In September last year, Welsh four-piece Catfish and the Bottlemen released their debut LP, The Balcony. A drip-feed of singles over the last couple of years built plenty of anticipation for The Balcony,which debuted at Number Ten in the UK charts. Affection for the youthful foursome is now spreading worldwide; The Balcony has just seen its US release, which coincided with an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman, and later this month Catfish and the Bottlemen will grace our shores for the very first time.
The band’s frontman Van McCann triumphantly embraces the warm reception they’ve received so far: “For me it’s all about making short little tunes that are played on the radio and people like hearing in their car,” he says. “When I was growing up that’s the kind of bands I liked – big songs that sound like they belong in stadiums.”
The band’s forthcoming tour includes a run of gigs supporting The Kooks, as well as a few smaller-scale headline shows. The Kooks are another band whose first album made a big impact. Boasting hit singles such as Naïve and She Moves in Her Own Way, 2006’s Inside In/ Inside Out remains a favourite among Kooks fans and its songs continue to dominate the band’s setlists. Such adoration for early material can be a source of frustration for musicians, who are desperate to spotlight their recent releases. Perhaps it’s too soon to predict whether The Balcony will stand the test of time, but McCann’s not bothered by the prospect of performing these songs for years to come.
“If people asked me to play my first album in ten years time in Australia in some mad arena I’d be made-up with that,” he says. “As much as anybody else says, ‘I make music for myself and if other people get it then it’s great,’ that’s just bullshit, because you’d just stay in bed if that was the case and sing to yourself. It’s about everyone else – the way you make everyone else feel.
“Radiohead don’t play Creep because they don’t like it. It’s like, who cares what Radiohead like? It’s about what the people who like their music like. That’s what it’s all about, in my opinion. That’s the kind of band that I want to be. I don’t want to be headlining Glastonbury but going, ‘Oh we’ll play the new album.’ I’d be playing all the singles.”
It’s a common occurrence that a successful first album is promptly followed by another record of similar nature. The Kooks’ Konk,The Strokes’ Room On Fire and Kings Of Leon’s Aha Shake Heartbreak are prime examples from recent years. From here, all of these bands sought out new stylistic terrain, with varying degrees of success. McCann is eager to release plenty more records, but he’s not too interested in artistic reinvention.
“I’ve got the second album written and they’re just songs about different things,” he says. “The only thing I ever wanted to change was to write songs about different things and use different producers to make it sound different. But we’re not going to be getting lost and changing our sound every album. I like the simple thing we’ve got. I’m not really into bands that change their sound all the time.”
Simple is a rather modest summation. The Balcony is a punchy collection of harum-scarum rock songs loaded with enough catchy choruses to give you a seizure. “We wanted it to be like The Strokes or Oasis or the Arctic Monkeys’ first albums, in the sense that we wanted every song to be a single,” McCann says. “It wasn’t about making an album. It can take you places, an album – you’ll have a sad song and then a fast song and a love song and a song about how good it is to be alive – but we just wanted to write a collection of songs, almost like a greatest hits album. It doesn’t even have to make sense as an album as long as each song is good.”
The Balcony proves McCann and his three band mates know their way around snappy, melodic rock tunes. If they keep this up, the forthcoming Australia tour will be the first of many. McCann was actually born in Oz and returning with his band fulfills a lifelong dream.
“The first year of my life I spent travelling round with me mum and dad,” he says. “They went over to Australia when they were younger and got married over there and then we just travelled round everywhere in the back of a car. I always said, ‘That’s where I want to go with me music. I want to write a song that’s good enough to fly me across the world.’ It was always the dream so I could tell me dad.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
