Mickey Cooper

Hello, I’m Mickey. I’m going to write this in the first person because nothing makes me feel more physically ill than writing my own bio in the third person and pretending someone else is writing it, which I admit to have sadly done in years gone by while traipsing around in bands such as Kilns and RAT!Hammock. So here I go. Speaking of “I go”, I go by the name Mickey Cooper even though my real name is Michael Cooper, but Michael Cooper is not only a very boring name for a singer/songwriter, it’s also a terrible name in terms of search engine optimisation. Google Michael Cooper and you will either come across an 80’s hip hop artist, an unheralded yet key member of the ‘Showtime’ era Los Angeles Lakers, or the guy who took the Sgt. Pepper’s cover photograph. What you will not find is a Naarm-based singer/songwriter who likes country music and punk rock and writes infuriating, tangential biographies in the first person. With Michael being the number one most popular boys name of my birth year of 1990, Year of The Horse, I often tell my parents they should have really committed to the lazy, suburban sprawl aesthetic of it all and named me Boy. And now with Cooper rocketing further up the baby name charts year after year, it’s getting to the point where I might as well just be called Boy Boy. Actually come to think of it, Boy Boy is a much better artist name than Mickey Cooper, but I’ve already committed to a Bandcamp URL, and I wouldn’t want Boy Boy to come across as some sort of endorsement of the gender binary. Before I stop talking about the name thing, I’d also like to pre-emptively point out that a) yes, I know the name Mickey is not suitable for a full-grown adult person and b) instantly conjures images of a certain mascot of capitalism masquerading in the form of a cartoon mouse, but here I am. Speaking of “I am”, I am writing this first person bio as support material for the release of my new album ‘Hi Horse’, which is a collection of 12 songs that I recorded at home during the time when we weren’t allowed to go outside (iykyk), to keep me busy while I was waiting for my health insurance to level up so that I could have back surgery (iykyk). The title is a reference to a beautiful chestnut horse that I hallucinated in the recovery room while heavily sedated immediately after said surgery. I’ve only just now while writing this realised the link between the horse I hallucinated in the hospital and the being born in 1990, Year of the Horse, and there being 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac as well as 12 songs on my new album ‘Hi Horse’. I’m not entirely sure what to do with that realisation, as it’s genuinely happening in real time and making me reevaluate what I intended most of the songs on the album to mean. I guess all I can say is that if you’re still reading this, firstly thankyou so much and secondly that probably means there’s a better chance you might like some of the songs on ‘Hi Horse’, which is out in November through Heart of the Rat Records.