How A Health Battle Caused Two Door Cinema Club To Slow Down And Reevaluate

The last time Two Door Cinema Club were scheduled to play Splendour In The Grass, they didn't make it. In 2014, with the Irish pop combo booked for their second Splendour appearance, they had to cancel, after frontman Alex Trimble collapsed at the Seattle Airport and ended up in hospital.

"That's when everything came to an end," says Trimble, 27, from London. Prior to that unexpected break — Trimble's hospitalisation billed as a 'stomach ailment'- the trio had never taken a break, not since starting Two Door Cinema Club as a trio of teens in County Down. "The first five, six years were so full-on, we didn't really have time to process what we were doing. And we nearly killed ourselves in the process. Which is surprisingly easy to do, when you're doing this kind of thing. It was one city to the next, one day after another, for years and years."

Trimble attributes his hospitalisation to "various things", the gathered effect of years on the road. "Without taking time out to process what's going on, to relax, to put things in perspective, you drive yourself crazy. You don't eat properly, you don't sleep properly, you end up exhausted. I wasn't looking after myself very well. I was partying a little bit too much. It's a lot of cumulative behaviour, and it takes its toll after five years.

"Without taking time out to process what's going on, to relax, to put things in perspective, you drive yourself crazy. You don't eat properly, you don't sleep properly, you end up exhausted."

"It's a terrifying thought," he continues, "that you're slowly destroying yourself. So, it's not something that I gave too much thought to. You just put it out of your mind. Ultimately, it ended up with me in hospital. That's the point it took for us to put our hands up and say 'maybe we need a break, now'."

The band — Trimble, guitarist Sam Halliday and bassist Kevin Baird — were ambitious from the beginning. After finishing high school, in 2007, they deferred from their university enrolments and set out touring. "The pressure we put on ourselves was intense," Trimble recounts. "Once we got on the road, and discovered how much fun it was, how rewarding it was, each little nugget of success spurs you on. We were working our asses off. And we still are. You can't let that slip. It doesn't matter how much creativity and talent you have, if you don't have that drive, that ambition, you're not gonna take it anywhere."

In their early days, Two Door Cinema Club were entirely DIY. Their first EP, 2008's Four Words To Stand On, was self-recorded and self-released. They found fans through MySpace, booked their own tours, managed themselves. "It took a long time for us to gain any kind of attention in the media or the wider world," Trimble recounts. "We weren't getting played on the radio. Magazines weren't writing about us. Looking back on it, now, it feels exceptionally rewarding, and I wouldn't want to have it any other way; all that struggle and heartbreak and exhaustion, all that shit along the way. There's nothing comparable to that feeling that you've achieved your own success. Of course, once we did get any kind of recognition, as far as the media was concerned, we were an 'overnight success.'"

The band broke out with their debut LP, 2010's Tourist History, which went Platinum in the UK behind its five singles. The album was filled with three-minute bangers, their new-wave pop brightly mixed by French house producer Philippe Zdar, and released by French cult boutique Kitsune. "From the very beginning," Trimble recounts, "we were always focused on making good pop music. As teenagers, we'd been in rock groups that were more progressive or self-indulgent, but that wasn't really us. We wanted to make music that was accessible, and open, and relatable, and fun. For us, it's always been important to have a good melody, to make something memorable, to be catchy."

2012's Beacon refined the Two Door Cinema Club formula, its songs ready-made to boom out at summer festivals and arenas; the record hitting #1 in Ireland, #2 in the UK and #4 in Australia. But, after Trimble's battles and their subsequent time away, the band's goals for their third LP, 2016's Gameshow, involved matching their lightness of melody with weightier subjects.

"You can call five years a generation now, with the rate that things are changing."

"What inspired the latest record was the internet," says Trimble, simply. "It's changed our world in so many ways. We don't live in the same place we did ten years ago, even five years ago. As a band, we were starting out in the infancy of the internet's influence on the world. It might be cheesy to say, but it felt like a simpler time. Humans have become very confused by what the internet has done to our world and our lives. We interact with one another in a very different way. We see each other and ourselves in a very different way. The way we consume so many different things, music and art and television, and how we buy products, how we get information, it's completely different to generations before us. And generational gaps are closing. You can call five years a generation now, with the rate that things are changing. That's something that's been on my mind a long time."

Thinking about the internet, and the changing tides of the digital climate, Trimble realised an irony in this endeavour: as Gameshow was to be an album about modern life, the very institution of the album was losing its lustre. "The concept of an album is just not as important anymore; it's not," he says. "Things are consumed much faster, and in smaller quantities. Singles are more important than creating a whole body of work. It's starting to feel, to me, like spending a year making a record, and then 18 months touring it, is becoming less and less viable. People want things faster, they want things fed to them over time. With the rise in streaming services, the accessibility of the entire history of recorded music, people are able to pick and choose, and get more much faster. That's starting to make us rethink how we create and release our music."

The band were also concerned that, having taken time away following Trimble's hospitalisation, that the world would've moved on without them; four years, in the digital age, is an eternity. "That fear really started to creep in," he admits. "As the world gets faster, you worry about getting lost, and you worry that if you stop and take yourselves out of the picture, that no one will remember you when you come back."

Instead, Gameshow debut at #5 in the UK, and the band picked up where they left off. Including, finally, returning to actually play at Splendour In The Grass after their 2014 cancellation. Two Door Cinema Club made their Australian debut at Splendour in 2010, and have longed to return since. "To be able to travel to the other side of the world and play to people who were digging what we were doing, it was so great; so, you've always had a special place in our hearts, and in our memories," Trimble says. "After ending up in hospital last time, I'm so excited that it's actually happening now. I can't wait."