New album ‘Gameshow’ ditches any “safe” tropes that second full-length ‘Beacon’ relied on. Right now, Two Door Cinema Club are in a healthy state. It must be tempting to focus on the present day. The more time we spend at home, the less time we’re away slogging it to reach that festival headline slot.” ![]() Life at home is this little gap in time that’s prolonging the work you’re gonna have to do to get to that point. Life on the road, you’re not enjoying the things around you, thinking each show is a step on the ladder to somewhere else. There’s this mystery point where everything’s fine and you can say yes or no, on a whim, to what you’d like to do. “You imagine playing fewer shows, having more time at home. And that means in five years time, we’ll be this really big band and we’ll get to do the things we want,’” Kevin quips. “You’re telling yourself - ‘We’ll put the work in now, at the start. We ended up winning a Best New Band award and all of a sudden, the label said, ‘Hey, America wants you back!’ We thought, ‘It’d be silly not to, right?’ And we ended up touring for another year, year-and-a-half, right after we’d intended to stop. ![]() And we were invited over to the MTV Awards in Texas. On that first album, when we were touring, we were about to finish. Although we were always in control, there were very convincing arguments made by labels and managers that made offers impossible to say no to. I don’t think I know anyone who really thinks they’ve achieved that feeling of having made it. You can go out and do the things you wanna do. “When that day comes - when you ‘make it’ - you can relax. “At the beginning, there’s a sense that one day you might ‘make it’,” he says, listing off how the tour led to a record deal, a debut album and, eventually, a stint in hospital. “But that was just a way to convince people around us that there was a back-up, if this didn’t work out,” jokes Alex. The trio first went on tour at the age of seventeen, still at school, with university places waiting. It’s almost as if they had this sense of achievement wired into their collective mainframe. Everything Two Door said at the time, in fact, referred to being “bigger”, aiming for territory they’d yet to conquer. “Headlining a great festival like Latitude is obviously quite a big deal for us but we also feel like it is the next natural step,” he told the BBC. Weeks before their cancelled Latitude slot, Kevin was saying very different things. That new thing where the fee is higher, the slot is bigger, we could bring in more production. “How could we capitalise on all this success that came out of nowhere? We ‘needed to do a new record’, we ‘needed to do this and that’. “It all came down to ‘momentum’,” says Kevin. The trio are currently in Valencia, Spain, a few hours before a disorienting 1am festival set. But rarely has a group been so willing to inspect their own wounds. They’ve since patched up disagreements, rediscovered friendships and their reasons for being in a band in the first place. Barely speaking, they bottled up disagreements and bit their tongue with the belief that all this hard work would eventually pay off. Alex, guitarist Sam Halliday and bassist Kevin Baird weren’t on good terms. This came after months of tension within the group. He was physically incapable of boarding a plane to go home, and found himself stranded in a Seattle hospital. Frontman Alex Trimble, already in the depths of a nervous breakdown, developed stomach ulcers. But their Latitude spot coincided with the band’s breaking point. In June 2014, Two Door Cinema Club were on the brink of headlining their first big UK festival. Others believe they’re dealing with it just fine, but then the cogs and gears begin to tumble. Some people are cut out for becoming superstars, capable of maintaining sanity thousands of miles away from home, able to deal with demand from fans and industry alike, press intrusiveness, working with a body clock that’s always out of sync. Accolades like the BRITs, Grammys and the Mercury Prize remain unclaimed, so why not strive for all three at once? A bigger audience is always out there somewhere. With increasing demand comes more reasons to book another tour and make a new record. ![]() With each chance to sit back and take stock, out steps another opportunity. Now they’re speaking out, addressing creative differences, mental health and how they rediscovered themselves after hitting self-destruct.īeing in a successful band is like sitting in a merry-go-round that never stops. Suddenly, these future headliners had to rethink everything. Hospitalisation, alcoholism and depression cut short all plans and any momentum they’d built in a whirlwind five years. But for Two Door Cinema Club, they were literally forced to put everything on hold. ‘Hiatus’ is a convenient word to use for when bands fancy a break.
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