Voices from The Fuselage
With Voices From The Fuselage’s anticipated second album, that follows up conceptually from their 2015 debut, frontman Ashe O’Hara has opened up about his struggles, from mental health to substance abuse, like never before.
Singer Ashe O’Hara digs deep on the band’s new album, Odyssey: The Founder Of Dreams.
For many fans of prog music, Ashe O’Hara is a familiar face, and a much-loved voice. In 2014 he decided it was time to step down as vocalist in TesseracT, following a twoyear stint during which the band released album Altered State. O’Hara’s departure disappointed fans, but it meant he was able to turn his attention back to Voices From The Fuselage, the proggy post-rock outfit he’d co-founded and fronted since 2010.
“Lots of people have said, ‘I’m so glad you’re back in Voices,’ but I never left Voices!” he protests. “I was doing a degree and the last two years of it was spent on the road with TesseracT. I barely had any time to do anything with Voices but they always said they never wanted to replace me and I never wanted to leave them either. They were happy to take a back seat and they were really supportive.”
His return also enabled him to realise a musical vision he’d cooked up way back in college: the creation of two musical ‘Odysseys’, the first being sonically ‘dark’, and the second ‘light’.
Voices From The Fuselage’s debut album, 2015’s Odyssey: The Destroyer Of Worlds, represented the first of those instalments: an intricate delight which balanced heaviness and pop-inspired melodies, technicality and accessibility, using the deftest of touches. Today though, we’re here to chat to O’Hara about its successor, Odyssey: The Founder Of Dreams. As originally envisioned, it’s the more ethereal of the two chapters, packed with simmering, radiant melodies. But you only need to take a closer look at the lyric sheet to recognise that these tracks come from a dark place, delving bravely into O’Hara’s past, in particular his tumultuous childhood.
“With the release of this album,
I feel like I owe it to the fans to be more honest and open about where my music comes from. I’ve been scared to do that,” O’Hara explains. “My mum put me in a Catholic school for part of my childhood. I fucking hated my time in that school. As I got older, the pictures didn’t make sense to me, the idea there is someone watching over us and trying to lead us through to a better path of righteousness, that everything we face is a challenge and we’re being tested. With me coming to terms with the fact that I’m gay and everything negative that’s happened in my life I thought, ‘Fuck these tests.’ It didn’t add up to me.
“When you’re a kid it’s difficult to define yourself because you’re still trying to sense what everything around you is,” he continues. “I was surrounded by Catholics and I felt very confused, a little bit lost. It was around that time that knew I liked boys in a different way, but I didn’t know that was gay. I felt that way about Christianity. I knew I didn’t believe in it, but I didn’t know that was atheism.”
O’Hara has never known his father, or “the sperm donor” as he refers to him with an edge in his voice, and instead was brought up, initially, by his mother. By the time he was 12 however, she had developed a serious drinking problem and needed to be hospitalised. At that point, O’Hara was placed
“With the release of this album, I feel like I owe it to the fans to be more honest and open about where my music comes from. I’ve been scared to do that.”
into foster care. It marked the beginning of a traumatic period which would continue into his adult years.
“We thought she was going to die, the doctor said she had two days left,” he remembers. “My first foster mum took me to the hospital to say goodbye and she looked horrible, like a skeleton, with green skin, full-on liver damage and liver spots all over her body. She was so malnourished. It was horrible, possibly the worst day of my life. She’s ok now, she recovered, went into rehab, got her own place and picked up her life. How can a doctor be so wrong? Nothing any doctor has told my mum has been right. I was 12, and it angers me when I look back because I was so young and vulnerable, and all that grief I felt at the time was unnecessary.”
While his mother recovered in intensive care, O’Hara was moved between foster homes before settling with a couple called Lena and Dave, who he lived with until he was 20.
“I was broken, I’d had three foster homes which said they didn’t want to look after me,” he says. “The first was a short term one and it didn’t work out well. Then I moved onto another place, that lady was in her 50s. She had three grown-up sons, her middle son was gay and she didn’t have a good relationship with him. She secretly packed up my things when I was at school. My social worker came and told me I was being moved because she said I was ‘strange’ and that I reminded her of her son. I think it was because I was obviously gay, but I didn’t know that at the time. As you can imagine that’s why I felt very lost and didn’t have much hope.
“After that I went into an emergency place for about a week and then I eventually moved into Lena and Dave’s. I remember that night really clearly: I was outside the house crying up against a tree like a fucking child. But I spent about seven and a half years with them and they changed my life.”
Fast forward to 2016. After living apart for many years, O’Hara moved in with his mother in Northampton in order to get a handle on his drug use, which had started to spiral.
“I moved down to Brighton to go to university and I had friends who probably weren’t the healthiest relationships,” he says frankly. “I don’t blame them, I take full responsibility, but [they were] enablers and encouragers. I started taking methamphetamines, getting into all the horrible class A shit. There was a lot of Mandy [MDMA], a lot of meow [mephedrone] and a lot of coke. It’s weird because I hated the idea of drugs, but it just took one sniff and it was downhill from there.
“When I moved to live with my mum I didn’t stop taking drugs though,” he admits. “I met a guy who I was seeing, he is the inspiration behind Via, the first track on the new album. He was a ketamine dealer: he dragged me even further down. The reason I came off of it was because it was overflowing onto other people in my life. There was a point where I said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”
Not only did moving home eventually help O’Hara get off the drugs, it also gave him and his mother a chance to overcome their painful past. “It was a weird dynamic given we’d only lived together for 11 years of our lives prior to that, but I’m glad we did. She has been there, she has tried to raise me. Where the hell has my father been? Nowhere. I’ll always forgive my mum and never hold against her what happened because
I’ve recently gone down a similar path with drugs.”
O’Hara wrote his first song when he was just nine years old and it quickly became a coping mechanism, a way to shrug off the unhappy realities of his home life. With Odyssey: The Founder Of Dreams however, escapism wasn’t an option the singer laid out for himself on the table. On the contrary, these are easily the most on-the-nose, candid tracks he’s ever written. Take a song like The Monolith, for instance, on which O’Hara sings about ‘Wrestling, grappling with my demons.’ Elsewhere, single Nine Levels includes the lyric: ‘Are you depraved are you depraved down here? Will you survive the place
I’ve endured for several years? It pulled me underneath.’
“They always say the most broken people make the best art,” he muses. “I’m very much a ‘beauty in sadness’ songwriter. When I was about 12 I was diagnosed with depression. I’ve always felt depressed since then. I have good days, I’ve had laughs, I’ve had good times, but I’ve never been truly happy with my life or who I am. I’ve kind of made my peace with that, with the fact I’ll never be truly satisfied and I don’t think you’re supposed to be.”
Is O’Hara nervous about releasing such a personal record, especially given fans’ tendencies to pore and theorise over his lyrics?
“No, I like it,” he replies. “It’s helped me. Some of the messages
I get from fans are so encouraging. People have said my lyrics have stopped them wanting to kill themselves and given them a revived outlook on life. That’s literally more than I could ever ask for.”
“There was a lot of Mandy [MDMA], a lot of meow [Mephedrone] and a lot of coke. It’s weird because I hated the idea of drugs, but it just took one sniff and it was downhill from there.”