Cut Copy

“It takes bands to start playing dance music live for a lot of Australians to take to it.”

On the eve of a pair of Irish shows, we talk to the synth-fuelled Aussies about their startlingly different second album. Drummer Mitch Scott explains why they’ve not been afraid to reinvent the wheel.

Words by Chris Jones

Cut Copy’s second album, In Ghost Colours, is justifiably winning hearts for its subtle blend of radio-ready rock and slinky synth-pop and just now it feels like the calm before the storm of touring awaiting them for the rest of the year. Belatedly building on the start they made on 2004’s Bright Like Neon Love, the new record seems set to send the band on another path entirely. From being the darlings of leftfield electro alongside the likes of Junior Boys at one end of the scale and Justice at the other, the new record’s massive choruses and emphasis on writing and recording as a rock band could well see them headed for some very large stages indeed.

When we speak, the trio, frontman and songwriter Dan Whitford, Tim Hoey and drummer Mitch Scott, has just arrived in London after playing three shows in Scandinavia, and stretched out far in front of them are a three-week headline tour of America, two weeks back home in Melbourne, a month of touring Australia and a summer of European festivals. A daunting prospect, you might think, but the chatty Mitch sounds, appropriately enough for the time of year, full of the joys of Spring. Maybe a fawning Pitchfork review has something to do with it.

“It’s really good to see the album’s been received so well,” he says. “We were blown away by that review. It was a really positive one, and to get a score like that [8.8/10] was really great. We probably didn’t go in a commercial direction, and I guess it’s a bit of a gamble in that way, but all the responses have come back really positive, and going to Number One in Australia was something that blew our minds. We never imagined that could happen.”

The new album is a triumph of forgetting what anyone else might think or expect and trusting your own judgement. They could quite easily have played it safe and released Bright Like Neon Love Mk. II, but where would be the fun in that?

Mitch says, “We made a really conscious choice not to follow the dictates of what people might want us to do, or think about what sounds might be in vogue. We decided to make the record we wanted to make and the sort of thing we wanted to hear, and we’d happily suffer the consequences if people didn’t like it. We thought it was really the only approach to take if you want to be able to enjoy the songs that you’re playing.”

Get that? “The songs that you’re playing.” Unlike a lot of their contemporaries, Cut Copy is not a dance act, but a band that happens to play music you can dance to. And it’s in the live arena that they feel most at home. It’s undeniable that In Ghost Colours takes them in a new, gig-friendly direction, and it turns out that it was a considered decision to head that way.

“It’s something we wanted to do,” Mitch explains. “It’s also something that [DFA co-owner] Tim Goldsworthy, the producer, liked. Also, when the first record was put together, Dan had started writing that before I came on board, and when that record came out, we’d only really just got together as a band and played maybe one or two live shows. The amount of recording time in an actual studio for that record was half a day, to get all the live elements down. Whereas, on this one, we had a lot more time. But yeah, from that time to now, we’ve evolved into much more of a band focus, whereas before it’s always been a few things – you know, a production team, a DJ kinda thing.”

Though Cut Copy essentially started out as a solo project for Dan Whitford, Mitch explains that the whole process of writing and recording is much more collaborative than it ever has been. And on In Ghost Colours, another element has been added to the mix: an external producer. The band eventually settled on Goldsworthy, whose credentials as part of the DFA production and remix team, as well as his recent work on the Hercules and Love Affair album, are pretty impeccable. “[DFA] almost can’t do any wrong,” Mitch enthuses, perfectly reasonably. “As producers and as a record label, they’ve just got amazing taste and an amazing ear for quality.”

The drummer recalls that the band was initially happy to carry on as before and self-produce, but Modular had other ideas. “Our label was definitely keen for us to work with a producer,” recalls Mitch, “and some of their ideas were of some really big-name producers, and that wasn’t the sort of thing we were excited about.”

For example?

“They were thinking of people like Nellee Hooper or Timbaland. It would have been a pretty crazy thing to do.”

He’s not wrong. To listen to the euphoric synth-rock stylings of In Ghost Colours, it seems inconceivable that Timbo – production genius though he may be – would have done anything but, well, destroy it.

“We wanted to make our record,” insists Mitch. “We didn’t want somebody who was going to put a crazy stamp and have their own signature all over it. We didn’t even entertain that idea, it wasn’t something that we wanted. So, whereas they were probably after somebody with a massive profile, we just wanted somebody whose taste we really respected. So with the names we threw around, Tim was right up on that list.”

The label then sent the band’s demos to Goldsworthy, and a relationship was built up immediately. Mitch recalls that Goldsworthy was able to “nail” the reference points. There’s certainly plenty of synth-pop and early Nineties dance in there, as well as a smattering of shoegaze on several songs, particularly ‘So Haunted’, but some of Mitch’s suggestions as influences are a little odd, as he namechecks Fleetwood Mac and ELO as well as the expected My Bloody Valentine and Nineties dance. All the same, it seems that band and producer were on the same wavelength from the outset. Mitch recalls, “We thought, ‘he totally gets it’, and obviously we respect his body of work, so we knew from that that it was going to be brilliant.”

And so, it appears, it turned out. Most of the work on Bright Like Neon Love was done on a very small scale, mainly “bedroom work” as Mitch puts it, so the In Ghost Colours sessions were a totally new experience for Cut Copy. In that situation, you’d want to be in the hands of someone as experienced as Goldsworthy.

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Issue #51 - I Told You This Would Be A Good Issue

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