Catfish And The Bottlemen Have Some Weird One-Sided Feud With One Direction
6 April 2015, 14:37 | Updated: 8 May 2017, 17:09
It's 2015 and apparently rock bands hating on pop bands is still cool.
It's safe to say that in the past couple of weeks, the boys of One Direction have had their fair share of adversity. Zayn split up with the band, Louis split up with his girlfriend, Liam nearly split up with the fans, and Niall probably spilled his ice cream or something.
So after all that, the recent comments from Catfish and the Bottlemen frontman Van McCann should be pretty easy to handle. In an interview this week, McCann declared openly to the boy band "we're here to f*ck you lot off".
"You lot won a competition!" He rants to the Sun (the newspaper; though the image of him yelling at the actual sun is kind of hilarious). "I've sat in a band of seven years, while you queued up outside Manchester Arena then did a bit of disco to a man behind a table who then put a few dollar bills down your jacket."
Hilariously, the two groups have "clashed" before; in December Louis Tweeted his appreciation for the band, to which they (presumably Van) responded with a baffling retort about their plans to "get u lids out charts and bands in":
@Louis_Tomlinson Genuinely made up you like it but we're here to do us best to get u lids out charts & bands in. I promised Ma a jacuzzi see
— Catfish&theBottlemen (@thebottlemen) December 19, 2014
This was a week after Catfish and the Bottlemen won the Introducing Award at BBC's first Music Awards, so it's safe to say the honour wasn't exactly humbling.
After describing 1D as "live pantomime", Van went on to justify his own band's appeal, explaining "We're resonating with young people because no one else is doing the big guitars and chorus thing". He might be right, there's no one else. Literally not one band who plays guitars and writes choruses is doing this.
But where Van gets his inspiration for beefing with pop stars is pretty clear, when he admits that recent Catfish and the Bottlemen gigs are full of "40-year old men who tell me: 'I've been waiting for a band like yours since Oasis'."
