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:
- Mr Powell teaches Welsh.
- Mr Powell misses some classes, a substitute teacher steps in.
- Gossip spreads that Mr Powell had a nervous breakdown.
- some time passes
- 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