The Klinker Club is an event series that hosts music, poetry, film, art, and performance events. It has been held in a wide variety of different venues in and out of London, often simultaneously.
Ian McLachlan and Hugh Metcalfe started the Klinker in December 1982 at the Metropolitan on Farringdon Road in London.
After an extended hiatus it was relaunched in 1997 by Hugh Metcalfe, Darren Morris, and Matt Scott at the Water Rats in parallel Gray’s Inn Road, and it has been running at venues in London, in Suffolk where Hugh Metcalfe is now based, in Bristol, Cornwall, Dusseldorf, and in 2015 artists Stephen Flinn and Viv Corringham launched a Klinker in New York City.
The approach is open without a fixed ethos or manifesto. Recent acts have included US folk, soundscapes with spoken words on the theme of migration and encountering racism, ECM jazz musicians, electro-pop, a cross-dressing improvising string quartet, a feral Glaswegian bagpipe and guitar duo, horror poetry, a Finnish banjo and loop pedal player, and a Bollywood musician improvising from graphic scores on viola. The multimedia events comfortably featuring odder leftfield acts, poets, films, comedians, performance art, and dance alongside more conventional fare.
‘Blood rocking’, says poet and music hall performer Alec Dunnachie.
