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Cats and Cats and Cats are a five piece from different corners of Britain with numerous albums, EP's, a best of, and a whole load of puns under their belts. They have three felines in their name and are sadly no more having split up earlier this year, their new record Catsalogue is a brilliant collection of their jangly, noisy, math-pop sound. While they’re now all enjoying their free time gallivanting round the various hemispheres of the world we met up with a vocalist so good they named him twice, Ben George, for a quick chat about Come Dine With Me, Cats (obviously), and you know some serious stuff to do with music in between, but mainly just cats and how you might package them.
Alt Sounds: First of all Ben, I guess the most obvious question would be that your name is amazing, where on earth did it come from, were you trying to one up Duran Duran?
Ben Cat*: A little known fact about Cats and Cats and Cats is that the entire inception of the band was based on trying to one-up Duran Duran. From our hair styles to our racy music videos, everything we did was based on upstaging and bringing down the DD empire. The fact that this went unnoticed is testament to both our ineptness at upstaging Duran Duran and also to the fact that none of this is true.
To be fair Duran Duran did do ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’ and we all know a wolf would massacre a cat in any sort of fight, so it’s really not their fault. We decide to progress from the lies to all things pun based.
Alt Sounds: For those who might not be so familiar with you you’ve just released your excellently titled greatest hits, Catsalogue, I think it’s a great place to start, what do you think it has to offer fans new and old?
Ben Cat: I've been avoiding calling it a greatest hits since describing any of these tracks as "hits" requires changing the definition of the word to include anything anyone has ever listened to (queue thousands of ‘aaw’s’ here.) I think "best of" is probably more appropriate, so if anyone hasn't heard us then this is a good way of checking out what we consider our best and deciding whether you would like to delve deeper into our back catalogue; something I would suggest doing as we had to leave a lot of tracks off this album, stuff like ‘The Projectionist’, ‘If I'd had Antlers’ and ‘Brilliant the Brilli Ant’ just didn't work so we had to cut them. Actually, structuring this album was really difficult as every release we've tried to make as coherent as possible over its length, meaning taking tracks out of context and rearranging them with songs from other periods was a really tough job.
Old fans get a chance to hear these tracks in a new environment as well as an album's worth of rarities, a page of liner notes and a digital copy of our scrapbook all wrapped up in a picture book style casing. I had to feign illness for two days to select and arrange the photos for the cover(s), it was wonderfully nostalgic though!
Alt Sounds: How would you describe your sound?
Ben Cat: I try to avoid doing so and I think your reviewer picked up on our genre based inaccuracies (In THIS review). We've never been a band that strove to fit into a genre; it was always more like "Here are several (possibly disparate) types of music we like. Let's try and incorporate the things we like about them...in one song". This certainly served the purpose of calming our musical ADHD but also allowed us to move pretty freely between moods or genres in the context of whatever story or progression the album or EP was taking. We can't put that on a press release though so we stick with "Math pop story telling in a museum of crumbling instruments".
Alt Sounds: Yeah, that press release would have been a little intimidating, but you’ve managed to fit it pretty concisely into that mental description and somehow been matched with all this incredible bands, but who is the best band you’ve ever toured with?
Ben Cat: This is a tricky question, it was great to tour with bands like 65 Days of Static and Forward Russia as it made us feel momentarily famous and they were both amazingly friendly people. We always enjoyed taking other bands on tour with us though and The Siegfried Sassoon, A Genuine Freakshow and Delta Sleep are three fantastic bands that anyone still alive in the UK should check out right now. I know that's not very specific but they're all amazing.
Alt Sounds: Thanks for the tips. While we’re on the subject, who would you most like to have toured with?
Ben Cat: Well we tried for a long time to get the band Buttonhead out of their early retirement to play all of our big London shows. As soon as we'd split up they decided to release their long awaited debut album and are going to be playing shows in June, typical; the bunch of scallywags.
Is anyone else picturing pirate cats now? Anyway down to business and the reason for the interview with the lovely Ben in the first place.
Alt Sounds: Why are you breaking up?
Ben Cat: We'd reached a point in the band's life where other plans had become pretty important in each of our lives and it was taking its toll on the band, when you get different levels of commitment it's pretty easy for things to get difficult. This plus the fact that a few of us had been wanting to get out of England for a long time (I'm now in Tokyo and Doug is in Melbourne) lead to our decision to call it quits.
AltSounds: I hear that you’re all still friends, but were there any secret feuds, bitter rivalries, or stupid arguments you can tell us about now? Not that we’re stirring or anything, we wouldn’t do that, we’re the nice journalists you don’t hear about these days, Ben.
Ben Cat: Haha. Of course there were loads of stupid little arguments about whether it should be four beats before the guitars come in or five or whether that extra glockenspiel overdub was really necessary. The thing that sticks in my head though was while we were recording If I'd Had an Atlas, we decided, since we were in a residential studio, we'd do our own version of Come Dine with Me. We're all friends, we thought, it won't get nasty. We were wrong and the footage was "accidentally" deleted and we never spoke of it again.
After an intricate scouring of the world wide web we’re saddened to inform you that all evidence of the great cooking cats has been removed from existence. We’re terribly sorry you can never see this and that it’s now only an interview anecdote for the cats, but sometimes it takes a horrible Come Dine With Me experience to realise your true purpose.
Alt Sounds: You played Glasto twice, can count Huw Stephens amongst fans, and were approached by Big Scary Monsters amongst other things, by all accounts you were pretty successful, but how would you measure the success of Cats and cats and cats?
Ben Cat: Having recently written this article about how to be an unsuccessful band and actually getting a bit of scorn for doing so, I felt like I had to reassess our success. At the time of writing the article I was still in what I called "Cats mode", a way of thinking where nothing is ever good enough, meaning you have to keep trying otherwise your band will crumble into obscurity; something I attribute much of our achievements to. While this sounds kind of arrogant or something I've seen a similar drive in almost all of our friends' bands and it's a great thing and is probably the backbone of any underground scene. So, now I'm out of Cats mode and can appreciate that we did pretty well for ourselves. Your kind comments are helping with that too!
Oh, that’s our pleasure, you’re actually helping with our, ‘How to be an unsuccessful website’, we’re only going to be reviewing and interviewing bands that have split up or simply don’t exist, we think it could be huge, in terms of un-success.
Alt Sounds: If you had to pick a favourite song from your back catalogue what would it be and why?
Ben Cat: It would have to be 'Kites', this song kind of came out of nowhere while we were recording 'Sweet Drunk Everyone' and instantly became a live favourite of ours. I've had people try to dissect the lyrics, which is something I love. It was also the last song we ever played live and it even started a bit of a mosh pit (albeit a 3 man one!).
Alt Sounds:What’s your most memorable show or experience with the band?
Ben Cat: For me getting to play a show in the USA with The Music Tapes was a really big event. I'm a huge Neutral Milk Hotel/Music Tapes fan so meeting Julian Koster and getting a musical saw lesson from those guys was something I never thought would happen! We did a couple of really amazing album launch shows where we dressed up as characters from the albums and had about 13 people onstage. Our last UK show was also a crazy night, ending in a stage invasion of semi naked proportions.
Alt Sounds: What does the future hold for each of you?
Ben Cat: Well as I said I'm now in Tokyo and have set up a new music project called Merry Christmas and I've joined a band called Le Tis (named after the footballer); the prior being a fuzzy folky thing and the latter a shoe gaze-y pop rock outfit. Don't worry though I'm following my own advice on how to make them unsuccessful, I mean just look at their names! Doug's in Australia for a year at least, probably having the best time ever. Tom and Jamie are back in the UK resetting people's servers and finishing some mental health nurse training respectively. They'll come and visit us out here I hope!
Alt Sounds: Any regrets?
Ben Cat: Not meeting our last violin player, Jess, sooner. She joined us on our very last tour and it was as if she'd been in the band for years, not just musically too, she proved to be the biggest lad on tour! Apart from that a big regret of ours is falling out with our first European booking agent from Kollect booking. A breakdown of communication and inter band argument ending with us being unintentionally rude to him. More than not getting to tour Europe for a while it was really painful knowing we'd genuinely made someone feel bad about their work (which was actually really good!). Still makes me pretty ashamed today.
After making Ben dredge up the past and show his human side-look people in bands are still people, who knew?—we decided we’d be nice and let the kind gent answer a couple of nice and deeply prying personal questions to end on. It’s fine he’s in Tokyo, so nothing bad can happen to us.
Alt Sounds: Who are your favourite artists right now?
Ben Cat: As mentioned above Buttonhead are putting out their debut album, 3D Opera Whale, at the end of June and EVERYONE should buy it, it's probably the best thing I've heard in four years.
Alt Sounds: Lastly, I suppose I really want to know if you like cats as much as it seems, surely you can’t be hiding a massive love of dogs under all the cat puns?
Ben Cat: The T in the last Cats is supposed to be pronounced N. In fact, iTunes released one of our singles under the name Cats and Cats and Cans due to someone using the correct pronunciation. We love cans. Best type of packaging for cats in my opinion.
That’s it, the cats are now back in the alleys, but it was fun while it lasted and this certainly isn’t the end, cats have nine lives and always land on their feet and I’m out of clichés.
*For the remainder of this interview Ben George will be referred to as Ben Cat, because while it’s not quite as good as Tom Cat would have been, it still brings this writer a large amount of joy. Thanks.
Alt Sounds: First of all Ben, I guess the most obvious question would be that your name is amazing, where on earth did it come from, were you trying to one up Duran Duran?
Ben Cat*: A little known fact about Cats and Cats and Cats is that the entire inception of the band was based on trying to one-up Duran Duran. From our hair styles to our racy music videos, everything we did was based on upstaging and bringing down the DD empire. The fact that this went unnoticed is testament to both our ineptness at upstaging Duran Duran and also to the fact that none of this is true.
WATCH // 'A Boy Called Haunts'
To be fair Duran Duran did do ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’ and we all know a wolf would massacre a cat in any sort of fight, so it’s really not their fault. We decide to progress from the lies to all things pun based.
Alt Sounds: For those who might not be so familiar with you you’ve just released your excellently titled greatest hits, Catsalogue, I think it’s a great place to start, what do you think it has to offer fans new and old?
Ben Cat: I've been avoiding calling it a greatest hits since describing any of these tracks as "hits" requires changing the definition of the word to include anything anyone has ever listened to (queue thousands of ‘aaw’s’ here.) I think "best of" is probably more appropriate, so if anyone hasn't heard us then this is a good way of checking out what we consider our best and deciding whether you would like to delve deeper into our back catalogue; something I would suggest doing as we had to leave a lot of tracks off this album, stuff like ‘The Projectionist’, ‘If I'd had Antlers’ and ‘Brilliant the Brilli Ant’ just didn't work so we had to cut them. Actually, structuring this album was really difficult as every release we've tried to make as coherent as possible over its length, meaning taking tracks out of context and rearranging them with songs from other periods was a really tough job.
Here are several (possibly disparate) types of music we like. Let's try and incorporate the things we like about them...in one song
Alt Sounds: How would you describe your sound?
Ben Cat: I try to avoid doing so and I think your reviewer picked up on our genre based inaccuracies (In THIS review). We've never been a band that strove to fit into a genre; it was always more like "Here are several (possibly disparate) types of music we like. Let's try and incorporate the things we like about them...in one song". This certainly served the purpose of calming our musical ADHD but also allowed us to move pretty freely between moods or genres in the context of whatever story or progression the album or EP was taking. We can't put that on a press release though so we stick with "Math pop story telling in a museum of crumbling instruments".
Alt Sounds: Yeah, that press release would have been a little intimidating, but you’ve managed to fit it pretty concisely into that mental description and somehow been matched with all this incredible bands, but who is the best band you’ve ever toured with?
Ben Cat: This is a tricky question, it was great to tour with bands like 65 Days of Static and Forward Russia as it made us feel momentarily famous and they were both amazingly friendly people. We always enjoyed taking other bands on tour with us though and The Siegfried Sassoon, A Genuine Freakshow and Delta Sleep are three fantastic bands that anyone still alive in the UK should check out right now. I know that's not very specific but they're all amazing.
Alt Sounds: Thanks for the tips. While we’re on the subject, who would you most like to have toured with?
Ben Cat: Well we tried for a long time to get the band Buttonhead out of their early retirement to play all of our big London shows. As soon as we'd split up they decided to release their long awaited debut album and are going to be playing shows in June, typical; the bunch of scallywags.
Is anyone else picturing pirate cats now? Anyway down to business and the reason for the interview with the lovely Ben in the first place.
Alt Sounds: Why are you breaking up?
Ben Cat: We'd reached a point in the band's life where other plans had become pretty important in each of our lives and it was taking its toll on the band, when you get different levels of commitment it's pretty easy for things to get difficult. This plus the fact that a few of us had been wanting to get out of England for a long time (I'm now in Tokyo and Doug is in Melbourne) lead to our decision to call it quits.
AltSounds: I hear that you’re all still friends, but were there any secret feuds, bitter rivalries, or stupid arguments you can tell us about now? Not that we’re stirring or anything, we wouldn’t do that, we’re the nice journalists you don’t hear about these days, Ben.
Ben Cat: Haha. Of course there were loads of stupid little arguments about whether it should be four beats before the guitars come in or five or whether that extra glockenspiel overdub was really necessary. The thing that sticks in my head though was while we were recording If I'd Had an Atlas, we decided, since we were in a residential studio, we'd do our own version of Come Dine with Me. We're all friends, we thought, it won't get nasty. We were wrong and the footage was "accidentally" deleted and we never spoke of it again.
After an intricate scouring of the world wide web we’re saddened to inform you that all evidence of the great cooking cats has been removed from existence. We’re terribly sorry you can never see this and that it’s now only an interview anecdote for the cats, but sometimes it takes a horrible Come Dine With Me experience to realise your true purpose.
Alt Sounds: You played Glasto twice, can count Huw Stephens amongst fans, and were approached by Big Scary Monsters amongst other things, by all accounts you were pretty successful, but how would you measure the success of Cats and cats and cats?
Ben Cat: Having recently written this article about how to be an unsuccessful band and actually getting a bit of scorn for doing so, I felt like I had to reassess our success. At the time of writing the article I was still in what I called "Cats mode", a way of thinking where nothing is ever good enough, meaning you have to keep trying otherwise your band will crumble into obscurity; something I attribute much of our achievements to. While this sounds kind of arrogant or something I've seen a similar drive in almost all of our friends' bands and it's a great thing and is probably the backbone of any underground scene. So, now I'm out of Cats mode and can appreciate that we did pretty well for ourselves. Your kind comments are helping with that too!
Oh, that’s our pleasure, you’re actually helping with our, ‘How to be an unsuccessful website’, we’re only going to be reviewing and interviewing bands that have split up or simply don’t exist, we think it could be huge, in terms of un-success.
Alt Sounds: If you had to pick a favourite song from your back catalogue what would it be and why?
Ben Cat: It would have to be 'Kites', this song kind of came out of nowhere while we were recording 'Sweet Drunk Everyone' and instantly became a live favourite of ours. I've had people try to dissect the lyrics, which is something I love. It was also the last song we ever played live and it even started a bit of a mosh pit (albeit a 3 man one!).
Alt Sounds:What’s your most memorable show or experience with the band?
Ben Cat: For me getting to play a show in the USA with The Music Tapes was a really big event. I'm a huge Neutral Milk Hotel/Music Tapes fan so meeting Julian Koster and getting a musical saw lesson from those guys was something I never thought would happen! We did a couple of really amazing album launch shows where we dressed up as characters from the albums and had about 13 people onstage. Our last UK show was also a crazy night, ending in a stage invasion of semi naked proportions.
Alt Sounds: What does the future hold for each of you?
Ben Cat: Well as I said I'm now in Tokyo and have set up a new music project called Merry Christmas and I've joined a band called Le Tis (named after the footballer); the prior being a fuzzy folky thing and the latter a shoe gaze-y pop rock outfit. Don't worry though I'm following my own advice on how to make them unsuccessful, I mean just look at their names! Doug's in Australia for a year at least, probably having the best time ever. Tom and Jamie are back in the UK resetting people's servers and finishing some mental health nurse training respectively. They'll come and visit us out here I hope!
Alt Sounds: Any regrets?
Ben Cat: Not meeting our last violin player, Jess, sooner. She joined us on our very last tour and it was as if she'd been in the band for years, not just musically too, she proved to be the biggest lad on tour! Apart from that a big regret of ours is falling out with our first European booking agent from Kollect booking. A breakdown of communication and inter band argument ending with us being unintentionally rude to him. More than not getting to tour Europe for a while it was really painful knowing we'd genuinely made someone feel bad about their work (which was actually really good!). Still makes me pretty ashamed today.
That’s it, the cats are now back in the alleys, but it was fun while it lasted and this certainly isn’t the end, cats have nine lives and always land on their feet and I’m out of clichés
Alt Sounds: Who are your favourite artists right now?
Ben Cat: As mentioned above Buttonhead are putting out their debut album, 3D Opera Whale, at the end of June and EVERYONE should buy it, it's probably the best thing I've heard in four years.
Alt Sounds: Lastly, I suppose I really want to know if you like cats as much as it seems, surely you can’t be hiding a massive love of dogs under all the cat puns?
Ben Cat: The T in the last Cats is supposed to be pronounced N. In fact, iTunes released one of our singles under the name Cats and Cats and Cans due to someone using the correct pronunciation. We love cans. Best type of packaging for cats in my opinion.
That’s it, the cats are now back in the alleys, but it was fun while it lasted and this certainly isn’t the end, cats have nine lives and always land on their feet and I’m out of clichés.
Catsalogue is out now and I severely suggest you get it, like, NOW.
*For the remainder of this interview Ben George will be referred to as Ben Cat, because while it’s not quite as good as Tom Cat would have been, it still brings this writer a large amount of joy. Thanks.
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