HIGH HOPES
Meet the British/Danish rock singer with Iron Maiden in his veins and the 80s in his music.
If Steven Tyler and David Coverdale co-fathered a child, it might have been Michael Catton. Armed with a microphone, the softly spoken 32-year-old transforms into the sort of rock singer you didn’t think existed any more – a flamboyant, joyously larynx-shredding force built by years on the grass-roots scene of his native Denmark.
Observers of that scene may recall his old band Tainted Lady, but it’s Catton’s solo debut, Point Of No Return, that really shows what he’s made of. Co-masterminded with Glenn Hughes guitarist Soren Andersen, it’s stuffed with ear-worms that call to mind the 80s at their brightest and riffiest – music that Catton has adored since his teens. “I was really into eighties glam bands like Whitesnake, Steelheart, Winger,” he says. “All the guys with big hair, those are the guys I idolised as a teenager, so I think that naturally came out of me in this process.”
The son of an English father and a Danish mother, Catton was born in Castle Hedingham, Essex before moving to Denmark aged 12. Alongside learning Danish (he’s now fully bilingual), he developed his voice through church choirs and singing along to his parents’ Michael Jackson cassette. “And when I was twelve my dad gave me aWho CD, which got me into rock.”
It was Guitar Hero on PlayStation that introduced Catton to the heavier, shinier 80s stars that he truly fell for, and ultimately fed into his own music, initially with a high-school band. In his early twenties he fronted t
