“I fell asleep in a portaloo” - Two Door Cinema club talk festivals at Reading 2016

Waiting backstage for their headline set in the NME/Radio 1 tent on the Saturday night of Reading 2016, Two Door Cinema Club are reflecting on a big summer. “I think this is our fourth time playing here,” frontman Alex Trimble says, “and because it’s at the end of the summer, we see our work over the summer pay off.”

Trimble remembers the band’s first ever Reading set - a mid-afternoon slot in the same tent he sits behind, and calls that set “the biggest moment to date”.
Playing festivals around debut album ‘Tourist History’ as teenagers was the first time Trimble, bassist Kevin Baird and guitarist Sam Halliday ever went to them, but being ‘on the job’ didn’t stop the Irishmen picking up some heavily regretful memories like the rest of us.

“I fell asleep in a portaloo on the Isle of Wight,” remembers Kevin. “It proved to be gross, and just a bad decision really.” This certain story seems not to have reached Sam, who claims the band were “the sensible ones” of their touring party at festivals in their early days.

“One year at Glastonbury, the guy that came along to do sound for us got really drunk and fell over loads of tents, losing the car keys to the rental car with all our gear in it.”

Gearing up for the release of third album ‘Gameshow’, the band have been sprinkling new songs into the set, and mixing up styles a bit more. “When we were 17 and 18,” Baird recalls, “the challenge was ‘can we physically play any faster?’, so we’d be trying out high-tempo songs, and we got a bit bored of that. Also, as we got older, we thought ‘fuck, I can’t keep up with this!’, and we wanted to explore different ways of getting people moving.”