cat on form
photo by greg neale
we're not sure entirely about a biography because they can be really boring affairs. i guess the point of a biography is to tell you a bit about the band so they make sense, so part of this is the (hi)story of us getting together, and the rest is things we think need saying so that cat on form makes sense.
cat on form started in december 2001 in brighton , england. we came together after our previous bands had just split up, jamie, steve and daniel got together and wrote some odd songs with a drum machine and played a show to around twenty people, eva was in the crowd that night and liked what we were doing, so she asked if we wanted a drummer. we said yes, so we all got together and wrote 3 songs in six hours and played a show the next day. the moment we all got together in a rehearsal room we realised that we clicked musically and that we shared many beliefs. once the inital momentum got going we just played a bunch of random shows around the country, and a new label called vacuous pop agreed to release a 7” of our stuff. we recorded it ourselves and did a short tour with the 7” in hand. we gradually got approached by more and more people from the music industry but we didn’t trust any of them, the one exception being southern records who had a history to prove what decent folk they were, and even better, put out some of the best records we owned. our first record for southern comes out in june and needless to say we are very happy to be working with people we like and trust.
photo by greg neale
we all feel really restricted and confused within our lives and music plays a massive part in helping us get out our hatred and love of this existence, so our music is about our lives and the world as we see it. our songs are about social change and taking control of your own life, we're inspired by people that have created there own path and challenged conventions in all aspects of our society.
people call us a “political” band which is true, but politics is often misunderstood as Politics : governments, laws, parties, -isms. but politics is not just something which is “up there” or academic, politics is life; the personal is political. so yes, some of our music is anti war or anti capitalism but it also concerns things like working shit jobs, like relationships between people...our music comes from our thoughts and feelings about living in a world which is not easy to live in. this may not be surprising but it seems to us that a lot of music out there seems to be about not much at all, or certainly nothing that we can relate to. with our music we want to establish the things which we feel are missing a lot of the time, we want to communicate and reach out to people, we want to talk about things that don’t get talked about enough, we want to make each other feel things and realise what we have in common.
photo by greg neale
with our music we hope to break down any artificial divides between us and our audience because that’s just a barrier to everyone understanding each other. we want people to take care of each other better, to listen to each other more and be more open about how they feel, and if we can inspire people to do that through our music then that’s a really positive step in our book. we also hope to inspire people to go out and do things : form their own bands, write fanzines, quit their jobs, smash corporations, question how their live their lives, take the time to really find out how other people feel. “hope” is an important word.