Hot Chip interview
Hot Chip
Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Foppery
In a reserved, studious manner, Alexis Taylor most resembles Napoleon Dynamite‘s Internet-dating lothario Kip, sans moustache. Diminutive and soft-spoken, it’s slightly hard to believe in a mere five hours — seersucker clad — he will muster the exuberance to perform in front of a sold-out, undulating sea of bodies. One on one, Hot Chip’s lyricist exudes a down-to-earth mentality erupting in spontaneous likability that seems to transfer quite well to the stage.
Sitting on a pea-green drapery-covered loveseat in the bowels of Lakeview’s Vic Theatre during sound check, the British electro pop quintet’s frontman highlights his dualistic nature in a conversation spanning Prince to early-20th-century Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy.
In the midst of a lengthy tour spanning U.S. festivals Coachella and Bonnaroo to European stalwarts All Tomorrow’s Parties and Roskilde to promote Hot Chip’s third studio album, Made In The Dark (Astralwerks), Taylor’s enjoyment level at this juncture ranks high. “I haven’t been finding it hard on this tour at all, actually,” he says in an accented lilt drowned out by the pulsating bass bleeding into the dressing room from upstairs. “I think it’s nice to push yourselves. It’s good when the venues are quite sweaty and hot; it feels like a physical experience. When it’s really heavily air-conditioned, that’s really nice, but you can sometimes feel like you’re not really doing anything. You can kind of become very slow, blasé about it.”
Still, Taylor refrains from the usual antics employed by others in his position — no peacock struts, no grandiose gestures, and definitely no rock star behavior. Not that he doesn’t revere rock royalty; he just doesn’t follow the same playbook.
“I don’t think we are like Prince and I don’t think we’re as good as him, but I do think about people I idolize like that every night that I’m onstage. I think about how it could be as good as . . . Prince or Alex Chilton or any of the things I’m kinda obsessed with. I think about their persona onstage is all . . . but I don’t ever try to imitate other people. I just think we all try to be ourselves, but you still can really learn from things that they do or things that make a show work or feel really alive,” Taylor explains. “Some people I used to watch would just sing like with their eyes closed for the whole gig and I kind of liked it and thought they were pretty cool or whatever, but I actually find myself not doing that. I find myself looking at people and connecting with them while singing and not trying to be too standoffish.”
Taylor name checks the Purple One often in conversation and with good reason — Hot Chip share a Coachella festival date with the icon. “I found out about a week ago and I was really, really excited,” Taylor gushes. Recently, Taylor attended four shows in one week during Prince’s 21-show stand in London — for those counting that’s two regular gigs and two late-night forays into Prince’s legendary “after party” jams — that left him pining for more spontaneity in the Hot Chip set list.
“I would love to get to the stage, where if we had, ’cause we have a reasonable amount of material for a band three albums in, but I feel like when we stop playing a song on a tour it tends to be kind of forgotten rather than like you can just go back to it . . . and I wish we could just drop into a song at any point in time, but Felix [Martin] has been changing all of the drum machines and stuff he uses,” Taylor says. “So, having changed all of that means he can’t really just drop into something that he hasn’t played for four years because he doesn’t have like a set of sounds ready for it. Whereas if you have a live drummer or you have Prince’s band and you just insist that they learn 300 songs for a tour then obviously they’re gonna know how to do that.”
— Janine Schaults
To find out how Hot Chip constructed their sound, grabe the May issue of Illinois Entertainer, available free throughout Chicagoland.
