THE COPS [09.05.07] PLAYING WITH THE RADIO DIAL Sometimes, your pre-conceived ideas about a band are entirely wrong. People that you imagine to be hard drinking, street fighting, blood on the stage types turn out to be the polar opposite. That's exactly what happened with The Cops. In a nutshell, frontman Simon Carter would rather concern himself with archaeology than living up to any rock clichés. But before we get into all that, a brief history lesson. The latest local signing to Inertia Records, The Cops have had a tumultuous couple of years. Formed in 2003 by Simon Carter and Beck Darwon, the Sydney group burst onto the indie rock scene with a self-titled EP back in 2004. A full-length album followed, 'Stomp On Tripwires', and the critical praise came thick and fast. By 2005, however, it had all fallen apart. Band members left, record companies bailed and management soon followed suit. While it could easily have been the end of the group, Simon and Beck persevered. "You can always find new members if you want to continue and that's what we did," offers Simon, when asked about the groups second incarnation. "We had an idea that maybe we should just use extras and do it ourselves. Just get in guests. But luckily we found Nicholai and Jarrod and kind of just went from there." As Simon tells it, finding the new members to complement himself, Beck and Todd was relatively easy. The new members all already knew each other and there was no weird hazing ritual or anything like that. So you didn't get them drunk and push them in fire to welcome them into the band? "No. None of that frat boy kind of stuff," is Simon's slightly bemused reply. But that's the thing about The Cops in 2007, while their music and name inspires images of anarchy in the suburbs; they're all quite sensible and focused these days. Questions about run-ins with police and smashing things up on stage are simply met with a polite "No." Similarly, enquiring about the schmoozing and free dinners that get handed around when a record company are trying to sign the band fail to elicit anything of note. "Kind of yeah, [there is that], I would prefer to just get down to business though... We left our previous record label and gained a few members and then we basically shopped around and decided that Inertia was a really good home for us and it's working out really well." The bands new album? "I think there is a healthy spread of different sounds coming out of this thing. At the end of the day we just come out with the material that we do..." Indeed, it's only when you start talking to Simon about hip hop and the posters that plaster his home studio that things start flowing. As he explains down the telephone line, he's got various posters of Ice Cube on the walls and grew up listening to listening to hip hop. The lure of guitars didn't actually set in until later in life. "Going through school I listened to exclusively hip hop, I didn't listen to rock music or guitars until about 1996, so I kind of started off on hip hop and went from there. [I was into the movies to], I liked all of the Friday movies, Boyz N Da Hood and all of that kind of stuff... "I actually I discovered the first album by Oasis, 'Definitely Maybe', and I really liked the sort of attitude, I thought it was raw. I thought there was a bit of a similarity to their attitude and the hip hop that I had been listening to, which was slightly aggressive. I kind of got into Brit pop from there, y'know. I kind of bypassed the whole Pearl Jam, Grunge thing until a lot later when I started to get into Nirvana and stuff." And Simon very nearly bypassed the rock thing as well. As he explains: "I do have a pretty healthy interest in archaeology and pre-historic creatures, I was actually thinking of becoming an archaeologist before I found music. I was either [going to be] an archaeologist or be in a band, I just had heaps of groovy dinosaur books growing up as a kid." Probably a good thing he went with the latter. 'Drop It In Their Laps', the new album from The Cops, brims with energy. "A mashing of rock, funk, soul, electro, hip hop and pop... a cross-pollinating smorgasbord of tasty sing-along choruses, arse shaking beats and whacked out lyrical quest," is how the band describes it. "Like hearing snippets of every great song you heard across the radiowaves of your youth," chimes in the official bio. Monster Zero 'Drop It In Their Laps' is out now on Inertia. The Cops will be playing a special free show at The Zoo on Wednesday May 16. The Show is presented by Triple J's Home & Hosed and also features Mary Trembles and Operator Please. back to top ^

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