Credit: Found On Internet

“We had crowds that were singing along to songs that aren’t even released yet, so it just showed the band the enthusiasm we’re getting from our audience.” Ben Gautrey, singer and frontman for Berkshire’s favourite sons, The Cooper Temple Clause, is understandably enthusiastic coming off the back of the band’s recent UK tour.

It’d been all quite on the Coopers front until recently. Since 2002’s second album, “Kick Up The Fire And Let The Flames Break Loose”, founder members have left, record labels have been changed, and the band dropped almost out of view. Early next year they’re promising us their “most eclectic record to date”. Music Towers cornered Ben to talk tunes, label-politics and…bowel operations?

Speaking of songs that haven’t been released, the new album, “Make This Your Own”, is out in January, isn’t it? What can we expect from that?

“We needed some time to make this record, to get this record right, to make sure we’ve progressed. We worked for the first time with a producer in the traditional sense. He encouraged us to strip away all the music, taking songs down to their raw bones - just a vocal and a piano or a vocal and an acoustic guitar, and just to try to make the songs like that and add the other instruments later. That was quite an arduous and hard task for us because we’d always written songs by jamming, and by having layers upon layers of sounds, and always adding the vocals last. This time it was the other way round; the vocals were first and we added the music to it. It took a bit of time, but ultimately it’s been really rewarding as we’re better songwriters and a better band because of it. It’s the most eclectic album we’ve ever done. We’ve got songs on there that are acoustic and we normally use them as b-sides.”

He’s got a point – both previous TCTC albums were barbed hails of bullets, boiling over with guitars more venomous than Steve Irwin’s snake collection. Couple with the kind of punishing rhythms that properly applied could be used for the demolition of derelict housing, with an tempered edge of electronica keeping it from being too brutal, both records were a veritable sonic assault.