15 questions with…HOT CHIP

Is it really two decades since Hot Chip first got together? Time for a celebratory album release in the form of a Late Night Tales compilation, and for the band to reveal their studio – and many a Eurorack – secrets

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Yes it really is a full 20 years since Hot Chip first formed with founder members Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard. After a few EPs the duo were joined by current regulars Felix Martin, Al Doyle, and Owen Clarke to launch themselves into something of a synth and quirky pop stratosphere. Their debut album came out in 2004, called Coming on Strong, but it was the band’s follow up, 2006’s The Warning that bothered the charts with the singles Boy from School and Over and Over, going on to be nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. Since then they’ve released five further albums including the Grammy-nominated Made in the Dark (2008) and 2019’s critically-acclaimed A Bath Full of Ecstasy. They are celebrating a couple of decades of success with a brand new album Late Night Tales: Hot Chip, the latest in the famous series of compilations which features tracks by Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and Fever Ray (among others), along with new material from the band themselves. Alexis Taylor and Felix Martin join us to discuss how much things have changed since the early days of a Dell and Cubase (that’s a Dell PC, Not Adele).

1 How did you get into music production?

Alexis: “Just because we liked other people’s music so much, and had started trying to make some of our own, as teenagers. I heard a lot of music that I loved growing up, good records which were inspiring, like Short People by Randy Newman and lots of pop music in the charts, plus older things from the 60s and 70s that my parents liked. Joe Goddard and I bonded over lo-fi Amercian indie music, Aphex Twin, American R’n’B, soul music, reggae etc.”