Remember me
Recorded at London's St Bartholomew's Hospital, the new album by the former member of Simian Mobile Disco and the Last Shadow Puppets lays bare a journey of sickness and recovery
James Ellis Ford’s second solo album joins a small and exclusive list of records that were made in hospitals. There’s J Dilla’s Donuts, there’s The Wind by Warren Zevon, and now there’s Lost In Another World, in this case recorded at Saint Barts in the City of London between intensive sessions of chemotherapy over a nine month period. At times it’s heartwrenching, but never mawkish, and throughout there’s a sense of dignity that often comes with the knowledge that death could be just waiting around the corner. Given a less than 30% chance of survival, it’s heartening to report that Ford is still with us and seemingly making good progress.
Perhaps most striking is the stark honesty of these songs, where irony falls away and there’s no room to play around with anything as indulgent as a persona. The central character here clearly is Ford, laying it on the line with instinctive, lyrical candour in diaristic fashion. Many of these tracks were made in bed, with the vocals recorded into the mic of a laptop, or later, with a PC his wife brought him to alleviate the crushing boredom, occupying a corner of the hospital ward. He’s a likeable protagonist: stoic, philosophical, resilient, never self-pitying. Knowing about the run of secondary illness that he picked up along the way including sepsis, E. coli and MRSA adds to that sense of fortitude, though it should be said that Lost In Another World works as a fine, albeit reflective, electropop album without having any of that biographical knowledge.
The followup to 2023’s The Hum was supposed to follow more esoteric influences than the music Ford is best known for producing (Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode, Pet Shops Boys) with Sun Ra Arkestra and Harold Budd close to his thoughts as he first approached it in his Hackney studio loft. That plan was curtailed by the bombshell that he had acute myeloid leukemia, a devastating diagnosis received during the Christmas of 2024.
If Lost In Another World is not the album he intended to make then it’s an important one, nevertheless, given the scarcity of documentation in music regarding chronic illness. To be clear, death itself is an oft explored theme in pop, but invariably, the details of how we got there are vague or missing altogether. Love and rejection might take up the biggest chunks of the songwriter’s pie, but death has its own slice, with the idea of facing the final curtain romanticised and even embraced.
Chronic illness, on the other hand, barely gets a look in. A cursory web search brings up albums by Eels and The Antlers that deal with watching someone in palliative care, though such details are scarce in the final albums of, say, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen or Freddie Mercury’s Queen, alluding to the hereafter with enough ambiguity to throw listeners off the scent. Indeed, having reviewed Blackstar in 2016 while I too was undergoing chemotherapy and radiotherapy, I was not only shattered by the sudden death of Bowie but also had proverbial egg on my face from not decoding what he was apparently trying to tell us – a message that’s all too obvious now, given the benefit of hindsight.
Ongoing sickness is not something that we like to countenance in art or in life because the narratives are not neat enough. It’s almost easier to process the fact that somebody has died, and certainly it’s much easier if the sickness is vanquished. As a cancer survivor, I lost count of the times I was informed that I – and not the surgeons, doctors, nurses and oncologists – had “kicked cancer’s arse”. Whether intentional or not, that infers that any other result must be considered a symptom of weakness or moral failure.
Lost In Another World, then, is an impressively put together DIY electronic album that takes us under the covers of the hospital bed, lying around endlessly with just your thoughts to entertain you, punctuated by sundry temperature readings, injections that you barely notice, as well as the semidiurnal arrival of trays of inedible food. Without ever being boring, the album captures the ennui of lying there with opioid eyes staring into the void.
Strange out-of-body sensations twinned with the alien surroundings add to the sense of displacement: “I’ve had the strangest feeling / I felt the earth revolving at high speed,” he sings on the Ryuichi Sakamoto-inspired opener ‘Overtones’, “and it haunted me / Then was gone.” ‘Homesick For Another World’, too, pitches him as a Thomas Jerome Newton figure from The Man Who Fell To Earth, singing “I’ve got to get back home / Why can’t they leave me alone” over some chugging, breezy synthpop. ‘Parallel Dimension’ is less equivocal: “I’m trusting in the process / But it really fucking hurts.”
Whether these songs are listed in the order of when they were made is doubtful, though there does appear to be a story arc running through Lost In Another World that seems to broadly follow the five stages of grief, albeit starting more with confusion and dislocation than anger, and concluding with songs that deal head on with the prospect of passing into the next life. The triumvirate of ‘The Ever After’, ‘Did You Ever Want To Go To Your Own Funeral’ and ‘This Will All Be A Memory Soon’ see the author facing up to the prospect of the quietus, even if things now look a bit more hopeful.
But it’s the songs that inhabit the midpoint of the album that hit hardest, emotionally. ‘Here Today’ reminded me of the bargaining that occurs when one is deep in the hole, consumed by the whats ifs and the if onlys. “I’ll never again take these moments for granted,” he sings, remembering his son clambering over him on the sofa at home. And ‘I Believe In You’ is equally heartbreaking, addressed to a steadfast partner who is just as lost in this new reality and condemned to wait and wonder at home with only their feelings of hopelessness for company. Lost In Another World, then, should hitherto put the idea of the “difficult” second album into some perspective.