In one of the most inspiring and dramatic debut performances I’ve ever seen, The Cage hit the live circuit May 28 at Committed. In a night beset by a number of technical difficulties leaving the doors opening an hour late, the sound of Cage translated to the stage seamlessly.
For a number of years the cage has been honing its sound and building a body of material which was unleashed tonight. The strong passionate sound of the cage is multifaceted, drawing from a wealth of inspirations to deliver something that has not only incredibly raw and honest rock but with all the flair and aggression of more electronic music. The Cage are an exceptionally rare sounding act live with all the quality and presence of an established touring act.

From the moment Red and Rage took to the stage the utter power of the Cage was apparent with thoroughly bombastic beats and bass whetting the crowds appetite for more on opener Bad Boy.

Quickly followed with the serpentine sway of Lifeline there is a unique touch to the Cage’s performance, with its surging effects and potent vocals that have been somewhat lacking in the past decade, being more reminiscent of acts like Garbage in their infancy. This track also throws a lifeline to the guitar solo which blends seamlessly and with out pretension to the rest of the song. As the set continues there are funky elements to the bass along with a heavy, chunky guitar sound.  You could even say the Cage put the hard rock back in harmonizing with their excellent use of dual vocals.

The audience gave back a great deal of energy to The Cage.  This didn’t feel like a debut, but a performance by an utterly professional yet spirited band. When you hear The Cage, especially live, it feels like you’ve always listened to them. They cover a multitude of bases without stretching themselves too thin and above all else put on a good show.

The band are currently finishing up work on their debut album ‘Bring Me The Heads Of The Nine’ and glimpses of this material can be found on the bands Reverbnation and Myspace pages.

I caught up with the band following their performance to see how it all went for them and find out more about The Cage.

I’d like you all to introduce yourselves and say what you do in the band first
Rage – my names Rage, real name’s Ian, I play guitars and write and produce

Ruby- I’m Ruby Razer, that’s with an E R. real names Claire and I do vocals

Red – Dave, or Red as it is in the band. Bass player and keyboard player.

I’ve noticed a presence for the band online for quite some time, with this being your debut gig, what took so long?
Ruby – Wow. A lot of things actually. Just circumstances of work patterns. We all work shifts, so getting together to write, record and produce the music was quite tough. I got ill so that put me out off action for about 6 months. Dave decided to have a baby and get married, that put him out of action for about a year (laughs). yeah and that just took its toll really, and because we’re such perfectionists, well we really are. I think we’re kinda hard on ourselves and that took us a lot longer to get the album together, we’ve still got two tracks left to write as well.

Rage – Plus writing and recording, y’know, it costs a lot of money.

Is there any particular way, other than from your own wages that you’ve funded the band?
Ruby – Not at the moment. But you guys have from a past project…

Rage – Very small royalty cheques from a project we’d rather not talk about.

Red – We’ve got some skeletons in the closet, there’s no doubt about that. But we’re not going to tell you what they are! (laughs)

Are these shameful or sordid skeletons?
Rage – Shameful!

Red – The most shameful shameful embarrassing thing you can think of! And not in a rock and roll kind of way

Rage – We worked with the BBC on an important remix and we made some royalties out of that.

Would you rather not have it go in?
Rage – No, we just don’t want to be associated with it

Red – You’re not born doing what you do are ya? Its something you develop and work your way into.

Rage – We all have things we do for a little money but keep what your really want to do burning, cooking.

Red – We’ve all got day jobs.

Ruby – Thats the reality in a way.

You’ve got quite a wide range of influences, there’s different areas of music that shining through in different songs. is there anything in particular that you would say is the core part of the cage sound?
Rage – Whenever we set out to write something we start out with a kind of inspiration from something. That might be a number of influences from our past, that might be influences from our present, but inevitably when we end up with the finished piece it doesn’t sound like anybody else. It sounds like us, so it seems to be its almost unavoidable. If we embark on something to sound like a particular vibe it just comes out the way we always sound and that’s always been the case for as long as I’ve worked with The Cage.

Ruby – yeah. I think somebody coined the phrase that it sounds like “The Prodigy mixed with Lacuna Coil”. I think that’s the closest thing you’d probably get to how we sound. but I’m a massive blues rock fan so yeah, I absolutely love David Coverdale and Deep Purple and anything like that. so those kind of vocals, I’m really pushing myself towards and they kind of influence my melody writing. obiviously theres a lot of different influences that rage and red bring to the floor.

Does the name Cage actually mean anything?
Red – It means more every time we revisit it. We did a lot of work with a guy called Fred Purser. He was a guitarist in Tygers of Pan Tang. An old 80′s rock band who were HUUUUGE in Japan, and their last album ‘The Cage’, stuck in the Japanese charts for something like 3 years. Just bubbling under all the time. The Cage is a great name. We thought ‘we’ll lift that’. There were references to The Cage in ‘Floyd songs.

Rage – Its a political reference. When you listen to the lyrics it can be taken in a number of ways. When Ruby and I sit down to write lyrics its inevitably political and so we feel ourselves when Dave first proposed the name we felt it fit. We felt like we’re in a cage and thats what we sing about. we sing about repression and unfairness. If you listen to the lyrics they can be taken in a number of ways and I hate to tell people what songs are about for that reason but really thats what we wrote them about. We wrote them about feeling repressed and you have no part, no destiny and no interest or ability to change, like you’ve got no stake in it.

With this being the debut gig of the cage I would like to ask if this is your first gig personally or have you been in other acts?
Ruby- This is my debut performance in a band. I’ve performed on stage before. Doing other things.

Rage- What? A pole dancer?

Ruby – Yeah thats my day job actually! (laughs)

So, with it not being strictly a debut..
Rage – It is a debut for The Cage.

..How has this debut differed from your previous experiences of performing?
Red – Me, personally. Its a big debut for me because its the first time I’ve ever played bass live. I’m a keyboard player by trade. But It was born out of necessity, because with the odd daytime shifts patterns we ended up working, actually finding a bass player to get involved in recording and writing was boring, so I just went out and bought a bass and learned how to play bass. So for me that was quite a big one tonight in terms of playing bass in the band as opposed to a load of keys.

Rage – I’ve got to say, We’ve had a lot less problems in the past with sound systems because we take our own out. I think we had a two hour sound check tonight and it still didn’t go right. The sound engineer didn’t get us right today. Reds keys were muted for most of the set which meant we had to drop a song.

Ruby- Yeah. Its a shame we had to drop a song. Its called Falling Over. It was the ballad of the set, with just keys in it and it was just a really nice atmospheric song that would have just fitted into the set nicely. It was a bit of a shame, but its the first one so you live and learn.

How do you all feel it went tonight?
Rage – It is what it is.

Red – Its difficult to say anything other than that, I’ve really enjoyed it ’cause I’ve got no idea what it sounded like at all. Without keyboards we were at a bit of a disadvantage. But no, I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it. The audience reaction was good. It was defitintely something thats reignited our buzz. thats not just going to be it now, theres going to be a string of dates.

Rage – I think its a testament to how well rehearsed we are without good monitoring, it was almost non existant on stage. we couldn’t really hear what we were doing at all, we went onto autopilot because we were so well rehearsed. When we got it across to the people. It was good enough for us that we managed to do it.
Red – We enjoy the business we’re in. That’s the honest thing about what we do and that’s reflected, I think, in everybody that attends nights like this. Its about how they want to be how they want to dress how they want to be seen. thats our vehicle on how we want to be percieved. Its what we’re about. If it works out well, great!
Ruby – I had a blast up there, a really good time, I was little, oh god, I can’t hear myself. I hope I’m not off key or anything like that but I tried my best to entertain everybody.

Red – I could actually hear you, So I thought If i could match pitch against you It’ll be okay! But I couldn’t hear me!

Was there much in the way of preparation for this gig or any specialist preparation?
Red- Only in the terms of when you spend your time writing and recording material in a recording studio its almost arse first to how you should do it I guess in that you should get a set together, go out with a full band, gig it, and then take them to the studio once its all rehearsed, but because we’re a three piece. We don’t have a drummer. we don’t have umpteen different members of the band to provide backing vocals, to provide bass parts when I’m playing keys, keys when I’m playing bass, to double up on guitar parts when he’s playing solos. So a lot of stuff comes back from hard disk. I’ve gotta say, no more than you’d get with a band like Manson. I saw Marilyn Manson in Birmingham, and probably a comparative amount of stuff came back.

Rage – I think so for certain. It’s done all the time now isn’t it. That sort of thing that drives a lot of bands now, with keyboards and stuff.

Red – And its not like we’re being lazy on stage either we’re all doing something always. We can’t physically do any more than we’re doing, which is why we do rely on technology to play to fill in the gaps. So theres a lot of getting that together to take it live, which was quite weird. That transferrence from your computer at home to something thats a bit more stable, to take the gig out and obviously, trying to rehearse up, at volume as well.

Rage – The guitar sounds very different when its louder and you need to have that volume to get them right. So that was a lot of preparation of going out to studios and blasting through gig P.A.’s and stuff like that but we were in control of the sound then. It went alright! (laughs)

Was there much in the way of preparation for your visual performance?
Rage - Massively

Ruby – Well I bought My skirt yesterday. (laughs) You laugh, but I have been thinking about the look for a very long time. If you look on facebook, the photographs are on there, and the top I’m wearing tonight and the tights I’m wearing tonight are on there with a different skirt and a different look. I had blonde hair then. But as the years have progressed I’ve kind of developed who I am and with Ruby that really is who I am. That person is inside of me, so I think for me it was more getting into it.

Rage – The moves have come quite naturally to you over the course the rehearsals haven’t they?

Ruby- Yeah

Rage – They’re all moves you knew through a sort of dancing back ground?

Ruby – I think its all from like, performing from a very young age. I’ve performed since I was 3 years old. All different things, dancing, drama and musicals and stuff but I think it was like I knew what needed to be done. I enjoy it as well.

Rage – I think when you’ve got people, theres a lot of people supporting us tonight. A lot of people came around to see us which we think is absolutely amazing because for some bizarre reason you never really believe anybody’s going to have any interest in you do you? So for us to see that. To feed from that. There’s no question about it. And even through the technical difficulties that we had, that reigned supreme because the people were having so much fun at the front and we could see faces going Ah! Loving it! We definitely drew from that and reflected it back. I hope we reflected it back anyway. I felt that we did.

Whats the next step for the cage?
Ruby- We’re going to write another song. We’re going to do that while we arrange our next show. We don’t want that to hold us back though. We’ll book a gig and if the songs ready it’s ready. If its not it doesn’t matter you know.

Red – And we’re quite happy being a support act at the moment which is quite nice in some respect the pressures off. But you’re still there to perform, you’re there to support, get the night going which hopefully we’ve done.

There is some kind of pressure for the other band if you’ve kind of blown the crowd away though!
Rage – the British love an under dog!(laughs)

Whats going to take priority for the band? Is it going to be recording, establishing a live presence?
Rage – Both, writing first. I think writing and trying to get a few more people into what we do knowing who we are. So definitely; we’ll expand the live presence.

Ruby- Definitely, I’ve got the bug now. There’s no holding me back! I want to do more. It was great I enjoyed it.

Do you have a particular stance on how you release music?
Ruby – Well, we actually have all the songs available to buy on reverbnation. Just the downloads at the moment until we get the album finished and then we probably print them on disc if its worth it.

Rage – The ethics really behind what we do in terms of own label which we created to produce, is that any money that we make doesn’t pay any wages doesn’t pay us any fee over the years, what it will do is it will go into recording. So every penny that we make doesn’t go to a record executive, it doesn’t go to an incompetent A&R guy who can’t play the guitar so writes about how bad other people are at playing the guitar. We absolutely believe that music is about music and its about people enjoying music. so we’re quite happy to play for no money, and if people want to buy our music they can be assured that all of that money will go to recording more music for them to hear live.

All images are provided courtesy of Janet Roberts Photography