Cry For You (RAK Version) – Hot Chip (2015, Domino Records, Taken from ‘Dancing in the Dark EP’)
Cry For You (Album version) – Hot Chip (2015, Domino Records, Taken from ‘Why Make Sense?’)
There I was minding my own business at one of the Glastonbury Festivals, it would have been 2005 I think, we were wandering across the site I think we were heading back from the Green fields or comedy tent when it started to rain. It wasn’t raining hard but it was irritating enough to have to find cover.
So we all dived into the first big tent we could find, which as it happens was the newly positioned Dance Stage. It was between acts when we got there so we sat about and read our little program thingy to see what would be coming on. That told us it was a band called Hot Chip. I’d heard Hot Chip, thanks largely to one of their tracks being on a Moshi Moshi compilation that I’d recently bought, so we stayed put for a bit.
Baby Said – Hot Chip (2004, Moshi Moshi Records)
When they ambled on stage, my wife suddenly nudges me and tells me to look on stage,
“Is that Andy?” she shouted and pointed at the band’s singer.
Andy, was a guy who we went to University with. He was one of the DJs in the indie club in our first year, quiet unassuming chap, who got criticised by the Guildford indie mafia for playing hip hop instead of Blur. I liked him. He went off on a work placement when I started my second year and I never saw him again. Looks like he’d done well for himself.
Now, of course, I know now, that the singer in Hot Chip is a chap called Alexis Taylor, and not a guy called Andy who grew up in the slums of Basingstoke, but back then in the late evening rain at Glastonbury, with a plastic bottle of cider in my paws, and at least two earlier ones addling my senses, I had no idea and right there I was convinced that Andy, was the singer in Hot Chip. To be fair to me, he does look a lot like Alexis Taylor but in reality, I should have realised that no one who studied Mechanical Engineering could ever be linked to a song as fantastic as this (which was the third track they played that late June afternoon).
(Just Like We) Breakdown (DFA Mix) – Hot Chip (DFA Records, 2005)
(Just Like We) Breakdown (Album version) – Hot Chip (EMI Records, 2005)
Still, Hot Chip, have pretty much since that evening been a band that I have really liked and they are a band that I haven’t featured on this blog anywhere near as much as I perhaps should have. They are one of those bands that are consistently excellent and always making music that is evolving and innovative and in Alexis Taylor they possess a frontman with a voice that can stop traffic.
‘Cry For You’ is a track on the bands sixth album ‘Why Make Sense?’ which is an album which saw the band take a more house orientated approach as opposed to the dancey synth pop which dominated their earlier records. About six months later, a new version (The RAK version) appeared as track two on an EP called ‘Dancing in the Dark’ which saw the band take the Springsteen classic and pump some disco house beats into it and then splice it with a brief foray into an LCD Soundsystem track. It’s all sorts of excellent and continuing a theme I started yesterday, when the No Badger Jury eventually get round to voting on Rocks Greatest Ever Cover Version, I shall be disappointed if it doesn’t feature in the Top Ten at least.
Dancing In the Dark – Hot Chip (2015, Domino Records)
No Badger Required 