|
"Wild
thing - the return of Cerys - pop's Welsh lioness"
By Nigel Williamson
---
It's
2.30am when Cerys announces she's going to bed. We've been
out for a late night curry at Akbar's, Bradford's finest Indian
restaurant, followed by a couple of jovial hours in the hotel
bar, drinking and joshing with the other members of her band,
Catatonia. Now it's time for her beauty sleep. Except that
before she leaves she walks over to the bar and orders a bottle
of red wine and one single glass. "It's the only way I can
get to sleep," she explains as she and the bottle trip off
in search of the hotel lift.
It's
as good a way as any to announce that after a year and a half
out of action, everybody's favourite party girl is back. There's
a new Catatonia album, Paper Scissors Stone, out next month,
Cerys' Welsh vowels have again been gracing the radio waves
on the single, Stone by Stone, and we are in Bradford for
a live television appearance on Later with Jools Holland.
Cerys
- like Diana or Madonna no one ever thinks of using anything
other than her first name - first stole our hearts four years
ago with her distinctive delivery of such songs as Road Rage
and Mulder and Scully. But above all it was her bubbly personality
that endeared her to us. Brash and brassy with a penchant
for cheap jewellery, she resembled a character out of a saucy
seaside postcard. At the Hay-on-Wye literary festival last
month Cerys entertained Bill Clinton with an excitable rendition
of folk songs, her blonde hair resting against the former
President's chest. This is a woman myths are made of.
But
Cerys has always appealed equally to women and men. Her own
sex admired her independent spirit. The opposite sex fell
for her because she was flirtation and one of the boys at
the same time. Stories about her alcohol-friendliness swiftly
became the stuff of pop legend. Photographers captured her
out on the town in various inelegantly slumped positions wearing
a T-shirt bearing the slogan "Fastrisinglagersoaked-riproaringpoptart."
One famous evening she stated out drinking in Southampton
and woke up in the South of France with little idea of how
she got there, and a concert to play that night in Brighton.
It might have been a bit undignified, but it only made us
love her the more.
Then
somewhere in the middle of 1999 something went seriously wrong.
She began to talk about feeling "like a hamster on a wheel"
and suggesting fame "didn't agree" with her. A few months
later the group cancelled a sell-out tour and Cerys and Catatonia
dropped off the radar. A record company statement claiming
they needed a break to work on new material only served to
send the rumour mill into overdrive. Cerys was having a breakdown.
She'd been spotted checking into the Priory. She'd quite the
band and was going solo. All the clichés of rock and roll
excess where trotted out, but she said nothing.
So
what did really happen? By the time I get around to asking
her it's Friday evening and we've had one of those incredibly
frustrating afternoons of the kind that caused Charlie Watts
to declare on the 25th anniversary of the Rolling Stones that
their first quarter of the century had consisted of 24 years
of waiting around and one year of rock 'n' roll.
We've
been to the sound check for the show and it had dragged on
interminably. Catatonia will that night play three songs totalling
eight minutes and 40 seconds. But it has taken more than four
hours to get the sound right, partly because as soon as the
band had begun their check, the BBC crew decided to take a
meal break. As time limped on, Cerys had grown irritable and
sarcastic.
Eventually, back at the hotel and with another five outs to
go to the late night live broadcast, she begins to relax.
Only once she does so, she starts to fret about her earlier
behaviour. She shouldn't have been so lippy to the sound man
("They can really f*** you up if they've a mind with one flick
of a switch"). She should have signed autographs for the bunch
of kids waiting outside ("I didn't see them until we were
already in the car but it's bad karma that we didn't stop").
I
repeat my first question and she shrugs self-consciously.
"I don't know. It just got a bit much really," she says all
tongue-tied. She begins fiddling with her rings. Cerys likes
rings. She has one on almost every finger, two on some of
them. They mostly look like they've come out of a Christmas
cracker. One bears the word "LADY", another says "KAT" (it
would have been better if it had been a "c", she admits later,
but it sounds as like Catatonia so that was good enough).
Around her right wrist she wears a beaded letter bangle which
spells out the words "BLESSED", half of the title of the band's
third album, Equally Cursed and Blessed.
She
draws herself up and suddenly the words come tumbling out.
"I felt stupid going on stage. I was getting blanks, even
in the middle of a song like Mulder and Scully. I needed to
escape and replenish my batteries, I didn't think we were
good enough live. I didn't want to be under pressure to go
on tour. I didn't feel it was fair to ask an audience to pay
for what we were doing."
Having
spat this out, she relaxes again. There's a line in Fuel,
one of the songs on the new album, in which she sings, "Stop
stoking the fire, we're out of fuel." I wonder if that was
intended to describe how she felt. "Definitely. Most songs
on the album describe it in some way. We had been touring
incessantly since 1994 and it was fantastic to finally get
the success we deserved. But I felt I didn't get much support
from some areas."
She
then swiftly adds a coda of self-blame. "I know I'm difficult
to support because I tend not to want people to support me.
Then I fall flat on my face and then blame people for not
supporting me. I just needed a break."
It
doesn't take three brains to work out that she's talking about
the band's guitarist and songwriter Mark Roberts who discovered
her a decade ago busking outside Debenham's in Cardiff. For
several years they were romantically linked until he broke
it off around the time they were breaking into the big time.
For
a while Cerys joked light-heartedly in interviews about the
potentially awkward situation, but she now admits the issues
between them began to grow with the added pressures of fame.
"If you ask Mark he will avoid the question like the plague,
and it's not fair on him that I dwell on it. But I don't find
it very easy. I don't think it's healthy to be stuck with
someone who was that important in your life. I need to move
on but I can't because we're in the same band."
Later
I do indeed ask him and, as predicted, he denies there has
ever been a problem. But what is even stranger is that it
is Roberts, not Matthews, who writes many of the groups lyrics.
In effect he has the power to put words in her mouth and make
people believe it is Cerys pouring out her own emotions. Even
she feels it. "Mark has an uncanny knack of writing songs
that are a gift to me. His words express exactly what I'm
thinking and feeling. It's such a hard thing still to be working
with him because of our history, but it's even harder to break
it off because it was so special. And he's on of the very
best contemporary songwriters. I don't know anyone who can
write as consistently and be off-beat and accessible and beautiful
at the same time."
So
when she wrote herself a sick note would it be an exaggeration
to say she had a breakdown? She hesitates before answering.
"I don't know if it was a breakdown as such, but when you
start to question your actions so much that you no longer
enjoy what you are doing it's time to change your circumstances.
I don't know if that feeling is over yet but I felt I was
ready to go back to work."
She
admits that there were times when they were making the new
album when it went "close to the edge" again. And while she
was on sabbatical her life didn't really get any better on
the personal front. She took up with another musician, from
Joe Strummer's band The Mescaleros, and spent a summer touring
America with the group, but they are no longer an item. "I
haven't had any fortune in romance," she complains. "The rest
of them have settled down but I've had absolutely no luck.
The bastards." It's not clear whether she means the band in
particular or all of them. But Cerys has one of those faces
that can look soft and vulnerable one minute and tough as
old boots the next. It's the former that is winning at this
moment.
Born
in Cardiff in April 1969, Cerys' background somewhat belies
her self-consciously working class image. Her family came
into farming stock but her Father gave up the land to become
a surgeon. She was a "bit of a handful" as a teenager but
eventually enrolled in a course in psychiatric nursing. It
didn't last long, and when she packed it in she took off backpacking
to Spain. According to one story, on the coach journey there
she lied to the man sitting next to her that she was a successful
singer. He demanded proof and when she opened her mouth to
fake it she was surprised at how good what came out sounded.
Back
in Cardiff two years later she met Roberts and they formed
Catatonia, with guitarist Owen Powell, bassist Paul Jones
and drummer Aled Richards completing the line-up. There followed
several years of slogging round in a Transit van carrying
their own gear. Early press attention was mostly based on
Cerys' drinking exploits rather than the music. But it alerted
the major labels to the band's existence and in 1995 they
signed to the Warner Brothers imprint Blanco Y Negro.
The breakthrough came two years later with the group's second
album International Velvet, which included the hit singles
Mulder and Scully and Road Rage. Further hits followed, Cerys
duetted with Tom Jones ("a lovely man but you can forget about
getting to bed before dawn if you're drinking with him") and
became a media darling ("media whore more like"). Then the
wheels came off.
This
time round, at 32, Cerys claims she's calmed down. Despite
some evidence to the contrary the night before, she also insists
she is no longer such a party animal and does not feel pressurised
to live up to the image. "That's only half the picture. But
it tires me out. I'm knackered now and f***** off with myself
over last night because now my voice has gone funny. I don't
go clubbing anymore. We've no longer young chickens so the
prospect of dressing up and going out is not really top of
my list. But I do get excited. I'm like a rabbit out of a
trap."
Despite
singing on the last album that she "came alive outside the
M25", she has recently bought an apartment near Paddington
and makes the train journey between Cardiff and London around
twice a week. It's not a particularly grand apartment but
then, the purchase of a sports car aside, she doesn't really
do grand. She hates a fuss and won't have minders ("It makes
me feel like I've got flies everywhere and I want to swat
them like mosquitoes"). When she appears on Later with Jools
Holland she has no make-up and is still sporting the same
jeans and white shirt she had worn during the afternoons marathon
sound check.
"Fashion
is a minefield I don't want to deal with," she says. "You
can get so paranoid about your image and you get right up
your rectum. It's not healthy. Styling gets priority over
the music these days and that doesn't make my world rock."
Yet
the paradox - and Cerys is full of them - is that she admits
she would love to be more glamorous. "I'd like to look lovely
on television and to look pretty and be stylish. Sometimes
when I'm in the mood I try to turn that on it's head and subvert
the fashion thing. But quite often I really am trying and
I still end up looking like a hefferlump." You can't help
wondering where such low self-esteem came from. And she would
rather be regarded as an all round entertainer than merely
a pop star. "But that's a hell of a big pressure because I
don't have an on-off button. Robbie Williams has it. Judy
Garland had it. She'd be off her head and they'd push her
on stage and she be word and step perfect. I'd be proud to
be like that, but once the song stops I become a tree."
She'd
like to make a solo "more naked and acoustic" album, perhaps
including songs drawn from the old hymnals and books of traditional
folk songs she collects. But she insists the group will always
remain her first priority. "I'll never leave Catatonia unless
they throw me out. I love being in a band. But it's also the
most frustrating thing I've ever come across."
If
she wasn't getting browned off in a band she reckons she would
have married a farmer. "But I'd still be singing in the kitchen.
There's something about singing that gives solace to the soul."
She pulls a face the instant she says it but then softens
into a smile. "And if that sounds completely pretentious I
don't give a shit."
|
