Last year Creeper guitarist Ian Miles was committed to a psychiatric hospital after he suffered from a psychotic episode. It was during that time of his life, when he was working on the bands new album “Sex, Death and the Infinite Void”, which dropped today (July 31) – whilst being hospitalised. During a Zoom call with Radio 1 Newsbeat, he opened up about Creeper’s “worst year of their lives.”
Miles isn’t alone while he’s talking about what happened, singer Will Gould is also with him. The band is based in Southampton, which is where it all happened. “I was told by this underground cult that my area was Southampton, so I was to go out and eradicate religion in my area. That was what happened that day – I was on a mission to help the cause”, the guitarist said.
When he’s being asked if he’s being uncomfortable with certain information being published, he just replies that he wouldn’t reveal stuff that he doesn’t want to be published. It’s quite the opposite, actually: “There’s a lot of misinformation out there about mental health and I feel like people should be educated.”
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it is July 31st 2020, opening day.
two & a half years of work have lead to this very moment, a moment in time that will stay with us like the persistence of glitter on skin.https://t.co/KMr427ivrP pic.twitter.com/Qjl63Fv3dG
— C R E E P E R (@creepercultuk) July 31, 2020
The 31-year-old was diagnosed with a bipolar disorder “a long time ago”, but it wasn’t until it was too late that he realised how bad it could be. “There was all sorts of stuff going on. Like I thought I could kill people by blinking at them. I thought religion and the police were collecting money and handing it up to the government and MI5 to buy nuclear weapons to end the world. And so I thought there was an underground cult that were looking to shut down religion – I was trying to fight the good fight.”
But even with Miles institutionalised there was no way for the band to stop working on the album. Will Gould revealed that he was “an anxious mess” but that they had to keep going. “At the time, basically the band was going to break up if if we stopped… we had to deliver.” And so they continued to work on it via FaceTime. “Ian’s wife brought a guitar into the hospital and I would FaceTime him from a piano and we would try and write like that.”
“I remember trying to find a chord for a song and, at the time, Ian was still really unwell and believing all these delusions, but it was really funny because he could still just turn all of that off for a second to help me work out what chord I needed.” Creeper’s new album is out today, if you want to check out how working from different rooms has worked out.
