Cooper Temple Clause - London Koko - 18/10/06
3/5
By: Thomas Hannan
I hold my hands up and admit to having a memory like a knackered sieve. It's not that I'd forgotten the Cooper Temple Clause. I knew a lot, I thought. I knew of the Manics-like devotion to the Reading band during their formative stages. I knew of Didz Hammond's departure, favouring doing his bass thing these days for Dirty Pretty Things rather than for the band in which he made his name. This band. I knew of the sound - that butch indie, that messy swirling rock that you could call both primitive and progressive with equally forceful supporting argument. I knew of that second album, the one that spawned what seemed to me to be decent singles yet was largely ignored by pretty much everyone. I knew they'd since disappeared.
What I'd forgotten were the songs. I'd forgotten that I knew a lot of them, and of these that rung bells in my head, very many of them are actually rather great. Whether this is down to rose tinted spectacles on my part for looking back on my formative teenage years and mistakenly thinking that I was actually a bigger Coopers fan than I ever was is certainly up for debate. What is true is that I always thought they were a hell of a lot better than Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. This remains the case.
Of the songs I didn't know, TCTC have no real need to worry. You see, that Manics fan-like devotion remains in a hardcore few today, and whilst I'm up on the balcony struggling to remember, there are hundreds down on the floor bouncing politely away. To new songs. The band will be delighted with the way raucous new single 'Homo Sapiens' went down, but to be fair people had been given the chance to hear that one or two times before. The rest of the brand new material, which nobody will have hear 'owt of ever, also slays the devoted, and due to this, the Coopers will be sleeping like babies.
What it probably won't do is reinvigorate the passers by who took interest in their early work, stayed with them through the peaks that littered the troughs of the second album but then, like the band themselves, drifted out of touch. At its core, it's more of your standard Cooper Temple Clause stuff, and perhaps not enough has changed. But there are just about enough people for whom that isn't a concern, people who would regard the very criticism as poppycock. Stop laughing at last word in that sentence.
That worry over the band's future place in The Grand Scheme of Things does sit in the back of the mind, my mind at least, throughout the set. The band themselves seem unconcerned, totally caught up in the moment. Either that or they're bored stiff - who can tell? They never move a muscle. For the casual listener like myself however, despite the lacklustre stage presence and absence of the sense of the future, the one real thought in the mind afterwards is a wholly complimentary one - who ever knew the Cooper Temple Clause had so many cool songs?
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