2020: the antidote

Back in June I waxed somewhat lyrically about the re-release of The Blue Nile’s fourth and final album, High, and how Messrs Buchanan, Bell and Moore’s mellifluence was the perfect antidote to these sulphurous times. Well, guess what? Those times are still with us, and the need for a soothing balm is as acute now as it has ever been. Step forward, then, Tim Bowness.

One of the UK’s much-respected but not universally-known singer-songwriters, his collaborations with - full disclosure - my friend Steven Wilson date back to the late 80s and the formation of ‘no-man’, an outfit once described by no less an organ as the Melody Maker as "conceivably the most important English group since The Smiths”. Over the last 33 years, the Bowness/Wilson partnership has generated seven critically acclaimed albums, including their most recent, the “disco epic” Love You To Bits. When not in each other’s professional company, the pair have focused on solo interests - Wilson, with the equally revered Porcupine Tree and latterly, albums on his own, with Bowness working prolifically on five solo albums of his own (including his last, the highly rated Flowers At The Scene, which included contributions from Wilson, XTC’s Andy Partridge and 10cc’s Kevin Godley) and a plethora of collaboration projects. But now comes his sixth, Late Night Laments, which pretty much does what it says on the tin - a soothing collection of nine songs (14 on a limited edition CD with extras) which evoke the intimate, even claustrophobic state of late night, headphone-wearing consumption of atmospheric music. That description, though, probably doesn’t do Bowness any favours: Late Night Laments is no ambient gloomfest, but certainly does provide a timely reflection of where we find ourselves today.

“50% was written in late 2019 and 50% was written in early 2020,” says Tim of a creative process that went right up until the first signs that something more than just a flu outbreak was going on. “From the very first tiny newspaper article on the new coronavirus, I was aware of what was happening,” Tim recalls. “It was no surprise to see it go from a small piece on page 20 to taking up the first 20 pages of the paper by late February.”

Notably, the album was formally finished on the day lockdown was announced in the UK. Some of what it covers was certainly prescient. “My main worry was that some of the themes - hate crimes, generational divides, terrorism, social exclusion, etc - would be irrelevant in the face of the virus. As it turned out, a lot of the subject matter seems more current now.” Perhaps inadvertently, Bowness realises that he’d tapped into the emerging reality. “On one of my last listens through [in preparation for release], I became so absorbed in the experience that when the album finished I had to gradually re-remember that ‘lockdown’ and ‘the virus’ were real things. The music (or my exhaustion) had made me forget what was happening in the outside world and for a few moments the all-too depressing reality we’re living through seemed like far-fetched fragments from a bad dream.”

The result is an album of reflective, stripped back consideration, written from the perspective of an individual, late at night, enclosed in the almost claustrophobic intimacy of a living room, the outside world shut out by headphones, the music channeled from source to ear by the shortest of routes. The cover art, by longtime artwork partner Jarrod Gosling, almost says it all. “The artwork does provide a good insight into the album, I think,” says Tim. “There is a sense that the music is quite beautiful and comforting, while the lyrics represent a harsh dose of reality. I imagined the album as being like someone trying to immerse themselves in their own special world of favourite books, favourite albums, familiar furniture, while in the background the constant hum of global news is serving to puncture that state of grace.”

Bowness’s own ingestion of culture played some role in that, with songs like Darkline evoking the music of 60s spy thrillers. No surprise: “Late last year, I went through a phase of reading le Carre books,” Tim reveals. “Although they’re sometimes dismissed as genre thrillers, they’re actually well-written and frequently emotional pieces of work. There’s a real sense of sadness in his writing and a great depiction of how small lives can be sacrificed to the supposedly greater good of national politics or religion." Added to that is his love of 60s spy films and the scores of people like John Barry in the Bond and Harry Palmer series.

Late Night Laments is certainly a tonal shift from Bowness's last outing, no-man’s Love You To Bits, with its themes of relationships-lost framed by a clubland-infused electronica. “I think it was a necessary shift in direction,” Tim says about his latest direction. “What I do is often a reaction to what I’ve done previously, so albums can be a continuation of the most recent work or a complete rejection of it. In this case, the songs emerged totally spontaneously and were very different from the dynamic Love You To Bits and the eclectic Flowers At The Scene. I didn’t intend to write a late night ‘headphones album’, it was what naturally came out.”

One Last Call was the first track out of the bag - and closes the album (“The beginning became the end”), and concerns itself with idealogical terrorism, albeit written ambiguously as also a love song. Between these two points, it sets the sonic template for the entire album, all atmospheres, subtle bass motifs and Bowness’s own emotive, intimate vocals. “I didn’t intend to write a late night ‘headphones album’,” he says. “It was what naturally came out. Once I’d written One Last Call, the album title, album direction and album cover came to me pretty much immediately.”

The themes bubbled up as he went. The album’s opener, Northern Rain covers something I can closely relate to, the progressive demise of someone with dementia, but while this might sound depressing, the song is, in Tim’s own words, more about “coming to terms with ever-shifting change and being replaced.” I’m Better Now takes a nihilistic view on hate crime, seen through the eyes of a perpetrator, and examined through the prism of society’s increasing division, especially the polarities that politics here and in the US have been tainted with in recent years. “I wanted to present an extremist view and an extreme act in a way that ‘almost’ made it appear normal. The banality of evil,” says Tim. Elsewhere, We Caught The Light, written in the early hours of New Year’s Day, tapped into a “strange sense of foreboding” Bowness had that 2020 “was going to be significant and not in a good way”. “We caught the light,” he sings over a gentle melody, “but missed the signs”. Makes you pity those journalists who’ll be compiling the end-of-year retrospectives in December.

To make the album Bowness tapped into his expansive network to call on the talents of people like co-producer Brian Hulse, whose drum machine programming plays a constant part in the album’s sensuous textures, as well as Steven Wilson to mix the project. The joy throughout is that everything is perfectly weighted. Nothing - not the vocal or the instrument - is ever overplayed, with contributions by Porcupine Tree bassist Colin Edwin and former Japan keyboard player Richard Barbieri (who has long featured in both Bowness and Wilson’s work) adding subtlety, rather than obvious virtuosity. A case in point is the delightfully slowburn Darkline (inspired by a typically black-humoured Warren Zevon comment during his final days), on which Barbieri contributes a muted scream of a synth solo that just works in the piece.

If One Last Call, the first song written for the album provides its “emotional template”, according to Bowness, it’s impossible not to draw reference to the aforementioned Blue Nile, with whom many positive similarities can be drawn. Perhaps this is no coincidence, given the involvement of The Blue Nile’s recording engineer Calum Malcolm. “I’m a huge Blue Nile fan, and have followed the band’s work since the beginning,” says Tim. “I particularly love how they manage to humanise imaginative electronic soundscapes. My voice is totally unlike Paul Buchanan’s, but there’s no doubt that the feel of and the textures in The Blue Nile’s music have an influence on what I do since the beginning of my music making.” Another reference is Peter Gabriel - himself a huge part of The Blue Nile’s source code - and it’s with some pride that Bowness, a longstanding Gabriel fan, is now signed to his Real World organisation in a publishing deal. “I greatly admire the label and studio and have long been a fan of Peter’s, so it’s a lovely association. Hopefully there will be creative and career repercussions as well.”

Late Night Laments is, then, a fantastic addition to Bowness’s canon and, he says, the unpredictable nature of the directions he takes each time could lead him anywhere (“As many of my albums are a reaction to what I’ve just completed, you can expect a full-on K-Pop extravaganza or a detour into Noise Metal!”, he says, maybe jokingly). But there is no rush. This is an album that will get plenty of play, especially throughout the remainder of this particular shit show of a year. It does indeed recall the ambient brooding of The Blue Nile, but also Talk Talk and Prefab Sprout. Significantly, though, it also recalls the wooziness of One World, one of my favourite John Martin albums. That closes with the eight-minute Small Hours, a lot of Echoplex and the sound of geese recorded on a tape recorder taking flight from a nearby lake, amongst other ambient sounds. Previously it had been my go-to source for late night listening. With this new work by Bowness, I’ve found a successor.

Scots missed: The Blue Nile's High

These are sulphurous times. You don’t need me to tell you that, of course. Just turn on the news and see Neanderthals making up for the lack of a summer football tournament abroad to bring their particular brand of knuckle-dragging nationalist mayhem to Westminster. Then there is the relentless death march of the 'other' virus, plus rancour over gender politics and myriad other social disagreements chewing up life still (mostly) in lockdown. Never has there been a greater need of a soothing balm like The Blue Nile.

“The Blue who?”, you ask. Tinseltown In The Rain or The Downtown Lights? No? A shame, then. OK, the Scottish trio’s reputation was hardly strengthened by a somewhat indolent output of just four albums in 21 years. But in that quartet there was more than enough to justify the critical acclaim from, admittedly, a cognoscenti that included music luminaries and musos alike who fell in love with their somnolent mood music. 

In each of those albums - A Walk Across The Rooftops, Hats, Peace At Last and 2004’s High - The Blue Nile set a benchmark for an unashamed romanticism, channeled through ruminatory songs laid over beds of synths blended with singer Paul Buchanan’s sonorous voice (invariably described as “haunting”). Theirs was vibe music that went boldly against the brashness of rock and pop throughout the course of the decades their output spanned. Despite an apparently fractious denouement, the band have been progressively re-releasing their catalogue with audiophile remasters befitting a band whose first album was issued on a label owned by Linn, the high-end hi-fi people. That brought The Blue Nile to the attention of Peter Gabriel, himself no sonic slouch and one of many big names to champion their cause (Gabriel would go on to involve Buchanan in his OVO album and show for the Millennium Dome's opening in 2000). High is therefore the last of the reissues, available both as a double-CD package containing four new songs (Wasted, I, Big Town and Here Come The Bluebirds) plus extended remixes of The Days Of Our Lives and She Saw The World (two of the album's standouts), and for the first time on vinyl (and in the super-duper 180g format, too). 

Although I've always hated the American term "adult oriented rock", High's adult orientation veers more towards the wistfulness of reaching a certain age. I suppose another way of saying this, is that - from my perspective as a 52-year-old man - much of the imagery is reflective of the things someone of my age pays attention to: weather and the state of things, for example. Like it's predecessors, High carries a gentle melancholy. For some reason, I've often associated this with The Blue Nile's inherent Scottishness. I know it's not wet and grey the whole time in Scotland, but the sparsity of the band's music invokes a palette of cool sonics. Some might find this dull. I, personally, have always found it refreshing. Coming eight years after its predecessor, High hardly moved the band's oeuvre onwards, but then that was never going to be an issue, such was the standard that they'd set on their previous outings. The music remained luscious, Buchanan's voice remained...er...haunting, but there was a subtle change in lyrical tone as songs tackled the world-weary topics such as the passing of time and the passage of relationships. 

This reflection might be borne from the fact that Buchanan was laid low by an ME-like illness for a couple of years between High and Peace At Last, but may even be the result of tensions between him and bandmates Robert Bell and P.J. Moore which made the album's gestation somewhat fractious. That turbulence could have manifested itself in the shear size of the task Buchanan, Bell and Moore had in whittling down "hundreds" of songs, according to the singer, that were candidates for High before settling on the nine committed to record. Nothing - or at least, very little - is left to waste. All nine tracks land and land well.

The fractiousness that coloured the recording of High can be seen as the part of the fuel that made it. Clearly, from a musical and lyrical point of view, there was much pondering going on. Buchanan himself has admitted as much, describing High as "stoic" and "to some extent a record about ourselves", implying that the band had reached their limit. "We showed up, we went into the room and worked, and whatever drift had set in we were loyal to each other and we knew we had to form the wagons into a circle," he told The Quietus in 2013. The subsequent album tour was made in the late spring of 2006 without Moore, even reducing The Blue Nile billing to "Paul Buchanan sings the songs of The Blue Nile", albeit with Bell on board (who remains to this day featured on The Blue Nile's reissues website, along with Buchanan). 

To this day there has been no definitive word on whether the group exists or not, though the renewed commercial activity with the reissues has lit a faint fire of hope about new material. Perhaps, though, we must be resigned the fact that sometimes a candle simply blows out in its own time. We can bemoan The Beatles' mere decade as a functioning pop group, or the seven years between Jimi Hendrix's US Army discharge and his death, but those brief windows gave us so much. The Blue Nile, in a way, can be viewed similarly: four albums, four gems. That'll do.