The Lodger In Me: Bid from The Monochrome Set on the Aneurysm that Changed His Life

In an exclusive extract from his new book, Strange Young Alien, the founder member and principal songwriter of the Monochrome Set discusses the ruptured cerebral aneurysm that changed the way he thought about music and the creative process

In 2010, I survived a ruptured cerebral aneurysm. The following is an extract from Chapter 2 of the book, Strange Young Alien. The references to Lille and Osaka concern two gigs in early 2011 when I had to stop playing as I had completely lost comprehension of the songs.

In the summer of 2011, I started to write the songs that were to make up the Platinum Coils album. As the lyrics started to glide out of me, it was clear that the subject matter of all of them was the aftermath of my aneurysm. It really wasn’t something that I wanted to write about, but the songs were good, so I just went with the flow. This may have been the first time in my life that I had really been attentive to not being in control of what the lyrical ideas were.

During the writing I started to tire quite quickly and was unable to go for more than 20–30 minutes without a pause. I got into the habit of taking little breaks (sipping tea, staring blankly at dust, throwing paper balls for the cat) until I felt better, which didn’t take too long.

Halfway through one lyric I went into the kitchen to make tea, and as I was doing so looked at the basil plant nearby. At that moment I realised that I didn’t have a word for it, in fact there were no words in my head at all.

I deduced that back in Lille and Osaka I must have suffered from a sort of temporary aphasia, which is a condition where a person’s understanding of language is compromised, at varying degrees of severity, and is a typical consequence of brain trauma. In my case it seemed that my ‘way in’ to those songs was via the lyrics, and without my understanding of them I was helpless.

The basil incident confirmed the aphasia very plainly. It was an interesting experience; I knew that it was food and good to eat, but without a word for it it did not have the immediate connections to the wider knowledge that words bring. It was like a familiar unknown. I made my tea and went back to my song, and it didn’t take very long for the words to reappear.

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