The heroic comeback of Ben Howard: ‘I realised how fragile everything is’

Tanned but a little weary, Ben Howard is halfway through his European tour when I catch him, in a studio in Spain. He’s actually just been sightseeing, he tells me, scaling the Iberian Peninsula from the Basque Country to Santiago. “It’s quite an incredible place,” he remarks. “People do that pilgrimage for all sorts of reasons.”

For the past 15 months, the Ivor Novello winner has been on a difficult journey of his own. In March last year, he was sitting in his garden when he suddenly found himself unable to think clearly, form sentences, or speak, for almost an hour.

A month later, the same thing happened again, and after seeing a doctor, he found out that he’d suffered two mini strokes. This Friday, a week after releasing his new album, he opens the Other Stage at Glastonbury. Which seems astonishing.

A wry and introspective character, Howard sees his recovery not as a triumph of strength, but as a lesson in humility and finding out what truly matters. “You realise how fortunate you are to have a family,” the songwriter tells me. “What a miraculous, incredible thing that is.”

Howard, the child of musical parents, grew up “going back and forth” between the idyllic spots of Devon and Ibiza, where his grandfather set up shop in the bohemian Fifties. It reflects his restless musical spirit – nothing about him has ever been fixed.

His debut album, Every Kingdom, was nominated for a Mercury Prize when he was only 24, and in the years since he has continuously reinvented himself, growing out of the folk sound that made him famous and ditching the buttoned-up collar he was wedded to throughout the 2010s.

His new album, Is It? delights in a more electronic sound, which he began warming to in 2021’s Collections From The Whiteout. “Sometimes when I do an interview I feel like I’m kind of going over the same stuff, because I don’t feel like I’ve changed enormously,” he says. But if a title is anything to go off, Is It? seems to suggest an almost anti-Howard record.

One listen confirms that suspicion – this is a new Howard, different to the one I thought I knew. This one’s more interesting, his production more complex, and his presence more restrained. The singer cites Nick Cave and Neil Young as influences but his new style feels more akin to that of early electronic pioneers (he “flirted with the idea of a techno record”, he says, but evidently thought better of it).

The album expresses the difficulty of singing and making music following his stroke. On Walking Backwards, the lead single, his voice is disembodied, overlayed with percussions and synths. Echoes complement partially chopped lyrics as he chooses atmosphere over intelligibility.

“One of the major things I wasn’t able to do that well after it was write,” he says. “I had a real foggy memory, and even now I still stumble on words.” The lack of lyrical fluency was a challenge — but one that ultimately made the music stronger. “It was allowing certain aspects of [my condition] to creep into existing songs,” Howard says.

The singer has barely discussed his health scare before, but when asked, he’s refreshingly candid. Transient ischemic attacks (TIAs), to give their scientific name, are caused by blood clots that travel to the vessels supplying the brain. For Howard, the idea that something so tiny could have such an all-encompassing effect prompted months of existential reflection.

“It really strips back layers of you personally,” he says. “I’ve sat and thought about that a lot: how fragile everything is, teetering on the brink of Armageddon.” For someone who still struggles with words, lyricism appears not to be a problem today.

And yet, “I definitely had to take a take a step back from a lot of things,” Howard admits. “You’re caught between two feelings, worried about whether it was a fundamental lifestyle problem or whether it was just a physical anomaly.” The whole experience has brought him newfound self-awareness. “I’m much more conscious of how I’m feeling day to day,” he says. “And I definitely try and take it easy.”

It’s also put the wider issue of healthcare into perspective for him. “We need to realise the incredible burden that’s on a very small number of people,” he says of the NHS. “There’s this [false] assumption of an infinite number of people who can help us.” It’s important, he thinks, for people to start “taking responsibility for [their] own mortality” — to listen to their bodies and change their lifestyle when the pressure becomes untenable.

“Shortly after [the TIAs] happened, I saw a post Hailey Bieber put up on Instagram where she explained that she’d gone through the same thing,” Howard says. “Ultimately we’re all looking for a path that’s been trodden by someone else.”

Our conversation turns again to family. Howard’s been in a relationship with the fashion designer Agatha Lintott for close to a decade, but when I ask whether they’re looking to grow their family, he turns coy and deflects the question with a laugh. It seems, for now at least, that it’s through music not progeny that he’d like to live on. “I think that’s a universal theme, you know?” he tells me. “What’s left of us.”

We return to language again: “What am I without it?” Howard’s statement feels almost Larkin-like. “We just assume we’re these incredible, individual, independent thinkers,” he says, “but a tiny anomaly can literally wipe your entire memory.”

Though created in the throes of existential angst, Is It? is one of Howard’s happiest records, an expression not of fear or resentment but of resolve and gratitude. Howard himself calls it joyous. “It’s a record about love,” he smiles.

More than music idols, it is the people around him the singer finds inspiring. “We all seem to coexist so magically,” he tells me. “I’m always kind of in awe of that.”

Howard speaks bluntly but his positivity is infectious. “I’m enamoured by people,” he beams, a world away from today’s habitual doom and gloom; his very own little spin on ‘what will survive of us is love’. Glastonbury is lucky to have him.

Ben Howard’s album Is It? is out now on Island Records