It is exciting times for Glasgow art-rock collective Peter Cat. Hot on the heels of their critically-acclaimed album, Starchamber they follow up with a selection of five live cuts and roll them together into an electrifying five track EP. Captured at the Folklore venue in East London, In And Out Of Glasgow And London is certain to become a high point in the band’s discography. With the EP released via Trapped Animal Recordings and out in the world, we get the low down from powerhouse Graham Gillespie:
Hello Graham / Peter Cat, for those of us who aren’t familiar, can you explain a bit about who you are and what you do?
I have been ploughing this particular art-rock furrow as Peter Cat since 2018, which is more than a quarter of my life. Quelle mortalité! I write, arrange and sing all of the songs, and play guitar and keyboards too. However, though it began as a solo project, I now have a fabulous band behind me who are infinitely more musically competent than I am. To date, I’ve released two LPs, The Saccharine Underground and Starchamber, and one EP, The Magus.
You’re about to release a special live EP, In And Out Of Glasgow: Peter Cat Live, made up of live recordings from a gig at Folklore back in 2023 – what inspired you to use the songs from this performance and release it now?
This particular performance at Folklore really felt like an inflection point, as the tour it was part of was really the first time Peter Cat started to feel like a proper band, a real unit – as opposed to a bunch of friends gathered together in a room who were kind enough to be playing my songs. I guess you could say a sense of mission crystallised between the four of us.
The EP really seems to capture the swirling energy of your live performances, but how would you describe the Peter Cat live experience?
A Peter Cat live show is where everything clicks. If you’ve ever heard one of our songs and thought ‘yeah, that sounds quite cool, but it’s a bit weird, not sure if I get it…’ then I guarantee, it’ll all make perfect sense once you come to see us live. Also, if you catch me on the right night, I might trip and fall backwards into the drum kit. That’s only ever happened once before, but that’s not to say it won’t happen again.
The EP’s made up of songs from both last year’s Starchamber album and 2022’s The Magus – how did you decide which tracks to include on the collection, and how would you say they link together?
The tracks from The Magus had been released the year previous, and were sort of the sound of Peter Cat at that time, and so we performed as many as we possibly could. We also played the track ‘The Magus’ at the Folklore gig, but cut it from the live EP because I had a ghastly malfunction with a voice-changing device which I decided not to inflict on the listening public. The tracks that would eventually be on Starchamber were just being fleshed out at this stage, so we were keen to perform them live as much as possible before we went into the studio to record them – which wouldn’t be for another two years, as it turned out.
I think there’s a strong lyrical link, or an evolution at least, between the Magus and Starchamber tracks. The songs from The Magus are all about deception and trickery, both of others and of the self, and about an obsession with personal freedom above all things. So there are these songs like ‘Nicholas’, where the character is this liar and deceiver who takes advantage of others in his pursuit of liberty at all costs, but he eventually comes to an unspecified grisly end. Then with the Starchamber songs, I started looking at the polar opposite: what would it mean to have no freedom at all, to acknowledge your guilt and complicity and to incarcerate yourself in a prison of your own design? Would that be hell, or would that be true freedom? ‘INSTRUMENTALITY.’, for example, is about completely erasing the boundaries of the self and being subsumed into someone, or something, else entirely. I was watching a lot of Neon Genesis Evangelion at the time and I blame it entirely for my choice of subject matter.
Having released a memento of your live performances, what would you say is your favourite thing about performing live? And is there anything that you don’t like or feel anxious about when performing?
My favourite thing about live performance is feeling the mood in the room shift from the beginning of the gig to the end. Often when we kick into gear, you can feel this sense of mild bewilderment from the crowd, because what we do isn’t like much else out there, our arrangements and delivery can make quite a strange impression upon the casual ear. But then over the course of the show, feeling the audience warm up, adjust their settings and get into the kind of headspace where they can enjoy what Peter Cat do, and the applause getting louder and louder after each song – that’s the best part of playing live! And that’s exactly what happened at the Folklore show, too. We like to feel like we’ve worked for any adulation we get.
And has there been a specific show you’ve played over the years that stands out as a particular highlight?
The above mentioned show at which I feel backwards into the drum kit would certainly be a lowlight. That’s probably the reason I’ve never been back to Bristol. In terms of highlights, our Glasgow album launch show for Starchamber at Nice N Sleazy was one I’ll remember for a long time. We organised and promoted the whole thing ourselves, all DIY, so a lot of work went into it – for us to pack the place out and play as well as we did was a tremendous payoff. Some of the members of Franz Ferdinand were in the audience too, so teenage me was screaming inside!
How is the live music scene in Glasgow? Have you been to any gigs recently?
It’s tremendous – I can’t sing its praises enough. I think Glasgow is hands-down the best place to be a musician in the UK, because we’ve got the infrastructure of venues and promoters, but it’s also relatively affordable, so you can practise your craft without being priced out, at least for the time being. And that’s reflected in the number of brilliant musicians and organisers who are practising here. There’s not so much a single scene either, more a number of different scenes, from the more commercially-inclined pop and punk fare to very forward-thinking experimental and electronic music. Some of my favourite Glasgow bands of right now would be Insider Trading, L and Middle Class Guilt, whose album launch I attended the other day. Special shout out to aortarota too – cheating slightly as that’s my partner’s band, but she is very, very good!
The EP is being released on the same day as your next gig – supporting Steve Davies’ band The Utopia Strong at Cottier’s Theatre in Glasgow – how did this slot come about?
From memory, I sent the promoter an email with a five-bullet-point list of reasons why we were the only choice to open that one up. Sometimes you just have to ask for what you want! The Utopia Strong have a prog influence to them, and their guitarist Kavus Torabi also plays in Gong and Cardiacs, both of whom were huge influences on Starchamber. I think another of the bullet points might have been that our drummer Kev is snooker loopy. Which is true – he was down at The Crucible in Sheffield the other week and had the time of his life.
And have you got any live dates down in England in the pipeline?
I’m doing a stripped-back show at Café Blah in Manchester next month, on 8th June, alongside my good friends Della Dolvinsky and Ike Goldman. And beyond that, the band will be back on the road in October. I’m currently in the process of booking that one up, we will at the very least be coming back to London, Manchester and Newcastle – hopefully there’ll be many more stops too!
When you’re out on tour, or playing gigs, are there any particular essentials that you like to have with you to keep you going?
We tour on a budget, so we’re normally all packed into a Volkswagen Golf or something similar, meaning there’s not much room for creature comforts. I definitely need to have a book on me for the longer stretches. But I think I can speak for the entire band when I say that a rest stop at Tebay Services is an absolute necessity. If you haven’t had the pleasure, I must insist you go: it’s a service station south of Carlisle, but it is so much more than a service station. It’s a way of life. Tebay or no way.
The EP seems to offer a great snapshot of the Peter Cat sound, but what’s next for the band?
A lot! We’ve already recorded a new EP and made a video for the first single, ‘Innocent Driver’, which will drop soon – it’s very, very 90s. Perhaps even too 90s for the kids of today. Our new material is tighter and poppier, designed to burrow deep into your ears and stay there – but it retains the harder and more abrasive sonics of Starchamber too. It’s the best of both worlds, and the perfect distillation of all aspects of Peter Cat to date. Then beyond that, a third album which we hope to record this year and release in 2027.
