But they both fitted in perfectly with what we wanted to do going forward.”

I’d delved back into the past, while they were more up to date. “They were listening to dance music, electro, more club-based stuff. “I sent them some ELO and some Bee Gees,” Alex says. When the three of them did reconvene after about a year, it was by swapping music that they were listening to and, as Alex puts it, “trying to get into each other’s heads”. Sam stayed in London, having got married at the end of the last campaign, while Kevin and his fiancée went to LA: a city he didn’t like at first but has now come to enjoy (“I don’t really know anyone there,” he laughs, “so I enjoyed spending a lot of time on my own, and… not doing a whole lot”). As well as a place he has in Portland, Oregon, Alex spent a few months at his parents’ house “in the middle of nowhere” in Donegal, Ireland, doing “simple things: like learning to eat better, reading and just focusing on nothing but figuring s**t out”. It did have to come to an ugly end before we put our hands up.”Ĭue a long, open-ended break.

So that’s what stopped us giving ourselves time to breathe. It’s ‘living the dream’, but you fear that once you have it, you could easily lose it. But it also generates a fear that if you stop, then everything’s going to go away. The hard work, for all of the damage it does, is undoubtedly beneficial. “It’s hard to communicate when you just want to escape. “Communication had broken down through being in each other’s company constantly for years,” Alex continues. And the physical deterioration was only part of what had gone wrong.

Six years of non-stop touring – they wrote and recorded second album ‘Beacon’ in just a few weeks at the end of 2011 after three years, then dived straight back in – had taken their toll. “So that became the point where we had to stop.” Instead, while Lily Allen replaced his band at the last minute and threw in a cover of ‘Something Good Can Work’ for the disappointed throng, Alex was being treated for stress-induced stomach ulcers. He was supposed to be headlining Latitude. The story of Two Door Cinema Club’s three-years-in-the-making third album begins in July 2014, in a hospital bed: a bed occupied by their singer, Alex Trimble.

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