Billy Fuller is a versatile bassist with a dazzling CV. He's a founding member of modern-day experimental band Beak>, with whom he has released five albums. Fuller has also lent his creative skills to work by Portishead, Massive Attack, and other influential British artists. And for several years, he recorded and toured with Robert Plant in the Sensational Space Shifters, appearing on a pair of highly regarded releases, 2014's lullaby and . . . The Ceaseless Roar and Carry Fire (2017).
Now in 2026, Fuller has put together a solo album, Fragments. Released digitally and on vinyl in early April, Fuller's album is a solo record in the truest sense of the term: he wrote and recorded the largely instrumental songs by himself, playing a variety of instruments to build arrangements that began as melodies on his bass guitar. Yet in contrast to the insular manner in which Fragments was created, Fuller is scheduling live dates in support of the album.
Fuller lives fifteen minutes by train outside of Bristol, England. The final track on Fragments is the brief and atmospheric "Last Train to Yatton," a reference to the train he boards to get home on a Saturday night. I spoke with Billy Fuller via video chat, with him comfortably ensconced in his home studio, surrounded by instruments and recording gear, and occasionally visited by one or another family member popping their head in to say hello.
Bill Kopp: Did the tracks on Fragments grow out of composed material or improvisation?
Billy Fuller: They all happened purely by myself in some room: this room that we're talking in now, and some of it in previous houses I've lived in with my family over the years. I made it over a nine, ten-year period. But it's purely me in my room, like I do all the time.
Even now, I’ll be in here and just start making music. And whenever I make music—even when I'm thinking about demoing for Beak>, the band that I'm in—I'm never thinking about a sound of what's come before or what I want it to be like. I just see what falls from the sky whilst I'm in the room.
The first thing to go in will usually be a bass guitar. Or it could be a synth thing where I put a key down, and it's playing a sequence or whatever. But the nucleus of it is for fun, not writing for anybody in particular, but purely just enjoying making music. After working at it for over 35 years, I think it's really important to try to keep it fun and light.
Bill: If I'm understanding the way you're describing it, when you sit down in that room with an instrument or instruments, it's not necessarily with the intent of creating a song . . .
Billy: Sometimes it's purely for the moment. It's just about me being here: "I've got an evening free tonight; I'll make some music." And then, at the back end of that, it’s something like, “I can use that on a record,” or it becomes a demo for Beak>, and we can start creating from there. That's a bonus. But initially it's purely for me. It's like meditation, reading a book, or anything like that. There's a good bit of it—or at least some portion of it—that I think, "Oh, that was fun, but that's not going to go anywhere."
Bill: Can I infer from that that you record everything that you do in there?
Billy: I've got a computer here. The hard drive's full of [material]. I had to wade through a lot. There are still over 50 other tunes that I was considering for Fragments.
Bill: Fifty!?
Billy: Yeah, I've got a folder, and they're still there with stereo mixes. But I came across those 16; they were the ones where it felt like there was a narrative: a beginning, a middle, and an end . . . in my mind, anyway, it made sense. Even though some of the tunes were made six months ago, and some of them are 10 years old. This sort of 16-song, 36-minute thing made sense to me. I was like, "Oh, it's an album. We're there; we've done it."
Bill: Because the tracks on Fragments are the product of you overdubbing—doing something and then coming back and adding to it—do you ever find that you're unsure of when a piece is done?
Billy: I know just by feeling. Knowing when to stop is one thing, and it's also knowing when to remove. A prime example in Fragments is the fourth tune, one of those incidental songs called "Budfrey Robbed Alexander." Basically, that is just an acoustic guitar track on a tune that I was making. It had about 15 channels of audio: drums, bass, and keyboards. But I was like, "This isn't landing."
And then, accidentally, when I was overdubbing the acoustic guitar, I had the speakers going in the room as well. So all the sound was going into the sound hole of the acoustic. And then, with the compression I added, I realized that the single acoustic guitar channel was the song. So I just deleted the other 14 channels of chuff. And it was like, “Wow.” It was a nice moment. It felt like what it must be like to live inside an acoustic guitar, on stage with a band going inside of it; it felt really organic.
I'm into things that sound organic. For me, the first Beak> album [2009's Beak>] sounds like we're crawling out of the mud. We're coming out of the ground, and you can smell the soil and the wet grass. I like that kind of feeling. Not being folk music or anything; just a real dirty, organic, coming-out-the-ground.
Bill: If there's such a thing as a typical method of composition in rock and pop, it's typically based on sitting down with a guitar or a keyboard. But you built many of these songs with bass guitar as the foundation. Since you're skilled on multiple instruments, what led you to make that choice?
Billy: Because I am most definitely primarily a bass player; I always have been. The first time I got into music, it was the bass I would listen to.
I was the youngest of three boys. We used to live in a council house in Bristol, a two-bedroom house, and we used to share a bedroom. I was nine years younger than my eldest brother, so I must have been annoying to be around! But my eldest brother would come home with loads of Motown, soul records, and the Jam; we loved the Jam. Getting into bass players around that time in the late '70s, early '80s, Bruce Foxton was a brilliant bass player.
I could hear it, but I didn't know it was called a bass guitar. I didn't know what it looked like, but I knew what it sounded like. And my brother would play soul records, so I was hearing [James] Jamerson without knowing who Jamerson was. And then when I finally did—I was about 14—I was like, "I want a bass guitar for my birthday!" And then I just sat on the edge of the bed playing along to cassettes and records, and I taught myself how to play; I never had a lesson.
For me, everything is rooted in that. The way I hear things is all rooted around those four strings on a bass, on that piece of wood. And I find it really grounding. It's a good place to start, because it's the link-up between the rhythm, the melody, and the harmony of a song. So I find that it seems very natural to start on a bass guitar.
Bill: Some artists create their music for a specific target audience, and others turn very much inward and make music completely for themselves. Where do you fall on that continuum?
Billy: I don't have an age demographic that I'm thinking of when I'm making music. Can you imagine that feeling? "Okay, 35 to 55. Here we go." Which is probably where I do live, to be honest. (laughs)
I'm not writing to any demographic, that's for sure. My eldest son is now 15, but he was about 7 when I did the song "Pirate Ship" on the album. It's just an instrumental, with bowed upright bass, an electric bass, and a little bit of noise. He came in when I was listening back to it, and he said, "Dad, Dad, this sounds like a pirate ship creaking across the ocean." And I was like, "Pirate Ship!" That was the working title that went in, and it stuck. And even if I listen to it now, I'm like, "Well, kids know a lot, don't they?" They're completely open. He called it "Pirate Ship," and he's right: It is a pirate ship.
Bill: Speaking of upright bowed bass, that instrument is very prominent on the final track, "Last Train to Yatton."
Billy: That's four double basses. With one Korg synthesizer. It was all complete, and then I was like, "It's just missing something." One of the last things I did for the album was to get that synthesizer out and put that phase swell in it, to get some movement going.
Bill: One of the things that I like about Fragments is that the tunes never overstay their welcome, if you will; they're concise. Was that by happenstance or design?
Billy: No, they were just like that. There are a few tunes that run into four minutes. But yeah, it just kind of worked that way.
I don't know whether it's because we've all got phones now, everything's quick, and we just need that quick hit of serotonin. Maybe it's the result of smartphones that my record sounds like this; otherwise, maybe I would have made full-length pieces of music.
But yeah, it was by complete accident that it's like that. Maybe working on my own, I get to a certain point and go, "Yeah, I'm out of ideas. That's what that is. Boom. Next."
Bill: You've got an arsenal of basses. Do you find that when you pick up one, fiddling around with it is more likely to give rise to music of a particular character, different from what another bass would do?
Billy: I can be playing on, say, my [Fender Precision] P-bass. That's going to make me do one thing. But if I pick up a hollow-body—say, I pick up the [Hofner] violin bass—it's going to make me do something completely different. And this is the reason why musicians keep buying guitar pedals or a new effects rack: because it's going to give you inspiration. You turn on that pedal and all of a sudden your hand goes somewhere else, and you start hearing things differently, because the instruments are reacting differently.
I buy pedals for the bass all the time, just to kind of get me another song! And it's a very expensive way of doing it.
Bill: When you recorded these tunes—or when you put them together as Fragments—did you give any thought to live performance?
Billy: No, I wasn't going to do anything like that. But I've been forced to. I've just started rehearsing with a band. Two other people: a drummer and another person playing guitar and keys. So we're doing it as a three-piece—very much like the Beak> lineup—and it's sounding really good. But it's been weird to correlate all this stuff that spans time and different brain spaces and go, "Right, I'm with two other people now, and we've got to reinterpret this in a live situation."
The other thing is that I've got a 36-minute album and I'm being booked to play 50 to 60-minute sets. But that's okay; I've got plenty of music.
Bill: You could do the dance remix of the songs . . .
Billy: Yeah, exactly. I'll do some interpretive dance in between! What can go wrong?
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