AD: Hey Sarah!
SL: Al Doyle! How are you?

AD: Very well thanks. It’s about 11am here and it’s freezing! What time is it where you are?
SL: 10pm.

AD: Oh, that’s weird.
SL: Indeed it is! So your new album One Life Stand is about to be released. I read that Alexis Taylor [lead singer and co-founder] said the title is like "turning a one-night stand into someone’s whole life".
AD: True, yes! It’s not really that complicated, the title. It’s just really a pun on the one-night stand. You know, Alexis is married and just had a baby girl, so he’s really been thinking about what it’s like to be growing up and settling down… and we all thought it was a nice sentiment and basis for the album. The album ended up having a lot of love songs on it… sort of quite simple, poppy love songs. So it made sense to highlight that with the title and the first single.

SL: Is there a period after you finish recording, before the album's release that you get a bit nervy about how it will be received?
AD: Yeah, I mean, this time around has been a bit different. This time we left ourselves a whole year to be off the road and do the recording, so we were really able to stretch out – we spent eight weeks in the recording studio and then did lots of tweaking and tinkering over the rest of the year, so we had a lot of time to live with it. I think the album is one of our most developed pieces of work, and sort of the most considered body of songs we’ve made, simply because we’ve had the time to think about it which we’ve never had before.

SL: I was checking out your MySpace today and you’ve had over five million views. Do those numbers mean anything to you?
AD: Not really. Those numbers are pretty much meaningless to me. The thing that worries me are the number of my Twitter followers.

SL: You and Felix [Martin, fellow Hot Chipper] share a Twitter page?
AD: Yeah, I know, so maybe he’s the culprit. We’ve got 5500 followers, which we thought was really good, but then James (Murphy, AKA LCD Soundsystem) started his Twitter account, and he’s immediately got loads more followers than us. We just don’t know what to do about it! We think we’ll launch a smear campaign. 

SL: Great idea! Guerrilla marketing!
AD: I know, exactly! I must get onto that.

SL: As you’ve become more and more successful, do you think the way you make music has changed?
AD: It’s not something we really think about, especially when it comes to writing music. We need to just write music on the basis of things that we are interested in. With Made In The Dark we were really proud of that album, but we realised that for some people it could be perceived to be a little chaotic as it veers from one musical style to another… which some people really love, but a lot of people find that quite frustrating. With this album we really tried to keep it quite straight down the line. 

SL: Despite your success, you guys still keep a pretty low-key lifestyle. Do you get recognised out and about much?
AD: We are kind of popular, but I think people think we are way more successful than we actually are. We don’t really sell that many records, and we’re not really household names in the UK by any means, we pull in quite a lot of people to the live shows but apart from that we’re a completely unsuccessful band. We don’t really court fame or popularity, we’re not going out and behaving badly and going out and dating models, or any of the things you have to do to get into the tabloid newspapers.

SL: In your live performances, you usually totally reinvent your studio-recorded songs – is that for your own entertainment, or do you do it for the audience?
AD: Most of our songs exist in the studio in a certain form… and we can’t actually play them on stage! All the songs from One Life Stand, none of us could play if you asked us to play them right now, we would have to re-learn them from scratch, so in a way we’re covering our own songs.  We don’t have a lot of reverence and respect for the recordings, so when it comes to playing live we change things around a lot and make something that works in a live scenario. We want things to be visually exciting and a bit more noisy and raucous.

SL: Do you think you’re ready to get back on the road with the new album? Are you looking forward to it?
AD: I’m really looking forward to it, but I’m definitely not ready to do it at all! We haven’t played together for almost a year! I'm scared shitless to be honest, but I'm sure it will come together after lots of practise.

SL: Well we hope it all comes together for you! Thanks so much for the chat.
AD: Thanks so much! Bye!

One Life Stand is available now. More at myspace.com/hotchip.