Art-rock band no-man were founded in 1987 when Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness started writing music together. They briefly flirted with mainstream success in 1990 when their single release colours was Single Of The Week in Melody Maker and Sounds, leading to record label and publishing deals. Wilson went on to have much more success with Porcupine Tree and as a solo artist, but no-man continued to release albums sporadically, including their most recent, love you to bits in 2019. The duo have more recently collaborated on their podcast The Album Years.
‘Pigeon Drummer’ comes from the band’s sixth album Schoolyard Ghosts released in May 2008. The song evolved from a demo by Tim Bowness called ‘City Sounds’ which can be heard here. Bowness later used the lyrics on ‘wherever there is light.’ The track ‘Pigeon Drummer’ was written at a time when Wilson was starting to move away from Porcupine Tree to focus on his solo career. His first solo album Insurgentes was released in November 2008.
What is remarkable about this track, and some of the songs on Insurgentes, is the sudden and shocking descent into extreme noise after a beautifully melodic section. This happens very quickly on ‘Pigeon Drummer’ after only about 30 seconds. When Wilson uses the same technique on Insurgentes, on songs like ‘Salvaging’, the noise section appear much later in the track. Wilson had been listening to the noise project Merzbow, started in 1979 by the Japanese artist Masami Akita, and enjoying the disruptive effect the use of noise had on melodic tracks, like obliterating an Old Master painting with black ink.
Wilson has often spoken of his love of cinema, and the term ‘cinematic’ often applies to both the sound of his music and the structure of his songs. Bowness’s demo version, ‘City Sounds’ and ‘Pigeon Drummer’ share a cinematic structure. ‘Pigeon Drummer’ opens with a music box. After a burst of noise, there’s a guitar theme that might remind some listeners of the guitar at the start of ‘Dream is Collapsing’ from Hans Zimmer’s score for Inception (2010). But if that film is science-fiction, a deeply philosophical, multi-layered thriller, the no-man song is perhaps closer in structure to the European art-house movies Wilson so admires. The juxtaposition of sweetly haunting melodic sections with extreme noise has the non-linear narrative of films by the Spanish iconoclast Luis Buñuel.
The track also seems to draw from another film genre; horror. The song adopts the trope of contrasting an insouciantly sun-lit scene with a subsequent scene of violent horror. The music box could have come from Philip Glass’s score for the original Candyman film. The tolling bell, and the ethereal choir could also have come from a horror film score. There’s also something unsettling about Bowness’s vocals, which are as sweetly and gently delivered as ever but heavily compressed to give them a slightly inhuman quality, a technique Wilson often uses on Porcupine Tree albums such as on the songs about serial killers on In Absentia (2002)
Whether you choose to view ‘Pigeon Drummer’ as a slice of art/noise rock, a homage to the structure of avant-garde European cinema, or the soundtrack to a horror film, it’s an extremely evocative and effective piece of music.
This post was updated on 29 August 2023 at 10.50 to add references to Bowness’s demo version ‘City Sounds.’
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