Two years ago, Melbourne duo Gypsy & The Cat charged into the Australian music scene with the triumphant release of Gilgamesh. This month, Xavier Bacash and Lionel Towers return with The Late Blue, due for release on October 19. Having already released two contagious singles, ‘Sorry’ and ‘Bloom’, they're on track for another bohemian musical masterpiece.
“We’ve explored a whole heap of new references on this album,” says Gypsy & The Cat’s Lionel Towers. “We listened to a lot of music from the early '70s, late '60s. Like Zombies, some Beatles stuff, lots of Pink Floyd, lots of old art rock, progressive rock influences. Talking Heads probably was our newest sort of reference. Yeah, there’s a whole array… our iTunes library definitely got overcrowded with new music.”
With all these influences working their muse magic, Gypsy & The Cat retired to familiar territory to hone their approach to the new album and wade through the slew of possibilities. “We spent maybe about a year up at Xavier’s dad’s farm just writing and writing and writing, scrapping songs and writing new songs and going through genre changes and then coming back to older elements of old genres. It was quite a long, arduous process.”
So with all the adulation which surrounded their first release, Gilgamesh, did the band feel pressured to recreate their original success? “Subconsciously? Yes, definitely, but it wasn’t sort of our motivating driver, I guess. You know, we just wanted to do something a little bit more different and be a little bit more experimental in terms of how we record things and try to push our own boundaries.”
Gypsy & The Cat’s experimental boundary-pushing psychedelic sounds have afforded the band the opportunity to tour internationally and perform at numerous festivals. “There’s been a lot of highlights,” says Towers, “I guess for me my favourite show would probably be the show in Japan that we did, the Summersonic festival…lots of the gigs in Europe were really, really great. You know that whole tour was a highlight. You know, I really loved doing Future Music Festival two years ago.”
The band will be touring their new album around Australia from the end of October, before pursuing a leap into the ultimate musical market. “We’re sort of working towards getting a release happening in America, so after we do this next tour, we’ll start looking towards what we need to do to make that happen.”
Gypsy & The Cat will play the following Future Music Festival dates:
Sat Mar 2 — Doomben Racecourse (Brisbane)Sun Mar 3 — Arena Joondalup (Perth)
Sat Mar 9 — Randwick Racecourse (Sydney)
Sun Mar 10 — Flemington Racecourse (Melbourne)
Mon Mar 11 — Bonython Park (Adelaide)
