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Al Doyle and Felix Martin’s 'New Build' was officially spawned in the gap after Hot Chip’s 'One Life Stand' album in 2010, but in reality it can be traced way back to when the two met at university. The first New Build material, made with Hot Chip engineer Tom Hopkins, eventually came to life with their 2012 shimmering debut, ‘Yesterday Was Loved And Lost’ on their own Lanark Recordings. After Hot Chip’s 'In Our Heads' emerged in 2012, the pair united once more to work on new tracks, releasing 'False Thing’ in the summer of 2013 and touring festivals and dates across Europe and the USA.
This year they've experimented scaling the full live band back to a duo, and in October, their sophomore album 'Pour It On' is released on Rob Da Bank's Sunday Best imprint, with winter tour dates in the UK now being announced. Pulse Radio caught up with them over a lunch in the midst of their studio sessions in the summer for the embryonic album, and the conversation took in 'bands within bands', computers versus instruments, bands and duos, the perils of releasing music and how a guitarist happened to become a frontman.
I was at the Corsica Studios gig [in 2012], and I’ve been on that stage, and I still don’t quite work out how you get everyone on there! I’d thought you’d knocked one of the walls out. A: [laughs] We have to remember that we’re all just starting out [in New Build] and we can't make all those demands that I could’ve made in a band like LCD or Hot Chip.
Felix Martin: And I think it comes to more that thing of people doing a ‘live show’ that’s essentially backing tracks. One of my least favourites is when you see someone with a laptop and a synth and a drum thing they hit with a stick. I hate that. It seems like a bit Top Of The Pops in 1984!
A: It does change the dynamic. Even with Hot Chip there’s a computer running, but it’s at the back, out of sight. Having said that, we went to see our friend Jam Rostron as Planningtorock the other night and she was essentially doing exactly that and it was fantastic.
F: It’s not the presence of the laptop itself. I don’t mind when that’s stage central, but I’d rather you were twisting a knob or, a filter.
A: I quite like the fact that with Hot Chip and New Build to me it’s almost a conscious thing to make almost old school sounding music. There’s always lots of live instruments, alongside the hardware in there.
But then was that a deliberate thing? A: Well it’s all pointless if no one hears the music [laughs]. You can have as many principles as you like but if you can’t get it out there then it’s meaningless. I want it to be right and to have a lot of pride in it, but I find that’s a fairly paralysing thing when you essentially play most of the instruments, and you write the songs and music. It’s tiring [laughs] but also it’s pretty cool! And then you’re trying raise yourself to try and promote it, and get people excited about it.
F: And it’s difficult, because you feel like you’re slightly working in a vacuum, and that it might be a good idea for us to start drip-feeding things in on a more regular basis, because we released “False Thing” last year and then we went and made a video for it, but we didn’t really follow it up with something, we didn’t keep the momentum going. The sad result [is] that singles are often the way to grab people’s attention these days.
Is this mind-set a symptom of the experience of making the first album? F: It is in some ways, because we ploughed a lot of our own money into it and, while it wasn’t a failure in any way it was still a success on lots of terms I want it to be a self-sufficient thing, I don’t necessarily want to make money from it, but it needs to exist on its own standing.
A: And then you’re into that territory of self-published novels, almost to scratch your own itch, which it’s not really about. We’re writing music to please people, to get other people excited, and we want to be just available to people basically…
You two knew each other from your university days, pre-Hot Chip. Was it always a case that you wanted to make music together but it just didn’t happen with the band in the foreground, and it was only the gap between 'One Life Stand' and 'In Our Heads' that meant you could think ‘well, actually we’ve got some time here’? F: We’ve always been making music together, but we were never really focused enough to sit down and work out who it was aimed at or what it was for. We never really had the time to do that either around Hot Chip.
A: It’s definitely true that when Hot Chip was really starting off, our own careers, or our own aspirations for our individual projects, were subsumed by that. But it’s a very strange position we’re in now, as I feel that if we had no association with Hot Chip it would almost be better for us, as we’re now being forever compared to that project, much more than say, Joe is with 2 Bears. And in our own mind it shouldn’t happen, but in everyone else’s we’re just ‘those two guys from that band.’
And it’s ironic, as people may not know that you’d already worked together before that. It’s like the Alan Partridge quote of “Wings were the band the Beatles could’ve been,” so maybe New Build is the band that Hot Chip could’ve been [laughs] A: [laughs] They definitely have fed into each other quite a lot, and I think that it’s been really nice working with Joe and Alexis recently. They’ve always been apprehensive of other people writing for the band, as no one else has ever written a Hot Chip song. But while some songs have been more of a collaborative thing, or with different combinations of us working on them, in the last couple of years they’ve been making some noises as if to say, ‘Yeah, you guys can play and write something for Hot Chip’ which is really really nice.
Is there an argument to say that the gap between the last two albums, where Joe started doing the 2 Bears work, and Alexis has B&O and About Group, would inject a bit of new life into the band as you’re getting to do your own music? And it doesn’t mean you’re then spilling that over into what Hot Chip do, it’s almost out of your system. F: It certainly hasn’t had a negative effect. Though we haven’t actually tried to make a new Hot Chip album yet! [laughs] But the sessions that we’ve had have been positive.
A: I think bringing in new people as well, that’s helped. We’re a bunch of people that are constantly up for doing new projects and being very collaborative. I find it so much more gratifying to work with other people, and all the people I’ve ever worked with, we don’t really sort of have to think of anything anymore. It’s a really married couple thing with us. [laughs]
Al, you’re the frontman of New Build. Is that something you always wanted to do of your own accord? Seeing you at the gigs, you seem to really enjoy it... A: Well of course, I’m a natural performer [laughs]
Is that kind of a nice upshot of New Build coming together? Al: Yeah of course. I think it was always a bit annoying for the guys when we were playing with Hot Chip. I mean Alexis and Joe didn’t really talk to the audience back at the start, and I think Alexis has really got a lot better with that, he’s a really engaging frontman. And back then there’d be gaps between the songs, and I thought I’d just say something. And it was often a little ill-judged and embarrassing. [laughs] And now I’ve got this huge platform to do that [with New Build]. And I think I may need to dial it back a little bit, and if we are going to go on stage and not have as big a band as we did, as half my shtick was just introducing everyone else [laughs]. But we can concentrate on the music a little more. I mean we haven’t really found our place in the musical universe yet.
The reception so far must've been impetus to carry on. We had such an amazing response to a lot of the songs, but the response to 'Do You Not Feel Loved' was above all even that, and then what we were saying to each there was ‘well, let’s just make ten songs that are like that’. And so we’ve taken that sound and explored that as a starting point.
I mean the first album was interesting because while in many ways it was that standard structure of versechorusverse, pop song structure, once you had that, it was like you’d said ‘yes, but we’re going to anything within that', and I really liked that. F: There’s still a bit of that, but there’s also a few songs where we tried to restrict ourselves, where it didn’t have to have an A and B section, or it doesn’t have to have changes of chord sequence.
Is it a case as well with you both DJing out, you wanting to make things that lean more towards the dance floor? A: It was exactly that when we started out in the most recent stage of writing, where you would try and make something that would work to dance to, or in a club. It’s been so validating going down this different route recently, because we’ve done a lot of DJing at the same time, so we're thinking what we’d like to play out or what we’d feel useful as a DJ.
Sometimes when you’re playing out you’re almost in this holding pattern, and then there’ll be this one tune that, not by virtue of it being a big tune, but it’ll just change the mood slightly, and I think all of the songs have the potential to perform that role within somebody else’s set, and it’s interesting to see how they’ll be used.
F: There’s still a few that are quite ‘rock and roll’ in some respects, it’s not like they’re not just ‘four to the floor’.
That assumption that dance music it’s just 4/4, 120127 BPM with a kick drum and snare and hat, and a bassline and melody. That’s a bit limiting. F: I think we’ve still got overarching Brian Eno obsession, just because he was someone that married esoteric lyrics and had a peculiarly English outlook that was very interesting. And just constructing weird grooves and unusual rhythms and unusual ideas for melodies and using the studio as a big sounding board itself. It being part of that sound itself, and he said it was more important than the actual musicians. Musicians may not agree! [laughs] But now it’s almost accepted that it’s an important element to the process, but then it was just seen as a place to capture what you were playing.
I found the lyrics interesting, as they obviously talk about things that people can clearly relate to love, loss, friendship but was it a case where you weren’t being autobiographical, but you were writing to lyrics to fit into the mood of the song…. A: Or it is autobiographical, but it’s behind a few layers. I don’t find it very easy to write about personal experiences, more than anything from a technical reason that my writing’s not good enough to capture what’s actually going on, so I often find myself occupying the mind-set of a fictional character or trying to put myself into somebody else’s shoes. I think the recent songs, while they’re all still pretty straight up pop songs; a lot of them have some kind of political element to them that, while they’re not floating on the surface of the water, they’re visible. And I’m not sure what to say about that. I think that can be very off-putting.
But it’s all relative, putting it in a way that people can digest and enjoy under the surface without sounding like you’re preaching to someone. I mean, no one wants a protest electronic music concept album. [laughs] F: Al has this notebook with different thoughts and ideas and then will often just stitch them together. He’s just like the Bob Monkhouse of electronic music, with his little black book. Sort of Mao but a little less political.
A: And I don’t find it that easy to do it. There’s a lot of situations where Felix and Tom are sitting there ostensibly writing music, when in fact it’s three dudes sitting in a room in total silence, watching the other guy not writing anything lyrically. [laughs] It’s difficult. And again, talking about Brian Eno, famously didn’t really enjoy writing lyrics and thought they were a bit pointless, but sometimes that’s a way in, where the sound of the words can be quite important.
It’s the same with music in many ways, where you’re making music and it’s going through a sequencing program of some sort you really need to get away from sitting and watching the screen as it’s playing. You’re not hearing it as it should be as that’s a barrier. A: It’s very difficult to break down those structures. And anybody that’s listening to a lot of music or studying it in some way, that idea that there’s no right or wrong, but there's things that are ‘more’ right or ‘more wrong’. There’s an awareness now with a lot of procedures with the dangers of over crafting things, and there has been for a few years now with electronic music of trying to make things a bit looser sounding, but then even looseness is crafted!
F: That’s really interesting actually, because with Hot Chip, we were exponents of that philosophy, but it wasn’t a pretentious assumption of something we were aiming for, it was more that we didn’t really know how to use the kit properly [laughs]. But something like the groove from “Over And Over,” we didn’t know how to properly put it together. It sounded like it had a bit of a wobble to it.
Exactly. It can’t be just uniform. And I suppose with the new music, you’re making stuff with guitars and real drums, real instruments…. That’s room for human ‘error’ in some ways. A: It’s funny; it really is a one-way path. It’s impossible to unlearn something you’ve learnt. So something that happens because it’s a mistake, and you’re experimenting, and you don’t know, that can only happen once. It’s a kind of thing we’re all gradually losing, which is sad really.
There’s been other people in the studio collaborating as part of the sessions as well, for instance Joy Joseph. A: Yeah, Joy’s been singing on a lot of the new stuff and Rupert [Clervaux] has playing drums in an incredible way on four or five of the tracks, but otherwise it’s been me and Felix and Tom [Hopkins]. Joy’s voice seems to work with mine really, really well, and she’s a great person and a really experienced musician, and we were conscious we really wanted her voice on the record.
Is live stuff on the plan then? F: We’re definitely experimenting with a few different kinds of live show, so me and Al, we want to do some stuff, just the two of us.
A: The two amigos…
F: [laughs] Then hopefully we’ll get a bit of money from somewhere so we can do the full band, same as before, as that’d be amazing. They all consider themselves New Builders.
A: It was really sad that the year the album came out, and we did this tour, and we went around Europe and the States, and then just as we thought it was rolling a bit with this nice momentum it just stopped dead, and we saw Joe and Raf being able to carry on and do these gigs, where Joe was already out on the road, and Raf could go and join him and it made us think about how much you could keep things going [like that]. We’d have to freight half a ton of gear and six people and just thought, “Holy shit, maybe we just need to have that option." We need to be mobile.
But then that’s that kind of pushing back against that whole thing of wanting to be like a band. F: We are having to compromise. We’ll make a virtue of necessity and then just go back to the full-blown thing as soon as there’s the option. We’re quite a maximal band – we find it quite hard to do minimal. We just can’t help but add more synths!
But ultimately that’s evolution. And for New Build, you’ll [always] have these periods where you can make a record and tour and then that’s put on ice, then you come back to it. A: But it’s even nicer to be able to do your second album and have a bit of a life beyond that sort of anomalous little project. I definitely want to be doing this for a long time. Writing new music has never been a problem. The album will be a superior record. It will be the best of the two New Build records. [laughs]
It will definitely be the second best album New Build have done… Al: The worst it can be is second best! [laughs]
What about singles? F: We’d love to do a couple of vinyl 12” releases as well, but we’ll see. We managed to sell quite a few of those [on the last album].
A: There’s lots of Felix’s dad’s artwork we’d love to use from that series, and it’d be lovely to continue that series. We should talk about that Felix!
New Build's second album 'Pour It On' is released on Sunday Best on 20th October, and UK live dates are currently being announced. For more info go to www.newbuildband.com.
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