Ben Ottewell

“It
was going to be called Bones That Catch The Light,”
says Ben Ottewell of his third solo album, “but when I mentioned that to friends they either
sniggered like Beavis and Butthead or thought it was too wordy.”

In the end this Chesterfield-born, Derbyshire-raised
singer-songwriter
opted for A Man Apart, a title
with a pleasing ambiguity. “It could refer to my solo career away from Gomez, or
to the crazy populist politics demagogues and thugs that seem to rule our world
right now,” he
explains. “Or
it could simply refer to a broken man; someone who has fallen apart.”

Given that Ben turned 40 last summer, and given that
next year marks the 20th Anniversary of his former band Gomez’s Mercury Music
Prize-winning debut Bring It On, it was perhaps inevitable that his
latest record was preceded
by a fair amount of stock-taking and personal reflection.

Demonstrating Ben’s potent and ongoing love-affair with Americana — and flecked with
trace elements of what you might loosely call Derbyshire folk — A
Man Apart is the first solo album he has made without some
kind of Gomez project lurking in the background. As such, he found the process
both liberating and ever-so-slightly daunting.

Throwing off the “security blanket” that is/was Gomez —
and untroubled by the question of whether the songs he
was writing should be earmarked for himself or his former band — Ben knuckled down.
The two guitarleles (think ukulele with six strings) he bought for his
nine-year-old twin boys proved a good investment —
though not for Joe and Ry. “They just hung them
on the wall,”
laughs the singer, “but
I picked one up and wrote [title song] ‘A Man Apart’ on it.”

While the ever-fertile ground of love and
relationships tested feeds into the material that this passionate and famously
gutsy singer has again co-written with childhood friend and former Tunng member
Sam Genders, there are other themes afoot too. Fervent opener “Own It,”
for example, sees Ben reflect upon his time growing up in public with Gomez,
while the album’s
aforementioned title track — which was kick started by him reading about the
disgraced American TV Evangelist Peter Popoff —
ultimately concerns the kind of populist politicians
who deliberately exploit peoples’ hopes and fears.

“Most of these songs were written before the
Brexit vote,”
says Ben, “but
it would have been hard not to reference the Brexit and Trump debacles in some
way. I live in Brighton and frankly we’re all scared shitless. I’ve got a lot of
friends who are European immigrants and it’s a very strange and uncertain time for them.”

Like 2011’s Shapes & Shadows and 2014’s Rattlebag, A
Man Apart began life in Los Angeles. The three days spent at The Chalet
near Culver City were primarily to procure the services of ace engineer /
bassist Will Golden and Richard Thompson’s live drummer of choice, Michael Jerome. “There’s this great liquor
store across the road there on Washington Boulevard that’s full of crazy
fuckers,”
Ben explains, recalling the LA sessions. “They sell Bulleit Frontier Bourbon in every size you
could want, and that was our fuel.”

From there he brought the record back to Mu Studios at
The Laundry Rooms complex in Sheffield, where Martin Smith engineered and
produced the record. Key contributing musicians during that stage included lead
guitarist John Smith (“a
true gent, and one of the best electric folk guitarists in the country”) and Rhodes electric
piano / Hammond organ player Joel White.

It was when he wrote “Bones,” Ben says, that he knew he had a record. “Just in terms of
craft, I think it’s
one of the best things I’ve
ever written” he
says of the
spare, cello-ornamented song. “It’s basically about not being worthy of someone or
something, but I think it’s
healthy to figure shit like that out.”

Elsewhere on A Man Apart, “Lead Me Away,” with its nod to
Dylan’s “Simple Twist Of Fate,” makes fine use of a
the kind of portable field organ that army chaplains once utilised as a hymn machine, while “Walking On Air,” with its gorgeous
resonator guitar, spans a whole lifetime of adoration via sussed deployment of
its titular pay-off line.

“I still love my Americana and my JJ Cale,”
says Ben in summary, “but
I think this is quite an English-sounding record. I feel like I’m really finding my
feet as a writer, and I notice that the people who are coming to my shows these
days aren’t
necessarily Gomez fans.”

Asked how the Ben Ottewell who collected The Mercury
with Gomez in 1998 compares with the 2017 model of himself, meanwhile, Ben says
this:

“I was so crippling shy back then that I barely
recognise that person. I was having a good time, but not feeling comfortable.
We were all smart enough to know that it wouldn’t last forever, though, and we found the surreal-ness
of it all amusing. A couple of days after the Mercury we played to 20 people in
Philadelphia, and that was when we started to be a proper band.

“Nowadays, I just feel incredibly lucky to have
had some kind of 20-year run at this, and if I can sustain what I do, great. I’m also starting to
look a lot more like the way I sound,” adds the singer, laughing. “I’m not this
fresh-faced kid freaking people out anymore!”