“I’m going nowhere/There’s nowhere that I’d rather be/Than sitting here getting old/In the shade of the same old tree” sang Cerys Matthews on 2003’s Cockahoop, her alt.country debut solo album.
At the time, we were surprised. Hell, she was surprised. But the former first lady of Brit-pop had left it all behind. Her band Catatonia, her beloved Wales, a drug habit and the eagerly attending tabloids were ditched in favour of marriage, motherhood and a rustic shack in the woods outside Nashville.
“I just needed to get away from everything,” she tells me. “It all got mad and mixed up along the way.”
Sure enough, it had been one hell of a ride. Propelled to youthful fame by her luscious sonic boom and ridiculously infectious singles such as 'Road Rage' and 'Mulder And Scully', Ms. Matthews’ whirlwind journey from Cardiff to Tennessee took in The Priory, Wembley Stadium and – should we choose to believe the gossip columns – every swish bar or club in London.
When she developed a taste for heroin, Bob Dylan did the intervening, but the red tops had made merry by then. How they tittered when she jumped onto an Ibiza karaoke stall to sing one of her own hits, only for the entire structure to collapse beneath. Famously, she once woke up from a weekend binge just in time to realize she was due onstage. Problem was, Cerys was in France and the show was in Britain.
Sitting beside me in The Lord Edward, she sighs cheerfully when I mention such debacles.
“You know why you see that story about me waking up in France so often?” she asks. “It’s because it only happened the once. So that’s the story they have to keep telling. If it was a regular thing, you would have heard all about it.”
I hate to sound like a broken record, but is this a girl thing? Similar non-appearances by male performers are usually greeted with a metaphorical pat on the back.
“Oh yeah,” she nods. “I spent the last ten years completely ignoring things like that. You don’t notice it as much as when you are in a band. But it’s the little things. You keep getting questions like, ‘Were you scared?’ Why would I be scared? And why aren’t you asking the lads the same question? I’ve only recently acknowledged the fact that women still have a hell of a lot of ground to cover. Now, more than ever, it is scary and difficult for a woman to do exactly what she wants. Christ, you should see the women in Tennessee. They have rules about what colour shoes you can wear at times of the year.”
Hmm, it’s hard to imagine certain Welsh ladies – say Charlotte Church or Cerys herself – playing along with that.
“We’ll raise this glass of Guinness to Charlotte Church, will we?” gushes Cerys. “Too right she wouldn’t. You look at Girls Aloud and Nelly Furtado and compare them to Charlotte and they’re not even in the same league. I don’t want to rant but I have not watched much telly in the past four years and then suddenly you start reading about Beyonce getting asked to lose weight or you hear Shakira’s new song. She’s a talented woman – what the hell does she needs to do a song like ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ for? It’s craziness.”
Today, three years after rehabilitation and band implosion, you can still tell Cerys has been through it all. Once the statuesque Boudicca and gay icon voted Sexiest Woman In Rock, her features have softened into pretty birdlike delicacy. Her speaking voice, in contrast to her frequently mighty chanteuse swell, is a sweet soft babbling. But fear not, pop pickers, for Cerys Matthews is back. She recently returned to Pembrokeshire with husband Seth, children Glenys Pearl Y-Felin and Johnny Tupelo Jones and all their worldly goods. Meanwhile, her latest album Never Said Goodbye, marries the pastoral bliss of Cockahoop with the belting pop of old.
“I love big pop songs but I didn’t want to do it in a formulaic way,” she explains. “So it took me quite a while for the arrangements and getting the right production personnel. It has been a quite a journey. It was horrible sometimes. But I finished it. It’s not 100 percent the album in my head but it’s close enough for me to think – right then, I’m ready to rock.”
She’s also looking forward to introducing her daughter to Welsh notions of gender balance.
“We like going up Cardiff High Street on a Saturday,” she laughs. “That’s when you get to see all the Welsh men dutifully carrying shopping for their girlfriends. Now, that’s a bit more like it.”