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Copy Haho - Bred For Skills & Magic EP

Copy Haho release their excellent debut EP 'Bred For Skills & Magic' in a week or so's time (23rd February). Singer and guitarist Joe Hearty talks us through it.

Posted 13th February 2009, 7:38pm in Track by Track
Copy Haho Copy Haho release their excellent debut EP 'Bred For Skills & Magic' (check out the artwork over thataway >, download the first track here) in a week or so's time (23rd February). Singer and guitarist Joe Hearty talks us through it.

'Pulling Push Ups'
A bit of a stab at the idea of being in a successful rock band really, fairly self explanatory. The first version of this song was constructed in garageband and sounded a bit like the Animal Hospital theme. Lyrically, it's quite sarcastic - I liked the idea of coupling a pop hook with really anti-pop lyrics, and using big fat cliches, like the line 'hey, hey, baby'. I don't want for it to sound like we detest pop music, or the music industry as a whole, because that's certainly not the case - i just thought it might be fun to write something that reflected that retarded anti-everything ethos that some people seem to adopt.

'This Retro Decade'
The words for this song were written while I was working at a publishing company in Aberdeen designing adverts for chip shops and terrible nightclubs. The second verse explores this theme a little more than the first - the 'living to work'/'working to live' line came from a discussion about our incredibly weird, work obsessed, manager. He would arrive at around 7am and leave at 10pm every single day. I guess it's about settling for something comfortable because it's easy to, rather than chancing a swing and a miss at something a little more ambitious.

'Cutting Out The Bad
This song is a re-recording of the b-side on the 'You Are My Coal Mine' single we did in October last year. I had always imagined the chorus having strings in it, so put some parts together a couple of weeks before we went in to record with Ross at Chime. I'd imagined them far grander and Disney-like, but we ended up only recording the cello parts, so it sounds a little more subtle (for better or worse).

'Bad Blood'
Rikki's brother referred this song as the EPs 'ballad' - which I can kind of understand, more withdrawn musically than the other songs and lyrically a bit depressing i suppose. The middle section, where the rhodes comes in, sounds a bit like Neil Young if he'd used the leslie-speaker guitar pedal we put mini's guitar through. We used a soft sample version of The Mellotron for the beginning and the end - as soon as we'd finished recording I looked into buying one, but unfortunately they're really, really expensive! The only other thing i can remember thinking while recording this song was 'woah, it's so slow' - there's something about writing and playing slow songs that really scares me.

'The Last Dash'
I'd thought that, even before this song was finished, it would probably end up being the last track on the EP. Every other song on had been demoed once before, this one however was pretty much a shot in the dark. To be honest, we hadn't really played it through too many times before going into Chime, so I think we're pretty happy with how it turned out. The middle break with the drum swells and startreck-like chord progression probably stems from my former obsession with Tall Firs (see the song 'So Messed Up'). It's not something we'd ever tried before, but I'd always liked the way their drummer fizzes around his kit, so Rikki gave it a go. Also, there's something in the strings and casio flutes that remind me of Blur... well... kind of.

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