Sounds From The Junkshop #82 - The Cooper Temple Clause

 

"First of all let’s teach you how to mingle/Then we’ll teach you how to kill..." - The Cooper Temple Clause - Who Needs Enemies?

The Cooper Temple Clause, similar to King Adora a couple of years previously, were one of those bands who exploded on the scene in a bright supernova flash only to never quite live up to that brilliant early promise that they had. Bursting out of Reading like some twelve-legged nightmare machine, I first became aware of them when their debut single The Devil Walks In The Sand picked up rave reviews in both the NME and Kerrang. Listening back to it now, it still holds up well with the crushing drony guitar riff hammering your brain into pieces. Certainly in an age where most indie bands weren't really packing much of a punch, they definitely stood out.

This was early 2002 and there were signs of a UK indie renaissance at this point to counter the Strokes-dominated US wave that had broken the previous year. Along with the likes of the Libertines and Hoggboy, the Cooper Temple Clause were initially right at the front of it although subsequent singles Panzer Attack and Let's Kill Music certainly had the ferocity of their debut but kind of lacked the focus a bit with both of them narrowly missing the Top 40. I think it might have been around this time that I first saw them live as well and they certainly had an undoubted ferocious energy on stage, it just felt like it needed a bit of direction to make them something genuinely special.

The group would finally get their chart breakthrough with single number four Film Maker which remains one of their best with its piercing riff and air of menace ("Don't think 'cos you can't see me that I'm not watching") and crashed into the Top 20. The group's album See This Through And Leave followed soon after and was a prime slice of ferocious electro-punk which could very easily have wandered well on to the wrong side of hipster pretentiousness but packed enough fury and anger in there that you couldn't help get drawn in from the sinister almost whispered opener Did You Miss Me? (reminiscent of something Mansun might have done on Attack of the Grey Lantern) to the vitriolic likes of Been Training Dogs. The album had cool artwork as well which seemed to mock the middle England Berkshire suburbia full of outwardly perfect but underneath massively dysfunctional families that the band had grown out of and established their outsider credentials.

Sensibly, the group would release the album's strongest song, the swaggering Who Needs Enemies? as their next single and it would give them a second Top 30 hit. I still think this is their best moment with its loud-quiet dynamic and creepy-cool atmospherics. I saw them a couple more times around this point at the Leeds Festival where they were one of the standout bands on the second stage that weekend and out on their own and they really seemed to have properly nailed their sound by now with the chaos onstage being barely restrained but just enough to allow the growing tunesmanship to shine through.

So what exactly happened? Well, I'm not quite sure but the group followed up See This Through And Leave very quickly, returning just a year later with Kick Up The Fires And Let The Flames Break Loose and for some reason it just wasn't as good with the sound reined in and the group going for a much more conventional rock sound rather than the chaotic punk energy that underpinned its predecessor. The second single from it Blind Pilots sounded more like Oasis than anything and I wandered off muttering darkly under my breath. Although it made the Top 10 (a marked improvement on See This Through And Leave) and gave the group a second Top 20 hit in Promises Promises, subsequent singles stalled in the lower reaches of the charts and the group would end up dropped by their label.

Bassist Didz Hammond (largely regarded as "the cool one" in the group) clearly saw the writing on the wall and was poached by Carl Barat for his post-Libertines band the Dirty Pretty Things. The rest of the group would struggle on for a third album, 2007's Make This Your Own but with the group now back on the indies, its impact would be minimal (I pretty much missed it altogether to be honest) and they would split soon afterwards following the departure of guitarist and co-songwriter Dan Fisher. The various members would go on to other bands, none of which made anywhere near the impact that the CTC did.

It's a pity that the Cooper Temple Clause never really built on the potential of that debut album - I'm not sure if it was a case of the label "advising" them to go for a more commercial sound, if the band were trying to move up to the next level themselves or whether they just rushed things too quickly but Kick Up The Fires really was the sound of a group rolling for a double six and getting a three and they never really recovered afterwards. Still, See This Through And Leave remains a classic album of the early noughties in my book, just about too-cool-for-school enough to appeal to indie kids but with enough riffs, anger and attitude to satisfy those who like their music a bit more aggressive as well. It's just a shame they couldn't keep it up.