The Catweazle Club

16/01/2025

Beautiful start to a new Catweazle chapter last week at The Slow & Steady. We’re NOT on tonight: back next Thursday, Jan 23rd, and 1st and 3rd Thursdays thereafter 🧨💥🚀

14/01/2025

wot 'e said

09/01/2025

Lift Off!
Tonight: Sign up 7pm, doors 7.30pm

11/12/2024

We are back!

I'm delighted to announce that, from the beginning of January, we we will be kicking off another year of The Catweazle Club (our 31st) in a brand new venue (both for us, and for Oxford!)

From January 9th, 2025, we will be taking over the gorgeous, newly-refurbished upstairs room at:
The Slow & Steady
38 Abingdon Road
Oxford
OX1 4PD

It's a brand new Dodo pub (formerly The White House), sibling to The Rusty Bike and others, and the team are very supportive and super exicted to have us join them. The pub also does great food, serving from 5.30pm, if you want get supper in beforehand, and will hopefully to stay open after the show for hang-time too: something I'm especially looking forward to. I've dearly missed the apres-Weazle sessions in which we can all more deeply foment and connect.

We kick off January 9th and then a fortnight later on the 23rd, before reverting to the 1st & 3rd Thursdays of every month from February. Please help spread the word...
https://www.facebook.com/events/9017366308286559

Can't. Bloody. Wait.

Our move to The Slow & Steady marks our tenth venue in total, since we first began in October 1994.

Prize of a year's free entry for anyone who can list them all...

It's an enormous privelege for me to still be holding space for the countless talented people who continue to grace our stage: The Catweazle Club still feels to me to be a vital resource in the world - perhaps now more than ever.

It remains a beautiful place to connect, to be a part of something both simple and profound at the same time: where we all get to share our stories, and be heard in return.

I am just as inspired now as I was when I began hosting the space in the Autumn of 1994. Sitting at the feet of someone sharing so intimately - and often so beautifully - will never get boring for me. And so, I intend to keep doing it for as long as I am able.

After an unexpected couple of months off, I am looking forward to welcoming you all back in to the fold come January, and in the meantime would like to wish you all a hearty, healthy and hairy Solstice/Hannukah/Christmas/Zarathosht Diso/Kwanzaa/Ōmisoka/Soyal & New Year..

See you in '25,

x Matt

20/11/2024

A reminder that Catweazle is NOT on tomorrow night (and not until at least the New Year) but some hopefully very good news coming soon…

30/10/2024

Incredible, this

This digitally restored documentary about a 1972 music and culture festival includes performances by Marvin Gaye, Roberta Flack, the Jackson 5 and more.

23/10/2024

*Heartbreaking Announcement* 💔

Just days after our triumphant, sold-out 30th birthday celebrations at Common Ground Cafe we have shockingly been given our marching orders, with immediate effect. I am so surprised and saddened by this, as I really thought we’d found a wonderful, long-term home at Common Ground.

Just last Thursday night I was eulogising from the stage about how lucky we were to have found a space such as this, so grateful have I felt to both venue and staff from the outset. But, having spent the past year building a beautiful new momentum, entirely out of the blue they have now decided that Catweazle is not for them. I’m really gutted.

And so, at the ripe old age of 30, we are once again on the move. If any of you have any ideas, pls let me know: any help in getting the show back on the road would be hugely appreciated.

There will be no further sessions at Common Ground - or anywhere - until we manage to find a new home. Ideally, weekly on Thursdays moving forwards. Hopefully see you out there, somewhere, soon, and I’ll keep you posted.

The body may die, but the spirit lives on.

🙏❤️

The Catweazle Club

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

10/10/2024

It’s The Catweazle Club’s 30th birthday, next Thursday, Oct 17, at Common Ground…!
Oh, and the dress code is Green.

03/10/2024

Tonight, was everything

03/10/2024

It's only National Bloody Poetry Day (Again).
Tonight, folks…what ya got?