How did the band get together?
We all went to high school together. I guess we started hanging out when we were 14 or 15 and we kind of bonded through music. We were all listening to the same stuff and we all played guitar so we started jamming together in Sam’s garage for a few years and formed a couple of bands. After a few years of that we formed Two Door Cinema Club and started writing songs properly. When we left school we decided to take it a bit more seriously.
Was there a big music scene where you grew up?
Yeah. There was an amazing music scene where we grew up. Not in our town, but in Belfast. We’d go up and play Belfast a couple of times a month for the first year of us being a band and there’s so many amazing bands. Everyone’s really good friends and everyone helps each other out which is really cool. There’s no kind of envy or jealousy when other bands have success, which I find happens quite a lot in other music scenes. We moved to London and you kind of discover that in the London music scene bands can become rivals and they end up hating each other, just wanting to be better than everyone else. It’s not like that where we’re from.
Why do you think that is?
I guess because Northern Ireland is cut off from the rest of the UK, it’s on it’s own on an island. Everyone wants to kind of put Northern Ireland on the map, rather than just themselves. It’s maybe a bit less selfish. They’re not only doing it for themselves, they’re doing it to get all the other great bands recognized. There’s just that real sense of solidarity I guess.
What Northern Irish bands should we be listening to?
There’s hundreds, I’ll give you a few. Kowalski, they’re a band from our hometown; And So I Watch You From Afar, Cashier No.9, Panama Kings. I’ll stop there. Those are kind of my favourites but I could go on for a lot longer.
What would you be doing if you weren’t in music?
I was always very, very much into music. I would spend almost all of my time playing music and listening to music. I was also quite into art. When I was finishing school I applied to art school, but I didn’t end up going to university or college. I guess if it wasn’t for music I might be in the art world.
Do you get involved in the art side of the band?
Oh yeah, we’re one hundred per cent involved in everything we do. It’s important to us, you know it’s our band. Everything from our artwork to our videos, we’re very much hands on. We like to do a lot of it ourselves and come up with the ideas. It’s more a matter of getting people to help us with these things than getting people to come in and just do it all for us. I don’t think we’d be very happy if that happened. Usually what happens when we’ve got a song is we put out our vision for a video – what we see happening in the video, maybe where we want it shot or how we want it shot. We send that kind of stuff off to directors and they’ll come back with a pitch and we’ll pick the one with the best idea.
So what’s the idea behind the Tourist History cover?
Ha! That was a company called Megaforce who shot our first music video for ‘Now I Can Talk’. We absolutely loved the video and we knew that they were designers as well. We just asked them if they would like to work with us on the album cover so they sifted through their back catalogue of different stuff and found this image of this cat. It’s kind of a strange one because we saw this photograph and for absolutely no reason, we loved it. There’s no real meaning behind it but I think it’s nice in a way to have something that’s a bit hard to explain. We picked the photograph and then worked with them to put all the artwork together.
Tell us something fun to do next time we’re in Belfast.
The first one I can think of is a great cinema, it’s actually the place that our band is named after, in a place called Cumber in Northern Ireland – the Tudor Cinema. That’s just something that’s quite special to us. Our band’s named after it [when Sam mispronounced ‘Tudor’ as ‘Two Door’] and we always used to go there when we were younger. It’s just a cool cinema that this guy made himself with his bare hands pretty much. It looks like an old ‘40s cinema. It’s all old-fashioned, all original vintage everything, inside it’s amazing. In terms of Northern Ireland the Giants Causeway is always a good bet. It’s always pretty nice to go up there and have a look around. It’s an amazing thing to see.
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Tags: Artery, Interviews, Music, splendour in the grass, tourist history, two door cinema club
