It's All There In A Bright, Shiny, Tiny Package

Clouds are an Australian four-piece indie band, who formed in Sydney in December 1989, split up in May 1997 and reformed in August 2011 and have played live from time to time since then, up to and including last December. 

 

My time in Australia circa 1990-1991 was well-timed insofar as discovering great. homegrown music was concerned, and Clouds were right there at the forefront. A few weeks after my arrival in Perth, Western Australia, Clouds released their debut EP Cloud Factory and the title track received regular rotation on my go-to radio station, Triple J.

In April 1991, as I was heading off on a whistle-stop tour of the continent, Clouds released their follow up, the Loot EP. Souleater was the lead song and it's an absolute corker, two minutes and thirty eight seconds of pop perfection. In both cases, the rest of the songs on the EP are also excellent and inevitably, I snapped up copies of both on CD to bring home with me.

Debut album Penny Century was released in October 1991, by which time I was back in Bristol, and although it got a UK release in 1992, with the exception of a song (Immorta) on a freebie cassette with Select magazine, it completely passed me by.

Clouds released another three albums - Octopus (1992), Thunderhead (1993) and Futura (1996) - none of which got a release in the UK, and so for many years I just had the Cloud Factory and Loot EPs to tide me over.

Following the split, founder members Jodi Phillis and Trish Young collaborated again as The Girls From The Clouds in the mid-2000s, with a sole EP Lalalala in 2007. They reunited with Dave Easton and Raphael Whittingham as Clouds to tour with - of all people - Jesus Jones and The Wonder Stuff in August 2011 before heading out on a headline reunion tour later that year and into 2012. Further gigs and a trio of one-off singles have followed in subsequent years.

It's unlikely that I'll ever get to see Clouds live in concert in person and although I've caught up with some of their album releases, it's the two EPs - and Souleater in particular - that takes me back to a very happy time and place in my life.