But two days before the band were due to go into the studio, Ben got a phone call from 4AD: they were dropping him. ‘I mean, it wasn't very pleasant,’ Ben says with considerable understatement. ‘Nothing had led us to believe that it was going to end so abruptly. I signed a deal for three albums.’ The story continued with an almost sadistic twist: The Golden Dregs recorded the album over the next five weeks in a basement studio under 4AD’s London offices, both parties having previously agreed to the arrangement. ‘That must’ve been weird, at the very least,’ I suggest. ‘I kept on moving so as not to think about it too much. And the main perpetrator of the dropping wasn't there.’ His blurred face seems to darken. ‘Looking back, I think I was completely unhinged.’

Ben describes moments during those five weeks with the spare-but-telling detail of an Ernest Hemingway short story. The band members coming into the studio one by one to contribute their parts. Recording the harmonies. Ben making little home movies of the process. ‘As a band, we’ve really been drawn closer by the whole experience,’ he says. And did getting dropped provide additional motivation? ‘Yeah, I had a burning fire underneath me. I was cycling in every day right up till Christmas. I did my final mixes on New Year’s Eve.’

It isn't just the story surrounding Godspeed which draws parallels with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, it’s also the music. Both albums are emotionally complex; both showcase a creative break from previous work: they might inhabit alt rock’s broad church, but both push against its walls. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot turned out to be a 21st-century masterpiece. Godspeed isn’t quite that, but it is excellent and — this is the important bit — it suggests Ben is capable of writing a masterpiece.

Great bands require friction to spark. It's a theory substantiated by multiple examples. In Wilco the abrasion was between Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett. The three studio albums they made together, Being There, Summerteeth and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, were arguably Wilco’s peak. Ben is a super-gifted songwriter, but would Godspeed have been even stronger with a songwriting partner at hand? Not necessarily somebody to sit opposite him, guitar in hand, eyeball to eyeball, but someone to provide a little fruitful discord. I'm thinking how to frame the question exactly when I look at the one half of Ben's out-of-focus face and decide against it. Bruised talents like Ben’s need nurturing, not some music critic twit grasping for parallels with the past.

After Godspeed was finished, Ben went in search of another label. ‘Yeah, I was thinking this is a cool record, we just need to keep the wheels moving. So I got in touch with A&Rs I knew, who were super open about me sending stuff over. Then once it arrived, they weren't so communicative. The rejection letters were the nicest ones. It's the people who didn't respond that can fuck off.’ So there wasn't a happy ending? ‘No, I kind of don't think there will be now.’

Is that where the parallel with Wilco stops? Well, in one way. But as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot did in the early 2000s, Godspeed says something about the music industry a quarter century later. First up: record labels are still rejecting great music. Second, as Ben explains: ‘There's no money in music. But the offices, the expense cards, the cars, everything is being paid for by the music made by the artists. If you're a bigger artist on a label, you're keeping the lights on in offices in New York, London, Germany and Paris. That's built on an old model. But I don't think it's sustainable. Labels may be useful if stuff’s going really well, you're already selling loads of records and then you need a money and infrastructure injection to take you to the next level. But they're not really tastemakers anymore.’