17/10/2024
Beloveds,
30 years ago, I arrived in Oxford, moved onto a boat on the canal with nowt but my guitar and few clothes, and immediately set out to find a creative place that I could call home.
After three weeks of searching, I couldn't find anything like the thing I was looking for, and so had to create it: The Catweazle Club. From that very first session, in the candlelit snug of The Vicky Arms in Jericho in October of 1994, it was immediately everything I had hoped it might be. Warm, intimate, inclusive. In fact, like nothing else I've ever found anywhere since.
What this role has bought me over the past 3 decades is both immense and immeasurable: friends, collaborators, community, inspiration. And I know that that has been the same for so many of you too.
For all of this I am so very deeply grateful, and I'm delighted to say that, as of today, we are still here, 30 years on!
Tonight, we gather again (for the approximately 1,500th time!!) to celebrate all of that, and do it all over again, fresh and new and never-before-the-same, as usual.
And as always (but maybe even more so tonight), there is an invitation to hang your expectations by the door, so that we may be surprised and delighted and intoxicated by that which springs forth from yet another unique and precious shared moment in which we find ourselves.
So, at the same time, tonight is not a special occasion, no more special than each and every one of the ordinary extraordinary moments we've gotten to share over the past 30 years.
The dress code, as some have asked and should you be arsed, is GREEN, the colour of the 30th anniversary.
We've seen many changes over the past 30 years - the world’s gone from analogue to digital, for starters! - but the fundamentals are the same, as they have always been: the profound human need to gather, to connect, to see and be seen, to share the news - both good and bad - of what it is to be alive. And, even if for just a few hours, to know that we're not alone.
See you down the front,
x Matt
