From A Whisper To A Scream

They may have inflicted 800 years of tyranny, 30 years of Jimmy Hill and a decade of the X-Factor on us – personally I think Hill’s Cross of St. George dickie-bow was far more heinous than anything Oliver Cromwell got up to – but the Brits redeemed themselves this summer with Danny Boyle’s acid trip of an Olympics opening ceremony.

Elite sport as seen through the eyes of the Trainspotting cast, David Holmes, Holy Fuck, Doctor Who, The Sex Pistols, William Henry Monk, The Prodigy, Handel, Mike Oldfield, Winifred Atwell, Rizzle Kicks, Lionel Bart and Her Maj – to name but a baker’s dozen – combined to challenge the notion of the UK as a divided nation of stiff upper lipped Daily Telegraph readers and sink estate pram pushers.
Smack bang in the middle of all the mayhem was Alex Trimble, the newly bequiffed Two Door Cinema Club man who was invited to perform the new Underworld song, ‘Caliban’s Dream’, with Only Men Aloud, the Dockhead Choir, the London Symphony Orchestra, soprano Elizabeth Roberts and percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie. Surreal or what?
“Totally!” the affable 23-year-old agrees. “I don’t know when or if it will ever sink in. The week was very, very full-on which was good because it didn’t give me a chance to think about it too much. I came in on the Saturday before and watched the run-through; then on Sunday I had a rehearsal; Monday another rehearsal; Tuesday we went to Amsterdam to do some promo; flew back Wednesday morning and went straight into rehearsals; Thursday I had a day off; and Friday I was in rehearsals straight through the day. It was mental!”
Such is the lot of a globetrotting international rock star whose band’s new album, Beacon, debuted at number one last month in Ireland and if it hadn’t been for those meddling Vaccines – starts shaking fist, Scooby-Doo-style – would have been top of the pile in the UK as well. I imagine there were a few missed calls and messages on his phone when he came off stage at Wembley?
“Just a few! They couldn’t understand what had happened. I wasn’t really allowed to tell anyone, but I let my mum know two days before and she told my dad – I didn’t want to give them a heart attack! I told the lads as well and warned them there’d be slaps if they breathed a word of it!”
Had he met Danny Boyle – or Sir Danny as he’ll undoubtedly be post-the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List – before?
“No, Rick Smith, who wrote the song, gave Danny Tourist History; he really liked it and made the call.”
If it had been ten years ago, we’d have got Winston Churchill, bowler hats and Phil fucking Collins, but this was a really inclusive modern view of Britain – with added Johnny Rotten!
“Danny made it mental! Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more bonkers it did. I loved what he was trying to represent – it was young and independent artists who don’t necessarily get too much mainstream attention. Having David Holmes in there too was brilliant for Northern Ireland.”
“I kept getting messages from friends saying, ‘What the hell is your mate doing up there?’” laughs his guitar-playing colleague Sam Halliday. “They were shocked and also really proud that Alex landed a gig that’s not too far behind Live Aid in terms of the number of people who were watching. Hopefully they’ll hear our tunes on the radio and think, ‘It’s that bloke from the Olympics!’”
Danny Boyle’s isn’t the only career-changing phone call Alex has received over the past 12 months with Gaga’s peeps asking last October whether they might have a few spare hours to remix her Ladyship’s ‘Electric Chapel’.
“You think she’d have gone with big names like David Guetta and Tiesto but, no, it was us, Metronomy, Friendly Fires and Wild Beasts,” Alex enthuses. “We didn’t get to meet her, so I’ve no idea whether it was her or one of her team who picked us. I imagine she was striving to be relevant, but it certainly brought us new fans who liked the music and went to find out what else we’d done.”
“There are some people we’d have said ‘no’ to but Lady Gaga’s just a great pop star,” adds drummer Kevin Baird who not to be outdone by Alex’s quiff has added a beard to his hairy accoutrements. “She was using us and we were using her, I guess!”
A person they did get to meet when they headed out on the NME Awards tour with her in January is Amanda Brunker’s mate Azealia Banks. What did they make of the hip hop riddle wrapped up inside an enigma?
“She’s mental!” is the Trimble verdict. “Totally bonkers! We didn’t get the chance to hang out with her much because she was so busy. It’s taken us a few years to get to where we are now, but she just blew up overnight. I remember talking to Azealia one day and in between gigs she’d flown to Paris for a video shoot which involved riding round the streets on a horse! It was Fashion Week as well, so she’d run off stage, jump into a car and drive back to London for all these events and parties. I thought, ‘I don’t know how you do all this at once.’ It was a bit terrifying.”
Alex’s assertion that “she seems to be breezing through it with confidence” was undermined somewhat a few weeks ago when post-Spanish champagne ‘n’ wine binge Ms. Banks declared herself to be “exhausted” and pulled a number of festival appearances including the Electric Picnic. Let’s hope that we’re not witnessing the birth of the new Amy Winehouse.
“It takes a certain character to take all that on at once,” he reflects. “We’re not those kind of people. We needed to take baby steps. We’re super-confident playing our own songs because we got that time to develop when we were younger. We’d practice five days a week, working really, really hard to be the best band we could be.”
There must have been brown trouser moments like doing Later… With Jools Holland for the first time or finding themselves on the same Glasto stage as U2, Coldplay and Beyoncé.
“Because it’s happened gradually, it just seems like the next step on the ladder,” Ken proffers. “Some of these things are crazy but you don’t get time to process them… well, not until we get three or four days at home and you go, ‘Fuck, I was on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury!’ It all gets blocked out until that moment sat on the sofa where you kind of crumble in front of yourself.”
The Two Door Cinema Club sat before me today appear to be the best of friends, but having spent pretty much the whole of 2008 to 2011 on varying sizes of tour bus there must have been some smelly feet and dirty toilet-related bust-ups.
“We’re not the offenders when it comes to that sort of thing,” Alex reveals. “We have some filthy crew. We love them, they’re our friends but they’re not the best at personal hygiene.”
“It used to be whoever was willing to work for a pittance, but now we can afford to have a constant crew who’ve become our road family,” Sam takes-over. “We’ve made characters of them on our blog. Brendan, the youngest member, is this little excitable Essex lad we call ‘The Kid’. Then there’s our sound engineer who’s in his 50s and seen everything; he’s got all the stories. If anyone gets on anyone else’s nerves there’s somebody else you can go and talk to, which wasn’t the case in the early days when it was just the three of us. It did sort of become unhealthy at one point being in each other’s pockets so much.”
“This is the first time in the history of Two Door that we’ve lived apart,” Ken notes. “That’s added a little more normality as well.”
Inveterate road warriors that they are, can they better Thin Lizzy man Ricky Warwick’s story about a member of his former band, The Almighty, chopping up a line of their 65-year-old bus driver’s chronic Athlete’s Foot and snorting it as the forfeit for losing a bet?
“I think I might throw up, that’s disgusting!” Alex blanches. “We don’t want to ruin our nice schoolboy image, you know? Does it have to be horrible?”
Ideally but I’ll settle for plain stupid.
“Oh, we’ve done lots of stupid things! Mostly when we’re socialising with other bands and turn into children. I don’t know how this happened – it started off as a pillow fight and turned into a completely destroyed dressing-room with broken glass and everything. Mumford & Sons’ crew were involved. Every now and again something typically rock ‘n’ roll happens. The fire extinguishers come out!”
Occupying the Beacon production chair was Garret ‘Jacknife’ Lee, the Dublin-born studio whiz whose CV includes U2, REM, Snow Patrol, Bloc Party, Weezer, Regina Spektor, Editors, The Hives and, most recently, Robbie Williams.
“We were always aware of Garret and liked him but feared working with a big name producer because we couldn’t imagine him not putting his stamp on it,” Alex resumes. “The fear of relinquishing control in a way. Our manager said, ‘Just meet him and talk’ so we did and fell in love straight away!”
“We expected him to come with a sort of overbearing attitude and loads of baggage and a huge ego but he was like, ‘Okay, what do you wanna do?’ When we told him our ideas – and we had very strong ones – he went, ‘That’s brilliant, let’s make this happen!’ As soon as that meeting was over we were booking the flights, clearing our schedule, we were making the record! And we never looked back; it was the best decision we could have made.”
Tragically, Lee is now based in Los Angeles, which meant the chaps leaving behind the autumnal grayness of Glasgow where they live and wallowing in Californian sunshine for a month.
“That was a very happy turn of events!” Alex beams. “He’d just finished building his own studio there, so that – tragically, as you say – was the only way it was going to work. The best thing about it is that it doesn’t look like a studio. We walked in and there was no desk, no microphones, nothing. He had weird toys and fun instruments lying around, huge sofas, a computer and some speakers at the end of the room. That was it.”
“It was more focused on creating than recording,” Ken interjects.
“Yeah, the whole room was covered in fairy lights,” Alex resumes. “You’re in this wonderland when you’re recording. Then you take a step outside and remember you’re on top of a mountain in California. You’re looking over this valley of forests and there’s a swimming pool and a ping-pong table and a trampolene. You’re thinking, ‘Is this real?’”
Was there time for getting shitfaced in the Viper Room?
“No, we were too busy for really bad behaviour,” Trimble rues. “Kev’s girlfriend was there and introduced us to some of her Los Angeles mates. It was important for us in terms of our career to live there and experience America a bit more. Because it’s been non-stop touring and promo we’ve never had time to soak up the atmosphere properly.”
Not always having the broadest of world-views, what do American media types make of Two Door coming from Northern Ireland?
“Some who think they know more than they do try to link us in with the Troubles, but that wasn’t part of our lives really. What’s influenced us is the bands from home we grew up with. Ash would have been huge for me. I’d learn all their songs on guitar and play along with them. They made me believe it was possible because they were from a small town and broke out with these great albums. We’ve gotten to know the guys and Tim in particular, which is totally surreal. He’s still there championing Irish music.”
Do older Nordy outfits like The Undertones and Stiff Little Fingers resonate with him?
“The Undertones were before our time but once the Oh Yeah Centre started up ‘Teenage Kicks’ sort of became its anthem. It was a song that united all the bands in Northern Ireland. We missed out on their back catalogue, but it’s something I’m trying to get into now.”
It’s amazing to think that come next summer there could be a second Bangor (by way of Donaghdee!) band playing to 55,000 locals in Ward Park.
“Yeah, I remember when Snow Patrol did that a few years ago – the whole town was buzzing. It’d be amazing if we could follow in their footsteps. We’ve gotten in touch with Gary Lightbody through Jacknife and there’s just so much love between these Northern Irish bands. Jonny loaned us his kit; most of the drums on the album are Snow Patrol’s!”
There is a danger that, á la Snow Patrol, Two Door Cinema Club’s success will alienate their more stamp collector-y fans who don’t like the idea of sharing “their” band with people who buy their records in Tesco.
“I’ve never understood that indie snobbery thing; if a band’s good they’re good. Snow Patrol get a lot of stick for ‘selling out’, but writing a song with three chords and a seemingly simple melody can be one of the most difficult things to do. It’s fantastic. I’d love the ability to write a song like ‘Chasing Cars’ or ‘Run’, which really hits people. Gary is one of the great songwriters of his generation.”
“It’s also hard to be around for so long and maintain your success,” Ken ventures. “I remember getting Final Straw and then a few months later ‘Run’ was just everywhere. Seeing them go from an unknown band to that was amazing – the years of hard work paid off.”
As indeed they have for Two Door Cinema Club. What have been the trio’s standout moments so far?
“Headlining our first festival in Madrid,” Alex says. “We played after Azealia Banks and had a ball. Every time we go to a new country and realise there are people who want to see us is amazing. Next week we go to Hungary for the first time; it’s all these little firsts. Winning the Choice Prize was a big one. There’s a fear that people will hate you for being successful, so it’s nice to have that support from home.”

Beacon is out now on Kitsuné and gets a live airing on January 19 in the Dublin O2.