Interview: Klaxons

Q: You’re from Stratford?

James Righton: Yes. Me and Simon [Taylor-Davis, guitarist] are from Stratford, Jamie’s [Reynolds, bassist] from Bournemouth.

Q: I went to Stratford when I was a kid.

J.R.: Did you? What did you think?

Q: It was gorgeous.

J.R.: It’s a pretty little town but someone said they’re trying to turn it into a theme park based around Shakespeare, which is a bit alarming. We were living there at the time so I wasn’t sure what my role would be within this theme park. Be some kind of seventeenth century writer, you think everyone was going to be playing their part in like real life theatre. It’s a bit Truman show really.

Q: You could be one of those court guys –

J.R.: Yeah, court jesters.

Q: No one of those –

J.R.: Court monkeys.

Q: Yeah you could incorporate tights and ruffles. . .

J.R.: I’d do it anyway to be quite honest.

Q: So, you taught English?

J.R: I did – I taught in Madrid. I finished university in 2004 and I just wanted to live in Madrid really. The only way you could do it and make any money was to teach English. You didn’t need a qualification or anything – you just needed to be able to speak English. It wasn’t too hard, but it was great – I learned a lot. I had a great time in Madrid. I miss it.

Q: Is it one of those places where things are going on all night?

J.R.: Yeah. You don’t go out until 12 and it’s full of good parties. The mood is more chilled out and relaxed. It’s got everything you need. Always the sun, there’s never any clouds in the sky because it’s the highest city in Europe. Good air and always blue skies. You never feel down.

Q: You lucked out here today in Seattle.

J.R.: It’s been brilliant. We went up the Space Needle and had dinner. A posh place to be eating dinner.

Q: What did you eat?

J.R.: Lobster, crab, prawns, every fish under the sun that was caught in the river.

Q: So you like fish?

J.R.: I love fish. A massive fish fan. A massive fish fan band.

Q: Fish is good for you.

J.R.: Lean meat, brain food.

Q: The videos by Klaxons are crazy. What about the director?

J.R.: Saam Farahmand. The new Michel Gondry. He’s a dude. He’s our mate. Simon went to university with his sister, and his sister has been a friend of ours before the band. He was doing just kind of the odd thing on MTV. We’ve kind of grown together – he did the Gravity’s Rainbow video and in the last few he’s had a bigger budget to play with to do whatever he really wants. He’s a mad, mad, man – he’s absolutely insane. He just gave us a treatment for the next one.  He’s out here doing a documentary with Soul Wax. We met up in Philly and talked about the new video – it’s going to be really, really big.  We’ve got to learn to fight. We’ll fight an invisible, alien object. We’ve got a day of choreography. It’s good because he really likes to push us and challenge us. We don’t want to make standard videos. We want to prat around and have fun.

Q: The videos reminded of the ones Duran Duran used to make, like the one with ribbons in it -

J.R.: Golden Skans. No one’s ever said that before but I know what you mean actually. Which one was it when they were tied up on a mill –

Q: Wild Boys.

J.R.: That was the Simon Le Bon almost died, the machine got stuck upside down. We  haven’t taken risks like that yet.  The biggest risks we’ve done to ourselves to harm ourselves has been shaving our chests, which we’ve done many times for Saam.

Q: And you’ve survived.

J.R. We’ve survived, just about. Just a few uncomfortable months. The sacrifices we make for the music.

Q: And it’s not always the case that the music is great and the visuals are great.

J.R.: I know what you mean. I just think that when you’re into a band you’re into everything about the band.  The music is the most important thing with us but I think that there has to be a whole world that people actually want to be a part of. All the best bands that I’ve loved have had their own little world. From the Libertines to the Strokes to Radiohead - it was more than just the music. Bands with ideas are short in numbers these days.

Q: Were you excited about the small Libertines reunion?

J.R.: Nah, it’s good they’re back together because I think their solo stuff that they’ve done after the Libertines hasn’t been as interesting. It’s a classic example of a songwriting partnership which feeds of each other and  needs each other. The first Libertines’ album is great – I’m not really bothered about the second. There are few good tracks.

Q: You are planning a trilogy of albums?

J.R.: When we first started the ideas that we had were to make a trilogy about the past the future and the present, starting with the future. We’ve kind of loosely done the future and start with the past next, I think. This first album that we made was kind of forced – and that’s not in a bad way – we just work better if we’re kind of pushed and we’ve got deadlines because otherwise we get very lazy. Most musicians are [lazy]. We just kind of sit around and do nothing until we’re forced. We want to crack on though and see if we can get the next one out early next year.

Q: What made you guys decide to cover Grace’s It’s Not Over?

J.R.: It’s a great pop song that stood out from the early 90s kind of rave era. It’s a song we didn’t associate with rave as much. It just has a melancholic melody and kind of sad popness to it. We just thought we could do our own version of it. I like to think we’ve given it a new lease of live and added to the original. One of the guys who wrote the original contacted us and said they really liked the version we’d done of it, which was a great compliment for them to pay.

Q: What about this dark side to Klaxons.

J.R.: We’re quite British. Quite dry. We’re not miserabalists or anything like that but I think there’s just something in the water in the UK that you have a sadness about what you do – a lot of the bands do. We wanted to pursue topics and things that are less real and less reality based or everyday life. We wanted to make a fantasy record, an escapist pop record and bring in some references that you don’t normally see in pop music.

Q: I haven’t seen anything about Aleister Crowley since the Stones.

J.R.: They’ve all dabbled in it. Zepellin did as well. But we just wanted to put something out there that wasn’t heard on daytime radio. It’s a topic that hasn’t been addressed in a while. We’re not occultists or practicing Crowley fans. We wanted to play around with  ideas. We try and make pop music kind of happy and melodic but if you have happy topics it can be too sickly and sweet. All good pop has to be a bit tainted.

Q: You’ve created a whole fantasy genre of new rave.

J.R.: It’s funny because something that we started out as a joke is now a youth cult. In a lot of ways it’s great because it means something to people and actually become something that exists. It’s really weird. I don’t really know anything about it.

Q: I read about you as being described as an apocalyptic pop band.

J.R.: That’s pretty spot-on. I think that’s what we are, apocalyptic pop.

Q: Is the show with Muse going to happen.

J.R.: We’re not. They asked us but it clashed with another festival we were doing. It would have been nice in a lot of ways to play Wembley Stadium because it is the national stadium. Hopefully we’ll be able to do it off our own back one day.

Q: Are you going to work with Brian Eno?

J.R.: He’s doing Coldplay’s album. It’s kind of like, what’s the point now? I love Brian Eno but it’s like if you work with Timbaland now. It’s already been done. We’re thinking about going to Prince’s studio. If we ask nice enough . . . Prince isn’t doing much at the moment is he?

Q: What are your thoughts on Stock, Aitken & Waterman?

J.R.: There was a period for five years where they writing some of the best pop music in the world. But I think you’re only creative for a certain amount of time. It’s hard to stay fresh when you’re married and you’ve got kids and you’re not at your peak. Things change. We’ll see what happens. The other guys [Jamie and Simon] are getting married soon, I think. They’ve been threatening the idea. Maybe we’ve only got a couple of years left. I have to get married then. I’m only in my early twenties. I’m only 23.

Q: What are your fans like? There are a lot of teenagers here tonight.

J.R.: Are there? We’re lucky that we’ve got that age group - the 15-18 year old fan base. It’s such an important age when a band means so much to you. These days it seems like I am just chewing through music and the band doesn’t matter as much as it did when I was 14. Coming here [Seattle] – like hearing the first Nirvana record, you looked up to them, you wanted to know everything about them and you wanted to dress like them. Imitate them. We’re really lucky. In the UK it’s crossed over now. You get the 20-somethings the 30-somethings. A 70-year old man went to our gig the other day in Paris. He loved it. He was in the front row, bopping his head to The Bouncer.

Q: You aimed from the beginning to be a popular band.

J.R.: I just think it’s ridiculous that some bands don’t want to be big. Not big in the sense of sell a lot of records but getting your music heard by as many people as possible. When you write music you want people to hear it. You don’t write it for you and a few of your mates. I hate that kind of indie snobbery of certain bands who don’t want to get their music out there. The bands that we’re into made credible, interesting pop music and still got their music out to a lot of people. You go back to Roxy Music, Eno, David Bowie - you listen to these records now and they still hold up. They’re so forward thinking and so incredible, some of them are so weird but they’re still big selling artists. When we turned up to meetings with record companies you could see this is what they wanted. We’re not possessive of what we do. We put our songs up on myspace for free and for the first year we just let people download them.

Q: What’s the importance of myspace? You never add anyone, only take requests.

J.R.: It’s an organic, natural way to see if people actually like you. It just spread - we didn’t force ourselves on people. If it’s good people will find you.

Q: This is the first band I’ve seen in a bit with 2 bass players.

J.R.: I’m not a particularly good bass player. I play bass on Totem on the Timeline and Four Horsemen of 2012.  None of us are really good musicians. We’re not musicians really. We’re just some guys from South East London. I’m a guitar player originally, Simon isn’t a musician in any way, Jamie plays the drums and somehow I’m playing keyboards, Jamie’s playing bass, and Simon’s playing guitar. And that’s a good thing. In that way the music we’re writing wasn’t self-indulgent because none of could indulge – we didn’t have the talent to. A lot of the time it’s better not to know the instrument.

-Photos and Interview by Dagmar Sieglinde

Mon Jul 2 2007 · Posted in Interviews