A tank full of highs and a mind that never sleeps: My love letter to Catfish and the Bottlemen
APRIL 26TH 2023 | by EMMA SCHOORS
PHOTO BY JORDAN CURTIS HUGHES
San Diego, March 2019. Catfish and the Bottlemen are on the road, as always, and their home tonight is the House of Blues. Someone’s lovingly written “I hate Van McCann” in thick Sharpie on the ground outside the venue, but light-hearted prods are counteracted by the fierce devotion fans have for this damn band, and frontman McCann in particular. It seems anyone who's heard of The Bottlemen is ready and willing to go to the ends of the earth for them.
The girls in front of the line are skillfully flirting with someone from the band’s team in exchange for signed tickets, or something of the like. They’re on a first name basis with him, leading me to believe this is far from their first show this tour. The band’s third album, The Balance, is being steadily rolled out, and today, “2all” makes its grand entrance. I’m sitting here like a loon trying to memorize the lyrics with my phone to my ear. The show is rowdy as hell, fueled in part by the song’s release, and I go to sleep with ringing ears and a well-fed heart. Still, the hunger for Catfish shows goes unsatiated, no matter how many you attend. This is a phenomenon with no real explanation.
A few days later I’m in Hollywood, counting the well-dressed dogs that walk past as I scarf down a slice of overpriced pizza and hum Father John Misty’s “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings,” one of the band’s go-to backstage tracks. The Palladium is home today. I find myself on lead guitarist Johnny Bond’s side of the stage, screaming the lyrics to “Rango” like they’re the last words I’ll ever manage – “Darling, you’ve ducked them in style, and I’ve always loved you for that.” I have less of a read on the crowd’s energy tonight because I’m more to the side of it, but I’ll go on faith and say LA is in a Catfish mood. Three singles from The Balance are on regular set rotation so far; “Longshot,” “Fluctuate” and “2all.” McCann plays around with a segment of a new song, “Sidetrack,” during “Business,” something he’s done since mid-2015. It’s ominous ad-libbing until the album’s release, but foreshadowing is a sneaky habit of his. McCann has everything about this band planned. It’s not unusual to hear bits of songs as mumbled live improvisations years before they come to fruition in the studio.
“...Dart off a plane…”
“...As if you’re holding up a card with my second name…”
“...Will you wait for me?…”
The Balance arrives that April as the band’s third studio LP, and it’s met with less than stellar reviews. Redundant. Boring. Uninventive. The formula that won them their fan base seems to be faltering from overuse. “Longshot” is shot down as a cop-out, and while “Fluctuate” comes close to winning over critics, I don’t remember seeing one five-star review of the record in whole. All that said, the only way to truly know a record is to dive so far into it that every guitar lick becomes a breath in the album’s lungs, every lyric a thinly-veiled life story. It’s easy to make fun of the blunt simplicity of a song title like “Basically,” but that song bears witness to some of bassist Benji Blakeway’s best lines yet. Bondy is the guitar-slinging star of “Overlap,” (McCann “didn’t get into it to melt someone’s fucking head off,” but he did) and drummer Bob Hall drives “Mission” to its fanatical bridge and beyond. “Encore” is textbook Catfish, and it does the trick: “I’m only here playing up so that I can come and fall at your feet.”
Warm, Spring evening air envelops me the night the record is released. “When I finally found a place, I said I’d get you round / To talk through all the things you thought that I’d forget about,” McCann sings in “Basically,” mirroring the newfound desire to settle down in “Mission:” “We could go Sydney pretty much any day now / Knowing us like I do, we’ll love it there and stay out for an age.” McCann’s shifted his focus as a writer, that much is true, but it’s a necessary change. He can’t write about the excitement of life’s firsts forever. Eventually experience takes over for innocence. Original material aside, the band’s covers are well worth discovering, from The Killers’ “Read My Mind” to U2’s “Sweetest Thing” to Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead.” McCann occasionally throws bits in during shows, namely Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing In The Dark” at the end of “Cocoon,” and Austin Powers’ “ouch kabibble!” during the last chorus of “Pacifier.”
That June, the Welsh rockers return to the states, and I catch them on a blazing Vegas night inside The Cosmopolitan. Outkast’s “Roses” is a fixture on their pre-show playlist, and the only time I’ll see groups of girls singing “crazy bitch” – a hilarious anomaly that I join in on. I’m back again in December, this time in Phoenix, front row center. Hell, last year I flew to Wales for shows they backed out of at the last minute. If they announced a show on Jupiter, I’d find a way there. Every time I step off a flight, I’m transported to “Outside” and its matching lyric. I listened to “Heathrow” the first time I flew into it. Same with New York, and “Emily.” I’ll never forget the first time I heard “Hourglass,” lips stuck in the dumbest smile as I realized McCann really just sang “dreams of you fucking me all the time.”
To me, the Catfish and the Bottlemen trilogy is complete. 2014’s The Balcony is about young lust, love, and the clumsy infatuation that settles deep inside you while you’re young and never quite leaves. It’s a prelude to the devotion that defines 2016’s The Ride. It’s sonic evidence of a band about to blow the wheels off of everything you know about music, while somehow coloring comfortably within the lines. McCann has always said Catfish is a simple guitar band, but The Balcony is anything but. It summarizes the feeling of falling in love, falling out, falling all over the place. It is messy and foolishly confident, and because of that it is perfect.
The opening seconds of “Homesick,” before McCann ever utters a word, are the most intense moments of any Catfish song. It’s in those seconds that thousands of fans wordlessly fell in love. The Balcony’s genius lies in “Fallout” and its test-tube baby explosivity, McCann cramming every big word he knows in every song (narcissistic, simpatico, acquiesce) and the dangerously passionate riffs of “26.” There’s a reason the ongoing joke is once you hear the opening chords to “Tyrants,” you’ve entered the final hour of a Catfish show. It feels like a separate, elevated experience, far less a goodbye than a “See you next time.” It’s hard to overstate how important this album is to so many people. Within 37 minutes, it grabs you by the face, yanks you out of whatever rut you’re in, and reminds you that your dreams can, and should, take priority.
One of the visual hallmarks of the band’s sophomore album is the iconic alligator spotlighted on the cover, designed by Tim Lahan. “I really wanted an alligator because I was writing the songs in the back lounge of a pub called the Alligator Lounge. That’s where we’d go to smoke and cut loose. It has green neon lights in it. When I moved into my place, I bought green neon lights for my kitchen so it could glow like that back room,” McCann told Rolling Stone’s Reed Fischer. Recorded at the Hillside Manor in Los Angeles and produced by Dave Sardy, The Ride is just that – a thrashing yet eloquent love letter to live music. “If I could, I’d play live for the rest of my life. And we’re still very much fans of going to see music. It’s a hunger for something that doesn’t die,” McCann said. “Postpone” is my favorite from this record, and remains my all-time favorite song of theirs: “And you feel like it all starts falling, and you feel like your luck needs changing / Yes, I’ll be there when it falls.”
Catfish and the Bottlemen is a live band. That’s a sentence you’re guaranteed to skim over in any show review, overheard conversation, or interview with them. The mere thought of ever hearing the scathing acapella intro to “Helter Skelter” ring through another venue, of seeing those flickering blood red and black lights, is enough to get my heart racing. That’s not a feeling I’ll ever take for granted. In a lot of ways Catfish was my first love. Whenever someone asks me my favorite band, the word “Catfish” escapes before my brain can even process the question. My mind and heart have set them as the default answer. Nervous for finals? Skip them to go see Catfish six hours away. Good days call for “Oxygen,” bad days call for “Red” or “Glasgow.” Music is medicine, alright. It’s everything to me. “This whole band, and my whole life, is based around being in love with something, you know what I mean? I don’t give a fuck what’s going on around me as long as I love you, you love me, and that’s all that matters,” McCann told Steve Lamacq in a 2014 interview.
As of April 2023, Blakeway and McCann are the only remaining members. Hall and Bond have both started new projects since their respective departures from the band. Though Catfish and the Bottlemen’s future is uncertain, and breakup rumors circle nearly all the time, their hard-fought legacy supersedes their eventual end. In a 2015 interview with Pancakes and Whiskey, McCann summed up his hopes for the band: “I want it to be life-affirming, positive stadium rock where lyrics are just sharp and straight to the point, you don’t mess about with it. If it’s like, ‘I love you,’ it’s like, ‘I fucking love you.’ Do you know what I mean? Like, I really love you. It’s severe…I want it to be deadly.”
It’s been deadly, Catfish and the Bottlemen. I fucking love you.
Check out Emma’s playlist, Curated By Catfish, featuring songs listened to and loved by the band.