![]() ![]() I’d wake up early, get up and go play like a madman. It was part of the process of healing and rebalancing: the piano was giving me the tools to express subtle emotions. I was playing the piano for about six hours a day, to the point where I had no real concept of time. The music and lyrics for Malody started to form when I was not long out of hospital, in 2012. We sat down in the communal kitchen area and I said, ‘Look, I can’t write any more Futureheads songs in the foreseeable future,’ and they were totally accepting. One of the catalysts to my recovery was when my bandmates visited me in hospital. Barry Hyde has now released a solo album, called ‘Malody’ For a while I was pretty much catatonic – there was this inability to verbalise anything. You stop seeing friends, eating, washing. There’s another line: “You’re the one I miss the most but when I see your face I swear that I’m staring at a ghost.” When I’d look in the mirror, I’d think, what has happened to you? It was terrifying. The lyric is: “How can I expect this madness to end by staring at myself and tearing myself apart?”. “Theme”, the first song on my solo album, Malody – the name is a blend of the words “malady” and “melody” – is about searching. The longest I was hospitalised was three months. I moved back in with my parents and was in and out of hospital. They visited me daily to make sure I was safe. I started to take anti-psychotics and became a patient of my local mental health crisis team. My life dissolved and I had a proper breakdown. Inevitably, it all crashed spectacularly. This was all part of the mania, of course. I started to feel like I had some special purpose and powers – I thought I was superhuman. I was like Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man. We had a huge garden and I started growing vegetables and espousing this new way of living, but I was also abusing my body and living a debauched life. My life dissolved and I had a proper breakdown.Įventually, I left my wife and moved in with some people who were living a hedonistic life. My awareness of the world around me seemed to explode and I had a false spiritual awakening. ![]() I went to Arizona on a retreat, where we did long meditation exercises from 6am in the middle of the desert. My wife was not remotely interested in my new preoccupations and simply wondered where her husband had gone. I set up my own school doing meditation techniques and teaching this holistic life, even though I was reckless with my own.Īt the same time, my marriage started to crumble. Around 2010, I discovered George Gurdjieff, the 19th-century Russian mystic who was all about achieving a higher state of consciousness. I became interested in the occult and spirituality, anything that took me out of the physical world. I started looking for answers, but I was looking in the wrong places. I couldn’t sleep, I was experiencing extreme mood swings and periods of mania, and becoming detached from my surroundings. As time went on, it became clear that I was coming apart. It seemed to fit well with our existence and with the cycle of creativity, so I pushed it to one side.Įven so, the disillusionment didn’t go away there’s a sourness to it because there’s always someone who gets more breaks than you. Also, because of the strangeness and unrealness of it all, I couldn’t be sure that what was happening in my head wasn’t just a normal reaction to the life I was leading. I found the lifestyle I was living really didn’t suit me, but I also felt I would be insane to curtail it and say, “actually, this is not for me”. Our third album was all about being upbeat and getting back on the radio and big festival bills, and it worked. I wrote about it a bit on our second album on a song called “Thursday” but the press reacted along the lines of: “This is not what we want from The Futureheads.” It shattered my confidence in expressing myself in that kind of way, so I stopped. I started to have mental-health problems around that time, but I mostly kept it to myself. The Futureheads formed in 2000 and, after four years, we finally signed our first big record deal and had a hit with “Hounds of Love”. ![]()
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