“You think it’s weird for you?” blurts Tim Hoey (above right) down the phone line, breaking into an incredulous laugh as if on cue. “Man,” he sighs. “You should see how we feel!”
It’s no more than a week since Melbourne’s indie-dance monarchs Cut Copy – bass-player and guitarist Hoey, drummer Mitchell Scott, founder, front-man and general jack-of-all-trades Dan Whitford – released their long-awaited second album In Ghost Colours, and no more than a week since the record went spiralling straight to the very top of the ARIA album charts. Suffice to say, it’s nothing less than a shock for the trio.
“It’s pretty crazy, you know,” admits Hoey, who is chatting from home on the eve of the bands next round on international tours. “We’ve never really considered ourselves a charting band, especially not of the kind of magnitude of the other artists that were in the charts at the time.”
While Cut Copy’s ascension to the top of the pile comes as a shock, it’s not as if it happened overnight. Since the scattershot retro-dance-riffage of their brilliant, hastily recorded 2004 debut Bright Like Neon Love, the trio have been anything but idle.
With their countless European, UK and US tours, several single and remix projects and their ever-expanding Cutters imprint – responsible for releases from The Presets’ side-project KIM, Midnight Juggernauts and Knightlife amongst others – they’ve cut an inimitable path through an otherwise lagging international dance scene. In the process they’ve helped give electronic music a band-based facelift.
“Live dance music is so often still considered as people behind laptops,” says Hoey. “Australia has such a rich history of live music, and when we started out we always preferred to see bands play as opposed to guys on computers or something like that. So I guess we kind of found a way to combine both.”
“I guess that’s possibly why the rest of the world is looking to Australian dance music at the moment, because essentially it’s live bands that are playing it. That really isn’t happening in Europe and the UK.”
This leaning comes as no surprise if you’re to trawl Cut Copy’s creative lineage. Prior to their conception in 2001, essentially as a solo project for Whitford, Hoey remembers himself as an out and out “band guy”.
“It wasn’t until 'Da Funk' (Daft Punk’s iconic 1995 single) dropped that I even knew that dance music really existed,” he laughs. “It completely changed the way I thought about it. I thought music began and ended with bands like Pavement and Sonic Youth and stuff like that.”
To the contrary, In Ghost Colours embraces a sprawling sense of musical miscellany. Recorded in New York over six weeks with the DFA’s Tim Goldsworthy, it adds an increasingly melodic and pop song-based dynamic to their ever-expanding palette. While there’s plenty of dance-floor action in the form of cuts like 'Lights and Music', 'Hearts on Fire' and 'Far Away', tracks like 'Unforgettable Season' draw from the kind of shimmering, fuzz soaked minor-key melodies more at home on a My Bloody Valentine record. Meanwhile, the scything guitar muse of 'So Haunted' could belong to Joy Division (but with a campy 70s disco twist), while 'Strangers in the Wind' seems to reference the peeling, guitar-scored grooves of Fleetwood Mac, but again with the kind of electro-pop-textured overture that could only come from the collective smarts of Cut Copy.
For Hoey, the record’s key ingredient is its range. “We wanted to make a record that could exist in a club, but that you could also listen to at home,” he says. “It was about that total experience of going out and buying a record and not having to skip songs. It was about adding a lot of texture, so you could sit at home and listen to it and kind of find something new each time you listened to it.”
“With Bright Like Neon Love we really only had a day in the studio before it was taken to Paris to get mixed, you know, so there wasn’t that light and shade. This record was much more about being a band with different song writing directions and different aesthetics…kind of figuring out what it is to be a band and operate in that kind of atmosphere.”
Hoey’s the first to admit that spending a month and a half with Goldsworthy at DFA studios played a prominent part in nurturing such a direction. “The guy’s like an encyclopedia of music and gear and how bands record and just everything,” he laughs. “He’s quite obsessive.”
“It was kind of funny, the label’s initial thing was that maybe we should try something really crazy like going for some huge, heavy-hitting producer like a Nelly Hooper or a Timbaland or someone like that,” he continues. “And you know, it kind of sounds great in theory.”
“But Tim just seemed like the most obvious choice to us. We were all huge fans of what he was doing at the time, like all these Loving Hands mixes and all the DFA mixes. They were certainly delving into that very psychedelic realm of pop music, and that was something that we were trying to capture on this record.”
But even with this lavish new musical lifestyle of six-week inter-continental recording jaunts, big name producers and No. 1 records, for Cut Copy home is still where the heart is. “Man,” he sighs. “I’m just kind of getting back into my domestic lifestyle. Being away recording and being on tour all the time, it’s great, but I’ve really come to miss this.”
“I’m actually enjoying washing the dishes and vacuuming and stuff,” he pauses laughingly. “It’s all very reassuring.”
by Dan Rule
In Ghost Colours is out through Modular/Universal