Members of ‘lost band’ who rejected Catatonia star reunite for new act
“THE Pooh Sticks kind of didn’t exist, I think I’m allowed to say that now 35 years on. It was just me and another guy who made this little song and the press overtook us.”
This is the honest reflection of Huw Williams, 57, founder of The Pooh Sticks – a group which is often considered as one of Wales’ “greatest lost bands”.
The Pooh Sticks were an indie pop group from Swansea who once showed promise to take over the music charts and were supported by bands like The Cranberries and Pulp who went on to much bigger things, but they broke up not long after being signed to a major label.
Now, Pooh Sticks founder Huw Williams admits the band never really existed and has joined up with former Pooh Sticks singer Amelia Fletcher and fellow indie luminaries Rob Pursey and Ian Button to form the indie group Swansea Sound who played a special gig in Swansea on Saturday night.
Although Huw’s band formed in 1987, rose to indie prominence in the early 90s and was booked at festivals like Reading and toured in the US and Japan, this show was the first time Swansea native Huw had performed in his hometown.
Huw explains that Cymru was not always “cool” and his music took him away from his roots but this did not stop him coming back and playing an instrumental part in the success of Cerys Matthews’ Catatonia and Britpop trio 60 Ft Dolls.
After Huw and Steve Gregory named themselves The Pooh Sticks and put out their first single Heartbreak, Radio 1’s John Peel picked it up and asked them to do a session for his show and music bible the NME had written about them too. Needing more bodies for the upcoming session, Huw went to a local show where indie pop band Talulah Gosh from Oxford were playing and met singer Amelia for the first time.
“We didn’t know Amelia at all but we got her number from someone and we called her up and Amelia was naive and foolish enough to come along. We did that Peel session and then Amelia was on most of The Pooh Stick records and played some big shows with us,” said Huw.
Studying at university in Oxford at the time, Amelia sang in the “girly, punky” band which never released a formal album and said the band became infamous because so many people “absolutely hated them” because of how “girly and shambolic” they were. They did however have a cult indie following and made it into John Peel’s Festive Fifty list.
Amelia, now 56, said: “I thought people shouldn’t do bands after they were 21,” but she restarted a band called Heavenly in the 1990s and is now playing in Swansea Sound.
In her day job, Amelia is a leading economist and has received a CBE for her services to the economy, while her former Talulah Gosh bandmate Elizabeth Price won the Turner Prize in 2012.
“Elizabeth and I got through to 18 and 19 without ever really realising how we were meant to be as women and I think that put us in a really good place both for being in bands and in our later careers,” she added.
While Amelia made it into The Pooh
Sticks, one singer who went on to become a household name did not quite make the cut.
“With The Pooh Sticks we used to put different line-ups together so we were looking to put a line-up together around 1992 and went to watch this woman that someone had tipped us off to go and see,” said Huw.
“It was their first gig and it was a band called Sweet Catatonia which then became Catatonia. It was a slightly different line-up but Mark [Roberts], Cerys [Matthews], Paul [Jones] and Daf [Dafydd Ieuan] from Super Furry Animals was the drummer.
“They were quite chaotic and played as if they were on acid, we didn’t ask Cerys to be in The Pooh Sticks which is really hilarious. She wasn’t good enough to join our band. At the time she sent me a letter afterwards saying ‘I can play guitar and I can sing.’”
With some interest from the press, The Pooh Sticks signed to an indie label and even played at the same 1991 Reading Festival which featured legendary American band Nirvana for the first time.
Amelia performed at the festival with the band and said: “At that point it was the festival to go to. There was only really Glastonbury and Reading and so it was a really big and exciting festival. We were on the second biggest stage.”
Huw explained that they were one of the few indie bands there that year and he remembers Captain Sensible playing as they arrived at the festival, “Indie was quite a different thing then.”
Signed with RCA Records, the group were encouraged to tour more and Huw started picking all his own support groups which included Pulp, The Cranberries and Shampoo. “At one point it felt like everyone who came to support The Pooh Sticks went on to be really massive within about 18 months.”
On the back of the success of their records from The Great White Wonder, the group signed to a major label and Huw said that this marked “the end of it all”.
NME named their album The Great White Wonder as one of the best albums of the year in 1991 alongside the likes of Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, Nirvana’s Nevermind and REM’S Out of Time but the group never saw the same popularity as the big Britpop names that eventually came after them in the mid90s.
During his time with The Pooh Sticks, Huw noticed his talent for scouting potential stars and became an A&R rep for bands that helped shape the Cool Cymru movement like Catatonia and Newport’s 60 Ft Dolls.
After that fateful first show Huw went to, he heard Catatonia on the radio and got back in touch with the band.
“They didn’t really have a lot of people around them helping them out but because I’d been doing The Pooh Sticks for a while I could help,” he added.
Huw was working as an A&R rep for Sony Publishing and took Catatonia into their offices where they were later signed.
Huw also managed 60 Ft Dolls who got signed to Nirvana’s label Geffen Records in America. This was during the Britpop era when Cymru was “cool” and indie bands were getting signed to major labels, so things had already changed from when The Pooh Sticks were trying to make it big.
Huw added: “Bands can come out of Wales now and it’s accepted but it was so different 30 years ago.
“The Manics took a lot of s*** when they first came out. With The Pooh Sticks, we never pretended we weren’t Welsh but it’s quite telling that we didn’t really do a lot in Wales at the time. We had to go to London or America to do our stuff, so when I came back and found those new groups I spent a lot of time in that scene and took that scene out of Wales and internationally.
“The Cool Cymru thing didn’t exist at the time. It’s kind of like a Welsh version of Cool Britannia. The first few years of The Pooh Sticks we never did anything in Wales.
“Previously I’d never met anyone in Wales that I thought I’d liked and all of a sudden in ‘93 and ‘94 there was about four or five. It was another couple of years before they became known. Even though I was younger than some of them but because I had that experience with The Pooh Sticks, I had some contacts and worked with a few of them and helped them.”
On his return to making music Huw said: “I never thought I’d do new music again and I definitely think I’m too old for it but actually no-one seems to care!”
Swansea Sound have released new music and will be playing at Swn Festival in Cardiff on October 22.