cat on form started activity in winter 2001. dan and jamie are cousins and had been in bands together already, and my old band had just broken up. we decided to have a jam together after we'd kept seeing each other at i'm being good gigs around brighton. we first got together and played with dan and jamie's other cousin, mike, on drums, but that only lasted a couple of jams (cat on form is another classic example of the rock music industry standard "ongoing drummer change saga"). then we played around with a really cheap drum machine, we put in one really simple beat and made it go as fast as possible, we had some rough songs and played them out at a gig, and there we met eva who offered to play real drums again. so we jammed with eva and things really worked well and we did our first show as a 4 piece very soon after. we wrote songs pretty fast, probably because we wrote everything as a group so there were lots of ideas. no-one ever wrote a whole song (the closest we got to that was "blood drained" which was all eva and the rest of us played to fit her chords.)
with this line up we played a lot, recorded some bedroom stuff on 8 track and put out a 7" on vacuous pop and did a tour to support it. then we got approached by loads of idiots from the music industry, and a little later by southern who were pretty much the only label we liked or trusted. we technically signed to southern in february 2003, went to record our first (and only) album in april 2003, and released it in august 2003. that summer ended up a little different to how we expected, we had to postpone 2 tours over that summer because eva had some serious back problems, so we ended going for several months unable to play which kind of stalled our momentum a bit!
after various personal events late that summer eva decided to move to the USA, and after a short period of inactivity we decided to play some shows with ashley marlowe (from charlottefield) on drums. after that we asked tom barnes (from i'm being good and my previous band the oedipus) to play drums, and we started touring pretty hard that autumn. with tom we covered two UK tours, one mainland european tour and a tour of the USA. midway through our tour of the USA we wrote and recorded some new songs with this line up. we wrote some of it in a log cabin in manassas thanks to our friend becky and driver eric, then we finished writing it in philadelphia, where we recorded. we recorded in 3 days with steve roche from off minor, whose band we played with on the tour. steve was perfect for us because we liked recording live as much as possible (including vocals on many songs), and also he was very hands-off and let us do all the work and dictate how the recording sounded.
when we got back to england again it was time for tom to leave his post as drummer (we'd agreed to borrow him for 3 tours only), so we asked ashley again if he'd complete a UK and ireland tour - our longest one yet, and what turned out to be our final one. we got back from that tour in august, and decided (for various reasons) that we should end cat on form, so we played our last show on august 21st in our hometown. tom played drums for the last show. our intentions to finish the philly recordings in england and release it as our second album were dashed, so we have now released a 6song "mini-album" on southern of those songs. we think it's the summary of everything we were striving for and i'm glad we recorded it before we broke up.
cat on form was about honesty, communication, liberation, challenging yourself and others, speaking out, fucking with people, playing like there's no tomorrow, trying to make ourselves feel better, and mostly, about playing music we liked and believed in. sometimes we were good at these things and sometimes we weren't. thanks.
steve (december 2004). xx
the old biography can be read here