Interview: Hot Chip

Chatting with two members of Hot Chip, Student Direct can reveal that the creators are quite like the created – quirky, intelligent and individual.
The lucky two are Al Doyle (guitar, synths and percussion) and Owen Clarke (guitar and synths). At the start of a UK tour, Al states how there are a few surprises on stage, such as when Owen gives him “the wrong cowbell. You don’t know until you hit it.” What about things to keep them occupied off stage? “We play a game with coins,” Owen remarks, “today we were racing an American five cents piece with a UK five pence piece.” They put two coins on a table in their tour bus, and see which one vibrates to the other side first. The winner today was “The Queen”. More activities include staring at a particular coin and taking an hour to fill out the immigration form on flights to America, taking care not to tick the box that says you were a member of the Nazi party. As Owen puts it, “a stroke of a pen and you’re incarcerated”.

It is becoming apparent that Hot Chip are no ordinary band. Some of their influences are ordinary, such as Bruce Springsteen and Prince. The Beatles are also mentioned, but interestingly enough Al doesn’t own a single Beatles recording of any kind. But there is much more diversity in their musical influences than these big names, and Al attributes this fact to the diversity in their latest album, Made In The Dark. “We are quite an unusual set of people in the sense that we’re very happy to listen to instrumental music, older styles of music like folk and blues and country, but we also listen to a lot of techno, modern dance music and R&B. So I suppose it is not surprising people don’t necessarily accept the album as a whole, but the strong songs on there are incredibly strong.”

This is something Al lingers on for a while – reviews of Made In The Dark. He is slightly confused with some contradictions, for example a song that some reviewers have chosen as the album’s best song others say it is the album’s worst. He continues: “For me it’s more about the quality of the review. I don’t care if they say something good or bad; if it’s actually well written and they understand what we’re doing then I’m much more interested. Most of the reviews are just pretty poorly written, under-researched drivel.”

Hot Chip are no stranger to the odd rumour, the most recent being associated with Kylie Minogue. Owen however was quick to comment about the rumour that ‘Ready For The Floor’ was written for Kylie: “We’d like to scotch that. Scotch it like an egg.” Rumours take quite easily to Hot Chip, not least because they do nothing about them. As Al puts it, they just embellish them for a while. “In any other field of journalism if you have a news story, you call and you either confirm or deny it. But in music journalism it doesn’t work like that. It’s just rumour. We do it all the time, we just say stuff and they go ‘oh right that’s interesting’ and then write it down – then it’s in print.” Owen then proclaims: “I’m going to kill everyone I meet.” Hot Chip and the killing spree – you heard it here in Student Direct first!

The truth was that Kylie Minogue’s people did approach them, but due to scheduling problems nothing came of it. As a result of Hot Chip’s lack of action regarding certain allegations, Al himself has been named and called an “outright liar” by the website Drowned in Sound, and regarding the Kylie Minogue rumour, he states: “The strange thing is that it wasn’t us that created that rumour at all, it was the NME, as it nearly always is.” Al lets us onto some rumours they did create – mainly about himself.  “They’ve [other band members] told people my favourite band is Primal Scream. And that I grew up in a household that didn’t have any music and I used to go round to other people’s houses and play their instruments and be really excited by it.” And that he is from Switzerland, and the first time Owen met Al was at Glastonbury and he had long hair and was totally naked, covered in mud.

Proof, if proof be need be, that Hot Chip are just about the weirdest group of people around. With their unusual and unpredictable music seeming to echo their lives, Hot Chip are a special group trundling their way to the top honestly, with genuine amusement and excitement. Actually, I’m not totally sure about that honesty…