Obsessed with Making Music | A Conversation with Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard

Text: Isabel Aleman | Photo: Mario Arizpe

There has always been a heavy dose of energy at every Hot Chip show we have attended—the lights in the club, the bodies swaying back and forth, the need to let loose when the band hits the stage. The indie-tronica band are veterans to the scene and have paved the way for the ever-growing electronic wave.

The band formed in London, back in 2000, and have 6 studio albums under their belt. The Grammy nominated artist hit the stage at Club Here I Love You and performed a DJ set with members Joe Goddard and Felix Martin on Thursday, November 18, and we had the chance to speak with Joe before their show.

You seem to have a ravenous curiosity to create music, to sample music and to collaborate. Can you elaborate on what drives this continuous loop of music making?

For me, making music is an obsession. I guess what drives it, is the fact that it’s quite difficult to create something that you consider to be perfect, so I have a continuing desire to improve on what I have done with the next piece of music that I make. Also, you always have more to learn in music making, and I’m still excited and ambitious to learn about all aspects of music making.

You recently released, Electric Lines as a solo record, can you let us know about other solo projects that you may be working on and or have worked on?

There is some new music by 2 Bears just being mastered and new remixes for several artists. I may release a couple of new tracks under my name early next year.

The Simpsons sampled “Boy from School”—how cool was it to have one of your tracks in the legendary series?

Yeah it was amazing, if felt fantastic. Like pretty much everyone, I grew up loving the Simpsons. The quality of the humor was so high for years—it’s definitely one of the high points of our career.

As I was reviewing your twitter, I can tell you are a good person, what are 3 things that make a good person in your point of view?

I think with regard to Twitter it’s really important right now to try to avoid jumping to conclusions and judging others before understanding a situation and researching it a little bit. Twitter obviously makes it very easy to quickly share information, but I think many people, sometimes myself included, share information without checking its validity.

I also think that as a white, middle class, heterosexual male, it’s important to understand that I am very fortunate and privileged, and to understand that people from less fortunate backgrounds trying to achieve equality are not threatening you intentionally—they are just trying to make the world less unjust.

Hot Chip just keeps going because we enjoy making and playing music together. I hope that if that ended, then the band would just end. In order to keep enjoying those things with a group of people that you have known for roughly 20 years, I would say mutual respect and admiration.

Can you please tell Fusion magazine something that not too many people know about the band?

We once invented a cocktail called the ‘Highly Deadly Black Tarantula’ which contained rum and Guinness. It was disgusting. The ‘Daily Thompson’ (gin and lucozade) was equally bad.