The first major lineup featured Dafydd Ieuan of Super Furry Animals on drums, Paul Jones on bass, and Clancy Pegg on keyboards.

Rumours began to circulate about a breakup, but a further album, Paper Scissors Stone was released in 2001 following a two-year break from live performances.

[4] The story that Catatonia were formed after Mark Roberts spotted Cerys Matthews busking in Cardiff in 1992 was an invention for the media in order to give the band a newsworthy biography.

[9] They took the name of the band from Matthews' experience working in a mental health facility as well as the novel The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley.

As Sweet Catatonia, Matthews and Roberts recorded a series of demos at the city centre youth project in Cardiff, nicknamed "Grassroots".

Roberts and Matthews hired a drummer, Stephen "Frog" Jenkins from the band U Thant, and continued to record bilingual Welsh/English tracks.

They were spotted by the girlfriend of the lead singer of the band The Pooh Sticks, who thought that Matthews would make a good female voice for the group.

Mwyn used his contacts to get Catatonia onto Welsh language television, and strove to move their live performances away from Cardiff so that they were not simply playing in front of their regulars the entire time.

[18] They held their first London gigs in support of the EP, under the advice of George and The Pooh Sticks lead singer Hue Williams.

After warm-up gigs in Cardiff and Birmingham, the London performance took place at the Samuel Beckett pub in Stoke Newington on 13 November 1993 alongside Anrehfn and Margi Clarke.

[19] On 19 and 20 February 1994, the band's follow-up EP, Hooked was recorded in Llandwrog, Gwynedd, and produced by Ken Nelson who they had met on Radio Wales.

Matthews later recalled that they'd needed to borrow money from a fan to pay the toll on the Severn Bridge on the way back to Cardiff.

[33] The first time subsequent producer Stephen Street met the band was when they arrived to record at the Maison Rouge Studios in London.

Ieuan left during the recording of the album to join Super Furry Animals, and was subsequently replaced by Aled Richards.

They ultimately hired Colour 45's Owen Powell, who by this time was working as a music technician for the Super Furry Animals, to this role.

[43] While Roberts sought to begin work on a second album, they began to tour with fellow Welsh band The Manic Street Preachers as a support act, and the label released the compilation Tourist EP in Japan.

[17] One example followed an incident at a party celebrating the victory of the yes vote in the 1997 Welsh devolution referendum, as when asked how she felt about the result, she responded "What we want to know is who is going to shag Siân Lloyd?"

Catatonia found their roles reversed shortly afterwards, performing as the support act to Space after the Liverpudlians had a series of top 20 singles.

[50] Warners replaced "That's All Folks" with "My Selfish Gene", and agreed to release "Mulder and Scully" in January 1998 and International Velvet some two weeks later.

Matthews explained in an interview that she wanted to turn to invert the idea of being Welsh from an apparent negative into a positive, "We're not seen to be very good at anything.

"[14] In front of 70,000 spectators, Catatonia performed "International Velvet" at the opening ceremony of the 1999 Rugby World Cup in the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff.

Catatonia were so popular at the time that in April 1999, Way Beyond Blue, International Velvet and Equally Cursed and Blessed were all in the top 40 of the UK Albums Chart.

They returned to the stage for a further charity gig on 28 April, in support of Unison's campaign for a living wage at the Manchester Evening News Arena.

[78] Catatonia went on to headline the NME stage at the T in the Park festival on 7 July, having conducted a warm up concert at The Lighthouse, Glasgow.

However, on 21 September it was announced that they were breaking up with the record label releasing a statement which said "Their decision has been made entirely amicably, and there are no details at present as to their future plan".

Iestyn George, editor of the magazine Maxim at the time, praised the influence that Matthews had through Catatonia in the later 1990s, saying that "Around 1998 and 1999, Cerys was in the papers every other day".

They released a charity single in 2010 to fund construction of a statue of Welsh footballer Fred Keenor in Cardiff city centre.

On 3 June 2023, Matthews announced on Twitter that a new retrospective collection of music titled Make Hay Not War: The Blanco Y Negro Years would be released by Cherry Red Records.

[90] While working on International Velvet, Matthews was approached by Tommy Scott of the Liverpool-based band Space to perform on the single duet "The Ballad of Tom Jones".

[93] By the time that Paper Scissors Stone was released, the band were using country music influences in some of their songs according to Fiona Shepherd at The Scotsman.