Oli Spleen's first band "The Flesh Happening" formed in 2003 at the Brighton launch of his debut novel "Depravikazi". 

In 2009 he formed the band “Pink Narcissus” and in 2013 released his debut solo album “Fag Machine” which spawned a club-night of the same name which ran weekly for three years and was the first to showcase live original LGBT+ music on Brighton’s gay scene.

In 2017 he formed his third band “Spleen” and in 2018 he teamed up with Mishkin Fitzgerald and members of her band Birdeatsbaby to make what would be his second studio album “Gaslight Illuminations”, (released February 2019) which incorporated themes of psychological manipulation and the emotional fallout of a toxic relationship. 

In 2020, twenty years on from his hospitalisation he teamed up with pianist and songwriter Nick Hudson and released another album "Night Sweats & Fever Dreams" which was themed around the AIDS epidemic, framed as the hallucinations of a dying man. 

April 1st saw the launch of Spleen’s fifth studio album “Still Life”, an album about life in the shadow of and in spite of death. Its themes encompass nature, the environment, mortality, grief, life, death, mass extinction of species, displaced people and the general human experience of existence in the 2020’s.