NIGEL CLARK — THE SONGS, THE STORIES, THE VOICE

There are certain voices that can transport you somewhere before you've even had time to place the song. Nigel Clark's is one of them. One moment you're here. The next it's the mid-1990s: festival fields, guitars on Top Of The Pops, Melody Maker and NME on the newsstand and British bands suddenly believing they could conquer the world again. Yet Clark's story deserves considerably more than simply being filed away under Britpop nostalgia.

As singer, bassist, songwriter and founding member of Dodgy, Nigel Clark helped create some of the most gloriously melodic British guitar records of the 1990s. Staying Out For The Summer, In A Room, If You're Thinking Of Me, Found You and, of course, the apparently indestructible Good Enough — songs filled with harmonies, hooks and sunshine, but often carrying considerably more emotional weight beneath the surface than their carefree reputation suggested.

Now Nigel Clark comes to Barnoldswick Music & Arts Centre solo, stripping away the full band, the volume and the festival stage for something altogether more revealing: one man, one guitar and songs drawn from across his career. And in the intimacy of Barnoldswick's tiny cellar listening room, this could be a very special way of hearing them.

Dodgy's story began before anybody had invented the term Britpop. Clark, drummer Mathew Priest and guitarist Andy Miller built their following the old-fashioned way — playing relentlessly, including an eight-month residency in Kingston upon Thames, before signing to A&M Records in 1991. Their Ian Broudie-produced debut arrived in 1993, but it was 1994's Homegrown that really opened the doors. Staying Out For The Summer became one of those irresistible records seemingly engineered to escape through an open car window.

Then came 1996's Free Peace Sweet and suddenly everything went enormous. The album reached the UK Top 10 while In A Room, If You're Thinking Of Me, Found You and Good Enough all became Top 20 singles. Good Enough climbed to No.4, becoming not merely Dodgy's biggest hit but one of those songs permanently woven into the soundtrack of British pop in the '90s.

The story behind it reveals something important about Clark as a songwriter. He wrote Good Enough around the period he was becoming a father, with the positive spirit of Bob Marley, George Harrison and Karen Carpenter among the musical influences swirling around him. Years later, Clark acknowledged that the song had effectively escaped its creator. "It's owned by the listeners," he told Songwriting Magazine. That might be one of the best descriptions of what eventually happens to a genuinely great pop song — people attach their own summers, relationships, friendships and memories to it until it belongs as much to them as it does to the person who wrote it.

And there was always considerably more to Dodgy than three permanently cheerful blokes with guitars wandering through Britpop spreading sunshine. The Beatles, The Who, punk, soul, psychedelia, classic harmony pop and the social conscience of bands such as The Clash all fed into their musical DNA. At the height of their success, Dodgy also supported causes including War Child and the Liverpool dockers, and in 1996 travelled to Sarajevo to perform following the lifting of the siege.

Listen closely to Clark's songs and that deeper side has always been there. Behind those enormous melodies there can be melancholy, reflection and vulnerability. When the original Dodgy line-up returned with Stand Upright In A Cool Place in 2012, The Guardian heard those familiar "sun-drenched harmonies" but also recognised a band that had grown older rather than simply attempted to recreate its youth, ultimately describing the record as "the album of their career."

Clark's musical life outside Dodgy has been equally important. His first solo album, 21st Century Man, appeared in 2006, while Make Believe Love followed in 2020. In an acoustic environment those songs reveal another side of him. Without the electric guitars and full-band rush, the melodies, words and stories are suddenly exposed — and what emerges most clearly is the songwriter.

Crucially, Nigel Clark isn't living in 1996. Dodgy released their seventh studio album, Hello Beautiful, in May 2026, adding another chapter to a recording career stretching back more than three decades. The record has attracted enthusiastic reviews, with The Prog Report suggesting it "easily stands alongside their best work from the mid-90s." Rather than trying desperately to recreate yesterday, the current music carries the melodic warmth people associate with Dodgy while reflecting musicians who have actually lived through the intervening thirty years.

And that brings everything beautifully back to Barnoldswick. Because in a room holding only around 60 people, there really is nowhere for a song to hide. No enormous PA system. No festival field. No Britpop circus. Just the man who wrote and sang the songs, a guitar, an audience sitting only feet away and more than three decades of stories to draw upon.

Expect songs spanning Nigel Clark's career. Expect the Dodgy classics. Expect solo material, stories, humour and perhaps a few unexpected musical detours. And when that unmistakable voice begins Staying Out For The Summer, In A Room, If You're Thinking Of Me or that song — Good Enough — they won't be distant records from some mythical Britpop summer anymore.

They'll be happening right there in the room.

More than thirty years after Dodgy first helped soundtrack a generation, Nigel Clark remains what he was before anybody decided to call it Britpop: a songwriter, a storyteller and the owner of one of the most instantly recognisable voices in British guitar pop.

The songs. The stories. The voice.