The Making of THE WARNING by Hot Chip - featuring Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard

My name's Alexis Taylor, and I'm talking about the Hot Chip album, The Warning, which came out twenty years ago in two thousand and six.

I think of The Warning as definitely something of a high point.

I don't go back and listen to it all of the time now, but I think that we really connected with a lot of people through that music, and it was something of a breakthrough record for us.

And, uh, yeah, I just feel like it is definitely an important stage in our career.

There are other highlights.

There are other things that I remember on other records, but without The Warning happening in that way, and without us being given the freedom we were given to make that record, and without us putting a bit of pressure on ourselves to make something better than the first album that would really follow it well, I don't think we would be where we are today.

Hi, uh, you're listening to Joe Goddard from Hot Chip.

Uh, within Hot Chip, I'm a kind of producer and I do a, a little bit of singing as well.

I mean, Alexis and I became friends very soon after we joined, uh, this secondary school, Elliott School in, in Putney in Southwest London.

So we, we became friends at the age of twelve or around then.

And initially, our friendship was, you know, we ate our packed lunch together, ate our sandwiches at lunchtime and played football together, realized that we were both into kind of WWF wrestling and, you know, very much like young teenage boy stuff.

But Alexis was already, um, a music obsessive, and I was as well.

We played football together, and we talked about bands quite a lot and listened to music together.

I would go around to Joe's house after school and listen to The Best of Leonard Cohen on a cassette.

I remember he had that and also Neil Young, After the Gold Rush, we would listen to together with his brother, Jazz.

And then I, I also remember that we talked about contemporary bands.

He would read the NME newspaper, and I would as well, and we also loved a lot of the same things as each other and went to see just loads of gigs.

And we were talking about music all of the time.

We were studying at that school, but we were, as friends, it was all about going to gigs together and just, like, learning about music and being inspired by other bands.

Alexis already had his enormous passion for, for Prince and New Order and Jamiroquai and these, these type of things, Neil Young, some singer-songwriter stuff.

And I was very passionate about kind of, you know, grunge rock records and hip-hop records.

I was really, really obsessed with New York hip-hop in the, in the early nineties when we were When we began to know each other and went to school together, so I was listening to a lot of De La Soul and, uh, Beastie Boys and A Tribe Called Quest and these kind of things, which were also very important records for Alexis.

And my family house in Fulham had like a, a cellar, a basement where we were allowed to kind of hang out, where there was a TV and a, you know, a, a games console, and we had an acoustic guitar.

And we would hang out down there kind of all the time, um, from the age of like 14 or 15, and play music to each other, play songs on the, the acoustic guitar.

And that developed into us writing songs together when we were maybe 15 years old.