Besides being the unique voice behind Hot Chip, Alexis Taylor has also juggled his share of side projects over the years. There’s his free improvisational About Group, a bizarro synth-pop single as Booji Boy High, collaborations both recorded and live with everyone from Bernard Sumner to Peter Gabriel and Robert Wyatt, and solo albums like 2008’s low-key Rubbed Out and 2014’s tender Await Barbarians. Last year he released Piano, a sparse and intimate record composed entirely of Taylor’s voice and piano keys, and now he’s releasing a companion version titled Listen With(out) Piano.

It’s an unusual concept for a record: Taylor invited other musician friends (including Brian DeGraw of Gang Gang Dance and Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux) to reinterpret the material on Piano, but rather than turning in a conventional remix, they worked around his voice and song structures, meaning that it can be listened to either in isolation or at the same time as the original album. “You have a new album that works both as a kind of electro-acoustic ambient companion piece to Piano,” Taylor explained when the album was announced, “and as a series of musical clothes to be put onto the deliberately bare record I released.”

Listen With(out) Piano also features a version of “Repair Man” by its co-writer, Green Gartside, best known for his work with cult pop favourites Scritti Politti. Since forming all the way back in 1977, Gartside’s extraordinary musical legacy has taken Scritti from critical theory-obsessed art-punk Marxist heroes to bona fide pop stardom, collaborations with Shabba Ranks, Mos Def and Kylie Minogue, and the Mercury Prize-nominated White Bread Black Beer. It’s this album that first brought Gartside and Taylor together: they were both nominated for the prize in 2006, and bumped into each other at a Dalston pub in the months leading up to the ceremony. Gartside, having just returned from Japan, was carrying a particularly large doll of the rapper Biz Markie that he’d picked up over there – Taylor, a fan of Markie having grown up on Yo! MTV Raps, evidently realised they’d have a lot in common and ended up talking. Over the subsequent years they’ve written a lot of material, played festivals, and performed on stage together, but the version of “Repair Man” that features on Listen With(out) Piano marks one of the first times they’ve actually released one of their recordings.

We sat down with Taylor and Gartside in a central London pub to talk about their work together and their respective approaches to writing and singing. Read on and listen exclusively to the blended version of Listen With(out) Piano below.

Where did you first hear each other’s music?

Alexis Taylor: My brother had the single of ‘Oh Patti’ when I was growing up. I remember seeing the cover of that 7” in our house and listening to it, but not knowing that much else about Scritti Politti. And then when I was working at Domino, the record label that I’m now on (with Hot Chip), one of the albums that was on heavy rotation was Songs to Remember. One of the things that struck me about it was how ahead of its time it sounded – the track ‘A Slow Soul’ reminded me of Sign ‘O’ the Times-era Prince, but that was from 1987, while this album was from 1982. There was a Rough Trade compilation of early Scritti Politti output that I bought at that time, so I worked my way from that very early stuff into the more well-known mid-80s catalogue. I think I was doing all of that around the time that I met Green. My wife was a big Scritti fan already, so she had most of the albums and singles.

Green Gartside: I don’t know if anybody played Hot Chip to me, so I guess I would’ve heard you on the radio. And I would’ve been struck, principally, by the good tunes. I liked Alexis’s voice very much, and – oh, I don’t know! – I just loved the wit and smarts of it. It ticked a lot of boxes for me.

“(On ‘Repair Man’), I was talking in metaphorical terms about starting your life again if you feel like you’ve broken something. Green... sounded like he was taking some of those phrases literally, thinking about what happens if you reference it to an actual repair man” – Alexis Taylor

You’ve worked together a lot over the years, but ‘Repair Man’ is one of the first times you’ve released a collaboration.

Green Gartside: We did start writing some songs (before this) and they were really good, but I hold myself personally responsible for that falling to pieces. I periodically, fairly frequently, just fall apart a bit. I don’t know what happens to me. I not infrequently lose the plot. (laughs) That sounds terrible. Nothing terrible happens to me, I just… (to Alexis) What do I do?

Alexis Taylor: I think it’s just difficult for you to finish stuff. Which is why we always get up to a certain point, and then…

Green Gartside: Yes, I found it almost impossible to finish this (‘Repair Man’). It’s the greatest pleasure in life, to start making songs – I have to start writing songs or a beat or something pretty much every day – but finishing them is nigh-on impossible.

Alexis, you strike me as the opposite – you’ve always got projects on the go.

Alexis Taylor: I’m not good at working on things for long periods of time.

Green Gartside: Yeah, you’re completely the opposite to me in that regard. I will just work something over and over.

Tell us about how you finished ‘Repair Man’ then.

Alexis Taylor: Green and I wrote (the song) together. It (first) came out on an About Group record, then I re-recorded it for Piano, and now I’ve revisited it on Listen With(out) Piano. So in a way, I may work quickly, but I’m happy to revisit things over and over. The original form (of the song) isn’t quite what’s on Piano. It was written together in Green’s house – I had the opening lyrics, we both strummed guitars together and worked on chord progressions. Green then wrote corresponding lyrics. I was talking in metaphorical terms about starting your life again if you feel like you’ve broken something. Green can speak for himself, but it sounded like he was taking some of those phrases literally, thinking about what happens if you reference it to an actual repair man. He seemed quite tickled by that.

Piano was quite a reduced album, so what was the appeal of taking something minimalistic and expanding it by introducing all these other artists into it?

Alexis Taylor: I’ve never done anything where I’ve tried to expand a record before, but I think the reduced nature of it meant that it crossed my mind: ‘What would happen if this music was produced by different artists? What would they have brought to it?’ I also thought that collection of people would all bring something very different to it, rather than if I just said to a producer, ‘Here’s a set of piano stems – what would you do?’ I also felt it was different, asking people to write to a finished thing and to fit into that space around it, that would complement the music but also – if they took my music away  – work on its own. I definitely wanted you to have the option to combine them if you wanted to or not.

“I periodically, fairly frequently, just fall apart a bit. I don’t know what happens to me. I not infrequently lose the plot” – Green Gartside

Green, coming from the perspective of the remixer, what appealed to you about the idea?

Green Gartside: Well, almost anything Alexis suggests is appealing to me because I like Alexis. I suppose it was the fact that it was a tough brief in that you either have to interrupt what Alexis was doing – which could’ve been interesting, to cut through it in various ways or disassemble it – or attempt to work in and around it, which is really what I did. That’s an interesting and quite tricksy thing to have to do. I like (having) little problems to solve.

Alexis Taylor: It’s quite different from a remix, because with the remix you can just mute whatever you don’t want to use, or you can use the structure or you can change the structure. This meant that you couldn’t really, you had to work around what was there. Green would ring me and say, ‘Well, I’ve done this and it’s basically finished, but the way it’s mastered and EQed has to be adapted from this point in the song to this point so that there’s enough room for your bits and my bits to work sonically.’ Which, I think, tells you about his level of engagement with the music.

Green Gartside: (There are) parallels in art, where something might be built around some pre-existing structure or with the original structure removed – and what’s of interest is what’s left. That has historical precedence in the arts, broadly speaking, but I wasn’t familiar with it in pop music. I really like that – once you’ve taken Alexis out, you’ve got all this strange noise. It’s good!

How did you feel about giving your work over to other people, given that it’s such an intimate record with just piano and voice?

Alexis Taylor: It was a great relief, actually. Doing something quite intimate-sounding or confessional, I’d had a period of really enjoying playing concerts like that and putting a record out like that – and then a moment of thinking, ‘All right, it’s finished now. It’d be nice to hand it over to other people.’ Actually, it was most satisfying to hear the record without the piano playing. That was the real payoff.

You’ve both got very distinctive singing voices. Have you at any point consciously developed your singing style?

Green Gartside: Yes, is my answer.

Alexis Taylor: I like to think that I haven’t consciously developed it. Then the other day, my dad said that I sing in an American accent.

Green Gartside: There are probably some words and vowels that you go transatlantic on and others you don’t.

Alexis Taylor: I think if you were to choose not to do that, it might be more of an affected thing – if you really go for a British accent, it’s almost more affected.

Green Gartside: When I started, I did do the English accent thing. As a kid, singing along to pop songs, I would sing in that transatlantic voice, and then when it came to making the (first Scritti Politti) record (I used an English accent), I guess because the influences at the time were English singers. But then I got mistrustful of the idea of ‘the honesty of the voice’, which freed me up to drift to a voice that didn’t have any pretence to authenticity – a bit of psychic ventriloquism.

“I’ve never done anything where I’ve tried to expand a record before, but I think the reduced nature of it meant that it crossed my mind: ‘What would happen if this music was produced by different artists?’” – Alexis Taylor

Alexis Taylor: Is there any truth in the idea that Michael Jackson was an influence?

Green Gartside: Yeah, Michael Jackson was. R&B singers of the early 80s were an influence. So were fey 60s pop singers. There were a slew of influences, you can obviously hear them in the early recordings when I drift away from the London accent to whatever it is I’ve got now. I’m aware that this was the start of what got perceived as a kind of dishonesty at the time, back in the old days of record labels and the NME and the rest of it.

Alexis Taylor: But did you feel like the voice you were singing in before was natural, or did you actually put on more of a London accent to make a point?

Green Gartside: It felt more like being comfortable in myself to have gone to the ‘Scritti voice’, that thing that’s more childlike or got more femininity to it, that felt more – and I’m very mistrustful of the word – more honest place to be than whatever I was before. Still, it comes back to the dread argument of what listeners turn to music for – purportedly to hear us, the artists, delivering some unmediated, unaffected purity.

Alexis Taylor: I wonder where that idea comes from.

Green Gartside: It’s a Romantic idea, isn’t it? It comes from Romantic philosophy, I would argue – Romantic ideas about the artist that are 250 years old, but alive and well in critical ideas in thinking about music today. They hold nothing for me. I don’t really buy into all that.

Green, before we finish, I can’t not ask you this – I read an interview with you from six years ago where you were in the middle of working on the follow-up to White Bread Black Beer. How’s it coming along now?

Green Gartside: Oh, for fuck’s sake. (laughs) I work on it every day with a kind of near-religious fervour. But I just… I wake up every day and I have new ideas. I want to feel the pleasure of starting something new. I love that, more than anything else. So that’s what puts paid to the awful business of finishing it. But it will get finished – Geoff Travis (head of Rough Trade, Scritti’s record label) is on my case every day. Geoff is kicking my ass, rightly so.