Ep 09: Ratcat - Show Notes

Show notes, links, music and other stuff for Ep 09: Ratcat.

This episode is called That Ain’t Bad, the name of a song by Ratcat.

Further reading

As usual, these early Sydney years – there’s always a debt owed to Craig Mathieson’s book The Sell-In. Ratcat’s story is told in that book, especially from a label point of view. Lots of great detail about rooArt, with interviews with the band and the people around them.

The episode, for the sake of the story, focussed on Simon. But there were a lot of members in Ratcat. Andrew Polin was the drummer over a decade, including on all their key recordings. Amr Zaid was the bass player in the Blind Love years and was the first to leave the band. Marc Scully replaced him and was a key member for those last couple of albums. More should be said about Joe Segretto, Ratcat’s manager. But he’ll be a big part of the Homebake episode.

The intention isn’t to leave people out. But listing name after name in a podcast doesn’t work. Here’s Amr, Andrew and Simon. Andrew is wearing a Massappeals t-shirt, a Sydney 80s band (also mentioned in the You Am I song Pizza Guy).

Ratcat doesn’t have the dedicated fanbase of other bands that topped the charts, such as Powderfinger of Silverchair. People probably know this, otherwise there’d probably already be a book. It’s a great story. As I said in the episode – the documentary is waiting to be made.

In fact, in the couple of years of intense production leading up to this episode, several people important to the Ratcat story have died. rooArt head Chris Murphy, Big Day Out founder Ken West, and musician Margaret Urlich (who sand on Don’t Go Now).

Videos

Here’s all the Ratcat music videos.

Ratcat on Hey Hey It’s Saturday. We’ll have a lot more to say about Hey Hey in a future episode.

Ratcat on Australian drama/soap opera A Country Practice.

This concert footage from 1992 is fantastic. It really showed that they were ready to graduate to big audiences. Those big songs and that live energy totally translates to bigger stages.

The music

Miso the cat with **Ratcat**, the albums and a couple of singles.

Ratcat’s Blind Love album is the key text. It still sounds really good today. It has been reissued with all the tracks from the Tingles EP and could probably do with a nice vinyl edition.

There is one Ratcat best of – and it’s pretty good because it goes back and collects the Waterfront stuff and also all the loose singles from post Blind Love. Ratcat were pretty prolific and Blind Love was just one album. It’s called Twisted Tails and there was a double CD version with rarities.

You would think that after a while it would have reverted to a 1 disc compilation that was cheap every Christmas. And it looks like they never sold out of the first run. Anyway it’s up on iTunes but it’s odd – you can’t listen to the non rooArt tracks on streaming. Madness.

Music heard in the episode