← all Middle 8 videos
11:25 · 1,912 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- Three singles define them completely, the only songs from the debut with their own Wikipedia pages, and nothing since has come near them.
▶ 00:00:36
- The two met in 2001 and bonded over 1970s and 80s neo-psychedelia, naming Chrome, Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized, and made loops in dorm rooms before they sang at all.
▶ 00:01:15
- Their early shows were closer to performance art than concerts, playing college parties in fur coats and improvising over the Ghostbusters theme for an hour.
▶ 00:01:59
- The pop songs were written as a joke, an attempt to sell out as fast as possible, and those became the campus hits.
▶ 00:02:18
- The band was effectively over after their first tour, with one member considering joining of Montreal, until Columbia offered a deal.
▶ 00:02:40
- The debut sold over two million copies and was named the 18th best album of the decade by Rolling Stone, which turned the joke about selling out into the actual outcome.
▶ 00:03:20
- They urged the label to leave Kids off the record because they had been playing it since college and were done with it, and one of the other singles was sped up to match the tempo of Dancing Queen.
▶ 00:03:40
- For the second album they hired Peter Kember of Spacemen 3, deliberately making a record with no single for mass audiences to latch onto.
▶ 00:04:41
- The title track is about being congratulated for success they felt came from mocking the thing they were now expected to keep producing.
▶ 00:05:24
- The break is what fixed it. One moved to Los Angeles and the other to Queens, they resumed writing by email in 2015, and went back to basic song structure instead of avoiding their pop instincts.
▶ 00:09:40