Stowmarries new album, and the ‘fragility of being middle-aged’

If you stick around long enough… …you get more and more sophisticated, and then there’s a point where you just want to get back to the energy and the excitement of what it’s like when you were first in a band, and that’s what this foray is really all about, which is doing gigs again, and releasing a record around it. Going about that, it’s all about the energy of playing live and the sound you really get to feel from playing live, which is an instinctual experience, going into a tiny little venue and playing to people who don’t know you’re playing, to just attempting to play great rock. I’ve let the cat out of the bag now, letting the fans find out, but the idea is to be loud, nasty and noisy! I think what got me started on doing this now is probably down to creeping anxiety. The kind that you only have as a middle-aged person, the kind of worries about the fragility of family, the worries about mortality and these kinds of things. I think what I’m doing now, launching a solo career now, at this point in my life, reflects that. I wanted it to be about that, not from the perspective of a twenty-six year old man, but very much from the perspective of a fifty-six year old man. I thought it would be a kind of interesting duality. It hasn’t got the arrogance of youth, there’s a lot of hesitation, there’s a lot of vulnerability in there. I’m lucky to have quite a lovely and healthy organisation around me that always looks after me, which is kind of amazing, and I can allow myself quite a lot of creative freedom to experiment a lot more. It’s meant really that I’ve been able to go back and reassess or re-evaluate the work I’ve put out over the years and remake or remodel much of that which was done of its time, at its time, which I don’t think I would have ever done if I hadn’t released this record. I wouldn’t have had this artistic freedom. I’ve had to look at every situation and sort of assess it and look at the good things about it and use those things as opportunities. I love performing live the older I get, using my experience and staying relatively fit, and if I can stay around long enough, I can use this experience and continue onward and upward”.