‘The one person I want to share it with, I can’t’: Aaron Gilbert of Delays on life, loss and his brother’s dying wish
Aaron Gilbert is showing me the new vinyl reissue of his band’s 2004 debut album, Faded Seaside Glamour, when he is suddenly stopped in his tracks. Inside the package is a photograph comprising all four Delays members: the keyboardist is in one corner alongside bassist Colin Fox, drummer Rowly and Aaron’s older brother Greg, the band’s boyish lead singer and guitarist.
“Fucking hell,” he says. “Your whole life ahead of you … kids.”
In the 20 years since that photograph was taken, Delays got to live out their wildest indie rock dreams: they toured the world, released four albums and built a devoted fanbase around their soaring melodies. But it wasn’t all highs. In 2016, Greg was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer and given six to eight months to live. After the band’s fans rallied to help fund treatment unavailable on the NHS, Greg’s prognosis improved. He spent five years in a creative whirlwind, producing mesmerising artworks from his hospital bed and writing poetry that confronted his mortality face on. But in 2021, at the age of 44, he died. Aaron puts down the photograph and shakes his head. “Fuck, I adored him,” he says.
Today, we’re sitting in the offices of the band’s label, Rough Trade. Aaron doesn’t look much older than he did during the band’s heyday, although he’s bulked up – lifting weights, he says, has helped his mental health. His eyes occasionally well up when talking about Greg, but he clearly cherishes being given the chance to do so. “Cathartic,” he says, as we relive those early days.
Greg, Colin and Rowly were already in the band together when a teenage Aaron bought himself a sequencer and started making music in his bedroom. One day, when he nipped downstairs for a drink and left a synth line running on repeat, he returned to find Greg strumming along to it in his room next door. That song became Wanderlust, the opening track on Faded Seaside Glamour, and Aaron was immediately made a member of the band.
The brothers both suffered bouts of anxiety and depression – “we were a train crash, man” – but found that writing uplifting songs with melancholy lyrics helped ease the burden. One time, an 18-year-old Aaron woke up from a dream about a creaking door and rushed out of bed to try to capture the sound of it. It was 3.30am when he woke Greg up to tell him. “He was so fucking annoyed with me,” laughs Aaron. “But he started playing along to it until it was getting light and then we got the boys round and just played it for six hours straight. Euphoric.”
What they didn’t foresee was how much their music would connect with others. That song, Long Time Coming, became a Top 20 hit and remains one of the most endearing songs of the early-00s indie era. Watching their gigs sell out and their audience grow came as a shock. “We realised that other people were struggling too, and that this album was holding their hand and pulling them through,” he says.
They recorded Faded Seaside Glamour at Rockfield Studios in Wales, but by the time it was ready for release Aaron was suffering from serious mental health problems. “I was suicidal,” he says. “That time on paper should have been incredible. And, retrospectively, it was. But I genuinely thought I was losing my mind. One night I couldn’t even get on stage, we had to cancel the show. But I remember Greg helping me through that, saying that people that do lose their minds don’t worry about losing their minds.”
Despite the turmoil, the band’s popularity grew. They performed on Top of the Pops and had people singing back their songs in Japan and Mexico. “That’s not normal,” says Aaron, who still seems to be constantly pinching himself to check it all actually happened.
By the time of their final tour, Delays were playing some of the most joyous shows of their career. But this time round it was Greg’s mental health that was flailing. He refused to tour at all unless he shared a hotel room with Aaron; often he was so anxious that he would violently throw up before shows. Aaron assumed that this anxiety was behind the sudden flare up of Greg’s IBS symptoms, rather than the reality: that cancer was spreading through his body.
Greg was so riddled with health anxiety that for a long time he refused to seek any kind of medical help. When his family finally persuaded him to go to a hospital he was told that he had cancer and that it was terminal. “In that moment, my mind did a bunch of strange things,” Greg told me in a 2019 interview. His anxieties faded away and, suddenly, he saw the world clearly.
“He found himself completely present for the first time in 10 years,” says Aaron. “He’d always drawn and written poetry – but this was the first time it could be his focus. And he ended up making the most wonderful art he’d ever created.” His artwork would eventually be shown at Southampton City Art Gallery alongside works by Leonardo da Vinci; Carol Ann Duffy published his poems in her annual laureate’s choice publications.
When Greg was healthy, he and Aaron used to argue like typical brothers. But once he was sick, the pair of them … still argued like typical brothers. Aaron remembers the time he’d been struck down with Covid and Greg hadn’t called to check in on him. “I was like: ‘I’ve had four fucking years of your shit!’” he says, laughing. “But the arguments were always fuelled with love. We’d make up, like, you wanna cup of tea, yeah? Or I’d buy him a bunch of flowers. He loved his flowers.”
They enjoyed plenty of dark humour together. Aaron says he liked to pull the bedsheets over Greg’s head and whisper: “Goodnight sweet prince.” He swears blind that Greg would pretend to gasp his final breath at times just to freak him out. But they couldn’t joke around the reality for ever. Aaron recalls visiting the hospice towards the end of Greg’s life and his brother puncturing their awkward small talk.
“He stopped and said: ‘Do you know how proud I am of you?’ And then we both just lost it, like completely burst into tears. We had to have that conversation. There’d been this tension building because we both knew. And I remember thinking, Jesus, you’re sitting there, you know you’re gonna die. That’s the most surreal, looking-in-onyourself conversation you could ever have.”
Greg died on 30 September 2021 in his brother’s arms. “You know how people say that they wait for whoever they want to be there with them? Greg did that. It was me and him. And what an honour. We’re not religious people, but there is something so magical about someone wanting you there, for you to be the one, and he did that. And that was … absolutely life-changing.”
It was always one of Greg’s wishes, Aaron says, to have their debut album out on vinyl. During his final weeks Aaron promised him he would work on it. “And it’s happening,” he says. “It’s just the one person that I want to share it with, I can’t.”
Included in the deluxe version of the reissue is a print of Greg’s artwork – all swirls of colour as dreamlike as the band’s music – and the words Aaron wrote to read out at Greg’s funeral: “I’ll be singing with him in every blink and every gap and through every teardrop,” it says, “and I’d love you to do the same, because his life was a chorus and the half-life of music is infinite.”
There’s also a fifth Delays album out there somewhere. Their producer is currently going through the material they recorded before Greg’s death and pulling things together. “It’s about three-quarters finished,” says Aaron.
It’s been good for Aaron to have projects like this on the go. He says he still has his fair share of difficult days, but that there are also life-affirming ones too, such as the day he spent reading through messages from fans, telling him how much the music he made with his brother meant to them. He’s gained a new outlook on life, one that appreciates being in the moment a little bit more.
“I don’t need to be skydiving to have a good time,” he says. “I can look at a tree with a gust of wind and the leaves blowing and be wowed by it. So I think I have to find beauty in all of this, or there’s no point otherwise. And there is beauty. It’s everywhere.”
Faded Seaside Glamour is released on vinyl on27 January.
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