Ben Ottewell

Ben Ottewell earned widespread recognition through his role in the British rock act Gomez. That group’s opening release, Bring It On, captured the Mercury Music Prize in 1998. Without any appointed lead singer, Gomez drew vocals from Ottewell, Ian Ball, and Tom Gray alike, and most of the band’s records distributed multiple vocal spots among the three. Ottewell stepped forward as lead more often than his colleagues, which positioned him among the outfit’s most visible figures. Once the band delivered its sixth album in 2009, he began laying groundwork for work outside the group, issuing his first solo collection, Shapes & Shadows, in 2011. The follow-up, Rattlebag, arrived in 2014. Early the next year he put out the single “Watcher” to herald his third album, Man Apart, which surfaced that May.