Cut Copy - Ghost Colours all cohesive in time

The Dwarf found an ebullient Tim Hoey on a good laundry day, which is just as well considering the band were in the midst of preparing for Cut Copy’s latest overseas jaunt, armed with brand spanking new material, an infectious enthusiasm and more importantly, enough clean jocks for the road ahead. .

Answering the phone with a smile in his voice, you can see why the boys have been so popular in recent times – their music is a textural blancmange of light, shade and splashes of vivid colour. Speaking of colour, their newest offering In Ghost Colours is slated for release this March

The Dwarf ventured, apart from the focus on a clean pair of smalls – how are Cut Copy gearing up for a lengthy stint overseas? Tim offers, “Drinking a lot of coffee I think, since this will be our last chance to get a good one. Coffee pretty much keeps us together as a band, so we are drinking a lot of coffee at the moment and preparing for five weeks of bad espresso (laughs)”

So the first thing Cut Copy are planning on doing when you get back in Melbourne is to go buy a decent coffee? ‘Yeah, we were actually thinking of buying a coffee machine and bringing it on tour’ Tim answers, with only a hit of a half-joke in his voice. The Dwarf offers that considering there is a new record due out that perhaps now is the time to start making some diva demands, perhaps take the coffee machine to the next level? Tim immediately picks up what The Dwarf is putting down, considering “Yeah, instead of bringing a chef or something, we can bring a barista”. The Dwarf, helping musicians become divas, one interview at a time since 2008 – brilliant!

Aside from encouraging their diva side, The Dwarf was particularly interested to hear about some of the inspiration behind their soon to be released opus – it is here that Tim’s enthusiasm, hits fever pitch. “We were listening to a lot of ELO’s Time album in particular when we were writing the record and Tim Goldsworthy, who we worked with, is a huge ELO fan and he wanted to try out a certain recording technique that ELO used in recording drums, but that was only one aspect of it contributing to the sound…everything is going to go in, in various ways, its not one distinct genre in our music that you can define the record by. All our music backgrounds are different …it’s more a matter of making a cohesive album”

So, just how did the erstwhile lads in Cut Copy go about pinning down, preparing and putting together In Ghost Colours and what exactly was their rationale? Tim explains, “We started out by sending out mix CD’s, just the music that we were listening to; to give each other an idea of what direction the album was going to take. I was listening to a lot of psychedelic music, which is pop in one way or another. And we wanted to try and push our songwriting and make a record that was not necessary immediate – something you had to listen to a few times where you start discovering new things over and over again – I find those albums really enjoyable. So we started writing all these songs and once we collected enough we went over to DFA studios and then started thinking about the album as a whole and it kept going back to the ‘Hall and Oates’ take on psychedelic music and we considered that in the album artwork as well – it has a lot of washed out colours, a lot of layering and it had a lot to do with what we were doing in the music. We spent about a month tying all the songs together with interludes trying to make a cohesive record – I guess, at the end of the day that is it what it is for us to make a record. When we start thinking about things like singles it seems really hard and foreign”

In creating this cohesive effort, Tim reveals the importance that having the right producer on board is imperative to the process, “When you hand your work over to someone else sometimes its hard to let go of what you are doing…luckily for us we have been very fortunate with the people we have worked with like Philippe Zdar on the first record, he was great and fascinating to work with and we never felt uncomfortable and that happened once again with Tim (Goldsworthy) and he was like ‘I am here for your music, if you want a sound or direction I will help you get there but it’s really on you guys’ It’s reassuring to hear and we kind of hit it off .. seeing how he worked and how that DFA studio worked was very voyeuristic (laughs) and it was amazing getting insight into how they operate”.

This insight also pushed Cut Copy to further experimentation in creating In Ghost Colours – aided by the gear geekdom rampant at DFA studios, as Tim recounts “Seriously, every day something new would arrive from eBay or something far off somewhere… it would just turn up and they would be like ‘Oh yeah I forgot I ordered that’ and just plug it in and see what would happen…half the time a fair bit of that ended up on the record.” Tim continues “It was really inspiring to see that and interesting to see how other people worked; they have no pre-conceived idea of what they are going to do, they are so committed to pushing their own sound”.

With some of the fruits of this labor already being given a spin by radio, it seems that inspiration has certainly paid off at Camp Cut Copy – let’s hope they remember to come home and hopefully down Tassie way – if for nothing else, the barista might be getting a little homesick.

In Ghost Colours is out March 22nd on Modular.

Cut Copy also appear at V Festival nationally. Details in the gig guide.

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