Chameleon Circuit

[Blowfeld]

Introducing Trock: Songs about 'Doctor Who'

Monday, June 8 2009, 4:10am EDT

By Neil Wilkes, Editor
Fed up with the same old songs about relationships turning sour, hooking up with hussies or.. umm, feeling a bit bonkers? You're not alone. It's time for something a bit different. Please welcome Chameleon Circuit, a new band that writes songs about just one subject: Doctor Who! It's a new type of music that's been christened 'Trock' (Time Lord Rock) and has our favourite cult TV series at its heart. We spoke to band frontman and YouTube wonderkid Alex Day about this growing Trock phenom.

What inspired you to start Chameleon Circuit?
"Harry Potter fandom has this thing called Wizard Rock (Wrock), which is just bands that sing songs about Harry Potter. I wanted to do a similar thing for Doctor Who but actually thought it would already be done. I did a search for 'Time Lord Rock' on Google and couldn't find anything so I thought I'd start it! I wrote a song called 'An Awful Lot Of Running', uploaded it to my YouTube channel and it got 100,000 views! So I got a few of my friends got together, started a band and named this thing Trock."

Did you expect it to be as successful as it has been?
"We planned straight away to do an album and hoped it would do well, but we didn't expect it to be big in the sense of talking to you guys. We also did an interview with Doctor Who magazine, so it's become quite exciting. We're trying to get more into the fandom and that's going really well."

When did you get into Doctor Who?
"I started watching it with the revival. I always feel a bit bad about that - because I didn't watch the classic series, I fear lots of fans are going to hate me because I'm ignoring 40 years of their show! But I think it's okay, because the revival was meant for people my age to get into. And there are also quite a few songs about the classic series on the album."

Have you attempted the classic series?
"I've watched 'Genesis of the Daleks'. It was quite good. It had Davros in it, which is why I watched it, but because I'm so used to the 45 minutes, I find it really hard to watch four or five 20-minute episodes which are one story."

It's one of those shows where if you had watched it at the time, you would be able to watch it back now and overlook any imperfections.
"... which I think will probably be the same with the current series in ten years. It'll probably look really naff and the CGI will look terrible but we'll smile fondly! I found out all of the classic episodes have been novelised though, so I've been getting them as books and reading those. I've found that better, because my imagination doesn't have a special effects budget."

What are your favourite Who episodes?
"I like 'Blink' and 'The Girl In The Fireplace' because they're good standalone stories. Whenever I'm with someone who hasn't seen Doctor Who before, I usually show them one of those two. They're good introductions and they're written by the Moff too, who's brilliant. I also really like 'Midnight' even though a lot of people think it's boring. The Doctor's always championing humans and how brilliant they are, so I like that that episode is humans at their worst. They all turn on him and he looks very vulnerable."

What are the songs on your album about?
"There's 'Count The Shadows', which is about the season four two-part episode 'Silence In The Library' / 'Forest Of The Dead'. There's 'Exterminate Regenerate' which is kind of based on 'Journey's End' but is about the battle between the Doctor and the Daleks in general. Then there's a track specifically called 'Journey's End' which tells the story of the final episode. There are also songs that aren't based on specific episodes but just ideas, like 'Gallifreyan History 101', about the history of the Time Lords. And there's a song called 'Type 40', which is written from the point of view of the TARDIS."

Have you heard if anyone from production or the BBC is a fan of your songs?
"The BBC's YouTube channel favourited our video of Charlie singing 'Blink', so that's the biggest indication that we've got that they're not going to sue us. Apart from that, we haven't got any official word."

Do you think you'll be writing anything about David Tennant's regeneration into Matt Smith?
"We haven't started talking about the second album yet but if we do, I don't want to focus too much on the really current stuff. There's so much back catalogue of material that we can work with. For instance there's no song about the Cybermen on [this album], which is a big thing for me."

What's your masterplan for Chameleon Circuit?
"I really wanted to encourage people to start up their own Trock bands. Also I'd love to hopefully get embraced by the fandom. Wizard Rock is a really big part of the Harry Potter fandom, so I'd love Trock to do the same things for Doctor Who."

Chameleon Circuit's self-titled debut album is available to download now through iTunes or through the web at dftba.com. For more info on the band, visit myspace.com/chameleoncircuitmusic.

Story can be found at: digitalspy.com