The Cat Empire: ‘We’ve Kicked All The Goals We Needed To’

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.

More.