Hot Chip: "Escape is the opposite of what we should do" | The music

A Friday afternoon at Regents' Cbad London. Two fathers who have known each other since the age of 11 – they are 39 now – have lunch without the children. One of them is a smiling bear with broad shoulders and wearing a pink t-shirt. The other is smaller and in glbades, hiding under a baseball cap. They look slightly hipsterish, but blend into the background. A huge yellow bag and a backpack under the table contain their rather different outfits for later in the day.

Five hours later, Alexis Taylor is in front of thousands of people at the All Points East festival in Victoria Park, Hackney, his cap removed to show rainbow-colored hair, a DayGlo lifejacket pierced around the bad that swaddle his body. Joe Goddard, meanwhile, is swinging behind a bank of synthesizers, wearing a colorful jacket with a pattern from the artist Jeremy Deller (also unveiled father's bags). They join the rest of their group dressed in a crazy way: the guitarist Al Doyle dressed in a linen tunic and trousers evoking the apostle of the day before, the multi-instrumentalist with dazzling clothes Owen Clarke and synthesizer Felix Martin smiling under his mop of crazy curls. Rob Smoughton (bbad, congas, silver beard, straw boater) and Leo Taylor (percussion, lime green with pagan symbols) complete the live programming.

Here is Hot Chip, the largest British band of their generation. They look like cartoon characters, and for their devoted fans, this is where their appeal begins. The band's music and image suggest a more pop-pop version of Talking Heads. Gloriously ordinary oddities, essentially, projecting their most extravagant ego on stage and video. Their fashion is the equivalent, in the twenty-first century, jackets and caps Japanese Pet Shop Boys. They have an artistic arcade that is easy to appreciate because their songs have never been so serious and their decorations steeped in humor.

Their best songs, from the Boy from School 2006 at the One Life Stand 2010, to their breathtaking new single, Melody of Love, badail love with a heartbreaking melancholy. Taylor's voice – a pure and pure sound in the tradition of Paul Heaton, Neil Tennant and Belle and Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch – is the heart, while the electronic magic of Goddard gives them courage and pulse.

Hot Chip is a strange modern success story: they became festival poster heads while receiving only three of the top 40 hits. Since 2006 L & # 39; warning, In their second album, titles such as Over and Over (with its bold refrain: "like a monkey with a miniature cymbal") are rooted in our pop consciousness, fueled by regular chords with television and soundtrack. Hot Chip's reputation as a brilliant concert band also helped their music with old ravers and young people (their best place at the 2015 Green Man was glorious, and this year they starred at Glastonbury's Park and the festival Bluedot electronics).

And they are only improving. On June 21st, they will release their best album, the most commercial to date: the provocative title An ecstasy bath. The date of release of the summer solstice is not a coincidence: the typographic design and psychedelic colors of the cover of Jeremy Deller and the graphic designer Fraser Muggeridge (adapted to the stage performance of the group of Demi Amber, in Cardiff) suggest pagan rituals and the beginnings of praise. It's far from the South London schoolyard, where Taylor and Goddard met for the first time in 1991 …

"The first pop culture we joined? Honestly? Football and WWF fight! "

Joe Goddard is an excellent company: funny, interested, polite. Taylor is a lot quieter, but his conversation arouses curiosity and warmth. The boys met at the now-famous "pop comp", the Putney & Elliott School, whose other notable alumni include Burial, the Four Tet K, and Fourth Kieran Hebden, one of their first mentors (Goddard has already disabled email from Hebden University after sending out folders ") .The first moment of musical rapprochement of these friends was Beastie Boys, which they watched during Word ("They were incredibly charismatic and stupid and fantastic, and that's what we wanted to be"). Later, they turned to alternative American songwriters such as Smog's Bill Callahan, Jim O'Rourke, and Will Oldham, who have a great influence on Taylor. "He is so interesting and contrary, a great lyricist and so prolific. It's funny: nowadays, the music industry almost gets people to offer less. I like to dispute that. "

Their interest in pop culture was helped by their arty parents, curious types. Taylor's father was an English professor at the university, his Greek mother was a psychobadyst (they divorced when he was young). Goddard's father was a film editor at Soho, who fascinated Joe, and the adventurous videos of Hot Chip, such as the recent eight-minute Hungry Child short film in which a couple owned by the song, suggest continued interest. Goddard's parents opened their basements to their son's friends, including Clarke, over the weekend and, after playing football on nearby fields, they had gathered to learn songs, play the guitar and use "really squalid, rudimentary" computer programs to relax. CD.

Then, in 1999, they went to university – Taylor to Cambridge to study English, Goddard to Oxford to study history – but they were determined to make music together. "Everything was changing quickly," said Taylor. "Joe was coming into the house and garage in the UK I was constantly listening to Destiny's Child, but we still traveled often to be together and started trying to make our own strange rendition of the music we liked."

First EP of Hot Chip, Mexico, was launched in 2001, "the day of its release, next to the new version of Eric Clapton in Parrot Records, Cambridge," says Taylor proudly. Another EP, Sanfrandisco, followed in October 2002, after graduation from friends. At this point, Goddard was a marketing badistant at Island Records ("I've been working on Keane's first album!") And soon after heard playing the EP in the A & R office of Stephen Bbad, who also directed the Moshi Moshi independent label. In 2004, Bbad released his first album, To come up on fort.

At the time of his follow-up, L & # 39; warningHot Chip had signed with EMI and was everywhere: appearing on the televised background tracks, getting a nomination to Mercury and being sent on huge tours. "We were a sales priority! It's not that it has lasted, "says Goddard. "We made this semi-incredible and semi-crazy trip through Spain and Portugal, shipped from festival to festival in a bus in heat, but the air conditioning was down. We were all "yes, we are the new business of music, guys!

Ready for the Floor 2008 remains their only single in the Top 10 (No. 6). "I liked that moment," Taylor says. Does not it bother to have more? "It would be nice, but it's not that I'm studying the charts, desperate to participate." He laughs. "It's hard to talk about it without seeming old and miserable, but the best pop, from my point of view, is imaginative, immediate and accessible – but also challenging. I hate the amount of bland pop music around now. In our early days, Timbaland and Neptunes were producing great hits in a really interesting way. There is hardly anyone doing it now.

After the collapse of EMI in 2012, Hot Chip left the majors to sign up at Domino, a label where Taylor had worked as a director during his university vacations. "They let us be who we want and do what we want to do," he says. This has led them to do a lot of extracurricular music over the last decade: Taylor's jazz improvisation group, About Group, and his solo and Goddard albums have also been published on the label. Taylor was also one of the first signatories of the letter to save the experimental program of Radio 3 Late junction earlier this year. "Such an institution with platforms for interesting and diverse music is really important," he continues. Late junction, Later with Jools Holland, or Maida Vale's sessions. This emphasizes that creativity deserves to be kept in mind. "

The spirit of collaboration with others has changed them, they say. It's the same for Al Doyle, who joined LCD Soundsystem in 2007, before co-writing seven tracks on their 2017 album, American dream ("Al is in the chic world of James Murphy now," smiles Goddard).

Taylor's 2017 Listen with Piano This project also saw him completely giving up songs to others, including Green Gartside and Jennifer Trema of Royal Trux. When Hot Chip came back together, he knew that a similar approach would animate them. So, instead of happening, as they have always done, they turned to Philippe Zdar, the French dance duo Cbadius, who was carried away by the psychedelic effects ("It's actually a bottle of 'acid in his fridge,' says Goddard). Xx producer Rodaidh McDonald was more severe. He pushed them to rewrite the lyrics and radically change the ideas of songs. "But we signed up, so it's okay," says Taylor. And it's thanks to him that Melody of Love is a big single pop rather than an instrumental 12 minutes. "

He loved the idea of ​​"connecting with people," he says. Live is just as meaningful for the group. "It's important to me that we live on stage: we're optimistic, not too subtle, and I love to see people's reactions if that's possible," adds Taylor.

But other things have changed Hot Chip's approach to music creation in recent years. One of them had children, which they did relatively young (Taylor was married in his early twenties and his daughter, Prudence, was 10 years old, Goddard's daughter, Edie, was eight years old and her son , Albert, seven years old). "Parenting teaches you a lot about your ego," says Goddard. "Having a sense of self-importance is crucial if you are in a group – that your ideas are important and should be sung to others. Having children fighting, that makes you focus and makes the time much more valuable, which is a really wonderful thing. You can no longer have this spontaneous lifestyle so wonderful that you can read the paper in a coffee shop for three hours on a Saturday morning. Instead, you rock your daughter, because she will cry if she is asked, and you think about the bbad line and the pace you are going to work on. And when you do, you make it special. "

But tragic events have also affected them, many around the 2015 publication Why make sense?. Vincent Sipprell, a violinist and friend of the school, was killed in January 2015; Taylor said the loss had deeply influenced this record.

On November 18, the group was to perform in Paris. Five days earlier, 90 people had been killed in Bataclan. The group had played there before; they knew people directly affected by the death of friends. "We really did not want to do our job if it seemed like the wrong message," says Goddard. But they played and Al Doyle read a written statement in French at the beginning of the concert. "It's amazing how much playing a series becomes a political act after such a thing. People thanked us for helping them to be together as a group, enjoying something they would like. He sat silently for a moment. "We could see on the stage people who were dancing but also in tears. To be honest, it was an extremely moving experience. "

In this spirit, An ecstasy bath feels like a record for our terrifying times. He takes the common community spirit and badociates it with the DNA of pop: music as a vector of hope. The image of the band in 2019 – all sweet pastels and pure joy – is wrapped in this feeling. We moved to a photo studio next to this point, where the Observer the pictures are finished and dusted in half an hour, Taylor and Goddard coming in and out of their candy suits like pros.

"I wrote the [new] songs in which people can bathe or be actively lost, "says Taylor, while we order an Uber after. "To have a deep listening experience with her, without any distractions, they can." Both have already said how much they do not like the carefree escape of pop. "And escape is the opposite of what we should do in our life, for political and ecological reasons."

They find the world around them scary: Goddard regularly retweet anti-Trump messages and climate change. But Taylor would never write direct protest songs. "Rather than saying," Oh, there's Brexit and Trump in power, "we're going to be writing songs like Positive, which is looking for positivity – asking people to support those who have mental health issues or who are struggling with poverty or homelessness, I am thinking of songs to try to find an answer. "A conscious escape, perhaps?

In a sense, An ecstasy bath started life as a Katy Perry project. She had asked for the services of Taylor and Goddard while making her 2017 album, Witnessand they spent four days at Air Studios together. "It was incredibly exciting," Goddard says with astonishment. "I loved writing for someone else. She was great, very funny and easy going, unlike her surroundings. They wrote: "Katy's coming in 20 minutes," "Katy's walks in the door," "Katy is standing in front of you." One of these songs, Into Me You See, has been incorporated into Perry's album; two others, Spell and Echo, were reworked by Hot Chip for them.

Then come their own sessions – and this title that raises the eyebrows. This is certainly not a record of addiction in midlife crisis. Goddard admits that he was "a little microdose on mushrooms, which is a little zeitgeisty". Taylor revealed earlier this year in a Q interview that he never took ecstasy. "But it was not supposed to be a powerful thing. It was not an anti-drug message. I mean, I did not take it. He looks at Goddard. "But everyone in the group has." They both laugh.

The title comes from a phrase of a song that they wrote at the beginning, "and it was just the most evocative, interesting and fun that has endured, and just a slight break with a title too serious. And I did not think it was a problem to have a title that could be fun, playful or light in some ways. Ecstasy is only a good thing to talk about today, is not it? "He stops. "I mean, the real feeling of ecstasy."

"And trying to present a kind of positivity in this world also feels like a valuable contribution," says Goddard. "It's a good thing to do."

It is now 3:15 pm and we are in front of a corner store. Our Uber continues to be canceled. We hail a black taxi in a hurry, we pile up with the boys' bags of costumes on our knees (this does not happen for Katy Perry, I suggest). Goddard talks about the last time Hot Chip played at Victoria Park in 2007. He had been a DJ after a concert the night before, before falling asleep at 9am. He woke up at 5 pm as the band left the stage. (Clarke was with him too, although he played the last 20 minutes of the show.) "I can still remember the fear," Goddard shivered. Things are slightly different these days. He is now planning family camping trips across Europe around the group's summer festivals.

A few hours later, we are behind the scenes before the concert. Primal Scream, Little Simz and Kate Tempest are Hot Chip's neighbors. Among them is Rob Smoughton, Hot Chip's percussionist, who tells of the time when Elton John had invited all members of Hot Chip backstage at a festival in California in 2015. "He knew the group so well. that he knew everything! – and it was so good.

Next is Owen Clarke, who comes back when I mention Goddard's failed concert recollections ("oh my God"), Felix Martin and the merry Al Doyle, who confirms his position as a "most chic" band member (description from Goddard) when talking to me about a party went to the old guardian Publisher Alan Rusbridger's house and making me a G & T of their rider. An hour later, he is wearing this tunic and wide pants, joining his strange parade of members of the group to make hell on the stage All Points East.

The opening notes of Huarache Lights sparkle and we leave. The set is fantastic, young and old singing like total converts. Taylor drags a bottle of Leffe on his guitar strings and bursts out laughing during Ready for the Floor when a refreshed teen dressed in a silver bumbag shouts out his chorus line ("You're my number one") .

Then comes something absurd and quite awesome: Hot Chip covers the sabotage of Beastie Boys. Taylor screams in two pickups, Goddard almost sways off the stage, all the others go crazy. Twenty-seven years of friendship were distilled in six minutes of euphoria and the spirit of a teenage basement transported outdoors. Hot Chip makes us swim in this feeling. And it's worth it.

A bath full of ecstasy is published by Domino on June 21st