Cut Copy opened the electronic door for everyone

There’s been a revolution, and this Melbourne quartet led the charge of dance music into the mainstream.

Cut Copy’s Mitchell Scott, Tim Hoey, Dan Whitford and Ben Browning in Brisbane yesterday. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen/The Australian

For the first few years of the millennium, dance music existed in its own bubble, outside the mainstream. Nightclub culture was dominated by musicians and DJs who composed and mixed songs on the same laptops they brought on stage, yet these were often insular, isolated affairs known only to those who frequented dark dancefloors in the small hours every weekend. It was a secretive, sensual world that was ripe for a mass audience, but in order to hit a critical mass, it demanded strong songs from skilled performers.

One act that helped usher in that change was Cut Copy, a quartet that performs electronic music with live instruments including guitars, bass and drums. Established in Melbourne in 2001, the group was part of a tight vanguard that shifted the genre from the fringes of popular culture toward the centre.

“Dance music didn’t really cross over until the arrival of people like us, and the Presets and Midnight Juggernauts,” says Dan Whitford, Cut Copy’s singer, songwriter and keyboardist. “From there, it’s really kind of blossomed and almost been a revolution, where I think dance music has become the dominant thing certainly over last eight years or so.”

When its first album, Bright Like Neon Love, was released in 2004, Cut Copy represented an odd prospect for concert promoters. “In those early stages, people didn’t really get it,” Whitford says. “Guitar-based music was ruling. We’d be playing festivals next to rock and punk bands, and we were making this weird hybrid that referenced so many pop, 90s rave and 80s synthesiser sounds. It was very foreign to the average music listener, but the landscape has changed in a pretty dramatic way since then.”

Today, the international success of Australian electronic artists such as Flume and Hermitude shows the strangeness has long since subsided.

“We might have opened the door for something that is now quite commonly understood,” Whitford says. “Now, dance music dominates. Ironically, we stood out then for being too electronic; now, we probably stand out for being too guitar-heavy. We’ve been running our own race, but I like being a bit of an outsider and forging our own path.”

In an era where electronic musicians tend to stand at centrestage with little more than a laptop between them and the teeming masses, the four musicians that comprise Cut Copy are outliers. At the recent dance music festival FOMO that toured eastern capital cities, for instance, the final three sets were solo performances by overseas producers RL Grime, Zhu and Kaytranada. Only the headliner played a live instrument: a stand-up drum kit, briefly, towards the end of RL Grime’s set.

“For us, there’s still an energy to live music with acoustic instruments that really is more interesting than someone standing there with a laptop,” Whitford says. “We can relate to someone being on a laptop, but you can’t really engage with the performer — whereas seeing people moving around on stage, being animated and vibing off the crowd, it’s a bit more of a two-way communication and something that can be a lot more spectacular. If there’s one thing I miss from our earlier days, it’s more people performing live in that sense, rather than a guy on a laptop with a microphone. That seems a little underwhelming for me. But that could be the generation gap.”

At 39, Whitford has spent nearly half his life making and releasing music under the Cut Copy moniker, which he chose after hours spent seeing those two words side by side under the “edit” menu on his MacBook while working as a graphic designer.

He notes that dance music is one genre where youth is less prized than in fields such as pop and rock.

“Certainly in DJ culture it’s less important to be a certain age, and there’s more of an emphasis on what your output is,” he says. “A lot of the better DJs are people who have experience as well, so being more seasoned is an advantage in that realm. But it’s comforting to know that the door hasn’t shut on our musical aspirations ­because we’re not 21 any more.”

The group’s second album, In Ghost Colours, debuted atop the ARIA charts and was later nominated for a Grammy Award, while lead single Lights & Music placed 15th in the Triple J Hottest 100 of 2008.

Though once based in Melbourne, three of the four members have recently moved overseas, with only drummer Mitchell Scott remaining in the Victorian capital.

Whitford has lived in Copenhagen for nearly two years, after his girlfriend got a job there. Fifth album Haiku from Zero was released in September and the band is in the midst of its first national tour in several years.

Whitford returned home before Christmas and, ahead of the first shows in Brisbane and Wollongong, has been blowing the dust off old instruments stacked inside a disorganised storage unit. “It’s getting a bit like the final shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark: all these boxes stretching off into infinity, and I’ve got no idea what’s in half of them,” he says with a laugh. “It’s fun coming back and trying to search for particular things when nothing’s labelled, and it’s a little bit ­chaotic. I’ve also found a few things I forgot that I had. You win some, you lose some.”

Having toured Haiku from Zero throughout the US and Mexico during the latter half of last year — as well as a couple of festival appearances in Victoria and NSW in the days preceding new year — Whitford and his band mates are well-versed in blending old favourites with newer works.

“It’s just over a year ago that we really did the bulk of the recording on this album,” he says. “But playing live shows and seeing the face-to-face response from crowds, it almost rekindles your love for the songs. This record feels the most natural and the closest to what we do with the live show.”

Whitford has resisted the urge to perform during his time in Copenhagen, but the foreign environment has helped his creative output. “I’ve definitely been making music over there,” he says. “There are quite a lot of interesting little dance music promoters, parties and labels in Denmark. People like to go out and see dance music and stay out pretty late.”

Whitford is one of those people, too, even if his intentions and priorities and those of his band mates have shifted somewhat since they first became enthusiastic nightclub attendees. “We’re not out every weekend until five o’clock in the morning, raging,” says Whitford.

“I’m probably more the kind of thoughtful guy on the edge of the dancefloor, listening to what the DJ’s mixing in; listening to the craft of the music rather than losing myself in it, as I once did.”

Instead of being at the centre of a mass of seething bodies, the Cut Copy frontman is now more likely to be watching how the crowd responds and making mental notes for how those creative decisions might feed into his band’s next work.

Cut Copy’s national tour continues with shows at Sugar Mountain Festival today, Sydney (Thursday), Hobart (Friday) and Melbourne Zoo (January 27).