The Clockworks

The Clockworks perform at Scala, London on 16 October 2026 at 5:30 pm. Look up. Look around you. What do you see? A row of commuters, lost in their phones. People in pubs looking at small screens, sat under bigger screens. We were sold the possibility of infinite connection, but all it really did was pull us further apart. Because in the modern world, there’s no more alluring temptress than technology and she’s rarely, truly on your side.

It was a time for The Clockworks, completed by James McGregor, Sean Connelly, and Damian Greaney, but when they stepped back into the writing room, they soon had the instinct to turn their focus elsewhere. The new material that swiftly began pouring out of McGregor was rooted in a very clear and distinct world that looked outside of their creative bubble and saw a society wrestling with an increasing isolation born from shiny new toys and bright lights.

The framework of ‘The Entertainment’ came intuitively and fast. The Clockworks are calling their second record a work of friction.

In stark contrast to their debut, which had been laid down with Butler in a flurry of activity, running on snap decisions with no time to look back, ‘The Entertainment’ was produced by Sean Connelly, recorded over a period of months and using techniques to mirror the jarring conceits inside.

With Freeman and Connelly having massively upscaled their production abilities in the years since ‘Exit Strategy’, the band began slowly chiselling away at the raft of ideas they’d accumulated, carving out a sonic landscape for ‘The Entertainment’ built around tension and release; moments of darkness juxtaposed with glimmers of light. A raft of cinematic inspirations were on the moodboard: Bladerunner, Drive, the works of Fellini.

Musically, meanwhile, nothing was off limits for the quartet.

Ask The Clockworks to list a fraction of their listening habits and they’ll reel off everything from Little Simz to Ennio Morricone to Beach House and AG Cook.

Throughout, the instrumentation and production hones in on this narrative.

On the record’s artwork, the band are seated in a cinema screen, replicating an old LIFE Magazine cover featuring the first theatre to show 3D films. Back then, the technology seemed fantastical; now, we can see people putting a blinker around their vision - the start of many to come. With their second, The Clockworks are highlighting that duality but they’re also offering a reason to support the alternative: a group of mates, making music to get you off a screen and into the world. That, after all, is entertainment.