THE COPE - “ALL WE WANT TO DO IS MAKE PEOPLE DANCE”

( Exclusive Interviews ) - Friday 17th November 2023

Words by Isaac Solanki. Photography by Laure Ghilarducci. Thanks to Jessica Lamb.

The Cope, an electrifying electronic dance duo who are currently taking the music industry by storm with their unparalleled ability to create mesmerising audio-visual art. Their videos, carefully crafted with a masterful blend of stunning visuals and captivating storytelling, have earned high praise from critics and viewers alike. However, their immense talent doesn't stop at the screen, The Cope's live shows are an experience of a lifetime, taking their artistry to another level. With dynamic stage presence and infectious energy, they effortlessly immerse their audiences in a pulsating sea of sound and visuals, creating an atmosphere where time and space seem to dissolve. The Cope are on a mission to push the limits of what is possible in the realm of electronic music, leaving audiences moved, inspired, and hungry for more. Earlier this week, I sat down and spoke to Joe and David about the story so far and what inspires them to make such moving audio-visual art.

So… where and why did The Cope start?

Joe: “Well, we actually met at a mutual friends birthday party, towards the end of 2019. We already knew of each other through the Irish music industry and through playing in different bands - David played in an indie-garage type band and I was a session musician playing with a bunch of different people. Then, in early 2020, when the pandemic hit, David was in the process of opening up a new recording studio and obviously couldn’t open it commercially straight away, so we ended up hanging out and and began to making music together; that then led to what we know today as The Cope.”

A happy coincidence. Where did the name The Cope some from?

Joe: “It’s all part of cognitive behavioural therapies and the idea that if you are naturally prone towards catasraphisation, you reframe your thought process to the fact that you're not going to die… you’ll cope and you’ll be alright. There’s this podcast by Blindboy Boatclub, its huge over in Ireland and they talk about it a lot in there; that’s mainly what inspired the name.”

What inspires you to do what you do and make music in the specific genre you do?

David: “We both actually came from more indie-inspired bands before we met, however, we both had a separate love for the opposite ends of the dance spectrum. Joe was more into 90s dance and I was more into the audio-visual acts - I was a big fan of The Chemical Brothers, perhaps some of the more modern stuff.”

Joe: “Yeah, so my love for dance mainly came from my love for the Irish TV show called Top 30 Hits which was essentially just Top Of The Pops… just without any real production value haha. It was just music videos back to back for the top 30 songs of the week - I used to watch it as a kid and my main memory of it was seeing'/hearing all of these these one hit wonders. A track that I always have to mention is Touch Me by Rui da Silva - I think that’s one of the main ones that sort of fuelled my interest in that side of music.”

So, what made you make the jump between genres?

David: “I think it was actually just more of a natural progression. It just got to a point where we were creating music during lockdown, mainly thinking about what sort of music people are gonna want to listen to and what type of music are we going to want to listen to when this is all over. We didn’t set out to make dance music, it was more about just making something that people can really connect with when we’re back with our friends celebrating in one big room, sweaty club or overgrown field. I think the sound we created just naturally came out that way.”

Joe: “Yeah, I think what informed it a lot too was actually just the tools we had at our disposal, as in the synths and drum machines that were in the studio. Perhaps if there was only a few acoustic guitars and some banjos in there at the time, our sound may have come out completely different. However, we’re both really happy with how it ended up going - we’ve definitely created the resonating sound that we were after.”

Yeah definitely, it sounds like the perfect type of music to act as a release right now and also as a relief when we came out of lockdown. Are there any specific people who have influenced your sound or style?

Joe: “I think it all depends on what were listening to at the time of writing really When we first came out with stuff, I was listening to a lot of Caribou, which then naturally influenced our sound slightly. He inspired me a lot in terms of trying to say more with less - less lyrics but more meaning, which was something that was quite new to me at the time”

David: “Yeah, I think I’ve always really love that whole one line saying more kind of thing. I think people like The Blaze recently have started to make a name for themselves in the audio-visual space too. Then with our personal influences, I don’t really think there’s one specific person who’s influenced our sound or songwriting style; I think it’s more just about the people around us and our relationships across the past few years. The love, the grief, the friendships - it all subconsciously finds it’s way into naturally inspiring our songwriting.”

Moving on the the visual side of things, I was watching some of your incredible videos the other day and wanted to ask what made you go into making such creative elaborate visuals for your music?

David: “As a lot of young artists know, to make it nowadays you have to be all over TikTok everyday hoping that something goes viral and as much as we’d love to have our new projects blow up and lead to us playing huge shows, I don’t think we really have any interest at all in forcing it like that. If the reality of making it as a young artist today has to involve you being on an app, I’m really not too sure what that says about the music industry as a whole. Personally, I just don’t see how you can get the whole creative fulfilment from making music and content just for an app. I completely understand that there’s still art in people’s music but it just feels like they’re having to reduce it to fit in, if that makes sense?”

Joe: “Well, between the two of us, there’s more that twenty years of music industry experience and I think the overall grind of trying to make it big in this industry is stressful enough. I think that what we’re trying to say is that it’s important to step back and make sure that we’re always creating what we want to create, not adjusting our sound to fit in.”

David: “Yeah, definitely and the right people seem to be interested so far, which is good and more important than validation from an app.”

What’s been your best/most proud of moment so far in your music career to date?

Joe: “One of my favourite standout moments is actually from the summer just gone - we played at a festival called Another Love Story, it’s been running for a good few years now and it just felt like a right place right time moment; we were on at midnight on the Friday night. We played to about a thousand people, the majority of which had never seen us play before. Normally when we play live, we incorporate the visual side of things really well by playing behind this kind of transparent screen - its completely see through but it takes projection really well, allowing us to put on a full scale audio-visual show. Anyways, the festival itself unfortunately couldn’t really accommodate this so the visuals were more at the back… however, when we saw how well the music was connecting with everyone despite the visuals, it was a really rewarding and eye opening moment for us. It was definitely one of the most enjoyable moments of my career to date, knowing that people weren’t just being blown away by the cool visuals but instead, connecting with the music - it was really doing it’s thing.”

What are your plans for The Cope moving forwards, both short-term for 2024 and long-term in taking it to the heights it can go?

David: “Short-term, we really want to put a focus on the music. Our first album is coming out (8th December) the day after our huge headline show in Dublin on the 7th December. The album was mainly written in lockdown and it features all of our tracks to date. It’s very varied in terms of genre and we’re both very proud of it. For next year and moving forwards, now that we’ve established the world we want the music to live in, it’s more just about putting a focus on what music we want to put into that world next, then I think the rest will come naturally from that.”

Joe: “Yeah, the range of the album literally comes from how we were feeling when writing. It all came together and kind of feels like each individual track on there is representative of different nights out - some nights are good, some nights are awful, some are more celebratory and some are perhaps regretful. I think we’ve added that spectrum in there without making it too much of a clear overriding theme, which has worked really well in terms of giving it some sort of narrative.”