The Chainsmokers make their way to SA for Ultra
They’ve been blowing up the charts with earworms like Closer and Something Just Like This – now they’re headed to our shores for the Ultra South Africa festival
THE BACKSTORY Alex Pall (33), the DJ and producer half of the duo, recalls falling in love with the craft as a teen when he watched a hired DJ perform at a friend’s 16th birthday party. “I grilled him about it,” he recalls. “I shadowed him and before long my mom was taking me to my own gigs, helping me carry my records.”
The duo’s writer and sometimes singer Drew Taggart (29) was exposed to most genres of music while growing up in the US but didn’t experience dance until he spent a year in Argentina when he was 15. There he could legally go to clubs and first heard the music of David Guetta and Daft Punk. He and Alex met in 2012 when a mutual friend set them up on a “man date” – a meeting Drew describes as “love at first sight”.
DARK SIDE TO FAME The pair first burst onto the scene in 2014 with the hit Selfie. Two years later they won a Grammy for Don’t Let Me Down and topped the charts with the Halsey collaboration Closer. By 2017 their debut album, Memories . . . Do Not Open, spawned the award-winning hit Something Just Like This with Coldplay’s Chris Martin.
But Drew, who was slammed when he performed with Halsey (24) at the 2016 MTV VMAs, is vocal about the dark side to their meteoric rise. “We’ve been through a lot,” he says of the past few years. “Dealing with becoming famous and having people look at your life in ways that no one gave a s**t about before . . . that affects your relationships with people you’re close to, and people that you’re not close to but who want to be close to you.”
MUSIC FOR MILLENIALS Drew says he draws on his own experiences and those of friends to pinpoint what he calls “really small, specific moments” in their music. Closer was inspired by the feeling of regret he felt after hooking up with an ex.
“We love writing about millennial relationships, for better or worse,” he says. “But we write about what we observe, and we write about making bad decisions often, as you’ll hear in the song. But also of being impulsive in getting into them, and living in the moment.”
9 TO 5 – EXCEPT FOR CHRIS “I treat it like a job,” Alex says of their recording sessions. “I’ve had rappers be like, ‘Let’s meet up at 10pm.’ And I’m like, ‘Uh, no!’ I can’t understand that way of working.
“But Chris [Martin] wanted to start working after he’d put his kids to bed – and well, because it was Chris Martin, and Coldplay are the f**king greatest.”