Catherine Wheel @ Manchester Hop & Grape, 13.2.98


button.gif (1533 bytes)
Back to
Lives

The bargain bin can’t be a nice place to spend your life. Rubbing shoulders with has-beens, could’ve-beens and never-ever-would’ve-beens, when you should at the very least be in the mid price section with a cigarette, a pint and some remaining integrity. Playing to static spectators in half empty clubs every night can’t be the most enlightening feeling either, especially when your past is largely critically commended and littered with ‘next big thing’ claims.

Musical chameleons Catherine Wheel are one of these bands. But, bless their little cotton socks, they keep battling on regardless. Despite only receiving the minimum amount of success as indie shoegazers and getting largely ignored as rock chomping guitar popsters, they’ve thrown caution to the wind and metamorphasised into a fully fledged Radiohead tribute band, just without the Radiohead songs. Well actually, without many songs at all by the looks of things.

Call me old fashioned, but I always expect a band to play quite a few songs at a gig. Some old, some new, some borrowed, perhaps some you don’t know. You wouldn’t blame me then for feeling disappointed that they just played the one. Okay, it was an hour and a half long, had all of these little gaps in it and they even went off for a break towards the end of it, but there’s epic and then there’s plain dull.

Alright, so there were times when I may have lightly tapped my foot, times when I even hummed along to something I thought I might have recognised, but by the end of the night I’d developed cramp from general lack of interest.

To give them some credit though, because they’re not all that bad, they do deliver with one hell of a passion. Singer Rob Dickinson performs like he’s got the devil inside his head and their lead guitarist doesn’t believe in playing his instrument with particularly nimble fingers. Image though, so we’re told, is everything, and when you can’t tell one action man style Catherine Wheel Bloke from the next you’re bound to have trouble establishing any kind of lasting celebrity status.

Poor old Catherine Wheel. If only they’d been born in another time, in another place, they could have been so much more. Like if they’d been born in Oxford at the start of the 90s for example. But they weren’t. Never mind.

James Berry