Catherine Wheel - Shoegaze for export

When, in the very early 90s, Catherine Wheel released their first EPs and the magnificent Ferment, slotting them into the noisy shoegaze pile was, for critics, a natural and obvious choice. They were, moreover, courted by Creation – Alan McGee, a man who certainly knows his shoegaze, would have done anything to add them to his roster. Indeed, the earliest output of the Great Yarmouth band screams shoegazing in every reverb-drenched note: it's all there, the feedback-stuffed guitars ready to charge headlong into the void, an ethereal vocal lost in the din, a strong leaning towards the most aching interiority. Yet there were already hints that Catherine Wheel were not merely that. Even on Ferment, Rob Dickinson's voice was far more full-bodied and sensual than those of his fellow gazers, just as the guitars of the frontman himself and Brian Futter were much less evanescent than the genre's average, not shying away, for instance, from hints of solos and sturdier rock structures. Even the song titles flaunted greater concreteness, at least compared to the vapor trails of Ride or the gentle breezes of Slowdive.

Chrome's muscular riffs shed further the rough shoegaze patina that had defined the band's sound up to that point; at the same time, the group began to look with interest not only toward grunge, but toward all the harder-edged trends of American alternative rock of the era. That label would be definitively shaken off Catherine Wheel's forehead with 1995's Happy Days, where shoegaze was by then the least relevant ingredient in their formula. A couple of years later, Adam And Eve would uncover a whole new pot of influences never before heard from the band, the most obvious of which is certainly the ever-present Pink Floyd. Catherine Wheel's fourth album, however, would also contain some of the most radio-friendly songs the band ever released.

Another distinguishing element – perhaps a bit of a stretch, but worth suggesting – between Rob Dickinson's band and the rest of the shoegazers is the band's refusal, at least for the time being, to join the reunion circus – or comeback, given that they never officially broke up – that the genre has been caught up in over the past few years.

After all, Dickinson, who has since relocated to California, seems determined to devote himself full-time to Singer Vehicle Design, the company he founded and runs, through which he personally restores vintage cars, with a particular fondness for Porsches. Which, honestly, isn't that much of a surprise, given the constant references to engines and chrome found throughout the songs on every Catherine Wheel album.

Every now and then, though, Rob still indulges in a solo outing – he's even released an album – so never say never.

1990 – 1992: from Brian Futter's bedroom to the shoegaze pantheon

As numerous interviews attest, Rob Dickinson's dream had always been to start a rock band. The same dream shared by thousands of kids, especially in the late '80s, but made all the more inevitable when you have a cousin named Bruce – yes, that Bruce Dickinson. And so Rob and his close friend Brian – Futter – very quickly began forming numerous projects, joining others already in existence, and so on.

In no time at all, bouncing from one band to another, the pair ended up playing around Great Yarmouth and the surrounding area practically every weekend. Things got more serious when the two, while part of Ten Angry Men, met Neil Sims, who would go on to become Catherine Wheel's drummer. The chemistry between the three was immediate and remarkable, so all that was missing was a bassist, whom the lads found in the most classic way possible: by putting up a flyer around venues and record shops. It was 1990, and the flyer required that the bassist in question count Stone Roses, Ride and, naturally, My Bloody Valentine among his influences. Among the various candidates, Dave Hawes won out, and he would remain part of the lineup until 2000, the year Wishwille was released – the band's final album, for the recording of which he was replaced by Ben Ellis.

By the time Hawes joined the group, the band had already recorded a number of songs; still amateurish material, cut in Futter's bedroom with the help of a single eight-track recorder, but enough to attempt a handful of live dates here and there. What was still missing was a name, and the choice soon fell on Catherine Wheel. The moniker, which evokes both a brutal medieval torture device and a well-known firework, was suggested by Rob Dickinson almost on the spur of the moment, but it instantly struck a chord with every member. There's an intriguing, if unconfirmed, theory that the choice of this name points to a further connection with Iron Maiden, another band inspired by a notorious instrument of torture.

The band's rise was meteoric. After their first show, not far at all from Great Yarmouth, came their first record deal, with the independent label Wilde Club Records. The promoter of that night, held at the Arts Centre in Norwich, was also the head of WCR, and after barely a couple of songs he had no doubts: Catherine Wheel deserved a contract. The band recorded two EPs for WCR, She's My Friend and Painful Thing, both dated 1991. Thanks to a champion like John Peel, who not only played the tracks on repeat but invited the lads onto his show for a storming Peel Session, the two EPs gained enormous visibility. After all that buzz, the labels interested in Rob and Brian's band were numerous, some of them quite attractive: Alan McGee's Creation, Brian Eno's Opal. In the end, though, it was Fontana Records – Philips's indie offshoot – that won out, and just a year later it would release the band's debut LP, Ferment.

Because of Wilde Club's less-than-cutting-edge resources, and also the lack of a seasoned producer's guidance, the songs on the two EPs, though powerful and clearly hinting at a great future, sounded rather crude and one-dimensional; so much so that noise-pop would be a more fitting term than shoegaze. Dickinson and his bandmates, however, were very attached to a few of them, so much that they decided to start precisely from reworking these tracks – "I Want To Touch You", "She's My Friend", "Salt" and "Shallow" – for their first full-length. Comparing the old and new versions of this quartet of songs is in fact an entertaining exercise, one that lets you gauge the sheer amount of work Catherine Wheel – not exactly the most polished of instrumentalists, at least not at the time – had to put in in the studio, pushed to the limit by the terrifying yet brilliant producer Tim Friese-Greene, the man who guided Talk Talk through what can be considered one of the most extraordinary evolutions in the history of pop music, but that's another story. The difference between pre- and post-Friese-Greene Catherine Wheel is enormous, and it shows just how much this producer's touch shaped not only the creation of the legendary sound of Ferment, but also the development of the four young musicians, who grew enormously in terms of method and skill.

From the very opening track, "Texture", Dickinson and Futter's guitars snarl and attack, bombarding the listener's senses without a moment's respite. They are so brutal and distorted that, letting your imagination run a little, you can almost picture a tower of amplifiers roaring such ferocity in your face. Yet the sound they produce is also blurred, impressionistic. When the picks aren't hammering away at the strings, that wall of sound seems almost to crumble, generating a melancholy haze in which Dickinson can let his anxieties, his anger, his fear echo. An inescapable sense of being crushed.

Especially when played at considerable volume – as shoegaze records always should be – Ferment has a devastating, almost physical impact, but behind its sonic clatter, elusive melodic glimpses can always be glimpsed. Ferment is practically the quintessence of shoegaze, the album you'd play to a newcomer to explain what the genre is all about, probably alongside only "Nowhere" and "Loveless".

The album's three singles – "Black Metallic", "Balloon" and "I Want To Touch You" – boosted the band's visibility in the UK, where they were immediately recognized as a cornerstone act of the scene. But they also proved a decisive push in the US, where "Black Metallic" was played on constant rotation on MTV and where the band would go on to undertake a triumphant year-long tour. Despite its scratchy, grainy sound, "I Want To Touch You" boasts a phenomenal melody and a refrain oozing palpable sensuality; while the seven minutes of "Black Metallic", thanks to a middle section where mood and torment are made to writhe and crawl before the final explosion, were destined from the start to become the zenith of their live shows. A few years ago, Pitchfork, in its shoegaze special, called the latter the "Stairway To Heaven" of the genre, a rather apt description.

The track where Friese-Greene's hand is most evident is, without doubt, the title track. The guitars drip with high, screeching notes, and tears; the drums, usually pounded by Sims with impetuous cruelty, are here brushed and covered in dust. It almost feels like stepping into one of the watercolors of "Laughing Stock", but danger lurks just around the corner. The mournful calm sketched out by the instruments is promptly and repeatedly swept away, streaked and disfigured by murderous riffs armed with feedback. Even more distinctive and well-realized are the guitar parts on "Flowers To Hide", where the Fender strings are made to buzz like a swarm of bees, and on the more subdued "Indigo Is Blue", introduced by a tunnel of white noise.

Some moments on Ferment are truly breathtaking, but what makes it a masterpiece is also its monolithic cohesion, the fact that every single track on it is irreplaceable, impossible to remove without undermining the whole vision.

1993 – 1995: the “American” phase

There's no point beating around the bush: Catherine Wheel's debut is also their best record. But the band's stubborn, unstoppable urge to change and explore new sonic territory, which they displayed with almost every new release, made the rest of their career just as intriguing and essential. Starting with the follow-up, Chrome, an album many point to as the peak – as an alternative to Ferment – of the Norfolk group's output, or at least the one where they truly showed their real face. All things considered, it's fair to agree with those who describe it as something of a halfway point between the various versions of the Wheel. It's also a record with some illustrious fans: Death Cab For Cutie and Interpol, for instance, who confided to Dickinson himself that without this record they would never have existed.

It may seem a bit odd to introduce Catherine Wheel's second LP by starting with who produced it rather than with the band's own intentions, but this is probably the best way to clarify what Catherine Wheel had in mind when they went into the studio to make Chrome. Tim Friese-Greene, along with his impressionist approach to rock material, his grainy production and everything else that had made Ferment so distinctive, was set aside in favor of Gil Norton. Before meeting Rob Dickinson's band, the Liverpool producer had worked with, among others, Echo And The Bunnymen, Pixies and China Crisis, proving himself very much at ease with heftier, more epic and at times more violent sounds. A completely different story from Friese-Greene's play of transparencies and backlighting.

“Kill Rhytm” opens the record and, from this point of view, it's emphatic. Sure, the way Rob sings the verses is still aching and floating, but the guitars snarl war-ready riffs and the rhythm section is a steamroller. Even the chorus, “Five years of nothing good/ And still screaming/ Shout, get this secret out/ Deep, distant and pure”, is howled with greater confidence, helped also by the prominence given to it in the mix, which back in Ferment's day tended to crush and smother the voice. Next comes “I Confess”, which, were it not for the impetuous metal charge unleashed by the guitars splitting it in two, would closely recall the “old” Wheel. The same goes for the gorgeous single “Crank”, an obsessive, morbid song, though softened in places by a bittersweet synth line. Despite its strong atmospheric potential, it was actually this very track that would finally launch the band with American audiences.

“Broken Head”, on the other hand, is a track of unprecedented violence: first a sharp, rusty guitar carves its way into your skull, then Dave Hawes compresses his bass through a thousand effects, mimicking an earthquake. “Ursa Major Space Station” has a title – borrowed from a guitar pedal – that seems to want to make contact with another famous space station launched that same year, the “Souvlaki Space Station”, but it broadcasts its messages in a completely different language from Slowdive's. Its frequencies are in fact tuned to the wavelength of early Soundgarden's granite-hard guitar blasts.

In short, Chrome makes a whole lot of noise, or at least doesn't balance it out with melodies the way Ferment managed to, but it still has its share of more reflective, more properly atmospheric moments. Such is the case with the ballad “Pain” and, above all, “Fripp”. Seven incredible minutes of underwater visions, with the vocal floating between futuristic keyboards and guitars slithering along the seabed like morays. It's a pained song, steeped in unresolved longing, but its strongly experimental bent and its title leave no room for doubt: it's a heartfelt tribute to Robert Fripp. Just how indissolubly tied Catherine Wheel were to good old psychedelic rock would become even clearer with the release of Adam And Eve. The floating pace and the sense of suspension conveyed by “Fripp” also recall the splendid cover artwork, a shot taken in an indoor pool by Storm Thorgerson of the Hipgnosis design company.

Chrome is, to all intents and purposes, a transitional record, moving from the shoegaze of their early days toward a harder, more defined sonic setup. A record that begins to sever the umbilical cord tying Catherine Wheel to their native Britain, drawing them closer to the scowling American alternative sound of the early '90s. Yet contrary to what usually happens with transitional records, it's precisely in being a record of transition that Chrome achieves completeness and, above all, uniqueness.

Although many longtime fans already pin it on Chrome, it's with the following record, 1995's Happy Days, that Catherine Wheel truly consummated their “betrayal” of shoegaze. Gil Norton was kept on as producer and this time was asked to push even harder in a Seattle direction. Listening to the opening trio of tracks – “God Inside My Head”, “Waydown” – accompanied by an iconic video set on a plummeting plane – and “Little Muscle” – it almost feels as if someone had gone through with a sponge to wipe away every trace of the feedback and hazy reverb that had hovered like furious ghosts over the earlier chapters of the catalogue. Futter's guitar is razor-sharp, striking its prey with precise blows and no bleed-through; Rob sings with a fullness never heard before, delivering the lyrics with force and vigor, though he still works himself up into more disorderly shouting at times.

From a commercial standpoint, the move worked out reasonably well, landing the band a long-coveted spot on the Billboard Top 200, but artistically Happy Days didn't fully convince. The riffs weren't all that distinctive, and that kind of chord progression was being churned out by the dozen every day back then. On top of that, the songs all seemed to follow the same structure, with Dickinson, at a certain point, ready to repeat every title like a man possessed, waiting for one or two hyperkinetic guitar solos.

If the first three tracks of the bunch still work, it's around the midpoint of the tracklist that things start to flatten out, with lackluster radio-friendly attempts like “My Exhibition” or “Love Tips Up”. It's also interesting to note how the more melodic tracks on Chrome, while less fashionable, were undoubtedly more radio-ready.

Things go much better with “Judy Staring At The Sun”, where guest Tanya Donelly – Throwing Muses, Breeders, Belly – balances out Dickinson's feral masculinity with her clear, sugary counter-vocal – that's what happens on the album version, anyway, while on the excellent single version Donelly sings the entire second verse. Also very interesting are the record's more expansive, contemplative moments, which, at least in part, also represent its most precious. “Eat My Dust You Insensitive Fuck” is an intriguing number that tries to replicate the magical limbo of “Fripp”, adding a plaintive harmonica to the mix, but it's the ballad “Heal” that's the record's true gem. It's there that, for a moment, not only the reverb returns, but also maestro Tim Friese-Greene himself, for a fantastic little organ solo. “Happy Days” also marked, during its making, the band's move from Fontana to Mercury, the label they would remain signed to through Adam And Eve.

1996 – 2000: from the return to atmosphere to the hiatus

More or less a year later, the band released Like Cats And Dogs, a collection of B-sides and rarities that almost completely disowned the sound of the third record. The compilation is in fact a very relaxed affair, leaning toward hazy atmospheres rather than warlike riffs and fits of rage. For a collection of leftovers, it's also remarkably high in quality, to the point that a few tracks deserve a mention. Such is certainly the case with the opening “Heal2”, an electric ballad carved out of warm, full-bodied guitars that recall the touch of Slash, or the lengthy “Girl Stand Still”, which over the course of its eight minutes comes to brush up against post-rock territory. And then there's the cover of Pink Floyd's “Wish You Were Here”, which, shadowed by a melancholy harmonica, is practically a hint of what was about to happen.

The very long Adam And Eve (an hour and two minutes) not only confirms the band's return to more spacious, enveloping sounds, but delves even deeper into their psychedelic potential, never so clear before now. Pink Floyd – particularly the “Wish You Were Here” era – are certainly the guiding star, the ursa major of the psychedelic Catherine Wheel, the band whose records they wore out as teenagers. And so the refined “Future Boy”, the intense “Phantom Of The American Mother” and the sweet yet urgent “Ma Solituda”, all reflections on loneliness and the modern man's inability to communicate, are built around dense, metallic-tinged acoustic guitar patterns, spacey keyboards, little organs and assorted psych trinkets. This isn't, however, a case of plagiarism or mere nostalgia: Dickinson and co. handle the Floydian material with skill and bend it to the current times and to their never-dormant shoegaze instincts.

Adam And Eve is, however, also an extremely varied record, one that draws together the best sounds from every phase of the band's career. Before revealing its contemplative, psychedelic potential, it in fact places two of the Wheel's most energetic and unabashedly radio-friendly tracks up front. “Broken Nose” and “Delicious” once again unleash big guitars and easy, catchy choruses, but with far more inspiration than on Happy Days. A few problems crop up toward the end, where most of the tracks stretch their endings out a bit too long (“Goodbye”, “For Dreaming”).

It is nonetheless a solid record, one that reveals a further facet of the band, an album worth hearing, if only to get a complete picture of its nuances and potential. It's also worth noting that Adam And Eve was released in 1997 only in the United States; Europe would have to wait until 1998, the year the Wheel first landed in Italy for a tour shared with Simple Minds.

And with that, sadly, it's pretty much all over. 2000's Wishville is - forgive the harsh adjective - superfluous. Released on Columbia under the name The Catherine Wheel (earlier records had dropped the article from the band's name), the English band's fifth album feels disoriented and somewhat slapdash right from the start. "Sparks Are Gonna Fly" is an aimless slice of Americana, followed by the more evocative "Gasoline", a track that tries to recapture the mix of ingredients found on Adam And Eve. The sense throughout is that the band tried to repeat the trick that had worked so well on the previous album, but where that record succeeded in blending discordant elements thanks to an underlying coherence and engaging storytelling, Wishville comes across as a frantic, episodic puzzle. Of course, a band like Catherine Wheel couldn't get all nine songs wrong, so there are a few moments capable of stirring some interest. Chief among them is "All Of That", a stop-start ballad built on dissonant guitars and skittering little keyboard lines.

Something had probably already gone wrong before Wishville was made: talented bassist Dave Hawes, in fact, refused to take part in it. The fact remains that the final chapter of this gripping shoegaze-for-export saga is also its weakest. Still, that can't tarnish the legacy of a singular musical journey, one that deserves to be mentioned more often, in terms of its standing within shoegaze, alongside the likes of Ride, Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine.

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