Losers take it all

Sarah Stead • Published 29 Jan 2010 14:00 0 Comments

Ex-Cooper Temple Clause guitarist Tom Bellamy was in town last week, rehearsing ahead of the Losers gig on Saturday. SARAH STEAD met him...

NEVER let it be said that Reading's music scene is fractured.

This weekend, local musicians, borrowed tracks and collaborations pepper an exciting night of live music at The Oakford. First up are local plug socket-breaking electronic duo MidiMidis.

They are opening for the band who remixed their track Nemesis for their debut single's B side: Losers, made up of Tom Bellamy, former guitarist with Reading's much-missed Cooper Temple Clause, a drummer he met in the After Dark and legendary XFM DJ Eddy Temple-Morris.

Finally, Temple-Morris will be Djing himself. Got all that? Good. Because it'll be a night to remember.

"When you play live, that's when it all comes together," Tom Bellamy told me. I snatched a few minutes with him while he was rehearsing at the Reading town centre Plug n Play studios last Friday.

All blond hair and cheek bones, he folded his tall frame into an executive chair while I admired his knitwear.

Friendly, funny and unbelievably down to earth, he began with: "I used to be in a band called Cooper Temple Clause" - gosh, really? - "When we were going I always found people would jump at the chance to pick at you and pull holes in what you were doing.

"But now I've worked with so many Reading bands, it's the complete opposite. I'd be the first to help some local band out, like at the moment I'm producing Pure Reason Revolution. It's nice there's a scene here."

Bellamy's background is guitar music but it was his mixes of Cooper Temple Clause tracks that were the catalyst for this project.

His work with Losers began with reworkings of the calibre that Temple-Morris's XFM show The Remix became famous for, but has grown into much more.

"I started doing remixes of Cooper Temple Clause just for fun and because I was bored, and then Eddy found one of my remixes and phoned me up straight away. We really get on and he really likes my production, and he'd been talking to this Belgian band Goose about a remix.

"We started doing that and really enjoyed it and he was like, 'Do you want to make an album?'

"It's all original stuff but with a lot of collaborations. We've done a Jane's Addiction cover with Brian Molko on lead vocal which is pretty awesome.

That's turned out really well." Prodigy asked Losers to remix Take Me To The Hospital for them ("we jumped up in the air and did a high five") but the fish to be fried aren't always quite so huge.

Reworkings of Reading acts Does It Offend You, Yeah? and Dan Le Sac also appear on the band's Myspace (www.myspace.com/losersuk)

"I get asked by a lot of unsigned bands if I'd like to do a remix. With MidiMidis it was because Marcus was pestering me in the Purple Turtle! Eddy really got on board with MidiMidis once I did the Nemesis remix.

"We get Marcus along to our live shows to do just that one song at the end - he really incites the crowd!"

Losers have played only around 10 gigs so far, but early indications are that they are doing all the right things.

"The gig before this was Bug Jam Festival and the place went mental," said Bellamy.

"That was the first time since leaving the Cooper Temple Clause I thought, 'This could work. 'Til then I was just Djing, you don't get the same buzz."

Their music was constructed in a studio and the hard thing, said Bellamy, was working out how to do it live.

"To start with we didn't know what we wanted to do but we've got a drummer, who I met in the After Dark, and I do guitar and Eddy's bass," he told me.

"We've got a programme called Ableton, you can put things into it and do things live. We can all play around with it on stage.

"People at the start don't know what to think because when you see a laptop on stage you assume the worst. I do, anyway.

"But I'm quite confident that by the end everyone will be buzzing. You can have a beer and a dance and everything's wonderful.

"It all comes together."

Monkey Suit presents Eddy Temple Morris DJing at The Oakford Social Club, Blagrave Street, Reading on Saturday with support from Losers and MidiMidis, as well as Plundercats DJs, DJs Sweet & Rennie and DJ Mark Is Egg.

Free before 9pm, £2-4 afterwards.

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This article appeared in Reading Chronicle 28 Jan 10

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