Luvcat and her band are concocting a riot of Parisian decadence and British sweat ‘n sawdust; romance, danger, escapism and good old fashioned rock’n’roll. Her early rise has been as thrilling and immediate as the songs themselves - tales of doomed loves and twisted fantasy, that have seen her loyal following swell in number by the day. But to paraphrase a great man, first we must ask ourselves, how did we get here?

One theory goes that Luvcat was born not so long ago, on the banks of the River Seine in the belly of a riverboat when, had you been passing by, you might have found a group of revellers clutching hand-branded silk knickers, in thrall to the woman on stage with her name emblazoned across them.

OR, according to BBC Radio 1, who broadcast the tale ahead of playing first single ‘Matador’, Luvcat began several years back when she ran away to join the circus and had a tempestuous affair with a ringleader.

OR, perhaps, the seeds of Luvcat were sown on the streets of Liverpool almost a decade ago, when the teenage musician was discovered busking ‘The Whole of the Moon’ by one of the actual Waterboys and subsequently taken on a serendipitous support tour around Europe. Some or none of this is true; you can make up your own minds as to which. 

Raised on a simultaneous diet of Nick Cave and Cabaret; The Cure and The Rat Pack, Luvcat grew up equally enthralled with both the gothic and the glamorous. She reminisces over “always wanting to be a Moulin Rouge dancer” but also had her world turned upside down when she first watched the video for ‘Lullaby’ by The Cure. “Its essence has just informed my entire brain ever since,” she says. “There was a dead marching band covered in cobwebs, and Robert Smith is in candy stripe pyjamas on this wrought iron bed.”

Now, she’s tying the two together in a flurry of theatrical playfulness and high stakes desire, with the artist herself taking the creative lead on all of her videos to curate a world of Luvcat’s very own making.

On that first single, ‘Matador’, it manifests in the form of a curiously-plucked gothic folk tale that tells the story of a destructive sort of love; the kind that has you “crawlin’ in on all fours”. “Every time I was in Liverpool, I could smell him; I’d know when he was there,” Luvcat recalls of the man in question. “It was tumultuous but inspiring. I saw him in the Kazimier Garden and, as he was leaving, he had this Spanish bolero-like jacket on and I wrote the word ‘Matador’ in my phone. I wrote the song the next day.”

Indeed, it’s these kinds of trysts and temptations that feed Luvcat’s dark vaudevillian world as a whole. “I love the kind of hopeless love where you’d take a bullet for someone,” she says. “The heartbeat of this whole thing is sex, love and strangeness; falling in and out of love and the mad things that happen along the way.” Suffice to say, many mad things have already thrown themselves into Luvcat’s orbit in the pursuit of pleasure. 

Once, she was whisked off to the Pigalle for an impromptu weekend of fine food and four poster beds by a visiting sailor - the twist? “I’d recently written a song about a date with a stranger ending up there in Paris. Within three weeks it happened.” 

A current live set favourite, ‘Love and Money’, winks at a conversation between the singer and an ex-lover, where they joked about making a sex tape to fund their adventures. Even her first foray onto TikTok (a platform that’s now embraced Luvcat wholly, to the point that second single ‘He’s My Man’ was all-but-demanded by her followers) was only as a means to post some found CCTV footage of Luvcat reuniting with a former flame, dancing - red wine in hand - to Sinatra’s ‘That’s Life’.

The fans, however, made a smart call. ‘He’s My Man’ - a scorched murder ballad that sounds like little else in the modern music sphere - distils Luvcat’s sense of timeless, eternal desire into four minutes of yearning strings and feminine need; of how, so easily, “love can become obsession”. “Obviously I’m a strong independent woman - of course!” she laughs. “But that undying love, the kind from the old black and white films - I kind of miss that.

The comments section might cry out for these songs to soundtrack the moves of dangerous women like Killing Eve’s Villanelle or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but just as crucial is Luvcat’s softer, sweeter underbelly - plus a capacity for a cheeky, knowing wink. Take forthcoming track (and another online favourite), ‘Dinner @ Brasserie Zedel’. “I always said I’d marry the first man who takes me to Brasserie Zedel. I don’t want the world, I just want a 16 quid prawn cocktail,” she smiles. 

Stopping off to play an intimate set in the legendary Piccadilly restaurant’s underground jazz bar at the end of September, Zedel marked the latest in a run of typically eventful - and typically packed-to-the-seams - early shows for Luvcat. Their debut Liverpool and London headlines sold out in around four minutes. At the former, Luvcat was greeted by not one but three exes facing her from the crowd; at the latter, gazing out from under a pillbox hat, she saw another former lover trying to break in up the stairs.

With a debut tour set for November, she might need to hire a security detail to keep a check on desperate former flames weeping at the error of their ways. But really, every brief spark, every fleeting romance, every one that got away is all part of the story; all part of the noxious, heady world that Luvcat is concocting. The way she walks, the way she talks, the way she stalks, the way she kisses… get it? Luvcat is Courtney Love with a Liza Minelli wink. She’s, in her own joking words, “Tom Waits in silk panties”. She’ll break your heart but throw hers on the line too. “Someone said to me, ‘All men are dogs’,” she chuckles. “But you’ve got to be careful of the cat…”