THE GREAT ESCAPE

The human experience is hard. One of life's pleasures for Eureka Machines is “having these little tunes, at gigs, that give people a couple of hours to get out of their heads”.

- Polly Glass

It’s 5pm on a Bank Holiday weekend. Central London is sunny and packed. Eureka Machines have piled into an old Soho boozer (about the only one without football crowds, or Sunday roasts flying overhead) ahead of their gig at the 100 Club later, when Chris Catalyst has a revelation. The sort that tend to come near the end of your first pint, as you contemplate a second round, surrounded by people who’ve known you for ever.

“I think pissing around is really important,” the frontman/songwriter-in-chief declares between sips of stout. “I’ve got a friend who goes to [male suicide prevention charity] Andy’s Man Club, and he says it’s been fantastic, because as he got older, and people started having kids, getting married and working away and that kind of thing, his social circle really got smaller. So having this, to get together with your mates and piss about, I think it’s important.”

He finishes solemnly, gesturing to his bandmates: “And we do a massive amount of pissing about.”

Dressed in a flat cap, hoodie, and T-shirt with ‘Northern’ across the chest, silver rings weighing down his earlobes, Chris is chatty without being domineering. Part Ginger Wildheart (but sweeter), part John Cooper Clarke (a 21st-century Yorkshire version), he has the gently ‘wired’ manner of someone without a real off-switch. It’s easy to picture him in his local back in Leeds, pint to hand, quietly noting down things he overhears. Invariably there’s a good chance they’ll end up in his next song.

“I spend a lot of time in the pub,” he says thoughtfully, “especially living in Leeds, people are just funny. There’s always someone funnier than you in the pub. I find this all the time. It’s that realness.”

Much of that realness comes out in the tragicomic pearls of Eureka Machines’ new album