A lot of people in the crowd want to be told what to do; if you just put your hands up, they do it.

When you're making the record, you're not thinking about an audience, but you still need them and you want them.

I know that I can't ever write a song that just sounds completely saccharin. Even if I'm singing about someone being my complete love life, I'm singing about my own inabilities to be as bright as that person.

That happens quite a lot in Hot Chip - you can let go of something that was originally essential to the creation of a song.

It's funny, I played a social gig once - we were playing music that was rhythm based, but it was going in some strange places. Some people came up to me afterward and said, "Can you play a tune that we'll all recognize?" I've carried that with me forever - why would you want a tune you could recognize? What's the point of that?

I was listening to a lot more folk music. I love the sound of acoustic guitars but I didn't want to be that person standing up there strumming away.

I like listening to music on a Discman, where the CD spins, and the fact that it's weird to listen to something on a Discman when most people have an iPod, even though those have an internal hard drive that's spinning, too.