“Are you ready to take it to the next level?!” booms David Morales.

I’m sat in the living room of Ian Hodgson, Moon Wiring Club, surrounded by shelves of trinkets, stacks of DVDs and old fitness LPs. These are all part of the machine behind Clinksell, the imaginary community of characters populating Hodgson’s records, which exist in an imaginary, timeless place, and whose identity is jigsawed together from hauntological artefacts and images of Peak District villages. David Morales isn’t here with us, he’s on the telly, in the opening video for MTV Music Generator 2 (2001) on the PS2, the computer game that Ian Hodgson makes all his music on.

Hodgson started making music during a fine art course, where he found that “all I really wanted to do, instead of trying to do high concept things, was draw vaguely aristocratic looking women in hats”. This eventually morphed into what’s now known as Moon Wiring Club, and just before Christmas, Hodgson released his fourth album, A Spare Tabby At The Cat’s Wedding.

There are two versions of the record: a CD and LP version, which are not the same, but share track names and a cast of characters. Oh, and the CD has just last week been reissued with different artwork. Hodgson explains to us below what on earth is going on in Clinksell…

“The LP version is the dream mix-up of the CD. So, by the end of listening to the CD you’ve fallen asleep, and in your sleep you’re trapped inside the LP.”

There are two releases with this album, a CD version of A Spare Tabby at the Cat’s Wedding, and an LP version, and they differ in terms of content. Can you explain how the two are connected?

“Every album I do has a story to it, and with this one I was very much interested in the idea of old entertainment, of old board games and old card games. Also, it’s like, when you look forward to something so much – a book, CD, LP, DVD – so much that you have dreams about it, and then you finally get hold of the real item, and it is totally different. But then what happens to that ‘dream version’? It still exists somewhere, so for this record, the vinyl version is, amongst other things, the dream-version of the CD.

“For this [the vinyl edition], there’s an old card game called A Spare Tabby At The Cat’s Wedding, and when it was around there were hints that there was a musical accompaniment to the game. The CD and the LP are that musical accompaniment, but whatever my idea for it is, isn’t necessarily the 100% fixed way to listen to it. The idea is to do the CD first and then the LP. The LP version is the dream mix-up of the CD. So, by the end of listening to the CD you’ve fallen asleep, and in your sleep you’re trapped inside the LP.





“The CD version is the male (prince) cat. He’s on the cover, but the reverse of the CD acts like a mirror trap holding him in place, until the first person who bought a CD lifted it out to play.

“You spend the first part of the game trying to avoid marrying the male cat.”

“The CD opens with the voices of the previous players, who couldn’t get out of the game. They’re no longer in limbo because you’ve played the CD, and that means you’ve started playing the game. There’s a voice that says: “It’s started,” which marks you starting to play, whether you realise it or not. In each track there’s sequences, and certain sequences are a part of the musical accompaniment and represent a card being played. As you progress, each track is a situation that you can or can’t get out of, and there’s also tracks based on people that could help you.

“The idea is that you would spend the first part of the game trying to avoid marrying the male cat. When you get to the end of the CD you need to escape into Edwardian times via a romantic dance, aka, the track  ‘Edwardian Romance’. But this is not an escape, it just leads you to the LP version, which operates on dream logic, and the female princess cat is now keenly pursuing you. The back of the LP says it’s a game for 1-450 players, because there’s 450 copies of the LP which are for sale.”

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