the making of the warning by hot chip - featuring alexis taylor and joe goddard

Intro:
Dan Nordheim: You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim. 

Hot Chip officially formed in the year 2000 by Joe Goddard and Alexis Taylor. The two of them had met years ago in secondary school in southwest London and began working on music together. While studying at different universities, they continued to collaborate and started releasing their music. One of their releases caught the attention of Moshi Moshi Records who signed them to a deal. Their debut album, Coming on Strong, was released in 2004. Around this time, they added other band members, including Owen Clarke, Al Doyle, and Felix Martin. For their second album, they signed a deal with EMI Records. The Warning was eventually released in 2006. 

In this episode, for the 20th anniversary, Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard reflect on how the album came together. This is the making of The Warning. 

Alexis Taylor:  My name's Alexis Taylor, and I'm talking about the Hot Chip album, The Warning, which came out 20 years ago in 2006. I think of The Warning as definitely something of a high point. I don't go back and listen to it all of the time now, but I think that we really connected with a lot of people through that music, and it was something of a breakthrough record for us. And yeah, I just feel like it is definitely an important stage in our career. There are other highlights, there are other things that I remember on other records, but without The Warning happening in that way, and without us being given the freedom we were given to make that record, and without us putting a bit of pressure on ourselves to make something better than the first album that would really follow it well, I don't think we would be where we are today.

Joe Goddard: Hi, you're listening to Joe Goddard from Hot Chip. Within Hot Chip, I'm a kind of producer, and I do a little bit of singing as well. I mean, Alexis and I became friends very soon after we joined, this secondary school, Elliott School, in Putney in southwest London. So we became friends at the age of 12 or around then, and initially our friendship was, you know, we ate our packed lunch together, ate our sandwiches at lunchtime, and played football together. Realized that we were both into kinda WWF wrestling and, you know, very much like young teenage boy stuff. But Alexis was already a music obsessive, and I was as well. 

Alexis Taylor:  We played football together, and we talked about bands quite a lot and listened to music together. I would go around to Joe's house after school and listen to The Best of Leonard Cohen on a cassette. I remember he had that, and also Neil Young After the Gold Rush, we would listen to together with his brother, Jazz. And then I also remember that we talked about contemporary bands. He would read the NME newspaper, and I would as well, and we also loved a lot of the same things as each other and went to see just loads of gigs. And we were talking about music all of the time. We were studying at that school, but we were, as friends, it was all about going to gigs together and just, like, learning about music and being inspired by other bands. 

Joe Goddard: Alexis already had his enormous passion for, for Prince and New Order and Jamiroquai and these, these type of things, Neil Young, some singer-songwriter stuff. And I was very passionate about kind of, you know, grunge rock records and hip hop records. I was really, really obsessed with New York hip hop in the early '90s when we began to know each other and went to school together. So I was listening to a lot of De La Soul and Beastie Boys and A Tribe Called Quest and these kind of things, which were also very important records for Alexis. And my family house in Fulham had like a cellar, a basement where we were allowed to kind of hang out where there was a TV and, you know, a games console, and we had an acoustic guitar. And we would hang out down there kind of all the time, um, from the age of like 14 or 15, and play music to each other, play songs on the acoustic guitar. And that developed into us writing songs together when we were maybe 15 years old. 

Alexis Taylor:  At some point, Joe bought a 4-track tape recorder, or got one maybe as a present, and he started to record on there, and he asked me if I'd like to bring some of my songs over and, and he could record them. So essentially, he would act like a producer, you know, in a very kind of rudimentary way. I mean, I don't mean in terms of lack of skill, but I mean, he was new to doing that, and he was up for doing it. That was something he wanted to do. So he recorded my songs that were written on an acoustic guitar, and Joe helped me record these songs, and then from there, we started to actually trade song ideas, or he would have a song and record it himself on his 4-track with a guitar and a vocal, and I would record another song. And we started to make a kind of project together called Hot Chip when we were still at school And I'd say those early days showed an influence from lo-fi American music and Americana, Smog, Palace Brothers, Pavement, things like that. But also we were going towards, even though it's very different music, we were heading towards dance music as well because we were listening to, I'd always liked Aphex Twin around this time, but none of that had come into the music initially. But gradually Photek, Aphex Twin, and some hip hop and some pop and R&B from America started to be, and garage, UK garage, started to be an influence on what we were doing and what we were trying to do. And we never really sounded much like any of those influences, but we did take those influences on board, and so it was a real mix of all of these different sounds and influences, and very much our own songwriting styles and our voices, I'd say. 

Basically a project that had been me and Joe and Owen from school gradually over time morphed into having Felix join and then Al join as well. But there were also other band members along the way. So the lineup kept changing, but the lineup was changing kind of in support of me and Joe doing the project. But by the time we all left the different universities we were at, we started to make Coming On Strong, and that was recorded again in Joe's family home in Joe's bedroom. So that record was made as a duo, and it was released by Moshi Moshi. But as soon as we finished making it, we really did become the five-person band Hot Chip with Al Doyle, Felix Martin, Owen Clarke, and myself and Joe Goddard. 

Joe Goddard: Mostly those recording sessions would be myself and Alexis, but the other band members, Owen had been our friend since the age of 12 as well, and he would often hang out with us and join in with recording and help us out doing the artwork for our early releases. And then once Al Doyle and Felix Martin joined the band, they would occasionally come and hang out with us and record with us as well. There'd be times when all five of us would be kind of trying to rehearse or record in my tiny bedroom while I was staying at home with my parents. So yeah, everyone was involved to a certain extent, but often the recording sessions would be myself and Alexis, and Alexis would write some chords and record them with me, or I might write some chords or a bassline and some drums, and we'd begin a song in that way. And those songs would kind of develop with both of us writing words and music in a kinda piecemeal, intuitive kind of way. The songs just kind of developed quite chaotically and would be kind of arranged and rearranged. And I'd been developing, like, a kind of home recording way of making music since about the age of 15 or so, that began with, like, using a 4-track tape recorder, and then a computer with Cubase. Maybe by, like, the age of 14 or 15 I began to use that. And we didn't have, like, a massive kind of sonic palette. We had a small number of inexpensive keyboards and percussion and things. But we kind of enjoyed those limitations. We enjoyed the kind of almost, like, the simple sounds that we got from these Casio keyboards and these kind of inexpensive instruments and just tried to kinda make the best of those, tried to be as creative as we could with them. 

Alexis Taylor:  But we made The Warning in a new home that Felix and Joe moved into together, that was a converted church turned into a flat with one very large living space in it. And that's where we set up all of the gear to start work on what would be the follow-up to Coming On Strong. And mostly it was me and Felix and Joe working on that music, and sometimes Al and Owen were part of it, but it wasn't completely the five of us just yet on the recordings. So I think there was, some of the music we were making that was like a drum machine and a synth, but I was singing kind of folky songs over it, and we decided not to go down that route so much. And then we decided maybe our sound was more to do with disco as an influence and hip hop as an influence, and Aphex Twin drum beats as an influence. So it was helpful for us to try lots of things out and figure out what really feels like a unified sound. But that took us a while to get there. 

Joe Goddard: I think making Coming On Strong, I had not so much fallen in love with house music up until that point. As a younger teenager, my interests lay much more towards kind of indie music and hip hop and jungle and drum and bass, and I hadn't really found my passion for kind of house music. That really awakened around the time of making The Warning, and so a track like “Boy from School” really kind of shows at that moment I'm kind of becoming much more inspired by that kind of music, which coincided with the kind of punk funk or electroclash, like genres kind of emerging and becoming kind of hyped and popular in London. There was, you know, “House of Jealous Lovers” was coming out on DFA, and records by bands like ESG were being reissued. So I was starting to understand and learn about New York left field club music in the early eighties, like Arthur Russell and ESG and Liquid Liquid, starting to understand a little bit more about DFA and where, where their taste came from. We heard from DFA Records that they were interested in some of these new demos. They'd heard a demo of “Over and Over” and a demo of “Boy from School,” and Jonathan Galkin, who was running DFA Records, reached out to us. I think Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy had, Jonathan Galkin had played them our music, and they were kind of interested in what we were doing. And so we went to record with them at their studio in Manhattan, and we worked with the DFA guys for like a week or two in New York and didn't end up signing to DFA. But then around the same period as well, LCD was signed by Parlophone Records, and that led to us developing our relationship with Parlophone as well. So we were all working full-time as well during this period. Alexis was working at Domino Records, writing press releases. Felix was running the Warp Records online shop, the WarpMart, and sometimes Al and I went in and worked for Felix, packing records and t-shirts and sending them off around the country. And I did work experience and then got a job at Island Records as well. So we were all kind of trying to get our foot in the door in the music industry, you know, in different ways. Yeah, a lot going on, and Alexis and I were kind of feverishly writing songs. 

“Careful” 

Alexis Taylor:  With “Careful,” when I heard the start of the track, it was so just quite crazy sounding, quite frenetic and busy and unusual, and it sounded kind of clattering and exciting and odd, and I really responded to that. So Owen and Joe and I were thinking about commands that you get to be careful, like, "Don't touch that. Don't stand there. Warning. Don't cross this line." You know, these kind of safety warnings, and we wanted to incorporate that into the song. 

Joe Goddard: I began making some kind of drums and rhythms for the song. That was maybe the starting point, and I was trying to make something that was much more, like, abrasive and frenetic than things that we normally made. I guess I was trying to move our Hot Chip kind of sound forward a little bit, make it a little more bold and a little bit more aggressive in terms of the rhythms. You know, again, like, this was at a moment when there were some pretty incredible, quite, minimal, but aggressive, like garage kind of rhythms and grime kind of rhythms coming through. You had a producer like Wiley from Roll Deep and So Solid Crew making records, that were quite, you know, jerky and funky and bassy and, yeah, just very inspiring rhythmically. So I guess kind of taking inspiration from stuff like that, I sampled, like, a kick drum from the beginning of a Paul McCartney, like, B-side. It's like a kick drum from a live version of a track. I don't remember which track, but it's from a Paul McCartney 7-inch that I found somewhere. It's just one kick drum. But yeah, took a bunch of drums from kind of various other places and just tried to put them together into something that felt more kind of energetic than something that we normally do. And then Alexis came up with all of the concept of this kind of “careful,” all of those lyrics and those ideas.

Alexis Taylor:  But also an ex-girlfriend of mine had met somebody new, and they were having a baby, and she told me that, and I was really pleased for them, and I wanted to wish them well, but also wish them, like, great care and to look after themselves. And I knew that that person had had some quite difficult times. So I was sort of wishing for a kind of smooth life ahead, and that's what that song was about.

“And I Was a Boy from School”

Alexis Taylor: I don't remember the exact order we made everything in, but I do remember that “Boy from School” was started in Joe's old home in his dad's house. I wrote that song in Joe's brother's bedroom on my own in a very, you know, short amount of time, a few minutes, on this Casio MT-70 keyboard just using one of the preset organ sounds and using a preset drumbeat. And I'd been listening to Robert Wyatt, I'd probably been listening to Robert Wyatt that day in the office at Domino, and my song sounded quite like a plaintive, hymnal, sad, sustained chords ballad, and I wrote it and then brought it into the other room that me and Joe usually worked in, and I said, "Joe, I've just written this song. Could we try recording it?" So we recorded it just like that, and Joe saw some potential in it to be actually repurposed as a disco track or a house tempo track, and so we set about making that.

Joe Goddard: I mean, "Boy from School," I have a much clearer memory of the creation of that song. It's very much kind of imprinted on my mind because it was a very kind of quick and really kind of fantastic recording session. It began life at my father's house in Fulham, where my brother, who's a great friend of Alexis, lived as well. So Alexis went across to my brother's room, and he began writing a song about, you know, referencing all of our friends and relatives that he knew at school, referencing, like, real friends and real people. And this song was kind of a quite a gentle ballad in, like, a 3/4 waltz time, and he brought the keyboard back to me in my bedroom and played me the beginnings of this song, and I thought it was a really fantastic song, a great idea. He'd already written the words for the chorus. But I suggested that we, instead of it being a gentle kind of waltz time ballad, that we change it to, like, a 4/4 beat and try it as a kind of disco record. 

Alexis Taylor: We built it up layer by layer. I had this Vox electric piano that does the kind of “da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da” riff on it. So I played that, and Joe immediately processed that sound and gave it a kind of auto-phase or auto-wah kind of sound. He did backing vocals that layered up with my vocals, and then he wrote this bridge, the “I got lost, I got lost” section. So it was between my demo and Joe's new bits of writing that, and then the two of us building up every layer, playing the bassline, you know, by hand and trying to approximate a kind of uptempo euphoric disco tune.

Joe Goddard: I was really, really enjoying, like, stuff like that at the time, whether it's like a, you know, these early DFA records or Arthur Russell records, and I liked the idea of a kind of left field disco track, and I thought that the chorus that Alexis had written would work well in that kind of format. So Alexis was up for this idea of, like, reformatting, reimagining his song. And so we spent the next couple of hours, like, putting together the elements of the track. Alexis recorded, like a bassline and a little kind of riff on this Casio keyboard. And I made a drum beat, I think using, sampling some drums from a couple of DFA productions. Like, I think I took the kick drum from the DFA remix of Le Tigre, “Deceptacon,” which was a great track from around that time that we'd been hearing in the clubs when we went out. I really loved that remix, and I thought the kick drum sounded great, so I took that. And interestingly, I remember speaking to Tim Goldsworthy about that afterwards, and him telling me that he had taken that kick drum from Loose Joints, “Is It All Over My Face.” So there's a great kind of like lineage to the sound in that song.

Alexis Taylor: That was very key, that song. And I always forget, you know, it has lap steel on it as well. We played this lap steel that neither of us knew how to play, but I just had a go. And Joe did all of those nice layers of vocals, and we both sang to try and make it rich and like a Beach Boys kind of song. 

Joe Goddard: And we put together a kind of basic demo of the song in the next couple of hours that night. It didn't really change that much from that moment. I worked a little more on the kind of engineering and the production of the song, and I added some vocal layers and harmonies and things like that. But essentially, we kind of got a lot of it done in a very short space of time. And yeah, I think everyone else in the band kind of eventually kind of added components to the song and, and gave their thoughts on it. But a lot of the work was done quite quickly.

Alexis Taylor: “And I Was a Boy from School,” that kind of long title starting midway through a sentence. I think that came from how much I listened to a Vincent Gallo soundtrack around that time, and it had a song called “And a Colored Sky Colored Grey.” So I think that at some unconscious level put in my head the idea of "and something” being the title of the song. And maybe it felt like if you start in the middle with a sentence, it suggests to you that it's about a fragmented experience. So it's like a nostalgic look back on a time at school. Now, I suppose not everybody tries to boil down their school time into just two verses and two choruses and a bridge. But for me, the kind of approach, it sounds so different to me now when I hear it, but the kind of approach in Robert Wyatt's mid-'80s records, like the album Old Rottenhat, was this sustained organ and high register vocal, and it's very haunting and very beautiful and very plaintive and very sort of minimal and simple and, and it really affected me so much more than any other Robert Wyatt music. It was that Old Rottenhat album that I loved. So I think I was trying to see what would happen if I just let myself sing about childhood experiences or school days experiences, the ones that first came to mind. And I was put in mind of that era at school because I went from Joe's bedroom where we were recording into his brother's bedroom, and Joe's brother wasn't in the room. It was just a, you know, the room was empty, and I went in there to be on my own with my thoughts. And I think I was provoked by being in that room to thinking about being at school with Joe and Owen and with Joe's brother, Jazz, and just remembering those days. But I sang about, in four lines, I was trying to summarize those school days. So there's me at school, “helplessly helping all the rules,” basically toeing the line, not being, like, at all stepping out of line. And then there was Joe “wrestling all his fools,” meaning he had, like, a wrestling match with me once, which was quite funny. I felt like a fool for being in a wrestling match with Joe. And there was a girl at school, “blending all the words she'd learnt (or stole) from home.” I think I felt like somebody I knew at school had grown up very quickly and had become very mature and had to take on a lot of adult responsibilities perhaps earlier than lots of people did through some family circumstances. And I felt like she didn't have any choice in that. That was my perspective on it. “We tried, but we didn’t have long,” was about going out with that girl and really feeling very connected to her, having a big crush on her, but it not lasting very long at all, and then that staying with me for a long time as a sort of, you know, unrequited love feeling. And those are kind of first experiences when you're young. So “we tried, but we didn't have long, we tried, but we didn't belong,” was a way of encapsulating that feeling of trying to be somewhere and connect with somebody else, but it just not, it's not meant to be. And because I don't state in the song explicitly this is about something of a school days romance, I think it allows the song to have more of an open-ended feel, and it could be about any number of things where people tried something but it didn't work, or they, they don't belong in a certain situation. So there's a sense of longing, and that's kind of what that song is about really. 

Joe Goddard: It's had a fantastic life, and all of these, the usages of the song on The Simpsons and in various other kinda contexts, are very kind of pleasing, obviously for us. I guess it's kind of a little oblique. It's not entirely clear exactly Alexis's meaning in, in all of his lyrics, but it has, a universal kind of quality to it and a mournfulness that really resonates with a lot of people.

Alexis Taylor: I think that people can relate to that song because it's evocative to talk about your memories and the nostalgia for school days or simpler times. And also it's like a kind of crude and raw, simplistic, compressed summation of a time in people's lives. So I think there's a lot to connect with there, and I think that it's even not that helpful to explain it in too direct a way because I think the magic of any music that actually works is that people connect with it, and they don't have to know what the specifics were, you know? So I know I've just given all those specifics, but those specifics may not be the full truth of those songs. We can gain things from them, but we can also lose our own interpretation too much sometimes. 

Joe Goddard: You know, it's one of the songs that we very rarely, like, drop from our live show, and we have, we've played it in many different kind of forms over the years in the show, and it's one that we still enjoy to kind of play. I think Alexis's chords and melodies in the song work just particularly well. Yeah, I'm very grateful for the song and the life that it's had. In terms of why that song in particular, it has been kind of singled out by a lot of people, there's a kind of alchemy to good songs, isn't there, that, that is quite difficult to kind of pinpoint sometimes. So yeah, I wouldn't claim to know exactly why that song over so many others is, is so popular, but yeah, it definitely has a kind of magic and elusive kind of quality to it.

This technique that we used of Alexis singing kind of more falsetto and me singing in a lower register, because we'd been kind of singing together, you know, since we were maybe like 14 years old, I guess we kind of had a lot of practice of kind of just doing that singing and harmonizing together and in the earliest days, we would be singing like Beatles songs or Velvet Underground songs or, you know, a lot of different kind of classic records by other artists. And our voices, I guess we realized that, that they kind of naturally, in terms of the tone of our voices, just kind of worked quite well together. And yeah, we'd already played a bunch of live shows, whether it was in the early days just in kind of local pubs or in our school or around the time, time of making this album, we began to kind of go on tour a little bit more properly and support other artists and tour around the country. And so yeah, we would have been developing these kind of methods of singing together for quite a while by this point. And it's just something that we'd kind of arrived at and realized that that worked, and yeah, something that we have done on kind of like countless numbers of our songs.

“Colours” 

Alexis Taylor: Most of us in the band went to see Kraftwerk play a late night gig at the Brixton Academy. I think it was like a 11:00 PM or 12:00 midnight start to the show or something. And it was really nice to go out on this evening, out with Felix and me and Al. I don't know if Joe and Owen were definitely at that show, but we saw them later. We went with friends, and the visuals in combination with the music in that Kraftwerk show had such a profound impact on me. I've never taken any drugs, but I know that some people really have heightened experiences by, you know, the way that drugs can affect their listening to music and can elevate things for them or might affect different situations they're in. For me, I was not on anything, but the combination of the colors in the visuals and the music and the lyrics that Kraftwerk were singing, which are often these simple mantra-like phrases repeated over and over again, the combination of all of that and the way that the visuals directly represented what was being spoken about in the music, it all just combined so beautifully to make this very deep and direct and powerful impression on me. And I came away from that concert just so blown away by it. And so the song “Colours” was to try and talk about that color-based, sonic-based experience of being at that show, and to just put that into language, I suppose, and to make a song that celebrates the impact of those things on you.

Joe Goddard: The making of the song “Colours,” the concept came from Alexis, and it's related to his kind of love of quite simple things, like Alexis has always been quite obsessed with, like beautiful clothes and fashion and, you know, even kind of trainers, like different kinds of Nike trainers in different colorways and, and with kind of, you know, collecting beautiful objects and paintings and clothing and all of these things. And the concept came from Alexis. We both have like a real shared love of quite kinda choral pop music, like the Beach Boys for instance. And so “Colours” was for me like a way of kind of showing that love for harmony and interlocking kind of melody and rhythm. The groove is kind of more motoric like a NEU! record or a Can record, something like that for instance. But yeah, melodically and chordally it's supposed to be this kind of harmonious, like beautifully working kind of mechanical machine of a song. Yeah. I honestly like, I don't remember too many specifics about while we were recording the song, but have a lot of kind of fondness for it.

Alexis Taylor: I don't know what specifically we were trying to do, but I think it goes from this kind of ballad like childlike beginning into something more motoric and that was probably, "Oh, let's make something that sounds like NEU! or Can or Kraftwerk, but done with a Casio keyboard," you know, not with everything, not with a full band and you know, not with a motoric drummer playing. So it's our attempt at that and maybe a bit of Spacemen 3 influence in there somewhere as well.

“Over and Over”

Alexis Taylor: “Over and Over” felt really, really good and really exciting. Felix made the bassline, the distorted bassline, and I played the guitar part, and Joe did a lot of the drum programming and percussion and organizing of all of it. And I was responding to the music that I was making with them, and so I wanted to sing a song that was about repetition in music and about groove and about sort of minimalism in dance music. And I also wanted our song to sound a bit like Devo and to sound a bit like Royal Trux, and I don't think many people realize that's what we were going for. I think Joe probably wanted it to sound like LCD Soundsystem. So if you put all of those things together, you get the thing that we ended up with that more than anything sounds like Hot Chip, I think.

Joe Goddard: With "Over and Over," I remember working on it in this shared house that I had with Felix in Camden. I'd written a bassline and some drums, kind of really inspired by the track, "Dance" by ESG. Like the bassline has a similar kind of rhythm to it, which feels really like a kind of Motown record or like a Northern Soul kind of record. I really loved this ESG record at the time and wanted to make something a little along those lines. I was kind of looping this bassline music, working on it endlessly, you know, adding little bits of percussion and little synth melodies and things. And Alexis joined me, and I think wrote the words, "over and over" kind of as a response, you know, because I'd obviously like obsessively been listening to this kind of rhythmic loop over and over. He really felt that and was inspired by that and was enjoying that repetition, you know, of something that's kind of just rhythmically enjoyable and funky and fun to dance to or whatever. So that was the beginning of the song. Felix joined us and added the offbeat bass guitar part that kind of really helps with the groove of the song. Alexis played that guitar part originally. We tended to like work very quickly, so I think a lot of those elements came together in this kind of like first initial kind of burst of activity, where I'd been making the, you know, the drums and the bassline, and then along with Felix and Alexis, we kind of threw everything, like a lot of stuff kind of together in, over the course of a couple of hours.

After the first Hot Chip album, Coming On Strong, was released, which in retrospect did sound like incredibly laid back and gentle. It's like very, very kinda soft, warm, a delicate kind of sound to it. We had critics mention that in reviews, saying, you know, it's kind of laid back synth pop or whatever. And this sometimes angered us. Like we hadn't been really trying to kind of make this super gentle music always. You know, we were trying our best to make things that were more energetic, but we just didn't kind of really know how to do it. So Alexis was specifically kind of referring to stuff like that in writing those lyrics on “Over and Over” and wanting to create something that was more raw, more rough, more energetic. 

Alexis Taylor: When we put out the first album, we had this single, “Down With Prince,” and I always felt like that had quite a lot of bite to it. It had a lot of humor, but it also had a bit of, like, bite to the lyrics. And when Jo Whiley played that song on the radio, on Radio 1, which was really nice of her to play it, and we were super delighted and, like, amazed that our music was being played on the radio, I then remember thinking, "Oh, it sounds to her like chilled out music," 'cause she described it as “chilled out sounds of Hot Chip.” She wasn't wrong to call it that by any means, but I thought, "Oh no," like, "what we've done that we thought had some vigor to it sounds like chilled out music." So, or maybe she said “laid back music.” So I wanted to say in the song in a kinda jokey way, "Oh, if that was laid back, we'll give you laid back," which I guess means we'll give you something not so laid back. And of course, “Over and Over” still sounds quite chilled out and laid back in a way, but it was our attempt at upping the ante a little bit. I laugh at myself, you know, because that was my perspective on it at the time, was that we must prove ourselves. But no one was actually being critical or mean about it. They were supporting what we were doing. It was just that they heard it as slightly different from how we heard it, and that gap between your own perception of what you're doing and how it actually sounds to other people, I love that. That's so interesting to me, you know? But through that, we managed to come up with a song that I suppose was a bit of a call to arms in our own way, and, and it has been the song that has really connected with a lot of people. And it, I guess it has a slightly tougher production to it, but only marginally. 

Joe Goddard: It has a real kind of youthful, joyful kind of energy to it, and obviously it has the kind of iconic “monkey with the miniature cymbal line,” which is kind of something quite unexpected and unusual. And that refers to Alexis was an enormous fan of, like, Royal Trux at this time, and still is. And on the liner notes of one of their songs on the back of one of their albums, it mentions “a monkey with a miniature cymbal” as being one of the kind of instruments on a song. And Alexis saw that and thought that that was a great image, so he kinda took that and brought it into the lyrics of the song.

Alexis Taylor: And like I said at the beginning, you know, a band like Royal Trux with their album Accelerator was a big influence on that. The kind of rock music and the compressed, overloaded sound of Royal Trux, that was in there in the mix as something we wanted to do. That's why the guitar sounds the way it does. That's why it's kind of a bit more rock than other things we'd done. Yeah, their album that came out after they broke up, it's called Hand of Glory, that listed Neil and Jennifer and “miniature monkey with cymbals” as the instrumentalists playing on the album. And I just read “miniature monkey with cymbals,” and I sort of misremembered it as “a monkey with miniature cymbals.” And I wanted to say like that, meaning this song is about percussion, and it's like a sort of mechanical monkey bashing these cymbals together. The song is about percussion, and it's about primal and raw groove and rhythm and percussive elements. It's meant to be kind of stomping and, and kind of crude in a way. I suppose in a way that's a callback also to Devo, who they would often try and think about how humankind is devolving and behavior is devolving, and they would kind of reference things like apes and kind of, you know, make comparisons with our behavior to that of animals. And so maybe at a subconscious level there was something of that in there because I clearly loved Devo a lot back then and still do now, and everyone in the band did. We would watch Devo videos before making our recordings, and we would watch Sun Ra videos before making our recordings, and all of those things would come into it. So you get this kinda crazy, messy keyboard solo I do on the Casio, and it's doesn't sound like Sun Ra, but it comes from me watching these Sun Ra videos where he's playing with, like, the backs of his hands and his elbows and Miles Davis would do that as well. And, you know, those things were just exciting and influential on us, and they got jammed in amongst all the other things that were going on into the music. But it's a real hybrid of different elements, I suppose. 

Joe Goddard: Alexis came up with the idea of there being this kind of 7/8 section in the song where we spell out various words like “kissing, sexing, Casio,” each word, subsequent word having one fewer letter than the previous one. And we were really kind of inspired in doing that by, like, a great kind of Devo record. We were really obsessed at the time with this one Devo song called “Timing X,” which has really crazy kind of time signatures and grooves in it in a typical kind of Devo fashion. It's very angular, but super funky at the same time. And so we were trying to kind of include something along those lines into the song, something that took the groove to a completely different place, a bit of some, a little stranger and a little more kinda wild. So yeah, I have very fond memories of, like, putting all of that stuff together. We had a lot of fun thinking of these crazy words and doing, the recording of this stuff. And then I remember Owen and Al kind of joining us and adding parts to the song, and then so it was quite a kind of collaborative effort and kinda came together over the course of a couple of days, I think probably.

Prior to the record coming out, Kieran, Four Tet, was playing a live show at a London music venue called, KOKO, and he asked me to play records before he came on from the DJ booth, which was up by the mixing desk at the front of house. And I was playing a set, you know, of obviously other people's music mostly, and then I played the unreleased version of "Over and Over," which I think we'd come from mixing the song kind of quite recently. So it was very, very, very fresh to me, and I played it, and obviously the audience didn't know it at that point, but I remember people really responding to it quite immediately. I could see people kind of moving and looking up at me, and yeah, it just felt very exciting hearing it out loud for the first time and seeing that it kind of struck a nerve with people immediately. And I'm just very grateful that we kind of had that kind of crazy moment of coming up with it because it's been a massive part of our career, and it's had this great kind of life.

“(Just Like We) Breakdown” 

Alexis Taylor: “(Just Like We) Breakdown," it was trying to retain a minimal quality whilst being a pop song. So I loved how it sounded with very few elements in it, and it made me think of a record like “Kiss” by Prince that sounds nothing like it in terms of the funk or the groove or the vocals. But “Kiss,” I think, has maybe six or eight layers in it in total. And to me, that's, like, quite an achievement of Prince's, that he knew how to make a record with so few elements that could sound so incredible, so brilliant, and so alive. And I think I was just sort of feeling like, what if we just don't keep adding to this, but we keep it quite raw.

Joe Goddard: The song “(Just Like We) Breakdown,” to me, it has a slight kind of feel of maybe like a kind of New Order track. Like, the chorus feels a little bit like something New Order would write. It came about, I worked with one of the drum machines that we had, like an Elektron Machinedrum it was called, and put together this kind of drum beat, which Alexis then wrote the song over.

Alexis Taylor: “(Just Like We) Breakdown” was another one that was a real breakthrough for me because Joe made this kind of rhythm track that's essentially a loop. It has a melodic element to it and a percussive element to it, and that was the thing I built the song on. And I just, I just loved how that loop worked, and it made me think about my love for Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II, which I used to listen to as a teenager, but I also listened to it on tour with our friend Hagop Tchaparian, who was our tour manager and friend. I listened to it late at night in a hotel room in France when we were on tour, and I had memories of how that music sounded as we were falling to sleep. So my song was kind of partly about minimalism and repetition, a bit like “Over and Over” was, and it was partly about some people kind of adjacent to me whose relationship was coming to an end, and I was trying to say to them, "Maybe the end of something could be the start of something new, and that could be positive." So I kinda put all of that together and used the one other keyboard that we had, which was this Casio CZ-101 synth to do those kind of synth string sounds on it, and it developed into that track. And it was very much a joint effort by Joe and myself because Joe made the starting points of the music, which inspired loads of the words by me. But then I wrote some of those chord changes and things, the guitar and the keyboard parts that took it into, developed it into that song. And yeah, I always still love that one now, and there was this very good, DFA version that Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy made with us in Plantain Studios in New York, which came out eventually as a remix, but it was initially actually a jointly made track with them. So I've got a lot of time for both those versions. 

Joe Goddard: When we became friendly with James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy of The DFA, we recorded a version of the song at their studios in Manhattan, and that became the version of the song called the DFA remix. Which listeners can find if they go on YouTube or whatever, it's up there, which is a much more kind of like deeper, kind of more housey, live version of the song. So we had a great experience, and it was a massive learning experience for me going to New York and recording that version with them. In terms of like the actual session of putting the whole thing together, I have like very little memory, honestly. I remember programming the drum machine, and I remember Alexis coming up with the chorus vocal melody. But yeah, I guess it would've been a, a fairly kind of routine recording session for us of, you know, a lot of the music comes from like a Casio, this kind of Casio tone keyboard that we used obsessively, and it would've been just kind of a few hours, I think, of working together in, in this shared space in Camden.

"Tchaparian"

Joe Goddard: Okay, so the song "Tchaparian" has a very kind of clear meaning. Tchaparian ​​is the surname of a great friend of ours called Hagop, and at the time we were making this album, Hagop kind of did everything for us. He used to drive us to shows and then do our live sound. He drove us around America in, like an RV while we were touring. He sold merch for us at the shows as well. He helped us soundcheck. He kind of tour managed us. He was just so helpful and so incredible. He'd been a great friend of ours for a while up to that point. He had previously been in, in a great kind of indie pop band called Symposium, years before that, who were a band that we enjoyed going to see. He grew up in the same part of London as us, in Fulham, and now he lives in, in the States and releases music on Four Tet's label Text Records, and still sometimes kind of helps Kieran, Four Tet, out on tour, kind of travels with him. We still see him. He's just a great person, really, really helped us so much at this part in kind of this stage of our career just out of the goodness of his heart. Like, I think just enjoyed our music and hanging out with us. So yeah, this was like a, this song was like a tribute to him. 

Alexis Taylor: So he toured with us for years, and he went through all of the formative stages of Hot Chip being a live band on the road. We did an American tour opening for Four Tet, and Hagop was the driver for all of that, and he was the sound engineer sometimes, and he helped us with the merch. He helped us with everything, and he helped us stay sane, and he helped us kind of stay together as a group and not lose it when things were getting too pressured and difficult. He was a massive part of our journey, and so the title was in tribute to him and his surname, and it was, you know, some kind of love for Hagop was there in that naming the song after him. And the music itself and the melodies, I don't think we were writing the song about Hagop. We just named it after him. But yeah, I can't remember exactly what the genesis of the music was now. If I remember it correctly, more of a hip hop kind of feel in the drums and things. 

Joe Goddard: Yeah, I mean, in terms of the production on the song, I just was listening to a ton of all different kinds of hip hop, whether it was The Neptunes or Dr. Dre, and always wanted to reference that stuff in the productions. We had this, you know, fantasy of being part of that world of hip hop, which is quite a bizarre kind of fantasy from, you know, the people who we are and the place where we came from. But yeah, you know, I just had so much passion for that music and still do of all different types, you know, whether it's like Madlib and J Dilla or more kind of the poppy side of hip hop or kind of just all aspects to it. Just things that I really love and still do, yeah.

“Look After Me” 

Alexis Taylor: I remember thinking “Look After Me” is our attempt at a soul song, and it's very sort of heartfelt, you know, and very raw. And I wanted the guitar playing to be like a Curtis Mayfield track. And I think Joe wanted the drum machine from the Casio to feel like it would have been, you know, an old Al Green soul record or something. And we're obviously not coming from those places. We come from, you know, London, and we're, if anything, doing a kind of lo-fi blue-eyed soul thing. We're not like authentic Memphis soul musicians by any means, and it doesn't sound like that, but we're, it's our take on that music and our take on something that's incredibly real on an emotional level.

Joe Goddard: So "Look After Me," I remember us recording it and remember it being a really, a kind of really beautiful moment. I think it's a really lovely song. It was related to, Alexis was going through, like, a breakup with a girlfriend at the time, and he's kind of speaking about the reasons why they're breaking up and maybe they hadn't been looking after each other, looking out for each other.

Alexis Taylor: What I remember about "Look After Me" was I know what I was going through at the time. I broke up with my partner, and I met somebody else and started seeing somebody new, and I was thinking about what happens in that situation where you lose connection with somebody who's been a big part of your life. And I was thinking about that late at night whilst walking back from a Zongamin gig. Now, Zongamin played at his own house in Dalston, and I went to this gig, and it was incredibly important gig for me. I thought Zongamin were, and still are, one of the best bands of that era and that I've ever seen, and I was really inspired by them.

That's Susumu Mukai's project, and it was on XL Records. I walked back from that, and on one part of the journey, I think I was listening to "Thieves Like Us" by New Order, and on another part of the journey home, I was just singing to myself in the street as I was walking home, and the melody for "Look After Me" was in my head. And that phrase, "Look after me, and I'll look after you," that's something we both forgot to do. That was, that was my starting point for that song. But in my head, it was gonna be over major key chords, and it was gonna be a bit like, I guess, a little bit like the chord progression in "Temptation" by New Order. I heard it as more of a kind of quite pleasing and, and upbeat melody. But by the time I got to my house and played my guitar to write the song and record a little demo of it, I found myself playing minor chords shapes instead of major chords, and the same melody that I had in my head sat over those, and suddenly it had more of a melancholic feel to it. It was very much written quickly about my breakup with this ex-partner and about me moving forwards from that, and it was about me recognizing that her dad had died. Actually, maybe the timeline of that is wrong. Maybe her dad hadn't died. He did die, but I think what I was remembering was the time I spent with her family and with her. It wasn't about his death. And so there were some bits of the song that were about, you know, remembering only very recently I was with you and your family, and I won't see those people ever again, and I won't see you in the same way. So it's kind of coming to terms with loss.

Joe Goddard: In terms of the way it sounds, it was again like us referencing things like Sly Stone and Al Green, like wanting to do this kind of gentle drum machine soul, which I think the sound of that song is really nice. It's really pleasant. We have a great friend called Emma Smith, who we'd also gone to school with, and she plays with us on many of our albums. She plays saxophone on “Crap Kraft Dinner,” and she plays violin on this song, “Look After Me.” She's played on many other songs by us and, and currently she tours with Pulp and with different bands. She also plays in like Beth Gibbons from Portishead's band. She's an incredible musician who we'd known again, since we were maybe like 12 years old. So we got her around maybe to my father's house in Fulham to record some violin. And yeah, I remember the song kind of coming together very quickly over the course of a few hours probably. And again, I think the drums and the, the main kind of chords come from this super inexpensive Casio keyboard. 

Alexis Taylor: I wanted the guitar part to be like maybe “The Makings of You” by Curtis Mayfield, but I can't play as well as him, obviously, but that's me trying to do that kind of thing on a quite bad, cheap, out of tune guitar. Like when people buy their first electric guitar and they get an amp that comes with it, that's what I had, and that's what we used on that record. But we got the best out of that limited sort of quality of gear, and I think it has a raw energy to it. The, the other thing I remember is the sort of synth line we did that's a bit G-funk and a bit Dr. Dre in a way, or a bit '70s, almost like, Rose Royce, “Love Don't Live Here Anymore.” That was partly to do with me hearing sirens at nighttime when I was in Philadelphia, when I'd just broken up with my girlfriend, the one I was just talking about. So she lived in New York, and I think I went to Philadelphia after I broke up with her, and I was hearing sirens whilst I was listening to Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen on a Lego CD player in my friend Will Pim's house. And I heard that siren as a sort of melody over this acoustic guitar from Bruce Springsteen in the album Nebraska, and I had a sort of idea in my head that maybe a kind of acoustic, sad, folky thing, but with a siren-like synth melody that you get in like funk music would be quite a nice hybrid of things. So I brought some of that to the equation, and then me and Joe recorded it, and I think Joe and I were really inspired by “Jesus Is Waiting” by Al Green, which James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy had played to us at Plantain Studios. They played it to the whole band when we were making the song “(Just Like We) Breakdown” with them. So although these are all different times and places, all of those influences came into the music, and we tried to do our take on that kind of classic soul song.

“The Warning”

Joe Goddard: So "The Warning," you know, clearly is inspired by, musically it's inspired by like, you know, these kind of garage records that were, that were so popular at that moment. I was trying to make, like, real kind of UK garage drums, and I spent a lot of time, like, making music of that type. 

Alexis Taylor: I think Joe used that Casio we've talked about, the MT-70, to play the chords, and he programmed the beat, and it was a garage-y beat, and he had his glockenspiel.

Joe Goddard: Yeah, we had an inexpensive kind of plastic, like a glockenspiel that we sometimes would bring to live shows. And I think one of the reasons why we use it is because we, you know, it was just one of the things that we had. We didn't have a ton of instruments really. But also, yeah, I like that juxtaposition of trying to make something that's kind of rooted in the world of dance music, but has this real fragile, gentle kind of qualities. Alexis and I were both really in love with, like, the third Velvet Underground album, you know, which has this very intimate, gentle sound to it, and has, you know, tracks like “Pale Blue Eyes” or “Candy Says.” And the sleepy, kind of quiet nature of that record is something that is very, very close to my heart. It's one of my favorite albums probably. So yeah, trying to bring that kind of sound into some of what we do is, has always been part of it.

Alexis Taylor: "Hot Chip will break your legs," is what he had as the chorus of the song. And, you know, that's what he presented to me. He'd written quite a lot of that. It sounded unusual and quirky and funny to me. It sounded like quite an amusing idea for a song to have a gentle voice singing, like a gentle voice of somebody who's never been aggressive in his life singing about Hot Chip will do this aggressive thing. And I think it's meant to be seen as kind of ridiculous. No one really snaps off people's heads, or at least I hope they don't. But there's that kind of thing going on in it. It's a kind of bravado that's meant to be immediately cut down by how ridiculous it is, and no one could take that at face value.

Joe Goddard: Lyrically, this kind of slightly kind of bizarre, menacing lyrics, you know, the kind of weirdly violent, but at the same time very gently sung. That was something, to me, it seemed like you got that on, like, certain Aphex Twin songs. Like, there'd be kind of weird, childish kind of vocals that said quite unusual aggressive things or strange things in some of his music. It's kind of slightly surreal, chilling kind of vocals. I just, I enjoy that humor and find it kind of funny to juxtapose these kind of aggressive words with the super gentle music. And I guess it's, it's also making reference to the fact that we were coming from Putney, but being quite outside of these worlds of, like, hip hop or UK garage, but, but just really being obsessed with these things. Which I think is also something that Green Gartside from Scritti Politti could kind of relate to, you know, in the music that he makes of, of being someone outside of these worlds of music, but wanting to, to show a love of them. 

Alexis Taylor: And the rest of the words that I sing are not to do with that. They're just a lot more stream of consciousness. We were driving to a music festival and I saw a sign out of the window for the Mechanical Music Museum, and I thought that's a very great phrase, but I never went there. And I just threw that into the song to try and talk about, you know, people on their journey to find the Mechanical Music Museum, which I suppose might mean Hot Chip's journey to make mechanical sounding rhythmic music or something. I don't really know what I was going on about, but there's lots of just being playful with words in that song and being playful with our playing, you know, like having a sort of little section in the middle where it goes to a more synth, funky synthy kind of section. And that's, I don't know what you call that, like a breakdown or something. And I think a lot of our songs had this freedom back then to just be like, "Well, what, what should we do now? We should do like a solo or we should do a something that sounds like a drummer falling down the stairs or we should do..." You know, we would just try anything out that we thought would be unexpected, I guess. And I think that's the spirit of that music.

Joe Goddard: Yeah, that kind of merging of acoustic and digital sounds has always been a big deal for us. In some way, that's kind of inspired by the brilliant kind of records that people like Sly Stone or Shuggie Otis made, where there would be kind of drum machine elements and live drums and synthesizers as well as live instrumentation, just that kind of the nice kind of gentle warmth of those kind of records. I'm thinking of, like, “It's a Family Affair” or something, the classic Sly Stone record. Like, that kind of feel of mixing digital and acoustic instruments has just always been very inspiring and, and just worked for us. So within the live show and within our kind of our own music, we were kind of always trying to balance that stuff. It also came from being really passionate about acoustic music as well as modern kind of electronic music and, you know, loving this kind of UK garage as well as like more classic songwriter stuff like Neil Young, you know, kind of going between Al Green and Aphex Twin or like being passionate about both those extremes of types of kind of recorded music, and we tried to just throw all of that stuff into the music that we were making. You know, coming at kind of electronic music from a real kind of indie perspective, which, you know, is much more normal for someone say in 2026, but I don't remember that being as kind of common when we were kind of recording this stuff in, like, 2002. That seemed like a more kind of outlandish and unusual approach to making records.

“Arrest Yourself” 

Joe Goddard: (laughs) Um, I don't really remember very much of note about the making of the song “Arrest Yourself.” Yeah, I think it was towards the end of making the record, and we were kinda just trying to kind of make like one final song, something like a little more kind of immediate. And it reminds me of something that Prince might do, and that's always been something Alexis is very good at writing and very able to kind of write.

Alexis Taylor: “Arrest Yourself” was like a funky, like hard funk song, maybe a bit influenced by Rodney Jerkins, The Neptunes, Timbaland, that kind of R&B. And it's a kind of sexy song or at least an attempt to be sexy in a song. And that's, you know, somebody like myself who's listened to all these Prince records that are so kind of explicit. Like, it's my own sort of attempt at that kind of thing, but coming from my own point of view. So trying to make quite groovy, dirty sort of dance music, I suppose. And I have no idea how it comes out to other people and sounds to other people. It may sound quite polite perhaps.

“So Glad to See You” 

Alexis Taylor: I mean, "So Glad to See You" sounds to me like it's a kind of partner of the song, "The Warning," in a way. It has a similar skittery garage-influenced feel, and that's definitely Joe programming all of that. I mean, I also really liked and still like garage music. I wouldn't want it to sound like it's either Joe's influence or my influence, but Joe knew how to program that kind of thing, and I don't know how to program that kind of thing. So we bonded over Wiley records and Dizzee Rascal records and various different quite early forms of grime, I suppose. We got to work with Kano a little bit later after that, and it was like a sort of more gentle pop song, more tender song that sits over the kind of rhythms you get in garage music. And I find it quite unusual now when I listen to it.

Joe Goddard: Okay, so there's a really nice anecdote about that song, "So Glad to See You." We'd been really great friends with a guy called Adem Ilhan, who is a musician who was a couple of years above us in secondary school, and he was in the band with Kieran Hebden called Fridge that were signed to Output Records, Trevor Jackson's label in the '90s. And Adem was a great friend of mine, still is, and the rest of his family and his partner, Emma. And so Adem and his partner had been round to our house in Camden, and we'd had dinner and hung out, and at the end of the evening, Adem was controlling like a vocoder. So he was, Adem was playing the keyboard and my wife, Celia, who wasn't my wife at the time, she was my girlfriend, but she improvised the words on the chorus that say, "So glad to see you, glad you came." And she was just kind of in the moment improvising about the fact that we'd just spent this nice evening with our friends, and they were just about to leave. And Adem kinda came up with the chords for the song. So it was totally unscripted and just something that I captured. I pressed record and yeah, we never kind of did another take. They kind of walked out of the door like five minutes after the recording of that, and I just thought it was really perfect. You can actually hear it, like the timing of the words is kind of unusual, and it's because Celia was kind of not really thinking about it being like a take to be used on the album. She was just wanting to say that she'd had a good evening with our friends. You know, I have a fondness for that song for that, for that specific reason.

And I really, really love the contributions from Alexis on the song, which I think he did after I'd recorded this chorus. It began with me writing elements of it, kind of the chords and the, a little bit of the rhythms, and getting this kind of chorus idea, and then Alexis slotted in the kind of verses for the song. 

Alexis Taylor: Yeah, that sort of tender, a tender song, and one of the back-and-forth songs, like Joe singing partly and then me answering his phrases, and that was often our sort of format for songwriting back then. Joe would leave space for me to write my own thing about my own things I cared about and felt, that didn't have to be directly on the same subject matter as his. But we would join together, and you get that on all of the first album, and you get it on The Warning too. I think we allowed ourselves to have different focuses, different things to focus on lyrically, but for it to all coexist. And I still remember this thing that I read as a sort of teenager about Johnny Marr from The Smiths, writing some guitar part and being really happy with this very beautiful guitar part he had, and then Morrissey coming in and singing, "Some girls are bigger than others. Some girls' mothers are bigger than other girls' mothers," on top of that. And there being a sort of surprise for Johnny Marr that, “That's not where I thought my song was headed.” And I feel like in Hot Chip, we have always allowed ourselves for those elements of surprise. Like, maybe I have written a song that starts out one way, and Joe says, "Well, can I transform that into this other thing?" Or Joe writes something that starts out one way, and it's perhaps largely instrumental, and then I drop a set of lyrics over the top of it that may surprise him in terms of what it is I'm singing about. So I think that that is integral to this thing of there being a melancholic edge with a more euphoric part of the music in Hot Chip, which has become what we're known for really.

“No Fit State” 

Joe Goddard: Okay, "No Fit State," that was actually kind of interesting in the sense that most of these songs were kind of, you know, just kind of made on my computer, kind of in a, in a home recording way. But I think "No Fit State," we went round to the studio that Felix and Al had been setting up in another location, and we recorded the song more as like a kind of live recording of our band at the time. So we, I think we set up a few keyboards and drum machines and kind of wrote the song and then recorded it in the way that a band might typically do. So it felt like a different way of working at the time. It was a slightly different kind of procedure, and Felix and Al were more involved in the creation and the recording of the song. And yeah, I have a lot of fondness for the song. We used to play it often in the live show and our audience kind of enjoyed it. And, you know, from Alexis's perspective, I think it's indebted largely to kind of Joy Division, New Order, and Alexis would sometimes kind of throw a kind of interpolation of a New Order song into the live, uh, performance of "No Fit State." So yeah, that band had been very important for Alexis growing up. His older brother, Will, had been an enormous fan of New Order and Joy Division, and so Alexis had heard that music from a very young age in his family house growing up. 

Alexis Taylor: The music was a little bit related to New Order's music. I know I've mentioned them. I think "No Fit State" was our, it's the only one I can think of where we were, like, maybe talking about, "Oh, this sounds a bit like New Order," or, "This should be a bit like a New Order track." I think everything else, we just made our music, and if we had influences, we didn't vocalize what those influences were so much. But with that one, I thought it goes from this, like, minor key verses and bridges and everything, and opens out into this major key outro, and those two chords that it goes between, what's it called? It goes between the fourth and the first chord. And those chords are what you hear in "Temptation" by New Order. And they're very pleasing chords, and they allow for these sort of synth arpeggios and things. And we just kind of explored that electropop world with that song. And it was a real fan favorite. It was like a highlight of live gigs. There was a sort of crescendo to it with all of this (sings) “boom, boom, boom, psh, boom, boom, boom, psh.” You know, that was there in the record, but live it became this moment for the percussion and the drums that we started to add in to be, like, very much heavier and more like us coming out of our shell and being more of a, not a rock band, but a band influenced by the sort of energy of rock music. So that's what I remember about that song.

I remember with “No Fit State” that maybe some of the kind of overwhelming stress of playing at SXSW Festival and everything breaking, and everything falling apart in front of us whilst we were trying to get somewhere with our band. And then playing in Miami Future Music Conference, I think it was called, or something like that, and everything going even more wrong there, and there being a lot of pressure on us. And then we played this pivotal show in New York. It might have been at Bowery Ballroom maybe. We played there, and all of the equipment seemed to be breaking, so all of the monitors were cutting in and out all the time. I couldn't hear. I was trying to sing. The room was full of people. There was a lot of hype and excitement around our band, and we were trying to deliver our best. But the people we were working with weren't always necessarily able to do things, or they weren't experienced enough, and stuff was going wrong. Maybe just technical problems, maybe it wasn't people problems. And I remember just totally losing my mind and being deeply embarrassed by how it was going so wrong, and I walked off stage during that show. We also didn't have our bandmate, Felix, 'cause he'd become very, very ill and was in hospital, and we had Pat Mahoney from LCD standing in for Felix at that show, and Pat never had a rehearsal with us. He just had to walk out on stage and drum to these songs that he'd listened to on a CD player in the dressing room about an hour beforehand. So there was this exhilaration and excitement about the show and everything kind of going wrong. So I think that some of this stuff about “I'm in no fit state to do this, that, or the other” was about feeling pressure and feeling immense pressure on the self. And at that moment in time at that New York show, I remember just being so stressed. I didn't know what to do, and I just said into the microphone, "Right, this is, I'm not playing. I can't do this anymore." And I left the stage. And I think Joe was like, "Is my friend just leaving Hot Chip? Is that what's just happened?" And so it was a really awful thing for me to say, really stressed him out. But it was like, I guess, three weeks of being on the road in America with quite a lot of it going really well and quite a lot of it going really badly, and losing our voices and not being able to perform and all this sort of stuff. And loads of stuff that was amusing and funny as well. But there's, at that moment, I felt a bit crushed. So I think there's some of that in there. There's also the feeling of, like, how you are after you've broken up with somebody and you're just starting over and you're emotionally exhausted.

“Won’t Wash”

Joe Goddard: Okay, so “Won't Wash.” Yeah, I don't remember much about this. I remember, I think like the building, the first kind of building blocks of the song from like a thumb piano that I had, the where, that I kind of recorded and looped. And I remember us kind of recording a few different kind of percussive instruments, kind of slightly unusual things, and kind of layering these, these different kind of percussive sounds. It's a little less of a kind of structured track, you know, a little more experimental sounding. 

Alexis Taylor: I remember that Joe had a thumb piano or kalimba, and he made that beautiful looping riff in the song, and it came together very quickly. I think that sort of percussion, and in that case tuned percussion, I think that was a big part of how Joe approached music back then. Not to say he doesn't approach it like that still, but if he could get his hands on a new bit of gear that was maybe a thumb piano, he knew how to make a song.

I really like that song, and I wanted it to be on the record even though it's a bit different in tone. It's a gentler side of Hot Chip's music. And I remember that Jonathan Galkin of DFA Records, we burnt him a CD of the album, and iTunes put the whole album in the reverse order by accident. And he listened to it with “Won't Wash” as the first track, and by the time he realized that he'd got it wrong, he was convinced that we had to put it out in the reverse order. So he thought that that reverse track listing was, like, perfect and more interesting than what we ended up going with. Another thing I would just say overall about this record very briefly is we did have the opportunity back then to work with the DFA, Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy, and that was an exciting opportunity. And they did really, really help us, and they inspired us, but we also didn't use their mixes of tracks. So they mixed “Over and Over” and “Boy from School,” and we didn't end up using those. And I think that it was quite important for us to recognize what we liked about our own production and our own mix choices, and to not feel like we're too inexperienced to sort of stand up for what's important to the Hot Chip sound. And we had to do exactly the same thing when Tom Elmhirst, who's a very good and very experienced mix engineer, when he mixed the album, I had to say to him, "Look, you, you're doing a great job," which is not me patronizing him. He knew way more than I did. But I had to say to him, "Please just back off all of this reverb that you're adding to my voice because I don't want it there. I haven't put, there's no reverb on these vocals originally, deliberately," you know? It was a bit of standing our ground on the right tracks where we needed to, and a bit of letting him do the mixes he felt were needed for other things. “Over and Over,” he got that right, and it's the track that it is today. But “(Just Like We) Breakdown,” I had to insist on all of the extra parts that he was adding being taken off 'cause I was like, "That's not our song. That's not the production." The A&R guy at the label and Tom Elmhirst both tried to take the song “Look After Me” off the album, and me and Joe said, "Well, no, this is essential to this album. This is one of our favorite songs on the album." And if that song had been taken off, no one would have heard it, and that's one of the songs that people talk to me about 20 years later as one of their favorites. So I think we were quite good at standing our ground and sticking up for ourselves, which is not meant to sound brattish or overconfident. It's more that you've got people around you that are telling you no, but you have to sometimes say we have some confidence in this and determination, and I think that has always been there with Hot Chip really, with me, Joe, and the rest of the band. 

Joe Goddard: We'd obviously just signed to, like, a major label, so there was much more, like, money at our disposal to get this record mixed properly, and that was one of the things that Parlophone wanted us to do. So they asked us to work with an incredible mix engineer called Tom Elmhirst, who has mixed, you know, big records by, like, Adele and ike, enormous bands, and he was a really great guy. We went, every couple of days we would go over to the studio that he was working at, which was Metropolis Studios in West London, which is a real classic London recording studio where a lot of great mixing and mastering is done. So we went there every couple of days to listen to what he'd been doing, and it was really an amazing process. Like, he really amplified songs like “Over and Over” and “Boy from School.” So yeah, a lot of fond memories of that. I particularly remember, like, the first time he played us “Over and Over,” and Alexis and I looked at each other and kind of realized that it was, we were just super happy with it, and that it had potential to be, like, a big song. 

Alexis Taylor: I think to be fair to EMI, they didn't meddle with anything except for those things I've mentioned about, like suggesting who mixes it and then suggesting we take certain tracks off. But they let us make the music completely freely and signed us on the back of all of those recordings, and they didn't say, "This is promising, guys, but can you go back and, like, start writing some more stuff? This isn't good enough." They didn't say that. They said, "We just need to, like, help you hone it down to 11 or 12 tracks." And so I really respected them, but I guess there was a bit of friction because it was very new to me to go from working at Domino, an independent label, and having the first album on an independent label, and then suddenly jumping to a major label. So I was fearing that there might be a very, it might be a different story with that label. But in fact, it was a good story. They were really, really supportive of Hot Chip, massively supportive of us to the point where they helped us to like, fund the touring in America that we did with Four Tet. And after that, we had some audience in America, and we were able to go back the next year and do our own tour without the label's support. So, and also just signing a record deal with EMI allowed us to leave our day jobs and become full-time musicians, so it's a huge thing that they did for us and with us. So yeah, I'm very thankful for all of that, and definitely was quite green at the time and quite worried that it could've been a bad move. And, you know, I'm protective of how we do things, and I didn't want our music to get destroyed by bad decisions. But we found a good way of doing it.

Joe Goddard: It's a real kind of milestone in our career. It's when our career went from being a kind of indie group to being on a major label, and when we began to kind of tour internationally and forge friendships with bands around the world. So it's really like the beginning of our career proper, and it's really lovely to kinda go back and, and think about what that time was like and how much it kind of established our career.

Alexis Taylor: So we're 20 years on, and we're looking back on that, myself and Joe, with fond memories of the process of making it, and it's an album that we've returned to some of the material from and played live for years and years. So songs like “Boy from School” and “Over and Over,” “No Fit State,” they've been part of our live setlist for a long time, or at least were, some of them were for a very, very long time. So it's kind of foundational music for us and it means a lot to us.

Outro:

Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about Hot Chip. You’ll also find a full transcript of this episode and a link to purchase The Warning, including the 20th anniversary edition. Instrumental music is the song “Little Johnny’s Confession” by Will Allensworth and Patrick Hakes. Thanks for listening. 

Credits:

"Careful"

"And I Was a Boy from School"

"Colours"

"Over and Over"

"(Just Like We) Breakdown"

"Tchaparian"

"Look After Me"

"The Warning"

"Arrest Yourself"

"So Glad to See You"

"No Fit State"

"Won't Wash"

Written, performed and produced by Hot Chip

Published by Warner Chappell Music Ltd.

Mixed by Tom Emhirst for This Much Talent.

Additional Engineering by Richard Wilkinson.

Assistant Engineer Matt Paul.

℗ & © 2006 EMI Records

Owen Clarke – artwork design, art conception, guitar, bass

Al Doyle – guitar, synthesizer, percussion, backing vocals

Joe Goddard – vocals, synthesizer, percussion

Felix Martin – drum machines

Alexis Taylor – vocals, synthesizer, guitar, percussion, piano

Episode Credits: 

Intro/Outro Music:

“Little Johnny’s Confession” by Will Allensworth and Patrick Hakes

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam