Ali MacQueen

Ali MacQUEEN lingers around east London for now, but grew up in a joyless market town in South Bedfordshire that was a vacuum for ambition.

His latest track, Lost In The Middle – out on Blagger’s Records on 04/11/22 – grew out of a riff that Ali had come up with in late November 2022: “It sounded like it would be great for Wet Leg.”

He took the track to producer Happy Cat Jay, who had seen Ali play live in Dalston the month before. Jay suggested that they hook up and try to write some songs at Ultra Music’s Tileyard Studios. Having recorded a demo of the song in February 2022, they returned to the studios in April that year and began working on the track again, where Ali had written a new bridge. He showed Jay in the studio who added a simple keyboard line for it. “I loved it. It’s got this beautiful Air-like quality to it… it takes the song to another level.”

The sparks Ali speaks are what his doctor spoke about when he was diagnosed with epilepsy: “Like lightning or sparks within the brain,” they said when describing how it affects him. Ali’s musical ambitions were halted early on when he needed an eight-hour bout of brain surgery to remove a golfball-sized benign tumour. Another surgery was needed shortly after but, for Ali, it was a wake-up call. Time is short… music is the medicine. He began writing more songs, and formed the basis of a band for live dates.

In one sense, the song is about being lost – lost among a constant state of haste and commotion that envelopes us everyday. But it’s also inspired by Ali’s epilepsy, which often causes him to stop and become absent, unresponsive and lost in an absent, unresponsive state.