Cerys Matthews is back on track

By FIONA STURGES

It's a scene that wouldn't look out of place in The Waltons. Three wooden cabins with creaky verandas and crooked chimney stacks nestle in the middle of a leafy valley. All is silent, save the chirrup of crickets and the odd gurgle of a frog.

White's Creek, an exquisite rural retreat-turned-recording studio 32km outside Nashville, is where I find Cerys Matthews, former singer of the Welsh band Catatonia.

Matthews, 34, lives just three kilometres away with her new husband, the Nashville producer Seth Riddle, whose baby she is expecting.

The studio belongs to the musician Bucky Baxter, Bob Dylan's slide guitarist and the producer of Matthews' first solo album, Cockahoop, a gloriously stripped-down work that brings together American and British folk music, along with a handful of new songs penned by the singer herself.

It heralds a dramatic change of direction for Matthews, whose bawdy vocals on hits such as Mulder and Scully and Road Rage, from Catatonia's 1997 album International Velvet, made her the toast of the Britpop scene.

Here, raucous guitars are replaced by acoustic shades of mandolin, banjo and fiddle. Matthews' vocals are instantly recognisable, but rather than belting them out, for the first time she seems to be really singing. The instant you hear Cockahoop, you wonder why she never made it before.

Matthews talks in husky, almost whispered tones. She is warm and kind and giggly, although it is clear that she is deeply alarmed by interviews.

Whenever the conversation veers into difficult territory, most notably the final years with Catatonia, she stares wide-eyed at her feet and digs holes in the ground with her fingers.

Matthews was the ultimate party girl — boisterous, beautiful and bursting with joie de vivre. Her favourite T-shirt bore the words "fastrisinglagersoaked-riproaringpoptart", and she often arrived on stage clutching a bottle of chardonnay.

By the summer of 1999 rumours began to circulate regarding Matthews' state of mind, and her alcohol intake was beginning to worry the rest of the band.

The following year Catatonia recorded their last album, Paper Scissors Stone. They called it a day in September 2001. What made the band finally split?

"It was just wrong," she murmurs, picking at the grass. "It had been right all along, in the time and the place and the music that we were doing, but now it wasn't.

"I wanted to do something a lot more simple and intimate-sounding. I wanted to step away from the big chorus-driven songs. I just couldn't do it any more."

She says it was on a "romantic whim" that she settled in Nashville. "Everyone's a musician here," she says, suddenly smiling again. "It is full of atmosphere. The whole place seems to be drenched in song."

She came over to attend a songwriting convention but decided to stay and go on some road trips around Kentucky, Alabama and Arkansas.

On returning to Nashville she called Baxter and asked if he would help her to make an album of acoustic folk songs.

Baxter knew little about Catatonia although he had heard a demo of Matthews singing old folk tunes.

"I don't know why the heck he let me come," she laughs. "I listened to the tape recently and it sounded dreadful. But I think he got the gist of what I wanted to do."

The singer's affection for country and folk music goes back to her early childhood. When she was 9 she made her singing debut with All My
Trials, now the last song on Cockahoop.

She was sitting in a tent in her parents' garden at the time, but when she emerged it was to a standing ovation from her friends and family.

"I wanted to follow my favourite tunes and see if there were any remnants of them played here," Matthews explains. "At the beginning of the last century, musicians in the Appalachians swallowed a whole lot of Irish and Scottish tunes and that's how that fiddling thing came out of there.

"But a few Welsh ditties managed to creep over, too. When we were in the studio, me and Bucky found we had a lot of tunes in common."

Is there a degree of fear attached to making an album under your own name?

"When I saw the promotional copy of the album, there was my name across the front. I thought it was a mistake. But then I didn't want to hide behind anything any more. In a way I was glad to have the sole responsibility of the sound of the album, for it to have one clear voice."

- INDEPENDENT

* Cockahoop is released this week