Harry Angus, The Cat Empire
July 2, 2010The Cat Empire’s madcap creative Harry Angus ingests music from the globe’s farthest corners. Cinema entwines several sonic threads. By Dan Rule.
There’s a real cohesiveness to Cinema. It’s more ‘interlocked’ than your earlier material. “We’ve definitely moved away from an aesthetic we used to have: wanting to play a bit of everything. Writing this record, there was none of the usual, ‘let’s do a song that sounds like a gypsy waltz’, or like James Brown or whatever. It was more, ‘here’s the song, this is the mood’. We took away the obvious signposts that we’d relied on in the past and let it merge naturally.”
The Cat Empire have always drawn on sounds far removed from Western pop. How did that start? “As a trumpet player, there weren’t so many options open to me as a young man. I couldn’t put myself in the role of some rock’n’roll dude, a rapper or whatever. So I followed jazz, and just kept going. Jazz leads you to Cuban music, into African music, then you come across Middle Eastern music and it’s just ‘wow, there’s so much out there’. You need to have that door opened, to start appreciating all these different musical languages that were just noise to you before.”
The Cat Empire were working on so many different projects individually, was it a necessity that you locked it down a little more this time? “Certainly. After we did the last album the band imploded for a while – which was largely to do with me, and what I was going through personally and musically. I wanted to quit the band and never tour again. But I got through it – we got through it – and kind of came out the other end feeling really optimistic and wanting to make a fresh start.”
Have you come together much more as a band? “Definitely. The songs were created quite spontaneously, with all of the musicians being involved, which is something we’ve never done before. That made a massive difference, to my ears. When you’re working with brilliant musicians it’s a shame to go in there and tell them that you’ve written a bass line for them to play, you know?”
Cinema is out now through Capitol/EMI
Visit: thecatempire.com
