Chris Catalyst – Eureka Machines – Uber Rock Interview Exclusive
Written by Ben Hughes
Sunday, 03 May 2015 03:00
With several Uber Rock writers already pencilling Eureka Machines’ new album ‘Brain Waves’ high in their Albums Of The Year lists Uber Rock caught up with main man Chris Catalyst to get the lowdown on the new album, PledgeMusic, and what it means to be a truly independent artist. You may also get an idea what the immediate future holds for the man and his funny little band.
Hey Chris, first off congratulations on the release of ‘Brain Waves’, it’s a bit of a corker. Were you surprised at the response to the Pledge campaign and at how quickly you reached your target?
Thank you. I was massively surprised. We set the financial bar higher this time – mainly as we had a DVD to produce as well – and as such I thought it would trickle to its target. But once again the people who support what we do got behind it in a huge way. We have a lot to be grateful to those people for.
Eureka Machines are one of the few bands to truly embrace the PledgeMusic platform, giving fans all sorts of bonus material including an EP of covers, a live album and a competition. Do you think your experiences with the ‘555%’ project and ‘Remain In Hope’ have turned you into the ultimate Pledge band?
I wish there wasn’t such a thing, I wish all bands would treat the people who keep them in business this way. The four of us are fans of music, fans of bands, and so we just try to do things the way we would like it if we’d bought it. I look back at some of the stuff we’ve done during our two Pledge campaigns and think… ‘yeah, that was pretty fun actually!’
It’s easy to get bogged down in it all sometimes – I never started a band to be sitting here packing CDs and t-shirts into envelopes – but this is just what it means to be an independent musician nowadays. Either I do it, or I pay someone else to do it… so I do it.
We are living on our wits and I know time will be kind to us. People are starting to see through the dinosaurs who won’t stop for 20 seconds for a picture or a chat. It should not be a privilege to be treated well by a band that you invest your money into.
Social media and PledgeMusic seem to bring band and fans together, there’s a real sense of community. Is it safe to say Eureka Machines wouldn’t be around if it wasn’t for PledgeMusic?
I’m not sure I’d go that far, but before the last album there was a definite feeling of ‘last roll of the dice’. We managed to get a lot of goodwill going, and that has sustained the band for the past two records and tours. And Pledge – or rather crowdfunding – has been a big part of that.
We were doing crowdfunding type stuff before the Pledge website came along – selling pre-order bundles of albums and shirts and so on – but what PledgeMusic have done is harnessed a lot of things at the same time and put them all together in a neat little package.
It’s not without its drawbacks and I think they’d do well to put a slightly more grown-up version of it together, for bigger bands who are looking at crowdfunding but maybe feel that a financial target and/or the whole ‘fan access’ thing is a bit much. It works very fantastically for us, though.
‘Brain Waves’ is a bit of a departure for the band. On the surface there’s different artwork, dig deeper and lyrically you explore themes of alienation, paranoia and the daily struggles of life. Was this a definite direction you intended to follow when you set out to write the album?
Yes, absolutely. It’s something I don’t particularly like talking about, for a million and one reasons, I’m generally a bit closed and private when it comes to my personal life. I don’t relish some of the people close to me reading this kind of stuff. I’m not really what you’d call an open book.
But I, like many other people, have had all sorts of issues throughout my life. The difference now being that now I feel like I’ve come out of it all the other side a bit, and as such, I wanted to share some of my thoughts, feelings and experiences through music. Now, that sounds a bit wank, but I was lucky to find comfort in tons of music throughout my teens and my twenties, and I feel that if the music that I write can be of similar comfort, then I’ve done ‘A Good Thing’. I’ve had more than a few emails since the album came out telling me as much, which has been immensely gratifying.
Being a person is fucking hard graft sometimes, but it doesn’t have to be. And music can help. Music can REALLY help.
I hear all sorts of influences, but mostly I hear ’90s Brit Rock all over your music. Bits of The Wildhearts, Honeycrack on to Mansun and Silver Sun. I must say I am loving ‘The Golden Lonely’ it has more of a modern rock twist to it, like Mansun meets Young Guns. It’s all so anthemic and effortless. Was the writing/recording process as effortless as you make it feel?
Thank you. I don’t know Young Guns, but have had a few people mention them to me.
I’ll let you into a little secret. The writing of this album was a lot easier than it has been in the past, because for the first time in my life I allowed myself to think ‘Actually, you’re not too shoddy at this songwriting lark, you know’. Once you have the courage to think you are good at something, suddenly it becomes a thing that you do, like making a sandwich. And as soon as you know the sandwich is going to be at least passable, you find yourself making them all the time.
I think I know now more what I want from the music I do, which makes it easier to know what it SHOULDN’T be, as well.
Are you judgemental of your music. Would you listen back to ‘Brain Waves’ in a few months and say, ‘Yeah I would’ve changed this or that’?
I’ll probably never listen to it ever again now that it’s out. Occasionally a track pops up and I will enjoy it. A funny thing happened the other day actually, I went round to see my dad and he had some music on, I found myself thinking ‘this is pretty good, I like this, what is it?’ and it was a track off Ginger’s 555% album that not only did I play on, but I had a hand in writing too.
Every now and then a song I’ve done pops up somewhere and I can usually enjoy it for what it is. I had Radio Leeds on the other day and they played the song ‘Do Or Die’, which was fun to hear (but really fucking fast).
The album ‘Brain Waves, but the song ‘Brainwaves’… explain please?
There was a brilliant reason for this, which I remember thinking was hilarious, and really clever, but sadly – and honestly – I’ve forgotten what it was.
The ‘Remain In 80s’ EP was a fantastic idea and sounds great. Any plans for a follow up?
Ha ha, that was a fun and happy accident. I love doing stuff like that, again the idea is to cover something in a way which you would love to hear pissed up in a club or something. I’d love to do Remain In 80s Part Two, and I’d love to do a series of them – Champion The 60s, The Story Of My 70s, you get the picture.
I saw you do A-Ha’s ‘Take On Me’ acoustic last year at The Fulford Arms, that’s a hard song to pull off, right?
Oh God, I hated that gig, Chris the landlord is a great bloke and a good mate but he got me accidentally drunk. It’s one thing to find yourself drunk on stage at a gig where there’s drums and amps and so on but when it hits you half way through your set, there’s only you and you don’t even really have a stage it’s quite difficult to handle.
‘Take On Me’ is not easy to play (or sing), but it’s such a brilliant song, plus everyone secretly loves it. A-Ha have got some corking stuff, you know.
As chief songwriter and decision maker, do you find it difficult going into another project where you are not in charge?
Not at all, as I mentioned before, being an independent musician involves a huge slice of living on your wits and if you allowed your ego or power trip or whatever to get in the way then you would find yourself stacking shelves in Tescos before the end of your audition. (Not that there’s anything wrong with stacking shelves in Tescos. Or, particularly, egos and power trips, but they don’t bode well for working with other people, which I am generally pretty keen on doing.)
The other guys in the band have jobs and you have various projects, where does Eureka Machines sit with you in terms of priority?
It’s a really difficult one, because all four of us want to do the band, and everyone wants us to crack on, but I can’t very well say to the dads in the band ‘we’ve got a six week tour of Europe supporting so-and-so and we’ll be dossing on sofas and you’ll go home two stone lighter with £30.’ So it’s only ever really going to be what it is, which is actually absolutely fine with us.
I’ve seen a million people in bands aspire towards some imagined chance of ‘success’, and I’ve seen 999,984 of them fail. What is success if you’re not doing stuff on your own terms, answering to no-one, carving out your own niche and having a massive doss while you’re doing it?
Anyway…
Ultimately I am a professional-ish musician, playing for various other musicians, which has been very quiet recently, with a sideline in working as a backline tech for various bands, which has been very fucking quiet recently. I do need to start thinking about what I do next, because asking the lads to do much more work than they are doing might make them resent doing it. It has to be fun, nobody is getting fat off this, so there is a balance to be struck.
I do want to do a solo album this year, which I’ll put out next year, and inevitably I’ll end up asking/coaxing Dave, Pete and Wayne from EM to get involved in some way with that. We’re mates, we have a laugh, and we have a good musical shorthand with each other. Barring some major fallout, country move or new drug habits, none of which I can see coming, anyway.
In your last interview with Uber Rock you said you saw Eureka Machines as a three album band, now that number 4 has been released where do you go from here. How long can you continue at this level?
I think we’ll carry on regardless really. The ‘three albums’ thing was just because I pigeonhole certain things in my mind, which is sometimes cool, and sometimes you paint yourself into a corner a bit with it. It would be mad to not disagree with yourself sometimes!
With the music industry in meltdown and low gig attendances, how does it feel to have achieved what you have done as a DIY band?
It feels fantastic to have achieved what we have just by doing our thing. However, let’s be realistic now, we still do gigs for next to nothing, and no-one really makes any money doing this. This album campaign has been way more than a full-time job for me, I’ve been working 18 hour days on it since November, and I’ll be very lucky to take half of what would be minimum wage for that work once the money is in.
It’s just about sustainable, but it’s not as if I can afford a car, or fancy holidays or whatever. I would love for us to be able to take this a bit more overground, and make people realise that there IS an alternative to the Starbucks Rock that they’re pedalled by the mainstream, and I would love it if the four of us didn’t have to work at other jobs so that we could concentrate on making music and pushing that.
None of this is a complaint, by the way. I love it. I know I am massively lucky, but I’ve worked very fucking hard, as well.
I was at the Brudenell gig, I reviewed it. I’ve not seen the DVD yet but it was a legendary gig for me. It felt like I was at a much bigger gig than it actually was, there felt like some real magic in that room. How was it for you?
It was amazing, it felt like a load of things had come together at the same time and was a total celebration of all the stuff we’ve done over the past however many years it is. I was reviewing footage with Ash (from the fantastic AshTV, who put the whole thing together) and I lost count of the number of times I got goosebumps watching it back. And every single time was from an audience shot – someone singing along with a big smile on their face, a couple with their arms around each other swaying and beaming, a gang jumping up and down, people lost in a moment, living for that second. THAT is why we do this. The audience is part of this band just as much as the four of us, we live for that kind of stuff. And to do it at our home venue was lovely too.
I live in York and see our own acoustic troubadour Daniel Lucas from Boss Caine playing regularly. He’s one of the hardest working musicians I know. You guys have some history right, weren’t you in rival punk bands back in the ’90s?
Oh man, I hated that then and I hate that now. I know this is a just throwaway comment with no ill-meaning, but I always hated that ‘band rivalry’ stuff, I could never understand it. I have been in bands longer than I care to remember and it was always dead embarrassing when you turn up at a new venue and the other bands would be sneering at you over their pint glasses during soundcheck, and, a few years later, sneering at you over an internet messageboard or whatever. That’s always utterly baffled me. Music should be a celebration, not a competition.
I like Dan a lot, he’s a good bloke and I think he does really good stuff, and I liked the band that he was in at the time, but I think there’s a time and place for that kind of bullshit band rivalry stuff, and that time is 1998 and that place is an anachronistic ‘battle of the bands’ in York.
Have you heard the rather excellent Brawlers album yet, you have some local competition there?
I love Brawlers, I’ve been on about them for ages to anyone who would listen, and got them on with us at the Leeds DVD gig. Again, it always strikes me as weird when people think you wouldn’t talk those bands up, they’re getting loads of press now and it could only be a good thing for us all if they were to sell a load of records. Their album is great, top raucous pop.
CD, Vinyl or MP3 junkie?
I am a song junkie. Doesn’t matter to me if it’s on a CD, an mp3 or a clockwork music box cat figurine. I think there’s a lot of guff talked about formats, a lot of it is just snobbery. I can get as much enjoyment hearing ‘The Air That I Breathe’ by The Hollies on Magic 828 (Leeds medium-wave radio station) as I can listening to Burial on my fuck-off studio speakers.
What album do you own that might surprise your fan base?
I wear my heart on my sleeve really, I don’t believe in ‘guilty pleasures’, again, it’s just snobbery/elitism. I like TONS of different stuff. This week has been about ‘So’ by Peter Gabriel, the new Brawlers LP, Sleaford Mods and ‘Any Minute Now’ by Soulwax.
What current artists/albums are you into, any recommendations?
I am always seeking out new stuff, but at the same time, like most people, I’ve got some big gaps in my record collection. I never really got into Neil Young, for instance. And I’m pretty sure that ‘Harvest’ or ‘After The Gold Rush’ are going to be better than whatever’s on the front cover of the NME or Kerrang this week. So, while keeping my ear to the ground, I’m not slavish to new music. I try to keep up with new stuff while filling the gaps from the past.
Recent stuff I’ve really loved has been Everything Everything (fantastic frenetic weird pop, although I’m less keen on the most recent album), Max Tundra (amazing glitch pop), Kacey Musgraves (brilliant country pop). You’ll pick up that I listen to a lot of pop stuff. I like a hook.
You mentioned Sleaford Mods – I’m in two minds about them. The live music lover in me says a guy pressing play on a laptop with a beer in his hand is a big turn off, but then I hear a song like ‘Tied Up In Notts’ and I think they are the most punk rock thing of the moment.
I’ve been banging on about them for ages, since my mate Neil (from Kleine Schweine – brilliant Leeds politico punk – look them up) told me about them, and it’s brilliant to see more people picking up on it.
It doesn’t matter to me that it’s a guy with a laptop, or an acoustic guitar, or a French horn, or one of those plastic windpipes you swing around your head. Does it make you smile? Does it make you cry? Does it make you think? Most importantly, does it make your arse shake?
Whether you like them or not, it’s challenging the norm, which can only be a good thing. We’re talking about it now, which is a good sign.
So I guess we can expect some further touring from Eureka Machines in 2015 but as Eureka Machines is not a full time concern, what happens next for Chris Catalyst?
Next? I don’t know, is the honest answer. I want to do that solo album at some point, so I’m going to do some writing for that over the next few months, I’ve some great and mad ideas for it.
I’ve actually found myself applying for some jobs recently. The past decade I’ve managed to survive solely off playing and backline teching (my other job is as guitar tech for various bands, from Skid Row to Ugly Kid Joe to Maximo Park to the Pigeon Detectives and back again… whoever will have me, really), but both playing and teching have been somewhat fallow this year. That’s been fine, as I’ve had the EM album to concentrate on, but that’s not going to keep me going for the rest of the year.
I think I’ve got something to offer at colleges which teach kids about music, obviously the playing side is just one bit of it (which I couldn’t teach in a million years!), but nowadays everyone has to think that little bit harder about how they get their music out there and how they can make enough cash/save enough cash to sustain it. I’d like to think I’ve worked out a few ways of doing that, and think it’s stuff we should all share (the knowledge… not the cash).
The constant hustle of music and work and bands is starting to wear me out, and I have to say I fancy a change. I am sick of being let down and messed around – my dad, a time-served joiner who has worked in construction since forever, finds the stories of flakiness I tell him incredible (in the literal sense of the word). He works in a world where people say they are going to do something, then do it, and do it to the best of their abilities. I quite like that idea.
There’s talk of doing another album with Ginger and Jon Poole and Denzel next year, if we can collaborate our schedules, which would be fun. We’d make it a proper band effort with us all writing and contributing. Some of the best creative experiences I’ve had have been with those three, doing ‘Time’ on the 555% album, or ‘Hot Piss’ for Ginger’s GASS project, or loads of the stuff on ‘Albion’. So that could be very cool. We have a good musical shorthand, we push each other, and we make each other laugh, which is most of the battle. But everyone’s very busy these days… fingers crossed for that one.
I have an inexpensive lifestyle… Ideally, I’ll continue to forge a path making my own music, with Eureka Machines, by myself, with some new and interesting people – as well as some old and interesting people too, ha ha – and doing bits on the side so I don’t have to worry too much about the rent. That’s the dream, right?
[Photo kudos to Neil Chapman]
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