Join us as we celebrate ten years of Cats In Space, that’s a whole decade of wondrous melodies, rocking hooks galore, harmonies to die for and out of this world live shows. It feels like the years have gone at warp speed, especially considering the band have packed in six studio albums, two live albums, a few EPs and a whole load of adventures along the way.
I’m talking to almost the entirety of Cats In Space (Greg Hart -guitar/vocals, Steevi Bacon – drums, Damien Edwards – lead vocals, Dean Howard – guitar and Andy Stewart – keyboards) in the comfortable green room in the dressing room complex of KK’s Steel Mill in Wolverhampton, where in an hour or two the majestic rockers will headline NWOCR Livefest 4 as part of their tenth anniversary tour.
There’s only tonight’s bass player, Willie Dowling, missing, who has put himself into exile due to the lingering effects of a bug that seems to have also blighted every other band here this weekend, cheerfully explaining, “If I breathe in here, you’re all going to die.”
It’s a lovely treat to speak to everyone together (even if the phrase ‘herding cats’ comes to mind), and we settle in for a bit of reflection and a lot of looking forward.
It’s been a long journey since the early Cats In Space debut album Too Many Gods, with songs written by Greg Hart with Mick Wilson from 10cc and originally intended as only a studio project, through to last year’s number one album Time Machine.
Over the years, the live shows have evolved to huge heights, with a massive sound, multi-layered harmonies, and everything that’s good about bombastic ’70s-inspired classic rock updated for the current day.
Cats In Space is a band that really knows how to put on a show, and with tours, the ambition increases.
“We’ve got a bigger stage production,” says Greg. “It’s even bigger than the last two. Bigger screen, more visuals. We’ve now got to the point where we’ve got the production that will probably go forward and come with us now.
“The first tour [with the added bespoke visuals in 2023] was like a pantomime. It was like scenery that got destroyed. The second one had a few travelling faults. At the end of the day, the TV screen inside the visor is a cool idea if it’s 50 ft big, but when you lose half of your screen for a visor, it makes the picture small. So we said just do away with it, get a bigger screen and make the whole thing look bigger.”
“You’re going to hear some older ones, some that have never been done,” adds Andy. “Some from the archive.”
The main change for this year is the absence of a familiar face on stage as original and much-loved member Jeff Brown stood down from the band at the end of 2024 for family reasons. Hence, bass and backing vocals for this autumn’s tour are being covered by multi-instrumentalist and all-round good egg Willie Dowling.
“It’s Willie’s second gig with us tonight. He’s all in or nothing,” Greg says. “He said, ‘I’ll sing, and I’ll do all the bass parts, the whole bit, and then we’ll see how we go at the end of it.’ He does his own thing as well, and I quite like that.
“He looks great, he plays the bass great, the way he stands with it. Some bass players are a bit sessiony, but he plays it like a good old-fashioned bass player without all the jiggling and juggling, which is good.”
This also means that vocalist Damien Edwards no longer has a vocal partner for the set essential, Greatest Story Never Told, which featured Brown’s vocals previously.
“It’s just me, I’m my vocal partner currently,” Damien confirms. “I guess long-term fans are used to that song being a duet, and now it’s a solo piece. But back when we were first recording my vocals, I recorded the whole thing.”
“Yes, and it’s brilliant,” Greg says. “The whole reason why this duet emerged on the song in the first place was when the song was written, me and Mick Wilson demoed what was an old Moritz song. I’m going back twelve years now.
“We had no melody for it. So when Mick came up with that, ‘I just don’t understand…’ and you heard all those 10cc-isms in the voice, I really wanted that on the album because that would be a real big plus.
“The first album, no one knows who we are, but we’ve got the 10cc man singing some of it. And Paul [Manzi, vocalist for the first three albums], as great a rock singer as he was, there’s no way he could do that first bit.
“So we said, well, Jeff can sing. Do you want to have a go at it, and he was off like a four-bob rocket! I’m not doing him a disservice because he really sang it great, but when Dames did it all on his own the first time I looked down at Steevi and knew that was how the song was always going to be.”
Greg’s also open to the possibility that this most epic of songs may further evolve once on stage.
“I like the fact that we have a singer who is good at twisting things around just for shits and giggles some nights. It just keeps everything fresh. We always do the same harmonies, so it doesn’t matter, but on the bits you can flex out on, why not?” 
Going forward, the bass position will be taken by Ricky Howard, who has a long association with the band as guitar technician and occasional stand-in member, and also Dean Howard’s son. He’s pretty busy as he’s a long-time member of The Australian Pink Floyd Show, and performs over a hundred shows a year, but will be recording the next album with the band and joining them on stage when he can.
It’s a great choice as he’s clearly well-loved by everyone, and for Dean, there’s an added bonus, as he explains.
“It’ll be great for me because, as he was growing up, Ricky would never play and jam with me,” Dean says. “Ah, fucking old man rock, I ain’t doing that, I don’t wanna learn them scales’ he would say. So we haven’t really done a great deal.
“I think he played a bit of acoustic on an album I did years ago, and I asked him to play bass on some stuff I’d written with Paul Manzi, but he was too busy with the Floyd. I haven’t really done much with him at all, so it will be nice to do the next album with him, so we’ve got that legacy.”
It’s been a summer of mixed fortunes so far for Cats In Space. There have been some good shows, including a date on the Silja Rock cruise sailing around the fjords in Sweden and Norway, and a headline appearance at Nene Valley in a beautiful setting, but also some huge disappointments.
“Belfast was a disaster, because the guy did a runner,” Greg says. “The gig was good, but the guy ripped us off. He booked a couple of bands knowing full well that [he wasn’t] going to be able to pay them.
“The only thing that he did do was that we got an upgraded hotel, which is when we first smelt a rat, thinking, this is an expensive hotel, why are we in here?”
“This was a side company that he’d built just for this ruse,” adds Steevi. Not receiving payment for a show has a massive impact in the current climate, where band finances in all but the biggest bands can balance on a knife-edge.
There was bigger disappointment to come, however.
In July, Cats In Space were booked for the support slot for Jeff Lynne’s ELO on their final ever date at British Summer Time in Hyde Park, a real match made in heaven. The day before the show, the whole event was cancelled due to Jeff Lynne contracting a serious infection, with no plans for a reschedule.
While it was, of course, the right thing to do, and everyone was genuinely concerned for Lynne’s health, nevertheless, this was a crushing blow, not just personally but also from the more business-like aspect of bringing in a whole load of new fans.
“We’d finished rehearsal at about five or six, did the last song, nailed it,” Greg says. “Then Dames said, ‘A message has just come in.’ Was it going to continue with The Doobies headlining, because they can hold it in their own right? But then what if the ELO fans are going to want some of their money back? Do they stay and watch the gig or get a half a refund?
“You can’t do it. It’s a numbers game. Sixty-five, seventy-five thousand, we were going to hit so many new people there who would hopefully join the tour, and because of that, our tour has been damaged because we’ve not managed to hit those people. So we lost traction there. It has set us back. You can’t use that as an excuse, though, you’ve still got to plough on.”
The Cats are undeterred. There are no broken spirits here or deviation from their mission. Their tenacity, resilience and a ‘build it and they will come’ attitude is as strong as ever.
“We are very dogged for Cats,” Greg reflects.
Cats In Space have always tried new things to keep the content fresh and to stretch themselves too. After dabbling with the occasional acoustic recorded version of songs or interludes during a live show, the acoustic concept is being fully embraced in the new year, with a series of dedicated acoustic shows.
“It will be an evening with Cats In Space, so there’ll be chat and we’ll do cover songs, and anything can happen because we can launch into weird shit,” says Greg. “We’ll have a discussion about how we’re going to do that, but there’s definitely room for it.”
A glimpse of how stunning these songs sound in stripped-back format has been previewed on the recent, detailed, and revelatory video features, in conjunction with Now Spinning magazine.
The band are not sticking to the obvious ballads, but presenting complex, upbeat, layered tracks such as Thunder In The Night or 2:59 to great effect. It wasn’t a massive challenge to convert to these arrangements, though.
“A lot of them translate very, very well because of the chords,” says Andy.
Greg confirms that “a lot of the songs are written on piano, especially the later-day stuff. For the first couple of albums me and Mick used to sit with acoustic guitars, but me and Steevi, nine times out of ten now, I’ll bring a piano in. Andy hates me for it, calls me a Happy Shopper player, says that’s not how you play an A minor.”
“Bloody guitar hands,” mutters Andy. “You don’t play it like this!”
“The songs play themselves really,” says Steevi, helpfully steering the conversation back on track. “The less you put in, the more exposed it is. We wanted to try and get it as stripped back as we can, to the pulse, and then it’s the piano and vocal that works really well.”
“These two [Andy and Damien], they’re just dynamite,” agrees Greg. “When we first did it live, two voices, piano, one guitar, and Damien, it was like we can do anything we want here. I love it. We want to do more acoustic shows, because we can play a lot more songs that we wouldn’t normally play, like Yesterday’s News from Narnia, and there are probably songs that we’ve not even attempted that we know will work.”
“Obviously, Deano will be with us on this next one,” says Steevi. “We’re going to bring more toys with us. We’re going to bring the harmonica, and we can bring all the extra little bits in.”
One of these shows is going to be at The Half Moon in Putney, incredibly ten years exactly to the day of their very first live show, which is a lovely touch.
MetalTalk were there that night, and looking back now, it’s remarkable to see how the band’s vision and approach has remained intact and consistent through to the present day, something which is evident in this (somewhat chaotic) pre-show dressing room interview by Mark Taylor.
“I remember that interview well,” Greg says. “Mark came into the dressing room. He was talking to me, and I had a pint of beer. I was so fucking nervous. I hid it, but I was really nervous. I think we all were, not to start with, but then we felt an expectancy suddenly descend upon the venue. I think the old nerves got in, but we smashed it.”
They did. It’s a debut gig that is still talked about today, for all the right reasons.
Since that night, many more fans have come on board, attracted to authentic, live, no-holds-barred rock and sticking around for one of the most rewarding and best value fan experiences around.
There’s room for plenty more to come on board, and following the anniversary shows, it’s onwards to the next album, which has been demoed and will be recorded in December in Brighton.
The band are sticking to their usual approach of creating exactly the album they want with little pressure to conform to any perceived fan or record company expectations.
“From a songwriting point of view, if you sweated over that, you’d go mental,” says Greg. “For every person that wants a Mr. Heartache, there’s someone that wants a Broken Wing. For every person that wants a Sunday Best, there’s someone that wants a Queen Of The Neverland.
“If the last album hadn’t gone to number one, then we know that we’d got to go back maybe a step to where we were before, but that was a clear indication that the path we’re on is the right path.
“Where we really do think about the fans is that we won’t go out with a begging bowl. We’ll always offer something special, which costs money, knowing full well everybody knows why you’re doing it. But at least you’re trying to make an event out of it rather than just saying we need the fans to support us.
“It’s tough because to do what we do costs a lot of money. The record label knows that we’re not going to turn an album in for five grand. It’s not going to happen.”
One of these events will be a VIP day for fans, something which has been successful in the past, a super-exclusive opportunity to get a glimpse of the making of the album in real time and even get involved (“anything can happen around that piano”), with this and other treats to be announced in due course.
Fan feedback is essential these days, yet there are still occasions when Cats In Space can be taken by surprise. Greg is genuinely moved as he recounts a story of a message he received recently from someone whose father had died and wished to have an extract from the lyrics of My Father’s Eyes on his tombstone.
“That’s worth more than money,” he says. “We take the piss a lot and make light of a lot of things, but things like that make you think. We all have a bit of imposter syndrome. When you talk about Queen, how can you compare us to them?
“But to somebody out there, out of all the things we’ve done, some song to them stands up as good as whoever. We are valid.”
With Cats In Space releasing the Chapter One 4CD Boxset, a deluxe collection celebrating the band’s first decade, the band are ready for their tenth anniversary celebration tour. Support for the tour are the awesome Empyre.
“For the first time this year, we have finally visited Sweden, plus dates in France and Ireland, and headlining two UK festivals has really turned 2025 into our finest year already,” Greg Hart says. “Our current album, Time Machine, is continuing to sell really well, and now we have the CD box set coming out this July.
“I think this proves, as ever, we are not a band to do anything by half measures!! This 10th anniversary tour has a real buzz about it already, so please get a ticket and come along and join in the celebrations! There sure is a lot to celebrate this year.”
Tickets are on sale at catsinspace.co.uk.
