What The Letters In "Over & Over" Mean

Ever been on the dancefloor, auditioning for Gurner Of The Month, when Hot Chip’s Over & Over is dropped? This scribe has, and always struggles to decipher the words that are spelled out in the middle of the track. “It’s not really worth deciphering,” Alexis Taylor claims. “It’s really infantile. It says – I can’t remember what it is: it says ‘kissing’, ah…” Is it ‘sexing’? “Yeah. ‘Casio’. Ah, ‘poke’… But having just said those words out loud, and [hearing] a grown woman say them out loud, I think it’s pretty embarrassing lyrics to put in a song, so, sorry about that.” When told no apology is necessary because the song challenges temporarily mungled brains, Taylor jests, “Yeah, well, we gave you something to ponder for years and then discover how awful it is.”

Hot Chip’s playfully titled sixth album Why Make Sense? contains a track called White Wine & Fried Chicken. Is this Taylor’s favourite meal or his idea of a cheap date? He laughs, “I’ve actually never had that meal and I’m also a vegetarian. When I was writing that I think I was just enjoying the idea of a slightly ridiculous combination of food and drink together – an unlikely pairing – but it could be quite cheap white wine, I suppose.” Taylor admits he “did try some alternative words that were less to do with food and drink”. 

“On this album I quite enjoyed writing words in that way and kind of maybe not fully understanding exactly what they have to be about. And then, later on, maybe feeling like they’re open enough for different things to be imposed on them.” The song is actually “very much a love song to spending time with someone and almost wasting time, you know; it’s about the freedom to get away from any constraints and to lose yourself in somebody else’s company,” Taylor clarifies. “But the title of the song, and the imagery in the title of the song, made me think – after I’d written it – that it could be read as one of those last meal requests from somebody on death row, or something like that.” 

When asked who provided the glorious diva vocals that open Need You Now, Taylor ponders, “I don’t know the name of that singer. It’s a band called Sinnamon that we’ve sampled and I think it’s a male singer – even though in our video we have somebody called Joy [Leigh Joseph], who plays in New Build with Al [Doyle] and Felix [Martin] from Hot Chip, she’s miming it in our video – but on the record, yeah! It’s a sample we took from another band.”

"It could be read as one of those last meal requests from somebody on death row"

It was actually Joe Goddard “who came across that sample” and, Taylor adds, “I think he was aware that it’s actually quite a well-known, well-sampled bit o’ music, but he wanted to use it again. And I think in the new context of the chords, and the mood of that song, it kind of felt new in that place. Then the rest of the words of mine, and the words of Al’s on that song, [were] written after that sample was already in the track. So it wasn’t the kind of thing that came in at the end to make the chorus, it was there from the beginning and, for me, that was quite nice ‘cause I didn’t have to write a chorus; I just had to write some verses and flesh it out a little bit.”

Asked to identify lyricists he admires, Taylor singles out, “Bill Withers, Bill Callahan, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, um, they all have to have the name Bill in them [laughs]. William Shakespeare, Willie Nelson, um, er – no, I’ll stop.” Bill Oddie? “No, no, definitely not an inspiration.”

Taylor reflects on his wordsmith heroes: “Bill Callahan definitely at one point, the period of Smog records that I really like, like, Red Apple Falls, Knock Knock, Dongs Of Sevotion – those three probably; the words on those, and the music on those, are a big inspiration in a way. Willie Nelson, at one point, I was listening to a lot and loving the sort of elegance and simplicity of his turns of phrase. It kind of felt like, between him and the literary writer Raymond Carver, and Bill Callahan: we had these people that were very interested in everyday language that could be quite simple and easy to understand on the surface, but there was quite a lot packed in emotionally.”

Taylor says his band are less influenced by “anyone in particular” these days and that, lyrically, he’s “more just trying to get something down on a page that means something to [him] emotionally and, if not, logically”.

He has a school-aged daughter and Taylor proudly reveals, “She likes singing a lot; she seems to sing really well, actually”. “She’s come to a lot of Hot Chip gigs over the years as well, since being a baby. So there was a time where she was very into specific tracks from Hot Chip live.” When asked for specifics, Taylor offers, “Let Me Be Him, I remember her singing Ready For The Floor, Now There Is Nothing; actually, Now There Is Nothing – we never played it live with Hot Chip, but she heard me writing it and recording it at home, and that was one that she often would sing. And she started to tell me that I got the words wrong! [Claiming] what she was singing were the right words.” 

“Bill Withers, Bill Callahan, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, um, they all have to have the name Bill in them"

Goddard was in the country earlier this year with The 2 Bears and Taylor also has About Group as well as his own solo guise. So how do the various members get their schedules to align? “Um, just the Google calendar,” Taylor illuminates, “and managers and common sense. It’s not always easy and some members of the band have missed gigs before, through oversleeping – it does go wrong sometimes. On the whole I think we just like being busy, really, and we like making music. Sometimes when we’re not on tour with Hot Chip, you know, we’re in the studio making music tryin’a get another record together. So I feel like that’s what we enjoy doing, and that’s what we should be doing, so we keep ourselves busy. And we do try and keep enough time free for Hot Chip to be able to actually tour and not just become secondary to all the other things we do as well.” 

They’re smashing live and now that we know what the letters spell out in Over & Over, we need Hot Chip to tour our shores. “I’m not sure what’s happening in Australia,” Taylor confesses. “I think maybe it will be at the end of this year, or at the start of next year, we’re hoping to be out there. We’re talking to our agent about it at the moment. We always come every time we do a record so it should be the same this time around… It’s a favourite part of the world for us to visit so we’re hoping to be back.”