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An
Interview with Owen Powell, Catatonia Guitarist
By Iestyn George
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In
an exclusive interview, Iestyn George talks to the Catatonia
guitarist about the band’s split “The year started out quite
well,” explains former Catatonia guitarist Owen Powell in
his typically understated Cardiff tones. “We thought we were
going to finish the album without too much trouble, then promote
it without too much trouble… and then everything fell apart,
for one reason or another.”
Don’t
be fooled, this is not a man staring into the abyss, wondering
what the hand of fate will deal him next. There’s no sense
of defeat, no morose analysis of how or why it went wrong
. That’s neither Owen’s style, nor that of his fellow band
members, guitarist Mark Roberts, bassist Paul Jones and drummer
Aled Richards.
It’s
now three months since Catatonia announced they had split
up after the best part of a decade and four albums together.
As Owen points out, they had a decent innings. Most of their
contemporaries had gone by the wayside long before vocalist
Cerys Matthews checked out of the Surrey hospital she had
admitted herself to six weeks earlier and travelled down to
Cardiff to meet Mark. Nobody may ever know the details of
that conversation, but it put a full stop to the Catatonia
story.
Since
then, the boys in the band have just carried on working on
new material. “We’re not in denial, or anything,” says Owen
wryly, with a mock American twang. “After it happened I think
I took it harder, because I tend to have a rather negative
view of life. I didn’t want to start doing anything else because
I felt quite bitter about the band breaking up.
“Then
about a month later I came to the conclusion it would have
been very hard for the five of us to carry on working anyway
and maybe that during the previous year and a half was a series
of signposts saying: ‘you’re not really meant to be carrying
on, you know. It’s over’. It might have been worth holding
it together for the music, but for the five of us, and what
was left of the band, it wasn’t.”
Far
too diplomatic to delve deeply into the band’s internal difficulties,
Owen will concede that the last couple of years saw an increasing
rift growing between Cerys and the rest of Catatonia. Beyond
the rumours of Cerys’ own personal battles against the more
self-destructive side of her nature, there were managerial
difficulties, which led to the band and the singer being represented
by separate companies – a move which invariably sounds the
death knell of any close working relationship.
In
1998 and 1999, Catatonia were as much of a component part
of popular culture as Oasis. It was all X-Files and road rage
back then and, aside from the success of their second album,
International Velvet, in sales terms, Cerys became a charismatic
figure, the like we’d not seen since the days of Debbie Harry
and Chrissie Hynde. Here was a woman who didn’t conform to
the kitten-like female pop stereotype; someone who played
the game by her own rules.
Or
so it seemed at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, Owen
reflects on the damage that Cerys’ popularity had on the band’s
internal relationships.
“It
started going wrong because she had a lot of pressure on her
that she felt we didn’t have,” he explains, “yet we felt we
were holding things together by being normal, which she couldn’t
see. Her life changed a lot, because when you’re the singer
in a popular group everybody wants to talk to you. Journalists
would be visibly disappointed if they were confronted by either
Mark or myself and they’d want to know what Cerys would think.
She felt a lot of pressure and it set the band into two camps.
Whatever we did to try and make her feel she wasn’t on her
own in this, it just didn’t work.
“It
did become us versus her in the end, which is sad. Everything
she thought, we would automatically take the opposite view
and, likewise, she’d do the same.
The
sad thing is if we’d had any amount of time together without
interference from anybody we would have sorted it out. But
we never did.”
By
the time of the band’s fourth album release, Paper Scissors
Stone last spring, it was clear that whatever happened to
the record, the band’s days were numbered. As it turned out,
it was something of a stillbirth, with Cerys chosing to search
for treatment for the catch-all pop star condition of ‘exhaustion’
on the eve of its release. Now the remaining four have to
get around the problem of the band being still together without
Cerys.
“That’s
exactly what we’ve been trying to work out,” observes Owen.
“If you try and get another deal as the band with another
singer who’s not as good or charismatic as Cerys we’d be crucified.
She’d always suffer by comparison. “The initial idea was to
write songs with different people performing them,” he continues.
“You always run the risk of going down the musical co-operative
route, but we’re not Soul II Soul. We might just try and write
songs and sell them as songwriters.
“What
is funny, though,” he concludes, “is the thought at the back
of your mind that you don’t want to go through all that hassle
of forming a band, trying to get a deal again – then you start
playing and you realise how much you miss it. The four of
us get on really well and we have a lot of fun together. And,
after the last couple of years, that’s as good a reason as
any to carry on working together. ”
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