London, UK · electronic · songwriter

James Ellis Ford

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Simian Mobile Disco's half and producer to Arctic Monkeys — solo pastoral electronics, a studio polymath finally under his own name.

James Ellis Ford is a British musician and producer, born in Staffordshire on December 11, 1978, known first as a member of Simian and then as one half of Simian Mobile Disco with Jas Shaw. He studied biology at Manchester University, graduating in 2002, alongside other future members of Simian.

In 2008 he formed the Last Shadow Puppets with Miles Kane and Alex Turner, playing drums as well as producing. Their debut album, The Age of the Understatement, reached number one in the UK and earned a Mercury Prize nomination, and its follow-up, Everything You've Come to Expect, gave the group a second UK chart-topper.

Over the following two decades he became one of the more in-demand producers in British music, working repeatedly with Arctic Monkeys on every album since their second, including AM and Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, and on records by Depeche Mode, Gorillaz, Florence + the Machine, Blur, the Pet Shop Boys, Fontaines D.C. and the Last Dinner Party. His production of Klaxons' Myths of the Near Future won the Mercury Prize in 2007.

He released his first solo album, The Hum, in 2023 on Warp Records. It draws on analogue synthesis and live instrumentation in roughly equal measure, with Ford singing and playing most of the parts himself, and sits closer to pastoral, song-based electronic music than to the club work of his earlier career.

A second solo album, Lost in Another World, followed in August 2026, written and recorded while Ford was being treated for acute myeloid leukemia.

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