Alexis Taylor

My name is Alexis Taylor.

We became friends at school.

We were like 11 and 12 years old, I think.

We grew up playing football and talking about bands that we'd read about in the NME and went to loads of gigs together, hundreds of gigs.

We all used to congregate at Joe's house, usually on a Friday after playing football after school.

And we realized that we both liked making music and we would play songs on the guitar and listen to music or watch films and stay up late and have a fun time together.

Joe was making music in a band with other people and I was making music in another band.

But then at some point, Joe asked me if I wanted to record songs of mine that were like solo guitar and vocal songs, record them.

on his four track so he was really acting like a producer from quite a young age and he did that but then also wrote his own songs and we would play songs together and i think initially they were separate songs from one another like a joe song or an alexis song and then at some point we started to write songs together and finish each other's sentences or like write a second section for a song or something like that or just sing together and that was kind of the beginning

We were just absorbing lots of influences from dance music, from four to the floor, house music and disco and DFA and other things that we were listening to at that time.

But even in the process of writing Boy From School, the first iteration of it that was recorded and written at Joe's house was more gentle and slow and was a ballad.

I remember leaving the room that me and Joe were working in and going for a break into his brother's bedroom where there was like no one in the room and just using that as a place to write something.

We'd been to university by this point and started working jobs and something about like being in that room was quite evocative of many years spent hanging out with Joe.

It made me think about the school days

And those school days weren't that far behind us, but something about continuing having a friendship with Joe and always making music with him, and it often being in that house, connected me to the school days quite closely, as if we hadn't gone that far away from our beginnings.

And this moment of Joe suggesting changing it from the ballad to the disco bass track was quite a big moment.

And it's not an obvious link between the kind of lyrical content, slightly nostalgic words about your experiences at school, trying to summarize

a relationship, that doesn't necessarily sound like the subject matter of disco music.

So I think it was a bit of a leap for both of us to see, will this work?

That original version, it was on this Casio MT-70.