Catherine Wheel guitarist Brian Futter has released a new song featuring Belly singer Tanya Donelly. It’s available on Soundcloud now. Brian was kind enough to answer some questions about this new work, and a bit about Catherine Wheel.
Look for the EP release on February 10, 2026 on various music services. (Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, etc)
How did Good Day Father come to fruition?
“Ever since Tanya sang on Judy Staring At The Sun, I’ve always wanted to work with her on something else. The last couple of years I’ve felt my musical imagination have a rebirth, song ideas everywhere. I needed a vehicle for it, so Good Day Father was born. The name comes from the phrase my son uses to get rid of me on the phone when he’s bored with me… Tanya was my first choice for singer. Very pleased she said yes!”
How many songs featuring Tanya are you planning to release?
“We’ve recorded a 3 track EP, which will be released through 2026, with plans for another EP in 2027.”
With modern home studio recording, cost and convenience are obvious advantages. But now that you’ve written, recorded, and released music in this era, have there been any unexpected benefits? Any unexpected drawbacks?
“The main benefit is for me is being able to create and build songs to completion, from garbled idea on a phone through to finished living song. That’s the personal joy of the whole thing and it’s how I got into being in a band in the first place. Now you don’t have to persuade a record company to loan you tens of thousands to get there. The downside is obviously everyone is doing it, the world is awash with new songs, human and AI derived, so in most cases music has no financial value to the songwriter anymore, other than performing live. I don’t think the present landscape for music is worse than it was, it’s just just different.”
How might having these tools have affected your past work with Catherine Wheel?
“Catherine Wheel always had its own little studio, we created demos/b-sides very quickly, I can’t see the benefits of today would have speeded anything up for us really, we were a lean machine!”
Alternapop related tangent – read my 2007 article here on what it was like to collect music in the 90s as a Catherine Wheel fan, trying to obtain the dozens of non-album b-sides
A related question for those interested in your past work, which is likely most everyone reading this, do you think some Catherine Wheel albums, such as Ferment or Chrome, would benefit from being remixed or remastered? If so, is there any chance that might happen? I know that Cherry Red supposedly “remastered” Ferment for the 2010 reissue but I’m not sure how that was done, or if the band had any say in it.
“Yeah, we gave Cherry Red permission for Ferment ‘remastered, but at that time none of us were interested in anything CW, we were all living other lives, so the whole thing went unpoliced by us. It would be different now. A proper remastered release would be closely governed.”
What else have you been working on, music-wise, over the last 25 years, and in what capacity? I think you did some composing for the British indie film ‘Home’ (2021).
“I’ve written the scores for a couple of films recently. Really interesting to start putting sounds over images and storylines, interpreting the film with sound sympathetically. An annoying aspect of that is you can’t help analysing and critiquing every sound or piece of music behind everything you see on tv or the big screen…hard to turn off.”
Good Day Father links: