Classic rock is a genre that will never die. And thank the metal Gods for that!
Each generation seems to throw up another band that fits the classic rock mould, and each manages to maintain some form of individuality to separate themselves from those who came before.
That band for this generation is the awesomely titled Cats In Space, a band that started life as a studio project but through sheer weight of brilliance soon morphed into a fully-fledged rock outfit in their own right that has swept all before them, culminating in their latest 15 track behemoth, Kickstart The Sun.
Guitarist/songwriter Greg Hart joined HEAVY to go into further detail.
“It’s been amazing over here,” he enthused of the reception afforded Kickstart The Sun. “I mean, it’s done really, really well. It’s outsold our other album, so it’s done well. In fact, I’m still getting emails in as we speak, and it has featured high in the end-of-year reader’s polls and critics polls and stuff, so we have had a couple of albums of the year mentioned with it which has been amazing. The reports and the reviews have been astonishing. It was a big gamble doing a double album in this day and age, but it seems to have paid off.”
We press Hart to elaborate on the musical direction of Kickstart The Sun and what Cats In Space were going for with it.
“To people in Oz that don’t know who we are, we’re kind of a classic rock band in the traditional sense that we’re very steeped in the 70s – like Queen, Yellow, there’s bits of Supertramp in there, John Miles, Uriah Heap – and we tend to go down that path. All of the albums we’ve done to date have gone down well in that marketplace. But Kickstart The Sun is a double album. It’s loosely concepted, but it’s not a heavy concept album. It’s basically 15 songs of chaos (laughs). We do epic songs and we do ballads… As I’m the principal songwriter it’s very, very influenced by Queen more than anything. We go to huge production that not many bands do these days, so it certainly gets us noticed.”
In the full interview we talk about the album being a double album and if that was planned from the start, the risks in the modern age of releasing double albums, the musical content, why specifically the 70s, touring Australia, the band name and where it came from and much more.
