'“Vices” is their most dangerous and exhilarating record to date” - Vive Le Rock



'Quite simply irresistible stuff, punk rock raising a middle finger at the establishment with craft and a lingering rock ‘n’ roll snarl.....one of the best moments, song wise, to be heard this year.' - Ringmaster Review



'London’s Katalina Kicks make a scuzzy rock n' roll rumble that owes a debt to their heroes The Hives, The White Stripes, QOTSA and The Stooges... a full-tilt masterclass in garage rock' - Team Rock


'lethal and exciting’ - Room Thirteen

‘Wow! These guys can write a hook, anthem style chorus!’ – TotalRock Radio

Developers and moneymen can change a city’s shape, but not its soul. There are ancient spirits that skyscrapers, shopping malls and “affordable” housing can never silence. Spirits that will always find their way through the ever-shifting concrete and clay; that once whistled up Goldhawk Road to the three chord stomp of The Who’s I Can’t Explain; that trembled between the traffic of the Westway to The Clash’s White Riot. The endemic sound of London, especially West London, will always find the crack in the masonry to slip out and shake free. In Katalina Kicks, it shakes yet again.

Katalina Kicks are a London band as only a London band can be, three nomads from different points of the compass – a Southern soul-searcher, a Northern agitator and an east end bass monster – whose desire to make music lured them first to the metropolis, and eventually each other. And, by birth, a quintessentially West London band, first fashioned in the clatter and fume of Shepherds Bush. Even if they’ve changed postcodes since, their sound – urgent, questioning, loud and fierce – has never lost the urban beat of W12.

Singer and guitarist Ian George is the last man standing from Katalina Kicks Mk I, once a punkish quartet who released an album named after their cat, stray moggy “Montague Rotter”, and found themselves accidentally sound-tracking a straight-to-DVD horror Z-Movie directed by the son of James Bond. “I’ve never watched it!” grimaces Ian of Jason Connery’s 51. “When we started we had an American publishing deal and that was one of the weird things that came of it. We got all of £3.50 for having a song in a crap film. So it’s taken a long time, and a lot of changing line-ups to get to where Katalina Kicks are today. I’ve always believed in the band. It’s just been a waiting game to find the right people.”

One such right person finally surfaced in the beard and flexing tattoos of Jase Wilkinson. Not so much born as smelted in Manchester, as a kid he’d wait for his stepdad to leave the house so he could sneak a listen of his Led Zeppelin vinyl. “And getting a whopping for it when he came home and found out.” Between John Bonham and hip hop he fell in love with the drums, later moving to London, instinctively settling westwards off Ladbroke Grove, first blurring his limbs behind the kit of a ska band until a chance audition with Katalina Kicks. Which he failed. “Because he wore these dodgy heavy metal black leather fingerless gloves,” laughs Ian. “My first thought was, no way am I having THOSE in the band. But then a few weeks later I called him back. Before Jase our drummers had mostly been arseholes, mentally ill, drug addicts and glory-grabbers. He was none of those. He had the passion and the power I’d always needed… so long as he kept those bloody gloves off!”

In the meantime bassists continued to fall by the wayside until a long time friend of the band, Conor Cotterill, brought his swag and thumping bass lines to the show.

Katalina Kicks have been a formidable core trio ever since, occasionally swelling their ranks to four with an extra guitarist for added live ferocity.

Together they play simple and direct heavy garage rock’n’roll: power chords and pummelling rhythms, fuzzy guitar and throbbing bass, big riffs and shouted choruses, pin-balling between grunge, punk and heavy blues. In Ian they’ve also a songwriter who can’t help but use his band as a platform to air his anxieties about the world around him. “I would never pigeonhole us as a ‘political band’,” he explains. “I just write about things I see and hear that upset me. We’re not preaching at anyone or trying to change the world. We’re just saying these are the things that affect and worry us. They’re too important not to talk about, whether in conversation or in rock’n’roll. That’s all we try to do.”

The new album, Vices, due for a May 2017 release, presents Katalina Kicks at their loudest, scuzziest and most politically aggrieved yet. But then opening with a “cameo” from Donald Trump, how could it not be? The Seattle-sized quake of Guns was written after watching Obama’s tearful reaction to the Sandy Hook school shooting. “It’s a song of despair,” says Ian. “The most powerful man in the world, and even he can’t stop the gun madness in his own country. And then after the Paris attacks, Trump said that terrifying quote about if people had guns, less people would have been hurt. So we sampled that just to show the absurdity.”

DISCOGRAPHY:

'Cold/I Want the World' (Double A -side single) - July 2017
'Killer' (single) - June 2017
'Vices' (album) - May 2017
'Guns' (single) - December 2016
2nd album 'Dirt' - September 2014
EP release - February 2013
Debut album ’The Return of Montague Rotter’ – US release September 2011 / UK release March 2012
Me – UK single release December 6th 2010
145 – UK single release July 5th 2010

• Rock
• Punk
• Blues
• Grunge
• Garage