Interview with Catatonia from Issue 4 of Welsh Bands Weekly, Winter 1997/98

I have a dream, a master plan, a fantasy so ridiculous I’m almost embarrassed to share it with you. But I’ve hugged this secret to myself for so long, I’ve just got to let it out.

My fantasy is this: Cardiff Arms Park has reopened and Wales are playing New Zealand. Surprisingly, Wales aren’t doing a brilliant job of it. WBW are in the crowd with Cerys Matthews, Catatonia’s diva of a singer, and we’re steadily getting drunk. Extremely drunk. We look at each other and, without saying a word, strip off our shirts and do a topless streak across the pitch. Wales put on a sudden spurt (fnarr fnarr) and, for the first time in donkey’s years, beat the All Blacks into the ground.

What a fantasy

I’ve admitted before, in an interview with Golwg magazine, that Cerys is my hero. She’s a real woman, y’know? One of the boys combined with absolute femininity; tough, direct, independent and, on top of all that, in possession of the finest, sweetest, yet raunchiest voice since Janis Joplin hung up her Southern Comfort for the last time.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Catatonia

4 November 1997, the Astoria, London. Catatonia are playing the last date of their hugely successful tour, and we arrive just before the soundcheck to interview both Catatonia and Big Leaves. Two overly-glammed-up girls from some other fanzine are also waiting to interview Catatonia, and their disappointment shines so brightly as to be visible from Holyhead when they’re led into another room with Mark and Owen while Welsh Bands Weekly go off into Catatonia’s dressing room with Cerys to do the interview for which we’ve been chasing their press office since April.

If you’ve ever read any interviews with or articles about Catatonia, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the real Cerys Matthews Is exactly like the Cerys Matthews of the music press: wild, loud, constantly pissed and falling over. Not so. Cerys Matthews on this occasion is quiet, almost reserved, speaks in a barely audible whisper, nibbles a sandwich and some grapes, and sips mineral water. My granny is wilder (this is actually true. Hello Nan). Declining Cerys’ offer of some grapes (never touch ‘em while I’m on duty), we settle back against the tatty padded velvet of the sofa, and the interview begins.

At the time of the interview, Catatonia are preparing for the release of what will become one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 1998, International Velvet. It’s their second album; their debut, Way Beyond Blue, had more than its fair share of inclusions in various magazines’ “best of ‘97” features, and deservedly so – it’s one of the most adaptable albums I’ve ever heard. So, what should we expect from International Velvet?

“It’s more live based than the last one”, says Cerys. “The sounds in it vary more than the last one. We’ve got quite rocky ones like I Am The Mob, we’ve got other ones which are more vocal and some folkier ones, so it’s more of a mixture, just to confuse people! There’s one which is just, say, vocals done round a mad drum roll. There’s Why I Can’t Stand One Night Stands, Johnny Come Lately… we’re quite proud of it, y’know what I mean? We did it in about two months, in the beginning of summer, but we were very late with the mixing and that, so it got delayed.”

Somebody recently described Catatonia to me as being like Welsh bands were in the 70s and 80s, more traditional than Welsh bands today, and more lilting. Is that a description that Cerys is happy with?

“That sounds okay to me,” she says. “It is a bit more lilting. If you look at Gathering Moss by the Super Furries, I think that’s quite Welsh. It depends on the songs as well. Like Gorky’s, they’re pretty Welsh, with their melodies… it’s melody based, it twists, I think that’s what we try to do, so you’re not copying the structures of “1, 2, 3, 4, bang bang” type songs. I don’t know if we are more or less, though.”

I actually know men who’ve fallen in love with Cerys just after hearing her voice once. Men who’ve never even seen her, who don’t have the foggiest what she looks like, yet fall hopelessly in love with her, such is the powerful effect of her voice. It seems almost criminal to think of Cerys doing a duet, but if she were to do one, who would it be with?

“I’ve just done one with Space, which is coming out soon,” she smiles. “That was something I wanted to do, because I really love the stuff that Space do. I really enjoyed it. They’re another band who are trying to do something different. Their songs, again… it’s melody, proper songs, even if you’re delving into eighty year old wrecks – it’s a crooning type of thing, it’s fantastic. So, it was really good to do that, that was what I fancied doing. The song is called Tom Jones and it’s about two lovers who want to kill each other, then Tom Jones comes on the radio and they don’t do it.”

Pretty surreal, isn’t it? I’d never throw my knickers at you/and I don’t come from Wales are what you might describe as surreal lyrics, don’t you think? Well, as you all know, here at WBW we love a bit of surrealism. What’s the most surreal thing Cerys has ever done?

“A friend of mine, who lives in my house, she’s quite surreal,” Cerys giggles. “She does this social choir, she’s got to do a new thing every time she does it, a new novelty every time see, so she gets her bike – nobody knows she’s going to do it – rides the bike all the way through the house and then down to the cellar. I dunno, we just do silly things really. Doing gymnastics in the garden and that.”

We’ve done some pretty silly things ourselves really – hands up who remembers Fantasy Flashing?

“Being a right tit,” says Cerys. “That’s my friend! She’s a right tit! She used to flash anywhere and everywhere. She’s stopped it now, mind. It was just to see what people would do.”

We’ve flashed at firemen a couple of times. That was pretty cool. We had a score table. In fact, Cerys, in Issue 2 we invited you to join us…

“Nah, I’m a prude you see. I have a prudish element.”

Yeah, but we keep our bras on most of the time, although there are bonus points for getting them out of the bra…

Cerys: “So you don’t like the Spice Girls but you like getting your tits out? Hmm…”

Whenever you read anything about Catatonia in the music press, inevitably it’s based around how much alcohol Cerys drinks, who she’s insulted lately, how many bands’ sets she’s invaded (esp. Space at the Big Noise Festival in Cardiff last May), what a hardnut she is, etc etc etc. As a reader I often think, oh for fuck’s sake, change the record! Tell us about what a fantastic band Catatonia are; tell us about what cracking tunes they’re playing at their gigs nowadays; tell us what they like and dislike; but please don’t keep on chucking out the same old stuff about how many times they’ve been to the pub this week! Please! And if that’s how I feel as a reader, how does Cerys feel as the subject? Is there a problem with the way Catatonia have been portrayed in the press?

“I think so,” she admits, “but that’s my own fault as well. We can only be philosophical about it and just carry on doing what we’re doing. Either it’s going to click or it’s not going to click. There’s a lot of bands who never seem to achieve what they might have been able to. I think that’s wrong. People have started to call us a cult band now, which I quite like really; I can go along with that.”

In its Christmas 1996 issue the NME ran a feature which involved taking Cerys, Julie from Tiger, Debbie from Echobelly, Marie from Kenickie and NME journalist Johnny Cigarettes on a pub crawl around Camden. The results were hilarious. Debbie fondling Cerys’ tits in a pub doorway. Cerys laying on the floor, screaming about how good she is in bed. Everyone getting completely pissed and making complete idiots of themselves, all in the name of “pub golf”. God, I would’ve loved to have been a fly on the wall at that one…

“It was mostly girls,” Cerys explains, “and it was really good fun.”

If you were to play pub golf again, and could choose the other participants, who would they be?

“Mark E Smith, because I’m gobsmacked by some of the things he comes out with, so he’d be one. My best mate from home so there’s not too many egos, Tommy from Space, and Debbie from Echobelly again.”

It all comes back to women again eventually, doesn’t it? A big deal is made nowadays, particularly in the music industry, about women being strong, about “girl power”, and about women having to be like men in order to get on. Grow some balls! That’s the message tapped into girls’ brains these days, and bands like the Spice Girls are doing their utmost to uphold it. As a woman who is frequently portrayed as having knackers of elephant proportions swinging beneath her skirt, what does Cerys think about womens’ perceived role in today’s society?

“I think it’s fine to a certain extent, but then again I don’t think we should lose our arts for equality. I really enjoy cooking and looking after people in the house, making it nice, and I’m not gonna be ashamed to say that either. Although equally I always wanted to be invited down the pub. That’s what the nineties are about to me, the freedom to be as loud as you want but also have the freedom to be making a quilt or something, and standing up for that. Being loud doesn’t mean you become less of a girl.”

So it’s okay for women to be feminine, then? We’re allowed our little bit of vulnerability? Well, that’s a bloody relief! When was the last time you cried?

“Actually,” Cerys laughs, “I was watching Fever Pitch last night. At the end of a tour you get to a point where you’ve been out all the time, and I got home and I was knackered. So, I was watching Fever Pitch, and it’s so fantastic ‘cos Arsenal score in the last few seconds!” I’m a bit teary with romantic films and that, even though it was Arsenal! So I’m quite emotional really.”

Emotional, gravely voiced, singing songs about how men fuck you up… you kind of sense a Janis Joplin influence there, right? Wrong.

“I always wanted to be Bob Dylan,” Cerys states proudly as Emma and I collapse in a fit of laughter. “I was forcing whiskey down my throat when I was about ten or eleven, and now my voice has gone all croaky I want it back! So Bob Dylan I guess is my biggest influence. But then again, in this day and age you get to see so much stuff on the TV and in magazines, there’s so much visual information that you can hardly not be influenced by other people.”

If you could turn back time to any point in history – either your own or anyone else’s – and make some sort of change, what would it be?

“That’s a hell of a question, innit?” Cerys muses. “What, you mean turn back time to before Jesus was born or whatever? I don’t know if I would, you know. That’s such a big question. You might change something, and then that would set something else off.”

What, you mean it could alter the space/time continuum?

“The space/time continuum? Beam me up Scottie sort of thing? I dunno about going back in time, but there is something I’d like to change. You know at the end of the night when you’re really knackered? I’d like to have tramlines going across cities, with wheelchairs on them, shuttling across the city. You just sit down and tap in your postcode, and off you go.”

What country have you enjoyed playing in the most?

“I didn’t like Amsterdam or Belgium much because our record company said that we didn’t exist! We went to America and that was really good fun. Texas and all that. We’d never been there before so it was interesting. Spain I liked best – we went to a beer festival there last summer.”

Apart from your own music, what do you want to be best known for?

“Can I be really soppy and say being a good friend to people? I love my friends and I know a lot of good people. And I’d like to be remembered as always being willing to try everything once.”

The delectable Catatonia: once tasted, never forgotten. New album “International Velvet” is out now on Blanco Y Negro, and you’d have to be pretty stupid to go without it for too long.