“We were kind of determined to just make some really good music and to break that mold, break out of that country and get to wherever we wanted to go,” he said. Trimble and his bandmates, bassist Kevin Baird and guitarist Sam Halliday, didn’t dare dream about record label executives coming to Northern Ireland to offer Two Door Cinema Club a deal. Not a lot of bands came out of the country either, Trimble said. Maybe partially due to The Troubles - the long and violent rift between Catholics and Protestants - Northern Ireland suffered from a lack of access to outside arts such as music, theater and film. “So we took our time and wrote the best songs we could until we were ready to get out there.” “We saw it as a chance to hide away until we were ready,” said Trimble, whose emerging band will perform at the Warfield in San Francisco Sept. While others weren’t sure what to do after reaching success in the small country, his band used Northern Ireland’s borders to shield itself from the glaring spotlight of the United Kingdom’s band-making - and breaking - press. The way singer Alex Trimble sees it, the isolation that came with starting a band in Northern Ireland - something that hurt many of his predecessors - ended up helping his dance-rock band, Two Door Cinema Club.

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