Dashboard!
This year, when we went to see Orla Gartland at the Albert Hall in Manchester, I decided to wear the tour shirt I'd bought at a gig I'd been to a couple of years before. I think I've mentioned before that I feel like there's a certain etiquette to wearing merch to gigs. Wearing merch for the band you are seeing is a flat no, at least from me; in the era I grew up that was a grave faux pas, and I'm too old to change my ways now. I do want to wear band merch to shows though, because as a result of seeing a lot of gigs and obsessively buying merch in order to assuage my guilt for still using Spotify as my primary means of delivering music to me on demand, 90% of my non-work wardrobe is now just a collection of t-shirts and hoodies procured from merch stalls over the last ten years. Like every insane, self-obsessed individual (I've written over 100 articles read by a dwindling collection of people without stopping, the diagnosis is not hard), I naturally assume everyone is paying attention to what I am wearing, so I try and pick something which might be a kind of silent recommendation, my "if you like this band, you might also enjoy the band who's merch I am sporting right now", like some kind of baffling human algorithmic recommendation. Rationally, I know this is never happening, but it doesn't stop me from doing it.
Walking into the Albert Hall, the cheery woman checking our ticket scans my phone, glances at my T-shirt, and smiles.
"CMAT", she says, pointing at the shirt as if I hadn't immediately internally celebrated her noticing what I was wearing. "What a babe." "She's great, isn't she." I smile back, and she waves us on in and hopes we have a nice night, while every hour I've spent looking for a shirt I knew I'd seen last week because it's what I should be wearing to tonight's gig is retroactively justified. When you're knocking on the door of fifty, you don't get to be cool very often. That night, CMAT made me cool for a fraction of a second.
Often, when I am talking about bands and musicians I care deeply about, I'm dredging through my dusty memory palace trying to figure out whether the remembrance I have of seeing a band on TV, or hearing them at a party was real or an age-soaked hallucination. In this case, what I have is live documentation, primary sources of the moment of inception.
I've known the target of this message, Stuart (and his partner Jenny, my far-more-talented musical co-conspirator), for some amount of time - somewhere between seven and ten years but lockdown has made my ability to judge any kind of near-term period of time extremely difficult. We kind of started as friends of friends and just ended up hanging around each other more and more, which has developed into a solid friendship in its own right. Stu can be prickly, easily annoyed at the state of the world and the people around him and is unafraid to voice those opinions. His slightly irascible nature hides the fact he has a heart of gold, cares deeply about his friends, loves spending time with them, and he has a talent for living life slightly at odds with what people would expect which means there's never a time when talking to him won't reveal something endearingly baffling or fascinating. He's also my cultural correspondent to the world of sport, and while I'm not really a football fan, through Stu's teaching I have developed at least a passing interest in the results of Rotherham United FC from the times we've spent together on the terraces while Stuart tries to invent new, more offensive epithets than have ever been conceived by man to direct at whichever Linesman happens to have been assigned to our side of the pitch. He's a good egg*, and his Twitter music recommendation (before we all absconded to a less Nazi-ish platform), and the WhatsApp message above led directly to my love of CMAT and her music.
I'm aware I'm like five paragraphs into this and haven't talked at all about the artist in question apart from in the vaguest terms, but thirty weeks into this project one of the many takeaways I have is you very quickly realise the process of describing music in text form runs out of non-repetitive ways of expressing itself. Every single music commentator is really just trying to find a way to gussy up the following sentiments "This is great and I love it and you should try it / This is good but perhaps it depends on your genre tastes / I'm not sure I like this / This is bad and here's why I think it's bad". So, let's be clear - CMAT's music is great and I love it. Now let me try and tell you why, with some vague descriptors and some personal experiences I've had linked to her music.
The thing that hooked me in on first listen, that made me want to stick around for more is, is the way her music writing so brilliantly tightrope-walks a line between genuine heartfelt feeling and self effacing humour. Each song is like a layer cake which can start with a upbeat, catchy groove, but then you go "wait, is she singing about having some kind of mental breakdown?", then you say "Man, that was a good lyrical one one-liner, maybe this was just a set up for a good joke" and by the end you're pretty sure it's not. Her confidence in her own self and value as a performer is captivating, and at its most compelling when she's using it to tell you how insecure she is. The point of comparison that jumped into my head I don't quite know how to articulate here is the way in which her music reminds me (in a vibes sense) of Amelia Demoldenburg's
Chicken Shop Date interview show which has a similar hyperconfidence/insecurity dynamic which works well. Maybe I'm just losing my mind.
Shortly after the WhatsApp exchange above, I told Catherine that we were going to see this show with Stuart and Jenny and that she should listen to If My Wife New, I'd Be Dead which I'd been mainlining all that week. I put it on in the car as we were driving somewhere, and my enduring memory is her spending the majority of her first listen through asking me why the album title was wrong. "It should have a K. Why doesn't it have a K on knew? Why would you be wrong on purpose?" She's come around to it know, but I know that secretly it still bothers her. I feel her reach for a red pen every time the album title scrolls across our in car music display. When we went to Scotland on holiday last year, we spent an entire day driving through the remote highlands on the way to Orkney, and with no phone reception, we were restricted to whatever we had downloaded onto our phones. As such, we spent around 6 hours listening to If My Wife New, I'd Be Dead and Crazymad, for me back to back and it was a delightful experience.
But as good as her studio albums are (and hopefully, I have conveyed to you now through my words that I believe them to be excellent), her live performances are a level beyond. I see a lot of shows, as my extensive band merch wardrobe shows, and the ones that stay with you, the ones that I can project myself back to in an instant because they are emblazoned into my recollection with their power exist on a separate tier from the rest. The Mount Rushmore of live performances, the Desert Island Discs of gigs. My list is pretty short - seeing Christine & The Queens do Chris at Manchester Apollo in 2018; seeing Tori Amos live for the first time, Nine Inch Nails at Glastonbury 2000, The Postal Service at All Points East, seeing The Eras Tour in Edinburgh last year, Faithless at The Foundry in 2002.
And this show, November 2023, seeing CMAT live at the Leadmill. The cynical part of my brain knows that sometimes she must be tired, sometimes she must just want to be anywhere else but performing again for the 30th night in a row, but there's no-one I've seen who seems like they love being in front of an audience than she does. She's enthusiastic, persuasive, charismatic and funny; her energy is infectious and the crowd are Here For It. She can make an audience do a reasonable approximation of a full-venue line dance just by asking, and when she finishes, you'll wonder if you ever had this much fun at a gig before.
This weekend we had the pleasure of seeing her again for the second time**, in a criminally short 30 minute set at the Tramlines Festival*** where the moderately sized tent was full beyond capacity and Catherine and I made sure to get there thirty minutes before her 4pm start time just to make sure we were somewhere in sight line of the stage. She has a new album due out at the end of August and the four songs released so far got a live airing and I'm not surprised to report that the whole crowd was totally into them (us included) and the audience loved her. In some ways this felt like a missed opportunity for the Festival, having her shuffled into a Sunday afternoon show when the crowd would have been there for a full set from her to close the festival, but I am sure people had their reasons. All it ended up doing was whetting our appetite for our upcoming CMAT gig at Sheffield Foundry in October when once more, Jenny, Stuart, Catherine and I will be enthusiastically jiving and singing along with every word.
She's exceptional, and if I've not been able to convince you with my words, here's my last ditch attempt. I've watched
this video of CMAT covering Wuthering Heights about 100 times since the algorithm served it up to me, and I still think it is incredible. If that video does anything for you, makes you even a little curious, take the time to listen to the rest of her work, she's a one of a kind.
CMAT. What a babe.
* This is somehow my highest level of praise for my platonic male relationships, and it means I admire them and think they're wonderful human beings. Being a repressed Englishman means that this translates into calling people a good egg like I'm some 1930's biplane pilot on their way to the village fete.
** Jenny and Stu flew to Germany shortly after we all saw CMAT in Sheffield and went to see her again in Cologne in an even smaller venue. I was very jealous.
*** I'm going to write a Tramlines wrapup as my wrapup this weekend I think but it was a weird few days which left me with great feelings about music and depressingly terrible ones about people.
