Two Door Cinema Club On 15 Years Of Iconic Debut Album ‘Tourist History’

Take a trip back to a defining era of music as indie darlings Two Door Cinema Club perform their iconic debut album Tourist History in full, alongside their greatest hits, in Australia this November. Released in 2010, Tourist History launched Two Door Cinema Club onto the global stage with electrifying hits like What You Know, Something Good Can Work and Undercover Martyn. The album’s catchy guitar hooks, irresistible rhythms and dancefloor beats quickly made it a staple of the indie-dance scene.

Fifteen years on, Two Door Cinema Club’s Tourist History is lauded as an era-defining album, forming the sound track to late night parties, dancefloors and festivals around the world. Australian fans will have the chance to experience wall-to-wall indie anthems as they perform this album live, with the beloved tracks that helped define a generation of guitar music. Kevin Baird talsk to Hi Fi Way about the tour.

Awesome news that Two Door Cinema Club are coming back to Australia to celebrate your debut album.
Yeah, yeah, it is exciting news. We’re happy to be coming back. We love Australia, we’ve obviously been many times. We feel a sort of connection to when the album came out, and what was exciting for us at the time and Australia was one of the early adopters of the record. I feel like we didn’t have to try as hard to get people to like us in Australia as we did in some other places. So yeah, it feels quite nice that Australia is going to be one of the first ones to get the anniversary shows.

It’s hard to believe sixteen years have whizzed by to be honest…
I know, I know! I can still remember… I think we went to Splendour in the Grass 2010, a couple of months after the record came out. I still have pretty vivid memories of that tour. Yeah, it kind of feels like it was a long time ago, and also yesterday.

I think it was also Laneway Festival in there, I’m pretty sure as well.
That was then the following January? Must have been the following January, so that must have been maybe about six or seven months later, which is kind of crazy. I don’t know if this is just the kind of thing you did at that time. I’m not sure if bands do that now in the same way, newer artists, but to come to Australia so early in our career, but also come back so quickly. It was a real amazing time for indie bands and music, and that made up a lot of what people liked and a lot of the programming at these festivals, which has changed quite a bit. But yeah, it was a good time.

Is it hard to not get swept up in the nostalgia of celebrating such a pivotal album in your career?
Yes, it is hard, I think, for us, I’d say to be honest, we were probably a bit hesitant about doing it initially.
I think it can be done really well, or it can be done as a sort of farewell, and that isn’t where we see it.
Block Party and Interpol have done a really great job of celebrating really important pieces of music, and it feeling special and about that piece, but also not a victory lap for the band themselves. That’s something we’re quite conscious of, we don’t want this to feel like a victory lap for us. So no, we felt a bit strange not marking that record. Ten years felt too soon, twenty years felt too far away, and so fifteen years sounded about right.

The track listing for the deluxe edition is pretty cool. How was the process of going back through the archives b‑sides, remixes, songs that didn’t make the album, live tracks?
Yeah, it’s cool. It sort of brings you back to a different time. When things mattered that don’t matter now. Like CDs, we used to have to do at least one exclusive track just for Japan, and that was the Japan release, and that way it didn’t have to be an import, and they could sell the record for an affordable price and not something astronomical. There were all these little nuances in markets around the world. The record came out two months later in America than it did in the rest of the world, for some reason. All these little nuances of the releasing business that don’t exist anymore, now it’s just boom, there it goes, there it’s on Apple and Spotify or whatever you use. It was amazing to go back. Some things were like, oh wow, that’s pretty cool, and other things were like, that is awful, why did we think that would be good on this? It is fun to look back and transport yourself to a different era when different things mattered.

Was there anything you discovered that you’d forgotten about that made you go, wow, that’s pretty cool?
I don’t know about pretty cool, but we were going back through some old footage. We found a TV show we’d been on, like a local TV show in Belfast. This was still when we were living back there at our parents’, I think we were even still at school. We found this video, and it was such a massive thing in our heads at the time, and then we watched it back and we were like, wow. We thought we knew what was going to happen, and then there was a song in there that all of us had completely forgotten about. We thought this was a great song and we used to play it all the time, but we’d completely forgotten about it. We watched this video and were like, whoa, that’s a kind of cool song but then actually, no. There’s a reason why we got rid of that one.

When you go back to when the debut album came out, were there any sort of moments or things that were happening then that still stand out for you as being memorable?
Oh, God, it was very memorable. I think it’s when all the firsts begin. The first time you get played on the radio, the first time you have a magazine feature, or the first time you go to Australia. For like a year period, two‑year period, it was just a whirlwind of upward momentum which is amazing. It’s like a dream feeling that you’re constantly then chasing probably the rest of your life. I remember when the record came out, I think things were kind of working for us in a live context, but I don’t think we would have been played on the radio anywhere, and the radio was way more important back then. We didn’t have any magazine features, we weren’t invited on any TV shows, so we kind of felt like, okay, this was all about playing live to people. Those are the things you really remember, whether that was Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London, or Splendour in the Grass in Australia, or some bigger things you did back in Ireland obviously stand out to us.

Once you have such a big debut album, when you needed to start thinking about the second album, did you really start feeling the pressure about how are we going to top this, or at least equal what we’d already done?
I don’t think we felt worried about topping it and that was probably useful naivety. What we worried most about was finding the time to do it. We were touring like crazy, and we interrupted the recording of the record. We had to split the recording into two parts because we were leaving in the middle to go headline the NME tour in the UK. So we were more worried about finding the time, and moving ourselves out of the headspace of touring and back to the headspace of writing songs. So yeah, maybe we did feel the pressure a little bit, but I seem to remember being more worried about finding the time to actually do it.

If you had your time over, is there anything on reflection that you might have done differently, or did things just happen for a reason?
I think everything happened for a reason. Sitting where we are now, I’m really happy with where we’re at, so it’s hard to try and rewrite things to improve the outcome, I think. Yeah, maybe I wish we had the maturity that we have now back then, just in terms of how we dealt with difficult topics, or how we dealt with each other, and how we dealt with struggles and things like that.

In terms of getting ready for this tour, how have you found the process of going back to the debut album and perhaps playing some songs there that may not have been played for a little while? Does it take quite a bit of practice or muscle memory to get those songs to a point where you’re excited about playing them live?
There’s some stuff we’re bringing out, some things that we haven’t done in a long time, which is kind of exciting. Some of it comes back to you really scarily fast, considering you haven’t played it in, like, fifteen, sixteen years, and then some stuff you think, okay, I know how to play it, and then your hands just go on, and then you play the note and you’re like, yeah, that’s completely wrong. That sort of blind confidence is maybe misplaced. But yeah, it’s exciting to look at some old things and try and sort of revamp them a little bit as well to make them fit in, because some of the stuff would have been from a time when we didn’t have a drummer and things like that.

Do you think you’ll do something like play it start to end, or are you likely to maybe mix it up in a different order? Has there been much thought around that?
Yeah, it’s something we’re really working on, I think. The record is thirty five minutes long, so I don’t think playing it start to finish is going to really work in this sense because then I think the bulk of the show would be things that aren’t Tourist History, just by the nature of it being thirty five minutes. We need to be a bit more strategic. So it’s definitely gonna feel like you’re in a Tourist History show, it’s not going to be like any other gig we’ve ever done. It’s going to be different in terms of the setlist and how we approach it, but maybe not quite as simple as start to finish.

Also touring with The Vaccines as well, that’s going to be an awesome tour, and they’ve got their own little milestone for their debut album as well?
We had them on tour with us in Australia in 2012, I think it was. It’s nice to have them back, and it’s a great reminder of the heyday, I guess, of when these kinds of bands were really popular. They’re lovely guys, and that’s a great record, and really happy to be a part of their celebration too.

What’s next for Two Door Cinema Club? Are there plans for another album at some stage, or is doing these celebration tours going to take you through a good chunk of this year?
It’s going to take us through a good chunk of time, and then we’ll look at some new music, I guess.
We have some new music already done, we’re just working out a little bit what that’s going to be. It’s definitely not the end for new music. We’re flicking back a little bit in terms of the chapters of our career for now, and then we’ll be back to the present very soon.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Two Door Cinema Club on tour with The Vaccines on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…