That give and take, it makes it far more interesting.T wo Door Cinema Club’s second album, Beacon, was a record that, to borrow the famous assessment of David Frost, rose without trace. If you maintain that pop sensibility, if it s within you - and all of us have grown up with great pop mu-sic you can write those super-huge melodies but make the lyrics slightly more obscure. There shouldn t be a formula to pop music, but there is now.
We haven t gone anywhere near as far out-there as Bowie did, but this could be the first step on the road to really pushing the boat out.
Bowie s death was a huge wake-up call to me that we d lost one of those amazing guys and it suddenly hit me that no-one s pushing that boundary anymore, so I thought maybe we could try that. They really straddled that line between insane pop and total avant garde craziness. Both total pioneers who did whatever they wanted to do. The two biggest inspirations on this record were Bowie and Prince, for me at least. Sonically we went the other way and started to experiment a lot more with things like using samples and more electronics. We re not embracing the pop that s going on right now in a melodic sense or even structural-ly. How do the band feel about embracing bigger pop elements? I feel really good about it, Alex says. It did feel a bit like a game show at times, fickle, false, fleeting, feeling unable to wrap your head around it. The whole world that we were in and what was expected of us, the disparity between the life we were living, the life we wanted to live and the life we were expected to live. not attack-ing the world around me but outlining why I don t really get it and why I don t fit in with it.Įlsewhere, their sense of dislocation is highlighted in Je Viens De La, a song inspired by a semi-nal 1960s sci-fi French film shot entirely in still frames like a slide show about time travel and Game Show which concerns the shallowness of the music industry games they were required to play.
The fact that it was a fully coined term and related to so many people that have existed and do exist made me feel it was okay to not exist on the same level as everyone else, it was okay to be comfortable doing your own thing. I discovered this term weltschmertz, the German word for being at odds with the world around you, Alex says.