TIM BOWNESS & THE BUTTERFLY MIND BAND
VENUE THE CAMDEN CLUB, LONDON
DATE 13/09/2024
Steven Wilson says Tim Bowness’s Powder Dry is “the best and most creative” of all his albums, and it’s arguably the bravest, too. Having made the jump to Kscope Records, Bowness flirts outrageously with the post-punk and industrial music he enjoyed as a teenager growing up in Warrington. If that’s unexpected, then so is the choice of venue for his album launch: a subterranean restaurant-bar with table service offering Creole cuisine and cocktails to keep the palate wet. Before Bowness’s full band take to the stage, Eno collaborator and sonic texturalist Peter Chilvers plays some gorgeous, shimmering synthesiser music that’s the very antithesis of the common or garden Friday night warm-up playlist, and then Tim Bowness jumps on stage and joins him for a wistful run through of Things I Want To Tell You. Before we fall into a cosy, neuroleptic, ambient coma, the singer promises a rock’n’roll show where “Samuel Beckett meets Little Richard”, and you suspect he’s only half-kidding.