Explain how Cut Copy began? Well cut copy began a while back. Some years ago with Dan messing around with sampled instrument stuff, and then at some point when we were doing our last record was when Tim and I came on board. Dan’s sampler blew up and his live should had been DJing with a sampler, so he had no live show. The ideas we to get some friends and do thrashy cover versions of the songs he had been doing for the record that was start of it, doing slightly dodgy cover versions. We all had fun with it so it shifted to become the focus of what we were doing and rewrote the songs and made live bits and added a lot of guitars and it has continued since then.
Since then you’ve toured with? Around Australia we’ve toured with Elbow, Bloc Party and Junior Senior and we did a big tour in the UK with Mylo and a really big one in the US supporting Franz Ferdinand so we’ve been really lucky with the supports that we’ve got, with people that are really cool to hang out with. Especially the Mylo and Franz guys, we had the best time.
And your were on the Franz tour with TV on the Radio as well weren’t you. Yeah. TV on the Radio were on half of it and Pretty Girls Make Graves were on the other half. It was great. A lot of time spent driving from place to place but going for a month some of it is very repetitive but when you get to the venue you have time to kick back or hang out after the shows.
How much of the city you play in do you get to see? Some of them not at all. The other bands, particularly Franz at least they were doing it right, you’d play your show, go out, get hammered and you’d just have to be at your bus at four am and you’d drive through the night in your bed. Where as we’d go out for a little bit, go back to the hotel and sleep for an hour just to get up and drive all day to the next venue. It was the budget way of doing it. So we were awake when you were driving through the day and it cuts down your time to do stuff. But we had a lot of time in some places that we hadn’t seen before, like Seattle, and all over. The UK we’ve seen a lot more cos you did’nt have to drive for a day at a time to get to place to place, so we’ve spent time in Glasgow, Aberdeen, Liverpool Manchester.UK has been really cool. We’ve been really pleased on how it’s gone over there. Going over with Mylo was great for us. We played at Barrow land – a massive place in Glasgow and since we’ve played on our own we’ve had people coming down and check us out. The media like NME and the radio have been really kind to us, giving us some play so UK has been great so far.
You played Glastonbury didn’t you? We did Glastonbury. We were on the liquid funk essentials stage pretty much the worst stage ever. We showed up there and the stage manager was off his head, tripping hard and he had no teeth and he just would get scared and couldn’t handle it, freaking out and go sit in his caravan. It was raining so hard the power shut out for the stage about an hour before we were supposed to go on. It took two hours to get the power back on so when we were supposed to go on people chanting “Cut Copy” but after an hour everybody cleared off and we were left with funk fans that had come to the funk tent to see some funk bands. It was a bit demoralising.
How about the Fabriclive CD. Was that actually recorded live at Fabric? No, it was just sitting down and doing a mix, so it’s a bit more planned out then that. We actually haven’t DJ’d there. We’ve played a live show there but I think we’re one of the only groups to put out a CD that haven’t DJ’d there. We’ve been down to the club a few times, it’s an amazing place. It’s huge with lot’s going on but not like our superclubs we have down here, It’s just bigger and still really cool.
Tell me about meeting David Bowie at your own merch desk in New York? Well we were in Madison Square Garden in New York and we had just finished our show and we were walking off the stage and David Bowie tapped Tim on the shoulder and said “hey, great show” and Tim looked around, saw it was David Bowie and squealed in a school girl fashion and ran off. I was hanging out with the Merch girl for Franz and then David Bowie walks up and is like “how you going” having a good ol chat. And he says “So you’ve been touring around America have you?” And I said yes and he said “Isn’t it bleak and a waste land” and it was pretty much what I was thinking, ther’s not really a lot when you’re eating at truck stops and diners and that’s the high point of culture in a days drive. And then after the show we had to pack up with no roadies which took an hour so when we went up to our band room afterwards our band manager was like “where have you been? David Bowie was up here hanging out.” And we’re like ” Ah, come on. Get us some roadies!”
You guys are working on a new album? We’ve adone lal out demos and started playing a few songs in aour live set already. Straight after Good Vibes we head over to new York and record with Tim Goldsworthy from DFA in the DFA studios. We’re really fired up about it. We feel really good about working with him and he get’s where we’re coming from with the record and has picked up on all the references straight away. And we’re really fired up about going to New York which we all love and the DFA studio is this thing of legends.
How long? Six weeks or so planned. I guess we’ll see how it goes. The demos are really solid already. We’ve done a lot of work on them already. So it will be going over there to record and keep working and developing things as we’re there.
How long a day do you have? Every studio is a little different. It’s not really a holiday. The idea is full on-days, well into the night and that’s the focus of what you’re doing the whole time there. I guess it depends on who you’re working with, their schedules, those kind of variables.
So that’s quite different to your last record which was all a bedroom masterpiece. The whole record was basically done at home, recording vocals and guitars and everything in Dan’s bedroom and then we did recording for half a day in this guy’s studio, it was more half a studio, it was nothing that glamorous. That was where we did a lot of my drum stuff. One of them it was so quick and I put the drums together and playing along and and he’s like “that’s good, next song” . We’ve recorded the single just recently and it’s gettind down to how bands really work, going hard at it and working on things properly rather than having a take take as long as a song is.
So going from a bedroom to a studio like DFA, was there a feeling of, “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality in how you approached it? The way we approach music, we’re not striving to keep it in a low key or particularly lo-fi way. I guess there is that element to it – where the last album was done in the bedroom perhaps this could be the same. But I guess with home studios these days things become so much easier now. All the demos were done in the same way as last time. With Dan sitting down writing in his bedroom, but this time with more collaboration and more live instruments. It’s pretty much the same as last time, we’ve started out like that but taking it to the studio to re-record some of the bits. But it’s the mixing that makes the huge difference of how it sounds. I remember last time we had the mixing done in Paris. Dan went away for a month over there with Phillipe Zdar from Cassius and he took the demos that we had already done I was thinking these sound cool, but they came back and the depth of sound was amazing. I think that’s how we’re approaching this. The basis of the songwriting is the same but the difference will be working with a producer to make some little changes to the songs and recording it in this, I don’t even know how to picture it, this weird, cavernous studio in New York.
Are the songs sounding different to the first album. Has influences over the last couple of years changed the sound. Definitely. I think it’s quite a different sounding record. I think some of the influences from the last record are there and certain songs they’ll be at the forefront. But it’s a different record with more instrumentation and Dan singing more. I think the dance songs are more dancfloor orientated and the guitar songs more guitary, it’s more diverse and all over the place on the one record.
Have there been any bands over the past couple of years that have changed your perception. There’s some stuff. Maybe the Sleepy Jackson record I think was just amazing. I really like this huge grand record and other stuff, the latest Joakim record, the way he mixed the live and the electronic. Also, my favourite albums of last year was Phoenix, Yo La Tengo and TV on the Radio were awesome too.
And what about your first single? Well, that;s on radio really soon. It’s a bit more of one for the dancefloor. There’s some really cool moments in there with 90s dance elements. It’s called “Hearts On Fire”.
