Cat's Eyes, interview: Faris Badwan and Rachel Zeffira talk late night song-writing and clandestine gigs

Jess Denham catches up with The Horrors frontman and Canadian soprano ahead of their gig at London's Lexington

Faris Badwan and Rachel Zeffira of Cat's Eyes released their second album Treasure House on 3 June

He’s the shaggy-haired garage rocker from The Horrors; she’s a classically trained Canadian soprano, composer and multi-instrumentalist. Faris Badwan and Rachel Zeffira seem an unlikely pair, but when they rock up to our interview in matching red leather jackets, they’re the poster couple for opposites attract. Cat’s Eyes was born back in 2011, after Badwan met Zeffira in Camden and began introducing her to life on the other, poppier side of music’s tracks, sharing his love for Sixties girl groups and psychedelia as she taught him about classic song structures and chord progressions. Before long, they were writing songs together and the electrifying, genre-defying fusion known as Cat’s Eyes came to life. But first, there was ‘the supermarket game’.

One of Faris and Rachel’s “favourite things to do”, other than checking out the snakes in their local reptile house, is to hang out in Sainsbury’s, trying to find all the misplaced items. It’s not a conventional pastime, but this duo don’t do boring. “It’s funny,” insists Faris. “People chuck the ham behind the tissue paper and the Creme Egg in the dairy section. I would send Rachel bladder infection medicine with the biscuits - ten points for that one.” At this point, an apparently knackered Rachel excitedly thrusts her phone in my direction. “That one was there for weeks!” she says, gazing fondly at a photo of a particularly sad-looking beer bottle that had somehow ended up in the wrong aisle. “It travelled across the supermarket! It had a little lonely journey!”

Back to music, and it seems Faris and Rachel share a similar mentality when it comes to songwriting, despite their musical differences. Surprisingly, being at other ends of the creative spectrum makes things easier, with Rachel insisting there are no “sacrifices or compromises”. “Something that he cares about, I don’t care too much about, and vice versa,” she says. “There’s no conflict.” The pair write mostly at home late at night with just one instrument and a voice, before adding everything else afterwards. Channelling creativity in the early hours might be the rock‘n’roll way, but Rachel is a morning person. “I used to get up really early in the morning but Faris goes to bed at 5am,” she says, as if she didn’t know what she was letting herself in for. Badwan hardly seems the ‘all tucked up by 11pm’ type. “It’s not like he’s hyper-productive during that time though. He’s watching baby goats in pyjamas and stuff!” she says. Just like that, cries of “What! That’s you! That’s you! Rachel! That’s you! Rachel, you’re projecting!” take over, as if watching viral videos is the single most uncool thing a person can do. “This is something Rachel likes to do and she's trying to make out like that it’s something I like doing,” Faris deadpans.

While the baroque pop influence of The Ronettes and The Shangri-Las still pervades their sound, Cat’s Eyes have “gone a bit deeper” into their relationship for the new album. “We write about our own lives really,” says Faris. Last year, Rachel took him on a nostalgia trip to her hometown of Trail in British Columbia, a tiny town of just 7,000 people. The adventure would inspire some of the songs on recently-released album Treasure House but to get there, they had to fly to Vancouver before taking a 14-hour car journey. “It gets more and more remote, you don’t see anyone for three hours,” says Rachel. “When you grow up there it’s claustrophobic because it’s so cut off, you’re surrounded by nature and nothing. It’s hard to get access to anything. It’s beautiful but it’s really remote.” Before experiencing it for himself, Faris had struggled to imagine where his partner grew up. “It sounded like such a weird place,” he says. “There’s nothing like that in England, it’s too small.” Rachel had warned him of the bears, rattlesnakes and cougars that would regularly rock up in her garden, but he didn’t believe her. “Faris was not getting the bear sprays and bells. He didn’t take it seriously and then the first day, there was a bear in my front yard,” she says. “It’s pretty scary. If there’s a cub around, you’re screwed.” Soon enough, Faris got the bell, the spray, “the whole lot”.

They started writing Treasure House before finishing their self-titled 2011 debut. “We got kind of carried away thinking we’d do another one straight away, then we got delayed because of the soundtrack and it took four or five years,” says Faris. Said soundtrack, for Peter Strickland’s indie drama The Duke of Burgundy, won Cat’s Eyes a European Film Award for Best Composer last year. “It was a good film, we were happy after doing it,” says Faris. “It suits our music, we’d like to do more.”

Rachel has a classical background while Faris is best known as frontman of The Horrors (Press image)

Making music does not feel like a job to the 29-year-old. The Horrors are still alive and kicking, but how does he balance his time between two bands? “You do an album for maybe a month, two months, then you tour it and there’s a gap. I’m recording The Horrors album next month, it’s fine,” Faris says. The two projects do sometimes overlap, with Cat’s Eyes live favourite “Sunshine Girls” starting life as a Horrors demo that Rachel re-arranged. Even so, it’s hard to imagine this man ever getting stressed about anything. “I like doing music all the time, I don’t really need time off. It’s fun. I can’t really do things that aren’t fun.”

Speaking of fun, Cat’s Eyes have been busy building a reputation for clandestine gigs in unusual locations. Most recently, in April, they crashed Buckingham Palace during a private event dedicated to the Queen’s art collection to perform new song “We’ll Be Waiting” under the guise of a Renaissance ensemble. Before that, they made their first public appearance during a service at St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, performing another song during a mass complete with church organ and choir. “We wanted to do something involving some kind of risk, danger and unpredictability - anything to break the tedium,” says Faris. “We’ve got a few more ideas. There’s stuff that we try out that doesn’t work, but it’s fun.”

Rachel is all too aware of opera’s reputation as an inaccessible, elitist art form. “It’s hard to listen to,” she admits. “I find it irritating to listen to a voice that’s got all this vibrato on it and stuff. Even when I go to the opera on a job, it’s sometimes hard work to sit through the whole thing.” She hopes her innovative work with Faris will bring classical music onto the radar of those with rockier sensibilities and isn’t ruling out the possibility of a more operatic Cat’s Eyes album. “I’d like to do something that makes it a bit more accessible. There are million and millions of pieces that people haven’t heard that are completely accessible. They maybe just need to be performed differently. Not everyone likes Mozart.” Faris knows that he’s best leaving the classical edge of Cat’s Eyes in Rachel’s capable hands. “It’s not something you can fake,” he says. “I can’t do it. If you’re not trained, you can’t do it, but most songs are based on classical music - almost every pop song uses classical chord progressions.”

Neither Faris or Rachel are bothered by the increasing use of and often reliance upon technology in music. “It’s just life isn’t it, things move naturally. I don’t think there’s any point fighting against it. I just want the emotional connection to be there,” Faris says, with Rachel pointing out that the volume of musicians shunning computerised effects to play simpler songs acoustically is also on the up. “There’s loads of good new bands, loads. Now is a good time for music for sure,” they say, before zoning out when the topic of streaming is brought up. “Streaming is useful. I don’t really find it interesting to debate that kind of stuff,” says Faris. ​“It’s just technology, and it’s always going to develop. It just is. It exists.”

So lastly, what of the name? Why Cat’s Eyes? “We just thought it sounded pretty middle of the road!” jokes Faris to an audible groan from Rachel. When they own the stage just hours later, the irony is sweet.