Interview with Alec Bowman: ‘Patience was as close to the bone as I could get’

Musician, filmmaker and photographer Alec Bowman takes himself on a deeply personal musical journey on his recently-released album, I Used To Be Sad & Then I Forgot, creating a series of lyrical, closely interwoven songs that run the full gamut of emotions.

One song – and the track that has the most resonance for Bowman – is ‘Patience’, which is about the breakdown of a relationship: ‘It sounded a particular way to me before I even went into the studio,’ he said. ‘It’s as close to the bone as I could get. I could hardly get through singing it. In my head, I imagined it as Frank Turner would sing it, with a big chorus, but when I said this to people, they didn’t hear that at all!’

He would love Turner to do ‘Patience’ as he imagined it: ‘I can’t think that he would but he’s a high watermark, a hero of mine, I’d love to hear him sing it.’

‘Finding myself among all that noise was difficult‘

The song was his way of trying to make sense of the situation: ‘Everything was over but I was persona non grata,’ he said. ‘People hated me, lied about me, accused me of things. I was cast as a villain and that was very hard. Finding myself among all that noise was difficult but I knew I had no choice but to do it. The song is realising that.’

With lyrics such as ‘wait a while and try not to be the man they’re all saying you seem’ and ‘dust down your wings, head for the light, pack up your things, you’re leaving tonight’, it is easily the most haunting song on the album.

‘It took me 44 years to get to the point where I could make an album like this that I would still be proud of in a year’s time,’ he said. ”Physics & Form’ (the first track) is the darkest one because the narrator – me – wants the plane to crash. By the end, ‘Never The End Of The World’, it is more hopeful but still bleakly humorous!’

The darkness of ‘Physics & Form’ – ‘when the plane I’m on crashes and grants all my wishes, I’ll come in too hard to drown, my approach is all wrong to come down clean’ – is a common thread throughout the other 10 tracks on the album, although many of them are also genuinely funny and sweet in places. ‘I was trying to be funny in a bleak kind of way,’ he laughed.

Bowman has a long history with music, going back to his childhood when his grandfather was a church organist. ‘I was in bands in school and have been in bands ever since,’ he said.

The mood of the album is ‘all me…angry, fragile, redemptive’

Even the album cover belies what lies within, featuring Bowman in a meadow, surrounded by buttercups, reminiscent of folk albums from the 70’s, which is in stark contrast to the songs within, which are more nuanced than the album cover would suggest. Bowman describes the mood of the album as ‘all me…angry, fragile, redemptive’.

Nonetheless, the tracks are frequently shot through with surprising and even optimistic turns of phrase. ‘Hand In Hand’ gleefully lists the various ways in which he doesn’t want to die while still managing to be a very heartfelt love song. The last track, which Bowman wrote at the end in one take, ‘Never The End Of The World’, turns an oft-used platitude into a genuine message of hope.

Songs like ‘Safe Mode’ – which compares people to the mobile phones that have started to take over their lives – are distinctly contemporary, whereas ‘The Event Horizon Of You’ makes something tender out of the general theory of relativity. ‘My Kind Of Chaos’, for its part, sets its turbulent theme against a calm counterpoint of acoustic guitar and examines the paradox of how disorder and harmony can co-exist in a loving relationship.

‘You hope that people on the same journey will recognise those parts of their journey in your songs’

By his own admission, Bowman went through a lot to get to the point where he felt he could release these songs into the world and it shows. Desperation might have been the initial driving force behind the album, but ultimately its message is one of gentle, even hopeful defiance. As such, the album represents the ending of one period of his life and marks a new beginning. He’s not a fan of the word ‘closure’ but acknowledges that the album gave him exactly that. ‘I had the same old boring stuff as everyone else in my life, relationships, bands etc. It’s about universal problems. You hope that people on the same journey will recognise those parts of their journey in your songs. Social media has also laid everything bare. You’re telling a story but it’s your story. I was looking for the heart of the thing.’

Essentially, it’s not about forgetting pain, but rather about claiming it. As Bowman says, his songs are ‘scar tissue on my skin, owned by me, worn on the outside, and if you’re going to judge me, then do it with an open hand in the cold light of a future day, rather than under the cover of a darkness past’.

In addition to Turner, Bowman is a big fan of US country singer Ruston Kelly. ‘I play his Dying Star album every day,’ he said. ‘I listen to a pretty wide range of music, including jazz and Belinda Carlisle. I don’t approve of the term ‘guilty pleasures’, if you like something, you like it and should enjoy it!’

Bowman says the album would never have come about were it not for his partner, the singer and musician, Josienne Clarke: ‘It just wouldn’t exist without her,’ he said. ‘She wrote the book on it for me, being so honest, lyrically. If I could collaborate with anyone, I want Josienne on guitar and vocals, me on double bass and Kieran (Hebden, the producer) on everything else, that’s my dream. I’d like to get his skewed, psycho techno view on acoustic tracks!’