The Comedy of Errors: The Family Cat - Too Many Late Nights [Peel Session] (22 May 1992)

This track’s been knocking about on this blog for two years.  When I covered two other tracks from this session’s original broadcast, I had to share them using the video of the complete sssion.  Too Many Late Nights was another standout, but under the terms that I set myself - only select and blog about tracks you hear on Peel recordings - I couldn’t devote any special attention to it.  Happily, the repeat of the session on this night’s show means that it can now get its moment in the sun.

What comes across to me about The Family Cat’s Peel Session is both the novelistic, storytelling feel of their lyrics and their strident melancholy.  Both Furthest From the Sun and Prog One on the earlier post were structured like character studies - the lamentation of a dead woman and a forced break-up respectively.  They contained achingly sad sentiments but blasted through an invigoratingly powerful racket.  Too Many Late Nights continues this approach setting its protagonist amidst debauched late night excess and in the company of dozens of people who are his best friend for that night.  There’s plenty of sex and substances on offer and he takes his fill of it, but all the while, he knows that it’s empty and unfulfilling.  Somewhere along the line, a true love has got away and each lonely morning that follows the frenzied evening brings that reality home like rainfall coming “through the cracks in the frame” of the bedroom windows.
The only thing that works against it slightly is that Paul Fredrick doesn’t have the lived in voice needed to fully convey the debauchery, but this doesn't really matter given that the track is about emotional hollowness and the desperate need to fill that.  While the pain of the break-up has to be endured, then sybaritic means will have to do, despite the fact that they ultimately lead to another kind of loneliness.  He does a fine job of getting this emptiness across.  It probably wasn’t their intention, but the final result comes across as an excellent, hard-rocking update of similar themed songs of excess and emotional emptiness such as Herman’s Hermits No Milk Today or Another Night by The Hollies, both of who were to become important bands to me in 1992.

Video courtesy of Vibracobra23Redux.