By Isobel Carnochan, Senior Culture Editor
With the autumn chill beginning to creep back in, my days are growing darker, my wine becoming redder, and my playlists getting spookier. This is, of course, abetted by the gloomful soundtrack of Luvcat’s discography. Sophie Morgan Howarth, performing with her band under the stage name Luvcat, rose rapidly to fame in the summer of ’24, quickly releasing her first single Matador that July. Two months later, her second single ‘He’s My Man’ was released, and remains her most played song on Spotify since. A year on, fans have been blessed with a new rendition, featuring world renowned poet John Cooper Clarke – and even more sultry, vicious sleaze than before.
Following in the footsteps of My Chemical Romance, Luvcat’s songs all retain a strong narrative. Live in concert, ‘He’s My Man’ is introduced as “a muder ballad, all about a bored housewife slowly poisoning her husband with arsenic”, which gained a round of cheers when I saw her live last February – warranting a cheeky “you shouldn’t celebrate that, that’s actually really bad” from Luvcat herself. The lyrics absolutely live up to this promise, featuring lines such as “I need him so much that it hurts”, “I want him to stay here forever // he’s happiest with me”, and “he keeps having feverish dreams // that he can never ever leave”. Through all Luvcat’s crooning and swooning, ‘He’s My Man’ captures the essence of the current tradwife movement and perverts it into something darker, laced with strychnine. Double edged with sentiments both sickeningly sweet and seductively sadistic, the narrative web spun by Luvcat is just as compelling as it is troubling, leaving listeners with a delightful cocktail of theatrical madness and love spun horribly out of control.
The music videos are just as deliciously morbid. Donned in rosary beads, lacey lingerie, and leopard print fur, Howarth wields chainsaws, chauffeurs skeletons in vintage convertibles, and bakes Victoria sponge cakes drizzled in black tar frosting and cigarette ash. There’s glamour and gore within everything she produces, both lyrically and visually. This is even more true of The Anniversary Edition, in which audiences see Sophie dripping in blood-red wine in typical murderess, almost cannibalistic, fashion; in typical Luvcat style, it’s romantically gothic.
Admittedly, there is a prevailing sense of loneliness to the original version – after all, she admits that the flies “knocking on the glass […] are the only other friends I have.” Yet, the new anniversary edition of ‘He’s My Man’ featuring John Cooper Clarke gives the story a whole new spin. Where our narrator was once a bored and lonely housewife, driven mad by obsession and longing for companionship, she now has a partner – both vocally and lyrically. In the chorus, “He’s my man” gets swapped for “I’m your man”, and the plurality of the following line, “we’re hand in hand to hell and back”, becomes much more believable when both members of the relationship are actually singing it. In fact, even “I want him to stay forever” gets revamped into “I want to stay here forever”; what was at first a one-sided obsession becomes an equal devotion, even if it is deranged and grisly all the same. It’s mad, tragic, and utterly beautiful.
In the same way that The Addams Family franchise was intended as an antithesis to traditional American ideology, Luvcat twists the conservative idea of domestic gender roles into something morbid, gothic, and gruesome. It’s gorgeous, yes – but it’s the satire of convention that makes it so. It would be practically impossible to come away from either edition of the song believing it to be an endorsement of the tradwife movement. It’s fun, it’s glamorous, and it’s absolutely perverse – in the best way possible. If you’re looking for the perfect song to soundtrack your couple’s halloween costume on Instagram, ‘He’s My Man’ is exactly that. Even my man certainly isn’t safe from winding up on an Instagram story with this song in the background, but at least he’s safe from arsenic poisoning, probably…..
Photo by Joanne Mooe on Unsplash