Cut, Copied and Pasted – Cut Copy live at the Forum, 6th March 2011

Cut Copy

I’ve been telling everyone how awesome Australia’s Cut Copy are for some time now, so you can imagine my excitement when I heard they were coming to London.

For me, Cut Copy really capture the spirit of 80′s music, and their latest album Zonoscope is no different – the record is spilling over with synths, deep male vocals just like New Romanticists The Human League, and that well-produced sheen you got on 80′s pop records. The second single from the album is Take Me Over (Spotify, YouTube), a song about leaving your comfortable life behind and following your dreams… this seems to be a theme of the album, and something I’ve been thinking about doing myself! Listen and you will surely hear influence from two 80′s classics: Down Under by fellow Aussies Men At Work (Spotify, YouTube), and Everywhere by Fleetwood Mac (the similarity here is uncanny – Spotify, YouTube).

frontman Dan Whitford

A feat that Cut Copy are highly skilled at is what I call the “seamless indie-rock to electro-dance segue” – in other words, you can start a song and be listening to an indie band, and by the end of the song you’ll be listening to an electronic dance act. This is beautifully executed on their previous album In Ghost Colours on two tracks: Feel the Love (check out the vocoder on this one! Spotify, YouTube) and So Haunted (Spotify, YouTube). It’s for this reason that I usually introduce them to friends as “indie-electro” or similar.

Hands in the air

So it was with great expectations that I turned up for the show at the Forum in Kentish Town (where I happened to live for the first 3 years of my life – yet another 80′s throwback!) …and I can tell you that they did not disappoint! The atmosphere was great; Cut Copy obviously have a massive following and a lot of the crowd really got involved with plenty of sing-alongs and hands-in-the-air moments. They played almost everything I could have hoped for, even some tracks from their first album. The light show was also very good.

Most of their songs sounded very true to the albums, though to be fair they did have some backing tracks playing. This is a controversial subject, and one I will save for another post. For now all I will say is that whatever they may have lacked in being fully live was made up for by being in the presence of my favourite band and a few thousand other fans.

Cut, Copied and Pasted - two happy fans

Big thanks to my gig buddy for the evening and thank you Cut Copy, officially Disco Patrick’s favourite band!