Keeping it reel
Since last we met hook-wielding pop-rock wizards Two Door Cinema Club, they've taken America by storm, bagged the prestigious Choice Prize and flogged the 100,000th copy of their scintillating debut album Tourist History. As a summer of festival dates stretches ahead, Celina Murphy catches up with the busiest boys in Irish rock to talk awards, headline slots and get the skinny on album number two.
Celina Murphy, 24 Jun 2011

When Hot Press featured an upbeat electro-rock trio from Bangor on our ‘Ones To Watch’ list at the start of last year, we struggled to find anyone who’d even heard the name Two Door Cinema Club. Not even 18 months later, their moniker is synonymous with an unstoppable, globetrotting live force.
The enduring mental picture of Kevin Baird, Sam Halliday and Alex Trimble is of three manicured twentynothings throwing themselves violently around a festival stage, but if their roles as writers, remixers and most recently, philanthropists are easily forgotten, it’s no-one’s fault but their own.
After 168 tour dates and 130,000 miles, we can conclusively deduce that Two Door Cinema Club just can’t turn down a gig. Should you require further proof, take yourself over to songkick.com, where the band are named the fourth hardest working act of 2010, ahead of the likes of Vampire Weekend, 30 Seconds To Mars and Lady Gaga.
“I dunno how the fuck it happened,” Kevin Baird exclaims, “but I think we’re doing more festivals this summer than we did last, which wasn’t the plan! It’s so hard to say ‘no’ to stuff, and at this point we’re getting a lot of offers from places we haven’t been to before... parts of France, Poland and we’re going to Singapore for our first show on our way to Tokyo. It’s tough to say ‘no’, and we’re starting to feel really comfortable out there.”
Over the next couple of months, the local-boys-done-good will be hitting main stages at Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds, as well as headlining the Park Life festival in Manchester. Then there’s the small matter of their Saturday show at Oxegen...
“Last year was really incredible,” Baird beams. “When we first got asked to do it, we were on the third stage and I think it was after we were on this Vodafone ad they were like, ‘Do you want to move up to the second stage?’ Then about two months before Oxegen we got a call saying, ‘John Mayer’s pulled out, do you guys want to go up on the Main Stage?’, that was the really incredible one. It felt like we had slowly moved up the ranks of Oxegen in the space of a couple of months, and without doing anything!”
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