I Used to Be Sad & Then I Forgot

Professional photographer-turned-singer-songwriter Mr Alec Bowman may have swapped the darkroom for the recording studio but it still doesn't seem to have lightened his mood. He's been described as an English Leonard Cohen and, while many of his songs such as ‘Patience’ and ‘A Ditch Worth Dying For’ possess a similar tragic beauty, they somehow lack the refined poetic cleverness of the late Canadian. Give him time though. Despite the misleadingly upbeat cover image straight off a 1970s pastoral folk album, his voice has an urban, contemporary appeal, charged with a raw and home-spun emotional honesty that makes him easy to empathise with. Reception of this, his first solo album, may suffer from being released in a year when the world's appetite for bleakness is already satiated, which would be unfair as the talented Mr Bowman clearly knows how to write a good tune and the production, at the hands of BBC Folk Award winner Josienne Clarke, is slick. ‘Leaves’ is the closest Bowman gets to the lighter side of suicidal, and there's occasionally a sly black humour in his work – like a cheeky wink from a hanging man. Contrary to the album's title, Mr Alec Bowman clearly hasn't forgotten how to be sad at all – he really should though, his future looks bright.