Cat The Dog

Opposites might attract, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be a clean fusion. Take Brighton’s Cat The Dog; a band borne out of natural aggression. Even their name comes inspired by violence, the logic going that if a cat and a dog were to exist in the same body, the beast would be a craven, violent thing, thrown together from opposite worlds: the feline hunter and the passive canine together, making a monster so delectable that it shouldn’t really exist.

The chain that led to Cat The Dog stretches throughout rock’n’roll time and space, and, in the physical realm, from Vancouver to Brighton. When school friends Chris Melian and Andy Newton, disillusioned with the lack of a good music scene in Toronto and infused with a lust for life, bought a one way ticket to Manchester, their travels led them to Brighton where they met Darren Pruess and Dan Logan and Cat The Dog were formed. The experience of leaving home and being flung together bonded the foursome and inspired one of Cat The Dog’s earliest and fiercest tunes: ‘Gotta Leave’. But, says Andy, 'it was more getting away from a moment in our lives, it’s not getting away from the place itself. We didn’t hate Canada, it’s a pretty cool place. But at the time it didn’t fit what we wanted to do.'