Clinic - Come Into Our Room

MAY 13 2002 · 12:00

Clinic - Come Into Our Room (2002) Director: Scott Lyon Era: Post-Punk Revival / Early Noughties Indie (2002) - Peak era of UK art-punk resurgence on indie labels; Clinic occupying a singular outsider position on Domino Records amid the NME-driven garage rock wave High curatorial value as a rare intersection of a visually distinctive UK art-punk act at their commercial peak and an emerging director (Scott Lyon) who would go on to win major industry awards. The video's warm chiaroscuro palette, ritualistic staging, and performer anonymisation constitute a coherent and reproducible aesthetic grammar that stands as both a document of early 2000s indie visual culture and a self-contained art object. Its placement in the MTV REWIND archive anchors a significant but often overlooked strand of the post-punk revival, the Liverpool outsider tradition, that operated parallel to the more heavily documented New York and London scenes. Context: Released in 2002 as the second single from Clinic's Grammy-nominated album 'Walking With Thee' on Domino Records, 'Come Into Our Room' arrived at the apex of the UK post-punk revival, sharing chart and cultural space with The Strokes, The White Stripes, and Franz Ferdinand. Clinic occupied a singular, deliberately oblique position within that wave: a Liverpool art-punk quartet drawing on garage rock, Velvet Underground cool, Suicide's icy pulse, spaghetti Western drama, and Jamaican dub, resisting easy categorisation. The band's practice of performing and appearing in surgical masks and clinical attire, cited as an homage to San Francisco acts Crime and The Residents, gave their visual output a ritualistic anonymity that the video reinforces. The song later gained mainstream UK/US television exposure via placements on 'The O.C.' and 'CSI: Crime Scene Investigation', bridging cult indie credibility with broader pop-cultural penetration. Director notes: Directed for Domino Record Co. in 2002 as part of the promotional campaign for Clinic's album 'Walking With Thee'. The video is consistent with Lyon's early music video practice rooted in fashion photography, characterised by controlled lighting, strong graphic composition, and an art-directed rather than documentary approach. The warm amber palette, low brightness, and ritualistic staging align with Lyon's known aesthetic sensibility of conceptual, image-led filmmaking. Clinic's established practice of performing masked and in uniform costuming provided a strong visual framework for the director to work within.