On the freezing, isolated stage at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, preparing themselves for a billion-strong televised audience at the opening ceremony of the 2006 Commonwealth Games, The Cat Empire were finding their marks and Harry James Angus was feeling out of sorts. The band had reached a level of commercial success that stretched far beyond the smoky jazz clubs that brought its members together, due in no small measure to the exuberance of their live performance and their relationship with their dancing, enamoured audiences. Yet looking back on the MCG today, nine years later – with the band still packing out venues and touring the globe – Angus feels that despite the great exposure, the event was the antithesis of what The Cat Empire are truly about.
“To be honest with you, I always hated that Commonwealth Games gig,” he says. I have met Angus on a handful of occasions, and each time I am struck by his friendliness and direct conversation. “I really didn’t want to do it. I wasn’t against it for anything particularly serious, mind you. It was just – there we are standing in the middle of the MCG, miming along to this recorded music. You can’t see anything, there are people miles away out there, there’s this huge invisible TV audience. When you talk about it as a career move, it sounds great. But if you talk about it musically, it was just nothing, you know what I mean? There was no music, there was nothing going on there.
“What I live for as a musician is connecting with people, or having something spontaneous happen; feeling in the moment. There was none of that. It was more, ‘OK, when you see the red light on camera three, go stand on that ‘X’ we’ve marked out on the floor, and try and look like you’re having fun singing, even though you’re completely freezing and you’re shit scared because you know they’re seeing you around the world.’ So you’re acting really unnatural, standing there miming. It’s got nothing to do with actual music.”
It is easy to appreciate Angus’ conflicted feelings. Turn back the clock to their formative days and you’ll find a fledgling Cat Empire almost solely dedicated to seeking out audiences – either their own, or somebody else’s – and honing their musical skills. Even prior to forming, the band members could be found skulking around venues and bars, eager to pounce on any opportunity to develop their passion for performance.
“Well, it was an interesting time. When I first met those guys [we] were all in Year 12 or just finished, so we saw a lot of each other at various gigs, running into each other when we were out catching our elders. Seeing these great guitarists or trumpet players who were ten years older and who you wanted to learn all you could from, you know? I’d look around and there would maybe be one other person there in the entire room who was even close to my age, so Felix and the others would always stand out. I knew they were musicians as well, otherwise they wouldn’t have been there in the first place. So we kind of got started there, and soon got to know each other.
“But I was pretty shameless in those days,” Angus laughs. “I’d go out to hear people play and sit at a carefully chosen table right at the front of the club, and I’d kind of have my trumpet bag positioned where the people onstage could see it really easily, have it poking out a little, and just hope that one of them would invite me up to play with them. And they often did, which was great. I try and return the favour when I can, but these days I don’t always trust that guy at the front with his saxophone ready to go. I don’t invite that many folk up onstage any more. Those old guys, they were much better teachers than I am.”
The clear moral of this story is that in order to find yourself invited up onto a Cat Empire stage, you need to find a surreptitious way of sneaking a tuba inside your shirt and easing a path to the front of the crowd. However, it seems that particular ship may already have sailed.
“It was easier when it was all part of the jazz scene. Now that we’ve crossed over with The Cat Empire into a more mainstream audience, we have plenty of stage invaders. Some of them are fun. Some of them are just pretty girls who want to come up and dance, or dudes who want to crowd-surf – and that sounds a bit sexist dividing it like that, but it’s generally how it is. And that’s fine, but sometimes it’s rappers who grab the mic, and one time out of ten it’s awesome. Those others nine times, well…” Angus chuckles. “We do a lot of mic confiscating.”
The Cat Empire are now entering their 16th year, and following the new Party In The Park event at North Sydney Oval, they will be jaunting across the Northern Hemisphere for a slew of performances. Suffice to say, they don’t seem to be concerned with slowing down in the near future. The audience for their ska-fusion antics has certainly not diminished over time, and by casting even a cursory glance around Australia’s strongest emerging acts, you can find similar genre-pushing sounds everywhere. As Angus points out, though, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
“Sometimes I think bands like Cat Empire, Blue King Brown, Melbourne Ska Orchestra are kind of like the ‘showbiz’ of it all. We’re the industry face of what is a much bigger musical subculture. It’s in Melbourne, but it’s also in Sydney, Brisbane. It’s the jazz musicians, the Latin musicians, the people who listen to FBi, who listen to the gospel show on Sunday. That community radio vibe. People who know their soul music, who know their Afro-funk or are really into doo-wop. They’ve got their scene, they’ve got their thing. It’s a really big subculture, and the people who love it are out there catching gigs five nights a week. I think some of the bands like us are a bit of a safer bet. We take some of that stuff and we tweak it in a way that can be brought to a wider audience.”
A safer bet, perhaps, but anyone who has caught them live before will attest to the passion and talent they bring to every song. It is almost exhausting watching the band kick into gear, but it is also electrifying.
“As a band, the big challenge in the last few years has been bringing things in. We started out with this mission to incorporate all of these different genres. We had a list, you know?” Angus laughs. “As time goes by, we’ve tried to scale that back a little. We’ve always wanted to have our own sound, but maybe something that is not so varied all the time. I guess that’s what we’ve been working towards. I think we’re heading closer and closer to something simpler. We’re getting closer to pop in some ways, but it’s definitely going to be on our terms.”
The Cat Empire are appearing at Party In The Park at North Sydney Oval, along withThe Jezabels, Little May, Husky, Sons Of The East onSaturday March 14.
