Leaking Beacon

Two Door Cinema Club worry that online piracy will hurt sales of their new album, says Ed Power

TWO Door Cinema Club’s Alex Trimble is explaining why he doesn’t want to talk about the band’s new album leaking.

“I put out a statement for our fans. It was strictly for them,” he says. “I didn’t mean for it to be picked up by the media. We don’t want to draw attention to the fact that is has leaked. That could be to our detriment.”

It’s a reasonable stance, but he contradicts it by outlining in detail why file sharing is a carbuncle on the face of humankind.

“We don’t object to people copying our music, at a certain level,” he says. “When I was a teenager, if a mate had an album I wanted, I’d tape it off him. If your friend wants to burn the record, that’s fine. Copying used to be small-scale and it isn’t any more. Back then, it didn’t harm people the way it does now. It has become very different.

“The way things are now, people download an LP, listen a few times, then delete it. Growing up, I would scrimp and save for a record and then listen to it over and over. You would pick up on stuff that maybe you’d missed initially. You gave the music more of a chance,” Trimble says.

That an album leak would cause Two Door Cinema Club such upset in this day tells you something. Many artists would be flattered someone had stolen their music. Better to be pirated than ignored. This Northern Ireland trio have ambitions beyond indie cultdom. Trimble says they want to be one of the biggest bands in the world, which means selling lots of records. They see no reason to be coy. There is no glory in obscurity.

“We would never wish to maintain our underground status for the sake of it,” says Trimble, who is 22 but, in a certain light, could pass for 14. “It [becoming a big band] is something we would love to do. The notion of selling out doesn’t really exist nowadays. If we could eventually play arenas or be on TV, why not? It would be a testament to us and to the strength of independent music now.”

Two Door’s biggest success has been in the UK. For all that, they are much less insular than the British guitar bands they see as rivals. An English act would be thrilled to sell out the 10,000-capacity Alexandra Palace (as Two Door have). Two Door, who have grander ambitions, see such achievements as the beginning of something rather than an end in itself. They want to be huge everywhere.

“There were certain territories where our last record didn’t do so well,” says Trimble. “We were very aware of that. We monitored where it succeeded and where it didn’t. It was like, ‘okay, it went gold in the UK, but it didn’t sell as well in France or the US, as we might have hoped.’ These are the things we pay attention to. We are lucky in that we work with people who don’t say, ‘oh, you’ve made it’ and slap us on the back. They know there is still a lot to achieve.”

Their new album, Beacon, is produced by Jacknife Lee, a Dubliner best known for working with REM and Snow Patrol. He gives their songs a gleaming, commercial gloss.

You can easily imagine tunes such as Sleep Alone or Next Year ringing out on drive-time radio or rocking huge arenas (as will happen when they play the O2 next year). Far from being a calculated move, the hook-up with Lee came about by accident.

“It all happened after our management convinced us to have a conversation over Skype,” says Trimble. “We didn’t know what would come of it, to be honest. We all hit it off straight away. He’s Irish, so working with him felt natural. He had the same sense of humour. It was fantastic. He’s the guy for us. We can’t imagine ever doing a record without him now.”

Lee lives in California with his American wife. Two Door Cinema Club relocated to Los Angeles for a six-week stint at his mountain top studio. It was, says guitarist Kevin Baird, a surreal experience. One moment they would be locked away in a darkened room, the next basking in 34-degree sunshine.

“We’d spend all day working on a song and get really closed off and into it,” he says. “Then, you’d step outside into this incredible sunshine and there would be a spectacular mountain view. It was definitely one of these moments where it’s all very surreal and you find yourself thinking, ‘how did I get here, exactly’?”

Two Door Cinema Club formed in 2007, signing two years later to French label Kitsune. The three musicians were all living at home in County Down at the time. Now based in Glasgow, they say having success at a relatively young age felt like a rollercoaster ride. It was fun. But some motion sickness was inevitable.

“We had very close ties to home,” says Trimble. “It’s different now. We’ve travelled so much. It feels like we are always away. However, we still like going back. We are close to the friends we grew up with.”

The week before this interview, Trimble sang at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. The experience has visibly blown his synapses. He struggles to explain what it felt like to perform to a global audience of millions.

“Surreal … that’s all I can say,” he says. “It’s actually hard to get your head around, to believe it really happened. I’m still processing it. I don’t think I will have a perspective on the whole thing for a while now. It could be years before I properly grasp what it was all about and what it meant. It was a lot to take in.”

* Beacon is out now. Two Door Cinema Club play Academy, Dublin, this Friday, and O2, Dublin, next year.