One of these men is a British rock star. The other is an overenthusiastic blogger. Can you guess which is which?

To say that Hot Chip is a breath of fresh air would be an understatement. Considering how some bands don’t know the difference between a live DJ set and an actual performance, the London 5-piece’s show at the 9:30 Club this past Friday was a veritable gale force wind. Ben will be posting a more extensive review of the show in a couple hours, but in the meantime you can enjoy my first ever TNG in-person interview with Hot Chip’s drum machinist, Felix Martin.

The band’s most visible members are its singers, the falsettoed Alexis Taylor and baritone sideman Joe Goddard. All 5 members contribute to the songwriting process and play at least one instrument onstage, which is what makes their show so dynamic. Though their biggest hit is the repetitive “Over and Over,” that song’s goofy bombast is only half of Hot Chip’s story. Songs like “And I Was A Boy From School” and “Colours” put beats over genuine and touching sentiment. The former song’s chorus of “We tried, but we didn’t belong” has undoubtedly contributed to the band’s sizeable gay fan base.

Full interview below the fold.

Hot Chip’s breakout album was 2006′ “The Warning,” but this year’s “Made in the Dark” splits the band’s poles even further apart. Songs that could inspire a riot sit side-by-side with low key piano ballads, and somehow it works. Live, the whole combination is potent enough to give your grandmother goosebumps. They’re coming back in September. This time, buy your tickets early.

The New Gay Zack: How long have you been with Hot Chip?

Felix Martin: I’ve known Alexis for long time but have been playing regularly with the band for approximately five years.

TNG: How much of a hand do you have in the songwriting process?

FM: It differs a lot from song to song, sometime it is a very collaborative effort. We’ve become an increasingly collaborative band. Alexis is the main songwriter, and Joe as well. Alexis doesn’t really sing lyrics that other people sing, he only sings his own words. He’s really uncomfortable singing stuff that other people have written, so he’s the primary songwriter because he’s the primary singer. That’s how it works.

TNG: Its funny to me that the same person could write “Bendable Poseable” and “In The Privacy of Our Love.” The new record is split so much between big dance songs and ballads that it’s like one person wrote half the songs and someone else wrote the other.

FM: There’s a bit of dichotomy with Joe and Alexis. I think most creative partnerships that work well are based on some kind of dynamism or tension rather than just two people who see completely eye to eye. For us its always worked by people thinking quite different things about music and what should be on the record, that’s why you end up with extreme differences in the kind of songs on the album. There’s also no rule book that says everything on the album has to sound one way, it’s quite boring if you always have to adhere to that. In terms of music we’ve always been all over the place, we’re just being true to the kind of music we make.

TNG: Hot Chip get called jokesters or prankster a lot. Do you try to keep to keep your songs so mixed up or humorous?

FM: Not with a conscious effort. I’ve always thought of humor as being an integral part to a lot of artwork that I like, whether it’s a Werner Herzog film that is very intellectual or artistic in its outward appearance or it’s something like a Leonard Cohen song. Some people consider them to be very miserable or depressing, but when I listen to his albums I find a lot of humor and just very funny kind of moments.

TNG: Like when he gets a blowjob from Janis Joplin?

FM: Right, yeah.

TNG: There’s nothing serious about that.

FM: What I’m trying to say is we’ve never seen the need to separate humor from what we do and to be poker faced or serious. I think it’s boring, and why would you do that?

TNG: More so than most dance music, you have actual emotion in your songs. Something like “And I Was a Boy from School,” seems to come from someone’s painful, real-life experience. How much of Alexis’ actual background goes into a song like that?

FM: He wears his heart on his sleeve. He’s quite an emotional person and he’s able to access that side of his character when he’s song writing. He gets very upset if he thinks that there’s this perception that there’s something kind of ironic in our music, but for him its something that he’s very genuine in.

TNG: I think its because of songs like “And I Was A Boy From School” that you have a really big gay audience here…

FM: Yeah? I don’t know if we do in the UK.

TNG: You do here at least, gay music can be so shitty here. Are any of your members gay?

FM: No, but people are always rumoring that one of us is. Sorry to disappoint.

TNG: I figured, but “Boy from School” is so much about being different, and the “You’re my number one guy” refrain in “Ready for the Floor” could give off that impression too.

FM: There’s definitely issues with gender in “Boy from School,” there’s something to do with sexuality in the song. It’s not someone coming out and saying “I’m gay,” it’s more blurring the kind of boundaries in pop songs between girls and boys. It’s the same in “Ready for the Floor.” Initially when he sang the line “I’m your number one guy,” which is just a reference to the original Michael Keaton “Batman” movie, he tried to say a word that was somewhere between girl and guy at the same time. So it was a kind of weird little sound, but in the end it just came out like guy. And everyone was like ‘Ooh, is he gay, is he coming out?” and its just like, ‘No , he’s been married for two years.”

TNG: Hot Chip really gives off the impression that you’re a group of outsiders that came together to write music, but now you have gotten really popular. Do you lose something when that happens, either of your song writing process or something special that you had before you got big?

FM:We’ve worked really hard to get
where we are, it’s taken a number of years achieve the kind of moderate success we have now, we’re not by any means a massive band like The Kooks that sell millions of records. We don’t have that kind of pressure on us, but also our intentions have always been to be a pop band and to have music that that’s successful on the charts, so it doesn’t feel weird to us. It’s amazing we’ve managed to get here, but it’s what we’ve always been aiming at. We didn’t come together as a group of experimental musicians who weren’t interested in pop music.

TNG: You have a really electronic record, but also a reputation for really great live shows. What’s the process of translating your CD into a live show? How do you decide what goes in and what stays?

FM: We try to be faithful to a lot of tracks on the album, to stick to the original idea. In the past we’ve done different interpretations of things but we tried to lock it down a lot more for this album. Other than that, there’s alot of bass, a lot of guitar, a lot of playing of instruments. We don’t have a drummer, that’s one thing we miss from normal rock band setup, but it gives us a slightly different sound from someone like LCD Soundsystem. They have a more disco sound.

TNG: Where is the band headed now? Are you going to keep splitting off into R&B or are you going to integrate your songs again?

FM: I think I have an idea of how the next one will sound, it will be more gentle. It won’t really have the rock-y edge and may be more electronic sounding. That’s how I’d like it to be.

TNG: Are people ready for a gentle Hot Chip?

FM: They’ll take what we give them! They might not take it, they might not buy our CDs. But we want to have a career that goes on longer than the next twelve months, we never wanted to be a band that’s known for doing one song and that’s it. If our next album goes off in one direction it’s not to say we won’t be doing something different again in the next twelve years. We’re always trying to change and be challenging, for ourselves and other people.

TNG: You mentioned only being known for one song. When you get a song as big as “Over and Over,” is it hard to overcome it? Do you feel the pressure to write a song like that again?

FM: It’s not hard to overcome. If you’re always writing new material like we are there’s always new songs and hooks and ideas that are really exciting to us, so its not an issue for us. Maybe it’s more difficult for other people, if they get obsessed with one track they find it hard to move on to the next one. There’s other songs like “Playboy” or “Down with Prince:” when we first started out we were playing to fifty or a hundred people in London, those were the song that everyone wanted to hear, they were the “Over and Overs” of their time. They have obviously fallen by the wayside, thats just how it works when you’re a band that has a career longer than a couple of years. I think “Ready for the Floor” has eclipsed “Over and Over,” so maybe the next one will be bigger still.TNG