Our friends at God Don’t Like It are putting on a Christmas bash this Friday with an absolutely killer lineup (and us lot DJing). This week we’ll be running interviews with the bands performing, starting with Hook and the Twin. More info on the night here.

HOOK AND THE TWIN

Headlining tonight, Hook and the Twin provide a danceable swansong to a decade that, from one perspective, started with The Rapture’s Out of the Race’s EP and ended with Geoff Barrow’s Beak> album, the Horrors’ second and Memory Tape’s blindingly good debut. Like these luminaries, Hook and The Twin trade in a confluence of taught disco and loose indie songwriting, crafting something darker than new-wave, lighter than no-wave, turned with continental and Japanese experimentation into something deeper and more modern than three-minute pop. Pair this with a visual aesthetic that incorporates Fritz Lang and Origami and, Christmas metaphors aside, this should just be ace.

What would be your ideal Christmas present?

Mind expansion

…and what would be the worst gift someone could possibly give you?

A dead cat

You’re a duo. How do you manage to recreate your tracks live?

We don’t try and recreate the records exactly – playing live feels like a different thing. We use lots of live looping so the songs become more stripped down and hypnotic. We let them stretch out a bit.

Speaking of duos, in London and elsewhere they seem to be responsible for some pretty innovative music at the moment, does the limited number of band members help your creative process?

Most of the time. Having fewer people means we work much more quickly and I think we find it easier to focus than we would if there was a bunch of us. But that’s difficult to imagine – it’s definitely 2-man music that we make. We like that intensity of two people playing off each other.

There’s a thread of disco running through your music but it has something of a dark tint to it, where’s that come from?

Discos are always better in the dark. Lots of our favourite music hides complications under something that might on the surface sound quite upbeat and energetic; records like Heroes by David Bowie. It’s that sort of layering that keeps me coming back to my favourite records. Most interesting things have an ambiguity to them.

If a Hook and the Twin record is played in an empty forest does it make a sound?

Yes – we get a lot of myspace hits from pine trees.

What can we expect from your set at God Don’t Like It’s Christmas party?

Gold, sweat and anti-gravity.

See you on Friday! More info on the night here.