Formed in 2001 by Melbourne vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Dan Whitford, Cut Copy brought a mellow, melodic vibe to the underground club scene—a welcome relief from the jittery, angular electroclash that had been dominant for a few years but was in decline by the 2004 release of the group’s debut, Bright Like Neon Love. Since then Whitford and his band have been refining a sound that blends contemporary electro with 80s new wave and 70s art-rock, a combination that’s won them a large international fan base (whose rapid growth has been fed by the ongoing EDM explosion) and helped them become bona fide chart-topping pop stars in Australia. In September the band installed billboards in six locations around the world—including Chile, Wales, and a burned-out block in Detroit—that allowed fans to use a smartphone app to hear the title track (and lead single) from their latest album, Free Your Mind (Loma Vista), which cranks up the blissful vibes alongside the club-moving beats, conjuring visions of a retro-sci-fi hippie utopia.
When you do that—when you’re translating it live—are there any rules or goals that you try to live by? To make it all playable?
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I don’t know whether we’ve got rules so much. Usually we’re just trying to draw out the essence of the song with what we’re doing live. And I guess sometimes that involves maybe changing the way that we interpret a song, just to make it suit a live context. Sometimes in the early days, our live shows were much more guitar driven than synthesizer based, just because there was an energy to that that really seemed to translate. Over time we’ve gotten better at translating some of the more electronic tracks and dance songs.
It’s been a weird process making this record, because we didn’t necessarily set out to make a psychedelic record, or make a record referencing psychedelic dance music or anything like that. Really we worked on it without any sort of basic idea or mission statement. We just thought, we’re gonna make the music and not second-guess any of the ideas. We’re laying down song ideas and adding to them and not questioning anything. And we had a pool of songs we could come back to and go, well, what is this? And at that point we saw a connection—a lot of these tracks had an uplifting, sort of psychedelic feel. And once we noticed that was a bit of a linking thread, we tried to draw that out a bit and enhance that and make it a feature of the record. So the idea of “free your mind” is a bit of mantra or mission statement now that we’ve finished the record.
Do any of the songs that are left off share similar styles? Motifs? The opposite of Free Your Mind, like maybe they’re about not freeing your mind?
I probably never expected to be considered an exciting band to see live. That was never even a goal in the early days, so that’s an interesting thing that sort of slowly happened in the beginning and that’s part of the way that people perceive us—as being a band that’s really exciting live. It’s somewhat strange, I guess, for someone who never really played any instruments and was totally self-taught to end up in the position where you’re playing in front of thousands of people at Lollapalooza or Coachella. How does that happen, you know? It’s kinda weird.
The first thing I was thinking when I listened to Free Your Mind was that a lot of the synth patches and the way you sample-fied some of the reverbed vocals reminds me of the Tough Alliance and CEO—are you familiar with them?
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