Press: Catatonia @ WelshBands
Arranging a location to interview celebrities is usually a straightforward business. Swanky Soho restaurants are a safe bet, as are the bars of prestigious West End hotels. Occasionally if the star is feeling especially charitable, they will deign to invite a journalist into their lovely home, Hello! style, and give them a brief glimpse of the sumptuous living conditions to which they are accustomed. So when a representative of Catatonia's record company asked if singer Cerys Matthews could meet FHM outside the gates of London Zoo at three o'clock on a Friday afternoon, we were a little taken aback.
The reason, as it turned out, was that Cerys spent a rare day off last month being enchanted by the zoo's collection of exotic fauna, and was so thrilled by the experience that she signed up for its sponsor-an-animal scheme. Now the proud benefactor of Margery, a 21-year-old white-faced saki monkey, she wanted to use this interview as an opportunity to get to know the simian better. "It's like a timeshare," she explains, as we are led to Margery's quarters by monkey-house keeper Frank Wheeler. "You pay £35 to share the animal with about 12 people and they put your name on a plaque. You can sponsor anything from an Asiatic lion, which costs £3,000, to a dormouse, which is only about a tenner."
Inside the animal cage, Cerys chats amiably with Frank about the creature's mating habits. ("She's had 13 children? She's a bit loose by now, eh?").
Cerys isn't the first pop star to champion the natural world - Sting's incessant tub-thumping about rainforests springs to mind - but Cerys does at least have the benefit of an agricultural heritage. Her first memory is of a huge sow leaping from a trailer that was trundling in the front of the Matthews family car near their home in south Wales. "The pig came flying out of the trailer and we almost knocked it over. I remember the farmer getting out and chasing it. So we started singing this old Welsh folk song about the days when each household would keep a pig as a family pet until the sad time came to eat it. Anyway, the sow was run over before the farmer could get to it."
Cerys' father was an orthopaedic surgeon, and such were the daily traumas he faced that, to toughen them up, he raised his own kids with "a slap and a kick". When his daughter broke her wrist aged 11, he thought she was joking, chuckled at her down he phone, and refused to make the journey to pick her up. Something of an eccentric, Mr Matthews also kept dead rabbits in the kitchen freezer to experiment on in his spare time. "He'd put skinned rabbits in the freezer and brains in the fridge. He had chicken legs, too, which I took in to school - you pull the tendon and the leg twitches. I'm still fascinated by the medical stuff - I always read Men's Health Answers in FHM."
After leaving school, Cerys endured a series of dead-end jobs - selling fruit, cleaning beaches for the council, working in an old people's home - before being recruited to Catatonia by guitarist Mark Roberts, who found her busking in Cardiff in 1992. The band then spent four years building up a loyal Welsh following, finally releasing their debut album, Way Beyond Blue, in 1996. But it was last year's singles Road Rage and Mulder and Scully which really catapulted them into the big time. To date, their second album, International Velvet, has sold more than 750,000 units, and with radio station copies of current single Dead from the Waist Down being played to death, things look rosy for their third LP, Equally Cursed and Blessed.
Cerys, who turns 30 this month, is the linchpin of Catatonia. Prone, perhaps unwisely, to sporting tiaras and handbags while performing on-stage, she adds a sprinkle of glamour to the band's mix of what is essentially classic Indie pop. The rest of Catatonia are happy to let the girl with real pop-star quality soak up fame, although they do worry that handling the media alone could get her down.
There's also the curious matter of Cerys' sex appeal. On two separate occasions last year, FHM received letters on the subject, addressed to the Burning Questions section. The gist of the problem for our troubled readers went as follows: "I know I shouldn't, but I really, really fancy that girl out of Catatonia. Can you please tell me why?" Cerys is no supermodel, but she has a wildly flirtatious streak that shines through wherever she appears. She's a girl you fancy for being worldly-wise. A bit on the naughty side. The sort who'd drink you under the table in the pub, then be assertive enough to drag you back home to teach you a thing or two - while all the time maintaining the pretence of complete innocence. Despite the fact that she likes to think of herself as a lady - preferring men who can woo her with "gold and diamonds" - both her "no bullshit" attitude and natural coyness are reflected in the pictures shot for FHM a week before the interview. They are some of the weirdest and sexiest FHM has ever published.
Of course, Cerys also has the horniest voice in pop music. Hearing just one chorus of Road Rage or Dead from the Waist Down is enough to make men sweat under the collar, provoking the kind of strange tingling sensations normally triggered only by "stimulating" pictures. If ever Catatonia go down the pan, Cerys could make herself a mint working on a soft-porn phone line.
The voice is even sexier when she speaks; quiet and understated, her conversation is littered with quaint turns of phrase. Endearing, she frequently spins off on imaginative tangents. Take this snippet about her new animal friend, for example:
FHM: Don't you think monkeys are crude? They spend lots of time masturbating, you know.
Cerys: Well, so do boyfriends. But a monkey's probably easier to carry.
These surreal observations are delivered, appropriately enough, over scones and cream at Hudson's Tea Shop on London's Baker Street, surrounded by Japanese tourists soaking up the twee nineteenth-century decor. Which means that we finished the oddest of afternoons by being served glass after glass of red wine by waitresses dressed in frilly maid's outfits...
Now you've met your monkey, would you like to take it
home and make it perform tricks?
I think the monkey should be allowed to
do what it wants. But if it wanted to perform tricks, then that would be
admirable. It could brush my hair and open a lovely bottle of port for me. Then
I could reciprocate and buy it a nice plant.
Er, okay. Did you have a favourite TV chimp - Bear,
perhaps, from BJ and the Bear?
Was he the big red baboon? Oh, he was a
truck driver's chimp - I don't think I ever saw that. Personally, I still like
Lassie the dog. He'd sort you out if you were in trouble. Then there was
Cheetah, who always looked a bit flea-bitten. He's still alive, I think. He's
got his own Californian pad with a Banana-shaped swimming pool.
If it was naughty, would you spank the
monkey?
You're just being silly now aren't you? That's not funny. I
think it must be a boys joke.
Well, last month we asked David Soul if he'd spank
his monkey, and he found it funny ...
You know, my first crush
was on David Soul. My sister always used to play Don't Give Up On Us
Baby and Silver Lady at home. He's porked out a bit now, though -
like Adam Ant. They say men get better-looking as they age, so it seems fair
that some of them pork out and lose their hair.
If you were a guy, do you think you would fancy Cerys
Matthews?
No. I'd probably want a model who's nice and quiet and looks
good on my arm. The sort you'd give a drink to now and then and she wouldn't
make a fuss. You can always go out with your mates if you want some interesting
company.
So why do so many men go crazy over you?
Oh,
don't be soft. If they do, they're mad.
For the FHM shoot, you said you wanted to
create an image that was sexy but powerful. Did you learn that from
Madonna?
Oh, I'm not a fan of Madonna. I think she functions in binary
numbers. Everything she does is so methodical = there's no emotion. And I don't
like her voice. I should have sung Evita, not her. She's held up as
being a music icon. And not a very interesting one at that. Madonna wouldn't
take you to the zoo - she'd read up on it, then write a song about it with
Massive Attack.
Would you win a fight with her?
Doubt it.
She's into yoga and tantric fighting.
What the hell's tantric fighting?
Oh, nothing.
I've just made it up. But Madonna works out, doesn't she? I can't be bothered
with all that. So your bottom sags an inch - who cares? I can't wait to get to
the age of 60 or 70 and be a cantankerous old fool with a saggy arse. I'm not
going to fight it.
When you're old, you can be rude to
children...
Yeah, didn't you hate that when you were a kid? You're
waiting politely in a shop and some old women wipes you away. There's somebody
down the road from me. I can't believe how rude she is. The other day she told
me to cut my lawn! "Long grass could kill a child," she said. Presumably they
fall over and it lodges in their eye. Death by grass - can't be very
common.
Is there anything you're got a real bee in your
bonnet about?
I hate adverts. I hate brands and people telling you what
you like. I hate salads without onion. And I really hate flossing my teeth and
going to the hygienist. That's a silly name for a job. And those "Baby on
Board" signs - do people really think we're going to drive any differently?
You've been in the music business for eight years.
Fancy a stint at acting?
No - I don't understand the attraction of being
an actress. Being on a film set is the most boring thing you can imagine. And
unless you're at the top, you'll end up doing Bird's Eye ads and having to sell
detergent. At least with music you have some control over what you do.
What's your most embarrassing stage moment?
In
Ibiza last year. I was on holiday when a friend of my brother put Mulder and
Scully on the Karaoke machine. I went up to sing and gave it everything,
but it was one of those stages on wheels. I fell right on my bum - legs in the
air.
Now you're a proper pop star, what do you spend
extravagant amounts of money on?
Well, I told my record company to fill
a studio with 30 square feet of corn for the Dead from the Waist Down
video. They came back and told me they couldn't do it because it was going to
cost £30,000. I insisted the corn was vital, so they came back saying:
"Well, we can't get you corn up to your waist, be we can get it up to your
knees - that only costs £15,000." I couldn't believe it! We're talking
Welsh corn, and it shouldn't cost anything at all. But apparently because it's
winter they have to get it from this special factory which makes film props.
You can buy a real-life calf at a market for £2, and we're paying
£15,000 for some corn.
As a country girl, are you going to be able to
survive when the Millennium Bug hits?
Oh, this is my pet subject. I've
never lost my handicraft skills - they're important for a woman's well-being
and balance. I could make a mink coat out of a whippet, and beef stew out of a
chicken. And I'd sing while I was doing it.
How about bacteria? Here at FHM we're worried
that they might be taking over the world.....
No, you shouldn't be
scared of bacteria. You don't need any of those blue liquids, you just need
elbow grease. That's why people get E. coli, flesh-eating diseases, all those
infections - because they use too much antiseptic.
When you were 16, did you want to be...
A
boy!
I was going to say fashion model, but carry
on.
I always wanted to be a boy, because they were allowed to play
football and do woodwork, while all the girls had to go to "life classes".
Life classes? What are they?
Life classes are
lessons where the teachers prepare you for all the horrors of becoming a lady.
You don't need to worry your little head about what the horrors are. Anyway,
they don't do them now - girls learn it on Vanessa.
So if you could teach boys one thing about the ways
of women, what would it be?
Oh, I think buys should learn it for
themselves - although men don't buy women enough rings and diamonds. "Go out
and hunt," I'd say. Be a hunter-gatherer and you can't go wrong.