‘I was allergic to heroin. My body would
react against it. It fills your lungs up.’ Luck-
ily, Bob Dylan called — she’s never talked
about what her hero said, but it obviously
meant a lot to her. ‘It gave me the cour-
age and the confidence and the ener-
gy to change the pages and move into a
new chapter,’ she says.
She absconded to a shack in Nashville,
fell in love with her first husband (turning up
to the ceremony in a tractor, which accord-
ing to the Independent makes her ‘the only
celebrity to have had her wedding photos
splashed in Hello! and Farming Equipment
News’) and had the first two of her three
children (Glenys Pearl Y Felin, now 16, and
Johnny Tupelo Jones, 14).
The reason Cerys doesn’t want to talk
about Catatonia is because she’s fresh
from seeing a tribute to Nina Simone at the
Proms. ‘I mean she was extraordinary,’ she
insists. ‘So I don’t think about me as a song-
writer... selling a few records, when there’s
people like Nina...’ I can see her point. If
I was comparing myself with Joan Didion
right now, I should just stop writing entirely.
But while Cerys doesn’t want to recall it,
if you’re middle-aged then Catatonia was
the soundtrack to your youth. So in that con-
text the most controversial thing she’s done
was probably coming fourth on I’m A Celeb-
rity... Get Me Out Of Here! shortly after
getting divorced in 2007. ‘The news that she
was taking part was accompanied by gasps
of pity and mild despair from almost every-
one I know,’ Charlie Brooker wrote at the
time. ‘“Why?” they all said. “Why? It’s such
a shame.” It’s a bit like when Kirsty Mac-
Coll died.’
While in the jungle, she became roman-
tically involved with an actor you’ve never
heard of and post-fact posed for saucy snaps
in the News of the World. ‘After an initial
reaction of “Why don’t I have an ass like
that?” I was shocked,’ moaned one music
critic. ‘Though not a fan of her music... I
feel betrayed.’
Now very happily married to her man-
ager, Steve Abbott (with whom she also has
a nine-year-old son, Red), Cerys has clawedher way back into highbrow hearts with her
BBC Radio 6 Music show where she plays
whatever she damn well pleases and inter-
views anyone she damn well pleases too. Her
favourites include astronaut Helen Sharman
(who told her the greenest parts of the Earth
from space were Ireland and New Zealand)
and the grandson of ‘Sir Joseph Bazalgette
— who had the foresight to build massive
sewers so the likes of us so many genera-
tions later can still poo in peace — so we
had a great playlist of Velvet Underground,
something else to do with underground, and
pipes and... you get the drift’.
For Cerys, making such connections is
what life is about, so her cookbook, Where
The Wild Cooks Go, is a distillation not only
of recipes but ‘poems, music, curiosities, his-
tory, characters, quotes, proverbs’, and she’s
going to go on defending and playing the
records she loves until she ceases to exist.
‘We are here on this earth for a blink of an
eye and yet we’ve got all these strands that
lead us back to our ancestors and are lead-
ing into the future,’ she explains. ‘Like Bob
Dylan, he’s not going to go away when he
dies. He’s going to be like Confucius. And
the more we can try and make sense of these
strands, and question who these people are
and why they are so extraordinary, then the
more sense we can make of our own time on
the land. That’s all I really care about.’‘I can’t wait to try Prue Leith’s barium meal.’