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”I come alive in the screaming city baby”
There aren’t that many bands that I feel passionate about who inspire little in the way of fierce emotion amongst music fans. But Catatonia – sweet, sweet, scyzophrenic Catatonia, by turns disconsolate and joyous, forever scaling great heights and simultaneously perpetually underachieving – they were such a band, and remain one. There are a lot of people who don’t care about Catatonia one way or another – never have, never will. Weren’t they just another female fronted Britpop band, who released a couple of annoyingly hummable singles with jangly guitars and big dumb choruses? They didn’t even make enough of an impact in the hip muso collective unconscious to inspire any venom, except in the heart of the most biter and sexless anti-populists. I say Catatonia, the world of modern indie rock as one says “eh”. Well, fuck you all. Catatonia were wonderful, Cerys is my rock’n’roll deity future wife, and ‘Do You Believe In Me?’ is still one of my five most reassuringly traumatic songs of all time.
I bring this up because there are currently ads in the UK press for a forthcoming album, apparently entitled Greatest Catatonia Hits if you trust typography, and it’s an incredibly depressing thing. Not because the album isn’t going to be any good – on the contrary, about two thirds of it is bloody brilliant, and if you’re the sort of person who buys ‘best of’ albums, you could do far worse. But leaving aside the fact that is far, far too early for a Catatonia ‘best of’ album (the cakes from the funeral are barely cold, Horatio, or something), there’s something very depressing and wrong about this particular album arriving right now.
To start with, it’s not a ‘best of’ album – it’s a ‘greatest hits’ album, and the two are always very different things indeed. In the case of Catatonia, what is especially highlighted is that early in their career, their best songs really were those shimmering, irresistibly singles. ‘You’ve Got A Lot To Answer For’, ‘Bleed’, ‘Mulder and Scully’, ‘Road Rage’ – all future jukebox classics, smart sassy guitar pop of the highest order with the odd ultra-modern quirk thrown in for good measure (although oddly, their best and most anthemic single remains one that bombed, ‘I Am The Mob’). But as they got older, the catchy pop singles started to become more and more annoying ('Kareoke Queen', anyone?), whilst the tragic and beautiful wine-soaked laments remained, well, tragically neglected. You won't find 'Shoot The Messenger', 'Goldfish and Paracetamol', 'Valerian' or 'Dazed, Beautiful and Bruised' on the 'greatest hits' collection - but it would be a much better record if you did.
Two of the tracks on the album aren’t even by Catatonia, but instead are guest vocal appearances by Cerys that mark out the difference between her and the rest of the band in several key ways. For Cerys, even if we allow for her judgment being impaired by an admirable fondness for hedonism in all its forms, had terrible, terrible taste in her choice of collaborations – if she really thought her band were doing the same kind of thing as fucking Space, then that explains some of dodgy singles and even dodgier videos that surfaced with the album Equally Cursed and Blessed.
But the fact that Cerys was invited to appear on other people's records is a relection of the fact that for a brief period she was an indie icon, a London 'it'-girl, a proper pop star. The rest of the band were four blokes whose attractiveness, personalities and charisma ranged from startlingly average to non-existent. And this was what did for the band's career, arguably, although we won't know for sure until the bitchy books are written. The cover of the new compilation shows Cerys leaning disconsolately against a wall, whilst the rest of the band lurk disconsolately (and anonymously) in the shadows. “We hate each other and we’ve fucked our career” seems to be the implicit message, an honesty that’s refreshing yet possibly inadvisable if they want this record to be bought by more than the three people who parted with good money for Paper, Scissors, Stone.
Alas, sweet Catatonia. I knew you. |
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