Chris Thomson and The Bathers are back with a superb new album

If you thought the Blue Nile took their time with albums - four in the space of 21 years - the Bathers make them look wildly over-productive. 

Chris Thomson (Image: PR)The new album, Sirenesque, is more than worth the wait. It might, indeed, be their finest achievement yet. Thomson's poetic sensibilities, his ability to summarise an experience in a few deft lines, are here accompanied by gorgeous string arrangements by Esté Visser.

The strings, recorded in the RSNO studios next to the Royal Concert Hall, are courtesy of the Scottish Session Orchestra, a superb Glasgow-based group that has worked on Craig Armstrong's new album and with Hans Zimmer on his Dune film soundtrack. The Prague Philharmonic plays on one of the other tracks. 

Chris Thomson on Friends Again, The Bathers and earning his living as a gardener

Two of the new songs - Garlands (the first single) and Lost Bravado - are among Thomson's most emotionally engaging achievements. BBC Radio London DJ Gary Crowley describes the former as one of his favourite songs of the year.

The exquisitely heartbroken Lost Bravado has the lines: "Exiled in heartache and so alone/ Dancing with a reckless joy/ Stranded in her cologne/ Stranded in heartache/ Yet so far from home'. "How bloody gorgeous is 'Lost Bravado'?", writes one fan on the Bathers' Facebook page. "Goosebumps ..." 

“The album was chopped and changed a bit”, Thomson says. “I got quite close to what I thought was finished and scrapped it, though certain elements remained. The end result is that I’ve probably got another album in the wings of stuff that I thought was good but didn’t realty fit in with the overall mood of this album. 

Chris Thomson, centre, with Este Visser, who created the string arrangements for the album, and Adam Robinson, who conducted the Scottish Session Orchestra (Image: Evie Fernand Thomson)“My plan is to hunker down over the winter months and try to get that final twenty per cent of the work done on certain songs that sound good but just need that kind of push.

"Having taken a while to get Sirenesque over that line, I’m wary, but I think I’ve learned a lot from just what it takes to complete something. The sense of completing it is good. It’s satisfying to finally get there and to be pleased with the end result. It would be great to follow up with something next year”. 

As for the emotional impact of songs such as Garlands and Lost Bravado, he concedes modestly: “It’s always been what I’ve aimed for; I’ve never been one to shy away from trying to do the emotional, romantic music, if you like, trying to go for that sweep. It doesn’t always work but in this case it seems to have hit the spot. 

The new Bathers album (Image: PR)

“Perhaps why the album took so long was because I kept paring away", he adds. "There were a few tracks that are good but when I took them out the thing seemed to just gel together. Lost Bravado is in the middle of the second side, if people are still listening to albums in that traditional way. That’s where you might expect something’s that not as strong as some of your leading tracks, but I think it just landed with a great atmosphere and feel. Again, the job that the string guys did seem to be work. And the lyrics mention ‘sun-kissed bathers’, which is a play on words on my Friends Again roots, from my younger days”. 

Ah, Friends Again …. Thomson was in that group alongside Paul McGeechan, Neil Cunningham, Stuart Kerr and James Grant. They recorded several great singles, including Honey at the Core, and Sunkissed, but broke up before the release of their debut album, Tapped and Unwrapped, in 1984. Grant went on to form Love and Money, with his Friends Again bandmates, Thomson, on his own, licked his wounds, and went on to establish The Bathers. 

Billy Sloan: Friends Again - Trapped And Unwrapped: Released – 1984

The Bathers’ sound reflects many of Thomson’s own distinct influences. Songs such as Bowie’s brilliant 1973 single, Life on Mars, continued a classic songwriting touch that can be traced back in time to such innovators as Sinatra, Nina Simone and Billie Holiday.

“It was songwriting people like that who got me as well,” says Thomson, “and if you combine some of those influences and you end up with something that is hopefully distinct while carrying those influences with it”. 

Unusual Places to Die, the first Bathers album, came out in 1987; by the time of the follow-up, Sweet Deceit, three years later, the template for the band’s sound was well established.

It was, as The Herald’s Teddy Jamieson would subsequently describe it, “a mutant Glaswegian gene-splice of Tom Waits, Van Morrison and late-era Talk Talk, all distilled through Thomson’s love for European literature (he discovered Proust in John Smith’s book shop, while looking for a last-minute Christmas present for a girlfriend)”. 

There then came the ‘Marina Trilogy’, recorded for the Hamburg-based Marina label: Lagoon Blues (1993), Sunpowder (1995) and Kelvingrove Baby (1997), which between them contained much of Thomson’s finest and most distinctive work: Gracefruit, The Angel on Ruskin, She’s Gone Forever, Thrive, Girlfriend, East of East Delier, Kelvingrove Baby, Hellespont in a Storm. 

Heavenly heights on a flight of fancy

The trilogy received critical acclaim, with Q magazine describing Sunpowder (featuring the vocals of the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser on four of its tracks) as ''gorgeous . . . inhabiting the same honey-spun, abstract turf as Van Morrison, Tom Waits, and Tim Buckley”.

To the Glasgow Herald's David Belcher, it was "the epic sound of one man alone - alone, that is, apart from the potent plangency of sundry stringed instruments and Liz Fraser's haunted tones - in a disturbingly beautiful wilderness of sound, breathily unravelling his psyche as he attempts the impossible: the celebratory exploration of love's mysteries".

The three albums confirmed the presence of a strong and enthusiastic Bathers fanbase, but commercial success has for various reasons eluded the group. It’s a state of affairs that genuinely saddens many long-term fans.

“It would always be nice to have a bigger audience than what we have”, Thomson says, “but I think that, right from the early stages, at certain points [playing] live, we probably hit the self-destruct [button] and shied away. 

“I think I would still be nervous of too much scrutiny. There’s a funny level, and it’s very hard to measure … There are certain people who seem to have just about got there. There are some peers like Lloyd Cole, who has built what I would call a big audience, but he’s not Adele. He’s maybe as close to that sweet spot as you could conjure with. 

Money problems, Liz Fraser and damp tapes: Chris Thomson on the Marina Trilogy

“Even though Friends Again didn’t enjoy a real break-out we found, in the year or so after the event, that we had been getting closer than we realised. Such is the way of things. People asked, ‘Why did you split up? I loved that record’. [Tapped and Unwrapped] was reissued last year and there’s still a lot of warmth towards it. 

“Sweet Deceit, The Bathers’ second album, was a really strong set of songs but the whole approach, the whole vocal and everything, was not warm and fuzzy in a way to endear us to any residual Friends Again audience. It was almost an anti-commercial approach but I totally believed in the songs and in the attitude, but it wasn’t seeking commercial success, really. 

“You’re always hoping, I think, for some unseen break that comes from somewhere without playing the fame game too much”.  

It’s never too late. Such poignant and beautifully expressed songs such as Lost Bravado, or Thrive, from Kelvingrove Baby (“Just remind her/ that I’m still here/ on the west coast, waiting/ I wear the rain like tears”) would surely be a heartstopping accompaniment to a film or TV script about loss and regret. 

Disc space

In the meantime, the good news is that the Bathers are playing live again. They performed a full set at Aberdour’s Woodside Hotel in August, with support from Paul McGeechan’s project, Starless. Coming up: a gig on October 27 at Glasgow University Debating Chamber, with Cowboy Mouth and Sister John, and two November shows at Kirkcaldy’s King’s Theatre.

“We’re aiming to play roughly half of [Sirenesque] in Glasgow and we’ll be bringing along a string quartet featuring some of the guys who played it. Esté Visser, who did a fantastic job on the album, is putting the quartet together”, says Thomson. He has worked with McGeechan on a couple of new tracks – one, Elektra in Blue – will be on the next Starless album, and has also contributed to a track for a possible fourth album. 

Bathers in the swim

Collaborations with McGeechan, the new Bathers album, some live shows … You understand what Thomson means when he acknowledges that “it feels like a little bit of momentum has crept into things. It’s quite nice”.

The Marina trilogy has been reissued, too, while the Summer Lighting album, issued via Last Night from Glasgow, contained some never-before-released Bathers tracks and alternative versions of previously heard songs. Licensing issues have, however, complicated the re-release of the debut, Unusual Places to Die. “At the moment”, its creator says, “it’s just simply delayed at the factory in Middlesborough …”

Let's hear it for the Hamburgers

Momentum indeed. After so long away from the music scene, after real life intervened, as it often does - he got married, raised a family, and even got into the gardening business in Glasgow – Chris Thomson is back. 

He makes, he says, a point of never looking over old interviews (“it’s a bit like looking at old photographs of yourself”) so is momentarily nonplussed when reminded of a quote he gave to David Belcher, in the long-ago summer of 1995.

Asked then what his aim was with his music, he apologised in advance if it sounded pretentious in print but observed: “it's about freezing some of life's moments of magic and mystery in your music. It's about creating moments that have nothing to do with us as musicians anymore”.  

Callum McNair and Chris Thomson (Image: Derek MacDonald)Three decades later, it does seem to characterise the Bathers’ sound. “I’d forgotten the quote”, Thomson says now, “but it does hold up”. He laughs. “I’m glad I said it then; I don’t think I could say it again. But I stand by it. It does still resonate with what we’re trying to do”. 

The Bathers play Glasgow University Debating Hall, with Cowboy Mouth and Sister John, Oct 27 (tickets: lastnightfromglasgow.com); and The Kings, Kirkcaldy, on Nov 17/18 (tickets from venue). The Bathers are on Facebook. https://clockworksessions.com/scottish-session-orchestra