Between drinking too much, a finished relationship and being bored of music, Deaf Havana singer James Veck-Gilodi thought he was done. Having documented the implosion on their best album in years, We’re Never Getting Out, he’s shed a lot of skin, and found himself in a much better, healthier place.
James Veck-Gilodi doesn’t remember making Deaf Havana’s new album.
“During that recording process, I was hammered. I barely remember it. I was blackout drunk the whole time.”
The way the frontman tells it, it’s a time he’d prefer to forget. Though We’re Never Getting Out features the best music Deaf Havana have released in years, a back-to-basics approach that echoes the Springsteen-via-Norfolk real-life digest of 2011’s brilliant Fools And Worthless Liars, a scan through the lyrics speak very clearly of bad times.
Trying to work when he didn't actually care much about what he was doing, while his marriage continued a slow splinter, James says today that, “I just wasn’t having a good time in the old brain. I hated my life. I was blacking out every day to cope with it.
“When we started the writing process I was still in my last relationship, but I knew it was done. A lot of the record is about that. But we were writing it while I was still in that relationship, which was really weird, really hard to navigate. But I’ve always been quite open about struggles. I don’t really have a choice, because it seems it's the only way I can write.”
James is in a much different place than he was a year or so ago when all this was going on. In one sense quite literally – he’s telling his story to Kerrang! in his grandparents’ place, ‘Back in the house that I grew up in,’ as he details on Tracing Lines, having returned from London as things shifted for him. He’s in a new relationship, too, splitting his time between home and the States, an arrangement that he says is working surprisingly well. On the day we speak, he proudly reads from an app that he hasn’t had a drink for 150 days.
He’s also immensely proud of Deaf Havana’s new album. This, itself, is something he hasn’t felt for a very long time.
“I had a pretty mental year last year, which was not good, but then this year has been mainly positive,” he says. “I’m definitely in a good space, and a lot better than I ever have been.”
There’s another, very different chat we could have been having with James today. We’re Never Getting Out was actually the result of Deaf Havana taking a mulligan on a record they’d written, didn't like, and binned. “It was so weird. I don’t even know what kind of music it was. It wasn’t shit, but it didn’t sound like us. Didn’t sound like anything…”
This was symptomatic of a malaise that had set in. The scrapped album had followed a similar route as 2022’s The Present Is A Foreign Land, a record James reckons “most people didn’t even know we’d made” and where “I was just going through the motions, my heart wasn’t in it.”
“After we did Brixton in 2019, the other guys didn’t want to do it anymore, and then COVID lockdown happened,” he recalls, adding that the amount of drinking and drugging he was doing didn't exactly help. “We were basically broken up. And then we realised that we had a shitload of debts to pay off, so we were going to play three shows to pay it off. Then we started writing, which turned into an album we didn't like and nobody noticed.
“So yeah, there was a lot of weirdness for a while, but it was a lot of it was coming from just me being a complete fucking mess.”
James Veck-Gilodi was a great drunk. At festival bars or doing interviews in the pub, he was a delight to sink a few with, and then a few more, the sort of man whose squiffiness was charming, a good laugh, even with a habit for dry, self-deprecating humour. Trouble didn’t follow him, he never got angry or violent after a skinful, and it didn’t seem to affect his schedule or work. Albums were done, tours happened. But that was the problem. The old saying ‘I didn’t know you drank until I saw you sober’ doesn’t apply here. Everyone knew, because they were often getting blootered with him. But as having a peeve became a way to get a handle on things, it was more a case of, ‘I didn’t realise you were a drunk until you started hiding it.’
“When you’re like that, you get sneaky,” he admits. “I started hiding it from everyone. Some people knew I was bad with it. But no-one actually knew how bad it was.”
Not every day, but regularly enough to make that academic, James would “go to the shop in the morning and buy cans of White Claw, something that you can’t smell, and drink it on the walk back”. From here, the focus of anything, whatever time of the day, would be about booze.
“It got ridiculous at the end,” he says. “I was physically dependent. I’d be throwing up blood and stuff. It was really bad.”
The crunch came in April this year, while out in Texas with his girlfriend, when “I had a nervous breakdown, I just blacked out”.
“I don’t remember this, but my girlfriend said that I was crying, and I told her everything about how bad it was and how addicted I was. She said I’d asked her to hold me accountable the next day, because I was like, ‘I’ll wake up, I’ll feel okay, I’ll start drinking again, and forget this happened.’ And she did hold me accountable. I haven’t drunk since.”
We’re Never Getting Out isn’t a redemption album. Almost all of it was written and recorded as all this stuff was still getting on top of James and making him “fucking miserable”. It’s more of a snapshot of a time, in honest language, of how things are.
It’s this talent, and putting it to music that, at its best, is simple genius, that puts James Veck-Gilodi as an equal to (and often better than) his peers. ‘Took a pill to forget you / Put an ocean between us that I tried to drink,’ he sings on Carousel, while Car Crash finds him admitting, ‘We’re two fish in the same sea, swimming in different directions / Spent too long gritting our teeth and trying to see the best / Guess we were happy for a while then times got hard and I got mean and you lost all the love you had left.’
Perhaps it’s two of the more reflective songs, Tracing Lines and Lawn Tennis (‘Will I ever understand why I’m losing all my friends to a perfect lawn? / Like there’s nothing more to life, and I just can’t pretend’), in which James takes stock as he realises the need to move forward, that sum up the positives in an album where the protagonist often seems stuck in an unhealthy rut.
“Tracing Lines was the last song we wrote, just before we went to the studio, and by that time I’d finished my relationship. I’d already moved back here to my grandparents’ house, and it is exactly that: taking stock. It was me realising, ‘Fuck, I’m 35 and I’m back where I started. And I don’t know if anything’s better.’
“On Lawn Tennis, I'm singing about your friends falling out of touch as you get older and they get houses and families, and that’s their priority and you’re not part of it. You’re there wondering where everyone’s gone, but then also being like, ‘Fuck, should I be doing that?’ It almost makes me feel worse about myself because I haven’t got any of that. I probably should have done things differently, but you live and you learn.”
Having reset to such a degree, though, what James has learned is that the world keeps turning. And there’s something good to take from that.
“The thing that kept me going was the fact that I can start again, and I haven’t caused any irreversible damage. I can really start again, albeit quite late.”
In Deaf Havana as well, his feelings have become more hopeful. The album is a good one. The shows are selling – including London’s KOKO – and the lethargy has been replaced with an assuredness, more than just a previous might-as-well attitude that had crept in because “I’m shit at doing anything else”.
“I definitely had a huge resentment towards everything before, but now I’m just trying to be positive about it,” he says. “There’s always a few songs I like on each record, but I love every song on this album. I’m really proud of it. I don’t ever want to talk about my own music, but I’ll show anyone this and be proud that that’s me.”
The James K! meets today is a man clearly proud of a lot. And good for him. The old sarky humour still pops up, but there’s also a renewed enthusiasm for everything. He’s open about where he’s been, because it’s brought him to a much better place. Somewhere he’s actually wanted to be for a while.
“I’ve tried to get sober for, like, five years, but I don’t think I ever actually wanted it. I was doing it for other people or other things,” he admits. “There’s so many changes I’ve wanted to make my entire life, and I thought I’d never do it. And here I am, completely free of drugs and alcohol – properly this time – out of a relationship that I was miserable in. I’ve lost the weight that I wanted to lose. I’ve got my mental health sorted. Well, not sorted, but I’m dealing with it, through therapy and stuff. I still feel like I’m mental, but I have addressed quite a lot of the issues I’ve not been able to address before.
“I’m always going to think, ‘Fuck, I could have a drink,’ because it’s the thing I’ve used for 15 years to cope with whatever. That’s always going to be there. It’s about overcoming stuff that I could never do before. I could never fly sober, because I’m really scared of flying. But now I’ve done it quite a few times, so I know I can do it. It’s just a lot of relearning how to live, which is quite weird, but it’s fine.”
A year or so on from making We’re Never Getting Out, then, how does James Veck-Gilodi relate to the James Veck-Gilodi from back then?
“I honestly do feel like a different person. I still have some of the same worries and insecurities, but I was in such a different place. That person was gearing up for this change. I think that person was reaching the end of the spiral and waiting for something to fucking explode.”
Having survived the blast, from his old bedroom in his grandparents’ house, James may have had to return to zero, but what’s come out of it all has been enough to make the future look brighter than it has in years.
“What I’ve learned from all this motivates me to continue what I’m doing now. Because when I listen to it, it does take me back to that place. Not necessarily in a negative way, but it reminds me of where I was and where I am now.
“I think that’s a pretty good thing.”
We’re Never Getting Out is due out on October 3 via So Recordings
Catch the band live this month:
Deaf Havana 2025 autumn headline tour
October
2 Glasgow Garage
3 Manchester New Century Hall
5 Birmingham The Crossing
9 Bristol Trinity
10 London KOKO
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