Editor’s note: Veteran producer Al Clark is a walking time machine, who started in London during the Sixties and built a career in the music biz before he took Virgin into film and emigrated to Sydney for the love of Andrena Finlay, where he began with The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
Al Clark’s career was ordained from childhood; born in Huelva, Spain and home educated in a mining town in Spain where his parents were posted, he discovered his own Cinema Paradiso in the local flea pit. An obsession was born. Technicolor Spain gave way at the tender age of 9 to the inevitable fate of a middle-class ex-pat boy, a stretch at a dreary boarding school ‘back home’. Emotional repression as a result of these separations characterised generations of privileged young men, many of whom wholly embraced their lot and cultivated their entitlement. Others, like Al Clark and many of his future colleagues, developed a lifelong aversion to institutions and unwarranted authority – the first step in a life of creative independence.
