Alexis Taylor – songwriter/producer/singer
Hot Chip was just a duo in the beginning. Joe [Goddard] and I met at Elliott School in Putney in 1991, when I was 11, and bonded over making music. We performed covers – Pavement, the Velvet Underground – at school and started writing and recording our own songs on Joe’s 4-track tape recorder. We listened to alt-country artists, such as Will Oldham and Smog, and to dance music, R&B and pop from the US, productions by the Neptunes and Timbaland and tried to make something of our own that was a weird hybrid.
When we finished university, we carried on making music. In the evenings, I’d go to Joe’s parents’ house in Fulham. We recorded our first album, Coming on Strong, which came out in 2004 on Moshi Moshi, in Joe’s bedroom, using a computer, Cubase, a couple of keyboards, guitars and bongos. Over and Over was a song we were working on for our second album The Warning. We felt pressure because we’d signed to EMI, a major label.
Joe had moved into a converted church in Camden with Felix [Martin] and they had a big open-plan living room. We used the same equipment we had for Coming on Strong – quite limited. I had a cheap pink Encore guitar that never stayed in tune. But we made do, because we were excited by making music. When you’re reaching for something at the beginning and don’t know “the rules”, you experiment and have fun.
I didn’t have any words for Over and Over written in advance. Joe had the percussion loop of the song. Felix played the distorted bass line. We were jamming and my words were a response to the groove. Joy in Repetition is a Prince song so I borrowed the phrase. I’m singing about the “joy in repetition” I could sense Joe was feeling in making minimal, repetitive dance music – which was fairly new to us – and I was saying, “I’m really with you when that joy is in you.”
At the time, I was frustrated that whatever we tried to do, it sounded gentle. Jo Whiley played one of our songs on the radio and said, “With chilled out, laid-back beats, it’s Hot Chip.” I thought, “No, we don’t want to sound chilled out and laid-back!” so the line in the song, “Laid-back, we’ll give you laid-back” was a tongue-in-cheek way of saying, “Here’s something a bit tougher.”
We played Over and Over live for a year before it was released and it always went down well with crowds. It was a life-changing song. It didn’t do well in terms of chart positions but it always got a reaction. The NME made it Single of the Year in 2006 – we felt validated. We were definitely lifted up by its success – we were recognised by people and taken more seriously. People understood what we were trying to do.
Joe Goddard – songwriter/producer/singer
We were incredibly happy with our first album, but the response in the press was that we were weird white funksters making a bizarre bedroom version of R&B. We were determined to step things up into something more powerful.
After living with my dad in Fulham, I was super-excited to move into an amazing new place with Felix, next to the Lord Stanley pub on Camden Park Road. The landlord said “This place will be perfect for band rehearsals – look at all this space.” But after five minutes of the first rehearsal, we got a phone call from an Australian lady who lived upstairs, who had just had a baby, so that kiboshed that idea.
I set my desktop computer up in a corner and that’s where I started making the music for Over and Over. I don’t think my partner, Celia, and Felix’s partner, Louise, were very happy about me constantly sitting there making what I thought were “banging beats”. It was our kitchen, sitting room and where our telly was.
I was obsessed with LCD Soundsystem and ESG – that stuff was the starting point for Over and Over. The bassline’s rhythm was directly taken from Dance by ESG.
We used to go to the Early Learning Centre to buy percussion instruments, like a kids’ xylophone that cost a fiver, and a kids’ set of silver cymbals, which we used as the main hi-hat on Over and Over. We used whatever was at our fingertips. Because Alexis worked at [independent record label] Domino, we’d been allowed to do a remix of Franz Ferdinand’s Take Me Out – I nicked the kick-drum sound and put it in the track.
Alexis often walks in and writes words quickly over an instrumental I’ve made. He responds to the energy in the room. He wrote the lyrics in a day. I couldn’t understand his obsession with Prince to begin with, though – I just thought of Prince as a strange, sex-obsessed dwarf.
We were mega-excited about the song. I played it at a DJ set in London, and I saw ears pricking up and people moving. I had a sense of “Oh my God, we’ve done something we can be proud of.” We played support tours for Mylo, Goldfrapp and some big bands, and Over and Over was always our biggest song. It’s still a set highlight.
In terms of home recording, we were ahead of the curve. It was seen as strange to make pop, R&B, or hip-hop-influenced music from a home computer. But that’s become the norm now. As a young musician, you think you need the seal of approval of going into a professional studio. But doing something that’s unique and a real expression of who you are is by far the most important thing in creating music. You use whatever equipment you have in an imaginative way and express yourself. That’s essential to keep hold of.
Hot Chip headline the Kaleidoscope festival at Alexandra Palace in London on 15 July. Tickets are £67.95, with concessions for children
