THE LAST ONES STANDING
TWO Door Cinema Club noticed something rather unusual during the summer of 2019. Midway through their busy festival itinerary, hopping from country to country, the Northern Irish trio began to realise that bands of their ilk - of the indie guitar variety - were becoming a dying breed. “We felt like the last ones standing,” says Two Door Cinema Club bassist Kevin Baird. “Festival lineups were all just full of new pop acts. The guitar bands who came through the same time as us, around ten years ago, loads of them aren’t around anymore. We’re one of the few to have survived. Playing all those festivals this summer, we did feel like the odd ones out.”
Two Door Cinema Club, it’s fair to say, have become accustomed to playing the role of the outsider during their decade-long career. Indeed, when the Bangor trio - Baird, alongside frontman Alex Trimble and guitarist Sam Halliday - first emerged at the tail-end of the Noughties, they were largely ignored by the mainstream media, struggling to win support from the likes of NME and Radio 1. And yet, despite the paucity of media profile or hype, Two Door Cinema Club found an audience - and eventual success - via good oldfashioned methods: by writing irresistible, feelgood pop songs, and slogging around the world playing them.
A decade into their career and the band’s rigorous work ethic has clearly paid off. Since their 2010 debut LP Tourist History, the trio have scored three top-five albums, performed as part of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony at the 2012 Olympics and, most importantly, they’re still selling out massive arenas across the country.
More successful now than at any point previously, Two Door Cinema Club are a shining example of how exponential growth really does still exist in the music industry. “We feel lucky to still be around,” says Baird. “When we first started out, there were so many new guitar bands being hyped and being skyrocketed into big stadiums after just one album. Our success has been more gradual; we’ve really worked for it, not had it handed on a plate to us. So the fact that we’re playing arenas now, ten years later, is pretty amazing. But it’s not been plain sailing.”
As Baird alludes, Two Door Cinema Club’s journey from indie underdogs to arena fillers has not been without its fair share of turbulence. Having effectively gone straight from their final school exams into the dog-eat-dog world of the music industry, the trio’s desire to succeed - they spent six solid years touring - eventually took a huge toll on their friendships. Things came to a head in 2014 when the band - all physically and emotionally exhausted, and barely communicating with one another - called a crisis meeting to voice their concerns.
“Their dilemma was a simple one: if the trio’s friendships couldn’t survive, how could they even continue to function as a band?
“There was a real lack of communication,” Baird recalls. “We’d started the band as teenagers; and having become young adults, I don’t think we knew how to talk to each other. Being in a band is such a strange way of life, and there’s this constant pressure to be on the same page all the time - to think the same, dress the same. We all needed to find out who we were as individuals, so we took a year out - no gigs, no recording. It was the best thing we could have done. When we eventually met up again, we all saw things from a fresh perspective. We were really excited about making music again.”
If those crisis talks represented the band’s lowest point, then the year 2019 surely marks the band’s apotheosis. The trio’s fourth album, False Alarm, which peaked at number five back in June, is undoubtedly their boldest, most confident effort to date, stretching the band both musically (the influence of synthpop, electrofunk and psychedelia) and lyrically (sharp social commentary about society’s dependency on technology). Having begun their career as underdogs, kicking against the so-called tastemakers of the music biz, Two Door Cinema Club still proudly retain their outsider status ten years on. Now, though, the trio are attacking the impact of social media upon today’s music industry.
“It’s frightening just how much social media drives everything,” Baird shudders. “Everything is based on data and stats, on Facebook and Twitter likes. You’ve got radio stations deciding what music they should play based on computer algorithms - where’s the emotion in that? Real music fans are smart people: they’ll always want to seek out odd, unusual bands and artists, not be dictated to by record companies or radio stations. That’s never going to change.”
Two Door Cinema Club play O2 Victoria Warehouse on Monday 7 & Tuesday 8 October.