Technically, Catherine Wheel marked the 30th anniversary of their second album Chrome in a timely manner with a mandatory vinyl reissue of the album in August 2023 (to go with the one six years earlier), but the band – or their representatives – aren’t quite done celebrating.
They’ve prepared some new shirts – their first merch release since 2000, they proudly proclaim – and will be putting them on sale at noon EDT on April 4, via an online store that’s live but still showing placeholder content. And, in what I guess is their way of trying to build buzz, they created a period-appropriate BBS where fans could find out how to get first dibs at the shirts… if they could figure out how to connect to it. Friends, I BBS-ed way back in the day with a 400 baud acoustic coupler modem and I’ll couldn’t find my way in, mostly because MacOS dropped native telnet in 10.13 and I can’t be bothered to install it again. And while the shirts aren’t bad, I’m happily still rocking my vintage Adam & Eve tour shirt purchased at The Lyric in Kitchener in December 1997. Still fits!
Also, some may recall a little over a month ago, the band promised some online Q&As with all four members of the band, slated to start this week. Of course, there have been no details since then about where this would be happening, how to submit questions, or anything of the sort. Or maybe every single question was, “when are you going to reunite?”.
So to sum up: The Catherine Wheel – great at fomenting debate about whether or not they were shoegaze (yes, then rawk, then prog, then something else), building Porsches, and not reuniting. Not so great at the internet.
But at least all this gave me an excuse to dive back into Chrome and discover that “Crank” was not the only single! “The Nude” and “Show Me Mary” also got videos; the former is actually one of my favourite tracks from the record, so it pleases me, even me if it means I just watched a four-minute close up of Rob Dickinson’s soul patch.
I also didn’t know that the single had a different mix; not that I can actually hear a difference, but it’s credited to Scott Litt rather than Gil Norton, who produced the album, so there must be something? Maybe the vocals are a little crisper?
