Cut CopyCut Copy plays The Zoo on Wednesday, the Rolling Rock in Noosa on Thursday, the Great Northern in Byron Bay on Friday and the Berlin Bar on the Gold Coast on Saturday.
My first Cut Copy experience was midway through last year, when my girlfriend brought home a vinyl single that had mysteriously appeared at her workplace. That tune, 1981, was a canny retro-futurist mix of old-school electro fun and hard-edged groove that left this jaded eighties-child all misty of eye and swingy of hip.
Since then a whole bunch of boogie-lovin’ kids have caught on to Cut Copy through the debut seven-track EP I Thought Of Numbers. The disc is a startling, playful melange of 80s synth-pop samples, snatches of seventies groove, a sprinkling of cheesy lounge, and any other style that’s ever taken main-man Dan Whitford’s fancy, all pieced together in new, quirky, catchy and very danceable configurations.
It’s a sound that’s easy to love, and has scored Dan and his cohorts a number of choice gigs, including their early morning Livid set last year, as well as sharing bills with the likes of Groove Armada and Jamiroquai. I ask Dan how it felt to play with artists of that calibre.
“It’s sort of bizarre when you play with those big acts, because there’s such a difference in scale between their production and what we’re doing,” he begins. “That doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of what you’re doing, I guess, but more just the actual effort that they’ve gone to, to create a show and stuff - in a lot of ways you sort of feel a bit intimidated by the scale of what they’re doing. But at the same time, the scale of what they’re doing sort of makes the scale of what you’re doing a bit bigger as well. You’ve got a big crowd and a big venue and that sort of thing, so it’s just a great opportunity to play in front of that many people.”
On a somewhat smaller scale, but no less exciting, is the current Australian tour which sees Cut Copy teaming up with Avalanches uber-DJ Dexter for some gob smacking groovilicious hi-jinks. It should be a night to remember at the Zoo tomorrow. How do you approach your live show, do you attempt to recreate your songs in the live environment, or is it more of a straight DJ set?
“It started out with us thinking ‘well, we’ll do a DJ set’ and sort of pull out tracks that some of the Cut Copy songs were sampled from, or just stuff that relates. But it sort of turned into a bit more than that,” Dan elaborates. “If you’re playing the songs over and over you start to think of other things and of other ideas, and not necessarily get bored with the tracks but just sort of think ‘well, we could push this even further’. So some of some them have been re-written for the DJ set and we run them off the sampler when we’re playing. So it’s a combination of DJ set and also just deconstructing some of the stuff we’ve written and putting it back together again.”
Now that I Thought Of Numbers has established an enviable worldwide profile for Cut Copy, surely a full-length release is on the horizon.
“Basically there’s two thirds of an album written now,” Dan reveals. “I suppose the plan was always to get an album out this year. There’s a lot of good response from overseas, and people asking about what’s next for Cut Copy, so it’d be nice to have an album out some time this year to keep people interested and keep myself interested. I think perhaps when the album comes out there may even be a format change with our live set-up and actually play it all live with a proper band, that’s what I’m working towards anyway.”
So the album is shaping up to be a more instrument-based affair, then?
“Yeah, I think so; part of when I was writing the new stuff was actually with that in mind, thinking that it would be nice to play it live. I mean, not always thinking that the whole time, but in a way it’s probably come from both directions, the material has influenced the way I want to take the live show and vice versa, so it’s definitely a more live sounding record, or at least it will be.”
