Samuel Smiles

Also known as Tim Bowness/Samuel Smiles

Samuel Smiles were an intermittently active English ambient-folk band. Their best-known lineup featured singer Tim Bowness of the band No-Man.

Inception: 1989

Overview

Samuel Smiles (frequently known as Tim Bowness/Samuel Smiles, the name to which all of their albums were attributed) were an intermittently active English ambient-folk band. Their best-known lineup featured singer Tim Bowness of the band No-Man. Band history During the mid-1980s, Michael Bearpark had played guitar for two Warrington art rock groups, After The Stranger and Plenty, both of which also featured future No-Man singer Tim Bowness. Bearpark subsequently moved south to study chemistry at King's College, London, where he won the Samuel Smiles Award For Scientific Genius (named after the Scottish writer, social reformer and self-help advocate). Bearpark had stayed in touch with Bowness, who suggested that "Samuel Smiles" might be a good band name. The original lineup of Samuel Smiles was formed in Cambridge in 1990 by Bearpark (electric guitar), Charles Fernyhough (acoustic guitar), Grainne McAlonan (vocals) and Phil Unwin (double bass) - multi-instrumentalist Peter Chilvers joined on piano shortly afterwards. The band went through a number of changes in style (including folk and country). Bowness (by then singing with No-Man and making an impact within the music industry) produced the first Samuel Smiles demo tape in early 1991, following which the band parted company with McAlonan and Unwin. Fernyhough became an occasional contributor who continued to play, write and record with the remaining members (on and off) until January 1995 - he would later become a celebrated child psychologist. In June 1991, Bearpark and Chilvers teamed up with Bowness to form a voice/guitar/piano trio, initially under the new name of Strapless. The band rapport was so instant that they performed their first live date on the day of their first rehearsal, and went into Liverpool's Amazon Studios (now Parr Street Studios) to record a live album barely three weeks later. These early sessions were eventually released on the Burning Shed label as Live Archive One. Reverting to the name Samuel Smiles, the band continued sporadically to record and perform over the next decade, playing a BBC radio session in 1992 and performing occasional support slots to musicians such as Holly Penfield in 1995. In 1997, Bearpark, Bowness and Chilvers added cellist Marianne De Chastelaine (formerly with The Wise Wound and Heather Nova) to the lineup. This quartet played several concerts and made a number of recordings engineered by David Kosten.

From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Also known as Tim Bowness/Samuel Smiles

Notable quotes

“A place for everything, and everything in its place.”
— Thrift (1875)
“Good actions give strength to ourselves, and inspire good actions in others.”
— Duty: With Illustrations of Courage, Patience, and Endurance (1880), Ch. 2, p. 49
“Mere political reform will not cure the manifold evils which now afflict society. There requires a social reform, a domestic reform, an individual reform.”
— As quoted in Samuel Smiles and the Victorian Work Ethic (1987) by Timothy Travers, p. 162
“The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil be, but he who is in the thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice.”
— Ch. I : Self-Help — National and Individual
“Nothing is more common than energy in money-making, quite independent of any higher object than its accumulation. A man who devotes himself to this pursuit, body and soul, can scarcely fail to become rich. Very little brains will do; spend less than you earn; add guinea to guinea; scrape and save; and the pile of gold will gradually rise.”
— Ch. X : Money — Its Use and Abuse
“We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.”
— Ch. XI : Self-Culture — Facilities and Difficulties

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.