James Ellis Ford Lost in Another World

Lost In Another World is James Ellis Ford's excellent, emotionally resonant second solo album. It was made from start to finish in just over two weeks in early 2025, while James was on a hospital ward between punishing rounds of chemotherapy, following a diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), an aggressive cancer of the white blood cells. He?hadn't?even fully absorbed the implications of the diagnosis - nine months of treatment with only a 30% survival rate - before a bed was found for him at Barts, London. During the second round of treatment, James (known for his production work with Fontaines D.C., Arctic Monkeys, Blur, Depeche Mode and as both a solo artist and one half of Simian Mobile Disco) did the only thing that felt natural to him; he wrote, played, sang, recorded and mixed a solo album about the experience. "There was no filter. I just sang the first thing that came into my head into the laptop." It became a form of diary keeping; a way to process what was going on?and also a way to cheer himself up, which would account for why some of the album is so surprisingly upbeat and poppy: "It was a pep talk; I was telling myself I was going to be OK. It was one way of dealing with the existential dread I felt. It gave me the ammunition to fight the experience and was a distraction from it. "Lost In Another World shares the experiences from the frontline of illness; fear, love, reassurance, boredom, pain, calm, disbelief, and ultimately hope. These transmissions from the eye of the storm have informed an album which is truly something special.