Interview Luvcat: Creature Of Delight

“She was clawing at the cage, waiting to be let out.” That’s how Sophie Morgan describes her transformation into Luvcat. “It’s not an alter ego or a character, it’s just my nickname now.” It can be hard to pin down the facts when it comes to Luvcat - Sophie having once claimed to have been born on a Seine riverboat before running away to join the circus - but the myth and mystique are all just an enticing part of the ever-evolving universe that surrounds Luvcat and her band.

Having initially started playing “to no one”, as she describes it, it didn’t take long for a devoted following to form. With gig footage amassing attention online, the ‘Kittens’ who follow the singer only grew in number. While the videos of Luvcat gigs may have had watchers believing this was an overnight success story, as with all things that surround them, there’s more than meets the eye.

“I’m so thankful we got to have an amazing year of just cutting our teeth and grafting away,” Sophie says today, just a few weeks out from releasing her debut album, “then it slowly started to change and every fortnight it’d start to feel slightly different. That was pretty special.” While this may sound like she’s downplaying the very real connection her music creates, make no mistake, she has put in the hard yards. It was in the sweaty back rooms of the UK’s grassroots circuit that she honed the Luvcat world. First came the sultry ballad ‘Matador’, and from there the rest quickly followed. That first single saw Luvcat seizing the moment, and she hasn’t looked back;“this was never supposed to be an album campaign, but it’s become one.”

Fast forward through a selection of releases and a summer of festival slots, and you land here, at her debut full-length ‘Vicious Delicious’ - a captivating, cinematic and - above all - sexy, album. Across its thirteen tracks are tales of love, obsession and murder; it’s a record that feels like it should be filmed on Super-8 film and screened in a smoky jazz club. “It’s been really nice to shape it as a record, and it not just be about singles. It’s about telling a story,” she explains. “For instance, there’s an interlude on there which is called ‘The Kazimier Garden’, which starts slow and sinister, and then builds into this manic cacophony of instruments and samples of old lovers, voice notes and love letters from all the people that have been involved in it. I wanted a thread of every single character that’s crossed the path of this record.”

Indeed, some of these characters are the very people on the record, too “It was great to tie it all together and be with all my best friends, the people I’ve been playing music with since I was a teenager. It was just really sweet to look back and be like, ‘Oh, look where we are, we’ve all made it this far together’. There’s just so much love and character. I hope that seeps through; I feel like I’ve infused all the songs with so much truth. And I’ve always been obsessed about the idea that if the song was about a certain person, then I wanted him to play drums on it or to sample sounds from the day that story happened. There’s even a take of someone spanking my ass because it was a kinky song and I wanted to infuse it. I think the studio engineer was quite traumatised that day, so I feel bad about that!”