I’ll Follow You: A Conversation with Tim Clarke, the Translator of IN MAY

Today I’m truly delighted to be in conversation with musician, actor, and translator Tim Clarke.

(You can stream our chat via the embed here, on Anchor, or pretty much anywhere else you source your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, and Google Podcasts.)

As an actor, Tim has performed throughout Europe, North America, and the UK, including close to 1,000 appearances on London’s West End stages. He’s had leading roles in productions including Jesus Christ Superstar, Blood Brothers, The Buddy Holly Story, Dusty—The Musical, The Glenn Miller Story, and The Demon Headmaster. Tim’s television roles have included Sir Richard Byngham in The Spanish Armada, fireman Mick Foster in Emmerdale, and Detective Inspector Goodman in Canary Wharf, as well as numerous TV commercials.

As a musician, he’s written and recorded the albums Life Changes and To Love and Be Loved and was the winner of the Netherlands International Song Festival and a finalist at the Isle of Wight Song Festival.

A highly competent German and French speaker, Tim has also translated into English the German musicals A Touch of Colour and Scrooge—A Christmas Tale as well as project managed the critically acclaimed musical theater piece In May, which features all original music by Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy. Which is what brought us together.

In the spring of 2017, I wrote a long, loving post here on my blog about the recording of In May that appeared as a bonus disk on the 2016 Divine Comedy album Foreverland. In the years since, it’s become one of the most highly trafficked pieces on my site. Fans of Neil Hannon are nothing if not devoted to his music. Tim himself found and read the piece and reached out to me about it, and the rest, as you’ll soon hear, is history. I was so excited that he was willing to spend a solid 90 minutes talking me through the ins and outs of his extremely varied career, as well as the creation of this breathtaking set of songs, which have meant so much to me over the past few years.