Ah, the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. When Ybor was scary. When St. Pete was devoid of fringe culture. When every cool dance club let bands play, and all of those bands played at least one song by The Church, and there were no Old Wave Nights because Old Wave was still, well, New Wave.
Perhaps the group most emblematic of the Tampa Bay alt-rock scene’s fascination with what was then a truly alternative sound was the one that started out as ICU before renaming itself The Catherine Wheel. (No, not the buzzy British band of the era, and yeah, that became a problem.) Vocalist Jonathan Harrison, guitarist Gerald Hammill, bassist Martin Conner, keyboardist Geoffrey Stuart and drummer Doug Prescott plied an original sound that incorporated the coolest influences of the time, and rode that wave nearly all the way to the national stage before tragedy and differences of opinion about the band’s direction caught them up short.
Culture is cyclical, they say, and many of the sounds that shaped The Catherine Wheel’s sound are once again prominent in pop culture, both in the vibes of massively popular acts like Imagine Dragons and in darker, more mopey and left-field outfits such as The XX.
That’s not why the band is getting together for the first time in nearly two and a half decades, though — they’re doing their one-off reunion show this weekend at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg in honor of Theo Wujcik, a late, beloved Tampa artist whose work is currently on exhibit at the museum.
“Theo was the local artist who kind of brought a lot of the arts into Ybor City,” says Hammill from his home in Brooklyn, where he’s lived since 2000. “I knew him in the mid-to-late ‘80s, he was this older, cooler guy… We weren’t best friends, but just being out every night in Ybor back in the day, Impulse was the club I was going to, Theo was there a lot. We’d hang out and talk.
“The museum is doing a retrospective of his work, and I guess a couple of people from the staff are from that era, that scene, and they were excited about asking us to play in conjunction with that.”
The scene was a small one back then; local original acts had few places to play, and local original artists toiled mostly for the sake of their own muses. Like a big brother who has the good records, Hammill says Wujcik had a large influence on making creative work in the Tampa Bay area, and in Ybor City in particular, “cool” in Hammill’s eyes, and in the eyes of others, as well.
“It’s kind of a small town,” he says. “I always had a lot of respect for him. You know how you see older people who are cool and interesting, they’re like the elder statesmen.”
The Catherine Wheel broke up in ‘91, after the death of keyboardist Stuart from illness at the young age of 24 and intraband arguments over the future direction of the group’s sound; Wujcik continued to make art and influence Bay area art up until he passed away in 2014. Now, the two creative entities are intertwined once again, as news of the artist’s current show inspired Hammill, Harrison, Conner and Prescott to reconvene over the 2018 Christmas season and play music together for the first time in nearly 25 years, with local veteran Mark Warren on keys.
“We rehearsed over the holidays while I was down visiting my parents,” Hammill says. “We practiced for thee days.
“We definitely needed to practice,” he adds, laughing, “but there was definitely still chemistry there, and I was surprised at how all those years have gone by but it still sounded and felt like us.”
The Catherine Wheel’s MFA show will surely bring out a host of old-school friends and fans — that goes without saying. What’s interesting, though, is how current the band’s music could sound to younger music buffs enjoying what’s going on in popular music today.
“I feel like music has come full circle,” says Hammill. “So much of that dark pop, there’s interest in that again, a lot of labels are putting that out. And maybe that’s the reason why [playing with The Catherine Wheel again] doesn’t feel as dated. I could be biased, though.”
Several of the members of The Catherine Wheel have their own current music projects — for his part, Hammill plays in an improvisational group called 178 Product with a former member of highly influential underground ‘80s band Liquid Liquid in New York when he’s not DJing. All of the members of The Catherine Wheel have lives, and not all of them are here; a full-blown reunion seems unlikely. And that seems fine with Hammill, who’s just happy to come back to town, play a show and pay tribute to one of the guys who made Ybor cool.
“It’s really exciting to be playing it again,” he says. “I’m just really excited to get down there, it’s always amazing reconnecting with old friends.”
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This article appears in Apr 18-25, 2019.