Greg Gilbert should have been having the time of his life. It was 2014 and his band, Delays, were touring the country to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their debut album, Faded Seaside Glamour, which had made indie stars of them in the noughties. He had also just become a father and was engaged to his partner, Stacey.
But Gilbert was not having the time of his life. He was in almost constant pain – “pain I can’t even describe”. His weight had dropped to 8st and he was beset by anxiety so extreme that he could not contemplate taking medicine, let alone getting himself checked out properly. “The only thing I would take is peppermint capsules,” he says. “I realise now that I was taking peppermint capsules to try to treat bowel cancer.”
By the time Gilbert arrived in hospital – a full two years later, after his family had intervened and called an ambulance – he was barely functioning. He went for an x-ray and afterwards, the surgeon drew the curtain around the bed and sat down beside him. Gilbert noticed he’d changed out of his scrubs into more formal shirt and trousers. “There’s nothing we can do,” the surgeon said.
Gilbert was told that not only did he have bowel cancer, it had also spread to his lungs. He asked how long he had left, but the surgeon couldn’t say. He asked how it had happened. You’re just unlucky, he was told. “Then my mind did a bunch of strange things,” says Gilbert. “I felt an interconnectedness between everything. I turned to Stace and said, ‘Wherever I’m going, we’re all going.’ And in that moment, I went with it.”
The moment you’re told you have cancer, they say, marks the end of one life and the start of another. As Gilbert puts it, in one of his written recollections of the experience, your life will “shift like a train on rails” as you watch your “other, previous life drift over there out of sight”. But these changes needn’t be completely negative: for Gilbert, his diagnosis sparked an artistic journey in which drawing, painting and poetry became an all-consuming way of coping. “I’ve got a million half-written novels I always wanted to write,” he says. “But when this happened, I realised this was the subject.”
I meet Gilbert in the cafe of Southampton’s Waterstones. This is where he now spends most of his working hours. Being there, rather than at home, keeps his mind on his work and stops him “getting overwhelmed and going off down a rabbit hole”. He looks a little drawn and apologises for some chemo-related indigestion, but other than that you’d hardly guess he was sick at all.
The drawings started pretty much the day after his diagnosis. Gilbert had always sketched: he studied at Winchester Art School before forming Delays and while in the band gained acclaim for his miniature Biro drawings. But now the art tumbled out of him: hospital beds, strange Henry Moore-type figures, anything to make some sort of sense out of his situation. The morphine helped to relax his brain, allowing him to experiment wildly, and the results are about to go on display at Southampton City Art Gallery, to complement its show Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing.
In one scene, a man slumps on a chair, impaled by spikes, while tiny people try to sew him back together. Another shows a figure in a kitchen, unable to cope with the dishes while wolves gnaw on its hands. Yet Gilbert does not believe these images are as dark as they appear. “A lot of them were versions of dreams I had,” he says. “But even if they were nightmares, I still found great comfort in dreaming. Because time was open-ended there: it lasted for ever, which was very at odds with how I was feeling day to day.”
Gilbert also began writing poems: some were stream-of-consciousness stories that mirrored the information-overload of diagnosis, others memories of his daughters condensed into short verses. As with the art – and his favourite Delays songs – they came quickly, pouring out of him while he sat by the fire one night. He was drawn to such writers as James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, and the painter Paul Nash. “You can see that those people suffered,” he explains. “I found a weight there I wanted to access – and find my own equivalent.” Some of the art depicts Gilbert as bruised, battered and vulnerable – a direct contrast, he says, to his years in a band, where photoshoots and videos would appeal to his vanity. “In hospital, your dignity is gone. You are just undone, hoping to be somehow saved and put back together.”
Not long after Gilbert was first diagnosed, a chink of light emerged. The surgeon might have been speaking honestly when he said there was nothing he could do – but there were things that oncologists could try. Gilbert underwent intense chemotherapy, losing his hair and enduring extreme fatigue.
Scans showed that this had been effective, but Gilbert’s consultant warned that the cancer, which had progressed to stage four, was likely to return. A Harley Street specialist suggested he take a new drug called Avastin. But it was not available on the NHS, and was ruinously expensive.
Gilbert and his family discussed how to fund it. Stacey suggested appealing for donations on social media, but Gilbert wasn’t keen. “I tried to talk her out of it,” he says, “purely because I didn’t think it would do anything. And I didn’t want her to be disappointed.”
Stacey didn’t heed his advice. The GoFundMe page she created became its fastest ever campaign to reach the £100,000 mark. Today the sum stands at £213,000, meaning Gilbert has been able to treat himself with Avastin, among other things.
There are three events in his life that have seemed supernatural to him: the birth of his kids, the cancer diagnosis and the flurry of goodwill for his cause that left him astounded. “I still don’t think I’ve been able to express enough gratitude,” he says. “I knew we had a wonderful core of fans. I never in a million years thought this could happen.”
I remember seeing the GoFundMe page just before Christmas. The news knocked me sideways. I’d known Gilbert and the band from my days as an NME writer, and they’d always been an especially likable bunch. I’d also just had a child myself, so the picture of Gilbert, Stacey and their girls was a bit like looking directly into some grim parallel universe.
The thought of having to deal with cancer at what should have been such a happy time was hard to comprehend. Yet I would soon get to comprehend it only too well. A year later, I was also diagnosed with cancer – in my case, a blood cancer. I was told my situation was critical and that I might not see 2019.
Gilbert’s poetry felt eerily relatable: the stress of waiting for results; the alien environment of endless hospitals; the strange sense of detachment that can occur while watching your children during poignant moments and you find yourself wondering: will this be the last time I get to see this? I was particularly struck by A Pact With God (One Year Since Prognosis):
Give me 10 years
To know my girls and do the things
I’ve not yet thought of and, for my part,
I’ll try not to doubt.
It’s a deal Gilbert regrets ever making. Now two years into the decade, he wonders if he asked for too little. “And also – who am I having the dialogue with?” he laughs. “As much as I want to refute and deny religiosity, there’s a part of me that contemplates it.”
While the physical side-effects of chemo were one thing (“Like autumn, eyelashes / Land on my sketches”), the psychological fear of flooding his body with toxins had an even more profound effect. “It’s like an alien thing pulsing around you. I had to find a way to mentally own it, to think of it as working with me.” In his poem Creating An Image to Focus On During the First Bout of Chemotherapy, he reinvents the treatment as:
A silver Cossack army
Wielding scimitars, the tumours
A petrified forest; the blades
Break on it as a chiming whorl
Of flashing sickle moons.
Carol Ann Duffy chose Gilbert’s poems for one of her four annual laureate’s choice publications. It is due in February, around the same time as the exhibition. This leaves Gilbert in a peculiar position. It’s an exciting time for him professionally but one still fraught with anxiety. His latest scan results are due just before that date, and nobody knows what they will hold. Before his scan he will read a passage from Don Quixote, and he’ll be taking along his copy of Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov – two superstitions he’s acquired since the diagnosis.
Even if Gilbert’s cancer can be kept under control, it’s possible any future chemo will cause neuropathy, damaging his hands and potentially halting his means of making art. It’s no coincidence that the wolves in the artwork were devouring his creative outlet.
Yet he remains positive. The anxieties that dictated his life before cancer no longer do so. In many ways, he has become happier. He’s reading voraciously (with around 35 books on the go, many of them dense philosophical texts) and learning to enjoy life in the moment. This can be tiring: sometimes, he says, he’d like to drift away and think about what his life might be like as an old man, living by the sea.Although he struggles to sing, he says that Delays have two or three albums worth of material written and waiting for him if he can summon up the energy. Will the songs tackle what he’s been through? “They have to. Lyrically, we’ve always been a bit obscure. But I feel what I’m going through is too valuable to obscure.”
When Gilbert was at his lowest, believing his cancer was terminal and that he might only have months to live, he captured the feeling in this short, beautiful poem:
Death makes a crown of love,
A mantle to take across the threshold
As a sign of accomplished living:
You are loved,
You have loved,
You have lived.
It’s one I was particularly drawn to during my bleaker moments (thankfully, my own prognosis has since been revised to a far more positive one). As with all Gilbert’s work, it’s unflinching – and he admits to being nervous about his loved ones reading it. “I don’t really want them to,” he says, “because in the nicest possible way, it’s not for them.”
So who is it for? He thinks for a moment. “I just wanted to be utterly raw, to present rock-bottom, and hopefully map a certain elevation that might come after. If anybody in a similar situation can get comfort from that, you can’t ask for more.”
• Greg Gilbert’s drawings are at Southampton City Art Gallery from 1 February until 6 May. His poetry collection Love Makes A Mess Of Dying is available to pre-order through The Poetry Business
