Owen Powell, former guitarist of the band Catatonia, was once a Welsh teacher at Brynteg Comprehensive School

Every now and again on these boards, some thread will ask you if you have some unlikely link to a famous musician, and despite the loose definition of the word famous, I usually reply mentioning that Owen Powell, the guitarist from Catatonia, was my former Welsh teacher in school.

For many years I’ve recalled this anecdote, long after Catatonia were a touchstone of popular culture, and the response in this century was more likely to be “I thought they were Swedish”.

The last time this happened was last month on these very boards, and after posting it and replying to @Ruffers, as any Bridgend reference usually goes, I started wondering whether Mr Powell had ever reflected back on his time as a teacher in an interview or something like that.

I read a few articles, but could find nothing meaningful, and no matter what combination of search terms I used, I couldn’t find even a vague reference to the fact that he was once a teacher. After a while, I started to wonder if this actually happened at all. Back in school, it was as good as factual that events went like this:

  1. Mr Powell teaches Welsh.
  2. Mr Powell misses some classes, a substitute teacher steps in.
  3. Gossip spreads that Mr Powell had a nervous breakdown.
  4. some time passes
  5. Mr Powell is on Top Of The Pops playing Mulder and Scully.

However this was pre-internet age, and while it felt very matter of fact at the time, Owen Powell was a very common Welsh name and I started to wonder if this wasn’t what actually happened at all, but instead was a false memory.

I opened up the Bridgend subreddit to post about it there, to see if anyone could confirm or deny this, but sadly it’s read only, having not been updated in years. Thinking bigger I decided to try the Wales subreddit, but I noticed that my post wasn’t getting approved even a week later. I messaged the moderators and they rightly replied

Hia - yes, the reason I didn’t approve the post because I couldn’t see any information online. There’s nothing online about him working as a teacher and plenty about the jobs he did do before catatonia as a guitarist and sound engineer. Apologies if I’m wrong about that but I think the appropriate place to ask, if not just asking him himself, would probably be a alumni group for that specific school.

With this in mind, I decided the best form of action was to message the school and see if I could find the contact details of Owen himself. Finding Owen was a pain in the arse. As mentioned, his name is incredibly common, but after using names of his subsequent musical projects, I eventually tracked him down and sent him a message. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he never replied, my message either rotting in his spam box or understandably ignored.

Hedging my bets, I also messaged the school since I figured that they would have no objection to sharing the information if they had it. Two weeks ago I fired off an email and heard nothing…

UNTIL TODAY

In an email I receive from Brynteg Comprehensive School themselves, it states:

Good afternoon,

Thank you for your email. Yes, we did have Owen Powell work here many years ago in the 90’s. I don’t know much else about him though.

Kind Regards

(name redacted)

So now I have the definitive proof that Owen Powell, former Welsh teacher of @ma0sm later went on to become the guitarist in Catatonia, and I’m posting it here on the internet so that it is never forgotten again.

tl;dr the thread title

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journalism

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And have we confirmed that they’re definitely a different band to The Cardigans?

I don’t know if the school can answer that

Alright PJ Vogt

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No unions were harmed in the making of this thread

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Yeah, I think I might have chosen the other guy.

Get this man on panorama. Vital investigative journalism

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Are you going back to r/wales to stick it in the faces of those powerhungry nerds on the mods team?

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This could be a case for Mulder and Scully and @ma0sm

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Of course! Trying to decide the way to do it with maximum impact.

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The school email seems to just confirm that ‘an’ Owner Powell worked there and not ‘the’ Owen Powell. Maybe it seems more conclusive with your e-mail to them.

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I reckon you should send Cerys a message at cerys.6music@bbc.co.uk. Bet she would know/answer.

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I hear the power went off in Spain and Portugal because all the bandwidth has been used by @ma0sm doing his investigations

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Excellent work

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Every day when he woke up, he thanked the lord he was a Welsh teacher

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I don’t have any links to Owen Powell, former guitarist of the band Catatonia/Welsh teacher at Brynteg Comprehensive School.

But my mums best friend used to babysit for Cerys apparently.

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when she was a child.

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Very thankful this has been put to rest so I can sleep at night again.

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My email was:

Hi,

I was a student at Brynteg Comprehensive from 1993 - 2000. I believe during that time that one of my Welsh teachers was Owen Powell who stopped teaching with short notice and then was replaced by a replacement Welsh teacher. I believe this was because the band he was in, Catatonia, were doing well and he decided to focus his time on that instead.

For years I have mentioned this casually when it comes up in conversation, and have always thought of it as fact, but while recalling it recently, I decided to do an online search to validate the details. Instead of getting the details, I could find no trace of this whatsoever. It made me question whether this is what actually questioned or was a case of Mandela-effect, so I thought I’d contact you as the school to see whether or not I had imagined the whole thing.

Thanks for your help,

@ma0sm.

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