So I recently got the opportunity to work on some assignments for Chicago Innerview - including an interview with Hot Chip. It was a phoner, and I spoke with Al Doyle, the guitarist for both H.C and LCD Soundsystem. Pretty rad, right? I was pretty nervous and had to be all McGyver with my resources on account of my cell phone not being from the future - it could not record calls. So what'd I do instead? Videotaped a speaker phone. Hardcore. From there I transcribed every "umm, quite, and yeah, kinda's" out of our 18 minute conversation. Doyle was a complete gentleman and even admitted to internet stalking me prior to our call. My only regret is that I had to cut the convo down to 650 words from an original 2,000. Not sure when the final copy will run on the site, but for the handful of friends who are interested, I've included our entire conversation below. I apologize for the grammatical errors and type-o's, deciphering a thick British accent on a video camera isn't the easiest task while simultaneously typing. . .
Al Doyle may be LCD Soundsystem’s touring guitarist, but that’s just his part-time job. His fulltime gig as one fifth of the Grammy nominated electro-pop-dance party sensation Hot Chip is keeping him more than busy these days. On the recently released One Life Stand, Doyle recorded guitar, bass, cello, synthesizer and lastly, (but quite hardly least), the flugelhorn. Doyle was kind enough to chat with me to shed insight on his love for Twitter, new favorite acts and life on the road. Hot Chip will be playing at the Riviera Theater on April 19th with The XX.
Al opened up conversation with some internet stalking:
Are you Jodifer by any chance on Twitter? That’s so funny bc I was just talking about that and I did a little search on you here and then I started looking at your photo and its like, really creepy, this is the, oh yeah, this is the person I'm talking to, I’ve sort of been sporadically creeped out by twitter now.
(Me, totally caught off guard that he even knew my name, let alone looked me up, led into actual questions after confirming my virtual identity. . . )
“Dance” and “Party” are two very common descriptors when googling Hot Chip. Did you always envision your sound would revolve around the dance floor?
Oh yeah, over the last few years re-honing our skills on a dance act, especially at our live shows, have been very much oriented around that- slamming some sweaty dance party affars, I suppose I can give ppl a slightly skewed idea of what the music is really about, there are a lot of songs on the recordings that are a lot more low-key, kind of acoustic music, music that is influencd by American folk or, or English kinda acoustic music but you tend not to really crack those open during the live shows. We’ve tried sometimes but it never seems to really work because you cant repunctuate the atmosphere with one of those songs, I don’t know, maybe at some point later in our career when we’ve built up like decades of good will .
What’s your favorite part about being out on the road? What’s the most difficult part?
Well I mean the best part is doing the shows and making a lot of people very happy for a short amount of time if you can do that. Our shows have been going very well, we just enjoy playing live and we always have and the band is sounding really good. The worst part is the obvious thing of being away from your family or your wife, all that kind of stuff - being away from home, that sort of thing. It’s constantly disorientated and dislocated but you also kind of get used to it as well. You know, we didn’t do that many shows last year but before that we were on the road for like four or five years so we’re definitely very used to it. I’ve been playing with lcd soundsystem sometimes as well, it’s a major touring band and its just something you get used to.
If you had to spend an evening covering one artists’ material, who would it be? On the flipside, if you could choose any artist to cover your material, who would you pick?
If I had to cover somebody else, probably choose either Robert Wyatt or Brian Eno, Brian Eno - he’s quite a good one because you could do for all the different things he’s produced or collaborated on so that gives you quite a wide group/body of music to choose from. But to have somebody cover us – maybe, I don’t know, can it be a historical band? Well probably black Sabbath that would be quite good – something like the height of when they were, I don’t know before Sunday, bloody Sabbath.
What are some of your more memorable moments from being on the road? Any particular performances, fellow tour mates, cities or venues that particularly stand out, either fond or nightmareish?
Well we do like touring in America, its probably our fave place to do shows. I've been playing with them for many years, we’ve got a lot of fans particularly in New York and Roosevelt, so much support there. And Chicago, and the west coast too. Those shows are always great but we did one tour in the south, we’d never played before or played again since but we went down to North Carolina and Atlanta Georgia and went through a few small places there and those shows were amazing. really really good bc I don’t think there are many british bands that go to those sort of towns, those parts of the world you normally do New York and go up to Canada, back down to Chicago, across the other side so I think they quite appreciate when you go down there. I think its called the orange peel in Asheville, North Carolina? And that was just a really good show, and we’ve also had shows in South America there’s just like an amazing the best looking crowd you’ve ever seen in your entire life, all the amazing dancing and al this really good atmosphere.
We haven’t really had a bad show in awhile, it’s quite funny that you call today because we’re about to do this show in France and we just found out the venue only sold about a hundred tickets and it’s the venue, you could definitely fit 1500 people in here so we’re going to have to put a curtain half way down it, they’re hoping to get another 100 people but basically we’re playing to like 200 people and it’s going to feel a bit strange tonite. Get a band into the crowd or something, we can probably fit all 200 peole on the back of the stage or something I’m not sure what’s going to happen but we’ll find out.
You’ll be playing the Riviera in Chicago this April, when you’re here do you think you guys will have a chance to hang out in the city? Are there any particular eateries or forms of entertainment you seek out in each city or is it all rush in and out?
Yeah, WE’VE BEEN out and about in Chicago quite a few times we’ve had good seafood even though its pretty far from the coast. we always like to going to this guy Chris Ware, comic artist, graphic novelist, who’s a Chicago resident who’s quite famous kind of, comic book store which is fun to go to. I cant remember what its called, but im sure you’ll find it. I think Chicago is one of those towns where you can basically kind of walk around a little bit which is more of interest, so yeah we’ll get out and about in Chicago again.
You’ll have to try the deep dish pizza.
Yeah, we always have that there’s a guy on our team who’s family is from the Chicago and he’s got a couple places he calls on for deep dish from, I like it and we usually get it developed to the venue. I normally manage one slice and then feel totally defeated but some of the other boys like to try and plow their way through so we’ll be getting one of those for sure.
The internet has dramatically altered the way artists can reach an audience. With things like blogs/myspace/etc, what are your thoughts on the power of the internet in terms of helping (or hurting) your music?
Uh, well, I don’t know talk to the label. It hasn’t really affected our sort of earning powers so much although – its really hard to say. basically if we had been releasing music about ten years ago, we’d definitely have been making more music through record sales. There’s just no doubt about that, I would just def be happy to have more money, but having said that we’re not by any means doing badly like we’re all sort of earning enough money and totally happy. And we can afford to tour and you know, the whole thing’s rolling on but the label has def been quite badly affected by digital downloads and its been quite sad for us in some ways bc there’s people at the label we’ve been working with for quite a few years that we’ve realky had built relationships and a lot of them got fired or left before they got fired and it was just blows to people. And they would go in in the morning and not know if they were going to be leaving in the evening with their job. There’s nothing good to be said about that you know, that’s just a shitty situation and that’s the whole download side of thing but thinking apart from that as far as getting giving people access to music its clearly a good thing.
You’re able to get feedback immediately on everything that we do. There’s been a lot of times, I’ve been running this constant search on hot chip on twitter where you just kinda see people’s euphymisms, a lot of thimes they can be very personal about us , like what we look like or what they think our intentions are. and that kinda thing and you can just respond to them straight away and a lot of times they are quite surprised that you’ve responded at all and it just reminds people that we’re sort of normal human beings. if you say something about it essentially instead of saying it to our face, cuz obviously we’re gonna know about it so we sort of demand a little bit more of a kind of justification for anything that does get said and it brings the debate down to a more kind of a civilized level rather than just a slugging match. It feels as if as like though a conversation which I really like. im not interested in training people to they’re entitled to think whatever they think but its quite nice to not to be when someone says something and you post up your reply to kind of comment saying , I do quite like the way twitter works like that it seems a bit more civilized.
Are there any new artists you think our readers should be on the lookout for?
Well we just finished doing a UK tour with this Norwegian band called casiokids that not too many people know about in the states. I believe they’re being released on American label possibly called polyvinyl and we had a really great time with them and the music was excellent. There’s another artist that was just released that collaborated with the knife on this opera called tomorrow in a year and her name was Planningtorock and she’s going to have an album hopefully coming on on dfa some time this year with 4-5 songs produced by felix and quite possibly one produced by james and yeah its just really really good, she’s an amazing vocalist with really good pop songs and quite strange, very heavy kind of atmospheric styles, so im excited for that release.
What’s your personal favorite track from the new record?
Well it’s gotta be one life stand, (laughs), otherwise I def feel that that song was a keystone to the whole record and that’s why I think we wound up calling it that, you know. We all really sort of like that song, I also really like take it in, at the end, I mean I know its one of the strongest songs that Joe's ever written and I really like slush as well, to be honest, im not sure how people feel about that song but I have got a lot of time for it and I usually play my flugelhorn on that for the recordings and that was kind of fun for me.
