| “THE CAT EMPIRE”, METRO THEATRE, SUNDAY 21st OF MARCH ‘Come to The Cat Empire!’ David said. ‘No!’ I said. Okay, look, I have an open mind about music, and will listen to anything once (except music which falls into several very broad genres that I don’t like). But I listened to The Cat Empire once, and they sounded to me like some guy talking about himself while some other people played music behind him, probably oblivious. ‘The Cat Empire sounds to me like some guy talking about himself while some other people play music behind him, probably oblivious.’ I said. ‘But Pat’, persisted David, ‘you said once that if they could train a monkey to screech on cue, it would be better than 90% of contemporary music.’ I don’t remember ever saying that, but it sounded like something I might have said. Perhaps when I was drunk, a time otherwise known as “any given weekend and most weeknights.” ‘How much?’ ‘$27’ Twenty-seven dollars? That’s a hard price to walk past. You non-frequent gig-goers might not think so, but anybody who’s bought tickets to a concert in the last five years will know that most concerts are considerably more expensive. Me: One ticket to (any given band or music festival) please! (places $100 note on countertop) Ticket selling staff (between hysterical laughter, tears of mirth running down their faces): Sorry! We don’t sell entry to the concert in five minutes increments. Do you still have both kidneys? The Metro is a great venue. And they DID sound like they’d be a pretty great live band. I don’t know why I thought that, but I turned out to be right in the end. So whatever. ‘They DO sound like they’d be a pretty great live band’ I conceded, mostly to myself, as David had already walked away. Plus, I thought, I could invite my girlfriend, of whom I had been seeing suspiciously little recently. I got David to get two tickets. A few weeks and a breakup later, David, myself, and recent addition to the concert-going group, Ajax, arrived at the Metro Theatre expecting God-knows-what, and saw an absolutely brilliant performance by one of Australia’s finest live acts. Really, these guys had more energy than Speedy Gonzalez on cocaine. On the radio, Hello may sound like somebody with a chronic smoker’s cough playing a Buena Vista Social Club CD too loudly, but on stage…holy crap! It went off. They even broke into My Sharona in the middle of it, THAT’S how off it went. And their other songs ruled too. They had some jazz numbers, some soul numbers, some funk numbers, some hip-hop numbers, salsa, reggae, and some great damn songs that can’t be classified in the confines of this already too-long sentence. Everybody was jumping about like crazy, dancing, screaming, singing, and making hand actions appropriate to certain lyrics (particularly in One Four Five, a song about…chords. Everybody put up one finger, then four, then a whole hand’s worth! Ah, I guess you had to be there.) So maybe I was a little quick to judge The Cat Empire, based on my single listening of perhaps two of their songs. But then, I’m like that. Due to popular demand, they’re playing another gig at the Metro on the 22nd of April, so if you want to support quality Australian live music, if you just want a great night out, or if you have even a single active brain-cell in your head, then TOO BAD, because it’s sold out. www.thecatempire.com www.metrotheatre.com.au This article was later published, slightly edited, in Blitz Magazine. |