James Righton of new sensations Klaxons is celebrating one year to the day of being a gigging band by doing phone interviews for the past four hours. Things have moved pretty fast for the boys from New Cross..
You have your debut album coming out. Will we hear a difference from the EP? Yeah. We’ve re-recorded “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Atlantis To Interzone” and they sound a lot better. I think the general mood is a lot heavier than people will expect. There’s more depth. It’s not poppy or anything. A lot of people think we’re going to do some new rave album. It’s got the poppier elements to it but it’s got the darker moments I wanted too.
Do you think your sound – which is punky dance with a very DIY mentality – has come about due to the limited resources available when you first started out? The sound that has come about is the combination of the three people all coming from different places and at the end we all compromise. If someone comes in with a song we generally cut it up and put it in a blender – dissect it, criticise and come out with a song in the end. It’s quite a tough process. At the start we knew what we didn’t want to sound like, but we didn’t know what we wanted to sound like. There were a lot of angular guitar bands, post-Libertines bands, and that didn’t really interest us. If ever a song like that came up we’d cut its legs off before it had a chance to walk.
Were you guys clubbers or indie kids growing up? In the UK there was a fusion that happened when we started to go out. Bands like Soulwax came out and clubs like Trash in London – where they’d be playing indie songs alongside dance songs – and the 2manyDJs records. There were remixes of indie bands crossing into the clubs. That kind of stuff was where we were coming from. We all love a lot of alternative music and experimental music but at the same time we’re listening to dance, as long as it’s good.
With all this genre-mixing, could certain scenes get diluted? That’s interesting. It’s part of the iPod generation – the fact that you can listen to a dance track right next to a rock track. Someone was telling me the other day that because you don’t have the goth kids who hate the pop, you don’t have that divide and the passion that good bands come out of. When I was growing up the metal kids didn’t hang out with the kids that liked rap, or at least they didn’t respect their music. In some ways that could be detrimental to music, but I say the more you get hold of, the wider you can spread your musical taste so when you do come to write music, you have more reference points.
Who have you toured with so far? It’s weird, we haven’t really supported anyone. We’ve played with the Rakes, and the Arctic Monkeys once, but we generally just do our own thing, put on our own gigs. We did this one NME tour where we played with Shitdisco and Datarock, and we played some really big venues, but we’ve mainly just done our own thing.
We heard a rumour that due to those bright outfits and glow sticks you have to stay away from Romeo Beckham because he has epilepsy. Is this true? Haha, it is true. Romeo, God bless him. He’s a sweet lad but we can’t go near him. His Dad will kick off.
How did you come about signing directly to Australian indie label Modular? Well, Pav and Phil from Modular came to a gig in Liverpool and the next day they flew us out to Croatia, and gave us good food and wine and we said, “Let’s sign.” That simple really. We knew bands like Yeah Yeah Yeahs were on the label and we heard they did a good job in Australia, checked Ôem out and did our research. And they’re nice guys – Pav’s a gentleman.
You’re coming to Australia for the Modular parties, have you been out here before? None of us have done the sacred gap year which everyone else in this country has done. I think everyone I have ever met has sat on a beach in Australia and then done Bangkok via LA. We never got the chance. We’ll be over there for your summer which will be great, can’t wait. – Klaxon’s EP Xan Valleys is out now on Modular.
