AFTER three years of hard work Ben Mills was delighted that his second album was finally at the CD pressing plant. That was until he had a email from Mark Owen’s manager asking for Ben’s phone number to have a chat.
“I’d done it all by myself and it was a relief to finally have finished and so I decided to do something really ordinary and was painting a wall,” said Ben, who made it to the final of the X Factor in 2006.
“I’d worked with Mark on one of the tracks that appears on the album so when I got the email I started to panic a bit.
“I called the CD pressers and told them to hold everything until I’d found out what the problem was. Thankfully it was all fine but there was a moment when I was convinced it wouldn’t be.”
The singer is getting ready to wing his way to Swindon as part of a tour promoting his latest album, Freedom, which he released on his own record label, Benjamel.
“It was an interesting adventure,” he laughed.
“I never realised there was so much work involved in setting up your own label.”
He said that his wife Melissa, who he married last summer, had been a life-saver during the process.
“Thankfully she’s got her head screwed on and did a lot of the paperwork for me,” he said.
“Being a musician I’m a creative type and we just don’t do paperwork. I’m the type of person who has phone bills from two years ago that have never been opened because my filing system just involves putting them on a table out of the way.”
Fans of Ben’s music will see a departure in style from Ben’s first album, Picture of You, and will hear some different versions of tracks found on it.
“After the X Factor I found that I wasn’t getting to make any decisions for myself, the record label was doing it all for me,” said Ben, who is patron of three charities, including the RSCPA.
“I didn’t feel like I was playing real music and even songs I had written were put through a production line and came back completely different.
“Which is why they might sound different when you hear them live, it’s gone back to how they were originally.
“This album is what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. It’s turned out better than I ever could have imagine it would be.
“Although I won’t be spending three years working on the next one.”
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