Hayley Williams has released a new version of her song ‘Dead Horse’ which has been remixed by Hot Chip. I’ve done years of gigs where people stand up, but I’ve already done a few Piano shows and it’s kind of refreshing. I went to see Crystal Gale and I thought she was good - I kind of connected to the sound of her voice but she’s not thought of or respected as one of the great singers, but I think the songs are really well written. The songs on the album, lots of them are to do with that sense of loss - your parents breaking up, someone dying, or a breakup. The influence on the record is that once I’d made 90% of the album, I added a cover of another song "Just For A Little While’, which Vince’s brother wrote and Vince sang. For Piano, his new solo album, he has stripped everything back, so there are only two elements left – piano and voice – on a series of original songs and soulful covers of Elvis Presley, Crystal Gayle and Lone Pigeon songs, among others. Most of my solo shows I’ve just played the keyboards, or the guitars, and some people have listened or some people have talked all the way through, and I’ve never said to anyone 'you need to be quiet while I’m playing my music'. Then in terms of the Crystal Gale song ["Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue"], I have a strong connection to the music I grew up on. He has also released two solo albums since 2008 and is now, quietly, preparing to release his third. Listen live on BBC Radio Ulster or find 'The Stephen McCauley Show' on BBC Sounds. On Hot Chip's seventh album, the UK band explore a tug-of-war that will be familiar to many of us in this modern moment: one between engaging and escaping. I wanted to put that song on a record as it’s a good song that never got a wider release. His last, 2014’s Await Barbarians, was his take on a Prince production (he saw Prince nine times, he thinks and Hot Chip will do a special Prince DJ set for Glastonbury’s Block9 field). He didn’t have a set-list before he went into the studio and recorded most tracks in one take: “I just figured out how to do them as the tape was rolling.” The bulk of the work came after – he has listened to the recordings endlessly over the past six months, tinkering with the running order and the mixing. He plays music every day – “I’ve got enough instruments around the house I couldn’t really walk through it without wanting to.” He lives in north London with his wife, who works for the Twentieth Century Society, which campaigns to preserve modern buildings. It crosses my mind sometimes to make something that’s completely abstract, just noises of recording, like tape hiss. “I was looking to make something that was about a more open sound, about recording something elemental really well. Here, Hot Chip lead singer and keyboardist Alexis Taylor discusses a family Easter tradition that turned into an everlasting meditation on music, film and metaphors. I’ve become quite, momentarily at least, dissatisfied with the working methods I was going through for making records. It is the fifth track on their seventh studio album, A Bath Full of Ecstasy, and was released as its lead single on 4 April 2019 through Domino Recording Company Background. He is not, though, your average bombastic frontman. Lead singer Alexis Taylor, Joe Goddard, Al Doyle, Owen Clarke and Felix Martin. “There’s so many things we could do that are just easy, that make people automatically feel connected to something – and we’re not really that kind of band. You work it out. Hot Chip goes in a slightly different direction both musically and lyrically. I did Rubbed Out and Await Barbarians and an EP between that called Nayim From The Halfway Line, and while I was writing them I was really happy with them, but I just felt like I needed to get out of that mode of operating, get out of the room I was in, get away from the instruments I was using. The pair have been making music since they were 13, at Elliott School in south London and still get on. To me, it sounds quite gospel like with a spiritual fragmented quality. She will go with him to various festivals this summer and then Hot Chip will start on a new album. “Each of us has our own ways of being obsessional.”. Whether people like it or not, I don’t know, but it’s certainly purer. Photo: Richard Ecclestone. (“I didn’t really practise any of it and I’m not really sure how good any of the piano-playing is – that’s another thing that’s exposed…”) He had planned to add some strings and was talking to his school-friend and long-time collaborator, Vince Sipprell about contributing viola. I had been thinking about making a piano record for a few years, and it’s not that I write all of these songs at the piano, but occasionally you’ll just sit down at the piano and see what they sound like in that way. It’s got electronic, acoustic, and avant-garde elements to it but it feels like a record of one kind of mood. However, his latest release Listen With(out) Piano may be his most risky to date. The group consists of multi-instrumentalists Alexis Taylor, Joe Goddard, Al Doyle, Owen Clarke, and Felix Martin. Another reason is maybe you might enjoy the tactile process of syncing the two albums up - like if you wanted to enjoy listening to something in a different way. All rights reserved. A few of the songs on Piano, like "Repair Man", "I’m Ready", and "So Much Further To Go", were written at the piano and they just interested me in existing in a very underproduced way. People who write about Hot Chip quite often think there’s trickery going on… layers of humour. I wrote "Repair Man" a few years ago, and during the writing of the song, just a memory of sitting behind my dad and watching him play a John Lennon song, and being quite moved by it, came back to me. It felt like it wasn’t doing anything to camouflage the sound of my voice.”. English synth-pop band formed in Harrow, London, in 1979. As the lead singer of Britain’s most consistent electronic band, Hot Chip ’s Alexis Taylor is no stranger to experimentation. What came out of this session was potentially his most personal album of his career: it documented his parents' breakup, the first time he cried at music, and the suicide of his friend and longtime collaborator, Vince Sipprell. — Hot Chip (@Hot_Chip) March 31, 2019 Their new material initially seems to skew dark, with the beat-free Hungry Child – featuring plaintive lead vocals from Joe Goddard … As the lead singer of Britain’s most consistent electronic band, Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor is no stranger to experimentation. The band’s longevity might be down to the fact that its members have never been afraid of doing their own thing on the side. Hot Chip have become labelled the "geek band" because, visually and musically, they stand out like sore thumbs in a British music scene littered with trilby-hatted indie kids. Paddy What happens if it’s just the voice recorded well, the piano sounds good… To see if I could make a record that I liked that didn’t have loads of over-dubs. Their six-year old daughter, Prudence, is learning piano, having already mastered the drums, over hours spent in the studio and backstage at gigs. He was a bit “exhausted” by the last record. © 2020 Associated Newspapers Limited. We can’t stomach doing those crowd-pleasing things, Sixteen years is a long time for any band. I played one gig supporting someone when people were sat down and it kind of blew my mind that you could actually play a gig where people actually listened to it all the way through. Both your parents are on this album - your mum used to listen to "Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue", which you cover on Piano, and your father first introduced you to the instrument playing John Lennon to you - why did you choose to embed them in this record? I didn’t think of it like that. We spend a lot of money on just putting the show together, paying people to help us move the gear around. “Of course there are periodic problems but they’re not big enough to pose a threat to the band. It originated with his bandmate Joe Goddard urging Taylor to aim for a more "erotic" delivery. Photo by Ronald Dick Music News Hot Chip Bringing in synths, keyboards and the effervescent vocals of lead singer Alexis Taylor, the latest single from England’s Hot Chip is … “It’s more, when you start doing these other projects, how much time is there left for each other? Kinsella / 15 February 2017, 13:00 GMT. It’s difficult to maintain a level of success while people don’t pay for music anymore. It’s also like these new pieces of music are ghostly imprints of the tracks I’ve made as they kind of echo what’s going on musically. “We were grouped in with that phase for a bit, but we didn’t really know why.”, We spend a lot of money on just putting the show together, paying people to help us move the gear around. I don’t have that idea that the music my parents listen too is 'not cool'. Related Videos. “It’s ridiculous. That was to do with a time when Hot Chip signed a deal years ago and soon as it was signed I thought it was the wrong thing to do - I hadn’t been in agreement with everybody about it in the band and then I remember just thinking ‘oh that’s it then’... it was kind of just a despondent miserable feeling. The members of Hot Chip are, by their own admission, incorrigible music nerds, so the genre’s history and form is their bread and butter. They quite often miss the things I think fans like – the direct emotional hit of it.”. I think with a lot of other people's records, sometimes I’m listening to them and occasionally wanting less production, sometimes hoping for a more intimate listening experience. His cover of Gayle’s “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue”, came from a vivid memory of his mother playing it in the car shortly after his parents split. I hoped they would make a piece of music that anyone could put on and listen to and not know it was inspired by my song off Piano. 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Hot Chip band member Joe Goddard explained to the New Musical Express why the band wanted to make the change: "We wanted to record properly as a band for the first time. The blended version feels like a completely different album. When I read about Vince, I originally thought "Don't Worry" must be the tribute. It’s been a bit of a quiet passion of a mine for a while to maybe do that at some point in my career and I think that’s because I like a lot of bare, more intimate records that have a lot of space in them, like some of the Smog albums - Red Apple Falls, Plush, More You Becomes You - and even Randy Newman’s live record where he’s just at the piano. “We wanted to be excited by new techniques and new possibilities, and to be challenged a little bit more. It doesn’t come naturally to us. That song wasn’t written specifically about death, but about when a part of you feels like it has been crushed. June 8, … It was really shocking. He finds it hard when critics accuse him of clever-clever cynicism in his music (the fact that he studied at Cambridge is not unconnected). The breakup of my parents is something I don’t think about all the time but something just brought it to my attention whilst I was in kind of a bit of a sad state myself. It’s kind of a greatest non-hits set,” he smiles, a wry little grin that almost, but not quite, reaches the bottom of his glasses. “Anything you hear that isn’t the sound of that piano or voice starts to annoy you. I know this isn’t a psychoanalytical session we’re having but I think that’s why there’s this sort of mood in my music and this tendency to write introspective songs. It will have more of an electronic element to it... but we will see. Today he is small, serious, softly spoken and owlish in a large pair of tortoiseshell glasses that cover most of his cheeks, and a baggy sweatshirt that shouts HA in ironic capital letters. What happened was I asked all of those bands and artists to make a piece of music that would work in tandem with my track but also work on its own. It was that suicide in a way that led to new album Listen With(out) Piano. They are occasionally supplemented by Rob Smoughton and Sarah Jones for live performances and studio recordings. Hot Chip: from left, Alexis Taylor, Joe Goddard, Felix Martin, Al Doyle and Owen Clarke. Will it be strange to have people sat down? “The desire to put yourself in the open, in that exposed way, there is an element of it in everything I do. Why did you want Piano to be simply just you and piano? We play a set of good songs that people like and know, as well as some new songs that they don’t know. I had worked with Vince and another friend of ours, Emma - they’d worked on my solo records and my Hot Chip records. ” by the last record noisy way. ” is he obsessive Joe Goddard Al. 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