A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH ANDY CATO OF GROOVE ARMADA


I was browsing through the internet sales charts over the weekend and I noticed that Groove Armada's Vertigo was ranked number one in Hollywood and three in Los Angeles. Finally, Los Angeles is setting a trend that has nothing to do with car chases or football teams leaving (a handful of years ago, I had both the Rams, now in St. Louis, and my beloved Raiders, now up in Oakland, in my backyard). Then I found out that Vertigo had been released in England practically a year ago and already has gone gold in the UK. Damn, behind the eight ball again. But if there is any conciliation, at least we have this interview with Andy Cato, one half of the before mentioned Groove Armada. Los Angeles was a year late, but better late than never and as always, unedited and in his own words.


FRED JUNG: Did you grow up in London?

ANDY CATO: No, I grew up in Leeds (West Yorkshire).


FJ: Was dance music a natural affinity?

ANDY CATO: Well, I was brought up playing jazz and blues because that is what my dad was into, by the age of about six to about sixteen, seventeen.


FJ: That explains a lot.

ANDY CATO: I was listening to much more traditional jazz. It was much more blues oriented stuff, sort of, Mississippi blues stuff and traditional jazz players because I was playing trombone as well and piano. I was listening to a guy called Al Grey. He used to play with Count Basie.


FJ: How did you hook up with Tom Findlay (the other half of Groove Armada)?

ANDY CATO: It was four or five years ago now. I was at college with an old friend of his through Cambridge and we started going out together. So I went to visit during the holidays and she took me around to see this friend of hers, Tom, who was into this music. She thought that we might get along well and that is how we first met.


FJ: You were at the University of Cambridge?

ANDY CATO: No, Joe, my then and current girlfriend and Tom were from Cambridge, but Joe and I were at were at college at Oxford. So just during the holidays, I would just stay with her and she would take me around to her friend's house and it was Tom. He was still up at Manchester.


FJ: You went to Oxford. You could have made a heck of lot more money by being a barrister or some other desk job.

ANDY CATO: (Laughing) Yeah.


FJ: Before the group, both you and Tom ran a club called Groove Armada.

ANDY CATO: About the age of seventeen, because I lived in Leeds at the time and that is where the house music scene started kicking off. I got really into that. I started making a few records, sort of, house, piano/house records and I ended up swapping a lot of those and selling them for other house tunes after I would deejay a house party up in Leeds. By the time I got to London, I had been deejaying house music for a few years. And Tom had been doing the same, but with live funk and disco music. We got together in London and decided to do a two-room venue with funk and disco in one room and house music in the other. It was great! When we first did it, lines were around the block. Most of the people that were coming were our mates and it just quite difficult because I always had to tell them that they couldn't come in. It was all going well, but then we decided to do a massive party on the Thames, in the middle of London and we paid a lot of money to this guy as a deposit to hire a yacht for the night. And the yacht and the money disappeared and that was the end of Groove Armada, the club.


FJ: Tragic.

ANDY CATO: Yeah, it was a shame.


FJ: You spoke of the budding house scene in Leeds, give us "late to the party" Yanks a little insight on the scene.

ANDY CATO: Oh, it was just amazing. It was 1991, when people like Sasha were just starting out and you go to these places and they would just be four, five, six thousand capacity venues. It would just be amazing because it was all fresh and new. The tunes were like Bizarre Inc. called "Playing with Knives" (topped UK charts) and there was a track by Last Rhythm called "Last Rhythm" in fact and they all followed the similar formula where it was quite musical stuff and it just had these incredible, euphoric breakdowns. You would jut see like ten thousand arms in the air. It was just brilliant.


FJ: As a rule, electronica, whether it is techno, house, or trance, kicks off in the UK, then it migrates over here to the States, to New York, Miami, Chicago, and as always Los Angeles is last on the deal team and last to know. So I am not reading this in tomorrow's papers, what is the scene in England still booming?


ANDY CATO: Well, it's a tough call because basically what is happening is that the scene in England is really sort of fractured. You have got a massive kind of Euro-trance thing going on and there is a bit of resurgence of very American funky house, which is undergoing a bit of a renaissance, which is nice to see. Then you have got all this new school, big beat breaks thing going on as well. So there is a lot of new things happening, but they are not as fond as your memories and there isn't that kind of magic that there was when it was a bit more homogenous in the early sort of house thing, where everyone had the same kind of agenda and was up for the same sort of thing. But it is still pretty vibrant.


FJ: What are your thoughts on your debut, Northern Star?

ANDY CATO: I think it has got some nice bits. It was all done in a week. The whole thing was made in a week in the countryside in the north of England. It was a really, really basic studio. It was like one sampler, a mixing desk, and a little synthesizer. That was it. The same thing that makes it nice was that there was a pleasant naïve quality about it all. There was nothing complicated. It was dead simple. It just worked. But some tunes were a little bit too simplistic to get away with, I think.


FJ: Do you employ a lot of samples?

ANDY CATO: Less and less really. There is about five on Vertigo. Those are just like vocal samples. All the grooves are played live. On the new album that we are working on now, when we play live, we play with a nine-piece live band. They are people I used to do jazz gigs with years ago. They are all brilliant players and we took them all off to Wales and we just did a concert in Wales. The starting point of the new album is very much a live band thing.


FJ: What makes a really good hook?

ANDY CATO: For me, a real good hook, I mean obviously, to be called hook, it has got to stick in your brain. But the sort of hooks that work for me are the ones that it has got to be able to be repeated again and again, but be sort of hypnotic rather than annoying. The great hooks are the ones where you can get lost in this repeating, repeating thing. You get into a bit of a trance rather than wishing that you would shut up after a certain time.


FJ: I got a copy of Vertigo and I thought I was hip and in the know and found out later that it has been out in the UK for almost a year.

ANDY CATO: Yeah, we have three singles off it that made the top 20 in England. The album was in the top 20 in England as well. The album has gone gold actually. It is basically quite an underground album.


FJ: Underground is good, but why wait so long to release it in the States?

ANDY CATO: It is just what they do. It is the nature of record companies to look for success before they back it. They are definitely backing it now, so hopefully the next one will come out a bit sooner after it does in England.


FJ: "I See You Baby" is getting some heavy airplay on college radio.

ANDY CATO: Yeah, it's funny, Fred, you see people in England now just sort of, you catch people just out and about singing "I See You Baby." It's become a little bit of a public consciousness for a while, which is nice.


FJ: The success of Vertigo in the UK will carry over to the States. We aren't that far out of the loop.

ANDY CATO: I hope so. Our thing with it is, like you said, we did that eighteen months ago now and we both love it, but we are desperate to write some new stuff and move on, but obviously, it is just the way these things work. These things take time in a country as big as the States. I hope it will do well. It is a difficult one to market just because it crosses so many styles and from what I heard of your radio, a lot of radio stations are quite compartmentalized in what they play, but that is the problem the record company has to work out. I think the key to it is when we come over with the band and everyone sees us live, it may help us turn the corner in places.


FJ: When are you kicking off your US tour?

ANDY CATO: Well, we are meant to play in Miami, at the Miami Conference at the end of March, but we just heard that the venue we were playing at has lost its license, so I don't know what we are going to do now. We are still waiting to hear what is happening there.


FJ: You are in the studio now working on new material.

ANDY CATO: I don't know when we are going to put it out. That has to be decided by the label. There is this England, Australia, and Europe on one schedule and America and Canada on another. For us, we want to get that closer together so we can just start promoting the same things at the same time and tour with the band at the same time. Hopefully, it will be towards the end of this year. That would be nice. I think it is going to be a bit liver, a bit moodier. We have got some great people who want to work on it, which is very exciting. We have been out of the studio for so long, I think it is going to be a long album. There's going to be about fourteen, fifteen tunes on there. I have been playing live so much over the last few months that I have so many ideas. We can't wait to get them out there, really.


FJ: Do you have a tentative title for it?

ANDY CATO: No, no, at the minute, it is labeled on the disc "Work in Progress."


FJ: Works for me.

ANDY CATO: (Laughing) Yeah.


FJ: Your music, if anything, is positive.

ANDY CATO: Yeah, it is just the sort of people we are right now. We are in a situation at the minute. We don't know how long it will last, where we can go up to the beautiful countryside, set up a little studio, look out a lovely view, and make music.


FJ: Stop. You are making me jealous.

ANDY CATO: (Laughing) Well, you know, if you can't feel positive about that, what else can you feel positive about? We could sit down and do the dark, urban thing, and reviewers and journalists might prefer it if we do, but that is not who we are. We love doing what we are doing and I think that comes across in the tunes.


FJ: Does that criticism get under your skin?

ANDY CATO: I think there has been a few reviews from people, who you know if you just made a load of like really weird, difficult to understand, mind satisfying tunes, you would get a good review. People like that you are just, "Whatever, that is your opinion. That's fine." Along the way, there have been reviews from people that say, "I like this." We taken a few criticisms and tried to adjust. We don't need to ignore it because a lot of people who are writing these things are bright people who have got good and interesting things to say. So we don't ignore it, but equally, we don't lose sleep over it if someone doesn't like it.


FJ: The ladies must come a calling, the record is getting some quality airplay, must be nice to reap the fruits of success.

ANDY CATO: (Laughing) Yeah, it is quite strange. Fortunately, we both love playing soccer. We are both surrounded by a lovely group of mates at home. Nothing has changed about our life at all. Every so often, you just get the odd thing like, we know that if we go to a club in the UK now, if we are deejaying somewhere, it will be absolutely packed every time. And suddenly you realize, that is because you're there and that is a strange feeling. It is quite a bit of pressure as well. These people, a lot of them have been working at McDonalds all week and they pay fifteen quid because I am there, I am going to give you everything to make sure that you get your money's worth. There are a few sort of added pressures and then every so often, people come up to you and ask you to sign a piece of paper. It is completely bizarre, but at the same time, it is wonderful. If you have gotten to a point where someone goes to their mate and says, "Check this album out," just like I have done a hundred times over the past few years, that is just a brilliant thing. You can't get any better than that.


FJ: Tom went to Manchester and you to Oxford. A good many doors in the business world open at the mention of the word Oxford, any regrets?

ANDY CATO: No regrets because all I have ever done is music. From five or six, that is all I have ever done and that is all I can imagine doing. I can't imagine working for anyone else. I can't imagine a life where I can tell you what the next few days are going to hold. I can't certainly do that at the minute.


FJ: One day at a time.

ANDY CATO: Absolutely, yeah.


FJ: You enjoy that?

ANDY CATO: Yeah, you just sort of hanker after a few days at home, where you can do normal things and go to the pub and see your mates. You only do it because you don't get a chance to do it and if you are doing it every day, then you don't want to do it at all. The grass is always greener. We are in a good situation now. We are doing a lot of traveling and seeing lots of things. So it is not too bad.


FJ: If you had a business card, what would it read?

ANDY CATO: Good question. It would say, "DJ and cocktail pianist: No job too small."


Fred Jung is the Editor-In-Chief and put the ger in swinger baby. Comments? Email Him