With his skills as a keyboardist in heavy demand, classically trained pianist Neil Cowley began his career as a session musician working with bands such as The Brand New Heavies and solo pop idols Emeli Sandé and Adele. With his own band, the Neil Cowley Trio, the critically lauded composer has straddled the pop, jazz and experimental genres with ease, releasing a host of albums concluding with the jazz instrumental masterpiece Spacebound Apes in 2016.
Not far shy of his 50th birthday, Cowley pivoted towards working on a solo project, releasing the more electronicfocused LP Hall of Mirrors. Enlivened by a renewed sense of self-expression, he returns two years later with the soothing brilliance of the electro-acoustic Battery Life – an album that examines the positive/negative balance of abstract memories; memories that were often too painful for Cowley to face.
The piano is obviously integral to your creative output. What is it about the instrument that has you hooked?
“I was the definitive classically trained piano kid. My father used to have parties at our house and installed a little Zender upright piano. By the age of five or six I was making little tunes and eventually went to see this dear old lady who would give me marks out of ten every week before professing to my mother that this boy’s got talent. Then a very kind man who used to play hymns in assembly plucked me out and said, ‘We’ll train this boy and get him into the Royal Academy’. I think I was a bit of a social experiment because when I got there everyone was super upper class and all seemed to know each other. I kind of hated it but just by chance I joined a Blues Brothers covers band when I was 14 and that changed my life. From that moment, I taught myself everything about contemporary music and piano and was hooked.
“In terms of sustaining it, I don’t sustain a love for it through thick and thin – there are huge swathes of time where I loathe everything about it, but that’s normally when I loathe everything about myself.
