Synchronicity - the Hot Chocolate song

I was playing this tour last summer around the States and I got a message from my friend, Spike Jonze, saying "Is it ok if I come see your show on the guest list ? It’s me plus 17." I never get requests like that, so it was really funny. So I played the show, and with live shows you’ve got good ones and bad ones, and maybe that one wasn’t one of the best, but afterwards we had all these tables and chairs outdoors. We had a little ghetto blaster and Drew from Matmos was Djing a little bit, and Spike and his 17 guests came to say hi. I met all the guys and it just became so much fun. Everybody started dancing, but it was really muddy there, so somebody dragged out a carpet they’d nicked from somewhere and put it over the mud. Everybody started breakdancing and inventing these stupid dances, and it ended up being 10 times funner than the show. But I got introduced to all those skaters there, and then two months later I got an email from Spike wondering if I’d be up for doing a song for their video. I was really excited, like "Yeah, of course !" I was in the middle of making this new album and I was on this little island of the coast of Africa in a tiny studio, and Spike was in LA, so I wrote the song and he’d email me the footage of them skating so I could see what it was going to look like. I was watching the footage at like the size of the stamp. I’d send him some music, he’d comment on it, I’d rework it and get it right. I had met all the guys on the tour, but I’d had a few drinks and wasn’t really fresh with remembering all of them on the spot, but I got this English kid who skates and lives on the island to say all the names of the skaters, and I sampled that and put it into the song. But it was such a fun experience, those guys were outrageous ! It was great fun.

slapmagazine.com, september 2004