When Cowbridge Monsters of rock made it to the top
YOU remember Noughties.
It was the decade that was not only difficult to name, but also a period where the music industry was in a state of flux, transitioning from the the myriad highs of the 1990s to a time where there were untold challenges to be faced from the internet in the form of illegal downloads and music piracy.
It was also the decade, let us not forget, that witnessed an unnatural uprising of bands beginning with K – see Kaiser Chiefs, Keane, Killers, Klaxons, Kooks, Kasabian and Kings of Leon for further reference.
The Noughties was also when a mighty garrison of bands ready to rewrite the rules of rock music emerged from the south Wales Valleys.
Kids in Glass Houses, the Blackout, Funeral for a Friend and Bullet for my Valentine marched to the beat of their own relentless, indomitable drum, forging a scene that galvanised a close-knit community.
A few miles down the A48 in Cowbridge, something else was stirring – the like of which the locals had never seen or heard before. A band was about to unwittingly put the town on the map. Whether they liked it or not.
For this group of youngsters, the Noughties would signal a brief but nevertheless brilliant moment in the sun. And if this particular tale is anything to go by, there may yet be another chapter written in the all-too-brief rise and fall of the Welsh outfit in question – the Automatic.
It’s now 10 years since the band’s final album, Tear The Signs Down. A decade on, it seems an appropriate moment to discover what happened to the musicians who appeared to have the world at their feet when they signed a major label deal in 2005 and released a bona fide solid-gold anthe them in the shape of Monster – an era-defining song turned terrace chant, as instantly recognisable now as it was back then.
The band’s frontman and bass player Robin Hawkins and drummer Iwan Griffiths have both agreed to be interviewed via phone for this piece. In another dimension, all three of us are sat in the pub sharing an ice-cool pint, but that’s lockdown fantasies for you.
ob and Iwan, both 34, studied for degrees after the band ended and now appear well-settled into domestic contentment. Rob is a software developer, who lives with his partner and their cat in Bristol, where he moved five years ago. Iwan, meanwhile is a trainee accountant and a married dad-of-one living in Wick, outside Cowbridge, with his wife and their one-year-old daughter.
When I ask them if the Automatic seems like it was yesterday or another world, Iwan quickly answers: “For me, sometimes it feels like a whole other life lived. We did the band and now it’s 10 years later. In that time we’ve been to university. Sometimes I think we did it all backwards. It’s like we had a tremendously extended and exciting gap year.”
“It does feel weird to look back,” adds Rob. “We were talking the other day about back in the day when the band was together people didn’t have camera phones. So our life hasn’t been documented like it is now. It’s difficult to remember all the stuff we did.
“I don’t really regret anything, but if I could wish for one thing, I’d wish that I’d at least written down everything I had done each day. I had a journal, I just didn’t use it.
“But, yeah, I do feel the distance of it now, It feels like a long time ago.”
Despite their current situations, it doesn’t mean they don’t miss performing.
“I was never about the fame or anything, but I do miss playing gigs,” concedes Rob. “I still make music at home, I guess I’ve never really stopped. It’s still a compulsion.”
Iwan too still dabbles. “I have to confess I do have a GarageBand programme full of 30-second snippets,” he laughs.
To look back you have to revisit the moment of inception, when the stars first aligned. To begin at the beginning, as a famous Welsh writer once wrote, having first met at Y Bont Faen Primary School, Robin, Iwan and best friend James Frost would soon be getting their teenage kicks and musical rites of passage at Cowbridge Comprehensive School.
There, these budding musicians took their first tentative steps in sound through the school’s excellent music department, Robin excelling with the flute – becoming a member of the Cardiff and Vale Youth Orchestra – Iwan, the drums, and James, the guitar.
There were, it transpires, more pressing matters when they first started comprehensive school.
“We all had shared interests,” recalls Rob. “I think the first thing we were more preoccupied with was whether Star Wars was better than Star Trek. We were all geeky nerds and still are.
“We were always doing creative things, even before the music kicked in. We used to watch comedy shows like The Fast Show and Big Train. We had a go at writing comedy sketches which we thought were amazing, when in truth they were C90 tapes full of small boys doing characters with terrible accents.”
However, as teenage years beckoned they found their calling.
“As puberty hit, music became more important,” recalls Iwan. “We were 1213 and things like Radiohead’s OK Computer had just come out.”
It was then a nascent band quickly took shape.
“I said, ‘Let’s be a band’,” remembers Rob. “Frost already played guitar, Iwan played timpani in school orchestra so he was naturally the drummer and I was the bassist by default. Overnight our heroes changed from Star Wars to bands.”
Through attending midnight signings for the Manics’ This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours at the Virgin Megastore in Cardiff to seeing Super Furry Animals in concert, the youngsters were fired by the music on their doorstep.
“All that was going on in Wales at the time with the bands that had broken through did have an impact on us,” says Iwan. “We thought we could do it too.
“It didn’t feel like a remote thing. It wasn’t music from a distant country. This was on your doorstep. It felt a lot more real.
“We always honestly believed we would give it a go,” adds Rob. “It was probably just teenage naivety writ large, but there you go.
“School was really supportive. We were in the music room all hours of the day. I remember the deputy headteacher complaining, ‘Do you always have to be playing those Radiohead covers?’.
“Every other assembly we’d be playing. If we felt like it, we’d ask and we’d be allowed to play in front of the school. We got a lot of leeway. We were very lucky.”
As the band developed they broadened their rehearsal horizons – with a little help from their parents, who clubbed together to pay for practice sessions for their sons. Setting up in the grandiose surroundings of one of their regular rehearsal spaces, Cowbridge Town Hall, must have come as a shock for the old boys in the local Masons’ lodge, when they were on the receiving end of the band’s noisy punk rock.
“I remember we were rehearsing in the town hall and there was a Masons’ meeting going on next door. This old man appeared at the door in this double-breasted blazer and uttered the words ‘Good Lord’, before turning on his heels. It was very Cowbridge. A proper culture clash.”
The pair unanimously cite “the Levy twins’ 16th birthday party at the Scout Hall in Cowbridge” as their first proper gig. “We did requests for people. It was like band-aoke. I think that was 2002, when we did our GCSEs,” says Rob.
From there they gave the band a name – White Rabbit – and became regulars at the well-remembered Teen Spirit under-18 band nights at late, lamented Cardiff venue the Barfly.
Looking for a fourth member to supplement their sound, Cowbridge Comprehensive schoolfriend Alex Pennie had seen them play at the Teen Spirit nights. He subsequently joined the band as backing vocalist and keyboard player in 2004.
His shouty vocal style and energetic performances would soon became trademark signatures of the band’s live shows. With the line-up complete, it all started to click into place very quickly for the teenagers.
“It was very fast,” confirms Rob. “I think we were still in the sixth form. We all pulled some money together to record a demo. We sent that out to everybody we could find in the yellow pages, like local record labels and management.
“Based on that we met music manager Martin Bowen, who was running local record label FF Vinyl. He came down to rehearsals. ‘Monster’ was one of the tracks on the demo. We thought it was a fun pop song, but you could see the dollar signs in Martin’s eyes. He knew