“It's quite a strange sounding song, in a way,” says Alexis Taylor, reflecting on his band’s 2008 single Ready For The Floor. “You wouldn't really write it down as an idea: Let's have gentle falsetto vocals referencing a Batman film, while singing about a kind of brotherly connectedness – and try to be inspired by UK garage music and Prince.”
It’s this eclectic and at times eccentric mix of reference points that makes Taylor’s band Hot Chip such an enduring force.
Operating at the intersection between dance music and indie pop, the London five-piece have taken something of a mix-and-match approach to songwriting over the years, blending synth lines and sequenced beats with live percussion, rhythmic guitar lines and an inventive approach to arrangement that often subverts the structures of traditional pop music.
Formed in 2000 by Taylor and schoolmate Joe Goddard, Hot Chip evolved into a five-piece by the time of their debut album Coming On Strong, adding Al Doyle, Owen Clarke, and Felix Martin to complete a fluid lineup that sees members regularly shifting roles both in the studio and onstage.
The band’s breakthrough came with Mercury-nominated second album The Warning in 2006, which was followed by 2008’s Made In The Dark and 2010’s One Life Stand.
This month sees Hot Chip reissuing all three albums. Ahead of the release, we sat down with Taylor, Goddard and Doyle in the band’s London studio to talk about the making of Ready For The Floor, the Grammy-nominated second single from Made In The Dark and – along with The Warning’s Over And Over and Boy From School – one of Hot Chip’s most popular tracks.
“I think Joe just played it in the middle of us working on something else in the studio,” Taylor recalls. “It was a bit of a surprise to hear all of these sounds that he'd been working on. We were midway through something else and took a pause, and then we heard these drum sounds and that main synth riff.”
That initial sketch was created by Goddard in his home studio, although as he explains, to call his setup at the time a ‘studio’ might be overselling it.
“The computer and a small amount of gear was just next to my bed,” he says. “There was a kind of spaghetti of black cables all over the floor, which traumatised my wife and still does.”
"I was very excited – I’d probably just learnt that you could use a synth to make drum sounds"
The core elements of Ready For The Floor were sounds sequenced from a Moog Modular, a synth the band would later buy in hardware form when the System 55 was reissued in 2015, although at the time Goddard had to settle for Arturia’s Modular V emulation.
“I’d just got this soft synth version of the Moog Modular,” he says. “I think I was very excited about that synth at the time, because I used that to make the beat and the main chord pattern in the song as well.
“I’d probably just learnt that you could use a synth to make drum sounds, which is something that we still love doing today. It kind of makes things feel a bit more unusual.”
The main body of the beat comes from rounded, bouncy synth kicks interspersed with stereo ‘laser’ tom sounds and noisy snares. The result is a very electro-sounding pattern, where the drums fall into the territory somewhere between beat and bassline. There’s a distinctive shuffle to the track’s rhythm too.
“We were all really into UK garage at the time,” Goddard explains, “so it's got a kind of off kilter feel a bit like that.”
That workflow was typical of Hot Chip’s creative process at the time, where Goddard would bring loose ideas to the band during rehearsal or studio sessions, and the remaining members would then work together to form them into a proper song.
“We have moments when all of us bring in ideas to the studio, but it's always been my passion to make drum tracks and bass lines as the beginnings of things,” Goddard tells us. “I often make beginnings and present them to everyone to be finished together.
“On this song, I definitely would have started just making that drum beat and then making bass and chords to kind of fit in the funkiest way I could with that drum rhythm.”
“It was inspirational,” Taylor continues. “It was just instantly exciting-sounding and interesting. I think the vocal ideas came very quickly. I’ve got quite vivid memories of us all hovering around the computer and thinking, ‘oh, I've got an idea’. Those are the most fun moments for me, in the studio, where you hear something new and you just can't get the recording done quickly enough. You're reacting to the music and to the atmosphere.”
That atmosphere, as the band recall, had a slight edge to it on the day Ready For The Floor was written.
“I think there was something a little bit tense, maybe from what we'd been working on previously,” Taylor explains. “I don't remember what song that was. But the words are partly about breaking that tension and communicating and speaking. And sort of getting stuff out in the open. That's part of what the song talks about. But being a typical Hot Chip song, it's also got these weird allusions to the Tim Burton Batman film for some reason.”
That allusion comes in the form of Taylor’s repeated mantra, ‘you’re my number one guy’, lifted from a scene in which Jack Nicholson’s Joker confronts a crime boss played by Jack Palance in the 1989 film. The line in the film is delivered with an aggressive undertone, although Taylor takes the phrase more at face value.
“In this case, it wasn't really meant to be a kind of threat or anything. It's more taking that phrase from pop culture and just using it in a different context. We’re singing positively about, you know, ‘Oh, this track sounds great. Joe, you're my number one guy. We can do this, we can make this brilliant bit of music all together.’”
“We have this thing that somehow happens where there's something on every album that sounds like the Coronation Street theme"
The approach of all members chipping-in is evident when the band opens up the track’s stems for us in Cubase. While the beats and chords provide a backbone throughout the song, the rest of the arrangement is built out of a collage of often short ideas. Taylor’s simple vocal hook is fleshed out with harmonies from other members; percussive guitar parts start and stop; simple synth riffs create layers of counter melody.
“We have this thing that somehow happens where there's something on every album that sounds like the Coronation Street theme," Goddard says, soloing at meandering riff played on a Dave Smith Poly Evolver, which does have a passing resemblance to the trumpet motif that precedes ITV’s long-running soap opera.
It’s just one of numerous ear-worm synth motifs that make the song memorable. Another is a telephone-like melodic line, as well as another descriptively named ‘cow synth’ in the stem files – both of which potentially originate from a cheap Casio Tone Bank keyboard.
“There's sounds in there from a keyboard that I bought for Joe for two pounds at the car boot sale,” Taylor tells us.
Hot Chip’s studio resources have come a long way since the band recorded Made In The Dark. We meet them in their current studio, situated next door to the room Doyle was using as a studio at the time the album was made, but now stocked with an envy-inducing collection of music hardware, including the Moog Modular, a Yamaha CS-80 and racks of vintage drum machines and outboard.
On reflection though, the band admit that part of the success of tracks like Ready For The Floor and Over And Over might lie in the naivety of their songwriting and production at the time.
“There's a point to be made about how we didn't really know what we were doing,” Doyle says. “We were still learning our craft at the time. We were definitely very interested in production, and we were listening to lots of cool music and trying to replicate our heroes, but we had a pretty basic setup.
“There was nobody around us that was teaching us how to do this stuff, so we were having to figure it out ourselves. We probably made some quite weird decisions, or just did things that you wouldn't do if you were in a more professional studio or working with a producer.
“It's difficult to get back into that mindset,” he continues, “because it's difficult to unlearn what you already know. It's funny to think that these songs that were earlier in our career have made this tremendous connection with people.
“I think that is something to do with the directness between thought and expression. You're just thinking of an idea and getting it down in whatever way is available to you. People respond to that because there isn't a set of production layers between you and the listener. I think that is quite instructive.”
Watch the band break down Ready For The Floor in full at the video at the top of the page. Hot Chip’s reissues of The Warning, Made In The Dark and Coming On Strong are out now.
