After emigrating from northern England, musician Ben Catley has called Perth home for the past decade.
Ben's newest single is the bluesy rock of 'For The Life Of Me', which features a guitar solo by Ash Grunwald. The pair have played together a number of times, with Ben hitting up Ash for the collaboration during COVID."I wrote this song as a reminder to myself when I've felt headstrong and full of confidence," Ben says.
"It can sometimes be easy to lose sight of those feelings and self-beliefs, and it's nice to think back to moments where you've been in your element and felt like hard work and struggles have been worth it. For me, a lot of those moments are on stage.
"Having Ash Grunwald feature a guitar solo on the track has been an honour. I've always admired his live shows and his music. There's no mistaking his guitar the moment you hear it."
In his downtime Ben is an avid distance runner, rock climber and graphic artist. He's also experienced his fair-share of moments that didn't go to plan.
1: Nosebleed
I was doing a local show in Fremantle and on my drive there I got a huge nosebleed that lasted a good 30-40 minutes.I got to the venue with about five minutes to spare before my set – I smashed some water, a load of table salt and some sugary orange juice, did a quick line check and started my set. I felt so dizzy and thought I was going to pass out. After the first song I came good and it was such a fun night.
2: Snapping too many strings
I was touring over in the UK for a month and my guitar had started acting up – I think from some solid over-usage and being due a decent service. I had myself a good slot on a good stage at Green Man Festival in the UK and I snapped three strings all at once in the very first song! Unheard of.As a solo act, you don't have a drummer or another guitarist to fill the void, so there's just this stillness with the crowd waiting for what happens next. And I probably don't have the best stage banter, haha.
Fortunately I managed to babble my way through a couple of minutes of tour stories while restringing, which seemed to get the crowd on my side more and the show went better than I could have ever hoped.
3: Power outages
This has happened plenty, but at the very first festival I played in New Zealand, I rocked up on very little sleep after a red-eye flight and issues with my hire van.About ten minutes into my set, all the power went out on the stage, except for my kick drum pedal, strangely. So while myself and the sound tech tried to figure out what was going on, I kept stomping on the drum, taking the tempo up and down.
It seemed to keep people engaged enough until the sound came back on – to an almighty supportive cheer! It was an absolute blast from that point on.
4: Watch those bloody fingers
More times than I'd like to admit, I've cut my fingers right before going on tour while chopping veggies or something.Once, the day before going on a WA leg, I had to fix a smashed wing mirror on my car, slicing a nice little chunk of my finger off in the process. I quickly dashed to A&E and got bandaged up and had to redress my finger a couple times while on stage at my Bunbury show the following night. It felt pretty rock & roll. The reason I'd cut my finger didn't.
5: Tyre blowouts
Again in New Zealand, I was about two hours from playing a set up on the Coromandel Peninsula (an absolutely beautiful part of the world), and a tyre on the car I was using blew out. Like, properly cooked it.It was late on a Saturday afternoon in a tiny town and no garages were open, and the spacer spare tyre was definitely not going to get me an hour's drive through the winding Coromandel roads.
I managed to find one call-out guy who slung on a new tyre and charged me through the roof for it, but I got to my festival set just in the nick of time and had such a fun show.
Moral of the story for me is that sometimes when things go wrong, things go better. And this is indeed the theme of my next studio track I'll be releasing in a month or two.
