The Cooper Temple Clause: Floydian Analysis.

The Cooper Temple Clause play The Zoo this Thursday

The record industry lives on fuss and its pumped up sisters hype and rave. The Cooper Temple Clause (TCTC) are fussed about. NME have small-but-intense orgasms about them. Their records are reviewed with nearly as much adjectival salivation as those by this year’s centre-of-the-hyperbole-universe, The Hives.

Q said TCTC’s debut, See This Through And Leave, was ‘over-produced’. Some people are deaf. TCTC are over-produced if Pink Floyd and Portishead are. Depends on your taste. The comparisons with the aforementioned Ps are relatively accurate, as are motions in the direction of Primal Scream (at a stretch), Radiohead (try Digital Observations), Charles Mingus, Super Furry Animals, Krautrock (as a species).

It’s bass player Didz Hammond’s birthday and as a present he’s been given a bunch of interviews to do. “What a bastard of a manager we’ve got,” he laughs, getting comfy in bed.

It’s only 9.35am. Despite the early morning start, Didz is quite chatty and happy to be lumped in with the aforementioned outfits and genres.

“I can see why most of the comparisons are made,” he says. “We do try and cover a lot of bases and do a lot in the space of an album. I always say this but we seriously do want to push the boundaries of music. We never rule anything out.”

“For instance when it comes to Floyd, most of the band prefer Dark Side Of The Moon, but for me that first album, Piper At the Gates Of Dawn, is absolutely amazing. The way they were using things that still seem quite modern now, like those radio samples, was incredible. However, we might be over our long tracks phase. (Digital Observations is 7.12 and Murder Song 8.47). We’ve come  to the conclusion that maybe we are stretching things out too much and we should get to the point quicker. The pop faction in the band are saying that, but there’s a more art school ethic at work that’s saying we need to lengthen the songs and the effect of the big bits, so we’ll see what happens on the next album.”

TCTC are mostly about the collision between dark grandiose rock and electronica. They make sweeping, big sounding songs loaded with energy and cut by pulsebeats and all manner of electronic wiggery. The bottom end is usually pure rock. They are big, the way Doves are big. They echo. See This Through And Leave  is wonderfully smart for a debut, ultimately poised-yet-pounding in its blissed out neo-psychedelia. A foray to the far side that avoids becoming a cliche riddled by self-indulgence. For a sextet so young (barely three years old), The Cooper Temple Clause sound remarkably grown-up.

Didz is still getting his head around TCTC’s global growing glory. The day before, he was shown a review from New Zealand.

“It’s still just strange to think that  there are people in a country that far away listening to our album,” he says. Yet it isn’t. New Zealand with its ever-so-British countryside and roots is an obvious bedsit for fellows and femme fatales with a taste for stellar guitar blowouts such as The Lake and Amber. Splendidly splattered and painting the sky, they are matched by the just-as-peerless opening brood Did You Miss Me? and the eerie closing Murder Song.

Imagining TCTC delivering Murder Song under the shadow of the sky-scratching Mt Fuji in Japan at the legendary Fuji Festival is quite chilling.

“We played that festival last year and we’re off there again soon,” Didz says. “It’s amazing. So clean. And the fans are so fanatical. The only place in the world where you still get chased down the street if you are a rock band. Last year when we played, we’d never been outside the UK to play and we were expecting to play to about 20 people . There was about 5000 people. It was lot of fun.” 

TCTC have strung together all the great festivals - Glastonbury, T In The Park, Witness, Rosskilde, Reading, Leeds. “Yeah, we’re festival savvy,” says Didz. “Glastonbury was a bit hippyish for me, but it was good. Our keyboardist Kieran got a photo taken with Natalie Imbruglia which was nice. She is amazing. Absolutely stunning. Very little.”