‘That Became the Blueprint for What Hot Chip Music Is’: Alexis Taylor Shares the Backstory of Six of the Band’s Biggest Hits

Hot Chip wasn’t sold on the idea of a greatest hits album. “We’ve always been a bit like, ‘Do we really need to do that?’ the band’s frontman Alexis Taylor tells Billboard while chatting from the group’s hometown of London. “I guess it just didn’t seem so important to us.”

But the project, which Hot Chip was invited to do by their longtime label Domino Records, ultimately became a way for the beloved indie dance outfit to review its history, celebrate the 20-year anniversary of its 2005 debut Coming On Strong and take part in the thought experiment of which songs in the eight-album Hot Chip catalog ultimately best define it.

“I mean, we didn’t have any big rows or anything,” says Taylor, “but it wasn’t the easiest decision making process.”

Ultimately the band – Taylor, Joe Goddard, Al Doyle, Owen Clarke and Felix Martin – narrowed it down to 14 songs that over the years have come to define Hot Chip’s live shows, experiences that match the intellect, sensitivity and penchant for melancholy that exist in much of the music with tempos that demand you shake your ass. As club and festivalgoers around the world know, Hot Chip shows are a party, and that mood of revelry is what the band attempted to capture with the selection they ultimately decided on for Joy In Repetition, which was released by Domino on Sept. 6.

“We were thinking about which songs have been essential to the live sets and which songs just ate there, even if they’re not the newest material,” Taylor says. “These are songs that just feel like an essential and central part of the live show.”

Named after the lyrics of the band’s 2006 classic “Over and Over,” Joy In Repetition also includes a pair of remixes – one of 2008’s “Ready For the Floor” and one of “Devotion,” a new song released as part of the compilation. Taylor says making this new track was a good way for the band to stretch its legs after a recent break and adds that its just a hint of the new music Hot Chip is currently at work on.

“So this project doesn’t mark the end of the band,” says Taylor. “With us, there’s always a new album coming.”

Here, Taylor shares the backstory of six Hot Chip essentials.

“Ready for the Floor” (Made in the Dark, 2008)

“Ready for the Floor” was a demo Joe brought to all of us. The whole band was together when we worked on it, and I felt like there was a lot of tension in the room because we’d been trying to make another song and it was not really working. I felt like Joe was frustrated that it wasn’t working, and you could see that frustration in his body language.

As soon as he played me and the rest of the guys the music for what became “Ready for the Floor,” I felt it was so good that I could sing words to it immediately right there on the spot. Some of those words were very encouraging, like, “You’re my No. 1 guy.” “We’re ready for the floor,” as in, we’re ready to make something for the dance floor. It’s about people coming together. Other words in it were more about there being a kind of invisible barrier and tension, like “I can’t hear your voice, do I have a choice?” So it was about trying to break through that communication barrier in song.

It came together really quickly, and there were lots of group decisions and group vocals and harmonizing and guitar parts. But also just to briefly remember what my life was like around that time, I think I started going to loads of car boot sales, which are the same as flea markets or yard sales, and I bought this keyboard, which I already had one of. I liked it so much that when I saw another one I bought it for Joe, and it was something he used for some of the sounds in this song. So I have memories of it being like, you can buy an old Yamaha keyboard for two pounds and it’s useful to Joe in some creative way, and it makes its way into this amazing production.

“Boy From School” (The Warning, 2006)

We must have just finished the first Hot Chip album, maybe it hadn’t even come out yet. We were getting together in Joe’s family home where he still lived at that point. In his bedroom he had a couple of keyboards and not much other music equipment. I had the Yamaha keyboard I was describing and then a Casiotone, and it was all over the first Hot Chip album, like almost every song, if not every song. That was my go to writing device.

I really loved the music of Robert Wyatt. I still do. I had been listening to these Robert Wyatt albums while working at a office job at the record label Domino that our band is now signed to. “Boy From School” was looking back over my school days and trying to make a song inspired by the sound I heard in these Robert Wyatt records. His voice is very high and plaintive. The albums I really liked by him were the ones he made in the mid-’80s, and this Casio keyboard had something of that quality to it. But I wasn’t trying to copy his music. It was just somewhere in the background.

The reason I came up with the “Boy From School” chords, melody and words was because I was transported back to my school days, and it was nostalgic to look back over that time. I left Joe’s room where we were recording and went into the next door bedroom that was his brother’s room. I was friends with both Joe and [his brother] at school, so this is a place I used to stay over if there was a sleepover. We’d all play Oasis or Pavement songs on the guitar and watch videos and stay up all night. So I knew that room, and Joe’s brother wasn’t home, so I went in there for some time on my own and quickly wrote “Boy From School.”

I was using the Casio, and it had a waltz time drum machine [pre-setting.] I came back into the room and played it to Joe, and he said, “I really like it. Let’s record it.” Then after recording exactly what I’d written, he had the idea that it could be envisaged as a disco song. We changed it from this waltz tempo, and it still retained that melancholic feel of the melody and the words about longing and loss, which were an interpretation of a school relationship I had with somebody. We remade it instantaneously as a uptempo disco song. It wasn’t something we thought would be a single, but we did feel it had an emotional core that we really liked, especially in combination with a disco or house tempo and groove, which was fairly new to us.

So I think it was a really important song, because it almost became the blueprint for what Hot Chip music is — which is melancholy meeting with dance music.

“Huarache Lights” (Why Make Sense, 2015)

This was made at Joe’s home studio. I think he had begun it before I was there. Some of the samples he put into the track were a big part of its atmosphere. There’d been a bit of sampling here and there, but [the use of Lyn Collins’ “Think (About It)”] was the most overt use of sampling in a Hot Chip track up to that point. It had a certain energy from having a soul vocal within it, and then rhythmically it felt really interesting. It felt like the chords change in a unconventional way, a bit like “Flutes” does actually, where there’s a 12-bar pattern rather than a 16-bar pattern.

I don’t know why, but I was trying to say something that recognized like, “I think we’re still good and we’re still relevant” whilst also inviting a younger audience of music makers to come through and replace us. Hence this idea of “replace with the things that do the job better.” It’s this invitation saying that if we’re getting older as we’re making dance music, maybe we can recognize that aging process, and whilst recognizing it we can also say, “let’s see if anyone can come through that’s as good as us.”

There’d been a lot of conversations in the band about whether we were still relevant. So here I’m saying “look, we are, actually.”

“Flutes” (In Our Heads, 2012)

This was one where I was sent an instrumental demo from Joe, and we were working on it separately, so it was just a file in an email. The moment I opened it and listened to it and put it into Logic or GarageBand, I was just responding to the music and the rhythms in the music and trying to write words which followed the same rhythmic patterns that are there in the Buddhist monk chanting that’s been sampled by Joe.

I didn’t know what I was trying to say. I was responding in a very stream of consciousness way to the music and trying to describe where I was physically in the room I was in and the sounds I wanted to add to it. It’s stream of consciousness, but it’s also a memory of things important to Hot Chip, so when I’m talking about “I put up on a string today,” that’s me thinking about the days spent when we were younger listening to the Beach Boys‘ Pet Sounds and thinking about their approach to music, which was you take a plucked string instrument, like a banjo, and layer it on top of a harpsichord, and you layer that on top of an accordion. For us, that was foundational as great, inventive production in music.

Obviously we weren’t making music doing those precise things, but somewhere inside of me, I was thinking about what’s important to Hot Chip, then adding my own percussion.

“I Feel Better” (One Life Stand, 2010)

I’m pretty sure Joe said he’d watched this very mainstream TV talent show that was big in the U.K. at the time. I don’t remember which one it was, but it had this artist who was an older lady called Susan Boyle. She had some runaway hit with a song, and Joe was inspired by the string arrangement in that and doing something orchestral.

At that point, Auto-Tune was a big thing in music, but we’d never used it, and to use it consciously did seem like a bold step. It was like saying, “This is what everyone in hip-hop and R&B and pop are doing, and we’re going to do it too.”

Quite interesting things come out of masking your voice in Auto-Tune. It can lead to things which are more emotionally connected than when it’s just your real voice. It depends on how it’s used, and what you’re saying and the sound of the voice, but I’ve definitely found moments like that. When Joe did it, I thought it had a striking quality to it, but it also felt like his words were quite long verses. Initially I didn’t really understand how it was going to develop into a finished pop song, and so I came at it from a bit more of a crass pop perspective.

For the first time ever, I thought it was okay to embrace major pop inspiration like Madonna. It was like, this could be our big pop moment, and I don’t think we must eradicate the desire to go in that direction. I think it felt exciting to imagine this could be a breakthrough track. You don’t always think about those things in the studio, but I do remember we were all conscious of it, and everyone was encouraging each other to keep going with developing it.

“Look at Where We Are” (In Our Heads, 2012)

I’m really proud of this collection of songs. There’s some obvious ones that are important to our history, like “Over and Over” is probably one of the most important tracks there. But then something like “Look At Where We Are” is is nice to have included, because there have been a lot of times, particularly while on tour in America, that the song has connected with audiences. It’s inspired by R&B and hip-hop in the production, and also those types of melodies and choruses — even though it’s sung by us and we don’t have the slick voices of a Whitney Houston or Brandy or whomever. It’s our own take on that, which felt important.

Also as the only downtempo or mid-tempo track on the compilation, I was pleased that it managed to make its way on there, because we are slightly a victim of our own interest in everything being about partying. That makes the live sets really high energy, sometimes so much so that it’s exhausting for the audience because there’s no break. We always try and find a way to include these ballads or slower songs, but they don’t always fit because they can feel like such a weird U-turn in the in the set, and yet they’re so important to us.