The band have talked down Beacon as “safe”, and occasionally you get the sense they are straining towards something with a little more classic-rock heft than usual. Yet Gameshow sets these complaints to music seemingly designed to make them more successful still. “I’m made of Plasticine, I’m a Pinocchio,” protests frontman Alex Trimble on the title track, before complaining about the attentions of rapacious fans: “Sing to me, you’re so pretty.”
It’s an album that, when not bemoaning materialism and the rise of social media (“Don’t need to know what everybody’s thinking,” offers Bad Decision), makes very heavy weather indeed of Two Door Cinema Club’s success. You might think this represents an ideal version of fame – all of the benefits, none of the intrusion – but apparently not, at least according to Gameshow. Whatever other pressures the trio may have had to deal with during their sabbatical, at least they can’t complain that their right to privacy and a normal life has been snatched from them by their recognisability.
And yet, you suspect most people would still struggle to identify a member of the band. In 2016, their popularity is seemingly undimmed by their extended hiatus: anyone who thought they might have been deposed in the affections of those who insatiably hunger for poppy, synth-heavy, putatively alternative music by their vaulting former support act Bastille (more poppy and synth-heavy still, 8m albums sold and counting), should note that their forthcoming UK tour completely sold out in a morning and a second date has had to be added at London’s cavernous Alexandra Palace. Still, there’s something fascinating about the way Two Door Cinema Club have become a band in a position to offer lofty pronouncements while remaining weirdly anonymous. It’s hard to overcome the feeling that this kind of finger-wagging is fine if you’re Crass, living off homegrown vegetables in your anarcho-syndicalist commune, but perhaps a bit much if your music has been used to advertise everything from Vodafone to Debenhams. Previously an inconspicuous, poppy, synth-heavy, putatively alternative rock band whose reviews seemed to deal almost exclusively in faint praise (“ A less po-faced Foals”), the County Down trio were transformed into an inconspicuous, poppy, synth-heavy, putatively alternative rock band operating at a level of popularity where arenas are filled with ease and so long can be taken to make a follow-up that it starts being referred to as a comeback.įour years separate Beacon from its successor, time during which Two Door Cinema Club’s personnel apparently did the kind of things that members of successful rock groups feel the need to do, including “giving themselves space to discover their individual identities outside of the band”, exploring eastern religions, staging photographic exhibitions, “battling their various demons”, and alas, on the evidence of Gameshow’s opening track Are We Ready? (Wreck), writing songs that castigate consumerist culture and admonish their audience for their materialism in time-honoured, imagine-no-possessions-I-wonder-if-you-can style: “You should be comfortable, don’t think at all … you get paid, don’t need any respect.” It reached No 2 in the UK charts and sold 100,000 copies. T wo Door Cinema Club’s second album, Beacon, was a record that, to borrow the famous assessment of David Frost, rose without trace.
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