Hot Chip, London Village Underground
L-R: Eddie "The Eagle", Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor
May 7, 2009
We’re in Shoreditch tonight. Stella Artois is throwing darts at us, again. It’s a one-off night of fun in aid of homeless charity, Crisis.
Hot Chip are an interesting one – our fascination with Kraftwerk mostly overrides the time we mistook Alexis Taylor for Eddie ‘The Eagle’.
We couldn’t listen to ‘Touch Too Much’ without picturing Mr. Taylor in Aldi’s stockroom, a lost toddler being sold for £1 over the tannoy. That’s our parallel interpretation. It’s ever so fitting that the only other time we saw Hot Chip live was in a charity shop. Should’ve gone to Specsavers?!
Aside… Man Like Me offer a brilliant support, the highlight taking the form of two interpretations of ‘London Town’. They are just so much fun. The middle-class rudeboy thing has the perfect amount of chutzpah. The lyrical quirks are nigh on adorable, almost as much as the collective’s frontpiece Johnny. Man Like Me channel their ideals on single-parenthood, Daily Mail-style sensationalism and so much more – and they’re simply formidable live. Again.
A little bit of DJing from Erol Alkan later (hint: think a soundtrack to a Skins party) and the headliners are on, ski-jumping and everything (sorry – we’ve probably ruined your enjoyment of Hot Chip forever). The pseudo-Victorian surroundings suit them perfectly, their static, socially awkward presence proving the perfect antidote to cholera (boom cha). The sub-bass is screaming.
Hot Chip’s defining feature is their climax, and live, it’s evermore apparent. The choruses of ‘Ready For The Floor’, ‘Boy From School’, ‘Shake A Fist’ and ‘Over And Over’ are situated as far away from their dorkiness as physically possible. They are magnificent. And the new tracks previewed here offer much of the same – shame we haven’t got names for them, but one of them had us shuffling on the spot like no other.
It’s dark and light, electronic and acoustic in a way. And the reaction ranges somewhere between that of a rave and a wake, as if bespokely ordered. Just don’t fixate on the ski-jump…
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