Cut Copy: how the band paved the way for Australia’s future artists
It’s not a part of the world with an obvious electronic heritage, but there have been moments in Australia’s otherwise rich musical history.
While there was an underrated synth-laden post-punk scene during the new wave era, as archived on the brilliant Can’t Stop It! compilation by Perth’s Chapter Music, and bands such as SPK and Severed Heads were electrifying the industrial world into the early 1980s, it was The Avalanches’ sample-stitching plunder-disco that broke the electro-dam for future Aussie synth poppers and psych groups like Cut Copy and Tame Impala to hit international acclaim.
The path to Grammy nominations and Coachella slots has unassuming beginnings. With little history of band jamming as a student at Melbourne’s Scotch College, Dan Whitford was running the successful graphic and design company Alter as he was crafting bedroom beats with a drum machine and keyboard, a fruitful confluence of his hip-hop obsession during his university days and the eager record buying for his student radio show, his lo-fi indie-synth convinced The Avalanches’ Sydney label Modular to snap Cut Copy up.
Perhaps it’s Whitford’s ‘fan first, musician second’ foundations that Cut Copy’s dedicated fanbase finds so endearing. Spending studio time listening to their favourite albums as essential pre-production, a YouTube clip of the band during the making of 2011’s Zonoscope saw music immersion as a key part of the creative process. “I spend probably half my time in record stores, and we collectively listen to old records all the time. It’s important,” Whitford told Pitchfork that year. “We don’t consider ourselves too far from a lot of our fans or people like yourself who write about music. We’re not these hot musicians that do guitar solos like nobody else. Cut Copy is more about an aesthetic and reinterpreting the music we like within our own records.”
As Cut Copy expanded into a live band, a potential for cross-rock and dance appeal began to emerge. While touring with Franz Ferdinand and TV on the Radio in 2007, new rave’s indie-twisted 1980s nostalgia came from Klaxons and CSS, in addition to their home country’s Tame Impala, who were crafting their synth-soaked psych. A new climate awaited their return from touring, ready to lap up their dance-rock sound.
Signing to Modular in 2008, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker came from a similarly eclectic set of inspirations, listing The Beatles, The Flaming Lips, and Britney Spears as influences on his work. Where he differed from Aussie-labelmates Cut Copy was the musical dallying in his youth.
“I’ve always been doing something musically, whether it was Tame Impala or some other band,” Parker told the Los Angeles Times in 2010. “Tame Impala has always been a recording project about piecing songs and sounds together. I’ve been doing this since I was 12 years old, using a cassette recorder in my parent’s living room. The live band has always had a different cast of people. At some point, there was a particular change: I started writing songs that were more melodic rather than more riffy rock ‘n’ roll stuff.”
While inhabiting different sonic spaces and backgrounds, Cut Copy’s international breakthrough in indie dance certainly laid the groundwork for the audience ready to eat up a record like 2015’s Currents, just as The Avalanches did before them.
