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Bush Empire, which I never thought we’d get to do when I was a kid,” recalls frontman Ben Gregory now. “I felt like a badass motherfucker playing that show; it was awesome.”
It’s been a long and bumpy road towards second album ‘Everything That Makes You Happy’ for Blaenavon’s Ben Gregory. There may be no miracle cure for life’s more testing moments, but with the LP’s recent release, he’s showing that something positive can also come from struggle. Words: Photos:
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Lisa Jenn
Wright. Five.
But throughout that period, despite the increasing external success of the band, the singer was struggling with his own internal demons. By the time he, bassist Frank Wright and drummer Harris McMillan had completed the touring cycle for the record, Ben had started “getting really worried about [his] mental health”; by Christmas, the singer had been admitted into a psychiatric hospital. “Fucking hell, it’s the gnarliest thing in the world, I can’t stress enough how absurd a Christmas that was. I didn’t know where I was, or who I was, or what the hell was going on, and it was truly harrowing,” he says now. “It’s a tricky one because you get to a place where you’re not feeling yourself, and then you get to a point where you decide you’re not fit enough to be around in public, so then they put you in a building with a load of people who also aren’t quite feeling themselves and it’s obviously going to be like a weird social experiment. But I got the treatment I needed and then I got out of there and started making music again and it was still good, so that’s cool. That’s when I wrote ‘Fucking Up My Friends’: “‘Cause living in corridors ain’t quite the cards I was dealt”... Make of that what you will...” The last track to be penned for Blaenavon’s recent, fast-released second record ‘Everything That Makes You Happy’, it’s fairly clear where the lyrical content of the deceptively-jaunty offering stems from. The rest of the record, however, had been written prior to his inpatient stay, and it’s from an even darker, more troubled place that he now recognises that they emerged. “It’s kind of scary because a lot of the songs ended up being quite prophetic and were pointing out areas in my life where I was getting concerned, but I wasn’t really talking to anyone about it,” he explains. “You don’t send people songs and then they go, ‘I’m worried about you’; you send people songs and they go, ‘Hey, that’s a great song’. A lot of the record foreshadowed what was soon to come, when I had a proper breakdown.
aving formed as young teenagers, playing a series of increasingly buzzy underage gigs before inking a deal and releasing acclaimed debut ‘That’s Your Lot’ back in 2017, Blaenavon had already clocked up half a decade in the game by the time they’d just hit their twenties. Managing to successfully transition from essentially the indie music equivalent of hyped child stars, to a genuine, serious adult proposition, the record felt like a triumphant punctuation mark on their first chapter, a long-awaited victory played out to a loyal fanbase who’d been willing them on for years. “I was really happy how that [album] went and we capped it all Ben Gregory off at Shepherd’s
Our first record asked a lot of questions about how to feel OK when you’re growing up, but I feel like
this one has more answers.”
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“I’ve always toyed with the idea of sanity and some of my
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