Eclectic Glasgow collective Peter Cat released their second album, Starchamber, in 2025 to huge acclaim. While the album was defined by a sense of grandeur, cosmic experimentation and unpredictability, their current run of singles is more stripped-back and understated, but never loses any of the charm of their instantly recognisable sound. We spoke to frontman Graham Gillespie about his influences and shifting approach to songwriting.  

You released your fantastic second album, Starchamber, last year. What went into making such an expansive album?

Of “blood, sweat and tears”, it was a two out of three, at least. There was a lot of sweat. I’m sure some blood was drawn from the fingertips when recording some of the more menacing guitar parts. As for tears, I don’t believe I shed any personally (stoic to a fault), so we may have missed the hat-trick there. Although I can’t speak for the rest of the band – they could have surreptitiously wept under the covers at home after a particularly arduous day in the studio. I suppose I’ll have to survey them anonymously on that. I’ll get back to you with the results.

In all seriousness, Starchamber was the culmination of an artistic journey which began a few years prior with our EP The Magus, which was when I started moving away from conventional indie rock arrangements and textures in my songwriting. That move towards writing in a less formulaic way, and drawing on more unsettling words and textures, happened almost by accident with The Magus, but with Starchamber it became much more of a mission statement, clearly articulated between the four of us, from the very beginning. We set out to create this ominous, disquieting feeling with that record, and in some instances to move as far away as possible from standard pop/rock song structures as we could, while ultimately still presenting the project as ‘music made by Peter Cat, an indie rock band – in theory’.

In other words, we weren’t actually trying to be King Crimson or Death Grips (goodness knows we don’t have the chops), but we were trying to sift as much of that influence through the Peter Cat colander as we could, in the hope that what came out the other side would be something quite new and exciting.

The album is a theatrical, unpredictable piece of art-pop with notes of everything from Frank Zappa to King Crimson, Black Midi and Pet Shop Boys. How do you keep a lid on such a wide range of sounds and influences? 

I’m not so sure the lid stayed on myself. I think the lid may have been blown off completely and an unholy blend of ingredients may have been sprayed all over the kitchen walls. And now we’ll never get our deposit back! But we’re talking about music, not food. I think.

I’d just say that provided your songs are undergirded by a distinctive voice and melodic sensibility, as I think ours are, then you can move through any number of genres and styles, and most people will still recognise you as you. My voice has its own Marmite-on-velveteen quality going on, and Kylie’s guitar work is unmistakable – so if those two elements at least are present and correct, then whether we’re playing prog rock or synth-pop, that Peter Cat-ness is still undeniably there. I do think too many talented bands end up stuck in one lane, or one genre, far too often. For me at least, being a great band is about doing more than just one thing well: it’s about being restless, continuously processing and reprocessing the multiplicity of musical styles you take in through the diversity of your listening, passing them through your own filter, and then throwing the results back to an unsuspecting world like a hot potato. Those results should be a little new, a little different, every time.

You’ve said that your most recent single, ‘Innocent Driver’, returns to a back-to-basics ‘weirdo pop’ approach. What does that mean to you after releasing such a far-reaching, expansive record?

It means a refinement, more than anything else. We’re melting down everything that went into Starchamber to find its base elements, while embracing limitation again. ‘Innocent Driver’ actually has a chorus that slaps, yes (there weren’t many of those on Starchamber), but it still has the best of those left-field elements in spades: a thoroughly sci-fi guitar solo, a modulation in key between the verses, and other little easter eggs of trickery and frippery. And in enforcing a sense of limitation again – in saying to myself, “yes, you can have your cake, but it’s got to be no longer than 3 minutes” – I’m getting reacquainted with the unsung hero of musical composition, The Editor, who it turns out isn’t as annoying as I remember. So in short, with the new material, you’ve got the best of both worlds that Peter Cat offer: the hooks and the weirdness.

Do the singles you’re preparing to release over the next few months follow a similarly restrained approach?

In their own way, they do. They’re big songs, enormous songs, full of longing and failure, but their goal this time around is not to scare or shock you. Instead, they want to tickle your dopamine receptors and get you falling in love with melody all over again, just like you did back in high school, kid. But against that more melodious backdrop, you’ll find a set of lyrics that are perhaps the bleakest I’ve ever set down, written during a very difficult period of my life and darker than most of what I wrote for Starchamber. I’ve always been fascinated by that juxtaposition: how far can a powerful and compelling melody carry a thoroughly depressive lyric? The words are uncomfortable in more of a mundane way, as in a “I’m not sure this person should be saying that about themselves in private, much less on a record” kind of way. Pulp’s This Is Hardcore album was the reference point for the ambience. So in this new material, I want you torn between irrepressibly bobbing your head and sinking into a thousand-yard stare, never quite sure which bit to commit to.

Will the next full-length be as bold as the previous? 

That’s the plan! It’s slowly crystallising in my mind’s eye, although I’m only around halfway through writing the thing. There had been a tentative plan to go ‘back to basics’ and knock out an entire third album of pop songs really quickly after our second, but I decided that didn’t sit right with me. For better or for worse, these days I take a conceptual approach to making a full-length. I’d struggle to just knock out an album’s worth of standalone songs, it wouldn’t feel ‘enough’ somehow. There has to be a clear theme running through the entire thing, and there has to be a particular style or genre of music that we’re giving the ‘Peter Cat treatment’. For Starchamber, the theme was guilt, and the musical style was progressive rock. For the third full-length, the theme is…well, I’m not quite sure what that is yet, but I can tell you that musically, we’re getting really into *drumroll*…jazz fusion!

I’ve been listening to lots of Casiopea, Allan Holdsworth, that sort of thing. There’s a Norwegian jazz artist called Owane whose records I love, who is influencing my writing a lot right now. I’m really interested in the semiotic qualities of jazz fusion too, as well as the stuff coming out of Japan in the 80s/90s, the ‘Shibuya-kei’ stuff…how it all seems to connote this artifice, ease, this ‘sweet life’ under consumer capitalism. I’m interested in recontextualising those sounds to make them feel uneasy, too much…so cosmic that you might drift away into outer space and asphyxiate! Like what American Psycho did with Huey Lewis, Phil Collins, and so on.

So that’s where my mind’s going. Clearly I’ve got some sort of morbid fixation on taking historically uncool genres of music and devoting entire records to that style. I hope to finish writing our deeply uncool third record some time this year.

What does Chris McCrory’s production and mixing bring to your music? 

Chris was on board for the mixing of ‘Innocent Driver’ and the three forthcoming singles. There are as many different takes on the best way to make music as there are musicians who make it, but for me, a great mix is a non-negotiable. If you’ve got someone who really knows what they’re doing in a mix and isn’t afraid to get creative with it – to see themselves as that fifth member of the band with license to impart their own artistry and sensibility – then a song can be elevated way beyond where it would otherwise be. For me, Chris is that person. He took certain creative decisions in the mix and gave gentle guidance on which elements to include, and which to discard, to ensure clarity and a sense of space.

He has the confidence to toss you the odd curveball, too. On one of the forthcoming songs, he threw a wah-wah on one of the guitar tracks, completely unprompted. It took about 30 seconds for me to go from “I absolutely hate this” to “this is utterly perfect, why did I not think of this myself?” And that’s why I love him being involved in Peter Cat’s music.

With the video for ‘Innocent Driver’, you introduce your new keyboard player RJ White to the world. What have they brought to the band?

Well, in their own words (and I hope they won’t mind me sharing this), they’ve brought a “Germanic sense of timekeeping” to the band…which certainly helps, because the rest of us were operating more on Mediterranean standards prior to RJ’s arrival. Of course, RJ has brought much more than punctuality to the table. RJ is a fabulous keyboard player, who cut their teeth on the Glasgow circuit for many years with their old act The Abstract Dancers. The Abstracts once had a proper fist-fight on stage at the King Tut’s venue in Glasgow, à la The Fall in New York in 1998. RJ now holds the distinction of being the only member of Peter Cat who has engaged in full-fledged fisticuffs with former bandmates in the past. As such, the rest of us now live in mortifying fear of him.

Speaking of that particular video, how did Laura Meek bring the track to life?

Laura was fabulous to work with on the video from the off – just very ‘all in’ on whatever daft idea I decided to throw at her, then throwing back an even dafter one a minute later. I think she very quickly realised the video had to go big to match the maximalist energy of the track. In fact, I had to draw the line at her suggestion that she bring a dead fish to set for use as a blunt instrument to accost certain band members with. We only had the studio for half a day, and I was concerned about the olfactory consequences of this for whoever was using the place after us.

All I had for the video was a very basic idea: that it was going to be ‘foley art’ jokes from cinema. So we’d show the thing that makes the noise first (say, someone chopping a head of lettuce), then we’d cut to the thing that noise is standing in for (a shot of someone getting punched in the face). If I had tried to make this myself, it would have looked like some sort of corporate training piece, and it would’ve sucked. Laura elevated the whole thing a hundredfold through framing, composition, and in managing to tease this wonderful sense of depth out of the space we were working in. She also got me to go full Monty Python and pretend I was riding a horse while our drummer Kev walked past me clicking a pair of coconut shells together. Not even my therapist could’ve convinced me to do that on camera.

What can we expect from your upcoming UK shows? 

You can expect it all, and then some! With the recent addition of RJ to the band as our keyboardist, I’m now liberated from synthesiser duties during our live set for the first time in a long time. Meaning I’m now facing the heretofore unfaced dilemma of what exactly to do with my hands for the entirety of our performance. I’ve been studying mimic octopuses, Japanese spider crabs, other marine animals, and Jarvis Cocker for inspiration on this front. Come see us on tour and you can ratemymoves.com.

We’ve got a great setlist lined up, comprised of cuts from The Magus, Starchamber, and our post-‘Innocent Driver’ releases. There’s a lot of variety in the set, with the more challenging stuff sitting alongside the bangers. The band are sounding better than ever. And we’re heading out to places we’ve never been before, which is an exciting development. It’s a very collaborative effort, and I’m relying on the good graces of many others to make this tour happen. A particular shout-out must go to my brother, who’s driving us about for much of it!

Touring at grassroots level is harder for acts of our size than it’s been for quite some time, so if you’re reading this and haven’t been alienated by my ramblings yet – please come and see us live in your town! Most tickets are a tenner or less, and will show you a much better time than two pints of Carlsberg ever would.

Finally, we want to know what you’re listening to. Can you point us in the direction of some artists that we might not have heard yet?

To minimise the chances of me giving you the names of artists you *have* heard of, I’m going to keep it strictly local and tell you some of the best bands doing their thing in Glasgow right now. Check out: Insider Trading, The Foot & Leg Clinic, Onat Önol, Fraser MacCallum, Oedipus & the Mamas Boys, Middle Class Guilt, Slug, aortarota, Della Dolvinsky & Ike Goldman. Also special shout-out to two great London artists who’ll be joining us on our London tour date (22nd October at the Cavendish Arms, by the way) – Kipp Boucher & Sweet Giant!