Kitten Feel was bought at a cost. Bethia Beadman lived on a hill in Lincoln, promised to a pure-hearted soul, the church booked. But to stay would have meant denying something she couldn’t name yet. Called by a malevolent spirit, the church was cancelled and she bought a cheap flight and fled to New Orleans. 

Cheap meant no luggage allowance, her floor-length black velvet dressing gown wrapped around her guitar case. “There’s an adrenaline before the grief sets in. It feels like the high of freedom, but is that just the survival-self talking?”

Writing songs from a New Orleans doorway. The drooping live oak trees, the Spanish moss dangling down – a portent. The mosquitos savage. Scary news on the radio. How to survive here without money or health insurance? The escape now seeming a kind of madness. Searching for swamp-blues heroes in old music clubs – planning safe passage round bad neighbourhoods. Everywhere the voodoo.

To swamp-town Lafayette. An artist’s wooden house. The fan spinning. Billowing net curtains. A mean-spirited parrot. Playing her first show in the Blue Moon Saloon. Beadman had been here, or near when touring with  Courtney Love’s Hole. But money was running out fast. She found respite with family. Could you call it family? A long-lost half-cousin’s brother-in-law. A Southern noir novelist, with a whisky-gravel voice. “He was a whole load of trouble”.

And so, it couldn’t be put off. She had to get to the swamp. Offered a ride there by a cross-eyed hobo who lived in his car. Strapped to the roof – a sitar seemed an omen of safety. But the silence of the swamp, the otherworldly vastness. Riding too far out in the hobo’s blow-up kayak. The bald cypress trees spiking up through the water, threatening puncture. The strange echoing sounds. The alligators. The hobo stripped naked and swam. 

Not redemption, but something darker. The songs appearing. “Lyrics fall out of real life. The verses for ‘Brick’ slithered out at midnight, like an ancient Mississippi worm. That song is my snakeskin jacket”. A kind friend lent money for a hire-car. Swept back into Britishness – the rental place could only offer a mini. That long pilgrimage - post-it notes on the windscreen “drive on the right!”. Arriving at the church. Reverend Al Green preaches here, but not today. Still, the glimpse of his cassock - his name emblazoned in gold. 

Finally, the pool-house of a dilapidated 1920s house in mid-town Memphis. Stained glass windows. The landlady a hoarder, her house suffocated by tat. Helping her unclutter, the feeling of something lifting. Moments later, deep in a box of worthless Elvis memorabilia - a hundred-year-old sapphire ring. The lady gifted it. So Beadman did go to church. And she did get her ring. 

The comedown from a ninety-day trip. Racing back to England as borders shut tight, and the whole world became as still as the swamp…

Then, lockdown in the bitter epilogue of winter. A drafty cottage in Devon, scribbling away. The chapters before this one — each as unlikely as the last. The bereft little girl in the school choir, singing for a red-coated Cardinal in the Vatican. The Sanskrit scholar finding her voice singing mantras. From now on, singing a kind of healing. The sound engineer working with Nigel Godrich on From The Basement with Radiohead, The Kills and The Stooges. The backing musician playing piano across the world for Hole — its divine but explosive culmination at the Roxy on Sunset Blvd.

“I’ve been writing songs since I was a kid. It’s been my unwavering compulsion. These new songs feel like they speak to different parts of myself, born from different voices. Like a loving arm around all the split and fragmented selves.”

That compulsion ran through everything — including the years of ‘audio diaries’, committed only to vinyl, that kept her alive as an artist. The year sleeping in her car to save money for the pressing. “Because having them on vinyl rather than the internet kept me in that liminal space. Cutting grooves felt like a pressure release on my skin.” It peaked in an extraordinary night filling (via word of mouth) London’s Union Chapel — described by The Quietus as “Ziggy Stardust meets Maria Callas”, voted second only to Ray Davies from over two hundred concerts that year.

The day Beadman moved her amps away from the hill in Lincoln, she met producer Paul Simm (Amy Winehouse, Neneh Cherry). Paul believes in spontaneity, in instinct, in setting flames under a project to catch the artist off-guard. 

Black-tooth rattle-skinned Adam Bradley Schreiber, who plays calf-skin drums like a shaman. “Paul said: he’d be good for your songs, and days later I was back in the States”. 

Detroit. Five days in dusty old Tempermill studio. No bass player made for a primal aesthetic. Guitar through a ten-dollar amp from a car boot sale. Beadman sang guide tracks for the drums, hunched over – but those were the takes. “When we finished recording, Adam and I were quiet – and finally he said, ‘Yeah, that’s healed’. Too right it’s healed.”

“When I wrote the album, heartbroken, I drove the car very fast, almost trying to crash, but another Bethia took over the wheel. And then I knew this other part of me would always step in.”

Kitten Feel captures something primal, elemental, thick with swamp dog magic. Its enchantments brought Tchad Blake (The Black Keys, Fiona Apple, Tom Waits), who announced his plans for his mix: “I’m going to go a bit swamp-dog with this”. Mark Refoy (Spacemen 3, Spiritualized) added guitar on the first two tracks. And 5dB records became home – “the coolest, sweetest spot on the map: it feels good to be part of a community - that’s somehow more important than ever”.

Bethia’s music sits alongside the likes of early Cat Power or PJ Harvey, and with a well-travelled guile and gravitas at play there’s a reverence to her songs that recalls some of her touchstone artists: Marianne Faithful, Scott Walker and Lou Reed. 

In its fur and claws, Kitten Feel gifts you the soul of a rare voice and talent. An antidote to contemporary overstimulation. A mainline to magic. 

Step into the mesmerising world of Bethia Beadman’s Kitten Feel. Feel it.