Biography:

Henry Fool’s music swirls and flows between the febrile pulsing of jazz-rock rigour and halcyon sun-filled glades of pastoral prog. Here, grand, sweeping melodies are bifurcated with fuzz bass and the dreamy ardour of languid mellotron.

With an emphasis placed upon feel rather than technique, the band marshal a strange spacey poetry; drilling wormholes into alternative universes that thrill, amaze and open up the mind.

Sid Smith (Classic Rock / Prog Magazine)

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Formed in the Spring of 2000, British band Henry Fool released its self-titled debut album on the Cyclops label in October 2001.

Created around the nucleus of Tim Bowness (No-Man) and Stephen Bennett (LaHost), the band’s music has also included contributions from Phil Manzanera (Roxy Music/801), Jarrod Gosling (I Monster/Regal Worm), Fudge Smith (Steve Hackett/Pendragon), Andrew Booker (David Cross/Peter Banks), Peter Chilvers (No-Man/Brian Eno), Michael Bearpark, Huxflux Mettermalm (Paatos) and Myke Clifford.

The band is currently signed to Kscope.

Henry Fool was born out of coffee shop conversations in the late 1990s.

Along with other friends, Stephen Bennett and I would often discuss what it was that excited us about music when we were growing up.

Although we both had very diverse tastes, we had an enduring affection for the ambition and creative explosion of the late 1960s and 1970s Underground music scene which, amongst other things, produced Progressive Rock, Cosmic Soul, Jazz Rock, Minimalism, Folk Rock, Krautrock and the singer-songwriter boom.

Out of these genres, the most critically reviled was Progressive Rock. In the late 1990s, the music received little attention in print or on the radio, and the media view – when offered – was mostly unquestioningly negative. For us, what the press wrote about the music and what much of the music actually was possessed few similarities.

The first Henry Fool album was created as a means of both reflecting our fondness for Progressive Rock and also showing that it could be a music more about ideas and emotion than technique. When the likes of Genesis, Yes, VDGG, Soft Machine, Jethro Tull and King Crimson created their early albums they were working without templates and making up the rules as they went along. With Henry Fool's debut album - from 2001 - we wanted to convey this joy of often accidental discovery as opposed to aping the genre cliches which we felt had become somewhat set by the late 1970s.

With less reference to things outside itself and no desire to prove a point or evoke a particular era, Henry Fool’s wholly instrumental second album, Men Singing, has been more about allowing what was good about the instrumental side of the band’s debut to naturally evolve a stage or two further.

Tim Bowness

Tim's blog on the making of Men Singing can be found here.

Band Members:

Michael Bearpark - Guitars
Stephen Bennett - Keyboards
Andrew Booker - Drums
Tim Bowness - Guitars, Vocals
Peter Chilvers - Bass
Myke Clifford - Saxophones, Flutes
Jarrod Gosling - Mellotron, Glockenspiel

Guest Players / Former Band Members:

Diego Mancini - Drums
Phil Manzanera - Guitars
Huxflux Nettermalm - Drums
Richard Osborne - Drums
Fudge Smith - Drums

From the band's Burning Shed store.

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