With word of a new Plenty album being released in the summer of 2021 guitarist Brian Hulse was kind enough to turn back time to the beginnings of the band, as well as reflect on the strange journey that leads to the present day revival of the group.
Reflections from Brian
The Beginning … A Better Mousetrap
Many of these events are so far in the past that I will inevitably misrepresent them and they will appear in a rambling stream as they skip across my disordered memory. The most obvious example of this is (apparently) the first time Tim and I met. David K. Jones and myself at that time were playing in a Liverpool based band called A Better Mousetrap, we had just dismissed our current singer Peter Goddard, against my wishes it has to be said. An example of the recklessness and hubris of youth as Peter was, upon later reflection, the only thing that was really interesting about that band. I can assure you that more recklessness and hubris would inevitably follow. Tim auditioned for A Better Mousetrap at The Ministry in Liverpool, a rehearsal space used by ourselves and many big names at the time, Echo and The Bunnymen and Teardrop Explodes to name drop just a couple. I have no recollection of that actual audition/meeting … but David assures me it did happen and that we decided against Tim because he was too similar to Peter Goddard in many ways and we wanted to go in a different, more commercial (doomed) direction.
After The Stranger
Some time later Tim had formed a band in Warrington called After The Stranger, which featured a very talented, and rather young Michael Bearpark. They had booked themselves into a local recording studio to record their first (and as it transpires last) album, Another Beauty Blooms, Tim contacted me to play keyboards to try and expand the sonic palette of the album and it was during these sessions that conversations about albums we loved happened at that time. Brilliant Trees, A Walk Across The Rooftops, Mr. Heartbreak were some I remember talking about. We established a common vision and understanding of musical form and decided to start working together
Plenty (Act 1)
To start with, Plenty comprised Tim, Mike, David and myself. We started by taking songs from each of our two previous projects and these featured on the first Plenty cassette. “Learning To Swim,” which Tim co-wrote with Mike and featured the drummer from After The Stranger, Howard Jones (no, not THAT one) on percussion, “Wounds,” which was an old Mousetrap song from myself which Tim re-wrote the lyrics to. However, these hardly constituted a band dynamic so the four of us gathered together and wrote our first song whilst all in the same room … the ancient and brooding “Forest Almost Burning.” This turned out to be momentous because we never wrote as a foursome ever again! These three tracks comprised the first Plenty cassette, but for me Plenty wasn’t fully realised as an idea until the next cassette, Prattle (Sultry Songs For Swinging’ Celibates), by which time Tim and I had started working much more closely together, usually with me writing a basic song backing to set the tonality and Tim writing the top line with his expressive lyrical form. This is how the song “Life Is Elsewhere” was born, and as far as I’m concerned, the Plenty “idea” was born with that song. The essence of Plenty became this sense of the bitter-sweet, yearning and sentimentality wrapped within simple song structures. The song is king, the song is everything. We even had the audacity to apply this ethos to someone else’s song as we featured a Plenty re-working of “As Tears Go By” on that release. By the time Prattle came around, Plenty had played live a couple of times, both in Widnes (lucky Widnes) but only as a three piece because Mike had left to start his studies at university by then. And then there were three! There was an explosion of writing at that time and a third cassette quickly followed, Stripped (For The Sake Of St.Anthony), which featured “Climb,” “It Could Be Home” and “The Blessèd Ones” (co-written by David and Tim, more on that last one later). However, times were a changing. No-man were beginning to get some traction so Tim moved to London to live his dream and I left the teaching profession and the North-West and started a new career in I.T. in Hampshire, and thus ended the first act. To all intents Plenty was over.
Plenty (Act 2)
Tim was doing his thing and I was doing my thing in different parts of the country … mine involved producing a self-penned album called “The Leaving” which was featured on local radio for a week … hardly anything impactful. Some years later (frankly I have no idea what the time period was) Tim contacted me and said that Mike and himself had started writing together again and would I like to be involved. This produced email chains which resulted in basic songs which eventually became the fourth collection. There is a cassette cover knocking around called “Swanky” (A Beginner’s Guide To Love Motels) but I have no recollection of this actually being physically produced, but that could be because of what happened next. The songs featured “Climbing Ladders To The Moon” (later to become “Every Stranger’s Voice”), “Walker,” “Broken Nights” and “Brave Dreams,” all of them very much in the Plenty style even though these were written much later than when the idea of Plenty was forged. I think that original idea was strong enough that it transcended the years lost. Most of these tracks were included on one of my own albums Avoiding Seagulls. However, things were brought to an abrupt close since the second act ended in acrimony, as during one of the recording weekends (Tim and Mike came over to Hampshire to record these songs several times) I have a distinct memory of throwing both Tim and Mike out of my house in a fit of rage (and since I can count the number of times I have lost my temper, in my many decades on the planet, on one hand … this was almost a unique event). We did not speak for many years.
Plenty (Act 2.5)
In 2008 Tim revived the Plenty concept by enlisting Peter Chilvers (a self-declared Plenty fan!) and Michael Bearpark under the guise of Samuel Smiles with the album “Plenty revisited” featuring classics such as “Towards The Shore,” “Life Is Elsewhere” and “Climbing Ladders To The Moon.” For me, this was not entirely successful as a project (I only heard it in 2017!) as it didn’t have the pop sensibility and emotional sobbing heart of Plenty, but that’s my view and I’m sticking to it! I’m not even sure this was ever fully released. However, these recordings were presented to me as a starting point for Act 3 …
Plenty (Act 3), It Could Be Home and Flowers At The Scene
Around 2017 Tim contacted David and myself and said it would be nice to actually produce the Plenty album “that never was” by re-recording some of our best songs. We started by using some of the 2008 recordings. “Never Needing” (as was “Life Is Elsewhere”) and “Every Stranger’s Voice” (as was “Climbing Ladders To The Moon”) are a case in point and made it to the album … there is a third which was “Towards The Shore” which didn’t get released at that point (more later). I was given the original files for these recordings and built new arrangements around them, this is how Peter Chilvers and Michael Bearpark appear on ICBH. At the same time I extended the range by producing new backings for some of our favourites using all of the experience and technique I had developed over the intervening years. In truth this all happened very quickly, very naturally and it has to be said, it was great fun. It was Tim’s belief that the songs were always very strong but because of time and circumstance had never really been represented to the world at their best. Thus the album It Could Be Home was born. However, there was such energy and bonhomie in this process that I also started creating new song beds in a Plenty style and I flung them at Tim … one such bed became “The Good Man” the only new song on ICBH and the first new Plenty track in decades. By the time the album had shipped we still hadn’t stopped writing, we had a couple more old Plenty songs that we reworked, “Wetherby” which became “Killing To Survive” and “Sacrifice” which became “Ghostlike.” We’d started on the sequel already! All three of us did meet after ICBH was released to rehearse for possible live performances and even though by the end of those rehearsals we did have a complete set that sounded pretty good, a lack of momentum meant that those performances just didn’t happen. Regardless, Tim and I settled into this new process of writing with him selecting from the dozens of song beds I’d created and writing songs to them. The first few became “The War On Me,” “Not Married Anymore” and then “Flowers At The Scene.” It was at this point that Tim realised that we weren’t writing Plenty 2, we were writing something different, in fact, what turned out to be his next solo project Flowers At The Scene … the album may sound like the idea was conceived before the implementation … but it actually started life as the next Plenty album! When the realisation hit, the process did modify slightly in that Tim additionally started sending me song snippets which he’d written himself for his next solo project, which I turned into full arrangements, modifying as I went. These became “Rainmark” and “Borderline.” Each of the tracks on that album originally had me playing everything (with the exception of the odd ukulele from Tim!) and as Tim invited named players in I slowly disappeared. For example, on “It’s the World” I originally played all the guitars, programmed the drums, it was all me. Now all that’s left of me is a single synth line (oh the horror!) On other tracks I faired much better, however, I still miss the wonder of having a guitar duet with Andy Partridge that eventually became an Andy Partridge solo. Steven Wilson’s mixing can be very harsh on the ego!
Late Night Laments
Built on the momentum of FATS and still full of energy, I produced dozens more song beds. Again, we didn’t have a clear idea of where this was going, we remained open to where the ideas would take us. Tim selected from the long list and wrote songs and at the same time gave me some of his own scratchpad ideas … this became our standard process. It became clear around the completion of “One Last Call” that a “house style” was emerging which Tim described as the sound of late night laments, which became a fitting title to the collection. Once we’d established the soundscape, we reworked some of the existing songs to fit the ethos, which is why the album sounds very much like it was conceived as a single idea with a consistent sound palette. But as always, it was an evolutionary adaptation. When I listen to FATS I still hear many things that could have been done better, but LNL still sounds perfect to me. And even though I was part of its creation, it seems I can listen as if it lives its own life.
Tim had this to add about Late Night Laments and Flowers at the Scene
Late Night Laments very definitely started with my demo for “One Last Call.” This was the first song I’d written for a year as most of 2019 had been spent working on Love You To Bits. Once the song was written (in late July/early August), I sent it to Brian with an accompanying email saying that I thought it would be interesting to make an entire album that operated in a very specific emotional and sonic territory (something simpler and more understated than both Love You To Bits and Flowers At The Scene). All that followed – both in terms of what Brian was sending me and what I was writing musically – was specifically working towards realising a very particular vision. I wrote a few things from scratch and, as is his way, Brian very quickly came up with pieces that brilliantly developed the brief I’d outlined (e.g.the backing for “Never A Place” arrived within a few days of me sending out “One Last Call”). The title was also in place early on. Although it was an easy album to make, it was also an emotional one. For whatever reason, I had a real sense of foreboding during the writing of it, which finds it’s voice most clearly on “We Caught The Light” (which I wrote on the New Year’s Day 2020).
Flowers At The Scene, on the other hand, did start off with three pieces written with the intention of making a contemporary Plenty – It Could Be Home follow-up and was more gradual in its coming together (involving a combination of writing new material and retro-fitting old songs). It was sounding so good, it morphed into a solo album as I brought more people into the fold (including Steven Wilson as mixer and co-producer).
Plenty (Act 4), the promise fulfilled …
I’m sure I’m not speaking out of turn but Tim suffered some emotional exhaustion from Late Night Laments; a lot of emotional energy went into that album, and I’m sure you can hear some of it rattling around in those tracks, so starting another solo album seemed some way off. Then COVID happened! Tim and I were left kicking our heels so we decided to try for some “fun” projects. Tim liked the idea of maybe doing a complete rework of a classic album. The first thought was Nick Drake’s Pink Moon. After I’d created the third song bed from this album we soon realized that the songs are very fragile. Once you take out Nick Drake, there’s very little left. He is the embodiment of that sound. Time to move on. Next we tried the Bowness/Barbieri album Flame. That only resulted in “Brightest Blue” and an unfinished version of “Feel.” Again, we didn’t think this was going our way. Our next game was for each of us to pick tracks in turn to work on and then I’d generate a novel arrangement for each which Tim would sing over. Although sadly many didn’t get completed, such as “Dissolved Girl” by Massive Attack and “Over The Hillside” by The Blue Nile, there were five that we were rather pleased with (and somewhat amused by) namely, “Soap And Water” by Suzanne Vega (produced as Pet Shop Boys electro-pop), “New Brighton” by the massively under-rated It’s Immaterial, “Tiny Children” by The Teardrop Explodes (given where this story started, a somewhat appropriate choice), “Forgive Me” by Kevin Coyne and finally “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” by Hank Williams. A motley bag it has to be said. We initially had no intention of releasing these, they were purely for our own entertainment during lockdown, or so I thought. This is where I suspect Tim was evolving a cunning plan all along. He asked me to look again at some of the Plenty tracks that we’d recorded previously that hadn’t quite worked and so hadn’t been included on ICBH. With a bit of perseverance, spit and polish I managed to revive several of them, they were beginning to sound really good and had a more gritty edge than ICBH. David and Tim re-recorded their parts to the new forms to further improve them. These included the David penned “The Blessèd Ones” and a construction built from the 2008 version of “Towards The Shore”. It was clear that we had a new Plenty release on our hands, so we engaged David to record bass on some of the cover versions and the next Plenty album was born, a two-parter. “Old” comprises 7 Plenty tracks and “Borrowed” comprises the 5 covers versions stated previously. Personally speaking, I see this as the final act of Plenty, a promise fulfilled, a journey completed. Furthermore, Tim and I have continued to write new material; we already have several strong songs for his next solo project, however, I don’t know what shape that will take, or whether that album will be the third part in the collaboration (FATS, LNL and ??? … everyone loves a tryptic) or whether it will be a transition point into his shift to a different collaborator/style?
Only time will tell…
Brian Hulse (April 2021)
Plenty – Enough is available to pre-order through BurningShed
All The Blue Changes 