Hot Chip - Boy From School

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. For more info, visit songexploder.net/hot-chip.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  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 Rishi Kesh Hirway.

• 0:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I'm going to be on tour, playing some shows this fall. I'm going to be in London on Wednesday, November 18. I'm going to be performing solo at Rough Trade Records on Denmark Street, and I'm going to be in conversation about my music moderated by one of my favorite actors and writers, Matthew Bainton. And a ticket to the show also gets you a copy of my album on vinyl or CD. And in December, I'm going to be on tour supporting S. Carry. We're going to be playing a bunch of shows in the Northeast US. So I hope to see you in one of those places. You can find all the details and get links to tickets at songexploder.net/live. That's songexploder.net/live.

• 0:55Speaker 01

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• 1:28Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Hot Chip is a band from London, made up of Alexis Taylor, Joe Goddard, Al Doyle, Owen Clark, 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 Enemy and Pitchfork. And later, Enemy 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.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  My name is Alexis Taylor.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  And my name is Joe Goddard.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  We became friends at school. We were like eleven and twelve 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 realised 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.

• 3:10Speaker 03

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

• 3:25Speaker 02

  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 that, but then also wrote his own songs and we would play songs together. And I think initially, they were separate songs from one another, like a Joe song or an Alexis song. And then at some point, we started to write songs together and finish each other's sentences or like write a second section for a song or something like that, or just sing together.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  And that was kind of the beginning.

• 4:11Speaker 03

  We really had no training in like engineering and making records. We were really making it up as we went along. I had a very small amount of equipment and we were using a computer, but in a quite a rudimentary way, doing it all in this bedroom. Boy from School was one of the first things that we made for our second album, The Warning.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  We were just absorbing lots of influences from dance music, from four to the floor, house music and disco and DFA and other things that we were listening to at that time.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  This was the moment in time when Basement Jaxx released their first album, which was, for a kind of indie fan, was a good way of getting into house music. So I was going clubbing and this kind of like indie version of dance music was exciting to me.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  But even in the process of writing Boy From School, the first iteration of it that was recorded and written at Joe's house was more gentle and slow and was a ballad.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  I remember leaving the room that me and Joe were working in and going for a break into his brother's bedroom where there was like no one in the room and just using that as a place to write something. We'd been to university by this point and started working jobs. And something about like being in that room was quite evocative of many years spent hanging out with Joe. It made me think about the school days and those school days weren't that far behind us, but something about like continuing having a friendship with Joe and always making music with him and it often being in that house connected me to the school days quite closely as if we hadn't like gone that far away from from our beginnings.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  And I was a boy from school, helplessly helping all the rules.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  It began as a Casio-based track.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  So when Alexis wrote this very gentle, delicate song.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  I remember feeling like, maybe this is a moment when we should try to be kind of embracing a different groove and trying something a bit more up tempo. Like, let's try changing the context of this song entirely. It's such a lovely song. But to me, it felt like an exciting thing to suggest going with something that we hadn't really ever done before, like having a go at a kind of style of music that felt kind of novel for us to do at the time.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  And this moment of Joe suggesting changing it from the ballad to the disco bass track was quite a big moment. And it's not an obvious link between the kind of lyrical content, slightly nostalgic words about your experiences at school, trying to summarize a relationship. Like, that doesn't necessarily sound like the subject matter of disco music. So I think it was a bit of a leap for both of us to see, like, will this work? That original, like, sort of version, it was on this Casio, the MT70. I think that that keyboard was particularly good at sparking ideas for Joe and for me.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  It's a really simple, inexpensive instrument that I guess was like mass-produced by Casio in the 80s. It doesn't have a lot going for it in terms of like synthesis power, but essentially it was like the most important instrument for all of our songs at that time. And even when we decided to make this kind of up-tempo version, it's used for almost all of the sounds on the song. I remember Alexis playing the bassline with this kind of lollaping rhythm. Within like, you know, the next two or three hours, we put down like most of the major elements.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Remember that riff is on the Vox electric piano that sounds a bit like a clavinet and plays all the way through. The effect you put on it, Joe, gives it a kind of auto war kind of sound, like that's done immediately after it's recorded. So the processing is a big part of the production.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I did a lot of experimenting with effects on each of those little parts. And so I just spent hours and hours cutting up these little bits of audio and moving them until they were perfect and kind of playing with the delays on these notes because we wanted the groove of this thing to just be super kind of tight and funky and mechanized.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  So it was a matter of like moving stuff around until it felt right and then looping that.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  And he was always and still continues to be somebody that wants to keep working hard to perfect something.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  Previous to this, I'd just been using drums from our Casio keyboard and cut them up. But at that time, I was learning about taking drums from other tracks.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  So I sampled a kick drum from this DFA remix of Decepticon by LaTigra. Really great remix.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  One of my favourites at the time.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  You know, that, we discussed this with James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy from the DFA many years ago. And they told me that they had taken that kick drum from Is It All Over My Face by Loose Joints, the Arthur Russell project.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  We would just kind of record like some clapping in the room. We didn't have like a full drum kit in my bedroom, but we had a hi-hat because we thought it was an element of the drums that's good to do for real, to be able to introduce your own kind of groove with your own kind of style.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Alexis sang the words to the song like right then and there in that original session.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  And I was a boy from school, helplessly helping all the rules. I was somebody who wasn't rebellious. I couldn't help but go along with things in a kind of fairly by the book way, which I suppose meant I'm not a rebellious teenager. So I think something about all of the time spent at Joe's house and then being in that room made me just look back on the school days fondly and with some wistful feeling.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  The next line was about a girl at school who I had a crush on and then went out on a date with and really liked. And then I was talking about her seeming quite grown up, like she had absorbed a lot of mature behaviour from like a family situation she was in. And it felt like she didn't remain young for very long, but had quite a lot of growing up very quickly. That was my sort of perception of her.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  You know, those school days in general and the girl that I was singing about and all of that love, it's a nice place to go back to.

• 12:42Hrishikesh Hirway?

  More with Hot Chip after this.

• 12:47Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 13:32Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Visit tidal.com/songexploder to create an account and start uploading your music for free. That's tidal.com/songexploder for zero platform fees on every sale. Your music, your earnings.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  For all of those years of making records together, we never had like a vocal booth. So when Alexis is singing, he's just in the room with me with headphones on. So I'm listening only to his voice without being able to hear the music. Now I find you on the street. And then I learnt those words and sang just in unison with him.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Breaking rules, hopelessly we meet.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  And it would be the same when I would record vocals and Alexis would just be kind of listening to me. Lives are found, but loves are lost.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  Say goodbye to everything nothing costs.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  I don't think we felt super confident about singing. We weren't people who sang with great skill and expertise and confidence. You know, it's not like we harmonized in a dressing room, practicing all of these things and perfecting it. We're doing our best, but we certainly weren't these like super slick pro singers. So I can also hear that in the recording. It sounds really nice to me, but it's not super impressive like some people's vocals would be. I'm not saying that as a criticism of it. I really like it, but it feels like people who haven't had vocal training in the best possible way. Like they're naturally themselves.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  You know, Alexis would be singing the verse to a song and I'm listening to him recording takes. And that would spark in my mind like ideas for the next section of the song.

• 15:34Speaker 04

  We try, but we didn't have long. We try, but we don't belong.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  The chorus that Alexis had written was very beautiful. And there'd been a kind of strong like Beach Boys reference because that was a band that both of us were really, really, really passionately kind of in love with. So it has a lot of layers of vocals that we both kind of added.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  We try, but we didn't have long. We try, but we don't belong. We try, but we don't belong.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  I was thinking about the relationship with that girl at school. And how even though you're very young and it's not like a proper relationship, it can still make you feel those first feelings of connection with somebody in a romantic way. Being with somebody and what you can feel like when that doesn't work out. It's essentially talking about loss. And it's also talking about friendships being lost between different people as their lives develop, as they grow older. Things not fitting together as you had hoped they would and what you feel like after that.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  We had this kind of funny children's glockenspiel that we would take to the live shows from the really early days. It felt important to us to kind of bring a range of slightly unusual instruments with us. And I think that's there in a fair amount of like hot chip music. It's a kind of a childlike quality.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  And I remember that we had an auto harp.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  It's a really super cool instrument. Like super annoying to tune because there are tons of strings, but like a really, really lovely sound.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  We had these things kind of scattered around my bedroom floor, you know?

• 18:11Speaker 02

  That really felt like how we made music back then was like, what do we have around us? Joe had a lap steel guitar.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  I definitely can't really play the lap steel guitar very well. So it's as good as it could be. And it's a bit fumbly, but it's something that was there in the room. And again, like if you've grown up listening to Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys, you're kind of fascinated with the idea that they put together different instruments that don't normally get put together. So we absorbed something from their productions and then felt like it was normal to go, and now we put lap steel. Now we put auto harp. Now we put Casio.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Just put these things together because we know we like it when all these sounds blend together.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  And then there was more writing that Joe did for like the other section of the song.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  Just responding to the kind of emotion of Alexis's chorus.

• 19:25Speaker 04

  This was the way back. I got, I got lost. You said this was the way back.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  The track sounds quite sorrowful at the end, like those vocals are quite exposed. The high range that we're singing in.

• 19:45Speaker 04

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

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Things are sort of falling apart around that. So it sounds like the musical equivalent of something coming to an end after the words have talked about something coming to an end. We didn't have long.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  I feel like it works really nicely as an ending, but from my perspective now, being an older person, I would generally now like finish a track with drums and things so that a DJ can mix out of the record into something else. I feel like I'm kind of more encumbered by the constraints of like genre now, now that I understand and know more about making music. So it's nice to just think back to being a person that really didn't really like know that much about those things and wasn't really thinking about those constraints.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  I can remember hearing it in a club in Sweden, walking through a really busy dance floor and the song was playing. And that's my only time I think I've ever heard it in a club. And it felt, A, really exciting to hear it and B, I remember thinking we made a song that isn't exactly like most club music, but it still managed to get played. So I sometimes feel like we kind of got away with something because it doesn't sound like other dance tracks. It sounds a bit more gentle. So it's nice that it could sometimes get played in nightclubs.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  And it's probably the song that people have emotionally like connected with the most out of any song that we've written.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Just the other day, we were playing it in Sydney at the Sydney Opera House, and I could see somebody really actually crying during the song and looking pretty distraught. And I don't know what it was that they'd gone through, but what the song makes you think about that's beyond the song, that's your own experiences. But there's an emotional core to it that I think is quite real.

• 22:15Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And now, here's "Boy from School" by Hot Chip in its entirety.

• 23:40Speaker 04

  ...

• 23:43Speaker 04

  We tried, but we don't belong. We tried, but we didn't belong. We tried, but we don't belong.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  Now I'm begging on the street. Heartlessly breaking rules we.

• 24:30Speaker 04

  Lights have found the lost ones. Say goodbye to nothing, everything gone.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  Now I find you on the street. Breaking rules hopelessly we.

• 25:01Speaker 04

  Lights have found the lost ones. Say goodbye to everything, nothing gone. We tried, but we didn't belong. We tried, but we don't belong. We tried, but we didn't belong. We tried, but we don't belong.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  I got, I got lost. He said this was the way back. I got, I got lost. He said this was the way back. I got, I got lost. He said this was the way back.

• 26:49Speaker 04

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

• 27:37Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Visit songexploder.net to learn more. You'll find links to buy or stream Boy from School, and you can watch the music video.

• 27:47Hrishikesh Hirway?

  This episode was produced by me, Craig Ely, Mary Dolan, and Kathleen Smith, with production assistance from Tiger Biscuit. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. And if you'd like to hear more from me, you can subscribe to my newsletter. You can find a link to it on the Song Exploder website. You can also get a Song Exploder shirt at songexploder.net/shirt. I'm Rishi Keishirway. Thanks for listening.

• 28:30Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Radiotopia.

• 28:33Hrishikesh Hirway?

  From PRX.