Two Door Cinema Club: Now Recruiting

Posted 20th Nov 2009 in Interviews, Two Door Cinema Club | Written by Martin Davies | 0 comments
Two Door Cinema Club Irish electro pop rockers, Two Door Cinema Club, are one of the most exciting young bands to come out of the Emerald Isle of late. Their punchy single ‘I Can Talk’ is released this month on the 23rd and promises much of their much-anticipated debut album. We sat down with bassist, Kev, to talk about his band’s three performances at Glastonbury, their hatred for their first tour van and his thoughts on music piracy.

I just heard your next single ‘I Can Talk,’ I love the intro, it reminds me a little of The Futureheads' cover of Kate Bush’s ‘Hounds of Love.’ Where do you take inspiration from for your music?

I dunno… We’ve been in bands before and written songs before and kind of taken a little too much influence from other bands and it never really worked out for us. We started to get a little bit of success when we started just… we just sat down and said 'fuck it, let’s stop trying to sound like something. Let’s just write a song and if it works it works.' Y’know? No boundaries of what it can sound like, then we just wrote the songs that we wanted to write and it came naturally to us. So influence wise? I don’t really know… I think it’s more like the bands that we love, between us, like Death Cab For Cutie and a lot of electro stuff. All of our songs are very different. ‘I Can Talk’ is a bit more of a darker song than our last single and some of the other songs on our album; but again, we just write the songs that we want to write, there’s no benchmark for what it has to be like. I think that’s a good way of doing it. If you go in with a clear mind when you write the song… it’s not gonna sound like this… it’s not gonna sound like that… we just have no idea. A lot of the time we think it sounds good at first and then it sounds shit in the end. It works… sometimes.

You played Glastonbury for the first time this year, playing three different stages across the weekend. Had you gone to the festival before as paying punters?

No, we’d obviously… we grew up in Ireland so we didn’t really make it over to Glastonbury; obviously we knew about it because it’s such a famous festival. I think it’s one of those things as a band… I don’t think we had a definite sit down together as a band and said it was our dream to play Glastonbury; but I think it’s one of the stepping-stones in the highlights of your musical career if you can play there, and play to a couple of people as well. We were just really thankful that they had us there and they allowed us to play three times. Once would have been enough - that would have fulfilled it for us, but the opportunity to play three times at three different places to three different sets of people was phenomenal really. We had such great reactions – the first day we played it was good but it wasn’t brilliant. As it went on and we played for Radio 1 was really good, and then the last gig on the last day was just brilliant. We could see people that had been at the first gig come along again to see us, it went really well. It’s good because I think it can go really badly, well, not badly, you can end up seeing a lot of bands you wanna see but just not be playing to anyone yourself. But we were very lucky and very thankful that we got to play to some people there; hopefully making a few more fans.

I know that for your Glastonbury performance both Zane Lowe and Jo Whiley got your band name wrong. Have you forgiven them yet?

They did, they got our name wrong. That was quite annoying because when you’re at the festival, and y’know, when you’re there with your phone you get messages about three days later because there is just not a hope of getting any calls or any messages when they’re supposed to come. That day, we played the Radio 1 thing and they showed some footage of the show on BBC One that night, and all out friends and our family, we didn’t know it was happening and no one knew it was happening and it just came on. People were just texting us, letting us know that it had been on, but we got that a day later. Saying that they’d called us two doors down. We actually saw Zane Lowe that day, the day after it, but we didn’t know that he’d called us that; we could have had some words.

I heard your song on Jo Whiley’s show the other day, I suppose she is forgiven now?

Yeah we had a midday playing on Jo Wiley which we were really really happy about. We get excited every single time we the song on the radio, or when someone tells us ‘cause we don ‘t get a chance to listen to the radio very much. Well, when we’re on the road we listen to ipod, but it’s great when your friends text you and say “I was just at a McDonalds and your song came on,” it’s cool. We don’t care whether it’s midday on Jo Whiley or one in the morning with someone else, y’know? Anything is great for us, we just hope that other people get to hear it.

I suppose it’s great to get DJs like Steve Lamacq, Jo Whiley and Zane Lowe behind you.

Yeah, Steve Lamacq’s been on it from the start. He’s really really helped us. We probably wouldn’t be as far along as we are at the minute if it wasn’t for Steve Lamacq. He recommended us for the Radio 1 show at Glastonbury and I think he gave us our first Radio 1 show as well. We did a session for him, so he’s been really good to us, it’s really good that Zane is getting behind us now too, and Jo Whiley, so we’re really really chuffed about that. It’s just obviously really nice when someone else appreciated what you’re doing y’know? Whether it’s Zane Lowe or your punter on the street at the gig, we don’t really care as long as someone likes us then we’re doing something right.

I know that you toured with Iglu & Hartly a while ago now.

Umm… yeah… we don’t really talk about that very much.

I read on your blog from that time that you were touring in a little battered van, eating Tesco value tortilla chips and chocolate. What’s touring like now? Have you changed?

Um… Not really. It’s not a case of we loved it so much then that we go back to it now - It’s still a case of needing to. Obviously when you get going for a bit longer then the money starts to get a bit better at the shows. But we just spend the money on now bringing a tour manager and a sound engineer. So you don’t really get a chance to spend much money on yourself, which is a good thing – every single bit of money goes into the band. Touring with Iglu & Hartly was a lot of fun. It was our first tour in the UK actually. We’d only played inside of Ireland at the time, then that came up and we jumped at the chance to play to some new people, y’know? We had a lot of fun along the way, they’re pretty crazy guys.

In that same blog entry you said that you had CDs and T-Shirts stolen at one of your shows.

That was in Belfast actually, probably about a year ago now. We went up on stage to play a live show in Belfast, left our t-shirts in a box by the door, underneath the table thinking that everyone was very gentlemanly and wouldn’t take them. But obviously we thought wrong, we had quite a few t-shirts nicked. The easiest thing about the night was that we knew we hadn’t sold any t-shirts yet, so basically anyone who was there who we didn’t know as a fan or one of our mates wearing it, we knew they had stolen one. Conversations, with hammered people who were trying to explain that they had bought it from the bar, were pretty funny.

What are your views on music piracy?

I don’t know, I think a lot of people get a bit annoyed about it. We kinda just see it as, at the end of the day it’s always gonna be there and there’s no point getting yourself upset about it. Obviously it costs us a lot of money to record our music, put it out there and hope that people will buy it so that we can keep going as a band. But thanks to things like iTunes, piracy is coming down, which is great. I think that people are starting to establish more of a love for music again. I think there was a period of a couple of years there where people just thought that they deserved to have it for free, but I think that people are starting to appreciate it more. Especially when you can see, for example: In Rainbows by Radiohead, where you can set your own price for people to buy it at – people were buying it for twenty quid or more for the love of their music. It’s obviously not very nice to know that people are getting their hands on your music and stealing it, it is stealing from you, y’know? We have seen some of our stuff up on torrent sites and stuff like that. We’re not two-faced about it. We make a point of not doing it ourselves. I think you’ve got to be above that, it’s not fair. People have put their heart and soul into it. It’s bad, but it’s always gonna be there, you’ve just got to deal with it and get over it and move on. It’s not gonna go away, and all these people bitching about it is only making it worse; it just makes you sound like a dick. Let’s just get on with it, people are still coming to gigs, so let’s concentrate on that for a while.

Looking at the success of your fellow Irishman, John and Edward on X-Factor – What kind of impact do you feel reality TV is having on the next breed of musicians?

Well, I don’t want the X-Factor. We don’t even have a TV in our house; we don’t get much time to watch TV. I’ve only seen things on YouTube about them. But, you’ve gotta support the fellow Irishman, y’know? I think reality TV is… I think if you want to be some kind of solo, sell 20 million records artist, then fair play to you; I think it’s a lot harder for those kinds of people to get into that circuit of playing gigs. It’s easier for bands to get up on stage and play a gig rather than a solo artist – if it’s just a girl singing, or whatever. But, for bands, I think one of the worst things you can do as a band is to be in a battle of the bands, you don’t want it to define you and people that haven’t done that don’t really respect you and there is a lack of respect for people like that. I think everyone wants to get out there and get some shows and if you’ve got the talent and the determination then it’s gonna happen for you, either way. We believe a lot of things happen for a reason – so if you’re supposed to be on X-Factor and win it and sell 20 million records then fair play to you but we wouldn’t do it. But we’re not gonna judge people who have a different view over what’s right and different opinions.

You played your first gig a little over two years ago and next month you will be playing a gig in Japan. What do you think got you noticed so quickly?

It’s hard for us to see it as being so quick because we just see it as step by step by step. It wasn’t like we jumped two years ahead in time and now we’re in Japan. I don’t now what it was, we did our own thing. When we started out we had two songs, we recorded two of our first demos and we figured a lot of people put stuff on MySpace and don’t let people download it so we just said 'screw it, let’s do something else, let’s put it up and let people download it.' It worked for us, we managed to get some gigs in Belfast and we played there a lot. We didn’t do too much, we’d try to do one or two gigs a month and then we’d take a break for writing. We just wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and played and played and played really. Then we released our own EP, we didn’t bother pursuing any Indie labels, or bother making up a name for our own band label, we just thought we’d leave it blank. We didn’t even bother putting a copyright symbol on it, we just thought we’d put it out their on a CD and sell it. So we did an EP launch and nearly sold out a big venue in Belfast, which we were really really humbled and overwhelmed by. We just also, with the medium of MySpace, people could listen to our tracks and people started to enjoy it and we got a bit of interest from industry over in London. We started meeting people and playing shows and we thought it was important to be out there and do some UK shows; so we did that between September and last December. We just did that and things just built up and built up and built up. We secured management pretty early… from then on we just did our own thing really. Like I said, it’s kind of gone in small steps, so it hasn’t really been any big jumps and touring at the start wasn’t very glamorous at all. We had the shittiest three-seater van in the world – at one point the wheel fell off as we were driving down the dual-carriageway. Ironically, taking it to the mechanic the wheel flew off and we had to get it towed to the scrap yard and we started again. This was when we were sitting in our shitty travel lodge hotel room in our boxers eating value tortilla chips and chocolate, y’know? It wasn’t even a loving goodbye, it was a 'get the fuck out of my life you piece of shit, you really are just scrap metal.' We watched the Death Cab For Cutie documentary a while ago, and they were talking about being in a tour bus and things, and how they missed touring around in their little van, and we were just thinking 'no mate, not at all.' It’s fine to look back on, there were some funny times, but I would never want to go back to touring in that wee van anyway, not that we have a big step up at the minute – it’s just literally the same kind of thing with more seats in it.

Is the album complete? Or are you still working on it?

We’ve finished it. We finished it in August, we did a couple of single mixes in September, so, it’s all done now, ready to go, we’re just doing artwork and things like that. Releasing singles, releasing videos, doing promos y’know? We’re just building it.

Are you feeling nervous about its release?

I think you can’t really not be nervous about your first album release. We just have absolutely no idea, or expectations of how it is going to go. But again, we try not to think about that too much, just concentrate on what we’re doing - we’re doing the shows, we’re releasing singles. We’re not too worried if people buy it or whatever, at the end of the day we’re going to put it out anyway and it’s a testament to what we’ve been doing for the last few years. We kinda see it as a bit like our CV for the next year until we have the next one out. We see it as the summing up of what we’ve been working for since we started the band, but obviously we’re nervous. We obviously want people to love it, but at the end of the day, if it doesn’t do well and it flops or whatever then so be it – we did what we wanted to do and I don’t think anyone can look down on us for that because we did what we wanted to do. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

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