The Cat Empire

A conversation with Ryan Monro

(June 2007)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

For years, The Cat Empire have been a hot ticket in their native Australia, turning wallflowers into dance machines with their personable and high-energy live shows that combine Afro-Cuban rhythm, reggae, ska, and straight-up pop.  Word-of-mouth didn’t spread as quickly in the States, but they’ve started to gain traction thanks to their last record, Two Shoes, and the (relative) hit single “Sly.”

Not wasting any time, the band hunkered down in Malibu to work on their follow-up, and are now spending their summer touring across America on a major tour.  Before heading out, bassist Ryan Monro spoke to The Red Alert about cracking the U.S. market and keeping new material under wraps.

So you were working on the new record in Malibu - was that a more normal recording environment than Cuba?  [Two Shoes was recorded in Cuba.]

Well, at least in Cuba, you can walk anywhere you want to go.  It seems around here you need a car to get anywhere because it’s five miles to the nearest anything.  We’re trying to break out of that and only use things we can walk to.

How much material did you write?

Yeah, we always record too many songs - it’s easier to cut songs than to rescue a song that didn’t really work out.  We can rehearse the hell out of a song and it’s all working, but in the recording it may not turn out the way you expect.  If you’ve got backups, then that’s cool.

The album won’t be out for this big summer tour in the States, but the new songs will be making their way into the summer setlists?

In the past, we’ve always wanted to play new songs live just to get them in front of an audience and see what happens.  With this album, we’ve been talking about waiting until the album is out before we start playing it to people live.  Technology is out there now and it’s weird because we can play a song at a gig twice and look around the Internet and someone’s recorded it and you can find the lyrics already.  (laughs)  So we’re trying to get them under wraps until they’re totally finished and out there.

I imagine you get kind of restless, then, because you’ll have these new songs that you’re excited about, but not ready to bust out.  How do you keep the songs from Two Shoes and the older albums fresh night in and night out when you have these new songs on the sidelines?

That’s a good question - I’ll have to get back to you about that one.  (laughs)  Some of the songs on Two Shoes are five years old; the album came out over two years ago in Australia and we’ve been playing that stuff for a long time.  But I think there’s still some mileage left in them.  It’s all good stuff, and the way we play them live makes it interesting every night; we never play the song the same twice.

Aside from keeping the songs fresh, how do you keep yourselves fresh when you’re on a grueling tour?  Is there a specific regimen?

When we started touring the States, we had like two minivans and we had to fit all of us and our gear in those - and then we’d drive ourselves on the wrong side of the road.  You’d deal with that for seven hours, then play a gig that night, then sleep four hours and get up and do it again.  That doesn’t keep you fresh for anything.  Now we’ve got the kind of vehicle that everyone can sleep on.

I was reading your tour diary online and I was glad to see that you guys finally had some proper good times out here in L.A.  You mentioned you’d had some misadventures in the past.

That’s right.  Every time we’d come here, you’d fly in and there were clouds and a few mountains sticking out under the clouds, and the city just goes forever in every direction.  We’ve seen enough cool stuff and had some fun over here, so, yeah, I’m digging it.  I’m starting to understand why so many people live here.

Well, you’ve been able to soak up L.A. because you’re recording here - do you feel like you miss out on the places you see on tour?

Depends on the schedule sometimes.  We might wake up at the venue, do a soundcheck, have dinner, do a gig and then get on the bus, and that’s all we see of the town.  But sometimes we’ll get a whole day or a few days to check it out.  On second visits you can find out more.  I’ve got a question, though.  You’re from the Midwest - that confuses me a bit.  How big is the Midwest?  The way people talk about it, it seems like it goes from Pennsylvania to the Rockies.

I’m from Wisconsin, and people from Wisconsin have a pretty narrow definition of states that qualify.  Pennsylvania doesn’t even come close.

(laughs)  That’s not west - that’s east!

That’s right.  I saw you guys here at the Knitting Factory a couple years ago now…

That’s going back awhile - May 2005, I think.  Wow, good for you.  (laughs)

I remember talking to a few fans and a publicist at the time and they seemed befuddled and really almost angry that the band wasn’t bigger.  You’ve gotten bigger in the years since, obviously.  Do you set those goals as a band?  “Next time we come through, we’re playing a bigger venue” - that sort of thing?

The U.S. freaked us out, really.  What seemed to work for us was that we’d play somewhere we hadn’t played before, then the next time we played, more people would come along.  But that didn’t happen in the U.S.  There’s so much cool shit going on and thousands of bands are touring all the time.  It wasn’t an instant growth thing for us.  We didn’t really set any goals, we were more like testing the waters.  But it’s starting to pay off, it seems.

Los Angeles is famous for being a city that doesn’t dance - which isn’t really true in general, and definitely wasn’t true at the show I saw.  Is it possible to go to a Cat Empire show and not dance and still connect to the music as much as the people up front?

I think about what happens when I go to a gig - if even my head is moving, then it maybe has seriously gotten through to me.  If I look out at the back and see heads moving from side to side, I think “Okay, they’re still getting into it.”

So it’s just the ones glaring at you with their arms folded that are the problems…

(laughs)  Or the ones up front with camera phones.  That’s a little distracting.

You’re playing a number of festivals this summer.  Do you have a preference between festivals and headlining gigs?  It seems that festivals would afford more of an opportunity to win over new fans, but it must present some logistical problems, too.

Logistics isn’t really my field of expertise (laughs), so I’ll just answer Part A.  We had a great time doing Bonnaroo last year - it was an early set on the first day, and no one had heard of us.  We played our set and the whole tent filled up and everyone got into it.  We love playing to a crowd that hasn’t heard of us.  It’s fun to watch what happens.

When we hear about how big you guys are back in Australia, can you put that into context?  Are the crowds evening out between Australia and the States?

In Melbourne, we play to about a 1,200-seat venue and do three nights there.  (laughs)  We can’t do that over here yet.

Are there Australian bands that are flying under the radar in America that you could recommend?

The Beautiful Girls… and Blue King Brown; they’re amazing, you’ll hear about them soon.