The six members of The Cat Empire don't share a lot in common.

If they didn't make music together, they probably wouldn't get along at all.

But that's precisely what makes things work so well for the swinging Australian sextet, which brings its eclectic hodgepodge of sounds to the Starlite Room tonight, with B.C. folk-rock trio Jon and Roy warming the stage.

"There's a range of musical tastes, political opinions, everything. In some ways we can't agree on much at all, except for the fact that when we get on the stage, the music seems to do the job for us," says frontman Felix Riebl, who handles vocals, congas and timbales.

"You get guys who ... listen to a lot of one style of music, and then from one member to the next it's about as far away from each other as you can get."

Instead of letting their differences be a hindrance, The Cat Empire absorbs ideas from all corners of the musical spectrum, jumping seamlessly from jazz to ska to hip-hop to rock to Latin pop.

"I think when a song's working for this band, it sort of just works and everyone can pretty much recognize that," Riebl says.

The band's eclecticism has attracted an unusually widespread international fanbase, topping Australian charts and selling out shows globally.

Racking up an impressive 750-plus gigs this decade, The Cat Empire has reached millions with spots on Late Night with David Letterman, The Tonight Show and the 2006 Commonwealth Games opening ceremonies, for which it was commissioned to write an 80-minute soundtrack.

In its travels, the band is constantly finding new sounds to incorporate into its music, particularly into its live sets, which are captured on the recent two-CD package Live on Earth and the DVD Live at the Bowl.

"It was always a travelling band. It was a band that wrote songs from travelling and learned a lot by going to different places and hearing other sorts of music and then kind of taking those on board," Riebl explains.

"It's been sort of a continuous process like that with this band, especially in the rhythm section. We hear something at a festival and then all of a sudden in the middle of a song (at our show) the next night you'll hear something which is kind of similar.

"You go around and sponge it all up."

The roots of the band's all-embracing musical mentality were planted in Melbourne's jazz clubs 10 years ago.

"We grew up in suburban Australia, in Melbourne city, and that's just a big melting pot of all sorts of different things," Riebl says.

"We were very influenced by the older musicians in the town.

"A lot of the jazz guys really embraced us when we were young and let us sit in with their bands."

Because of the band's relentless globetrotting, its success is just slowly starting to hit the frontman -- but he sensed that he was onto something big from the start.

"After our first show, I just remember looking up at the sky and thinking, 'That was the most fun I think I've ever had in my life,'" he says.

"And there was something about that feeling where the only way I could articulate how I felt about playing music was by writing another song."