CATE LE BON: Devastation Frozen In Lava
An interview by Tim Gruar.
The last time Welsh multi-instrumentalist avant-pop artist Cate Le Bon was here it was just a year before the world shut down. The show was a complete sell-out. A triumph we later thought we might never see again, from any international artist. But thanks to loosening restrictions the opportunity for live shows has opened up again.
And now she’s returning to our shores for two headline dates in June. Performing with her five piece band these gigs will be an absolute treat for her fans. Her inventive and innovative approach to song writing and spellbinding stage presence will make these shows un-missable.
Despite worldwide lockdowns Cate’s still been crazy busy finishing her swoon-inducing new album ‘Pompeii’. Over her career, she’s released six solo studio albums, three EPs (including one in Welsh) and a number of singles and toured with artists such as diverse as St. Vincent, Perfume Genius and John Grant.
Barely able to contain his excitement, self confessed fanboy Tim Gruar had a one on one (via Zoom) to chat about her new album, which she’ll soon be touring.
Hi, where am I calling You?
I’m back home in Joshua Tree, California.
That’s quite a change from Wales, Europe, the UK. When I think of places like that, the Mojave Desert, I think of Mexican music, bands like Calexico, desert blues….
Ohh, you know, I like the idea of taking yourself away somewhere. Where you can kind of stick yourself with any idea of, I guess anything that exists outside of what you’re making, you know. And so that’s quite achievable in the desert. When I was recording, I was looking for place to go. A place that was removed. But I ended up ended in Wales because the pandemic.
In fact, that was (Super Fury Animals’) Gruff Rhys’ house, your old flatmate from 20 years ago?
Yes, a terrace house in Cardiff, a place of rain and grey clouds …I wanted a place that was not particularly compatible with reality but then I ended up there. I suppose housebound in a pandemic is a removal from reality of sorts. But it was also a kind of ‘deviation’. It was a familiar place, where I’d checked in over 20 years ago, and now I was back. And so, it was, you know, familiar in ways that were kind of freaking me out a little bit. Especially, when the perspective of time is already being played with because of the pandemic.
All of a sudden, you know you’re gonna call out the wrong name at the bottom of the stairs. A kind of ghost? You know, where everything is and how the house kind of breaths at night, and all the different sounds that you are still very familiar with, even though it’s been 15-20 years. It was all the same. Yeah. Some queer type of time travel, you know.
It must have been. Did you find yourself falling into the old habits that you might have had when you lived at that house – hard student drinking, loud music, bad food choices, never doing the laundry..?
Ohhh. Good God. No! [Laughs] Yeah, probably. Yes, we’re grown-ups now! [Laughs]
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I was listening to your 2016’s ‘Crab Day’ and 2019’s ‘Reward’ and then Pompeii. There’s a very different sound between them? ‘Crab Day’ has, like this ‘indie guitar sound’ but the new one reminds me of a lot of that kind of 80’s new wave, like Ultravox or Depeche Mode?
There’s ‘Reward’, which was my transition, I guess, between the two.
Yeah, you figure out what you like and what you don’t and what you liked about the process, when making each record and build on that. For me I explore sounds. It all starts in a studio and ends there, too. I’m just working away, no panic, not constrained by studio time and there’s just less people involved. I’m mainly working with one person (in this case co-producer Samur Khouja), someone you really trust and has the same mentality as you do towards music and towards the process of making music.
‘Pompeii’ became a much more streamlined version of how ‘Reward’ was made. But much more layered. It’s different but it just flowed naturally from ‘Reward’.
I read a review in the New Yorker that referred to the lines from the first song on ‘Pompeii’, calling them a ‘Dada-ist collage’. Specifically, the lines “What you said was nice, when you said my face turned a memory” and “What you said was nice, when you said my heart broke a century.” Is that a fair analysis of the writing on this album. You do like to create abstract images with the lyrics?
I mean…I don’t know. I don’t really read reviews. But, I think there is some truth in that. I love Dadaism. I love the ambiguity and absurdity. It’s how we are connecting these days. It’s digital, Instagram and that, but also kind of surreal, abstract, fragments, absurd. I think there’s a lot more. Being definitive, acquisitive language – especially in the time when you know everything is so unsure. And finding hope. You know, like the Cabaret Voltaire, creating something really hopeful and joyous in a time of absurdity and chaos. Finding those moments in a time of mayhem, it’s beautiful.
You are referring to the current times – Trump, Ukraine, Brexit, Covid?
Yeah, the sickness in society. There’s a bit of duality there going on between that darkness and the hope. That’s what artists must do. Even in these overwhelming times you know, and it brings a lot of existential dread.
In the early, dystopian days of the Covid 19 pandemic, you received an unexpected gift – a painting of a female figure. It was stoic, saintly, in possession of a quiet power. It was made by your partner, artist and musician Tim Presley. It became the album cover, too.
He’d created in a flash of inspiration. That’s a photo interpretation of that painting. Tim was painting all the time when we were working on the record and one day he kinda came in with this thing that didn’t exist in the morning and by the afternoon did exist. It was this image of a woman that kind of possessed so many powers.
There was this kind of the tension in between something, I don’t know what. You know, it could articulate all these complicated feelings. It was ancient, but sometimes more futuristic – there was something religious but stoic, like you say. Something healing, but something kind of disruptive about it was all these things. It’s an interpretation of that. You know, the painting is absolutely one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen, you know.
You and Samur Khouja used this artwork as inspiration for the musical ambience of the album?
We did. The striking colour scheme that guided our (musical) palette.
The dualities – shade and hue, light & dark, hope and fear, existence and loss?
Yes indeed.
Now, now you’ve explained it – that makes total sense because the theme goes all the way through. A lot of album covers, you see them and you think “What’s that got to do with the music?”
The artwork, you know, Tim was also so connected. He’s like another member of the band.
The album has some beautiful, strange, ambiguous lyrics. I just wanted to go through a few. So, can you help me understand ‘French Boys’? There’s a reference in there to the artificiality of wedding rituals. “I caught a plastic bouquet / Down the aisle / With a sad sashay / Some noise / About / Some noise”. Please, explain….
Not my strong point, deciphering my own writing. I mean, there’s things that you attach to yourself, OK. You want without questioning them. There’s the fragility, but of what? Yeah, how tenuous kind of all these things that we think we’re button or we think so that we attach to ourselves in a in a way, to have some kind of identity or tribe or status.
I love the description you give about why you chose ‘Pompeii’ as a song and album title.
Yeah, it’s a kind of reference to how somebody’s private moments is being captured, literally in lava. Frozen, for us to now see, study, analyse, criticise, make assumptions.
Yeah. Have you been to have you been to Rotorua? At Lake Tarawera there’s an entire Māori village buried and excavated after a devastating eruption. It’s now a tourist venture.
You know, it’s a complicated thing. Who owns that narrative? Who has the right to assume what they see, with these people in the lava? It challenges your perspective of time. It’s confronting, seeing that permanence of someone’s final moments. Confronting these essential mysteries and putting your own pain onto these individuals.
Pompeii is the same, a tourist venture and an archaeological site. I think, perversely, that it’s like a playground for human fascination, even though you know it’s a place of tremendous devastation. It’s a connection with our own mortality, you know. You can draw comparisons with our current times. We have complicated feelings now that we’re emerging from this strange abstract time.
What will people in the future think when they excavate this time and look at our historically petrified bodies. What assumptions will they make?
I know you love playing with language and your first album was entirely in Welsh. Are you thinking of going back to doing some more work like this?
I don’t know. Really it’s different. A different style, that doesn’t really translate. And the Welsh language is my first language alongside English. However, for whatever reason, I find it a totally different process to write in a Welsh ‘feel’. Song writing is connected to what I’m saying, and I find that easier to articulate in English. It’s something that I should probably work on, though!
In Aotearoa, we’ve been going through a bit of a journey, re-connecting with Te Reo, Te ao Māori, the whenua and whakapapa. Is that something you do, as a Welsh citizen living abroad. Do you take that desire with you? Does it come through in your work? Writers often need to go abroad to awaken that feeling of home.
There’s a failure of the things that really matter, and no accounting system for them. How do we measure loss? So, individual cultures just morph into the greater, wider homogeny. If you don’t work on it, then individual cultures will see demise.
We had some backlash from reviving the Welsh language because people were looking at acceptance in the whole of the UK, forgetting that it’s OK to be Welsh, too. In Wales we can speak Welsh. What’s wrong with that? That makes us unique. Our identity is connected and integral to that. Why should others question us? They don’t need to speak Welsh if they don’t want to. But its part of us.
So true. We, in Aotearoa are starting to realise that it’s the language, te reo, that holds the key to identity and culture.
It’s strange when you leave somewhere you can have a different perspective on your culture. You look back at how it’s connected to a place. I go to America and speak so differently. I stand out, speak a language that is so foreign to them that they didn’t even know existed. I have an accent, the one Welsh person in the desert! But that’s OK, too. Here I need to work on those long distance friendships back at home. Memories become sharper, holding on to them like a treasure. It gives you the perspective to look at the life and culture you left but still feel connected to.
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I want to ask you about the song ‘Moderation’, from the new album, which I believe was inspired by a 1958 essay by Lina Bo Bardi (the Italian-born Brazilian modernist architect, who spent most of her life in Brazil, promoting the social and cultural potential of architecture and design). How did you come across her writing?
Yes, while it was written in 1958, it’s still so pertinent now. I’m always studying design.
Yes, that’s right. You’ve also made furniture and pottery.
Yes. Her essay was in a collection of her writings about architecture and furniture. Bo Bardi designed one of my favourite chairs. She writes more about the impacts of architecture than just design. How we interact with buildings and how they work, or don’t for us. It’s a philosophy.
The conversation has opened up between science and technology and the human capacity to think. You know, how we grow and connect with people. I think our relationship with buildings has changed since the pandemic because we were forced to stay indoors more and more and re-assess those spaces.
It’s interesting you say that. I’ve just been reading a book about Wellington’s architecture and it celebrates a lot of ugly brutalist designs. With time the greenery has moved in and softened these. You can appreciate them more now, their contrasting lines and colours. And in some cases, the office blocks have changed to apartments.
Yeah, it’s kind of cool. People are always re-inventing and changing buildings to suit their needs.
Do you think this happens with music? Your music?
Oh, yes. I’ve been asked if I can give permission for songs to be in adverts. I’m not against the idea of them being appropriated, re-interpreted. Once an album is out there, you can’t control that. But I will say ‘no’ if the song doesn’t fit my morals, code, standard or it just seems wrong. I have limited control. Sometime people just don’t know what the song is about and why it won’t work. Like, I find it funny that ‘Perfect Day’ is played at weddings.
OK. Yeah. You mean the references to drug use, Reed’s sarcasm, the depressing nature of the music, etc. Do they realize what it actually means?
Ah, well maybe, we can’t stop that. But hey, why not?
It’s been wonderful talking to you and we’re really looking forward to seeing you. Who’s coming with you? Is it just you or someone else?
The whole band! I’m just really happy that I can bring the whole thing down there.
That’s gonna be so cool. We’ve really missed you. Seriously, missed you. Live bands, everything. All right.
Thank you so much. Wonderful.
Cate Le Bon is performing two intimate shows in New Zealand next month alongside Vera Ellen. She will be performing at Meow in Wellington on the 4th June and at the magnificent Hollywood Avondale Theatre in Auckland on the 5th June. Tickets to both shows are still available from susiesays.co.nz but get in quick as these will sell out!
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