04 December 2016
Newsdesk
Van McCann speaking from an exclusive studio session and interview with Catfish and the Bottlemen on Radio X. Hosted by Radio X’s Phil Clifton, the one-hour special Radio X Presents Catfish and the Bottlemen aired last night and fans can listen again at www.radiox.co.uk
Van McCann on how The Streets’ Mike Skinner inspired his songwriting:
VM: “I heard the first one [album]; I loved the first one. But the second album was the one I got really into. It was all really conversational. You could read the lyrics out loud as a lyric book – you feel like you’re reading a text message to a friend. It was so close to the bone for me anyway listening to it. It’s always been lyrics and music that’s got me into it, I’ve never been a melody guy – it’s always been the words. And I just thought he could do it. I read this thing in his book where he used to sum up things with writing songs. I think I read he’d try and sum up – if you were going to split up with a girl, the three second feeling you get when it happens. Not the draw out of the breakup, the big story of it, just that feeling. You try and grab that and put it into a song. He could write a song about a ten-minute situation drinking in a bar, and make it. I love his stuff. All of it. I love every record he put out.”
Van McCann on playing in the street and flogging CDs in traffic in the band’s early days:
VM: “If there was a uni and we were there in time for lunch, where everyone would be out having lunch we’d just turn up. And if there was a crowd of people we’d just jump out of the van with these ninja masks on, a little generator we had in the back of the van and we used to play in the street. And we’d have our manager giving out flyers, you know, for the band; little ASDA CDs […] we’d go and buy a hundred ASDA CDs on the way to the next gig we’d be printing them off and do fifty each or whatever. We’d give them out in traffic jams and all that kind of stuff. But that was just because we wanted to get a deal so that we could make an album and go play live. You know you hear people getting it thrown on them, you know, it comes by chance sometimes where people are just kind of playing for fun. We were definitely like, “Check this band out!”, you know, try and get on us because we wanted to just build it live.”
Catfish and the Bottlemen on supporting emerging artists like Broken Hands:
VM: “I love Broken Hands, they’re one of my favourite live bands at the moment – have been since we saw them way back when we first met them in Sheffield years ago when we were playing a festival together and always stayed friends since.”
JB: “We did some outdoor shows over the summer where we curated the bills and we got bands on earlier in the day that are our friends’ bands but we’re sort of friends with them for a reason, because we’ve fallen in love with their music and have just become friends through that. That’s bands like Broken Hands, I mean I can’t say what they’re going to do but we love them, we love their music and that was why we chose to have them on when we were playing.”
