Pyramid Rock: Cut Copy

It’s 4 in the morning. I can’t sleep again – this time due to being too worked up after playing drums on Guitar Hero World Tour all night. Damn you Activision! Usually when in this sort of predicament, I make a call to the cops, just to see if anything interesting is happening in my neighbourhood. But I’m not allowed to do that any more – so I decided to call Tim Hoey, bassist of Cut Copy, to have a yarn about touring, chess and doing the dishes.

I man who always has to keep himself busy, I catch Tim while his getting his clean on. “I’m actually doing housework – I’m getting very domestic. I find that every time I get back from a tour I want to get straight into the housework. I put on a load of washing and stare down a pile of dishes. You gotta let those dishes know who’s boss, otherwise they might not be there next time you come back.”

Mind you, rather than being motivated out of OCD or any other compulsive disorder, Tim finds it calming, Zen even as a way to help deal with having just come of a European tour.

“Being domestic is the last thing on your mind when you’re on tour. Then once it’s over, I think every band gets that tour comedown, because you’ve been working 7 days a week for 12 months or so, and then you come off tour and it’s like “I have to do something” or “I have to be somewhere”, and so you try to fill it with the kind of mundane tasks like housework, or doing your taxes… anything to get your mind working again and to get back into your normal life.”

He needs it consider the epic journey of self discover and self abuse the boys just returned from. “We’ve been here, there and everywhere – and a lot of places we’d never been before actually. We’ve done two extensive tours across America, throughout Europe several times, Mexico, Columbia and everywhere else in between… it really has been a year of non-stop overseas touring.”

“I think that once you’re in that kind of world where you’re doing shows night in night out, you tend to go on autopilot a bit; all aspects of normal life go out the window, but then you just have to try grasp onto something that gives you some sense of normality while touring.”

It’s not only domesticity that helps keep Tim and the band clinging to sanity and reality, with the boys employing a varied and wide spanning regime to stay sharp and stop from going all Jack Nicholson in The Shining on each other.

We haven’t really lost it at each other, but we have gone a bit delirious. I definitely don’t think I’m as smart as I used to be. But we try to do things to fix that up, like having chess tournaments on tour and reading a lot and cutting out some of the partying to save our minds a little bit; basically trying to save your creativity, otherwise it might get sucked out of you after doing the same things night after night.”

Creativity however is one thing the band doesn’t seem to be lacking. The marketing department at Modular also seem to be in no need of a creativity injection (although I can think of a few other injections they could use), with the bands press release describe their latest album In Ghost Colours as an “inverse colours exist in a timeless space where 1980 is as relevant as 2080”. What in the name of God’s inflamed haemorrhoids is that supposed to mean?

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he replies with a laugh, deep and hearty. “Unfortunately we have no control over the press releases, although perhaps we should.”

“It’s a funny thing to read stuff about your record, especially the journalists’ take on what they think the record is. I guess they do it to build up as much hype about the record as possible. But I don’t think that particular piece is too relevant to our record… maybe it is in their minds but certainly not in ours. It’s hard to tell because it’s incredibly ambiguous – who’s to say that they’ve actually listened to the record?”

I know I didn’t, better not to ruin the picture the press release painted.

Must Read