No-Man’s Tim Bowness is back with his most experimental album to date, and his first solo offering for Kscope. Powder Dry finds him retracing his early art-rock and post-punk steps and “following the enthusiasm” to create a spiky blend of haunting soundscapes and vibrant prog pop. Prog learns what role his son’s budget guitar and Peter Hammill’s pedalboard had in its creation, and why he’s still excited by making music in the 2020s.
If Steven Wilson is the busiest man in prog, then his longtime No-Man partner Tim Bowness might well be the second. As well as playing in a ridiculous number of bands including Plenty and Henry Fool, he’s also a serial collaborator – Peter Chilvers, Richard Barbieri, Judy Dyble – and a solo artist to boot. When Prog meets him in a Central London pub, he and Wilson have just recorded an episode of their podcast The Album Years; another facet to an impressive partnership that stretches back to the late 1980s.
The pub, as it happens, is full of Warrington Wolves fans on their way to lose the Challenge Cup to Wigan Warriors. As someone from the former town, it triggers memories of his childhood years learning ukulele (because it’s what local legend George Formby did) and driving to Cornwall with his parents each summer in a boiling-hot, airtight hatchback filled with plumes of toxic cigarette smoke. He’s a natural raconteur, and this gift for verbalising the visual is one of the things that makes his songs so distinctive. Or as he puts it: “Like Steven Wilson, I find it difficult to shut up.”
We here to talk about Bowness’ eighth solo album Powder Dry, his first for Kscope and the first where he sings, plays and produces everything himself (Wilson mixed it, naturally). So why the change of label from classic prog stable InsideOutMusic back to Kscope, which released several No-Man albums during the 00s?
“I’ve worked with quite a number of the artists on Kscope, and I think they do have this quite dark, post-progressive sensibility, which my music dovetails into quite nicely,” he explains. “This album is even more detached than what I normally do from InsideOut territory. That’s nothing to do with the people or the label, because they would have released the album, and I really like them. It was just that Johnny Wilks from Kscope was particularly enthusiastic about this; and I thought, in a sense: follow the enthusiasm, follow where the interest is.”
Powder Dry is the follow-up to 2022’s Butterfly Mind, which, in raw data terms, was his most successful to date. However, following that album’s release, something unusual happened – Bowness dried up. He continues writing and recording, but he admits the songs were missing a certain conviction. “It’s such a difficult market that it’s pointless to release anything for the sake of it,” he says. “There’s so much music out there so you have to feel that it deserves to be heard.”
Salvation came in a suggestion from another regular collaborator, Brian Hulse, who told him he should go it alone – “You have to do this,” were Hulse’s exact words. Setting to work at his home studio in Bath, he felt a freedom that was the catalyst for his most experimental solo record to date. Without distraction, or the need to think about how someone else might play what he was writing, he was immediately invigorated.
“I’ve never really had the confidence to do it all by myself before,” he says, stating that the players he surrounds himself with are largely better musicians while he’s more a jack of all trades. But this time he didn’t feel that “what was coming out of the sessions was particularly fresh, or that I was inspiring myself.”
Being primarily a vocalist it’s all about expressing that emotion, expressing the idea, and cutting the flab
Free or not, he still required a sounding board or three. People like Wilson, Peter Hammill and Chris Hughes – the producer of Tears For Fears – were really encouraging.” Van der Graaf Generator legend Hammill even lent him his pedalboard for inspiration. Prog wonders what songs it might have inspired? Bowness laughs: “Actually, I left it in a corner because it looked very complex.”
The Powder Dry songs came thick and fast. There are 16 tracks over a frantic 40 minutes, giving the album a unique energy. Some appear fragmentary due to their brevity, but Bowness sees them as complete and fat-free. “Being primarily a vocalist, when I’m writing songs, it’s all about expressing that emotion, expressing the idea, and cutting the flab,” he explains.
Only A Stand-Up For The Dying, a song that came to him when his partner’s mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, threatens the five-minute mark. The rest were more intuitive. “I was following my instinct at every point,” he says. “It was almost like, you’re waking up, you’re creating. How do I feel? What do I feel? How am I going to express this? And hopefully you’re going to end up surprised at the end of that process.”
It adds up to what he describes as a “schizophrenic” palette. “Music was really vital to me when I was a teenager. It was exciting – it was moving. And you want to excite and move people in the way that you were excited and moved. One of the important things is to still surprise yourself, and still feel excited by music at this stage of music-making.”
Eventually he recorded 27 tracks in all, cutting away 11 in service to the album. Those that are left create a variegated smörgåsbord that sit together like chapters of an experimental novel. Some last an unprog-like minute or two each, such as the instrumentals Old Crawler and Films Of Our Youth. They often give the impression of fleeting thoughts or feelings set to music, being interrupted by one another as the album unfolds.
A lot of this stuff acts as a metaphor for living in the here and now… as we live through more troubled and more divisive times
A particular favourite of his is You Can Always Disappear, which was apparently preferred to another that evoked a similarly hauntological ambience. “The music is based on a 19th-century waltz and the story is about someone dealing with thwarted ambitions,” he explains. “Given the musical soundtrack, I was imagining an extremely bright and capable pre-suffrage woman being suppressed by the society around her – but refusing to accept compromise. The ‘disappearance’ is either her running away from the restrictions or, at the bleak end of the spectrum, committing suicide.”
It’s not the only song where the listener might feel like they’ve wandered into a short story. The first track to come to him was Summer Turned. Ostensibly it has an upbeat feel, but it was written days after the death of the Czech novelist Milan Kundera in 2023. The central protagonists of the song are “lost in a notion of freedom and love,” with the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia as backdrop. “The lyric was very specifically about the Prague Spring, and it’s partly inspired by my reading Kundera when I was younger.”
There’s a line about bumming around on beaches, which he admits isn’t necessarily synonymous with the Golden City, though he did his due diligence: “I did look to see if there was a beach in Prague. Obviously, it’s an inland country, but actually, there are lakes and there were beaches. There was a place where hippie revellers used to go. There’s always that level of obsessive detail – this has got to be right in some way. It’s got to ring true.”
Even if many of these songs relate to past events, they’re also very much pertinent to the present: lead single Rock Hudson is an exemplar of the nowness of Bowness, exploring the corrosive nature of online discourse. Similarly, a line like ‘the politics had changed’ in Summer Turned feels on point, just as it would have done in 1968. “Of course, a lot of this stuff acts as a metaphor for living in the here and now,” he says. “Whether it’s Ukraine, whether it’s what’s happening in Gaza, as we live through more troubled and more divisive times.”
In previous interviews, he’s talked about how each album is a reaction to the last, whether that’s a complete rejection of the previous work, or a continuation. Powder Dry is the latter, building upon the sonic capriciousness of Butterfly Mind. That album, though, was a very different record to 2020’s lush, atmospheric Late Night Laments.
It was lovely when Steven said, ‘How the hell did you get that sound on a guitar?’
“Late Night Laments was very sedate, very melancholy, very one-note, and it was absolutely what I wanted to say at that point,” he says. “Whereas Butterfly Mind hinted at something which I hope this is a conclusion of. I guess it’s different in the sense that, obviously, this is all me and it feels more direct. It feels more visceral.”
Bowness found himself on a voyage of textural discovery, trying counter- intuitive moves to create unusual sounds, eschewing his nice guitar for his son’s three-quarter Fender Strat copy, recording it acoustically and putting it through a series of microphones and virtual effects. The title track, for instance, judders violently between dulcet and industrial, from stationary to a wild ride on the dodgems. “And it was lovely when Steven said, ‘How the hell did you get that sound on a guitar?’” he beams with pride.
In a previous episode of Album Years, he and Wilson explored 1977, during which Bowness stated the credentials of Throbbing Gristle. A surprise, though not a total one, given the pair’s reputation for open mindedness (their last album as No-Man, for instance, was a swaggering prog disco odyssey called Love You To Bits).
“Throbbing Gristle were one of the bands I loved because of their use of extremes,” he remembers. “Bands that went from beauty to absolute hideousness always attracted me, which you get in the early progressive scene with Van der Graaf and King Crimson, who managed to effortlessly create this kind of fragile music that was then utterly destroyed – the apocalypse stomping on the peace and love.”
He decides, after some thought, that there are two types of artists he likes: those in the Scott Walker camp, who isolate themselves and work towards something, evolving in their own hermetically sealed universe; and then the Bowies and the Princes, essentially magpies who take the ideas of others and turn them into something sui generis.
I’m very envious of the Blue Nile and Talk Talk… if I got to that point of silence, I’d want to make an album of pure noise
“Bowie was a conduit for the world in the sense that all of this information is flowing through him and it comes out of him in a very distinctive way,” he says. “It’s the same with Miles Davis, hip hop, early progressive rock and Prince’s music... you hear anything from R&B to 20s jazz, while you can also tell this guy’s been listening to Brian May and Mike Oldfield. Everything’s on the table.”
Powder Dry is certainly more than the sum of its influences, and the wilder the mood swings, the more compelling it becomes. “I’m very envious of careers like The Blue Nile and Talk Talk, where they seem to be leading to one perfect moment or one silence. Because if I got to that point of silence, I’d suddenly want to make an album of pure noise,” he says.
“If I got to that point of simplicity, I’d want to write something more involved, more complex. I guess for me there never feels like a logical resolution, because I almost immediately want to jump off and do something else.”
