Dead Cat Bounce - Howl of the She-Leopard

The Irish lads are back and they've packed their instruments and hilarity

First published on 15 Feb 2012. Updated on 3 Sep 2012.

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They only started coming here in 2010, but already Dublin comedy musos Dead Cat Bounce are Aussie festival circuit favourites. To be sure, it’s partly to do with that lovable Irish thing. But for us it’s all about hilarious songs like wedding night ditty, ‘Christians in Love’ – “Flopping about like a couple of trout in a barrel… like a pony trapped in a broken lift.” The Time Out comedy award winners are back with new show Howl of the She-Leopard, and bassist Shane O’Brien spoke with Andrew P Street about…

…losing keyboardist Mick Cullinan last year

We’re back to the original three. But it’s been going great since. Initially, when we were performing the old show it was a little bit trickier. But we’re running the new show now and the response is still really good.

...writing the new show

[Writing last year’s show] we locked ourselves into this kind of bunker. We had this underground office, which was completely stupid – no daylight for basically a whole winter and then went on tour for a very long time. At the end of it we all came back and sort of self-destructed. This year, we treated it in a much more practical way. We were funded by the Irish Film Board to write a movie, so we took it as an opportunity to take some time off touring and actually move into a nice place and work. We had a relaxed winter for a change, which was good.

...how their yet-to-be-released Whitesnake movie inspired their show

We met with the production company we work with and I said, "Listen, we want to do this TV show where Jim is convinced that David Coverdale of Whitesnake is his father and we follow them around Europe.” It’s just a natural rock ‘n’ roll crisis that you go through when you’re around 30. A week later we were on a plane to Stockholm. We spent two weeks travelling around Scandinavia and the UK trying to meet him – we had no in with the band or anything like that – and we eventually did. We made a movie of the journey and this is what inspired the show.

...the difference between this year’s tour and last year’s

We were asked to join Whitesnake! He fired us after about five minutes, but we were all technically in Whitesnake. So this year we will be touring as former members of Whitesnake, whereas last year we weren’t.

Words by Andrew P Street |

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