Hot Chip - Boy From School

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Hrishikesh Hirway. I'm gonna be on tour for the next few weeks, and all the dates are at songexploder.net/live. I'm gonna be playing songs from my new album, In The Last Hour of Light, with a full band, and I'm gonna be talking about the making of my album with a special guest moderator in each city. I get to be the interviewee instead of the interviewer. So I'm gonna be joined by Jason Mantzoukas, Simu Liu, Nosrat, Alison Russell, Joshua Malina, Ken Jennings, and John Roderick, Min Jin Lee, and Adam Scott. It's a really personal album, and I hope you can make it out to one of the shows. You can get tickets and more info at songexploder.net/live. This episode is sponsored by the new video game Mixtape. It's sort of like if the movie Dazed and Confused were a video game. It's about high school and adventure and nostalgia. And if you're the kind of person who cares about the power of an amazing mixtape, then this game is probably for you. The soundtrack features Smashing Pumpkins, Iggy Pop, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, The Cure, and a lot more. Mixtape comes out May 7th on console and PC. Check it out at mixtape.game. [upbeat music] Hot Chip is a band from London made up of Alexis Taylor, Joe Goddard, Al Doyle, Owen Clarke, and Felix Martin. Their second album, The Warning, came out in 2006. It was nominated for a Mercury Prize and named one of the best albums of the year by NME and Pitchfork, and later NME would include it in their list of best albums of all time. For this episode, I talked to them about one of the songs from The Warning called "Boy From School". You might have heard it in the second season of the show Beef on Netflix, the band's also in the show, or you might have heard it on The Simpsons. You could have also heard the song in my car all the time in 2006. So I was very excited to talk to Alexis and Joe from Hot Chip about how "Boy From School" was made.

[singing] We tried, but we didn't have long. We tried, but we don't belong.

My name is Alexis Taylor.

And my name is Joe Goddard.

We became friends at school. We were, like 11 and 12 years old, I think. We grew up playing football and talking about bands that we'd read about in the NME and went to loads of gigs together, hundreds of gigs. We all used to congregate at Joe's house, usually on a Friday after playing football after school, and we realized that we both liked making music, and we would play songs on the guitar and listen to music or watch films and stay up late and have a fun time.

I lived close to where we all grew up and went to school, a place called Elliott School in Putney, which is, uh, close to this house. So Alexis and I would go home from school and make music in this bedroom really, really very frequently.

Joe was making music in a band with other people, and I was making music in another band. But then at some point, Joe asked me if I wanted to record songs of mine that were like solo guitar and vocal songs, record them on his four-track. So he was really acting like a producer from quite a young age, and he did