TIM BOWNESS TURNS THE UKULELE DARK
No-Man collaborator teams up with Barbieri, Edwin and Torabi on Late Night Laments.
Tim Bowness accepts that his upcoming solo album, Late Night Laments, could be seen as a premonition of the coronavirus pandemic – but he insists it’s not.
He’s glad that he managed to complete the job just days before lockdown commenced. He’ll release the eight-track recording on August 28 via InsideOut.
“A lot of the album came quite quickly. It was quite an intense burst of activity,” he says. “In late 2018 I started with the closing track, One Last Call; it had a particular mood, and it all came from that. I did have a real sense of foreboding when I was writing. It’s a darker album for darker times.”
He adds, “There’s an element of it being claustrophobic and intimate, but lyrically it’s the most global and political album that I’ve done.”
The timing was fortuitous as the singer-songwriter is convinced he couldn’t have kept working as the lockdown began impacting everyone’s lives, partly because the situation raised an important question: “Creating art in a time of crisis – is it useful? Suddenly everything felt tremendously irrelevant. So there’s a lot of self-questioning.”
He’s also reached something of a conclusion, however. “Music, films, books, are more important to me; they offer an escape and even a greater sense of reality.”
Late Night Laments was again mixed by Steven Wilson, Bowness’ collaborator in No-Man, and mastered by Calum Malcolm of Blue Nile and Prefab Sprout fame. Guest contributions came from Richard Barbieri, Colin Edwin, Gong’s Kavus Torabi and neo-folk artist Evan Carson.
“When I finished writing it I did feel emotionally exhausted,” he recalls. “I’d written about 53 minutes and then edited it quite savagely, so what you’ve got is what I consider to be the perfect length for the music I make.” Aficianados might be surprised to learn that a ukulele makes an appearance on the record, but worry not – “I’ve even managed to make the ukulele sound dark!” he promises.
With the future unclear, he intends to continue his The Album Years podcasts with Wilson, and hopes Late Night Laments will extend the purple patch he’s been enjoying over the past few years. “Success is finding yourself somewhere new and being excited by that,” he reflects. “And that definitely happened with this album.” MK
“Creating art in a time of crisis – is it useful? Everything felt tremendously
irrelevant.”