When most bands have their debut, lacklustre audiences, bad sound systems and sticky, beer-soaked carpets are the standard problems.
For the debut of Cat’s Eyes, a duo comprising Faris Badwan of Goth-garage rockers the Horrors and the Canadian soprano Rachel Zeffira, the problems were of a different order: a vast four-keyboard pipe organ, backing singers who caused a stir with their “racy” knee-length skirts and an audience that included seven cardinals. The gig was at St Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican, Rome.
“It was pretty stressful,” says Zeffira, underplaying the significance of performing their song I Knew It Was Over at the burial place of Christ’s Disciple.
“The choir got stopped because of their dresses, and we thought we’d get stopped because we were filming it. There was no rehearsal. They just pushed me on to this organ I had never played before. All church organs are different and if you make a mistake everyone knows it. Luckily, most people thought the song was a psalm.”
“The thing is, we want the songs to be accessible,” Badwan adds. So we thought that if we could get away with playing I Knew It Was Over in the Vatican, we could get away with it anywhere.”
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Both are neglecting to mention why the Vatican allowed Zeffira and Badwan (briefly and inaccurately known to readers of British tabloids as a “rock wild man” for his short fling with Peaches Geldof in 2007) to perform there in the first place.
“I sang some solo Polish music for Pope John Paul II a few years ago and I guess they had an old e-mail address,” explains Zeffira, who was brought up a Roman Catholic.
“I didn’t phone and say ‘I’m in a band called Cat’s Eyes and we’d like to play during a Mass’ because I don’t think they would have had an open mind to that. So we organised the Mass ourselves and the last song of the Mass was our song.”
Faris and Zeffira are in a Viennese café in St John’s Wood, northwest London, discussing their first live outing for the landmark album they made together. Badwan, whose stick-thin, 6ft 4in frame and lugubrious bearing give him the air of an Edward Gorey illustration, is quiet and intense. He fills the gaps in conversation by scrawling line drawings on the tablecloth. He has never properly learnt an instrument.
Zeffira, who is pretty, bright-eyed and slightly nervous, is an opera singer and a virtuoso on the oboe, English horn, piano and violin.
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They are an unlikely couple but somehow they make sense, musically and personally, as Cat’s Eyes, as their apparent romantic connection attests.
A lush, deeply romantic, sophisticated album of songs about love lost, found and denied, it calls on the spirit of Italian film music and the girl-group craze of the mid-Sixties: I’m Not Stupid and I Knew It Was Over come from the bleeding-heart school of classic tearjerkers, while The Lull and The Best Person I Know have a mood of otherworldly psychedelic optimism. It started when Badwan employed that age-old ploy to get a woman’s attention: make her a compilation.
“After we met four years ago Faris sent me a CD of girl-group songs from the Sixties,” Zeffira explains. “My favourite was called Guess I’m Dumb by Dani Sheridan, which was a cover of a song that Brian Wilson wrote for Glen Campbell. I wrote The Lull in response to that.”
“It was a Sixties pastiche,” Badwan says, staring out from underneath a large mop of unruly black hair. “She had done something strange to her voice and it sounded like it came from another world.
“Then we discovered that we liked the same things. I’m interested in Sixties producers like Joe Meek and Phil Spector, who found their own distinctive sound through sonic experimentation, and she likes György Ligeti, who would stick vacuum cleaners up pipe organs to create sounds that nobody had heard before.”
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While Badwan toured with the Horrors in Europe, and Zeffira wrote compositions in London, the pair worked on songs separately and sent them to each other before eventually carving out the time to map the album out together. The style that emerged was simple and wistful, love songs, mostly with direct lyrics free of metaphor, and couched in complex arrangements.
The pair then booked a session at Real World Studios in Wiltshire, using Zeffira’s life savings to pay for it. There was no record deal at this point.
“Then Rachel booked a full orchestra without us knowing how we were going to pay for it,” Badwan says. “We had used up all her money. If we hadn’t got a label to put the record out we would have been in trouble. There was no back-up plan.”
Zeffira says: “We didn’t tell anyone we were doing it. The Horrors didn’t even know. We didn’t play it to anyone.”
“Somehow,” Badwan says, “it didn’t seem relevant. With the Horrors the music we make comes as a result of a personality clash, with everyone pulling in different directions. That wasn’t the case with Cat’s Eyes. We were always in agreement.
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“And because Rachel can play pretty much anything, I found myself stretching out musically for the first time. Making the record was certainly a lot less stressful to what I’m used to.”
By this point in the interview it is obvious that Badwan and Zeffira are romantically involved. They respond to a direct question about this by stating that they don’t like talking about that kind of thing, while looking down at the table and smiling — which is as good as admitting that they are deeply in love and are in the process of moving in together. The album has the mood that comes when two people create their own world and wrap it up in an aesthetic all of its own.
Badwan has never formally learnt an instrument . “I had a guitar when I was a kid, but I would just record buzzing noises on it,” he says, but Zeffira has spent a lifetime in the confines of classical music. This included three years of study in Verona, Italy, where she made her private recital for Pope John Paul II.
Badwan takes inspiration from avant-garde musicians such as Arto Lindsay and Arthur Russell, who specialised in using instruments in ways not intended. By the time that she met Badwan, Zeffira was looking to escape the confines of her training. “I was really in the mood for being creative, for letting go and not relying on sheet music,” Zeffira says. “A lot of classical musicians will say ‘That should sound good because it follows the right chord progression’, whereas for him [she gestures at Badwan] it’s simply a case of whether it sounds right.”
Cat’s Eyes is a risk that paid off, but Badwan is nervous of talking too much about the songs and destroying their mystery, stating that “they should be open to interpretation”. He does not want to jinx their future work. “It’s never good to talk about things before they happen,” Zeffira concludes. “What if we went around telling everyone we were playing at the Vatican and then we got stopped at the door? It would be embarrassing. But right now this definitely does not feel like a one-off.
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“It’s hard enough finding people that you can create anything with without feeling compromised,” Badwan says. “But we met each other. It seems to have worked.”
Cat’s Eyes is out on April 11 on Polydor