Spotlight On... Peter Cat

It’s been five years almost to the day since Glasgow’s Graham Gillespie released his first album as Peter Cat, but the wait for album two is almost over as his latest musical adventure, Starchamber, arrives on Friday 21 November via Trapped Animal Records. Across its nine tracks that display a knack for intricate and theatrical pop, artists like Neil Hannon, Franz Ferdinand, Sparks, Pulp and Hamish Hawk all come to mind. Following the release of his latest single, The Power of Positive Thinking, we catch up with Gillespie to talk inspirations, songwriting processes, guilt and more.

First thing’s first, what’s the relevance of the alias, why Peter Cat?
It comes from the Japanese novelist, Haruki Murakami, who I was obsessed with as a teenager, and still have a very soft spot for today. When he was just starting out as a writer, him and his wife opened a jazz bar in Tokyo, where they’d work most of the day and night, then he would spend the last couple of hours of his shift writing his first novels in the kitchen. That bar was called Peter Cat!

I also like the format of generic first name plus animal last name. For starters, it puts me in the esteemed company of Hamish Hawk – a fellow alumnus of the Patrick Wolf School Of Naming Your Band.

What originally sparked your love of music growing up and who/what inspired you to start writing your own?
This is where people usually say something along the lines of “well fortunately, I was raised in a musical household, so…” But that wasn’t really the case for me: all I got growing up was Warren Zevon from my dad (hated it at the time, love it now) and the Glenn Miller Orchestra from my mum (still kind of hate it). So I had to draw outside the lines a little bit.

I started learning guitar when I was 13 or 14, inspired by all of the usual angsty suspects – Muse, Metallica and the like. I just wanted to shred on guitar at first. But when I was around 16, me and a friend went halfers on an 8-track recorder, which was a real penny drop moment. Once I began to understand the fundamentals of multi-track recording – that you could build an entire song up piece by piece, by adding melodies and countermelodies, and that really, your imagination was the only limit – then I was away. While all the other kids were hanging out after school and making friends, I was in the basement, writing songs on the 8-track.

I’m a good bit older now and burdened with more eclectic tastes, but I find that it’s still those artists who I got obsessively into in high school who cast the longest shadow over my writing style today – so Pulp’s kitchen-sink underdoggery, Björk’s unsettling cacophony, or the Magnetic Fields’ twee melancholia, to name a few.

Your sound has been described as ‘outsider pop’ and 'theatrical art rock'. Who are some of the other artists you’d say that have helped influence your sound over the years?
I couldn’t for a minute explain why, but I find myself drawn very intensely to those artists who seem almost antagonistic towards pop music on an intellectual level, yet are determined to operate within the format of the conventional pop-rock song in order to express that. I think that’s a fascinating contradiction which has produced some of my favourite music.

In terms of other artists working in that mold who managed to balance those plates and spin incredible careers out of a performative, oppositional, from-the-margins kind of pop music, I’d offer Pulp, Sparks and XTC – all huge for me. And if you want to go a little more niche, there are acts like the Fiery Furnaces, Deerhoof and Momus, who are perhaps more challenging compositionally, but arguably more rewarding. I’m trying to nestle somewhere between the two camps.

Your latest album, Starchamber, is due for release next week. I’d love to know more about the meaning behind the album’s title and opening track?
I’ve always felt very defective, as a person. Ever since I was a child, I’ve had this low-level feeling that I am doing, or am about to do, something fundamentally wrong, for which I’m going to be found out and banished completely from society and community. Somewhat inconveniently, this feeling has persisted into adulthood. And I’m not even a practising Catholic! Despite what I may have told my grandmother.

I’m sure a long and expensive course of therapy could have furnished me a proper answer to this defectiveness conundrum, but I thought it would be cheaper and more fun to make an album about it instead. So the ‘Starchamber’ became the central concept and metaphor that arcs across the entire record: it’s the inner court of the mind that sits within each and every one of us, where we will send ourselves to be tried and punished – even if we don’t have the foggiest notion of what it is we’re supposed to have done wrong.

In the wider mythology and media around the album (there’s a short fiction book and a video game too, by the way!), the ‘Starchamber’ is this sort of surreal otherworld where you’re sent down to be tried by shadowy figures of dubious authority who speak in tongues and riddles – like Kafka’s The Trial meets the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks.

Would you say there's an overarching theme, then, to the record?
The overarching theme is guilt, and every song on the album is definitely connected by this singular thread. On my previous record, The Magus, I was thinking a lot about deception and trickery: about how people (men, really) will do almost anything, go to the most arcane lengths, to deny their own complicity and to insist upon their own freedom from constraint, constructing the most elaborate conceits in the process. Starchamber is a continuation of that line of thinking, but rather than the denial of guilt, I’m thinking more about its acceptance – about asking, 'what if we really accept our guilt, our wrongness, and we give up our freedom?' Would we then, paradoxically, find true freedom somewhere in that?

Every song on the album is about a particular variety or flavour of guilt. So on INSTRUMENTALITY, for example, it’s about the guilt of not being useful – of not living your life completely enmeshed with, or subservient to, another person, thing or ideal, even though that would be practically impossible. On Is That All There Is to a House on Fire?, it’s guilt around being a spectator to climate inaction and impending civilisational collapse: standing there watching flames climb up the walls and thinking ‘oh, this is fine’. And then on Old Goat, it’s guilt around culture and belonging, or the lack thereof. I got my Irish citizenship and passport this year through my late grandmother; because I’ve now got a piece of paper that tells me ‘I belong’, can I then in good faith lay claim to that nation and culture as ‘my own’? I certainly can’t. But some do try.

Your songs are by no means straightforward, with frequent unexpected sidesteps and tricky time signatures. How do you go about creating a record full of twists and turns like this? Are songs fully formed from the off or is there a lot of writing different shorter parts and seeing what works well when pieced together? What’s your process like?
My working process is a bit of two steps forward, five steps back. I’ll start with a few parts, letting one section lead into the next, and then I’ll work backwards to pick out key themes and motifs. I’ll then ask myself, how can I rework that theme or motif to return later in the song – say, on a different instrument? Or, if it’s a melodic passage: can I transpose it to a rhythmic one, for the drums to play later? And if it is coming back, can I make a subtle change to it next time – say, by cutting a beat off the bar to change the time signature? And by rinsing and repeating that process, several times over, the songs start to build up their own internal logic of references and call-backs; a sort of narrative coherence. It sounds proggy and a bit out there, but it’s pretty typical in classical music – just less so in pop and rock, I suppose.

I’ll set myself challenges, too: ‘Can I find a string of chords that will convincingly link this A section, which is in one key, to the B section, which is in another?’ Or, ‘is there a way to have one guitar counting bars of nine, another counting bars of eight, and the drums counting bars of seven?’ (there is, and we do it on Execution). Of course, you risk straying over into rather smug and self-satisfied territory with that kind of thing, so we were always bound by the golden rule of ‘yeah, but does it sound cool?’ If it doesn’t, then into the bin it goes.

Lyrically, there’s a playfulness to your music. On Execution, I love what I assume is a little nod to Empire Records when you sing ‘shock me, shock me… with that deviant behaviour’. Are there any other cheeky wee nods or references that people should listen out for across the record?
Top marks for spotting that reference! Our guitarist went to see Empire Records a few months ago and posted a picture of that very scene in the band chat, saying ‘now I know where that lyric comes from...’ Execution has plenty of playful nods like that. Later in the song, I’m imagining being burned at the stake ‘in my Leigh Bowery platforms’, which is of course a reference to the iconic performance artist Leigh Bowery and his giant platform shoes – I was trying to summon a sense of camp, righteous indignation and defiance of authority with that one.

And on INSTRUMENTALITY, fans of the classic Japanese anime Neon Genesis Evangelion should spot a few little Easter eggs. In that show, the bad guys’ masterplan is the forced evolution of humanity beyond the individual, into a transcendent, collective whole (coincidentally, this also involves all human beings being turned into a mass of orange goop). The name they have for this masterplan is the ‘Human Instrumentality Project’… so you can see what we did there.

Señor Star. Photo: Audrey Bizouerne

You’re celebrating the album’s release with a couple of launch shows next week. What can we expect from a Peter Cat live show? What are the nights in Edinburgh and Glasgow looking like?
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 see us live.

We’re incredibly excited for our launches: the band is tighter than we’ve ever been, and in Glasgow and Edinburgh specifically, we’ll be playing the Starchamber album track-by-track for the first and probably only time ever. We’ve got great support acts on board, with Onat Önol and Hound joining us in Glasgow, and Sunday Driver and Boardgame on the bill for Edinburgh. And we’ll be bringing our giant papier-mâché sun head (who is called Señor Star, confusingly), designed and built by Kiera Saunders and Miriam Craddock of Vomiton, along too – he’ll be joining us on stage for the last time before he disintegrates!

We’re then off down south for more dates to promote the album – we’ll be playing in Cambridge (The Portland Arms, 14 Nov), North Shields (The Engine Room, 22 Nov), Brighton (The Brunswick, 26 Nov) and London (The Waiting Room, 27 Nov) later in November.

Finally, with the end of the year in sight, what does 2026 look like for Peter Cat?
We’re hustling in the background for more shows further afield into 2026. I’d love to tour in Italy and Germany again, and with a few copies of Starchamber wending their way to stores there now, I’m really hoping we can make that happen!
I’d love to get new music released hot on the heels of Starchamber, too.

Our third record is pretty much fully written at this point, and our partnership with Trapped Animal Records is just beginning, so in the new year we’re going back into the studio to start getting scratch demos down, with a view to having it fully recorded at some point in 2026, possibly for a 2027 release. Unforgivably, we left it five years between our first and second LPs – that’s not going to happen again if I have anything to do with it!

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Starchamber is released on 21 Nov via Trapped Animal Records
Peter Cat play Nice N Sleazy, Glasgow, 20 Nov; The Mash House, Edinburgh, 21 Nov

Follow Peter Cat on Instagram @petercatcatcat

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