Bicep: "We almost dropped 'Glue' from the live show"

Everyone knows 'Glue', Bicep's euphoric rave banger that'll melt your heart in less than five minutes ( as well as the equally iconic video which has now raked in 20 million plays).

But it wasn't always this way: in a new interview the Belfast boys have revealed that they nearly dropped it from their live show because "nobody reacted" to it when they first started playing it out.

Writing during a Reddit AMA on r/electronicmusic, the duo revealed their writing process behind 'Glue' and why it nearly didn't become a hit:

"It started as a drum loop we made with another set of vocals and different chords. We binned the vocals (which [were] just some cutup samples) and had Silkie Carlo came in to studio. We recorded new ones to the old chords (Still E minor) and felt we were getting somewhere.

"Left it for a few months and felt there was something there but the chords were too bland. Finally, we wrote new chords to Silkie's vocals and the original drums. It took about a year of playing around and tweaking, there's like 15 versions.

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"When we first play [sic] it out, nobody reacted for a few months and we almost dropped it from live show haha.

"We've got round to make a new 8 minute live version which is in the new stream!"

'Glue', which is firmly in the canon of the Greatest Dance Music Tracks, might not have ended up their had it not been for Bicep's perseverance.

"We were playing 'Glue' out for six months before we mixed it and nobody cared about it at all! It didn’t get so much as a cough! We played it at Coachella: nothing," Bicep told us last month.

“Even after the album came out, it was still a sleeper. We went through a phase where we didn’t even play it!”

“It only worked when we started closing with it. It’s almost like you can lower people into 'Glue', but you can’t lift them up into it. We have this new, really indulgent intro for it now, where it has four minutes of beatless arpeggiator at the start”.

The duo also gave irreverent answers to questions such as "what's your typical arm day workout?" and – an all time classic – "what's your favourite flavour of crisp?" (Bicep get extra points for name-checking Tayto and Manomasa in the same sentence).

As the pair look forward to their next live stream, they also fielded a question about their live show, saying that their performance has changed each time:

"The live show is constantly developing and has changed nearly every time we play it.. currently we have two monos and the majority of the drums live. Using 2 sh101s means we have a lot of flexibility and we spent a long time learning to get the mix right across a range of sounds. We used to make sequences on the fly but that became a bit annoying and now generally just send midi out to them but have the option to program them on the fly or use the arps etc live also. Pads and vox are recorded in the box as we only have two hands and carrying a poly all over the world never made sense. More noise coming from 2 drum machines and a modular atm."

Bicep's new album scored number 2 on the UK album's chart. Read their recent Mixmag cover feature here and listen to their cover mix here.

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