Gavin Clark obituary

If you have seen Shane Meadows’s 2006 film This Is England, then you have heard Gavin Clark, singing the Smiths song Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want over the closing credits. The singer, who has died unexpectedly aged 46, pulls off a fairly remarkable feat – investing a song already heavy with melancholy with so much more of it that the end result is difficult to listen to. Where Morrissey’s voice was epically languorous – his voice drenched in Marr’s cascading mandolins – Clark sounds utterly desolate and alone.

I first met Gavin when I was working as an A&R manager at Independiente Records. We released the soundtrack for Twenty Four Seven (1997), Meadows’s second feature, starring Bob Hoskins, for which Gavin had written several songs. Around the time of making the film, he formed a band called Sunhouse (named after their local chippy) with the guitarist Paul Bacon and the former Telescopes rhythm section Rob Brooks and Dominic Dillon.

We signed them to the label and set about making their debut album, Crazy on the Weekend, with John Reynolds producing. Gavin’s guitar playing was rudimentary, his singing often breathless with nerves, but his lyrics and his songwriting instincts were sublime. Then there was his voice – careworn, rough-hewn and angelic at the same time. Sunhouse imploded in 1998, shortly after the album was released, in what would become a familiar pattern for Gavin: intense critical acclaim accompanied by minimal sales.

Gavin was born in London and by the end of his teens, in the late 1980s, was frying chips at Alton Towers and living in a caravan with Judy, who would become his wife and mother to four of his children. Meadows was also working at Alton Towers (as a face-painter) while harbouring dreams of being a rock star. Those dreams ended the moment he heard Gavin pick up an acoustic guitar and sing: he realised that his new friend had more musical talent than he would ever have. Over the next two decades, Gavin would contribute songs to all but one of Meadows’s films. “His music elevated my early work from student tat into something resembling art,” the director said later.

Gavin returned in 2003 with the band Clayhill, comprising himself, the guitarist Ted Barnes and the bass player Ali Friend. But, once again, success eluded him like “a buttered eel”, in the music writer David Kavanagh’s memorable phrase. Clayhill released their final album, Afterlight, in 2007.

To support his growing family, Gavin looked for work delivering pizzas. This was where Meadows caught up with him to make the documentary The Living Room, about Gavin’s attempts to play his first solo live show in the front room of his house. The film is uneasy viewing at points. “I’ve had bouts of depression and panic attacks since my early 20s,” Gavin once said, “and I’ve had the usual addictions to booze and drugs that go hand in hand with mental illness. I can’t escape it and have almost learned to accept it – it’s part of me. My songs are a reflection of the world as I see it, and the world as I see it is often dark, but not hell.”

More recently, there was a sense that a larger audience might have been on the verge of discovering his work via more high-profile collaborations, primarily as a vocalist for James Lavelle’s Unkle project – a role filled in the past by Thom Yorke and Josh Homme. Gavin provided vocals on tracks for their albums End Titles (2008) and Where Did the Night Fall (2010).

He is survived by Judy and his five children.