Cate Le Bon interview: bridging the distant worlds of comfortable Cardiff and compelling LA

Welsh avante-pop singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon is grateful to be back in Cardiff for a short break from her Los Angeles base – it means that she isn’t going thirsty.

“Over there my accent is a joke sometimes,” Le Bon says in a Welsh brogue so strong it needs no exaggeration. “It’s one of the hottest places I’ve ever been and I can’t order water in a restaurant – there are too many syllables in my version of the word,” she laughs. “At least here I’m very hydrated at the moment.”

Translation issues aside, Le Bon has bridged the cultural gap between “lovely, rainy, familiar and comfortable” Cardiff and Los Angeles with the same sense of adventure that defines her output. Le Bon has been in California since 2013, initially drawn by “the extreme beauty colliding with concrete mess. It’s a strange and compelling place.” She could just as easily be describing the world her music inhabits: part of an ever-expanding thread of Welsh oddball experimentalists (Super Furry Animals, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, 9Bach, Meilyr Jones), over the course of four albums and one Welsh-language EP Le Bon has constructed her own alternative universe, where thrillingly off-kilter, melodic pop is augmented by surrealist lyrics and madcap concepts. Take the title of new album Crab Day, so named after her niece’s made up holiday.

“My niece was four and she just thought April Fool’s Day was the most ridiculous tradition. She was having none of it. So she decided that it was Crab Day instead, happy Crab Day! She sat down and drew crustaceans with different hairdos. So my whole family all say happy Crab Day on 1 April now. It makes sense to me!”

Crab Day’s bizarre lyrics further add to the surrealism: “love is not love if it’s a coat hanger”, “my heart is in my liver”, “I want to be a motion picture film/I want to be a ten pin ball” she sings before the third track has even finished. (Jurassic Park is the movie in question. “It’s best film ever!”)

Le Bon says her words aren’t as arbitrary as they appear, instead an attempt to make sense of the “completely bananas” backdrop to life in 2016. “They all mean something to me, they all have a genesis that fit into the background about what I see the record to be about. I guess it’s about nonsense, but reassurance in the nonsense. Everything is bananas right now isn’t it? And everything is getting worse. It’s a reactionary language of disillusionment, but also absurdity in the face of that.”

Musically, Crab Day is Le Bon’s most accomplished record yet, a difficult to define, curious cocktail of The Velvet Underground and Nico, early CBGB’s rock, post-punk guitars and the imagination of Kate Bush. Written in the mouth of Stinson Beach in San Francisco with her band (which included Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa as well as long-standing cohorts Stephen Black and Huw Evans), Crab Day’s freedom echoes its surroundings, recalling the anything-goes first day of summer. Having just made a scuzzy, lo-fi album with White Fence’s Tim Presley under the moniker Drinks, Le Bon tackled Crab Day with the same sense of abandonment.

“The Drinks record was just imbued with joy and excitement,” she says. “There was no audience and no expectation and I found it to be so fulfilling and nourishing that the only important thing was you were making it for yourself. I realised I’d lost a bit of that in my own music. So again working with close friends, in this beautiful place, in a bubble thinking about what’s happening and not what comes next – it was pure joyfulness. I’m not trying to be perverse of difficult. I’m making music that genuinely excites me.”

Le Bon was born Cate Timothy in Penboyr, Carmarthenshire in 1983 (her stage name referencing Duran Duran singer Simon is a joke that he says went too far). Mentored by Gruff Rhys, who wrote her early press releases and whom she supported on tour, it was with Rhys’ electronic side project Neon Neon in 2008 that Le Bon first caught attention. It was around this time Le Bon first went to LA. “I always romantically wanted to go; I was fascinated with the city, the non-Hollywood side. It was like no other city I’d ever experienced. When the opportunity came to move I couldn’t turn it down.”

If the move proved the catalyst for a creative surge – 2013’s excellent Mug Museum was also fashioned there – then everyday life in the City of Angels suits her. “You don’t need that much money to have a really nice day there. The quality of life is so much better on a frugal living.”

Her only worries, it seems, are political. “It’s bananas that Donald Trump could actually be president,” she says, exasperated. “It’s absolute bananas. It’s a scary, absurd time. Both the absurdity and the fear are feeding into one another. It’s bananas. And it’s bananas here, too.” Le Bon is referencing Brexit: what does she make of the fact Wales voted in majority to leave the EU?

“It’s really disappointing,” she says. “I came home to vote, but I woke up in France and I couldn’t quite believe the outcome. There is no telling the effect it will have. Nobody’s got a clue have they? Those shysters taking advantage of people with their scare-mongering. I went to the little town to the tourism office and the man behind the counter just laughed at me, “oh you’re from the UK”. But it seemed pointless to go “I didn’t vote for it!” By that point you’re wearing the stinky coat.”

Le Bon’s own future is much more certain: two UK festival appearances this month at Visions and Green Man, further touring, a second Drinks record and then the fifth solo album – to be written while undertaking a furniture building course in the Lake District. “I’ll learn how to build furniture in the day and then write at night. It could give everything a different feel.”

Won’t she have to be careful with the hammer and nails? “Oh I’ve done the maths and I can lose up to two fingers,” she laughs. “Any more and I might be in trouble.”