Tim Bowness' Pre-No-Man Band Plenty To Have Album Released

Plenty, the band that featured Tim Bowness prior to his forming No-Man with Steven Wilson, will have their debut album released by Karisma Records on 27 April.

“It’s a debut album over 30 years in the making (we’re even using authentic period photographs for the PR), and over a period of two years we re-recorded all of our 1980s demos, remaining faithful to the sounds and the intentions,” Bowness told Prog.

Plenty formed in 1986, ut of the ashes of Liverpool-based post-punk eccentrics A Better Mousetrap and Warringtonian art rockers After The Stranger. Distinctively echoing then contemporary artists such as The Blue Nile and Prefab Sprout - alongside the iconic likes of David Bowie and Peter Gabriel - Plenty’s music alternated between electro-pop anthems, poignant ballads and ambient experiments and was unheard at the time beyond two North West performances and a handful of plays on local radio stations.

Bowness hooked up with founder members Brian Hulse and David K Jones to re-record Plenty’s catalogue of 1980s songs and set about completing the album the band had hoped to release three decades previously. Whilst re-writing some lyrics and streamlining elements of the songs’ arrangements, the band remained faithful to both the spirit of the original recordings and the era in which the songs were written. Showcasing the origins of styles that subsequently became Bowness and no-man trademarks, It Could Be Home reveals different sides to Bowness’s vocals, as Jones’s powerful bass playing and Hulse’s inventive guitar parts and pulsating electronics push Bowness into territories he’s rarely explored since the 1980s.

It Could Be Home was mixed and instrumentally augmented by Norwegian producer Jacob Holm-Lupo (White Willow, The Opium Cartel) and has been mastered by The Pineapple Thief’s Steve Kitch The album also features contributions from former Plenty guitarist Michael Bearpark, pianist Peter Chilvers (Brian Eno, Karl Hyde) and No-Man violinist Steve Bingham.

Artists

Writer and broadcaster Jerry Ewing is the Editor of Prog Magazine which he founded for Future Publishing in 2009. He grew up in Sydney and began his writing career in London for Metal Forces magazine in 1989. He has since written for Metal Hammer, Maxim, Vox, Stuff and Bizarre magazines, among others. He created and edited Classic Rock Magazine for Dennis Publishing in 1998 and is the author of a variety of books on both music and sport, including Wonderous Stories; A Journey Through The Landscape Of Progressive Rock.