IF one man has the whole work-life balance thing sorted, it’s Clint Boon.
The 58-year-old DJ from Oldham, who made his name as the keyboardist for Inspiral Carpets, has his seven-year-old Cassius ‘sat on my back as we speak’.
He is the youngest of five for Clint, following Hector, 11, and Oscar, 13, from his current marriage to Charlie, plus 20-somethings Max and Harley from an earlier marriage.
“Family is a very big thing for me,” he told Weekend.
“I love music, I couldn’t imagine my life without it, but family is the reason I get up and do it.
“A lot of mums and dads have to get up for work and get the kids to school. They come home shattered and want to put their feet up.
“But we are fortunate that we have got an idyllic family life.
“I’ll go to work for a few hours, come back and then we can be a family again. It’s a nice dynamic.”
Clint’s working pattern involves his daily radio show, from 2pm to 6pm on Manchester station XS, plus ‘four or five’ DJ sets a week, including his Saturday residency at the South nightclub.
His three younger children are home-schooled, and Clint is seeing the benefits – with a budding musician in Oscar, and a keen photographer in Hector, who has an ‘amazing eye for it’.
Clint said: “I’ve always been someone to question the way we do things. The whole system is there for a reason, and it does work. But what we see is that people have thrived outside of that.
“Children that are educated outside of that often turn out to be little geniuses that are full of confidence and with a beautiful spirit. We want them to be confident and to pursue what they love.”
Home-schooling is just one part of the Boon family’s ‘world of natural ways to raise kids’, while Hector and Oscar were also home-birthed.
Five became six for Clint in 2012 following the birth of daughter Luna Bliss, but she was born three months prematurely and died after a 34-day battle for life.
“When you go through something like that it is profound in the way it affects you,” said Clint.
“I do a lot for charity, people ask me to do something special for a good cause and I will try and do it.
“But that’s just part of our world, it’s how we live.”
Clint has raised at least £20,000 for charity by auctioning off canvas drawings of the iconic Inspiral Carpets cow logo.
He also plays DJ sets at charity nights – including one which will be held at Winnington Park Recreation Club, in Northwich, on Friday, January 26.
The event is for Tiny Steps, a charity which is raising money to build a sensory play area in Cheshire, and it is the second year running that Clint has played a set for the cause.
He said: “We had an amazing night last year, and hopefully the same people will come down and we can have another fantastic time.”
It would be difficult to meet someone more enthusiastic about discovering and playing music than Clint.
He was into 1950s rock and roll at a young age, before falling in love with punk as a 17-year-old after watching the Sex Pistols in Manchester.
“That was my Road to Damascus,” Clint said.
“It was perfect for me. This was modern rock and roll. I was in the right place at the right time to embrace it.
“Punk changed my life. I wasn’t into spitting at gigs or anything like that – I thought that was disgusting – but punk represented something. Here were working class kids in the city that wanted another way to do stuff.”
More than a decade on, after discovering the technical side of production, Clint was about to enjoy success as the keyboardist for Inspiral Carpets.
He remembers how little known the band was when he penned This is How It Feels, a song which has gone on to be sung on football terraces and still be played regularly on the radio.
Clint said: “I think it’s lovely. I didn’t realise back then how big it would be. At that time we were still taking time off work to do gigs.
“If I knew then that it would still be played 30 years later, that it would be sung at so many football games, and that people would really embrace it, I would have been very surprised.
“It’s like a child that you have brought up, and they are now an adult doing their own thing. We created it but it is completely out of our control now.”
Clint saw Noel Gallagher ‘day-in-day-out’ for four years while the future Oasis and High Flying Birds star was a roadie for Inspiral Carpets.
He said: “When Stephen [Holt] left the band he wanted to be our singer, but we didn’t think his voice suited the band. So we took him on as our roadie and he was with us everyday. We would party together, we would go to the football together, we were extremely close.
“It was quite obvious that one day he would do his own thing, but not even Noel could have imagined how successful he would be.
“I still have to pinch myself that he is the same lad from Burnage that we had to pick up and take everywhere with us because he couldn’t drive.”
Guitar bands have enjoyed little commercial success in the charts over recent years, but Clint believes a ‘revival’ could be around the corner.
“I would like to see a top 20 full of bands,” he said.
“A band like Slow Readers Club would have been a household name by now 20 years ago.
“They are as good as Depeche Mode, but they will get their moment.”
Regardless of chart success, emerging bands are packing out venues and finding new ways online to get their music out to the masses.
Manchester and the north west continues to be at the forefront of that and Clint believes the outpouring of music from the area is ‘never going to stop’.
With bands like Cabbage, Stillia and Control of the Going picking up the mantle for the region, Clint is still as excited as ever about discovering new bands and playing new tunes.
“I think it’s getting more intense again, that excitement, because the show I do now isn’t a specialist music show,” he said.
“I used to do that on XFM, and it was brilliant but you become a bit immune to it all.”
One band that might not return to the scene is Clint’s own Inspiral Carpets, following the death of drummer Craig Gill in 2016.
Clint said: “We’ve still not had the conversation believe it or not. We’ve been helping his family and that feels like the right thing to do.
“There’s a chance we might never do it again, and if that’s the case then that is OK. Craig was 14 when he started with the band, and you just can’t replace that.”
Tickets for Clint Boon’s Indie Disco, at Winnington Park, cost £12 and are available from Scott Burstow on 07814 426014.
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