“The Pontarddulais Male Voice Choir sang a haunting, unaccompanied introduction to ‘Mulder and Scully’. There was a slight pause. Aled drummed in, the guitars ripped the evening air apart and Cerys cruised in from backstage. She was like a Spanish galleon in full rigging cutting through the sparkling ocean, bringing home the spoils of battle. She smiled in sheer delight as she neared the front of the stage, to be met by a wall of sound as the crowd sang as one, ‘I’d rather be liberated’. It happened in seconds, but that moment will last my lifetime.”
This is how author Brian Wright describes one of Catatonia’s biggest achievements to date, as they headlined a massive sell-out show at Port Talbot’s Margam Park. But when the band began in 1993 as obscure Cardiff pub hopefuls, he was at the lowest point in his life. Within the space of a year he had lost both his wife and mother to cancer, and personally survived a brain haemorrhage. As a result he fell into a downward spiral of alcoholism and depression. Then he witnessed an early Catatonia gig. It changed his life. He followed the band all over the country, and ultimately Europe, as a way of dragging himself out of despair.
Fronted by the brassy, irrepressible Cerys Matthews, Catatonia finally took the British pop scene by storm with hits like ‘Mulder and Scully’ and ‘Road Rage’. The album International Velvet quickly became one of 1998’s biggest long players, and the follow-up Equally Cursed and Blessed established them as a major pop force. Cerys, with her raunchy vocal style, was now the sexy and outspoken figurehead of a classic five-piece pop group. As the band grew in stature, so Wright’s self-confidence returned. But in a strange switch of fortunes it coincided with the tell-tale signs of stress that would eventually lead to the outwardly unstoppable Cerys suffering a nervous breakdown.
Drawing on first-hand experience, new interviews and years of research, To Hell and Back with Catatonia is a fascinating band biography, and the story of how a fan pulled himself out of depression whilst the main reason for his recovery sank into a private hell of her own.
