How James Ellis Ford made a solo album in his hospital bed while suffering from leukaemia

“It’s a deep dark hole that you find me in / Sick to my stomach and paper thin.” 

That’s how This Too Shall Pass, track eight on James Ellis Ford’s new LP, begins.  

The words are stark. No poetic allusions here. Just three chords and the painful truth. All the songs on Ford’s album Lost In Another World every bit as startling as the story and circumstance of their creation. 

“If I was trying to write now, I’d do more to shroud it in poetic language,” says Ford. “But at the time, I just needed this stuff out of my head. I’m proud of the way that it’s really direct. It is a product of the moment.” 

The moment began at the end of 2024 after a particularly intense period of work. 

“I was working on the Pulp record [2025’s More], I’d just done the Black Country New Road album [Forever Howlong] and had been to India with Damon Albarn, to record the new Gorillaz album, The Mountain,” recalls Ford, 47. 

“I’d been pounding it out and was feeling a bit sluggish. I thought, maybe it’s flu, maybe it’s burnout. It kept getting worse, but I was still working. Then I drove down to Folkestone to see my wife’s family and on Christmas Eve I was hit like a ton of bricks – 40 degree fevers, couldn’t get off the sofa. And that was the start of it. 

“It took a while to get diagnosed and into St Bart’s. Then, for a few months, I was totally out of it, pretty much at death’s door.” 

Acute myeloid leukaemia is an aggressive form of cancer of the white blood cells. There is just a 30% survival rate, and Ford was told he would need nine months of gruelling chemo. 

The treatment reduces white blood cell count to almost zero, leaving the patient with extreme risk of infection. After three of the four rounds of chemo, Ford contracted neutropenic sepsis.  

“But on the second round, for some reason, I didn’t get ill,” he says.  

“My energy started to come back. I was a bit more aware, a bit more awake. And I had a burning urge to do something music related.” 

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With Ford away from his wife and son, unable to immerse himself in his home studio, his health in the hands of doctors and fate, it’s little wonder the impulse to return to something familiar was strong. 

“This was a way of reconnecting to the version of myself that I recognised, you know?” he says. 

“My wife was coming in but otherwise I didn’t really have any visitors. She brought in my laptop and a microphone, a few tiny synths and this little IKEA table here,” he points out a rudimentary fold-down table, pausing for a split second as if he’s momentarily back there. 

“The whole album was done, start to finish, writing, lyrics, recording, singing, production, everything, in two weeks.  It was all done in one download, essentially.” 

Isolation 

As a musician, James Ellis Ford has played in Simian Mobile Disco and, alongside Alex Turner and Miles Kane, in The Last Shadow Puppets. But he’s best known as a producer. 

Ford has worked on the last six Arctic Monkeys albums, Fontaines DC’s classic Romance, Jessie Ware’s last two records, The Last Dinner Party’s breakthrough debut, with Pet Shop Boys, Geese, Everything Everything, Foals and on the recent War Child album, Help(2). 

He’s been as prolific as he is popular since his mid-noughties work with Test Icicles, Mystery Jets and Klaxons. 

Ford guides me up to his attic studio at his home in East London, past a frankly intimidating wall of gold discs on the narrow staircase, into a spectacular sea of analogue synths, guitars and a drum kit. I try not to spill my tea on anything too vital. 

“I’ll go somewhere else to record when it’s a band, but I always bring it back here. So I mixed Fontaines DC, Arctic Monkeys and all that up here. For Jessie Ware, we did the whole thing here,” he explains, glancing around at the kit he wasn’t able to use on Lost In Another World. 

“The work-life balance thing is weird when it’s in your house. Especially if you have a workaholic tendency. I’ve got a little boy who’s nearly nine years old. He’ll come up and tap me on the shoulder and I’ll jump out my skin because I’m in the zone. But the convenience means I can be so much more productive.” 

Lost In Another World is as solo as a project could be. Yet somehow, despite being written and produced on a cancer ward, Ford channels his isolation and existential dread into something beautiful. It’s a real-time exploration of mortality and love, boredom and hope, a snapshot of a time of trauma and a dizzying lack of control. 

“For a while I was sharing a room with a guy, who was just behind the curtain,” Ford remembers. “He must have thought I was a nutcase, re-singing the same line over and over again. 

“The nurses would creep around trying to take my bloods without making too much noise. It was an odd thing. But at the time I was just elated to be able to get into that flow state where the rest of the world sort of shuts down.” 

People Just Don’t Know, a catchier title than the original ‘Neutropenic One’, details a dark night of the soul. While Parallel Dimension, which shares a little DNA with late-era Blur electronic ballads, begins: “Now I’m trusting in the process / But it really fucking hurts / And I’m not sure this poison / Isn’t just making it worse.” 

Again, no poetic license. This is real life, mainlined directly into the microphone, a dispatch from the frontline of Ford’s fight for his future.  

Here Today, though, somehow sounds like the feeling of seeing the sky for the first time in months. 

“It’s great you said that, because that’s literally what it’s about,” Ford says. 

“Between my first and second chemo, I came home for the first time. Me and my wife and our little boy drove to the countryside, it was a sunny day and we just walked into the fields, sat under a tree, and I was floored. In tears. Absolutely destroyed by the beauty of nature and being with my family and how important that is – and how easy it is to take for granted. It was so powerful. It’s something I’m trying to hold onto.” 

Radical openness 

No song is more provocatively titled than Did You Ever Want To Go To Your Own Funeral? a swirling, ambient lament weighing up what you learn about yourself when you stare mortality in the eye. 

“I was fairly open about getting ill, I made a post on Instagram,” Ford says. “And I was inundated in the most wonderful way with messages of love and support from family and friends and my music community.” 

Ford had long text conversations with friends from the hospital. But he missed the thrill of talking about new music. So he began sending out musical dispatches, these raw, newly hatched songs, to select pals. 

“I sent songs to my dad, and to my friends Bill Ryder-Jones and Alex Turner. Bill gave me loads of feedback, which helped me shape it in the moment. And Alex was just very supportive. I loved talking about a synth sound or a middle eight rather than ‘oh no, my platelets are low.’” 

And the final track was a direct result of Ford’s radical openness about his illness. 

“Lauren Laverne, who has been through her own stuff, was wonderful,” he says. “She introduced me to someone who’s been through something similar, who became a mentor. 

“The title This Will All Be a Memory Soon was directly lifted from a text from her. Again, there’s no filter. You’re not allowed to have physical boundaries – there’s stuff coming in and out of your blood, people checking everything, it’s very invasive. So I had nothing to hide at that point. There’s no point trying to be cool.” 

Ford has, he says, resisted the temptation to add overdubs, re-record vocals or tinker with the St Bart’s recordings. Returning to the songs now, as he puts together a live band, has stirred up complex emotions. 

“It’s not… comfortable,” he says. “It sounds a bit strong, saying it’s re-traumatising, but it’s on that scale. I’m in a phase where I’m trying to move away from it, even if I can’t fully leave it behind me. And this is definitely pulling me back.” 

‘I nearly died’

If it’s taken a while for the album to appear, Ford has good reason. Between recording the songs in early 2025 and their release in late summer 2026, he has been back in hospital. 

“It’s been a fucking rollercoaster. I had a stem cell transplant to protect against a relapse. That was in July last year,” he says. But just before the War Child album sessions at Abbey Road, the transplant started to fail.  

“Then I had another dramatic Christmas period where I nearly died.” 

Ford still didn’t stop working. Just like his solo LP, the War Child LP ended up as much a triumph of technology as music. 

“I thought I was out of treatment then it dragged me back in,” says Ford. “I found myself in the same room with the same fucking table and same laptop – this time mixing the Arctic Monkeys tune. 

“So I was having a blood transfusion but could hear what they were doing in the studio and speak to them. Everyone pulled together. It was a very warm and fuzzy experience and gave me a real faith in humanity and our music community.” 

Ford has, he says, emerged “immeasurably changed” from the experience. He compares it to the feeling “after a heavy psychedelic experience”. 

“My own mortality didn’t scare me as much as I thought it would,” he says. “The scariest bit is that I didn’t want to leave my son so early in his life. That was what made me really want to hang on and fight as much as I could.  

“Coming out the other side, I’m much more focused on being alive and what it means to be alive – and what it means to be a positive force in the world and give into the world rather than taking from it.” 

Lost In Another World by James Ellis Ford is released by Domino on 14 August 2026 

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