Movement’s Debut Album Shows Strong Melodies, Catchy Refrains

Wherever television sets plug into cables, there are people who have heard the Movement.

However, they vastly outnumber those who have heard of the Movement, a young rock band from San Clemente that is just setting out to make a national name for itself.

Over the past year and a half, the six-man group brought its sound, if not its identity, to a broad public by writing and performing background music for several sports specials on the ESPN cable network. Come June, a new water-sports special, “ESPN’s Classic Summer,” will once again send the Movement’s music nationwide, but only as an anonymous backdrop to surfing scenes.

That is where the group’s debut album, “Waiting for You,” comes in. Produced and financed by the band itself, the eight-song record is an attempt to move the music into the foreground and bring the Movement some attention.

The songs most often recall the polished, mainstream techno-rock sound of British bands like Duran Duran, Tears for Fears and the Fixx, with U2-style drive-and-chime guitar boosting the harder-rocking numbers. While the Movement’s style and themes hardly can be called original, “Waiting for You” is founded on some basic strengths that make for enjoyable listening.

The band has a strong melodic sense, with catchy refrains in nearly every song. Carrying those melodies is the clear, rangy voice of Steve Clifton, who was singing the lead role in a Saddleback College production of “Bye Bye Birdie” at the time he was recruited into the band.

Clifton’s theatrical training shows on the album with big, dramatic belting and the occasional breathy heave. Unlike some theatrically inclined rock singers, who can be irksomely ironic or lapse into phony gushing, Clifton sings with straightforward, earnest emotion. James Gillett’s fluid, disciplined and well-structured guitar playing gives the band a second reliably melodic weapon.

Lyrically, the songs seldom move beyond stock images and ideas, most of them related to the wistfulness and anguish of the post-adolescent search for a lasting and meaningful love. But on a song like “Wind Against the Man,” with its stark, synthesizer-based melancholia, there is enough feeling in the performance to convey more than is stated in such cliches as “The moon, the sun, the stars above/What are they if you’re not here?”

Showcasing their new songs last Wednesday at the Coach House (along with spirited dance-band standards such as “Gloria,” “Love Me Two Times” and “The Jean Genie”), the Movement fared well on the rockers, pumping them up with more energy than the recorded versions.

But the quieter songs failed to weave a spell, and the band members appeared too preoccupied with precision playing to interact with each other and share the fun of live rocking.

Clifton, the visual focus (his flowing blond hair and flailing movements recalled Roger Daltrey of the Who), proved that his good performances on the Movement’s record were the result of talent, not studio paste-and-patch techniques. Gillett stretched out a bit on guitar, but his parts remained tasteful and well-proportioned.

The carefully crafted music on “Waiting for You” is the outgrowth of a change in direction that the band underwent after starting four years ago with a different name and approach, said Gillett and Clifton, the Movement’s main songwriters, in an interview after the Coach House show. The group, ranging in age from 19 to 23, started as Secret Service, in honor of bassist Paul Pontius’ father, a former Secret Service agent.

The band’s only object then was “joking around, having fun,” Gillett said. “It was more of a dance-oriented style,” founded on Jamaican ska rhythms. “We more or less changed everything. Our style of music, our attitudes. We’re a lot more serious in what we write, and in our playing.”

That commitment to a serious approach has prompted Movement members to drop college studies and devote themselves to a routine of day jobs followed by band practices seven days a week.

“It got to where all of us had to quit (college),” said Clifton, who had transferred from Saddleback to become a communications major at USC. “We can do this now, and no other time. School we can always finish later.”

Despite the anonymity of sound-track work, the exposure on ESPN has brought some gratifying results, Clifton said. Some viewers in Alabama were taken enough by the bits of songs they heard under the televised surfing scenes to ask a local radio station to track down the music and put it on the air.

Alan Gibby, owner of Dynocomm Productions, the Mission Viejo company that produced the television specials, said that he knew about the Movement because he is an acquaintance of drummer Damian Brawner’s family but that he commissioned the band for the TV work on its musical merits.

In so doing, he allowed a small bit of Orange County musical history to repeat itself: Brawner’s father, Dan, was the drummer for the Sandells, a San Clemente-based surf-rock band that performed the sound-track music for the classic ‘60s surfing film, “The Endless Summer.”

People who dislike getting a dose of carcinogens with their entertainment will appreciate the smoking ban that singer Michael Tomlinson has imposed on his club bookings--including a sold-out show Saturday night at the Coach House and a return engagement on April 15.

Judy Collins is the only other singer to play the club who has insisted that smoking not be allowed while she performs, said Ken Phebus, concert director for the Coach House.

“Tomlinson was very specific about no smoking or no date,” Phebus said, and the club put a printed notice on advance tickets that smoking will not be allowed. “We’re not going to be out there with gorillas” enforcing the ban, he said, “but we will tell them politely, ‘Please, no smoking.’ ” Those who absolutely need a puff will be able to step outside during the show.

Tomlinson’s manager, Michael Munniks, said the smoking edict isn’t part of an anti-tobacco campaign on the Seattle-based singer’s part, but a necessity if he is to perform without various miseries brought on by an acute sensitivity to cigarette smoke. “His eyes just literally go nuts on him. His voice gets raspy in a hurry, and he has to cut his shows short.” Besides that, Munniks said, it is just a nicer concert atmosphere without the smoke.

Tomlinson began requiring a smoking ban in his concert contracts about a year ago, Munniks said. “Venues are initially kind of cautious and skeptical, but we haven’t had any trouble with it. It was something we kind of had to battle for early on, but we’ve been able to demonstrate such a positive response. All of Michael’s shows have an intermission, so you’re never going more than an hour straight without smoking. Even the die-hards can go for that much.”

LIVE ACTION: Tickets go on sale Monday for two Pacific Amphitheatre shows: the Beach Boys (May 21) and INXS (June 4).