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Aside from keyboardist Keiran Mayhem (who, legend has it, was recruited because "he owned a really good keyboard and we wanted to use it"), the members of Team Cooper were selected less by ability and more by social deviances. Tom was the shadowy backroom, mastermind; Ben the f**k-you-cool smoldering front-god with the exotic past (born in Tokyo, schooled at the same Swiss college as The Strokes); guitarist Dan ?Fischer' Fischer the quarter-Afghan, son-of-a-circus-performer tortured poet who wrote a religious rock opera called "Armageddon City" when he was seventeen (best line: "The boy who fell from the sky just to look for his intergalactic mother"); and drummer Jon Harper the whispering heart-throb with a big yellow van covered in bubbles, a man so sweet he was surely in Travis in a former life. Oh, and did we mention Didz? Oh, come on, you know about Didz. Chances are he's already jumped on your back and tried to ride you like a racehorse while you were trying to watch The Futureheads. Yup, that was Didz.
For eighteen months, after the debut album 'See This Through And Leave', they gigged, drank and stage-dived themselves delirious: Europe, Japan, Australia, Wigan, Oblivion. Some days they'd play three festivals in three different countries, all in 24 hours and all of them riots. And when the road ran out in September 2002, they barely paused for crumpets before they hit their newly refurbished Studio Of Swine and cracked the cap on album number two. What else could they do? They'd smashed in the headlights, torched the roadmap. There was nowhere to go but up. See http://www.coopertempleclause.co.uk/ for more details.
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