The Cooper Temple Clause (1998-2007) were an indie rock band from Wokingham, United Kingdom.

Using a farmhouse turned into a studio on the outskirts of their hometown, it took almost two years to record their debut album ‘See This Through And Leave’. An intense rock record, unafraid of challenging listeners and genres, it ignored scenes and fashion.

By the release of second album ‘Kick Up The Fire, Let The Flames Break Loose’ in 2003 - again recorded reclusively in Reading and with the minimum of record company interference, Team Cooper had become an army capable of breaking into the Top Twenty without the need for crossover radio support or heavy rotation videos. Gigs were riotous devotionals. They played one triumphant US headline tour and a second set of arena dates in support of The Cure.

Then 2004 saw a shake-up at RCA leaving TCTC without an A&R man and with a new, unfamiliar set of faces and ears in charge who hadn’t grown up with, and therefore didn’t quite ‘get’, their isolationist methods and slash and burn musical direction. So, as the ‘Kick Up The Fire…’ campaign wound to a close there began a period of uncertainty and miscommunication between band and label. The Coopers once more holed up in their Reading pig farm to record demos for third album ‘Make This Your Own’ with long-term producer Dan Austin. After 12 uncertain months, eventually RCA re-signed the band and sent TCTC into the studio with ex-Adam and the Ants man Chris Hughes at the desk. He encouraged the band to return to their roots, when all six would swap instruments for each song and also share singing duties.

“Ben has always been the front man and that’s how it is,” says Dan Fisher, “But not many bands have three guys who can sing and have very different voices and Chris said we’d be stupid not to use it. Ben’s voice is a good old rock voice, Tom’s got the dulcet Barry White tones and I sing like a girl, and it works, hopefully.”
“It just made sense,” Ben adds. “Especially the songs where these guys sang it with a lot better intensity and better than me singing it.”

As could be expected, the record they made is fabulously unexpected. Opening in familiar dancefloor rock territory with the anti-music industry rant ‘Damage’, it soon swerves into unmapped musical sectors often utterly unrecognisable as a Cooper Temple Clause record. There’s radio-friendly emo pop (mostly Fisher-sung songs ‘What Have You Gone And Done’ and ‘Waiting Game’), soulful Dears-gone-Erasure tunes (mostly Tom-sung tracks ‘Connect’ and ‘Isn’t It Strange’), Lilac Time cool folk (‘Take Comfort’), laptop blip-rock (‘Once More With Feeling’) and dark 80s krautonica (‘Head’) on here, and all of it as concise and melodic as you’d never have imagined TCTC to be capable of.

‘Make This Your Own’ is a courageous leap out of the post-punk safety net and into a commercial Nu Coopers realm. So, inevitably, RCA didn’t get it, and all this while TCTC were still reeling from the unexpected departure of bassist, new dad and mental crowd-surfing nutjob Didz Hammond to join Carl Barât’s new band Dirty Pretty Things.

“It’s all very amicable,” says Fisher. “I guess he just felt it was something he had to do. It was a difficult time. At first we were worried about losing the onstage chaos that Didz brought to the band but there’s nothing you can do about it, you can’t hire in a madman. We lost Didz’s big personality and I guess it changed our whole attitude. We were gonna have to apply ourselves a lot more thoughtfully and be far more professional about the way we went about things. There’s a real strength now in the way we play that wasn’t there before. There’s a real punch and a power to it and a directness that wasn’t there before.”

“A brother has left the family home, but will never leave the family” read TCTC’s official website, and like all the strongest families, those left behind pulled ever closer as a result. They restructured as a five-piece and, determined not to be dragged under by extraneous circumstances, set out on a tour of back-to-basics club gigs to air their new direction. Their fanbase, after two years with no new material, were enthusiastic for an internet-only release of ‘Damage’. Some months later the band were signed to Sanctuary Records.

However, the band announced they would be going their separate ways on 24th April 2007.

Tom Bellamy - Guitar, Bass, Synthesizer, Keyboard, Trumpet, Programming, Samples, Melodica, Harmonica, Percussion, Toy Piano, Bow, Decks, FX/Beats, Vocals & Lyrics.
Daniel Fisher - Guitar, Bass, Vocals & Lyrics.
Ben Gautrey - Guitar, Bass, Keyboards & Vocals.
Jon Harper - Drums, Gretsch Drums, DW Snares, Sabian Cymbals, Percussion & Backing vocals.
Kieran Mahon - Keyboard, Piano, Synthesizer, Organ, Hammond Organ, Farfisa, Guitar, Bass & Backing vocals.
Didz Hammond - Bass, Synthesizer, Samples, Vocoder, Guitar & Vocals. (Left 2005)