The TimesJanuary 13, 2007
On the crest of a new rave
Ben Machell
Punk pop, sci-fi and glowsticks a gogo; we go underground to find out why Klaxons are the next big noise
London band The Klaxons release their debut album "Myths of the Near Future" on 29th January. They are expected to become huge.
Jamie Reynolds - vocals, bass guitar
James Righton - vocals, keyboards/synthesizers
Captain Strobe (Simon Taylor-Davis) - guitar, backing vocals
Something’s up under London Bridge station. The winter afternoon renders everything along the Thames a drizzly monochrome, but duck into the dark arches of Weston Street and soon you’re in a world of unseasonal vibrancy and colour.
Whoops and giggles echo off the walls, and what you initially took for a few oddly dressed youths turns out to be the end of a 100-yard human chain. But not normal humans, these are under-18s. And not even normal teenagers, but giddy girls and boys decked out in the most garish, luminous party clothes they can piece together. An enterprising bloke with a trolley is busy selling hundreds of those glow-in-the-dark necklaces and bracelets normally seen on Bonfire Night or at music festivals.
If the scene leaves you bemused, then Noah and Jerome, two 16-year-olds in the queue, are happy to explain. It’s Klaxons, innit. They are putting on a matinee show for the throng of young fans they have amassed in the months since coining and then leading the “new rave” pop genre. The band’s penchant for the neon dancewear of the early Nineties has been appropriated and approximated by their fans. This explains why Noah and Jerome are wearing what seem to be reflective lollipop- lady jackets.
“We stole them from school. It looks stupid, but the stupider you look, the cooler you are,” says Noah.
“Once you’re at the gig, no one cares,” chimes Jerome. “It’s a proper rave.”
The queue starts to move, and soon everyone rushes into the cavernous confines of the SEOne club to the pre-recorded sound of swelling piano chords and rumbling bass grooves from their heroes. It’s like watching the children of Hamelin vanish into the mountain (but with added bouncers).
Today Klaxons are in skinny jeans and dark hoodies. In fact, they say, it’s been a few months since they have donned fluorescent rave gear of any kind. Seated away from the crowds in the middle of an adjoining dancefloor, they tell me they are still impressed with the ingenuity and audacity of their younger fans.
“One girl stole three pairs of chemistry goggles. She’s decorated them and wants us to wear them on stage,” chuckles James Righton, the impish keyboardist. “Some of these kids must have broken up for the holidays yesterday and just fleeced their schools for whatever they can wear.”
From beneath a thicket of frizzy black hair, Simon Taylor, the guitarist, quietly suggests that attracting such felonious fans is a significant achievement. “That whole DIY ethic in music never really filtered into the mainstream before. You’d maybe see it at universities, but for it to have now reached the playground is a big thing.” Well, he was much too young for punk.
What you can’t dispute is the rapid ascent of the band. Their first single, Gravity’s Rainbow, was released only in April and today you can tune in to daytime Radio 1 and hear the follow-up releases Atlantis to Interzone or Magick cued between the Kooks and Lily Allen. After a major label tug-of-love, their debut album Myths of the Near Future comes out this month on Polydor. It is produced by the indie-dance impresario du jour, James Ford.
Perhaps the trio’s biggest achievement so far, however, has been to create a media buzz by fusing two thoroughly unfashionable genres — rave music and sci-fi lyrics — to their punk-pop sound.
“We just didn’t want to sound like anything else that’s going on,” says Jamie Reynolds, the beanpole bassist and vocalist. “If you do that, you’re already going to be behind.”
Given that the prevailing indie schtick still remains the me-and-me-mates-down-the-pub variety of gritty realism, the southeast London trio instead developed gloriously daft covers of forgotten rave hits such as The Bouncer (originally by Kicks Like A Mule) or originals with such heroic names as 4 Horsemen of 2012, helping to make them a sort of anti-Arctic Monkeys. Even though the band’s first two singles were limited to 500 copies each, the NME feverishly declared that the group was ushering in a “new rave revolution”, the genre Reynolds unwittingly invented when asked to describe his band’s occasional lacing of guitar-pop with the blaring sirens and sonic euphoria of early Nineties dance music.
Still, it’s worth remembering that Klaxons are all aged between 23 and 26. Righton, for example, would have been only 6 during the 1989 Summer of Love. Might these former students be having a bit of a chuckle at the record buyers’ expense? “We’ve been called a ‘novelty band’,” sighs Taylor with resignation. “We’ve been described as being ‘laced with irony’ too.”
“Irony’s a funny word, isn’t it?” ponders Reynolds with a note of caution. “But there’s absolutely no irony in anything we do.” Instead, blame the big kids at school. Or at least blame the sounds of C&C Music Factory and Ratpack emanating from sixth-form centres and older brother's bedrooms for Klaxons’ interest in 'aving it large.
Righton squirms at the memory: “You always wanted to know what people in the top year were into, that’s how I got into it. Then someone would bring a rave mixtape into the youth club, and the next thing you know there are 20 kids dancing around, high on e-numbers.”
The experience of Reynolds seems to have been much the same: “If you had a little strobe light, you were the most popular kid in the playground.”
Nevertheless, the more they talk, the more you sense that they feel that a little too much is made of their rave influences. Given that 2006 flew by in a flurry of acid-house smiley faces, this could sound rich. But when you hear Myths of the Near Future, you’ll have to concede that they’re absolutely right. For every snatch of siren or swirling piano, there’s oddball guitar noodling, frenetic three-man chants, Eighties pop melody plus the odd portentous vision of a dystopian future. It all adds up to the kind of album you half expect to be adorned by the fantastical prog-rock cover art of Roger Dean — a suggestion that leaves everyone nodding frantically.
“It’s weird, but recently we’ve been getting more and more proggy,” says Righton. “Maybe we can dress up as wizards? Do Klaxons on Ice!” cries Reynolds.
“But prog and rave are completely polar,” argues Righton. “People have only heard a few singles and some stuff we have put on MySpace, but a lot of our influences have been overlooked. The album will be a shock to anyone who thinks we’re just trying to be a rave band. I’ve always said that we are a pop band, and we wanted to make this a pop album.”
A sci-fi pop album? “The idea was to bring things that aren’t typically in a pop context into a pop context,” says Reynolds, after talking enthusiastically about Douglas Adams and J. G. Ballard. Aleister Crowley provides inspiration for the recent single Magick, and the band admit that there is a certain kick to be had out of hearing teenage girls shouting back lyrics that revolve around a dead, sex-mad occultist.
Later, just before Klaxons take the stage, the dance floor is a sea of Day-Glo with the anticipation fuelled by cans of something called Velocity energy drink. The scene is a Bugsy Malone version of an East End warehouse party. Cabals of young girls draw inexpertly on fags and hug pretty boys who have bought parent-baiting T-shirts that read “Klaxons are c****”. When the band take the stage, augmented by the live drummer Steffan Halperin, euphoric chaos ensues; glow sticks are lobbed, sparklers lit and energy drink is sprayed stickily over the shrieking fans.
Young Jerome’s prediction that the show would be “a proper rave” is wide of the mark, but only if you’re old enough to associate proper raves with fields, Ecstasy and music “predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats” (as per the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994). But for kids who steal lollipop-lady tops from school this will do just fine.
Myths of the Near Future is released by Polydor on January 29
timesonline.co.uk
On the crest of a new rave
Ben Machell
Punk pop, sci-fi and glowsticks a gogo; we go underground to find out why Klaxons are the next big noise
London band The Klaxons release their debut album "Myths of the Near Future" on 29th January. They are expected to become huge.
Jamie Reynolds - vocals, bass guitar
James Righton - vocals, keyboards/synthesizers
Captain Strobe (Simon Taylor-Davis) - guitar, backing vocals
Whoops and giggles echo off the walls, and what you initially took for a few oddly dressed youths turns out to be the end of a 100-yard human chain. But not normal humans, these are under-18s. And not even normal teenagers, but giddy girls and boys decked out in the most garish, luminous party clothes they can piece together. An enterprising bloke with a trolley is busy selling hundreds of those glow-in-the-dark necklaces and bracelets normally seen on Bonfire Night or at music festivals.
If the scene leaves you bemused, then Noah and Jerome, two 16-year-olds in the queue, are happy to explain. It’s Klaxons, innit. They are putting on a matinee show for the throng of young fans they have amassed in the months since coining and then leading the “new rave” pop genre. The band’s penchant for the neon dancewear of the early Nineties has been appropriated and approximated by their fans. This explains why Noah and Jerome are wearing what seem to be reflective lollipop- lady jackets.
“We stole them from school. It looks stupid, but the stupider you look, the cooler you are,” says Noah.
“Once you’re at the gig, no one cares,” chimes Jerome. “It’s a proper rave.”
The queue starts to move, and soon everyone rushes into the cavernous confines of the SEOne club to the pre-recorded sound of swelling piano chords and rumbling bass grooves from their heroes. It’s like watching the children of Hamelin vanish into the mountain (but with added bouncers).
Today Klaxons are in skinny jeans and dark hoodies. In fact, they say, it’s been a few months since they have donned fluorescent rave gear of any kind. Seated away from the crowds in the middle of an adjoining dancefloor, they tell me they are still impressed with the ingenuity and audacity of their younger fans.
“One girl stole three pairs of chemistry goggles. She’s decorated them and wants us to wear them on stage,” chuckles James Righton, the impish keyboardist. “Some of these kids must have broken up for the holidays yesterday and just fleeced their schools for whatever they can wear.”
From beneath a thicket of frizzy black hair, Simon Taylor, the guitarist, quietly suggests that attracting such felonious fans is a significant achievement. “That whole DIY ethic in music never really filtered into the mainstream before. You’d maybe see it at universities, but for it to have now reached the playground is a big thing.” Well, he was much too young for punk.
What you can’t dispute is the rapid ascent of the band. Their first single, Gravity’s Rainbow, was released only in April and today you can tune in to daytime Radio 1 and hear the follow-up releases Atlantis to Interzone or Magick cued between the Kooks and Lily Allen. After a major label tug-of-love, their debut album Myths of the Near Future comes out this month on Polydor. It is produced by the indie-dance impresario du jour, James Ford.
Perhaps the trio’s biggest achievement so far, however, has been to create a media buzz by fusing two thoroughly unfashionable genres — rave music and sci-fi lyrics — to their punk-pop sound.
“We just didn’t want to sound like anything else that’s going on,” says Jamie Reynolds, the beanpole bassist and vocalist. “If you do that, you’re already going to be behind.”
Given that the prevailing indie schtick still remains the me-and-me-mates-down-the-pub variety of gritty realism, the southeast London trio instead developed gloriously daft covers of forgotten rave hits such as The Bouncer (originally by Kicks Like A Mule) or originals with such heroic names as 4 Horsemen of 2012, helping to make them a sort of anti-Arctic Monkeys. Even though the band’s first two singles were limited to 500 copies each, the NME feverishly declared that the group was ushering in a “new rave revolution”, the genre Reynolds unwittingly invented when asked to describe his band’s occasional lacing of guitar-pop with the blaring sirens and sonic euphoria of early Nineties dance music.
Still, it’s worth remembering that Klaxons are all aged between 23 and 26. Righton, for example, would have been only 6 during the 1989 Summer of Love. Might these former students be having a bit of a chuckle at the record buyers’ expense? “We’ve been called a ‘novelty band’,” sighs Taylor with resignation. “We’ve been described as being ‘laced with irony’ too.”
“Irony’s a funny word, isn’t it?” ponders Reynolds with a note of caution. “But there’s absolutely no irony in anything we do.” Instead, blame the big kids at school. Or at least blame the sounds of C&C Music Factory and Ratpack emanating from sixth-form centres and older brother's bedrooms for Klaxons’ interest in 'aving it large.
Righton squirms at the memory: “You always wanted to know what people in the top year were into, that’s how I got into it. Then someone would bring a rave mixtape into the youth club, and the next thing you know there are 20 kids dancing around, high on e-numbers.”
The experience of Reynolds seems to have been much the same: “If you had a little strobe light, you were the most popular kid in the playground.”
Nevertheless, the more they talk, the more you sense that they feel that a little too much is made of their rave influences. Given that 2006 flew by in a flurry of acid-house smiley faces, this could sound rich. But when you hear Myths of the Near Future, you’ll have to concede that they’re absolutely right. For every snatch of siren or swirling piano, there’s oddball guitar noodling, frenetic three-man chants, Eighties pop melody plus the odd portentous vision of a dystopian future. It all adds up to the kind of album you half expect to be adorned by the fantastical prog-rock cover art of Roger Dean — a suggestion that leaves everyone nodding frantically.
“It’s weird, but recently we’ve been getting more and more proggy,” says Righton. “Maybe we can dress up as wizards? Do Klaxons on Ice!” cries Reynolds.
“But prog and rave are completely polar,” argues Righton. “People have only heard a few singles and some stuff we have put on MySpace, but a lot of our influences have been overlooked. The album will be a shock to anyone who thinks we’re just trying to be a rave band. I’ve always said that we are a pop band, and we wanted to make this a pop album.”
A sci-fi pop album? “The idea was to bring things that aren’t typically in a pop context into a pop context,” says Reynolds, after talking enthusiastically about Douglas Adams and J. G. Ballard. Aleister Crowley provides inspiration for the recent single Magick, and the band admit that there is a certain kick to be had out of hearing teenage girls shouting back lyrics that revolve around a dead, sex-mad occultist.
Later, just before Klaxons take the stage, the dance floor is a sea of Day-Glo with the anticipation fuelled by cans of something called Velocity energy drink. The scene is a Bugsy Malone version of an East End warehouse party. Cabals of young girls draw inexpertly on fags and hug pretty boys who have bought parent-baiting T-shirts that read “Klaxons are c****”. When the band take the stage, augmented by the live drummer Steffan Halperin, euphoric chaos ensues; glow sticks are lobbed, sparklers lit and energy drink is sprayed stickily over the shrieking fans.
Young Jerome’s prediction that the show would be “a proper rave” is wide of the mark, but only if you’re old enough to associate proper raves with fields, Ecstasy and music “predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats” (as per the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994). But for kids who steal lollipop-lady tops from school this will do just fine.
Myths of the Near Future is released by Polydor on January 29
timesonline.co.uk