A New Light

The Cat Empire are getting back to their roots with most recent album Steal The Light, with a focus on simply making people feel good and compelling them to dance. The atmosphere they wanted to evoke was very much inspired by the city of New Orleans and its Jazz Festival. “I think the music that we draw on now is often music that has a celebratory sound to it,” explains trumpet player and co-vocalist Harry James Angus. “In a way it makes things difficult for us sometimes because that kind of emotion in modern popular music is often not very cool, you know, like, just joyousness is a really hard thing to get across sometimes, in a way that's kinda hip as well. That's always been our thing – we're a joyous band. I mean, the trumpet, which is my instrument, it's a joyous instrument. And Latin music and jazz and all that stuff that we play, it draws on that kind of feeling, which is kind of like an old fashioned feeling. When you isolate it like that, celebratory, that's exactly what our sound is, but it's also a bit of our sound we have to hide into something a bit more contemporary as well.”

Having stayed together as a band for so long is no mean feat, and indeed there were times when the band's future was uncertain. Angus almost left the band, and both Angus and Riebl pursued other projects, with Angus forming hip hop group Jackson Jackson with producer Jan Skubiszewski, as well as jazz quartet The Conglomerate (with The Cat Empire keyboard player Ollie McGill), and Riebl going solo. Perhaps the breathing space did them good, as their priorities shifted back to their original reasons for playing music.

“The future used to be something very goal-driven for me in this band,” admits Riebl. “I used to think, like, if I could play on the Letterman show or if I could play to a festival crowd or if we could get to this country – I had these things in mind, and I was personally very determined, and as a group as well, we had these places we wanted to get to. For me, now, over ten years, this is our sixth official album and we've done a lot of other recordings as well… I'm really keen now to get back to why I enjoyed being in this band in the first place – and I've done that recently – which is the movement of it. I like playing percussion, I like that people dance to this music, I like that people sing back. Those really essential things have become really important for me again and they were really central to what we wanted to get on this album, you know, that feeling of those things that made the band what it was in the first place. So I'm really not thinking far beyond this tour and this album, and I really mean that, because to concentrate on enjoying the shows you really just have to try and be in the present. It's no longer the be-all and end-all of my life but I love playing with these musicians and I love the opportunities it gives us.

“As soon as this band doesn't feel authentic any more, as soon as it feels like it's just going through the motions, I would stop it that day because I think that the band really relies on that energy and that energy to be real. It has to be authentic, people have to [be] really listening and playing for it to translate and for it to mean something to people.”

While your average 20-something may explore foreign countries and spend a good chunk of their formative years experiencing other cultures, The Cat Empire also found the constant touring lifestyle that comes with being a musician meant that their travels were of a very different sort. Angus and Riebl reminisce about the times they've visited cities only to get off the tour bus, enter the venue to soundcheck, walk down the street to buy a sandwich, return to play the gig then promptly get back on the bus to head towards their next destination.

“There's a certain element of routine and settledness that most people get in their lives that musicians find really hard to connect with after a while because we're always travelling… It's like, you can almost get addicted to this kind of shadow world of always moving through everything, just always moving through,” says Angus, making a sweeping motion with his hand. “That's really fun when you're a teenager then as you get older it becomes something, like, you kind of feel like everyone else has put down roots, and I haven't, you know? They find it eventually but other people just find it earlier. We get to do other things, like, we've seen pretty much every grand city in the world, so you know, it's a trade off.”

“For me, I never think of the genuine travelling as the moving from one location to the next. There's a few moments each night on stage, where I'm just in a different space… It's very abstract but it's very real for me. That's the real travelling for me,” reflects Riebl. “That's when I can collect my thoughts in a way which is interesting and it's those sort of hidden moments within the schedule that music allows you, you know, being in front of a big audience allows you… It's a real privilege, and for me, continuously fascinating.”