Coincidences have a tendency to emerge where you least expect them. Last month Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip was pondering who he would most like to collaborate with, and answered almost immediately: “I really like Sinéad O’Connor’s voice.”
“I think she would be a fantastic person to work with,” he elaborated. “It wouldn’t have to even sound like a Hot Chip recording, but just to work with her would be interesting.” A week later, the sad news breaks – and though Taylor has mentioned he’d like to collaborate with O’Connor a handful of times before, his words feel doubly significant now.
“I bought a Nothing Compares 2 U 7-inch single when I was a child, so I think I was ten when it came out,” he tells me when we speak following the Irish musician’s tragic death. “I always was very moved by that recording… I thought that she had great beauty in her singing voice, and I thought she also sang with a lot of guts and power. She’s just meant a lot to me for a long time.”
Though Taylor’s long-awaited collaboration never happened, despite dropping a few hints to his manager – “I’m not sure if she had heard Hot Chip’s music, so who knows?” – his band have been a name in the industry for almost as long as O’Connor.
Taylor founded Hot Chip alongside Joe Goddard back in 2000, with Al Doyle, Owen Clarke, and Felix Martin completing the line-up. From the crisp electro-pop of Over and Over to the more mellow funk of Huarache Lights, the shape-shifting group have made a career of embracing change, segueing between disco, funk, and dance genres.
Over the course of twenty-odd years, it feels like Hot Chip have done it all. Now, they appear to be beckoning in a new era with the release of what they’re billing as a stand-alone single, Fire of Mercy. It’s quintessential Hot Chip, finding a guest star in the shape of rising Irish-Malaysian dance producer Yunè Pinku. It also fuses the band’s synth-heavy sound with some unexpected poetry deep-cuts.
“William Blake, he has his Songs Of Innocence and Songs Of Experience,” Goddard says. “That’s about [how] the way as you age and turn from a child to an adult, the world kind of corrupts you in various ways… for me, it’s about how things become more morally difficult as you become an adult.”
Throw in some gospel choir-esque chords for good measure– meant to evoke the idea “of being saved or transcending something” according to Goddard – and what you have is a song that speaks to the band’s evolving maturity.
Indeed, Taylor and Goddard have come a long way from their early days making music together. The pair met at school in Putney, formed the band, and signed to the indie label Moshi Moshi for their 2004 debut Coming On Strong; a brilliantly bizarre record informed by The Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder and LCD Soundsystem in more or less equal measures. While its follow-up The Warning was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, and featured massive hit Over and Over, it was third album Made in the Dark that took them from small-time outfit to internationally successful, with dance gems like Ready for the Floor, One Pure Thought, and Shake a Fist.
Over the years, their music has also made it into some odd places. Reflecting on the moment he realised Hot Chip was taking off, Taylor pinpoints hearing his music on “Match of the Day, or Football Focus, or different TV shows that would play bits of Over and Over,” he says. “It’s quite an amusing thing to hear... I think maybe the most exciting one for me was [2006 The Warning track] Boy from School on The Simpsons, with a bit of the episode written around the lyrics of that song.”
Were the band asked to voice guest? “Sadly not,” he laughs. “But you know, we’re still here if they ever need that.”
Perhaps appropriately for a band that regularly remixes other peoples’ work, they’ve also been remixed their fair share of times – Taylor plays a Morris Fulton remix of Over and Over in his DJ sets, while Goddard recalls a meeting with the New York and Berlin based DJ Honey Dijon in the latter city. “She was saying that there’s a remix of one of our tracks by a German deep house group called Kollektiv Turmstraße, and she really enjoyed that,” he explains.
With two decades in the business under their belt, Hot Chip has seen the music industry transform a great deal – and not necessarily for the better. This year, London’s iconic nightclub Printworks closed, with Werkhaus following suit last week; as of 2022, a fifth of the UK’s clubs had shut for good compared to pre-pandemic levels.
Venues seem to be under threat like never before – something that hasn’t escaped the band’s notice. “I think that it’s a massive issue: just the fact that venues are being forced to close, really constantly,” Goddard says. “The Tories do not protect and support that industry at all.”
He cites the example of Berlin’s iconic Berghain club, which was recently awarded the status of cultural institution. “I feel like that’s the way we should be viewing important clubs and venues in London… we don’t seem to value modern club music and things in that same way.”
As a result, he says, “the amazing music that has come from this country, that might cease if we don’t have these places where young people can perform and go out. It’s crazy not to support that.”
Venues closing has also made it harder for bands to operate – many artists, including the US psych-pop band Animal Collective, have cited the rise of streaming, Brexit and even the cost-of-living crisis as huge blows to their budgets, forcing them to downscale and, in some instances, even cancel tour dates. Have Hot Chip experienced the same thing?
“[There’s] not a huge amount of money coming into a certain level of artists from streaming. Maybe there is for the very, very big artists,” Taylor says. “I think it’s hardest for those starting out to launch their careers… it’s hard for people to tour and have the money to pay musicians, so people might scale down what they’re doing.
“We experience those challenges, too. But maybe we’re a bit luckier than some, in that we already started [our] career 15 to 20 years ago, when there was some income, or more income, in music. Maybe the music industry wasn’t exactly thriving, because CDs were no longer selling, [and] vinyl wasn’t selling, but the live music industry was thriving.”
Not so much anymore, particularly when it comes to staging expensive global tours. Mercury winner Little Simz cancelled her US tour last year after she said it would leave her “in a huge deficit”; Sampa the Great did the same with her European shows citing financial risk and tour exhaustion. One of the most recent casualties of a larger wave of venue closures is O2’s Brixton Academy, which has been shut ever since January of this year, when two people were killed in a fatal crush outside the venue during a performance by Nigerian artist Asake.
Goddard has no qualms about jumping into the matter. “We played a few shows at Brixton Academy to launch our album [2022’s Freakout/ Release] and it always just felt massively special,” he says.
“I think that’s more poignant now because the police and the council are trying to shut down Brixton Academy, which I just feel would be like the worst thing for that community… I just feel like Brixton Academy is so essential to London nightlife. It can’t just be closed down, just because the police feel like it’s difficult for them to keep it safe. [It] could be redesigned or whatever, but it needs to stay open.”
With their new single out in the world, there are no plans yet for a future album – or not imminently, anyway – though the pair do tease another exciting new collaboration on the horizon. For now, at least, the pair aren’t too worried about the future of music.
“If people want to connect to music, it finds them. People go and make their own discoveries of things. Maybe it’s just a bit different from when Joe and I were discovering records in record shops, or [we] borrowed things from a library, ” Taylor says.
“My daughter’s going to see Harry Styles again and again and again: different people are meaningful to the younger audiences... you have to adapt.”
