From Pleasant to Party: Cut Copy Live at Night At The Barracks
- Bernard Zuel
- Sep 16
- 3 min read

CUT COPY
Night At The Barracks, Manly, Sydney
September 12, 2025
MAYBE CUT COPY KNEW their audience and the location well. Maybe they knew it a little too well.
On a night that Sydney forgot it’s supposed to rain all the time – dry and mild and easy to take in, like one of the whites doing good business at the sponsored bars, next to the mounted car of another sponsor, which for anyone in the back third of The Barracks blocked the stage and screens showing ads for yet more sponsors – the four-piece electro-pop seemed perfectly positioned.
Coming on stage at 7.30 sharp and scheduled to be off by the 9pm curfew, before them was an audience bulking around the 35-45-year-old/parents-night-off demographic, in good mood with a light buzz on – only light, with seemingly no chemical enhancements, the air free of the scent of herbals, and even vapes not that common – knowing they’d be home in plenty of time for a good night’s sleep before Saturday morning activities.
Meeting the moment, from 2008’s Nobody Lost, Nobody Found to the brand-new Solid, from 2004’s Zap Zap to this year’s Still See Love, Cut Copy live offered a really pleasant, mid-level workout dance set: easy to move to, throw shapes to, without fearing sharp elbows or hectic sweat. There was a bit of French electro, a slice of handbag disco with a New Romantic sheen, guitarist Tim Hoey getting a little active on Mitchell Scott’s drum riser with a tambourine, and vocalist Dan Whitford enthusiastically if a little awkwardly, all long arms and legs, dancing.
While hardly thrilling, it was nice, even a little Wa Wa Nee, as the hour mark approached. And maybe it would have been enough, a little festival atmosphere and a little loosening of the hamstrings to remember when back at work on Monday. But when Time Stands Still found Ben Browning’s bass more prominent, it was as if somebody had given permission to loosen up, or someone remembered there could be more.

The new Gravity added fusion keyboards before the best breakdown, and build up, of the night so far as it segued into Out There On The Ice, a duo deserving of the strobing lights. Then Meet Me In A House Of Love, with its New Order synth stabs and solid footed underpinnings, moved into a pumping Hearts On Fire, and lordy we had a dance party of hands in the air, heads thrown back, even a few up-on-boyfriends shoulders turns. Where had this been all night?
Which made even crueller the shock of the power cutting out before the end of Hearts On Fire, the screens still showing mouth and hand movement but all sound absent. They were back after five minutes and Need You Now and Lights And Music did a pretty good job re-establishing the energy, but in doing so they served a clearer message: this body-active part of the show should have started a good 15 or even 30 minutes earlier in the set.
Playing it safe might have seemed sensible, like the audience, but sometimes you need to play to the senses not just the sensibility.
READ MORE
A version of this review ran originally in The Sydney Morning Herald
Comments