Van McCann @ Ei8htball / Live4ever Media Lounge (Photo: Paul Bachmann)
“I don’t believe in, talent I believe in graft. I don’t think John Lennon wrote ‘Imagine’ because he is talented. I believe he wrote it because he wrote 5,000 more songs than Roy Orbison.”
Catfish and The Bottlemen’s first set at SXSW in many ways provided a fitting tribute to precisely what’s endeared the four-piece to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Fresh from a Top 10 UK chart placing for debut album ‘The Balcony‘, animated lead singer Van McCann discussed with Live4ever how the band dealt with a raft of sound issues in their bid to ingratiate themselves to an expectant Austin crowd.
“It must have added to it I guess that we were having a bit of trouble”, he said. “I don’t even remember singing a song last night. I thought if anything let’s just make people talk about us so that tomorrow they’ll come and see us again and give us another chance”.
There are few bands who have been through such a humbling journey in making their way to the upper echelons of the alternative music scene. It quickly becomes apparent that the relentless touring schedule required in meticulously crafting their sound, and making their music heard across as many pubs and music venues on either side of the A55, has seen a tight-knit family unit develop – something which McCann articulates with utmost exuberance.
“Because we’ve been together for eight years we’ve been through every up and every down of anything any band could be involved in, down to coaxing our van to the next station because it’s run out of petrol on the motorway. We felt like we were fifteen again on that stage, like we had something to prove. It was exciting to be in a band that can still do that. It’s like being with a girl for ages but still fancying her like the day you met her.”
Even arguably the most successful British rock music commodity in the last two decades, Oasis, failed to make a significant dent in the US market. It’s often difficult to anticipate how a differing type of audience will take to the latest buzz band from across the pond, although the sweat drenched sets and unabashed drive of McCann and his band appears to have translated well to live spectators throughout their stint across the nation.
“It took a while for us to build up a fanbase back in the UK. We’ve noticed that straight away coming over here, people can see we’re young and hungry and full of energy and people are waiting outside the venues at 11 in the morning to meet us.”
The unrelenting desire from McCann is palpable throughout, having been a core trait of many of his comparable predecessors where word of mouth and honest graft led the likes of Oasis and subsequently Arctic Monkeys to the summit, inspiring each respective generation to pick up a guitar. McCann poignantly alludes to the shared notion of the fledgling generation today by stating there hasn’t been a British band since Arctic Monkeys who have truly connected with the hearts and minds of the young.
“We want to be a career band, we want to be a band like Oasis and the Arctic Monkeys. I never had a Stone Roses at Spike Island or Oasis at Knebworth. I got to the Arctic Monkeys at Lancashire Cricket Ground, but they’re nearly in their 30s now. Who is going to be there for the next generation of 15-16 year olds?”
“We used to just go to gigs on the way back home from touring. We would try and sneak on the bill and if they wouldn’t let us on the bill we’d spark up a generator and wait for 5,000 music fans to come out and pass them demos. When everyone was still drunk or asleep in their tents at Leeds Festival we’d leave early and stick a CD on every car in the car park so when people are driving home after seeing all the bands they wanted to see they’d be like, ‘What’s this new band? Let’s stick this on’.”
The determined attitude coursing from each word spoken by McCann is reflected in the group as a whole, in their collective desire to be everything they believe they are capable of becoming. The band’s hard-coded urge to put on a show of controlled chaos each time they step onstage is reflective of the attitude of their Britpop heroes, something which McCann believes is a dying trait amongst the tired carousel of familiar festival and stadium headliners.
“If you dream to be a big band you’re always chasing something. We’re just normal lads who want to throw these massive parties for people. Muse and Foo Fighters are doing it but they’re all veterans, they’re so honed at what they do there’s not that kind of charm where people will look at us as a band who they can see down the pub on a Saturday night, there’s a sense of losing that desire and hunger.”
“I’ve not heard a band in so long that’s written a song about something. They don’t seem to be singing about everyday life. I felt like when I was listening to Mike Skinner from The Streets that I was on the phone to my best mate; he wasn’t writing songs like The Eagles did about driving a Cadillac into the sunset, he’d just be with his girlfriend rolling a spliff watching the footy.”
“Some lads at T in the Park were grabbing me saying ‘You’re our Stone Roses’. They’re the kind of people I want to make music for, not the people who are sat on Twitter talking about going to gigs and sitting there criticising things.”
As if to prove the band exist to create music which resonates beyond the beer swigging joviality found on the festival circuit, McCann goes on to convey how the strong sentiments raised in album tracks such as ‘Pacifier‘ can move their fans to extreme depths of emotions.
“’Pacifier’ deals with death. I’ve always been raised to just move on because people die. But this girl I was seeing was the opposite end of it; she had people die when she was very young and said she’d never had a band write a song which resonated with her like that, which is where the line, ‘You don’t how it feels to lose something you’ve never had and never will’, comes from.
The band are repeatedly hailed in the media, and by their most ardent of followers, as the true heirs to the throne of alternative rock. Guitar-based music, as opposed to the current reinvention shown in the rap scene, is repeatedly attacked as a stagnant genre, although McCann would argue there is still room for a band to enter the public consciousness.
“Kanye West talks some utter nonsense, but he writes good tunes and sells out stadiums and buys a swimming pool and probably does a running bomb into it from the top of his mansion. Oasis were the same, they’d always say they felt like they’d won the lottery! They were people who had hard times and escaped from it through music.”
It comes as little surprise that during McCann’s journey from the bottom rung to the top has resulted in a distancing from other bands he views as mere puppets of a music industry more preoccupied with vacuous image than making music. “The music industry is full of frauds. I found out some stuff about bands who lie about their age and get told to dress a certain way by their label. I thought that only happened in Spinal Tap! People do try and fuck you over. To think there’s bands out there who are willing to do that, basically they’re not in a band to make music or to make people happy; they’re actors.”
“I’m very proud of the way we came through and I’m guessing maybe it’s given me a bit of a chip on my shoulder,” he concludes. “It makes me want to excel past those people, we don’t moan when things are going on.
“We go, ‘If the stage sets on fire we’ll go out in a blaze’.”
Catch up with all of Live4ever’s coverage from the 2015 South By Southwest Festival at this link
“I found out some stuff about bands who lie about their age and get told to dress a certain way by their label”
Nothing new there, that’s how it’s always worked mate. Bill Wyman was told to knock 5 or so years off his age, Ian Stewart was relegated to studio session player/roadie because he didn’t look the part. John Lennon was told to say he was single when he had a wife and kid at home. All this ‘Oh it’s all about the music man’ crap. No it’s not, obviously the music’s got to be good, but there’s more to it then that.