Touring Oz Is 'A Holiday With Gigs Attached To It' For Catfish & The Bottlemen

When Catfish & The Bottlemen say they can’t wait to come back to Australia, it’s not just lip service. For the increasingly huge Brit rockers, their previous local tours have brought good times, wild shows and sweet memories. “Every time we get there it just feels like a holiday,” says guitarist Johnny ‘Bondy’ Bond. “A holiday with gigs attached to it. Great gigs."

“There was one festival we did, Falls [in 2016/7], in Byron Bay, and it got rained out,” recounts frontman Van McCann. “Just as we were about to walk on stage, we got told we can’t go on, because there was this torrential rain, comin’ right through the roof, onto drums and onto microphones and everything. So, we head back to the dressing room, and after half an hour we got a tap on the shoulder, sayin’, ‘The crowd’s still there.’ They’d stayed there the whole time. It was like they got even wilder. 

"As the weather got worse, they started enjoying it more. When we came out for what, a 20-minute set, they were just goin’ fuckin’ nuts."

“They were already as wet and a muddy as they were gonna get," Bond chips in, "so they just went apeshit, sliding down the hill in the mud. There was this crazy atmosphere in the air.”

For McCann, there’s also a personal connection. “Australian shows always mean so much to us,” he offers. “My folks got married over there, so it’s always a big thing to be able to ring home and be like, ‘Guess what, we’ve sold out Perth,’ or Sydney, or wherever it is.”

It’s a similar thrill to when Catfish & The Bottlemen get to play “back home”, McCann enthuses. “The [shows] close to where we all grew up, that’s always big. There was one [show] we played where it was 15 minutes away from my grandad’s house, up in Liverpool Arena. To do that for the family, with all of them there, that was amazing.”

“I remember when we got announced, last year, in Newcastle,” Bond offers, of his own hometown. “Doing a big outdoor one up there, aside from the guestlist being an absolute nightmare, once that was sorted, it was great. I’d look down the River Tyne, and know that I was playing for family and friends.”

Their latest Australian tour follows the release of the third Catfish & The Bottlemen LP, The Balance. The album builds on the sound minted on their 2014 debut, The Balcony, and polished on their second record, 2016’s The Ride: big riffs, rock’n’roll swagger, and a sound seemingly built to fill stadiums. With Jacknife Lee serving as its producer, The Balance was recorded in Grouse Lodge, a rural studio located in the Irish Midlands. “We knew we wanted to record it somewhere freezin’, ’cause we made the last one out in LA,” McCann says, with a laugh. 

The band lived at the studio, literally, while making the record. That didn’t feel entirely new: “We’ve never, like, live lived together, like, in a home, where we’ve gone out together to do the weekly shop,” McCann says, “but we’ve spent so much time together on the road.” Still, living in the studio together did cement a bond between them and colour the resulting record.

“It was a nice experience, to have that isolation,” says Bond. “It made the days have a certain nice quality, where you were either recording or just sat around chatting for hours. There was no Wi-Fi signal, no want or need for it. There was a beautiful simplicity to that, and it was an experience that bought us all closer together.”

“[We were] engulfed in it the whole time,” McCann says. “Our bedrooms were above the studios, so every day when you woke up, on your way to breakfast or whatever, you’d pass the studio, and get excited first thing. I think you can hear that excitement on the songs... We were just havin’ a laugh making it. There was never some bit where it was like, uhh, bangin’ our head up against a wall, can’t come up with something. The first thought that everyone was comin’ up with is what you’re hearing. 

"Recording is always a fun thing for us, because you know what’s coming at the end of it. You know you’re gonna get to play those songs for the people, live. You know you’re gonna get out there. So, you know how with [Bob Dylan’s] Blonde On Blonde you can hear the band’re havin’ a good time, they’re enjoying themselves, I think that [this] album sounds like one o’ those, to us. We sit around and listen to it and laugh our heads off about it.”

Part of the excitement of recording, for Catfish & The Bottlemen, is knowing that they’ll get to follow it up with touring. Where many musicians see touring as a grind, for this band it’s a joy. McCann remembers the early tours, as a teenager, “travellin’ to play maybe 20 minutes of music, for petrol money for the next gig”. And before he joined the band, Bond worked stacking shelves in a supermarket. So, no matter how big Catfish & The Bottlemen have gotten, they’ve managed to maintain perspective.

And they’ve gotten plenty big: The Ride debuted at #1 in the UK, and cracked the Australian top ten. Shows, in turn, have grown in size. This reflects that, unlike a self-effacing indie-rock outfit, Catfish & The Bottlemen are genuinely ambitious, openly harbouring biggest-band-in-the-world dreams.

“I don’t know why we’ve always been so ambitious, it’s just always felt natural to us,” McCann offers. “There’s always that feeling where, like, you’re going to America for the first time. And you’re lookin’ ’round, thinkin’: ‘Wait, we’re out here making music, and the reason that we got put on this plane was that song?’ The ambition comes from that. Like, you do something you’ve always dreamt of doing, and, then, there’s something else you see, like, there’s this arena across the road, and wouldn’t it be great to come back and do that? With what we’re doing, there’s so much to be ambitious about.”