Hooked on Catfish and Bottleman
Explosive performances in 2015 make Brit rock band the talk of the town
Summer festival season may be over, but everyone is still hot for one of its biggest standouts: Brit rock band Catfish and the Bottlemen. After a steady schedule of explosive appearances at Glastonbury, Leeds and Reading, Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza, many have pitted the post-punk four-piece as a breakout of 2015 — BBC Music already awarding them the title of “best new act,” and Rolling Stone and USA Today respectively calling them an “artist you need to know” and “on the verge” of something big.
“Some of our biggest and best memories and gigs have been at festivals this year,” says bassist Benji Blakeway. “They were game-changing moments, especially being able to come over [to America] play festivals like Lollapalooza.”
At Lolla, the band played a poorly-scheduled early Saturday set, just hours after idol Paul McCartney, a fact not lost on Blakeway who has trouble finding the words to describe it other than “weird” and “mad.” The idea that, like the Beatles, a British band can still have a come-to moment after coming to America is something Blakeway and his bandmates (singer Van McCann, drummer Bob Hall and most recent addition, Detroit Social Club’s guitarist Johnny “Bondy” Bond) have been dreaming about for years.
“We always laugh at the fact that these songs we wrote in a tiny rehearsal room in the middle of nowhere and spent hours perfecting and playing live somehow managed to bring us over here,” says Blakeway of zingers like the chorus-ready “Kathleen” and the rebel howl of “Tyrants. ”
The songs appear on their debut, “The Balcony,” produced by Jim Abiss (Arctic Monkeys, Adele, The Kooks), but were written as far back as 2008 when the band, who met through school and playing “futbol,” started to assemble. Though for Catfish and the Bottlemen (named for a street busker McCann loved as a kid), it hasn’t been a meteoric rise to the top but rather a slow, steady climb filled with a lot of sweaty self-promotion and DIY gigging, something that Blakeway admits “made us who we are.”
Where they’re from—the tiny seaside resort town of Llandudno, Wales (the band used to rehearse in one of their parent’s B&Bs),— bands don’t get record deals or radio play or book gigs. Unless you were from Liverpool or Manchester or London you just didn’t get discovered. “Other bands had it easier being from the big city. They had a step up on us being offered opportunities. We had to go knocking for it,” recalls Blakeway. “We were doing anything in our power to get someone to notice us.” That includes sneaking into venues to give bands demos, stopping cars in traffic to hand out promos, and that one time they rogued their own Kasabian after-show in the parking lot after people started pouring out of the venue.
“We had a generator and ninja masks on, and two seconds into the song it started raining like I’d never seen it before,” recalls Blakeway. “All our gear was broken. I don’t even think we fin- ished the song. But we still get people coming up to us saying that was the first time they saw us so it was worth it.”
Even with all the success they’ve had Blakeway admits, “We are still the same people,” with that same early punk rock spirit. A recent “NME” cover even begged to ask if they were rock’s next bad boys, a la Oasis, but Blakeway says not so fast.
“Oasis had attitude, but it got them into trouble and tours got canceled. We’d never do that,” he says noting the band even has a certain time of night they cut off their drinking. “Shows and playing to fans is the most important thing so we’d never let anything stop us. …We are still always thinking how we can get to the next level from where we are now.”