Interview: Peter Chilvers

Peter Chilvers is a long time collaborator with both Tim Bowness and legendary experimental musician Brian Eno.

How did you first meet Tim Bowness and can you speak to his evolution as a songwriter over the years?

I think I first met Tim at an acoustic gig in Kings College, London in the early 90s. Mike Bearpark and I played as part of Samuel Smiles (a different, folky incarnation of the band with a female Irish singer whose name I can’t spell!) Tim played an acoustic set with No-Man as a headline (Steven on piano and Ben Coleman on violin). He made quite an impression, with big hair and an even bigger voice. Tim’s Peter Hammill influences were more to the fore back then, and he really let rip towards the end of the set. Some time after, Mike sent Tim an instrumental track we’d written, Tim liked it, sang over it, and it became the catchily titled “Life with the Independent Whore.” Very soon after – probably the summer of 1991 – the three of us got together and recorded an album in a day, under the name “Strapless”. This later was re-released under the name “Tim Bowness / Samuel Smiles” as the Burning Shed CD-R Live Archive One.

Hard to believe that’s nearly 30 years ago. Much of what Tim does now was already present back then, but I think he’s honed and pared down his style to something terser and less flowery. His lyrics on our freshly-released Modern Ruins album represent some of his best work in my opinion. Also some of his bleakest!

Were any future No-Man tracks demoed with Samuel Smiles. I know that the group played the then unreleased “All That You Are” live a few times.

I’d forgotten we played that one. A lovely song! I don’t think we demoed any other ones, but Tim and I wrote a song later called “Brighter Than Before” which became “All the Sweet Things.” Several No-Man tracks made their way into our sets, I think we used to play Wherever there is Light and parts of Days in the Trees in a more reduced acoustic form.

World of Bright Futures has some unusual cover songs. What led to the decision to record “Two Hands” by King Crimson, “Ophelia” by Peter Hammill and and a new version of “Watching Over Me”?

I think those were both chosen by me, but I could be wrong. Certainly they were both from artists we greatly admired, and I think we enjoyed the idea of covering bands who at the time were less fashionable.

I’ve always enjoyed stripping away rock arrangements and presenting a song in a much more skeletal form. It wasn’t done so often then, but now it’s pretty much a staple for John Lewis’s Christmas ads. Tim and I covered a few Deep Purple and Queen songs at the time, I wish we’d got a proper recording.

The Samuel Smiles cover of “Watching Over Me” came about because Tim had the tracks from a No-Man radio session version of it, and wanted to rework it. It ended up, particularly with the live versions, becoming quite different.

On Together We’re Stranger you are credited with “Space Bass.” What exactly is “Space Bass?” 

It’s fretless bass played through a huge filtered delay, which exaggerates and expands all the slides. I stopped playing fretless bass, for no real reason, shortly after that. I’ve only just picked it up again recently, which I’m enjoying.

Any chance of seeing a physical reissue of World of Bright Futures? The album has been a near constant for me while in quarantine. 

I don’t see why not! I should discuss it with Mike and Tim. I’ve always been quite fond of it ; my first studio album. Glad to hear that it’s been keeping you company in quarantine. I hope Modern Ruins helps maintain the required air of misery!

Any chances of a second Samuel Smiles studio album? 

We started work on a second one, but it never quite gained momentum. All three of us often work together in other line ups, so it’s not seemed so obvious that it’s not been followed up. I’d be inclined to say Samual Smiles unconsciously split into the more sedate Bowness Chilvers material and the more rocked up Tim Bowness solo material (which often involves Mike.) We all played together on several Henry Fool albums, along with Myke Clifford, which was great fun.

What is the story behind the “digital archaeologist” credit you have on David Byrne & Brian Eno – Everything That Happens Will Happen Today? That album is a dear favorite of mine and was my first exposure to Brian Eno outside of his work with Talking Heads

I started working with Brian Eno on the computer game Spore in 1996. It was supposed to just be a one off, but we worked well together and I altruistically suggested I doing studio work together in between our generative app projects. The first job to come up was the Eno / Byrne album. Brian had sent David Byrne a large number of instrumental tracks years earlier. Out of the blue, David suddenly sent him lots of songs and we had to dig out the original tracks. In computing terms retrieving digital audio tracks from even a few years earlier can be a nightmare – the software that created them has changed, plugins no longer exist, hardware stop working. So my job was to dig through all of these arcane computers – I’ll swear some of them ran on coal – and try and find workable versions. Archaeology was an accurate term! I love the final result though, an unusually ecstatic album.

I do still have to trawl through the archives sometimes, but thankfully most of our work together now involves me creating or finding interesting software tools to expand his reach.

The latest Tim Bowness/Peter Chilvers album, Modern Ruins, is available through BurningShed for order.