Inside Track: Gorillaz 'The Mountain'

When illness threatened to end James Ford’s stellar production career, he responded with a unique solo album recorded from his hospital bed.

James Ellis Ford is one of the UK’s leading producers, with an impressive credit list featuring prominent bands and artists like Arctic Monkeys, Blur, Depeche Mode, Florence + the Machine, Haim, Pet Shop Boys, Foals, Gorillaz, Beth Gibbons and many more. As an artist, Ford was one half of electronic duo Simian Mobile Disco, and released his first solo album The Hum in 2023.

Come the end of 2024, Ford was on top of the world, with a successful album by Beth Gibbons, Lives Outgrown, following projects like Depeche Mode’s Memento Mori (2023), Black Country New Road’s Forever Howlong and Pulp’s More (both released in 2025), and a trip to India with Gorillaz for the writing and recording of a forthcoming album. The Depeche Mode, Gibbons and Gorillaz albums are all meditations on death, loss and the afterlife — concepts with which Ford would soon become uncomfortably familiar.

“It was really out of the blue,” he recalls. “I’d been working pretty hard, and in the run‑up to Christmas [2024] started to feel as if I had burnout or something. Then, on Christmas Eve, I was absolutely floored. I could not get off the sofa. Soon afterwards I was in hospital, and it all began. Given some of the albums I had produced, I was wondering, ‘Did I partly manifest this into my life?’”

Other Worlds

Ford was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia, an aggressive white blood cell cancer. The prognosis was nine months of treatment, with only a 30 percent chance of survival, and Ford found himself confined to a room at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in central London. Remarkably, he not only survived, but continued to work from his hospital bed, contributing to the War Child charity album Help 2, completing the Gorillaz album The Mountain, and recording his own solo record Lost In Another World.

James Ellis Ford: The fact that I kept working in hospital, despite four chemo treatments and one failed stem cell transplant, may seem mad, but honestly, it kept me alive in many ways.

“The fact that I kept working in hospital, despite four chemo treatments and one failed stem cell transplant, may seem mad, but honestly, it kept me alive in many ways. Having something positive to focus on was hugely important to me. When you’re as ill as I was, you’re vulnerable and you feel like a useless lump that makes everyone sad. I’m used to making music every day, and I really wanted to stay connected to a world that I recognised.

The hospital bedside setup on which James Ford made Lost In Another World.“It’s like a prison sentence. Each chemo treatment is 10 days, and afterwards there’s a period of 15 to 20 days when you don’t have an immune system. You’re like a boy in the bubble while they try to keep you alive until your immune system comes back online. I fell life‑threateningly ill after three of my four chemo treatments, but for whatever reason not after my second treatment. My energy started to come back, and these 15 to 20 days in isolation offered a window of opportunity to work on music.”

Ford’s wife collected some music equipment from his studio, and brought it to his hospital room. “My home studio computer is running from a laptop with Pro Tools, making it really easy for my wife to pack up my laptop, my UAD Apollo Twin soundcard, my Teenage Engineering OP‑1, a Sennheiser MD 441 microphone, and my trusty Sony 7506 headphones, which I use all the time. I mixed some of the War Child album songs on them in hospital! My wife also brought a little Make Noise 0‑Coast modular synth that’s about the size of a book, and a really cool and inspiring Japanese ’80s synth, a Suiko, which is like a Koto synth. It’s not in a Western scale, and has these slightly FM‑like sounds. Plus a friend bought me a Sony Walkman cassette player, which I used to bounce stuff on and off and to get some tape effects. All stuff that fit in a backpack!”

Wards & Music

“In terms of my process, I’d be lying in bed or sitting at the table and I’d get ideas and would start sketching them out in Pro Tools. One source of inspiration was some of the loops I often make in my studio. I have two Revox A77 tape machines, and like doing this Frippertronics thing, where you record onto one tape machine and then the tape goes to the second tape machine and you feed the output of the second tape machine back to the first tape machine and you get these long delays.

“It’s a great way of building amazing soundscape‑like long loops that feel very alive and human. When I make these loops, it’s me trying to be Roedelius for a few hours, just because I find it soothing. I had a few of those loops on my laptop. Other than that, I mainly worked with sampling. I’m very into ’80s and ’90s samplers, and made a lot of use of the TAL sampling plug‑in, which is like an Akai S950 sampler, and a plug‑in version of the E‑mu Systems SP‑1200 drum machine. I also used the UAD PolyMAX synth. At one point my wife brought me a guitar, but I only used it on a couple of songs.

“Hospital is a really odd place to be. You have to give yourself over to the medical process, and you don’t have physical boundaries. People are coming in and sticking things in you at any moment. I felt like I was getting rid of creative boundaries as well. I was writing lyrics like stream of consciousness. Obviously, I had a lot of things to process, and the lyrics ended up being incredibly direct and honest. If I was writing them now, I’d probably try to disguise them a bit more. But I’m a great believer in the creative process being a photographic capture of a moment, so I left them as they are. Being so direct lyrically is something I really enjoyed, and I hope to do more of.

“Being in hospital I had to sing quite quietly, and it made me use my voice in a way that I’ve not really done in the past. Now and again, nurses would come in and try and take my blood pressure or whatever it was they needed to do, doing their best not to make any noise. There also were all the beeps and bloops of the machines. When you first hear them, they’re quite interesting, and there’s an odd rhythm that they can make sometimes. I did think about incorporating some of them, but those noises became nightmarish. So I actively tried to get rid of them. They’re really annoying sounds after a while, and I just couldn’t bear to hear them on repeat.

“Overall, Lost In Another World was the most creatively easy thing I’ve ever done. It all coalesced really quickly. There are no distractions in the hospital and I could not leave the room, so I had to pour all my energy into this. I don’t know if it was the enforced solitude, but also it was liberating not to have all this gear around me and to not have all the choices I have in my studio. It made me focus more on lyrics and melody. Creating limitations and then pushing the envelope of them as far as you can is a classic thing, and I try and encourage it in all the projects I’m producing. That’s where a lot of the most interesting musical stuff comes from. Having myriad options can be debilitating. Beyond my control, that happened to me. I lived limitations in the most extreme way.”

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