Ben Gregory

Today, Ben Gregory releases third single ‘blue sea blue’ taken from his forthcoming debut solo album Episode out 7th April on Transgressive Records.

Episode’s colossally ambitious ten-minute centrepiece ‘blue sea blue’, shifts from a snaking electro pump (augmented with saxophone from Tom McClung and serene tumbling guitar) into icy minimalist pop, then segues via a tender acoustic section into a sweeping piano ballad, which plunges suddenly into the record’s darkest sequence – a direct recollection of an ambulance ride to hospital during a severe psychiatric episode – then back up again into a transcendent and rousing crescendo. Gregory explains that it is “the type of song I’ve always had in me, that hadn’t had the chance to come out before.” Bold and beautiful, ‘blue sea blue’ is a song that confirms Episode as something to fight for.

The accompanying video is directed by Natàlia Pagès and features Gregory alongside the Czech National Ballet.

Gregory on the single: “blue sea blue is my attempt to explore the conditions of modernity that propel people towards psychic pain and illness. The numb ache where constant stimulation meets inescapable boredom. The simultaneous death of community and of solitude… A life recorded and thusly missed. It’s a long song because it’s a big deal."

Episode is a majestic, multi-faceted and emotionally wrenching record born out of a period of profound personal upheaval. In 2019 Blaenavon, the much-beloved band with whom he released two widely acclaimed albums, was dissolving and Gregory was receiving treatment in psychiatric hospitals. The album began to come together during his recovery. With breath-taking instrumentals and dark, insightful lyrics, Gregory – with the help of producer and old friend Blaine Harrison of Mystery Jets and engineer Matt Twaites – pushed his music to genre-bending limits.

Episode was written over a ten-day period, the eight songs that would become the album sprawled out across the vast emotional spectrum Gregory had experienced in the months beforehand. It was important, he says, “that the representations of different emotions highlight those emotions at their most extreme. That’s how it’s been for me generally, especially during and after bipolar episodes. Depression that couldn’t possibly ever end, guilt that you’ll never get over, yearning that will never be fulfilled, love that will last forever. Silly things like that.”

Episode is a record of unbelievable capacity, in which is to be found true catharsis; the type of record that does not come around often.

It is impossible to separate Ben Gregory’s majestic, multi-faceted and emotionally wrenching debut solo album ‘Episode’ from a period of profound personal upheaval. In 2019 Blaenavon, the much-beloved band with whom he released two widely acclaimed albums, was dissolving. Not unrelatedly, Gregory was receiving treatment in psychiatric hospitals. “Everything on ‘Episode’ comes back to my struggle to interpret, or reinterpret, my life and its core relationships, after having my concept of reality revoked,” he says. “This may sound dramatic, but it’s hard to know if you can trust how you feel about a partner, a situation, a future, when you’ve sat in a hospital bed, torn a newspaper to shreds, sat back and watched it put itself back together.”

To associate ‘Episode’ purely with despair would be blinkered, however. Its title is a clear reference to the album’s “central theme” of mental health, but in the word’s implication of a contained and resolved period of time, “it manages to look forward,” Gregory says. The album’s lyrics are totally unflinching, at times almost unbearably raw, but as he explains “it gives those memories their outing without dwelling on them or letting them control you. I mean it’s just one episode, an essential one at that, but still just a part of a whole.” The record provides a framework, a box in which to place those experiences, to process them and seek to move forwards.

It's notable that ‘Episode’ began to come together during Gregory’s recovery. For a long period after his time in hospital, he had been forced to stop writing music altogether, “partially because I found it too painful, but also because I wasn’t really functioning well enough to be creative,” but after a while was able to start reacquainting himself with his artistic drive, “working out how to get inspired again.” He applied to university on a whim (the fact that Blaenavon formed when he was just 14 had prevented him from doing so in the past), and in the process began to find a new sense of purpose. “I began to feel lucid again.”

Gregory tends to write in concentrated bursts of creative energy in which “it feels like everything I throw at the wall sticks; I get to feel very good about myself as an artist – productive and passionate.” Although they do, he acknowledges, come with their corresponding phases of deep depression. One such creative burst came a month or so before he was due to start university, living in the relative peace and security of his mother’s home, and was able to throw himself purely into music.

Over a ten-day period he wrote the eight songs that would become ‘Episode’, songs which sprawl out across the vast emotional spectrum he had experienced in the months beforehand. It was important, he says, “that the representations of different emotions highlight those emotions at their most extreme. That’s how it’s been for me generally, especially during and after bipolar episodes. Depression that couldn’t possibly ever end, guilt that you’ll never get over, yearning that will never be fulfilled, love that will last forever. Silly things like that.”

The instrumentals that back those songs are breath-taking. Gregory – with the help of producer and old friend Blaine Harrison of Mystery Jets and engineer Matt Twaites – pushing his music to limits far beyond anything he’s reached in the past. Lead single ‘Deathbed Hangover’, for example, is a conscious effort to enter new territory, a frenetic and intense pummel of electronics over which Gregory’s vocals are distorted to the brink of intelligibility. “It’s an example of obfuscating myself as a means of making something I can enjoy listening to, and that doesn’t sound at all like music I’ve made before.” It required more work than others on the record, but that can be a good thing, Gregory says. “If I'm feeling pretty down, writing music is hard, which makes me feel worse; but if I'm able to power through, the intense concentration and joy of composition can help me get back to a better place.”

There are several reasons that the album is so ambitious. It was the first time Gregory had made music without having to consider the compromise that comes with being in a band, for one. “I enjoyed the best times of my life with those guys,” he recalls of his time in Blaenavon, “but on this record I felt totally free.” Similarly, the fact he was making music without an explicit commitment to releasing it took the pressure off. “I wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed or awkward about any ideas I was having because I genuinely didn’t know if they would come out,” he says. Harrison and Twaites were the perfect collaborators on such personal material – “you need to feel safe with the people you’re working with, excited to see their faces in the morning.” Harrison was not only “an incredibly sweet and understanding person who really listens in a way that makes you feel heard and appreciated,” but also a key musical contributor. It all added up to a studio environment in which Gregory “saw all my most absurd ideas through. Some of them ended up being my favourite moments on the album.” The enormous ambition of ‘Blue Sea Blue’, for instance, “is one big absurd idea in its own right, really.” The album’s colossally ambitious ten-minute centrepiece, shifts from a snaking electro pump (augmented with saxophone from Tom McClung and serene tumbling guitar) into icy minimalist pop, then segues via a tender acoustic section into a sweeping piano ballad, which plunges suddenly into the record’s darkest sequence – a direct recollection of an ambulance ride to hospital during a severe psychiatric episode – then back up again into a transcendent and rousing crescendo. It is “the type of song I’ve always had in me, that hadn’t had the chance to come out before,” Gregory says. “I think it’s my best work. It felt like a moment that confirmed that the album was really coming together.”

‘Mother’s Son’, meanwhile, delves deep into his relationship with his mother, who witnessed the traumatic trip to hospital detailed on ‘Blue Sea Blue’ and at whose home he was staying for much of his mental recovery. My relationship with my mother is quite a big part of the record, obviously centred in this song, but also beyond,” Gregory affirms. The music is delicate and simple, the words plain, raw and direct. “All I’d like to say about this song is probably already obvious: she got ill when I was young. I’d never really let it be something I remember but it came out of me, quite out of the blue when I was writing. One positive of my getting ill is that she and I got to be incredibly close. That’s something I’m grateful for.”

It’s notable that the record closes on the resplendent ‘God Bless You’, for example, a colossal wave of emotive rock that delivers a final note of catharsis; perhaps even joy. “There’s a lot of pain on this record, but I didn’t want it to feel like too much of a sombre or distressing listen,” he says. “This felt like the perfect coda. Life is shit and painful sometimes but it’s also really silly and brilliant.” That sense of optimism and hope that can be implied by the album’s title is always present, however dark things get. It speaks to the emotional complexity that makes ‘Episode’ as a whole so intriguing. ‘Episode’, then, is a record that contains multitudes. It may have been born from a period of collapse, but its scope goes beyond just the darkness of that time. It embraces recovery too, the determination to pick oneself back up again, the excitement of breaking new ground, and the intense bonds formed with those who help along the. ‘Episode’ is a record of unbelievable capacity, in which is to be found true catharsis, the type of record that does not come around often.