The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest surviving long-form poem in human history. The titular character of the Mesopotamian Tale – carved onto stone tablets and predating the Homeric epics by some 1500 years – is a quintessential hero. Born to a mortal father and a goddess mother, Gilgamesh is physically exceptional in every way. When crowned ruler of the land, his exploits run the gamut from endurance to conquest. The Epic of Gilgamesh will lead us to the tale of Australian Duo Gypsy & the Cat.
First, however, let’s continue with the ancient poem. Gilgamesh’s hubris emerges in his search for immortality. The hero pays a visit to Uta-napishtim, a king who cheated an apocalyptic flood, in pursuit of an answer to the question that has evaded humankind for millennia: How does one avoid the inevitable? He is put through a series of tests, none of which yield the coveted reward of eternal life. Gilgamesh concludes that time is fleeting, and the empty promise of unattainable glory must not seduce him. “No one at all sees Death,” explains Uta-napishtim, “Then all of a sudden, nothing is there.”
Gypsy & the Cat named their debut album after this complex saga. Xavier Bacash and Lionel Towers wrote and produced Gilgamesh in their early 20s. It’s a contemporary meditation on the same themes, invoking the epic conventions of desire, tears, and wandering in the album’s song titles.
Bacash opens the title track with the lyric, “I’m searching for an endless moment”, the everyman tone of his voice reaches out into time and space, speaking through the ages. Co-opting the ancient world’s most significant literary piece as a symbol for the existential anxieties of adulthood was an audacious move but one that briefly gave two unassuming Melbourne boys the keys to the kingdom.
Released in 2010, Gilgamesh was borne into a golden age for southern hemisphere pop. A cavalcade of acts from Australia and New Zealand, including Cut Copy, Empire of the Sun, and Ladyhawke, impacted radio playlists Down Under and worldwide. Unified by a common approach, their synth stylings revive sonic elements from the 1980s and combine them with the credible indie rock of the early 2000s.
This strikingly nostalgic sound – a new iteration of dream-pop – spoke to a generation in flux. Millennials swapped cumbersome stereo systems for portable devices like iPods and started favouring digital downloads over physical media. In a rapidly changing cultural landscape, nostalgic comfort was found in the imagined stability of the past.
Gilgamesh is an unashamedly maximalist record. Punchy, live drums are augmented by warm pads, and guitar riffs burst into dazzling technicolour. Some reprieve comes with the acoustic closer, “A Perfect 2”, but the ten songs that precede it are an intoxicating wall of sound, showcasing the multitude of diverse influences behind Gypsy & the Cat.
Lionel Towers, the quieter counterpart to articulate frontman Xavier Bacash, started training as a concert pianist at seven. The pair met as teenage DJs in a Melbourne nightclub and soon realised they spoke a mutual musical language.
Bacash has no hesitation in detailing the artists that informed Gypsy & the Cat’s debut. “People can say we sounded like Empire of the Sun or Cut Copy, but we really didn’t. Gilgamesh was Tears for Fears, Toto – we were looking at that space, which I don’t think others were. I hear a Go-Betweens vibe when I listen to Empire, more of the jangly Australiana.”
“We were ultra-pop in that we were referencing really big songs, like ‘Africa’ and ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’,” he continues. “We probably didn’t have as much of that alternative edge that maybe those other bands had.”
These reference points are particularly evident on “Time to Wander”, the four-minute bildungsroman that initiates the journey of Gilgamesh. Inspired by Bacash’s pilgrimage to Rajasthan, galloping drums mirror the insistent footsteps of the song’s hero as he sets out to search for enlightenment. The refrain, “Now I’m gone, never here, when you look, nothing near”, recalls Uta-napishti’s warning to Gilgamesh, but also speaks to the transience of youth – a momentary glimpse of endless possibilities, tempered by the knowledge it cannot last. It is no surprise “Time to Wander” caught the attention of record label talent scouts globally, and Gypsy & the Cat were signed to Sony RCA in the United Kingdom.
With their self-produced album complete, the rollout should have been smooth sailing. In truth, Bacash and Towers encountered the hidden machinations of the music industry before a single note of music was released. In an open letter for a Kickstarter campaign to belatedly issue Gilgamesh on vinyl, they wrote:
“The head of the label at the time left to start a management agency. The company was now without a label boss to sign off on releases, marketing budgets, artwork, video clips, tour support for six months. This left Gypsy & the Cat to become a stillborn musical project in the Sony system. It’s common for this to happen at labels… and is the reason why many great young bands are lost to the industry.”
The A&R team in the United Kingdom did what they could, producing an oddly telling, low-budget video for “Time to Wander” without Bacash and Towers, opting for a flash mob of corporate suits wearing silver boxes on their heads instead. “There was a young director that came in,” Towers remembers. “We didn’t have a lot of say, but they pitched the idea, then they went off and filmed it.”
Although the concept contains the faintest suggestion of wry, English humour (the headgear was in the same universe as the styling on a Pet Shop Boys tour the same year), not using the band members themselves obscured their image and impacted the marketability of a brand-new act.
“It was frustrating,” Bacash sighs. “We had no real concept of the aesthetic when we made Gilgamesh. We got Leif Podhajsky to do the artwork, and he’d done Tame Impala at the time and a few others, so that made sense, but in terms of how we wanted to present ourselves in videos, we weren’t allowed to because we were left in hibernation. When you think about the first record, there’s no visual representation of Gypsy & the Cat at all.” Promotional photos of the duo were taken by their friends, not professional photographers, and media outlets lifted them from the band’s MySpace profile.
Yet, the music found its audience. Gilgamesh was released in Australia and certified gold, named one of Triple J‘s Hottest 100 Australian Albums of All Time. “Time to Wander” snuck into the Top 10 of Germany’s radio charts, and the follow-up, “Jona Vark”, peaked at #6.
“Jona Vark” traded on the same confluence of old and new, its phonetic title playfully reanimating Joan of Arc as a modern woman desperate for guidance. Like Gilgamesh before her, Jona “looks to the stars and asks for advice on where to go”, travelling from the city to “a place amongst the trees”. The guitar lines summon Tango in the Night-era Fleetwood Mac, the singalong melody taken straight from the Christine McVie school of earnest, uncynical songwriting.
In deference to the album’s unexpected success, an attractive music video for “Jona Vark” materialised in 2011. The concept seemingly acknowledged their local and European markets, with shots of Australian bushland at sunset digitally transforming into the Aurora Borealis by night. That same year, Gypsy & the Cat supported Kylie Minogue on a national tour, and Gilgamesh was nominated for both Breakthrough Artist and Best Pop Release at the annual Australian Record Industry Association Awards. The initial tensions of the album’s release were forgotten for a moment.
With a growing reputation as a strong live act, Gypsy & the Cat were invited to play Coachella, the small, bohemian Californian music festival that evolved into a defining cultural event. Populated by major artists, rising talents and influential scenesters, Coachella was meant to launch Gypsy & the Cat in America. Bacash and Towers readily accepted the offer and were listed as part of the 2011 line-up until Sony RCA informed them there was no way to fund the trip. Internal record company politics destroyed a crucial opportunity for the duo, who call it “the most heartbreaking moment of our musical careers”.
The lyrics to “The Piper’s Song“, another towering entry in the epic Gilgamesh song canon, might as well have been written about this moment. The first verse’s jubilant description of “singing songs of victory” is threatened by gathering storm clouds in the second, when “one day the thunder struck” foreshadowing “a change, good to bad”.
Sony RCA had a window of six months to put Gilgamesh out in the United Kingdom. The window closed, and Gypsy & the Cat relinquished their deal. At the same time, they were still booked for gigs in Germany and Australian festivals, including Big Day Out. “We worked our asses off trying to give [Gilgamesh] life, like breathing oxygen into it, because it was cut off at every angle,” says Bacash. “We just had to give that record the respect it deserved because there were good tracks on it. It felt right to work on them live.”
After honouring these commitments, Bacash retreated to his father’s farm outside of Melbourne to commence work on a sophomore album. Burned by the experience with Gilgamesh, he and Towers decided to issue it independently on their label, Alsatian Music. This added another layer of complexity to the lore of The Difficult Second Album, as the pair were now in charge of every aspect of the release.
The Late Blue arrived in Australia almost exactly two years after their debut. The shimmering pop cues of the 1980s were replaced by 1960s psychedelia, with greater emphasis on live instrumentation and unusual song structures. Bacash’s vocals became part of a larger soundscape, dreamily drifting in and out of the production, as on the languid “Soul Kiss”, or disappearing altogether, as on the instrumental “Valleys of Kashmir”.
Mixed by American engineer Dave Fridmann, who brought a sonic sophistication to two key album tracks, “Human Desire” and “Sight of a Tear”, on Gilgamesh, The Late Blue was an about-face. Bacash studied Fridmann’s work closely, especially his contribution to American rock band MGMT’s sophomore, Congratulations, which he cites as one of his favourite albums.
“At the time, we were quite influenced by the fact that they had gone off and done something in the more art-rock space,” says Bacash. “I was interested in going that way, and I don’t know if that was healthy for the fanbase.” A nodding Towers agrees. “There were some things that tied it [to Gilgamesh], but it was sonically different. It definitely took some fans away.”
The new direction was previewed on the first single, “Sorry”. The clever, sample-based production relies on a series of drum machine loops, creating a surreal melange of sounds and textures closer to the style of the British trip-hop outfit Gorillaz. Gypsy & the Cat’s woozy kiss-off to a relationship gone sour is matched by an even stranger video. Decorously sipping on cocktails and reading from a hardback book, Bacash and Towers are passive observers of a party that rages in slow motion; one guest anoints the room by ceremoniously flinging slices of bread in the air, another marches a burning teddy bear past a window on a stake. It is the equivalent of Ari Aster (director of Hereditary and Midsommar) doing an internship at MTV.
Whilst Bacash admits The Late Blue was a risk (“maybe some of the tracks wandered off too weird”), he maintains the second single, “Bloom”, embodied a creative high point for Gypsy & the Cat. Lyrically, “Bloom” presents change as a necessary rite of passage, taking the buoyant optimism of “Time to Wander” and giving it an indie-pop makeover, with rubbery bass and a stirring, earworm guitar riff in place of a chorus. Bacash and Towers lent the song to a promotional campaign for Jack Daniel’s whiskey that incorporated performance footage of Gypsy & the Cat, cementing “Bloom” as a vital part of their live set.
A six-track stopgap EP called Hearts a Gun was sent to digital platforms in 2015, a release Towers believes “goes under the radar”. Originally envisioned as a larger body of work, the duo reverted to a clean, synth-driven approach, crafting songs inspired by their experiences in front of an audience; on “Red Wine & Cigarettes”, Bacash borrowed the chord progression from a New Order remix he frequently played in DJ sets, whereas “Fire” was a live staple later reproduced in a studio setting. The EP also housed a collaboration with fellow Melbourne electronic duo Client Liaison.
The exceptional “Evolution” remains Bacash’s most strident vocal performance to date, pushing him to new heights in the chorus. “I am the life that defies evolution!” he cries, an ironic retaliation to the criticism levelled at The Late Blue for moving too far away from their established sound.
A full-length album, their third, followed in 2016. Virtual Islands represented a musical compromise between the glossy pop of Gilgamesh and the experimentation of The Late Blue, capturing the creative expanse of Gypsy & the Cat’s sound. The lead single, “Inside Your Mind”, an irresistible slice of moody, acoustic-led funk, turned Bacash’s stacked falsetto harmonies into a one-man tribute to the Bee Gees’ disco era.
A video filmed in Japan provided another homage, with shots of Bacash and Towers strutting down the streets as the Gibb brothers did in “Stayin’ Alive“. Dressed in boiler suits and hard hats, their look also evoked the industrial chic of the Beastie Boys, at once simpatico with their urban surroundings and delightfully alien.
For a band that never felt particularly cool, the investment in a location video, with a clear artistic point of view and a tapestry of intelligent intertextuality, showed exponential growth. “I’m so happy we did that,” beams Bacash. “I feel like that was the step forward aesthetically; this is who we are. Lionel was learning Japanese at the time. It’s still a timestamp for what we were interested in, and it’s aging well.”
Japan provided fertile ground for Bacash and Towers as songwriters. Their observation of a polite society where citizens coexisted but kept to themselves inspired the album’s title and laid the foundations for their most ambitious track to date, “Odyssey of the Streets“. The five-minute pop opera was, according to Bacash, “a commentary on the diversity of life and demographics, and wealth and disparity”.
Towers calls it “a flex”, noting the influence of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in the song’s grandiose musicality and malleable time signature. “It was just a shame that the industry at the time didn’t get it,” Bacash adds. “We’ve got two guys here doing classical music in a pop context – it went straight over people’s heads.”
A certain heaviness hung over the album. The music video for “I Just Wanna Be Somebody Else” extended the visual world of “Inside Your Mind”, following a lonely Japanese businessman wearing an oversized, hyperreal cat’s head as he fills in time on a late-night trip home from work. He stops off at a driving range and a convenience store but does not interact with any living soul.
When Bacash and Towers appear beside him at a karaoke bar, they, too, seem to be virtual islands; their eyes never meet, each gazing off in different directions, with body language that suggests some fatigue. The single indicated a pause for Gypsy & the Cat.
“I instigated it,” Towers discloses gently. “I was turning 31, so I was like, I think I’m too old for this. That was my feeling. I’ve spent eight years doing this, and the band wasn’t getting bigger, it was getting smaller. I was toying with the idea of doing film scoring, which I still want to do. I needed to do something else.” Towers gave Bacash his blessing to complete a farewell tour by himself to provide some closure for Gypsy & the Cat, but his bandmate was already eyeing solo projects as well.
“At first, I was surprised,” Bacash responds, “but I think with the series of challenges we’d had up to that point, it made sense to me, too. What was unfortunate was [Virtual Islands] coincided with a lack of interest from radio stations and outlets, and maybe a bit of wavering attention from our fanbase. So, the idea of having my project and exploring different styles of music was a good thing for me. If the band didn’t do that, I wouldn’t have met my wife; I wouldn’t have my son.”
Bacash’s solo alias, an ambient deep house project called Sonny Ism, led him to Scandinavia, where he lived for half a decade. When he returned to Australia, he reconnected with Towers, and over a series of informal studio jams, the two instinctively started making music again.
Quietly, in September 2023, the duo released “Dust”, their first new music in seven years. The hypnotic guitar loop, reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”, instantly catapults the listener back to Gilgamesh, but there is no hero’s quest in this new, more vulnerable narrative. “I see faces, faces turn to dust,” the pair sing with lived-in pathos, reconciling the passing of time and personal losses. Fifteen years after the conception of Gypsy & the Cat, Gilgamesh faces his mortality head-on.
The video for “Dust”, directed by Towers, demonstrates the mutual trust in their collaborative process. In a rented Melbourne film studio, Towers singlehandedly used three cameras and a drone to reintroduce Gypsy & the Cat, now rebranded as GATC, to the world. “Lionel’s running back and forth, changing lenses and camera positions, so it was literally a home video, delivered with high-end equipment,” explains Bacash. This time, there is no silver box or cat head in sight, just a tasteful overlay of a vinyl record in post-production. “We tried to go for the Air aesthetic, a bit more sophisticated. For the next one, I’ll wear a scarf.”
For now, the focus is on celebrating their accomplishments. The crowd-funded release of Gilgamesh on vinyl in 2024 reveals a groundswell of ardent fans, and in February 2025, the duo played a hometown show to celebrate the album’s 15th anniversary. The experience brought with it some catharsis, especially for Bacash.
“I’ve never looked back at that record with any resentment,” says Towers, before turning to his bandmate. “I reckon you were maybe a bit resentful years ago of it.” Bacash concedes there was a period when he saw Gilgamesh as an albatross around his neck.
“In an artistic sense, my frustration was that it pigeonholed us and didn’t allow us to keep pushing the vanguard out further. I don’t like standing still and repeating things I’ve already done. I like being curious when I get into the studio, that feeling of exploration. But I look back on everything we’ve done with pride.”
“When I moved to Denmark,” he continues, “a lot of my Danish friends didn’t know about Gypsy & the Cat, but in every Danish bodega – which is their equivalent of a pub – there is a jukebox, and ‘Jona Vark’ is on every jukebox in Denmark. I was like, fuck, you know what? Something I put time into made it here, of all places. And so that changed my perspective.”
As with all epics, the fatal flaw of Gilgamesh’s character drives the tension of the 4,000-year-old poem. However, one aspect that is sometimes overlooked is the role of Enkidu, a friend fashioned from clay who accompanied Gilgamesh through life. To fulfil his purpose, he must take human form and, inevitably, suffer the indignity of mortal death. In a story marked by ambition and reckoning, a 2019 article in The New Yorker surmises “their friendship is the most tender relationship in the poem”.
The same is true of Bacash and Towers, whose almost two-decade friendship is the nucleus of Gypsy & the Cat. “We like making music together. It’s really that simple,” Bacash expresses unequivocally.
The future of the band is open-ended. Both Bacash and Towers are fathers now, and there is talk of writing a Gypsy & the Cat album for kids. Their latest single, “Analogue Love”, is suitably unhurried, a percussive chillout session about disconnecting from “ghost-lines and internet love”, contemporary trappings that detract from living in the moment. The sonic reset indicates a commitment to writing the next chapter of the band’s mythology at their own pace.
“When we had no pressure, we made our best work,” says Bacash. “So we’ve now said to each other, we don’t care if a radio station picks up on this, someone writes about it, or whatever. It’s about making a record we want to make.”
“If we’re a heritage band now, cool,” he continues. “As long as we can do a tour and get together as friends and bash out some music.”