Two Door Cinema Club
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Two Door Cinema Club

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After forming in 2007 and earning a legion of fans through the (now archaic, but then groundbreaking) MySpace music platform, the band released Tourist History on the Parisian tastemaking fashion/music label Kitsuné. The album was a half-hour injection of irresistible indie dance that propelled them into the world spotlight, and the band toured relentlessly, almost flogging it for all it was worth. For Baird, it got to a point where he felt the band really needed to move on to the next chapter. “We felt exhausted. We’d started touring around six months prior [to Tourist History’s release], and then we toured it for over a year and a half after it came out – so we’d been on the road for a long time. We still loved the album, but we wanted to play something new and wanted to write something now.” Given the success of their debut, one would assume that backing it up would be a daunting prospect, but that didn’t cross Baird’s mind. “We never really said, ‘Oh shit, we better do something good now’”, he says. “[In the past] few years we had stopped exercising that muscle of writing a song. And it felt kinda weird, we used to do it all the time. Writing together after so long … we were just really excited. We stopped touring and it became fun again, the whole creative process.”

Beacon was always going to be a different album to Tourist History. Their debut was written with the uncultivated chutzpah and naivety of a band who, at the time, had had no success, no touring experience, no scrutiny. Sitting down to write the newer one though, things had changed. “We were a couple years older and we had done a lot, seen a lot,” Baird says, sounding every bit the tour-weary young man he is. “The first album was [filled with] the optimism of what we thought or hoped was gonna happen; the excitement of it. Not that we don’t have fun on the road now or anything, but there was a lot that happened between the first and second album… Suddenly, [touring] took up all of our lives, for the next two and a half years.”

The overarching loneliness that Beacon exudes is reflective not only of their life on the road, but also of the band having worked on it to the beat of their own drum; it’s not another happy-go-lucky party album in the vein of Tourist History. The band felt the need to show a certain vulnerability and sombreness on the record, rather than pandering to the demands of fans and stakeholders. “We didn’t have some horrible, overbearing producer with a creepy moustache or anything like that. We worked independently of labels; independently of everything. Everyone just let us go off and do our own thing.”

Their ‘own thing’ is a more refined, empathic sound than the ‘What You Know’s and ‘Undercover Martyn’s of their debut. The reason the band was on what seemed like every summer festival lineup around the world was because their music yielded to a live setting, as if envisaging the live performance was a big part of the writing process. “We thought about things a lot more in that aspect [with the first album] because we would write a song, and then a week later we would play a show in Belfast or something. But with [Beacon] there was no touring while we were writing it, so it was harder to be imagined. We started writing things without thinking about how it would sound live,” Baird says. “When you’re [writing] in a basement, you’re freezing and you’re wearing three jumpers and you’re just sitting there with your instrument. When we’re all piecing the song together like that, it’s hard to imagine playing that to people.”

While this may seem like a risk, Baird claims that playing to your crowds and indulging in their expectations is a stagnant creative mindset. “A lot of people talk about bands ‘selling out’ and people attribute that to many different things. In my head, the real definition of selling out is when you’re ripping yourself off because you know that it’s easy. You know that song from your first album got on the radio and people liked it and it was successful and you just rip yourself off again ‘cos that format works.” The band has found itself a comfy niche in both camp indie and camp dance, meaning they can fit perfectly on the bill at Glastonbury or Coachella, but also at something much more dance music oriented like Sydney’s Field Day. But this hasn’t been some carefully thought-out business manoeuvre; contrarily, Baird sees premeditation as the antithesis to creative progress. “We never really talk about it, yknow we never said to each other what kinda band we are, this is our genre and this is what we stick to. Trying not to calculate it is the secret I think.”

BY RACH SENEVIRATNE