Klaxons

The interview is up on Nerve.com. Here is the the extended, me edited version. See photos from Studio B in an earlier post

When Klaxons played ’s Studio B on April 13^th, infamously head-nodding New Yorkers turned into dance thrashing wet heads. While  NME’s Best New Band of 2007 aggressively played most of their debut album, Myths of the Near Future, drenched dancers moved so fast, they might have evaporated. There were crowd surfers and a couple of rave kids with pacifiers who managed to stage dive. There was pretend guitar smashing, but, I didn’t see any glow sticks and the Klaxons didn’t break out the neon colors.

I cozied up to interview bassist and vocalist Jamie Reynolds, 26, on a black leather sofa, next to a table full of snacks and soda, backstage, before soundcheck at Studio B. I was the last interview in a week bloggers called NY Klaxons week because they DJed four times, played a couple of shows and got free clothes for performing at Diesel. It wasn’t just that the band got big fast, it was that they’d off-handedly coined a genre.  Jamie, James Righton, and Simon Taylor started playing together in 2005, their debut album, produced by James Ford of Simian Mobile Disco, was released in January, 2007. Having gained a massive Myspace and party following, it entered the album charts at #2.  After Jamie said Nu-rave people, notably NME, tried to make Nu-rave happen, lumping Klaxons with Shitdisco and New Young Pony Club, struggling to make a movement. Others insisted there was no such thing as Nu-rave. The Klaxons were decked out in fluorescent colors, they covered the “The Bouncer,” an early 90’s rave hit by Kick Like a Mule, they encouraged the glow-sticks and threw parties in large obscure locations with thumping beats, sirens and disco hi-hats, but Nu-rave is still a joke, a sometimes appropriate catch phrase to blow up danceable rock. The day of the interview I read they’d given up fluorescent colors and were considering a glow stick ban. 

When the Klaxons got together in 2005 they knew they wanted to make a pop album like they’d never heard before, but more importantly, they knew they didn’t want to sound like: no arpeggios, or sexual lyrics, choppy guitars or off kilter high hats. Instead Myths of the Near Future sounds like a storming robot army on speed in a historical vision of space. But it’s pop and the top layers are full of oohs and ahhs. The rhythm, bass and synth meet the fantastical lyrics and drive the music forward into something dark and untouchable "All ships of sense on hyper ocean/All kites of chaos still in motion/My culture vulture such a dab hand/I'll steal you from the year 4000.”  The bits of old rave whip into the  wirling synths and reverb of today’s dance music. The drums, (now banged by Steffan Halperin, 22) distorted guitar and bass cut in rudely and make the songs on Myths anthemic tunes that play best live. The lyrics are obscure enough to remind you to feel the music. Clearly, I had a blast at the show and got a reporterly crush on Jamie while we talked about fucking to his album, easy American girls, and how soul mates don’t exist. Catrinel Bartolomeu

 
I’m not going to ask you about you about nu-rave, why you stopped wearing fluorescent colors or glowsticks, ok?
Thank you very much.

You’ve said that the music Klaxons make is about creating something unreal. Why fantasy?
So many bands in sing about having a relationship with reality and with . They’ll sing about a girl, or a car, about something you can see or touch in . We didn’t find those sorts of things exciting. W wanted to put things into pop music that generally haven’t or shouldn’t be there.

How do you write lyrics?
A lot of it is done via the Brian Gossman cut and paste technique. Some of it, Simon and I write down a big list of ideas that we want to put into.

Like images right?
Yeah lots of imagery and descriptive words. Simon and I sort of sit and write a big list of nonsense and find what we’ve got. We chop it up and fit it. We’ve gotten to finish each others sentences. He’ll say something ridiculous and I’ll say something ridiculous and it just comes together.Is the way you make music and write lyrics more instinctual or mental, like editing? The music is more instinctual.  I write the drum parts and the back synth which is sort of rhythmic. There’s no thought that goes into what comes out. But all the top lines and the lyrics are carefully thought out and pieced together. There’s nothing that’s out of place, everything has to sit perfectly,  fit the jigsaw-- it’s planned.

In terms of the music, do you agree that that first is best?
Yeah absolutely. We get everything down and if the first lot isn’t good we still continue with it until it’s close to being finished. If it still isn’t good we complete it anyway. Then we work it really quickly and we throw it away if it’s not good. We’ve only thrown away 2 songs.  It’s kind of, first lot, best lot, sticks. We never know what we’re trying to achieve, but we know exactly what we don’t want to sound like. So it makes things easier and faster

What’s the dynamic like with you guys? What are your roles?
I tend to do the rhythmic stuff. We all do things that we don’t do on stage. Simon has written keyboard parts, James has written bass lines. James and I tend to come up with the top parts and Simon and I write the lyrics. It’s very much like a three headed monster that works because we each come to it with different ideas of what we want and what we think pop music should be.

What’s the process of compromise like?
There isn’t much really. If something is shit one of us kicks it off.

Vetos.
Complete veto. It’s like no that’s no good I don’t want anything to have to do with it. And it’s gone

No question cause you all got to be in to it?
Absolutely, I don’t think there’s anything on the record that all 3 of us are not 100% happy with.
You have to have somebody to tell you when you’re shit, other wise you just get carried away. You need guidance nobody’s come to this abnd and delivered a song 100 percent on their own.

Critics say both that your music is something new and that it’s something like something old. Do you think it’s actually new or old?
We definitely take from the old and chop it up. It’s very, very difficult to make something new happen. I think the last genuinely new thing was ridiculously fast electronic music. It couldn’t have existed if it weren’t for a computer. But we’re kind of an organic band that could potentially sound like it was made by a computer, but isn’t. If for any reason we’ve managed to come up with something fresh it’s cause we’ve stolen so much chopped it to make it unrecognizable and churned it back out. You get a glimpse of something you might recognize and then it’s like, that’s gone.

James Murphy from LCD Soundsystem told me he likes that making music makes him uncomfortable, like he knows it’s right if it’s hard. What kind of feeling accompanies you when you play or when you get it right?
Well we’ve only got one song that’s easy on the ear. Everything that we’ve got is a bit off and a bit odd and shouldn’t work, but it does and that makes us happy. For us it’s more like being uncertain, feeling odd, not uncomfortable.

That makes sense because then you’re like eh, um, but, yes.
Yeah like, well should I, obviously, because if it’s slightly mmmm that’s kind of where the magic lies. It’s in that unknown part, it’s in that difficult part. Those are the bits you put the magic in.
Is that something you do in your personal life? In the way you carry yourself with people
It depends, I’ve got a million different personalities. Generally, I do tend to find life more exciting when things aren’t going according to any plan. I’m at my happiest when things are a bit mad. I like not knowing exactly what’s going on, it’s not so easy. It’s not that I enjoy a struggling with things, but I like to fuck with things when they’re not regularly exciting.

I don’t understand people sometimes, they like copasetic, a normal routine, not talking about the awkward or asking hard questions. Most people avoid making it harder.
I’m a bit of an asshole in that sense. I’ve had so many relationship issues where I just tear everything apart. It’s not like I want to have the answer and it’s really important to me, but for some reason I ask a million unnecessary questions. I’ve kind of stopped doing that, I taught myself how to stop. I’m happy at the moment and there’s no fucking reason to go about behaving like that.

I’m only laughing because I’ve been told that too, like ‘like you’re not interviewing me,  you’re an aggressive questioner.’ But, I just, you know, like to see how people think or whatever.
And I feel really really bad. For all those people too, I apologize and I am generally a nice guy but I have really picked some people apart and made them think about themselves in ways that I shouldn’t have been behaving…it’s not ok… and for that I apologize.

Do you or the guys in the bad have girlfriends now?
Simon and I do and the drummer Stephan. James doesn’t…he’s looking for an American film actress.

Where’s your girl?
She’s back in the right now.

Is it hard for her, you here?
No cause she’s in a band, we both have the same lifestyle so she’s not sitting at home pining doing a 9-5 job worrying about me traveling the world; she travels the world also. It’s more annoying than anything else because we’re never in the same place for very long. I go on tour with her when I’m off and she  comes with me sometimes. So that’s alright. I wish I was at home in sometimes; I think this American trip has been kind of tough, because the is a bit of an unknown kind of golden land to . Bands very rarely get a chance to come here. So I think they’re sitting at home a bit more nervous, not quite understanding what’s going on over here, unnecessarily worrying about it.

Are you trying to be monogamous?
Absolutely yeah, like 100%. I’ve never cheated on a girl in my life.

Really?
Yeah. American girls are quite easy aren’t they?

Some of them. The girls who come to your shows maybe.
Yeah I can imagine that.

Are they all over you guys?
Absolutely yeah. Loads of them. You don’t get that in the at all. If you want to pull a British girl everyone’s sort of a bit coy and a bit weird. But American girls are sort of straight forward, they make it clear they want to fuck you straight away.

That’s cool I like that, they know you’re leaving too. I read in Pop World something about an Australian girl at a show…
Oh, when I was in I saw this girl crowd surfing; for some reason I knew she was coming towards me. I was still playing and just watching her coming. She just pulled herself up on stage, stuck her tongue down my throat and dived back into the audience. I was like, brilliant. This what being in a band is all about! I’d only got together with my girlfriend like the day before that, so it was ok.

That girl is so psyched, she’s asking her friends, like did you guys get a picture?
I know, big night for her.

Do you believe …I’m sorry to pick the one lyric that says anything specific about life at all..
Go for it.

You sing ‘I’ll always be there for you my future love…” That made me think of soul mates and..
Aww that’s nice isn’t it.. ha ha ha

Awww, so sweet.
Hahahaha

So do you believe in soul mates, like are you meant for someone specific?
Who my girlfriend?

No, no, like in general
I dunno I think you’ve generally got to work at things. I don’t think anything is that easy, that things are destined to just be fucking really easy and have to happen. I think you got to put a lot of work into life, haven’t you?

It’s kind of better that way isn’t it?

It’s more exciting isn’t it? I can’t romanticize, things can be very romantic, but it never turns out that way. If you want things to generally be alright, you’ve got to give a shit and really put the effort in.

My first music interview was really a book interview with a neuroscientist named Daniel Levitin who wrote a book about music and the brain. He talked about how music tickles the same neural pleasure circuits as chocolate and sex. I’ve been on a mission to find out what about music is sexual. So first, do you thing your music is sexual?
Yeah I think you could fuck to our record. I think we find our record kind of unifying or something, it’s really sick. The bringing togetherness of people, that’s a really sexual thing isn’t it? But I don’t think they’re sexy songs by any means.

[The sound check starts and is blasting blasts “I don’t want to wait in vain” Jamie yells for it to turn it down.]

He used to play Leftfield and Sad Planet.

Now this?
It’s cause he’s a fucking stoner that’s why
Hahaha. You guys do a lot of drinking and drugs on tour?
Yeah all the time.

Sounds great.
It’s all right. We’ve been drinking quite a lot recently, but before that we drank and did drugs constantly for like a year. Then we stopped for our own benefit because we literally hit a wall. So we stopped for six months. But the drinking carried on. We were saying today how we really need to get back on it. We feel like we’re a bit boring.

Now especially you’re probably so used to playing, you won’t fuck it up if you’re fucked up.
Absolutely, but saying that we had to stop to fix ourselves. But yeah, I think we could be to the point where we can’t talk but can play a gig. But that’s the exciting part and that’s the creative part. It’s always been that a lot of good music has come hand in hand with some sort of drug. And that was how we wrote our first record and now we think we’ve maybe become a bit boring.

Did you ever fuck to your own record?
Nooo.

think I have.
Nice one. What song?

Well, I played the album pretty compulsively at first. The rhythm of almost every song is really made to move to.
Absolutely, that’s kind of the core of the record now that you say that

The rhythm?
Yeah.

It also doesn’t remind you of anything specific that might annoy you. It’s so fantastical that it gives you freedom to play.
It’s not real is it? It doesn’t refer to anything that pisses you off  in a day to day situation. Yeah, let go forget about yourself I think that’s what it’s all about we wanted to invite people to forget about them selves. I guess sex is involved like that too.

You guys get pretty physical on stage which is pretty sexy, but whoa that video for “Golden Skans” video where James is crashing into the rain splattered puddle and he’s shiny and boyish looking and wet.
That’s a very sexy video.

[James hears his name, he’s sitting on the top of a sofa mock playing “” on a tiny Casio.]

James: What are you talking about? What’s it like to break ?

No there’s not talk about breaking this is the sexiest interview ever. James, this is cat, she’s had sex to our album.

James: oh, hello Cat. What song?

Um, a lot of them I think. I was just talking about your sexy video and how you guys are all naked and objectified with those ribbons wrapping around you arms and torsos and man calves and all…
I think our video director Sam is completely sex obsessed. You know that’s what you put into a video to make people really want to watch it. Sexy videos are the now thing, that’s the pop isn’t it? He wants to have us floating in zero gravity and fucking for the next video.

Really? Fucking what?
Some unknown girl, a Goddess figure. But I don’t think it’s appropriate. The next single in the is “It’s not over Yet.”  Because the lyrics in that song have a personal touch, I don’t want the video to have to do with a relationship. I want it to feature something that’s unknown and not be about a human relationship.

Makes sense to not over do it.
I don’t really look at that song as about a human relationship, but I don’t know what it does relate to, so we’re kind of struggling with it.

Have you ever written a love song?
I think all our songs are love songs.

Really?
Yeah. Heh heh

How? I mean, what’s a love song then?
I don’t know, all the songs have that they all got that sort of unknown, exciting, wanting to them. I think every single on of them. Maybe not “Forgotten Works.”  It’s funny how we didn’t want to make a record that’s standard about relationships or about reality or love, but it just so happens that every track we’ve written is a love song. It’s bizarre isn’t it?

Aww, sweet..
Aww, that’s nice isn’t it? Really nice.