Riding It 'Til The Doors Come Off

It took their singer being hospitalised for Two Door Cinema Club to admit they needed a break. Hamish MacBain meets a band back from the brink

- Hamish MacBain

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. Alex wasn’t supposed to be there. He was supposed to be headlining Latitude. 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.

“I was in there for two weeks,” he says. “So that became the point where we had to stop.”

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

“It was forcing our hand, in a way,” lead guitarist Sam Halliday concedes. “we didn’t have anything else outside of the band. It makes everything seem so much more important, because you’re there in it all the time. Stuff that really wasn’t that big of a deal became a massive deal.”