Miscellaneous - Interview Part 1

  by Mark Rowland

published: 23 / 11 / 2003

---

Article

Although many people don't realise it, some of the most interesting and innovative music in England comes out of Brighton. I'm Being Good; a band that has been making very unique rock music for a decade now, is Brighton based. The most interesting band to hit the mainstream at the moment, Eighties Matchbox B-line Disaster, is also from Brighton. Now, a newer band from Brighton has started to come to the rest of the world: Cat on Form. Cat on Form got together at the end of 2001, when singer/guitarist Steve Ansell, screamer/guitarist Dan Jones and bass player Jamie Aston played a show after one jam session together. They met Eva Kelly afterwards, who offered to play drums for them, and also sings with the band. Now, about two years on, the band have released two EPs- their first release, 'Butterfly Kiss the Tar of a Thousand Births' and newer release the 'Set Them on Fire with their own Matches' single- and earlier this year released their fantastic debut full-length, 'Structure and Fear', and are receiving more and more praise from the music press for their music and live shows. It's hard to describe Cat on Form's sound exactly, but a good general description is forward-thinking punk that takes its cues from Gang of Four, Fugazi, Nation of Ulysses and Throwing Muses. Drinking tea in the beer garden of a Brighton pub, Steve Ansell seems like just another punk kid. Looking at him, you wouldn't think he was a member of one of the most innovative new rock bands in Britain, but that's part of the appeal of Cat on Form- they're one of those bands that make you want to form your own band. They make writing really great music look easy.     PB : When you first got together, did you have any idea of how you wanted the band to sound, or did it just come together through jam sessions? SA : We had pretty much nothing in mind when we started. Dan and Jamie are cousins, and they've been playing in bands for a while around Brighton, and I was in a band before that had just broken up, and I was saying "oh, we should hook up for a jam sometime" to various people, and one of those people was Dan, and he wanted Jamie to come along, because they always do stuff together, and so we just hooked up the three of us and had a jam, just to see what would happen, and it just kind of worked really well right from the start,. We had this little drum machine, and Dan and Jamie had a show booked for one of their other bands, and said, "Fuck it, why don't we play instead?" so we did this show with the drum machine, and we had a few songs that we'd wrote in this one practice, and Eva happened to be there. She was like, "Do you want me to play real drums?" and we said yes, and she said, "Ok, well I don't have a drum kit and I've never played drums, but I reckon I can." We had to use a rehearsal room that already had a drum kit in it, and so we totally just got together like that: we barely knew each other, we weren't friends, we'd vaguely seen each other's bands and seen each other at shows, but we didn't have a clue what would happen. We just got in a room and played to see what would happen, and as we've gone on, our style's been getting more diverse as we go on. PB : If there was any other band that you'd like to be on a par with, perhaps not totally in sound but in status, who would it be? SA : Shit I dunno. It'd probably be like elements of lots of bands. I really like stuff like Bikini Kill and Huggy Bear and Nation of Ulysses and stuff from that kind of era, just because it really stood up for something, and was a general kick in the face to a lot of kind of status quo music stuff. I'd love to be able to make an album as good as the Gang of Four's first album ('Entertainment'-Ed). That's one of my favourite records of all time. It's incredible, or the Slits first album (Cut'-Ed). I'd love to be like the Slits. Amazing. They made it when they were like fucking 17 or something and it's sick. It blows anything out of the water that's been made since then. It was 1979and they were teenage girls. It's amazing stuff. Then, I dunno, I'm trying to think of what the best live band I've seen is. I'd like to be good at that. I'd like to be in like an amazing live band, and an amazing band on record, an amazing band who fucked stuff up and made a difference to things, and didn't just be a band and carry on and go 'We were just having a good time,'. I guess fucking Fugazi are pretty good live, I'd like to be as good as they are. I'd tell you what I'd like to do. Fugazi have this thing where they can just go into songs without thinking. We tried to do a show without a set list and just go into songs without being too kind of thought through, and just roll off the energy we have. When I've seen them they were just incredible. They'd just go from one song to the next without any communication between them or anything. I guess it's because they've been playing together for about 15 years, but I'd love to be able to do that. So, lots of bands I guess. PB : Having seen you live, you do seem to play pretty loud. Do you aim to play as loud as possible? SA : No, it's not like, you know, 'Let's turn our amps up to eleven!'. It's basically because we tend to play quite small shows, and there's not a great deal of PA or anything, and Eva plays real loud drums. She just beats the shit out of 'em, so if we want to hear ourselves when we're playing, we'll be playing our guitars and Eva will be drumming away, and you just think, 'I'm playing, but I can't hear anything!', so we've just gotta turn our amps up. There was never any like, 'We've gotta be really deafening!' .It's just kind of a necessity really. You've gotta be able to hear what you're playing. Where'd you see us play? PB : I saw you at the Twominutemen gig for the first time, and I just came away thinking 'That's just mental'. When you blew two amps in the first song I was like 'Oh yeah,' and I was standing next to one of the speakers, and every time Dan screamed, my head swam. SA : Yeah, that was partly because there was so many bands on that night, and no-one got a sound check, so they didn't know what to expect, so they guessed that everyone in the band was like a normal singer, so they turned the vocals right up, and we came on and started screaming, and it was a blitz of like white noise. PB : It was funny, because after you'd finished, I went up to Andrew Clare from I'm Being Good and said 'They were really cool, really loud' and he went 'Yeah,' and took some ear plugs out of his ears. SA : Andrew's a good old friend of ours. PB : Yeah, I was gonna say, obviously there's a connection between you and I'm Being Good- You're mates with Andrew, and Tom Barnes who has just joined them used to play with you in the Oedipus. Is that reflective of the way things are in Brighton. Is there a scene or is it just a bunch of bands? SA : Well, there kind of is, and there isn't. I guess I'm never really clear what people mean by a scene. I'm not exactly sure what one is, but there's definitely like a bunch of people who have certain ideas in common and certain kind of ways of doing their music in common, and who help each other out and play together, and I'm Being Good have been pretty much at the centre of that for about ten years. If there is a scene in Brighton, then I'm Being Good are it. The people who have been through I'm Being Good, cause that band's had like 8 different members that have all left, and they've all been in, like, from Huggy Bear to Clearlake. All the bands that are in Brighton that you know will be connected to I'm Being Good in some way. Some of the more mainstream bands, like Eighties Matchbox probably have nothing to do with them, but everyone else does. Andrew helps me out a lot, like. Even in the Oedipus he used to help a lot,. We used to play with him, and he pretty much taught me how to make a record sleeve basically, to get photo shots and I'd never done one in my life, so I said "How'd you do one?" and he taught me. He's always lent us stuff, and helped us record and we've helped them record, and Tom from the Oedipus is now in I'm Being Good, which is weird. We've been going to see I'm Being Good since we were about 15 or 16, and we always like "wow!" running home and de-tuning our guitars trying to sound like I'm Being Good, and now Tom's IN I'm Being Good! There's definitely something. A scene always sounds a bit too glorified, because it's not like some amazing, crazy thing going on, but there's some cool stuff, and there's some cool bands, and people help each other. PB : Even the more commercial bands like Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster in my opinion still have a kind of odd punky sound compared to other mainstream bands. SA : Eighties just got put through the fucking music machine, the blender. If they weren't on a major label they wouldn't sound as polished as they do. At heart they're not a mainstream band. They just got a manager and got a major label deal, and have kind of been pushed in that direction. When they started out, all the songs that are on their records used to be played at about half the speed, and they sounded like Captain Beefheart and Black Sabbath, and it was quite slow and evil sounding, and it's just kind of veered off somewhere along the line. I think at heart, that band aren't really as mainstream as they seem. I definitely have a soft spot for them. PB : I've got to ask you this- the title 'Back off man, I'm a scientist', is that from 'Ghostbusters'? SA : Yes it is! PB : It is from 'Ghostbusters'! I thought it was. SA : It's fucking cool that you know that! Most people are like "This is Cat on Form, look at their crazy song names!" but it's not. It's just a really geeky in-joke. It's purely my idea, I love that line from 'Ghostbusters', and I was like, "I've gotta name a song after it!", so we called it that. It's just a stupid thing. Not everything we do is as serious as people think. PB : Over the past few months, the press seem to have jumped on you a bit. You've had lots of reviews and articles appearing in quite mainstream magazines... SA : Have we? I didn't even know that. I've read a review that was in Careless Talk, which, to be honest, I knew in advance would be good, because like the main people behind Careless Talk have been supporting us since like our third show, and coming to see us after the shows, and they've been really cool, so I kind of knew that it was going to be good, and I read another one in Rocksound, so that's all I've seen. I'll have to get hold of those other magazines. When I'm 40 years old I can look back and go, 'Oh yeah' PB : I was going to say, everyone at the moment seems to want to say something about you,. Has that come as a surprise to you? SA : I dunno. I haven't really thought about it. I didn't really realise the extent that it had been in the press. Shit, that's bad. I should be more aware of that because we're very cautious of that. I think it's partly because we've got an album coming out, so there's gonna be reviews, but no-one's kind of putting us on the front page or anything. I guess also maybe people like it. I'd like to think it's that rather than people thinking it's like a hip new thing that they want to associate themselves with. PB : I have to say, from what I've heard of you're stuff so far, although it's noisy, there's an accessible side to it. SA : Yeah I agree. We're not making the world's most off-the-wall music. It's funny, because for some people it's totally unlistenable, which amazes me, because to me it's like, 'What are you talking about? This song's got a chorus!'. There's a bit in the middle that goes: "How do we fit into this!", so come on, sing along! PB : It is catchy. You can sing along to it. SA : Yeah, people have sung along to it at our shows. I think it's a good thing. I do like a lot of music which is pretty out there and pretty extreme, but there's a certain line that you hit when you start pushing things where it kind of loses the thing that's most important to me, which is I want other people to be involved in it. I want to connect with people, and I want people to be able to be part of it and not be just listening to something and saying: 'Wow, that's really clever. You can play all these crazy timings.' but not getting into it. I want people to be able to participate even if it's fucking singing along and clapping their hands to the chessiest stuff. People are a part of what you are doing. There's definitely an element of like, catchiness or whatever you wanna call it, cause it's like a reach out to people, otherwise there's no way to get into a lot of music. At the same time, if you put it up against Blink 182, people just go, 'What the hell's happening?' PB : Going back to the titles, do you tend to get titles from random sources like 'Ghostbusters' or was that a one off? SA : It's all different basically. There are very few things that are constant in our band. Some songs get names because we refer to them as that for ages because we haven't thought of a name yet, like there's a song on the album called 'Rock 'n' Roll Song' because it's got this riff which always sounded like some old Bill Haley song or something, so we always just used to call it 'The rock 'n' roll one'. So when we came to record it for like the album we were like, "Let's just call it the 'Rock 'n' Roll song! That's what we've been calling it for like a year!". Other ones, the name's like song off the EP 'Everything has a History' is because that is specifically what the song's about, so some of the times we do pretty much get them from the lyrics. All the lyrics are always thought through. Some of the names are just out of the hat and a bit stupid, like the song 'Mr. Spotlight', which we called it because Dan used to start the song on his own, and we were like, "Spotlight on Dan!" and he would do his thing, so it was just a little joke, so we called it 'Mr. Spotlight', but all the words, we sat down and thought about all the words. The words are always they have meanings behind them. Part 2 of this interview will follow next month

Picture Gallery:-