Harry Angus (The Cat Empire) and Jan Skubiszewski (composer and hip-hop producer) teamed up for their debut album, Fire is on the Bird, in 2007. Offbeat and deliciously savage, it included masterpieces of wit like a homage to wannabes everywhere, The International Society of Bad Dancers.

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Harry Angus shared some of the musical journey …

‘Most of the songs I’ve written in my life have been flights of fancy. You know – imagine this or just talking about a little story I’ve made up. Making the transition from doing that to writing about real feelings is hard but once you’ve made the step, it’s not so difficult you know, it feels good to be writing music that has emotional integrity, especially if you’ve never done it before.

‘I mean everyone’s written breakup songs and love songs and there’s hundreds and thousands of them out there and it’s actually very interesting to get those kind of sentiments which are universal and really great to write songs about and try and do it in an original way.

‘When we were touring our first record I think the main kind of energy we got back from the crowd, was bemusement or, like, undecidedness, a lot of people standing there looking at us going ‘I’m not sure if I like this or not’…Touring this new material is also the first time we’ve toured the old material in a while. I don’t know what it is but all of a sudden our crowds are much more high energy than they used to be so it’s hard to gauge the response of the new material versus the old.

‘The old material is much more high energy all of the time whereas the new material is more dynamic, sometimes it goes to quieter, prettier moments, and there’s more build involved in a lot of the songs. I think it’s an intense live experience maybe not quite so much jump up and down but definitely still powerful.

‘I’ve never tried to write about anything sad before, apart from the Apocalypse, which is kind of sad but still peppered with little jokes all the way through it. I’ve never given myself the freedom to write something which is just sad, about heartbreak or something like that, and also something which is down tempo, melodic and not so crazy with lots of stuff going on. Another thing I like about this record is that there are still a lot of big moments but there are lots of intimate moments too. I think there’s a lot of heart swelling as well as heartbreaking in there. We tried to write songs that were reflecting our real experiences and our real emotional states and so there’s a bit of heartbreak – that was mainly Jan’s department, I was kinda falling in love, he was the one with the train wreck…

‘The Devil in me – track two – that’s the first song that we recorded for this record and kind of was a blueprint for a new sound and a new direction we wanted to take the music in. Lyrically, that was the first song where I thought ‘I’ve got to write about love related to myself’ – scary prospect, for me… Some people have never worried about that kind of thing, but I did. Also the last track on the album, Tools for Survival, is important to me… not so much the lyrics but just the music. I just think it’s exactly the kind of music I wanna be making, I love that song. I’ve been so inspired by some of the musicians I’ve been listening to lately who are just all about the art of just making a beautiful sound that gives someone an emotional response. I’m trying to copy them and do it myself and that’s probably the track where we’ve gotten closest to it.

‘Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who’s dead now, was considered to be the master of Qawwali music, which is Pakistani devotional music. It’s just incredible stuff, it’s kind of like Indian music but with this relentless beat behind it and this kind of call and response chanting that goes on… and then Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan had this incredible voice that just soars. I listen to him and he’s part of this 800 year old musical tradition which moves people to tears just by the sound of it… and I think I’ve just got to try harder in what I do. I don’t just want to entertain people and just make people happy anymore, even though I think that’s very important, I want to try harder, I want to try and catch up to these non-western musical traditions that are just so deep.’