Catatonia - Road Rage

JUL 01 1998 · 12:00

Catatonia - Road Rage (1998) Director: Gerald McMorrow Era: Britpop & Post-Britpop Zenith (1997–1999) - Peak era of Welsh alternative rock crossover success; Catatonia's 'International Velvet' cycle coinciding with their commercial breakthrough on the UK Singles Chart High curatorial value as a convergence point of multiple 1990s cultural phenomena: the Cool Cymru breakthrough, the Britpop visual era, and an early directorial statement from Gerald McMorrow whose later feature work (Franklyn, 2008) directly extended the dystopian aesthetic first visible here. The video is a rare example of a chart-topping UK indie single receiving Metropolis-scale conceptual treatment, making it an essential archival object for researchers of both British music history and music video as a directorial art form. Context: Released on 20 April 1998 as the third single from Catatonia's second studio album International Velvet, 'Road Rage' arrived at the peak of the Cool Cymru movement, a wave of Welsh rock acts achieving UK mainstream success in the wake of Britpop. The single peaked at number five on the UK Singles Chart and earned a BPI silver certification, consolidating Catatonia's crossover from cult Welsh act to national stars. The song's title referenced a high-profile 1996 murder case, though lead singer Cerys Matthews clarified that its lyrical content addressed technological anxiety rather than the incident itself. The music video's Metropolis-inspired futurism provided a culturally resonant visual metaphor for that technological preoccupation, situating a Welsh guitar band within an international canon of sci-fi visual art. Director notes: Directed in 1998 to accompany the third single from Catatonia's second studio album International Velvet. According to IMDB, the video depicts the band performing inside a room set within a futuristic city rendered in the style of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), complete with ships and flying cars. This aesthetic choice is highly consistent with McMorrow's later career-defining work on Franklyn (2008), which similarly constructed a dystopian parallel-universe metropolis. The video thus represents an early and documented expression of the director's signature retro-futurist world-building sensibility, connecting his 1990s music video work directly to his subsequent narrative filmmaking. The single was released on 20 April 1998 by Blanco y Negro / Warner Music UK Ltd.