Keeping it reel

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!”
If there’s one thing we can expect from Two Door’s Punchestown set, it’s scads of bouncing, riff-happy, shirtless revelers.
“We have the oddest experiences at gigs,” he laughs. “Fellas do the weirdest things! The last London show we had girls taking their tops off and it was a bit odd! There was this girl on some guy’s shoulders in just her bra swinging her top around her head and obviously what’s a dude gonna do behind her? He’s gonna unclip her bra strap, isn’t he? She was just trying to hold onto her clothes for dear life. I’m glad I didn’t have my glasses on so I couldn’t see it! We’ve had full-blown fights, too, like proper smacking each other in the face during songs. That’s the most distracting.”
When I speak to Baird and guitarist Sam Halliday, they’re fresh from playing their biggest ever headline date at the 5,300-capacity Brixton Academy, a show which sold out in just four hours. Presumably a gig of that scale comes with an extra bit of pressure?
“It’s always a bit nervewracking,” Halliday tells me, “but it was pure excitement to be playing such a great venue. It helps when you’re playing to that many people who are all really enjoying it, it helps get rid of any nerves straight away. We had a whole new big light show with us. It was kind of a test-out show to round off the campaign in the UK.”
It wasn’t all jazzhands and disco balls though – Halliday admits that the transition from Baby Bear stage to Mama Bear stage didn’t go off without a hiccup.
“We were using our new backdrop for the summer, this big white backdrop,” he says, “and we were using a kabuki drop at the front. We brought it down in the changeover and everyone just ripped it down! Air-conditioning came on, blew the backdrop forward and everyone just grabbed it. We learned that one the hard way!”
“I think it’s kind of blown our expectations every time we’ve done a show like that,” Baird muses. “We’re getting landmark shows in America now, but we don’t want to do any bigger because we want to save something for our next album. We’re just now trying to concentrate on winding things down and getting back stuck into writing. It’s going well so far, but there’s still quite a bit to do.”
“We’re definitely excited,” Halliday says of the new stadium-friendly material, which they’ll be capturing on wax at the end of the year. “We’ve got two sets of gear now so we can write whenever we want to, and we have a studio wired in so we can just record everything we do. We wrote a song last week for Brixton, which was nice.”
“We finished it maybe two days before the show,” Baird laughs, “and I think it’s probably the best new song we’ve written so far. We weren’t nervous about it or anything, we were just excited to write a song again, because it’s what bands should do and love to do, but we just couldn’t do it for a year.”
Speaking of the US of A, the threesome have just about recovered from the shock of winning the MTVU Breaking Woodie award back in March, which cemented their status as Northern Ireland’s most successful export of the last two decades.
“We didn’t know what to do,” Baird remembers, “to the point where we hadn’t even talked about an acceptance speech, because we were like, ‘There’s no point!’ Not trying to be humble or anything, it’s just such a massive TV channel over there and someone like Wiz Khalifa who has that massive ‘Black And Yellow’ song was up for an award and this wee band from Bangor win! It’s pretty fucking mental.”
Unless you frequent some form of sound-proof dungeon (Oy! Who let you out?), you’ll remember that Two Door Cinema Club bagged the Choice Prize for Irish album of the year and donated the €10,000 prize to Abaana, a small charity based in Bangor who work with underprivileged children in Africa. Presumably they got a big, fat smack on the lips from the folk behind the charity?
“They’re not the kind of organisation that can do an official thanks,” Baird laughs, “it’s pretty much just one guy!”
He explains the reasoning behind their altruistic gesture; “The Choice Award in itself is almost about trying to bring foreign attention to Irish music. We were friends with a lot of the other bands and we looked at how another band could use this money, it could really help them to boost their career. Not to say that we didn’t need it or anything, but our album had been out for a while and we’d toured all over and we’ve got our record labels and all that. It’s not something that we would have used, it would have just gone three ways and that’s something that we thought wasn’t fitting with what the Choice Award was about. We felt like we had to do something more constructive with it.”
While their prize money is being put to good use on the other side of the planet, Two Door have plenty of world-conquering to be getting on with, but I can’t let Baird go without congratulating him on his most prestigious accolade to date – just last month he graced the red hot end of the Man-O-Meter in Heat Magazine.
“Awh, thank you!” he beams, “Highlight of my career! My mum just loved it, she thought it was hilarious, the fact that her son was in Heat magazine was just hilarious to her.”
It’s the little things, eh?

Two Door Cinema Club play the Main Stage at Oxegen on the Saturday. Tourist History is out now on Kitsuné.