Anniversary concerts have become increasingly popular over the last few years. For fans, they offer the opportunity to experience a beloved album live in full, often for the very first time. With the rise of indie bands between 2005 and 2010, there are now more and more milestones worth celebrating.
The same goes for Tourist History by Two Door Cinema Club, whose 15th anniversary the Northern Irish band are celebrating with a slight delay. Speaking to bassist Kevin Baird ahead of the band’s show in Zurich this July, however, one thing quickly becomes clear: the band did not decide lightly to take the album back on the road.
We’re really excited about doing this anniversary tour now, but at first we needed some convincing. We were very conscious that this shouldn’t feel like the end, or like some final victory lap where we say, «Look how great we were back then.»
We wanted to give the album the moment it deserves while still focusing on what comes next.
The beauty of those songs is that they’re almost over before they’ve even started.
Many songs from the debut album always remained part of the band’s live set. Others, however, had not been touched in years. Revisiting the old material therefore not only means relearning the songs, but also rethinking the arrangements. At the same time, the question arises how much fifteen-year-old songs should actually be changed for today’s audience. Baird explains that the band consciously tried to preserve the immediacy that defined the record.
The beauty of those songs is that they’re almost over before they’ve even started.
They’re very immediate. We don’t want to drag a song that was originally intended to be two and a half minutes into something that suddenly becomes five minutes long. That would feel like a disservice to the song. It’s about finding the balance between making things interesting, enjoyable and a bit unexpected, while still keeping the essence of what those songs are about.
Two Door cinema club are: Sam Halliday (Guitar), Alex Trimble (Vocals), Kevin Baird (bass)
It feels like forever ago, but also like yesterday.
When the album was released, the three friends were barely 20 years old. A span of fifteen years suddenly becomes a significant part of one’s life. Yet the feeling of time is always relative, and Baird feels the same way.
It’s kind of weird. We’re approaching a point where being in this band, and even being in a band that’s had a bit of success, has been more of my life than the time before it. It all flew by so quickly. I think when things are really busy and so much is happening, time moves fast. There are probably two or three years that are just a blur to me now.
So it feels like forever ago, but also like yesterday at the same time.
That youthful carefree attitude shaped the unmistakable sound of Two Door Cinema Club. At that age, everything feels exciting and fun. You feel free and grown-up and simply throw yourself into things without overthinking them too much.
When you’re 16 or 17, you don’t really have imposter syndrome yet. You’re willing to try anything. We were always experimenting and asking ourselves things like: «Can we write a pop song in 7/4?» And then we’d just do it.
We didn’t know a drummer, so the three of us programmed the beats ourselves. A lot of things came out of necessity.
One of the band’s defining trademarks became Sam Halliday’s guitar playing. With its melodic playfulness, it often stands almost on equal footing with the vocals.
We were just kids jamming together, and if you don’t play during part of a jam, it feels boring. So everybody was constantly adding something. I think that helped create Sam’s very melodic and distinctive guitar style.
A lot of the songs started instrumentally before there were vocals, so he had this really open canvas to create melodic guitar lines. That became a huge part of our sound.
The music video for «Undercover Martyn» shows just how young the band was back then.
As the conversation continues, it becomes increasingly clear that the band’s origins also played a central role in shaping their identity. Bangor, the hometown of the band, may sit on the coast of Northern Ireland, yet culturally they never felt entirely Irish or entirely British. Baird remembers the strong sense of unity within the local music scene at the time.
I think because we never fully felt like one or the other, it created a very tightly knit music community around Belfast that we were lucky to be part of.
It was an amazing period full of great musicians and really supportive people. There was no competition. You could share a bill with a folk artist, an electronic DJ and a heavy metal band, and everyone was just helping each other out. If one artist started getting attention from record labels or people coming over from London or Dublin, everybody tried to support that momentum. We’d all make sure to show up to each other’s gigs, making it look like loads of people were coming to these shows. There was a real sense of community and people looking out for one another.
Northern Ireland was hugely important in shaping who we are as a band and as people. You grow up in the shadow of bigger things there, whether that’s the Troubles or the political instability afterwards.
It was almost forced optimism.
At the time the band began experiencing their first successes, many Northern Irish artists consciously avoided directly addressing the political and social tensions surrounding them.
We were really the tail end of all that. I think everyone was just exhausted by politics and the Troubles. People wanted to stop talking about it. There weren’t many artists openly addressing those topics at the time, even though they were obviously still there.
The optimistic sound of Two Door Cinema Club emerged in parts out of this political exhaustion.
In a strange way, I think it pushed us toward optimism. It was almost forced optimism. We wanted our music to be about dancing, having a good time and singing about everyday life, because those bigger topics felt too overwhelming.
We were also very young and probably wondered what right we had to speak about those things.
Three friends from Bangor who never stopped experimenting
That mixture of youthful euphoria and escapism is likely also part of the reason why Tourist History still feels so timeless today, and why the songs instantly transport so many listeners back to the early 2010s. Yet the album did not only leave a mark musically. Over the years, the artwork has also become almost iconic. Long before cats completely took over the internet, one already graced the cover of Tourist History.
We were ahead of the marketing curve.
What looks like a casual snapshot was actually the result of a surprisingly long search.
We had gone through a couple of different ideas for the album artwork. We had a designer from Ireland we were friends with that we wanted to use, but the record company didn’t like it. We were pretty disappointed because we thought it was perfect.
Then the label suggested another team, and they came up with something that we absolutely hated. It became this push and pull situation, and it got to the point where we thought we might just have to compromise and go with something that nobody was really happy with.
Then someone suggested that we work with Megaforce. At that point they were still fairly early in their career. They had made some music videos and done some branding work, but they weren’t huge yet. They came back with the image of the cat almost immediately, and we just knew that was it. That was the one.
We hadn’t given them any direction involving cats at all. We still don’t know much about the cat, other than that he was French. Sadly, I assume he’s not alive anymore.
«He was French.» – Kevin Baird on the iconic Tourist History cover cat.
Two Door Cinema Club emerged from an era in which indie rock was at its commercial peak and increasingly finding its way into the mainstream. Since then, guitar bands have slowly drifted away from the centre of pop culture.
We’re also aware that, when it comes to guitar music, not many bands have really come along to replace bands like us. When we started out, we were sort of picking up the torch from bands of the early 2000s, but that cycle hasn’t really happened again.
In some ways that’s sad for music and fans as a whole, but obviously it’s also good for us because we don’t really have much competition in that space anymore.
At the same time, the culture surrounding live shows has also changed. Concerts with elaborate live production have become less common, Baird explains.
Full guitar bands with live drums and proper production aren’t as common anymore. The landscape of music has changed a lot, partly because touring has become so expensive, which we’re discovering ourselves while putting together this new show.
Yet despite the costs and additional effort involved, this exact type of production has been part of Two Door Cinema Club’s DNA from the very beginning.
Seeing Phoenix during the Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix era, and touring with them, really shaped our view of what a live show could be. To us, it should be musicians actually playing instruments, combined with incredible lighting and production that truly fits the music.
This stands in contrast to much of what currently dominates the market. Productions leave less and less room for spontaneity and increasingly resemble tightly choreographed audiovisual spectacles. It is precisely against that development that Two Door Cinema Club want to position themselves.
A lot of modern production just becomes a huge video screen at the back of the stage, with people staring into it like a giant iPhone.
We want this tour to feel like a genuinely impressive live show, and now we finally have the opportunity to do that properly.
It is reassuring to know that bands like Two Door Cinema Club still want to carry the torch for classic live music. So maybe it is not only true that «Rock’n’Roll will never die», but also that indie rock will never die. Thankfully.