Gypsy & The Cat

Despite having never played live, the Melbourne duo was soon catapulted to international success, signing with Sony Music and hitting the stage joined by drummer John Jenkins from The Streets and Lily Allen.The upward trajectory continued with the release of their next single, ‘Time To Wander’, and debut LP, Gilgamesh, in late 2010. Global tours ensued before the band’s second LP, The Late Blue, arrivedin late 2012 – itself featuring the ubiquitous single, ‘Bloom’. However, after touring The Late Blue, Gypsy & The Cat kept quiet for nearly two years until re-emerging somewhat discretely with the Hearts A Gun EP this September.

“It was a mixture of things,” says vocalist Xavier Bacash of the duo’s retreat from the spotlight. “Wanting to let time pass away a little bit and let that expectation wander off a bit. When the first record came out, from then on a myriad of bands came along and were doing that sound too. It got to the point where we had to change from then, so we wrote the second record and it was probably a bit far away from where we started for people. For the third record, we wanted it to be our biggest musical statement and it takes a long time to put that project together, so we knew we had to give a couple of years to it.”

With interest regenerating, Gypsy & The Cat’s live absence will come to an end when they help launch the Melbourne Music Week hub this weekend. Given their two-year sabbatical, the performance will be a bit different from what they were doing in the wake of The Late Blue.

“We’ve scaled down to a three-piece – a drummer, Lionel [Towers] and myself,” says Bacash. “So it’s more compact, it’s more electronic and probably energetic this way. We’re putting a visual show together with the audio, in keeping with the style of the tracks. We’re not really playing many old tracks. So it’s been a bit of a reshuffle, which is exciting – to do it again from scratch.”

Emerging from the relative wilderness, you’d expect the band would be eager to remind audiences of its former glories. However, along with the new EP, this tour inaugurates the next phase in the Gypsy & The Cat story.

“We found that, especially on the second record, we were pigeonholed back into the first record – people wanted to hear all that music,” says Bacash. “So it’s definitely been a relaunch in the sense that it’s like Gypsy & The Cat Mach II. We’ve been writing for such a long time and creating new sounds. So just everything about the band is really quite different, besides the fact that I’m singing on everything – that’s the only common denominator.”

However, with regards to the songs on Hearts A Gun, that’s not entirely true. Although the tracks are looser and more psychedelic, the record coheres with Gypsy & The Cat’s overall aesthetic, marrying a dance sensibility with classic pop melodiousness and simplicity.

“We just have such a vast breadth of influences that it just comes out like that,” says Bacash. “Even the first record, we were a bit of a genre chameleon. ‘Jona Vark’was very different to, say, ‘Time To Wander’ – it was like Fleetwood Mac versus Tears For Fears, in a way. So we’ve always sort of been like that, and that’s part of the reason, maybe, of why we did well. There was familiarity but it was also done in a different style.

“We do have a very classical pop-style framework that we work to, just because we like that way of writing. I’m a massive pop fan, but also have a huge collection of old krautrock and psych rock from the ’90s and UK punk and things like that. It all kind of comes in and out. Although there’s a cohesion between Hearts A Gun and the other work, I would say the next record is even further away.”

Despite being inclined towards a pop format, when Bacash and Towers uploaded ‘Jona Vark’ to triple j Unearthed way back in 2009, they weren’t expecting to infiltrate the mainstream.

“We had no ambition whatsoever. It was a rolling snowball of ambition. We put the tracks up on MySpace and Unearthed and it just started going ballistic and we were like, ‘Oh cool, let’s start a band then.’ We put them on Unearthed and MySpace not with the intention of being a band, but with the intention of being a writing group. We were going to hopefully write these songs and get them on films. We felt like that was the only way to exist in modern music, because there’s just so many bands. We thought, ‘How could we rise above everything else? It’d be a fluke.’ But people saw something in what we were doing and it just kind of happened.

“On the second record, we wanted to do what we wanted to do, but then there was also this nagging voice saying, ‘Stick to these forms.’ On this EP and this next album that we’ve nearly finished writing, it’s been about having fun again and not really caring whether people like it or not. That’s really how it started, so hopefully it yields the same reaction. But you just never know.”