Let’s take a guy who plays guitar like Prince, sings like Axl, wears kinky boots & fish-nets like vintage Bowie, and sways like a throwback from art school circa 1974, what have you got?
BEAU BOWEN
His headline show on 10th March at the wonderful Half Moon in Putney mixed surrealism with pop theater to deliver a show that was grand in effulgence.
“A Rock ’n’ Roll Story” (his first single) was a Bowie-style ejulation that encapsulated all the emotional turmoil one might find in a romantic melodrama; this transitioned into a brand new unpublished song, “The Quiet Ones” which started as a contemplative dream and ended as an audiovisual paroxysm.
“Time Is An Illusion Baby” was frizzy and showcased the undoubted talents of Beau’s circumstellar bandmates including a new rhythm section (this was the first time they played together in concert) and a seductive interaction between Beau and his suitably sombreroed associate-guitarist, Mike Wroe.
On “Universe in Reverse” the vivacious multi-instrumentalist / singer created a glamorous, progressive rock fusion, to tackle the psychedelic experience of finding oneself floating beyond physical limits. While “Bisolar Disorder” brought a flurry of Prince Rogers Nelson style guitar-pyrotechnics with a bacchanalian sense of frenzied escapism.
We would have liked to have seen the wonderboy use more keyboards — if you have the apparatus on stage, you might as well use them — and some of the transitions between songs felt awkward, but for the most part, this was a multisensory, multi-layered and hallucinatory show.
Beau Bowen’s work is brimming with wordsworthian decadence, genius romanticism, and neurotic psycho-sexuality … so if you want to recapture the art-rock end of the glam scene you might have found in mid-1970s London (think of the majestic outburst found in Queen II for example) — this is for you.
His new album “The Great Anticlimax” is due out on 10th April and was produced by Miles James (Tom Odell) mixed by 5-times Grammy Award-winner Jimmy Douglass ( Roxy Music) and mastered by Grammy-winner Mike Bozzi (Kendrick Lamar)
Next show: Notting Hill Arts Club, 3rd April
Link: https://www.facebook.com/beaubowenofficial
Words & pictures: @neilmach 2020 ©
RAW RAMP 