Making His Mark I
Mark Owen talks about his new album, The Art of Doing Nothing…
n 2011, when Take That finished their record-breaking, world-eating Progress tour, they all agreed to take a year off. For Mark Owen, this was a strange prospect: although he loves to be at home with his family, he finds it hard not to be doing, organizing and taking control of his life. He likes a plan. But this time he decided to pause, not to rush into anything. Instead, he went down to the bottom of his garden. There’s a circular bench there, where he sat and tinkered with a few ideas. He did some sketches for an animation, a spot of painting and messed around with some tunes. He thought about what it was like to hit your forties and tried to open up his mind rather than filling it with a schedule, an aim or a worry. “I was sitting at that bench for a bit, on my own,” he laughs. “It was a party for one. And then people started turning up.” The first to arrive were his long-time song-writing collaborators, Ben Mark and Jamie Norton. Mark told them that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to work, but that he was happy to sit around and chat for a while. So were they. Gradually, their chats developed into a concept: The Art of Doing Nothing.
“The important thing about all of this process is that it was open,” says Mark. “For a while it wasn’t going to be songs, but animation. Then for a while, I wasn’t even going to sing on the record. But I’ve been making songs for 20 years now and I don’t really know what else to do – it’s my hobby and my day job all in one. Still, it feels better somewhere in my psyche to call it a project rather than a solo album, because so many people have contributed. Before this, I didn’t know that could happen. I felt you had to do everything yourself, otherwise it wouldn’t be real.” Not a solo album, then, though everyone is bound to focus on Mark. “I can cope with that,” he smiles. “I’ve relaxed into my shoes a little bit more. Instead of thinking these are not my shoes, I’ve realised they are. No one’s stealing them off me!” Instead, The Art of Doing Nothing is a toast to the joy of collaboration, three cheers for easing off the accelerator, for letting things unfold rather than taking control. It’s an album full of surprises, with depth and perspective, optimism and wisdom about our “massively significant, tiny little speck life”.
The concept is of creating by not forcing things, by just letting the moment take over. From that, a few songs emerged: scrappy demos and small creations, but nothing too concrete or definite. “We didn’t think too hard about them,” Mark says. Where in the past he would have obsessed over them, worked them up and niggled over details, this time he thought he’d let them fly. Someone suggested that a couple of producer friends, Charlie Russell and Brad Spence, might be good for the project, so the demos were sent there with a few notes. “See what came back,” says Mark. “Let them experiment without us looking over their shoulder.” What came back sounded great, so he and Jamie and Ben added a little more.
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