‘I thought: I could be dead by the end of this’: Cate Le Bon on making art from Covid chaos

She moved to the Mojave desert, but the pandemic stranded the psychedelicist back in her native Wales. She explains how three people losing their minds in a terraced house' ended up with an album of the year

It looks like the bottom of the ocean, the light is completely different. And the perspective of time changes out here. The days are so long." Down the line, Cate Le Bon is describing the beauty of desert living. Everything is so still," she says. Sound travels differently out here. It feels like you're in a vacuum, and you choose when you want to break the seal."

She still speaks about the Mojave with the wonderment of a newcomer; the events of the past two years mean that she has spent perhaps just two months in the home she bought in Joshua Tree, California. Instead, she pinged around the globe from Wales to Topanga Canyon, anything to keep working; producing records for John Grant and Devendra Banhart and recording her own sixth album, the spectacular Pompeii, the follow-up to her Mercury-nominated 2019 album Reward.