The campaign that followed the release of Beacon – an LP that fused the band’s knack for hi-hat heavy choruses and sharp, minimalist riffs with introspective tales of homesickness – led the group to their first festival headline booking, at Suffolk’s Latitude Festival. This aggressive tactic of riding a wave of interest appeared to work for TDCC, with their sophomore release, Beacon, reaching number two in the UK chart and perpetuating their rise in the public eye. It nearly fucking killed us, but we wanted to keep the momentum running from album one to album two.” That moment was poised right before our second album came out. Kevin explains, “All of these were big turning points for us. Memories of this landmark performance, however, were to be clouded by the sheer workload that the band were undertaking at the time.
My mum and dad have mine, almost all of my band stuff is at their house.”
“Our Tour Manager gave us each a printout of that 2011 Pyramid Stage crowd.” Sam recalls – still audibly entertained by the very notion of their popularity, “so we each have ‘the glory picture’ photograph at home. Just one year after their mid-morning slot on The Other Stage the group found themselves back in Somerset, this time as Pyramid Stage artists, performing before tens of thousands of spectators. This late renaissance of interest in the first record – over six months after its initial release – meant that the album campaign had to effectively restart all over again, with Two Door performing in bigger venues to hordes of newly recruited fans. So we kept playing gigs until NME and Radio 1 both gave us attention in the same week, just after we two sold-out nights at Shepherd’s Bush Empire.”
#Game show 2 door cinema club torrent#
“It’s important to remember that in 2010, Spotify wasn’t really a thing, it was all Bit Torrent and maybe iTunes people weren’t even buying CDs anymore.” Says Kevin, “to get heard you had to be championed by media outlets and we just weren’t getting that at first. “Kicked off” may be underselling the stratospheric boost that the quirk-pop outfit experienced following their appearance in Somerset, in an era where nods from a few specific gatekeepers could make all the difference in the trajectory of an artist’s career. In my memory there were millions of people there and it was the biggest crowd we’d ever played to. Kevin reminisces, “That was the first moment where we couldn’t believe what was happening around us. “We had a beer before the set, first thing in the morning.” Guitarist Sam Halliday adds, “it didn’t matter – there was going to be nobody there.”Īwaiting the group, however, were a sea of Basement People, with the mid-morning Other Stage crowd near capacity. We were even talking about going back to the studio to get another one done quickly.”
The first album had come out and a couple of months later it wasn’t going very well. “I remember our show on the Other Stage in 2010.” Bassist Kevin Baird recalls, “it was like 11am or something. It was the serendipitous coming together of these backers at Glastonbury Festival that gave the debut album the jump-start that it required. The initial release of the album was relatively subdued, but a prolific touring schedule meant that Alex, Kevin and Sam demanded respect from festival bookers, whilst cultivating a diehard fanbase who had already christened themselves “The Basement People”, in homage to a lyric from the track “Undercover Martyn”. The record could match each of its contemporaries in a riff-heavy musical landscape, whilst accenting these guitar structures with automated drums and an electro-pop ethos that allowed the release to penetrate beyond the realms of traditional indie circles. With their 2010 LP, Tourist History, TDCC offered a palate-cleansing alternative to the other indie groups of the time. With a debut album that refused to wane in velocity and a nosebleed-inducing climb towards the summit of festival rosters, the everyman trio from Bangor, NI, had somehow became the most unlikely superstars of a generation. There was a point in time in which Two Door Cinema Club seemed almost unstoppable.
0 kommentar(er)
