Michael Clarke, who goes under the generic name of Clarkesville, is a tall, blonde and handsome but he is no overnight/wannabe sensation.

Born in Walsall, Michael spent some formative years with his parents in Amsterdam where they were running a drop-in centre cum safe haven for recovering drug addicts. By the time he returned to the Midlands, as a 14 year old, Clarke had seen the other side of this life at first hand. A budding songwriter even then, he started to hone his craft playing acoustic gigs. “I never wanted to do anything else other than this – music, songwriting and playing but I wasn’t one of those people who had a band of mates together by the time they’re 19. I concentrated on my writing because I was adamant about my future. I did my A-levels and went straight into a management deal.”

Two more years of hard graft at the home studio face enabled Clarke to build his repertoire and when he turned up at the Wildstar offices armed with his acoustic guitar and a voice to die for it was patently obvious that he had the right stuff. After running through a couple of songs Wildstar snapped him up on the spot: no hesitation, no caveats.

Listening to Clarkesville’s gloriously accomplished debut album “The Half Chapter” (produced by top Swede Martin Terefe), it’s easy to appreciate that Wildstar enthusiasm. But this is no simple rock and roll rags to riches cliché. Clarke has spent many months before, during and around Clarkesville, getting himself about in the low-key environment of the support act. A usually hapless task, he turned it to advantage. He’s appeared before Coldplay favourite Ron Sexsmith (another of Terefe’s acclaimed productions) and, Kings of Leon, and also been spotted by members of Travis, when he did a gig at the Enterprise Club in Primrose Hill.

It can be common practise in biographies to censor the likes and dislikes of
the artist at hand because – oh, that won’t sound cool blah blah and no, that doesn’t fit the image we want etc. etc. There is absolutely no point in doing that to Michael Clarke, since his insistence on the values of honesty and melody is interlinked. “When I came back to England as a teenager,” he recalls, “I felt an element of not fitting in and there was a certain amount of rebellion from me. But it was more about culture shock than some false desire to be a loner. I’m a miserable bastard at times, I can be a major hypochondriac, even though there is sod all wrong with me, and I am prone to be a depressive. Not a manic one. I’ll leave that for later on,” he laughs.