THE WRIGHT STUFF INTERVIEWS

With five albums out, Catherine Wheel still makes emotion driven music. Here is a chat with Rob Dickinson to find out where some of the new songs off of Adam and Eve came from.

Highwire Daze: How did you achieve such a large stadium sounding album?

Rob: Does it got a stadium sound to it? Well, we didn't set out to do that so I don't know how we did it. It was meant to be an intimate record. Some of the songs have a natural expansiveness to them, I think. There were no plans to make things bigger or grander sounding or put pretensions on the band that we didn't want. We just wrote a record that hopefully had some intimacy to it and kind of sucked people in. We weren't trying to make a big sounding record necessarily.

HD: Does this album bring the audi-ence in to you?

Rob: Yeah, I hope so. That's the idea. We were aiming to make a shorter record this time and a record that people would feel a part of early on. I think Happy Days kind of distanced people a little bit. It was very brash and harsh right from the start. And we wanted to make a warmer sounding record this time.

HD: Your record seems to be even more personal than before.

Rob: I wanted the record to have to do with things that everyone knew something about: the treachery and love and the romance and the disappointment of people dealing with each other. From saying hello to saying goodbye, I wanted something that everybody does 24 hours of their lives. Have lines of communication, both tangled and complex when your dealing with other people.

HD: Who represents your American Mother from the song Phantom of the American Mother??

Rob: My idea of an American Mother is like any other mother, really. It's a loving, nurturing, caring person. The song is about some-one who is the opposite of that who forgoes her responsibilities. She is blinded by ideas of stardom or the American dream basically. It's a comment about the American Dream. It's about being caught up in things that are superficially important and start ignoring things that are really important.

HD: This is your fifth album. With Adam And Eve, the whole album was joyful and overwhelming.

Rob: We wanted to make a huge statement with this record that we were doing something different from other bands. There's so many guitar bands around. We just felt that this was the record that we really had to stand up and say this is why we're different than everybody else and why we're better than everybody else. We wanted to make a big, emo-tional statement on the record. And I hope that we've done that.

HD: You capture the imagination of lovers throughout your music.

Rob: It's a tricky thing to write about, really. It's a fine line and you could stray very close to seeming to be gratuitous. But to write about matters of sensuality and sexuality with finesse is kind of tricky. It's a good challenge though. If you can get under the skin of sexuality and get down to the dark side of what makes people attractive to other people, I think there's alot of scope there for music. It's what makes the world go round. It's the most fundamental thing. Everyone's gonna be sensitive to it. Maybe that is why we come back to it a lot.

HD: And with Adam And Eve, you went back to the original lovers.

Rob: A lot of words come into people's minds when they see Adam And Eve, whether it's betrayal, love, sexuality, sensuality, naked-ness, free spirit, open air. Lots of things strike people when they think of Adam and Eve. It seemed to be quite fitting to some of the stuff that we were writing about.

With an artistic demeanor always apparent, Catherine Wheel went back to the days of Adam and Eve for this their fifth album. It really hits home from beginning to end. It even cathes you up to date currently time wise as well.

Goodbye Duncan pic!

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