Cage The Elephant

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Cage The Elephant will be playing Saturday on The Last.FM/Presents Stage

Bowling Green, Kentucky is a small town in the American south. It's best known for manufacturing Chevrolet Corvettes and Fruit Of The Loom underwear. Soon, it's going to be best known for manufacturing thunderously sexy rock'n'roll. And with that, the next great American rock band. Meet Cage The Elephant: they're coming your way.

Matt Schultz (vocals), his brother Brad (guitar) plus their friends Daniel Titchenor (bass), Lincoln Parish (guitar) and Jared Champion (drums) have been tearing across the US, flooring everyone in their wake with their funked-up desert rock. They share the roar of Queens Of The Stone Age, the bounce of Beck, the psychedelics of Jimi Hendrix and the funk of Rage Against The Machine. When their debut album hits in 2008 they'll be impossible to ignore, but their story begins a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

Matt and Brad, along with Daniel, grew up on an alternative religious commune. "Our parents were kind of Jesus freaks," recalls Brad, "they were like a bunch of hippies and then they found God on acid. They were big hippies and then they became hardcore Christians."

The metal scene is strong in Bowling Green, but the three of them bonded when they were turned onto rock'n'roll by Jimi Hendrix. They didn't get to listen to much of it at home. "If my Dad was feeling saucy he'd put Pink Floyd on," chuckles Brad. He was an old rocker too, Joe Cocker, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan. But I can't remember listening to much that wasn't Christian until Mom and Dad got divorced."

Mr Schultz is "a lot more chilled out now," and right behind the band. But back then their love affair with music had to be a more covert operation. Concerned that his sons were being exposed to songs about suicide, he smashed up a Pearl Jam tape one afternoon. "He wouldn't let us listen to that shit," says Matt, "but we would sneak that stuff. We had this big crate of tapes, I remember sneaking all kinds of shit."

Sneak they did: The White Stripes, Green Day, Kings Of Leon, Queens Of The Stone Age. That, coupled with the funk of Rage Against The Machine, Beck and the Beastie Boys, the virgin sound of Cage The Elephant was being forged. Daniel, Jared and Lincoln joined up, the band toured, demoed, did the stuff that bands do. But something special was building; people were listening and a fever soon spread from that little Kentucky town. Stints on Lollapolooza and

Bonaroo touring festivals followed, which led to tours with Queens Of The Stone Age and Wolfmother. After signing with DPS in the U.S., they recorded their album in just ten days with producer Jay Joyce.

You probably want to know why they're called Cage The Elephant now. In Indian philosophies, the elephant is a symbol of strength and goodness. The Hindu god of wisdom, Ganesh, has an elephant's head. "It's strong and it's honest and it's loyal. And our name kind of stands for people, the whole of society, the people we all are by nature - it seems like people want to cage the elephant. It seems like they want to cage all the good in the world. It's not just the government or the media, it's everywhere. But you turn on the news and hear ‘today 26 people got gunned down, and one guy got his head chopped off, and here's a picture of it. It's like there's no hope, and somebody's caged the elephant. But you can't do that."

Cage The Elephant won't tell you how to live your life. They don't force a message, but they do share a philosophy; a quest for universal freedom that shoots through all of their hair-raising songs. It's there in the piledriving desert punk of ‘Free Love', as stirring a song about the pleasures of the flesh that you'll hear all year. The last song written for the album came about as sessions were closing and the band got the collective horn with excitement. "It's about sex," chuckles Matt. "Whatever kind of sex you wanna have, and wherever you wanna have it, if you wanna have orgies and group sex you can have it. And feel good about it! Don't
feel guilty!"

Then there's the heavy groove of ‘Aint No Rest For The Wicked', written after Matt gave a hitcher a lift who turned out to be a prostitute. He freaked out and judged her, but wrote the song after reconsidering his own position. "There's a lot of shit that I've done that I don't want people to know about, and I know that everyone in this world is the same. We all do things that aren't necessarily honourable. That was the basis of where the song came from - we all do wrong things, and instead of looking at the negatives all the time its better if you try to look at the positives in people and have a little respect for them."