Wild thing
Cerys Matthews on her BBC show, Bob Dylan and life after Catatonia
EMILY HILL
wall sense — she wanted to be him. ‘I
was very keen on sounding like Bob
Dylan and I have a very high voice,’
she recalls. ‘So I started drinking whis-
ky and smoking when I was very young
— deliberately to have a more Bob
Dylan-like voice. That’s just the logic
of a child...’ Or, possibly, just the logic
of Cerys, which is a logic unto itself.
Right now, she doesn’t want to talk
about what made her famous — front-
ing the Britpop band Catatonia. ‘I don’t care
about more fleeting things,’ she explains, ‘I
don’t really care about fame and smoke and
mirrors of celebrity.’
Legend has it the band was formed in
1990, when Mark Roberts, Cerys’s soon-
to-be boyfriend and song-writing partner,
spotted her busking outside Debenhams in
Cardiff. For the next eight years they gigged
away without much success and then wrote
a break-up album, ‘International Velvet’,
which became a massive hit. The songs ‘Road
Rage’ and ‘Mulder and Scully’ — which are
essentially about couples who hate each
other — were the soundtrack of 1998. If you
remember them fondly, do not hum them in
your head. They’ll get stuck there.
Cerys became ‘Cerys’ (losing the sur-
name in the ‘I’m so famous’ sort of a way),
as renowned for her antics as her lyrics. She
was given to insulting people in Welsh, such
as the weather forecaster Siân Lloyd. She
gave good quotes (‘if I sang with any more
of an accent, the Welsh tourist board would
sponsor me and set me in concrete’). She
disappeared after a gig in Southampton and
came to in the south of France with no idea
how she got there. Wore a T-shirt that brand-
ed her a ‘fast-rising lager-soaked rip-roaring
pop tart’. Threw a TV out of a window (her
own)... cue textbook rock-star meltdown.
‘I couldn’t walk, couldn’t breathe,’ she
told the Scotsman in 2006, recalling spiral-
ling out of control and quitting the band.aby, It’s Cold Outside’ was
a Christmas classic for more
than half a century until peo-
ple suddenly began to worry that it
was about yuletide date rape. ‘It was
because of the video Tom Jones and
I made,’ says Cerys Matthews, in her
smoky Welsh lilt. She recorded a
cover with Jones in 1999. The video
showed the craggy old Welsh crooner
slip something in her drink that turns
Cerys into a high camp vamp. ‘The song is
really innocent and beautiful and fun —
it’s got a huge heap of humour and wit and
I love it. That song is not our enemy. That
woman is a strong woman. She’s there
because she wants to be! It’s cold outside.
They’re making love. Come on!’
Cerys herself was exposed to explicit
record content when she was a child.
‘Famine, religious persecution, genocide,
injustice, political manoeuvrings.’ She makes
a list. ‘I had a book of Irish ballads when I
was about nine and it’s full of war songs
where they’re maimed and they’re injured
and they’re insane and they’re eyeless and
legless and armless and they’re putting out
a bowl to beg. All these songs — they’re
full of life and there are no taboo subjects.
This was a way of spreading news, a way
of processing things, a way of trying to
teach people and enlighten people. They’re
wonderful songs.’
If you are, like me (and her other
700,000 listeners), addicted to Cerys’s BBC
radio show, you may think she gets away
with quite a lot already — no song is too
esoteric, no sound too peculiar: ‘I’ve invited
buskers on the show before, dulcimer play-
ers, zither players, glass harmonium play-
ers from Ukraine that I met in Venice...
strange sounds like mating haddocks, whales
speaking like men, elephants speaking like
men, squeaking frogs.’ Finally, she reckons,
she’s found the place she’s meant to be.
Born in Cardiff in 1969, Cerys ‘rhymes
with terrace’ Matthews is the second of four
children and she spent her early years on a
farm. The idea behind the festival she’s cre-
ated — the Good Life Experience, which
takes place next month — is to recreate the
conditions of her running-wild childhood
in Wales, to let kids ‘off the leash’ so they
‘gain a sense of independence and respon-
sibility and enlightenment — to get the
chance to forage or see how a knife is forged,
or sharpen an axe or make your own pizzadough and put it on the fire. All those kinds
of things that quite often in modern life we
simply can’t really do.’
She was an oddball from a very early age
— when her older sister knocked all her own
teeth out playing on an iron horse, Cerys
coveted her dentures. She first discovered
she had a voice aged nine when she was sing-
ing ‘All My Trials’ — a track in which Joan
Baez contemplates suicide — to herself in
a tent in her back garden, only to find she
had an unseen audience of relatives who all
started clapping.
At an age when other girls were forming
their first crushes, Cerys became obsessed
with Bob Dylan. But not in a poster-on-the-‘I’ve invited buskers on my radio
show, and glass harmonium players
from Ukraine that I met in Venice’