CHATROOM
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The Cat Empire
Harry James Angus (vocals, trumpet) of the ska/jazz band talks the new album, playing for Mormons and wher INTERVIEW alex harmon
“ I couldn’t even open my mouth to sing without swallowing them”
How was the Bluesfest? It was awesome as usual. This year I didn’t see as much as I have in previous years. I have a little kid so I was looking after him while my wife was singing, she’s part of the RocKwiz band.
Photos: Getty Images
What were the highlights for you? Hardly saw anything except of my own gig which is quite selfish, I heard Paul Simon was really good and I heard Robert Plant was seriously good as well. You’ll have to interview someone else rather than live through me!
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The new album, Steal The Light has been a few years in the making – excited about it? Yeah! The last record was about the band going through some shit – like every band we had a little rough patch – but this record we’ve come full circle and returned to an energy that is present on our earlier albums. It’s more about dancing and the energy that our fans know us for. Did you debut any tracks at Bluesfest? Yeah we’ve been playing a few tracks in our set
and a big thing for us is improvising – we’re all about our live energy – we’re not the kind of band who gets things done in the studio and then play them live for the first time. We play them live and get to know then and then the songs kind of change and grow a little as we take them in different musical directions. How does the actual songwriting process work, then? It’s always different for everyone but as a general rule, either me or Felix will write the chords or lyrics and get the vibe for the song and then we take it to the band and they do their thing with it. It’s pretty simple really. It can be hard work, especially writing lyrics but there’s no mysterious process. Will this be your final album, especially now that you’ve come full circle? No, I feel like this is a real rebirth for the band, I would definitely say we’re going strong. The live energy has never been better – that’s my yardstick for the band – how the gigs go. And
the shows we’ve been doing recently have had a great energy and brought back memories of how we started when it was all about dancing. Best gig you’ve ever played? Tough question. It’s easy to measure gigs by biggest gig or the weirdest gig but best gig is really hard because there are so many moments where I’ve felt just like everything was perfect and often its hard to remember even where I was at the time. The crowd is right, the room is right, all the conditions are perfect and everyone is looking at each other thinking ‘holy shit, how is this happening right now?’ It’s a mysterious formula. Okay then – weirdest gig? Well I have to go right back, in the early days we did pretty much every gig we could get. We played at a Freemasons convention, we played at a Mormon’s wedding, all kind of weird parties back in the early days. I remember a gig in Italy that was so strange, there was hardly anyone there, but there was a plague of mosquitoes, like crowds of them, I couldn’t even open my mouth
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2/5/13 4:21:18 PM