Music interview: Hot Chip at the O2 Academy Bristol

Thursday 28th January 2010

Steve Harnell eases into his slippers and sparks up a pipe with Hot Chip frontman Alexis Taylor and Al Doyle to discuss the band’s new ‘mature’ direction ahead of their latest UK tour

Growing up in dance music isn’t really the done thing. In a world where celebrating hedonistic good times on the dancefloor will always remain its key component, Grammy-nominated Londoners Hot Chip were faced with something of a challenge on their fourth studio album – how to reflect on their combined new lives of cosy domesticity.

If that doesn’t sound too appealing, fret not. While One Life Stand may be a little light on dancefloor-slaying club monsters, they’ve more than made up for it with a collection of finely-honed songs of tenderness and warmth – or “soulful pop” as frontman Alexis Taylor describes it.

“We wanted to keep everything quite pop and simple on this album,” he explains “we decided to keep some of the more experimental tracks we were recording for outside projects.”

Although Hot Chip’s trademark sound remains mostly in place, there’s a sense that One Life Stand marks something of a new direction for the quartet. How does Alexis think it fits in with the rest of their back catalogue?

“We don’t tend to really think about the last album we’ve done when we’re making a new one,” he says. “It’s only when we go on tour that we look back and see how they all fit together.

“As we’re rehearsing now for the tour, I was listening to Made In The Dark a week ago and it struck me as sounding very different to what we’re doing now, almost tiny sounding and that everything was in miniature.

“Some of the songwriting for the new record was started when we were touring the last one, but we’ve very much started this new album from scratch. Usually, we record in quite a fragmented way but this time we had no touring commitments and it allowed us to really focus.

“Last time out we made a really sprawling-sounding album, but this time it’s a lot more coherent.”

Alexis disagrees with me though when I tell him that Hot Chip’s new album is pretty laid back.

“Well, there’s only really one slow one on the album. I would say though that it’s much less brash than what we’ve done before.”

Exhibit 1 is Slush, a plaintive piano-led ballad which features a tender vocal from Mr Taylor.

“I wrote the words and we recorded it very quickly. I needed to give it a title on the computer and came up with Slush – it does sound rather slushy, after all – and we never got around to renaming it!

“With it bordering on being grandiose, I thought it would be good to undercut it a little bit.”

Another striking feature of the new album is the use of steel drums courtesy of Trinidadian veteran Fimber Bravo. It sounds as if they’ve been warped with some studio trickery...

“We haven’t really done much with them to be honest, but Fimber plays along with us on synthesizers and the combination sounds really unusual. Over the last two years, the idea of working steel drums into our music became something of an obsession. I liked the fact that it is quite a specific sound and it hasn’t really escaped from its carnival connotations. We wanted to use it in a whole new way.”

And if any more proof was needed that Hot Chip have gone all “new man” on us, then the punning title track surely gives the game away.

“It’s a nice idea, isn’t it?” adds Al Doyle who joined the band in 2003, shortly before the release of their debut album Coming On Strong, “but it’s also the truth of our situation. Alexis is married now and he had a little girl last year.

“That’s where he is in his life now, so it wouldn’t make sense writing songs about going out partying and having models lying around.

“A lot of people have been saying really nice things about the title, but when we were deciding what it would be, we couldn’t choose. We settled on that, but we all thought it was a weak pun, really, and were apprehensive about using it. Now we feel totally vindicated because people seem to like it.”

Despite the tweaks, you couldn’t mistake the sound of One Life Stand for any other band.

Recorded in the studio beneath Doyle’s flat in East London, all the core elements are there – low-key beats, the odd sample, Alexis’s distinctive, almost thin-sounding vocal and generous nods to the bands’ wide-ranging influences; Prince, Will Oldham, mid-Seventies Fleetwood Mac and Motown.

Hot Chip’s instrumentation is also key to their sound. As well as the usual line-up of guitars, bass and drums, analogue electronic instruments and a weird array of old keyboards and synthesizers also play an important part in their Eighties-tinged sound.

“The more I’ve thought about it, the more Eighties I think this record is,” says Al.

“It’s always been like that, but this is looking toward the more soulful music of the Eighties and part of a longer tradition that includes the house music that was coming out of Detroit then.

“It’s definitely more that end of soul, rather than the Hall And Oates-end,” he says, smiling.

“As well as that, there’s Sixties Stax and Motown sounds in there, too. That’s the bulk of it, and there are some influences from now in there as well.

“I love the fact our songs aren’t loops. All of our songs can be broken down and you could play them on a guitar. I think the lyrics and the melodies stop the songs being throwaway dance tunes,” he explains.

“This album in particular has got a real melancholia to it, and while the songs are overtly Europop in places, the lyrics attached to it are quite dark, and there’s a majesty that comes from that.

“It stops them sounding like some Bulgarian Eurovision entry, anyway.”

Hot Chip play the O2 Academy Bristol on Tuesday, February 10. Tickets are priced £17.88 and available by ringing 0844 477 2000.