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Link - #9 Clara]
To Walker, making music means finding the most appropriate sonic environment for his lyrics. These unconventional, sometimes mocked and often alarming sounds are a mise-en-scène, a dramatic setting for Walker’s lyrics, which Brian Eno has described as “peerless”. The Clara of the song title is Claretta Petacci, Benito Mussolini’s young mistress, who chose to be shot dead alongside Il Duce in April 1945 by Italian partisans. Their bodies were strung up and beaten with sticks by a crowd in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto. Walker says he saw newsreel footage of this as a young boy and it gave him nightmares. The scene was – notoriously – evoked in the recording studio by percussionist Alasdair Molloy punching a side of pork with his fist.