John Power of Cast: ‘I’ve always looked at myself as a musical Jedi’

Now, at last, John Power & Co are hitting the road for a string of dates that includes Sheffield and Leeds.

Conscious that the past 24 months have been “terrible for all involved”, Power plays down the pandemic-enforced pause in Cast’s activities, gently joking that they will perhaps need to “re-do the merch, because it’s probably now the 27th anniversary”.

Fundamentally, however, he appreciates that they are “a fortunate band” who are looking forward to being back on stage. “I’ve had some great moments of appreciation of the audience because I realised how important it was to have people to sing to, so in one sense maybe it’s going to make the shows more special than they were going to be anyway,” he says.

The communal “rite” of concerts is something the 54-year-old singer and songwriter has especially missed. “People are social beings, they like to come together, we all like to get into some kind of connection, and music is a medium for all that,” he says.

“I’ve done a few gigs recently and I’ve had a couple of moments where I’ve just had to go ‘Right, I feel a force’. I’ve always looked at myself as a musical Jedi – well, I was feeling the force there.”

In the 18 months where “everything kind of stopped”, Power wrote a new Cast album, which he hopes will come out in 2023. “I’ve had an idea for many years of going back to our roots and making a real rock ’n’ roll/pop album again, so I’ve been doing that,” he says. “It’s all right having an idea but (another thing to) get the songs sounding the way you want them to, that’s what I’ve been working on. I now have 14 or 15 demo-ed that are all in a certain kind of style, they’re all three-minute songs, big acoustics, bouncing drums and soaring melodies.

“I’ve taken this opportunity to get them the way I want them to sound, now I’m going to present them to the band and the band will do their thing with it. These songs all feel like they’re brothers and sisters, they’ve got the same continuity to them, so that’s what we’re going to do as well in the next year, some new material.”

While many musicians like Power who came to prominence in the Britpop era have been writing their memoirs in recent times, the Liverpudlian has so far resisted following suit. “I sometimes lie awake at night and think about the whole journey that has taken place, but whether I’d want to write a memoir I don’t know if I do,” he says. “There’s a book there if I want to do it, I guess, but you’ve got to want to write it.

“I’ve just been doing an interview for one of those Top of the Pops (compilation) years, so I’ve just been going through all of 1995-96, the early years of Cast, so I’ve had time to revisit it all, what the singles were and when they were written. To be honest, going back and connecting the dots is something I do quite often anyway; like everybody else’s journey, it doesn’t have to be in the limelight. I’m quite often re-living bits and bobs of the story, they all seem quite in the present and you just continue with it, really.

“I think you just want to keep writing your own life and living your life, manifesting what it is you want to be and do, that’s the journey. I have the same life as everyone else sometimes, going over what should have been, but it’s all as it is.”

Cast play at Sheffield Foundry on Thursday January 20 and O2 Academy Leeds on Saturday January 22. www.castband.co.uk