“We got dropped by our manager, our publisher and our label. The grand project suddenly didn’t seem quite right”: Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness once gave themselves an hour to write a No-Man song. Another time, they took 25 years
Progressive rock duo No-Man, comprising Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness, released their 2019 album Love You To Bits after a gestation period stretching back 25 years to 1994. The album's origins trace to the sessions for their record Flowermouth, when the pair first conceived an ambitious, album-length exploration of a single song inspired by Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's disco epics, Pink Floyd's extended pieces, and cinematic soundtrack composers such as John Barry.
The project stalled repeatedly: an early version alienated their record company, costing the band its promotional budget, manager, publisher and label, prompting them to instead record the fast, abrasive Wild Opera in 1996 by giving themselves just an hour to write and record. Work on Love You To Bits resumed only sporadically over the decades, including a shelved 1998 attempt featuring saxophonist Theo Travis, before Bowness developed a fragment for its second half in 2013 and Wilson later revived it, finally bringing the album together roughly a year after that rediscovery.
- No-Man's Love You To Bits took 25 years to complete, from 1994 to 2019.
- An early version cost the band their manager, publisher and label.
- The pair once wrote and recorded a separate album, Wild Opera, in just an hour.