Promenade.

Rod’s instrumental skills have been in demand from early in his career and he has contributed to the work of some of the greatest names in folk & roots music. In 1974 he played bass on one the British folk scene’s biggest hits and best-loved classics, Ralph McTell's Streets Of London, which topped the charts at Christmas that year. Rod went on to tour and record several albums with Ralph.

The McTell connection led directly to Rod’s involvement with one of his guitar heroes and arguably the most influential guitarist of his generation, Bert Jansch. Rod and Bert worked closely through 1975-6, sharing a house in North London, touring Britain and Europe and recording Bert’s comeback album A Rare Conundrum (produced by Rod) for the Charisma label.

Rod's latest album Odd Man Out follows on from Stamping Ground and again features Thea Gilmore's vocals complementing Rod's own. Produced and partly co-written by Nigel Stonier, the songs reveal the strength of Rod’s commitment to his craft, an individual voice in an increasingly homogenised world, and a readiness to meet the future on his own terms.