“Last night I DJ’d in Paris and played out a beat I’d made myself for the first time and it was great to see the dance floor moving to it,” gushes Klaxons’ bassist and vocalist Jamie Reynolds.
The English four-piece have just finished a string of European shows and festival dates ahead of their appearance at this years Splendour In The Grass, but a full-scale Australian tour is not currently on the cards. “Fingers crossed for something as soon as [possible],” Reynolds notes on future plans to tour the country.
Aside from headlining Splendour’s Friday night Mix Up stage, Reynolds can be found the next evening providing a DJ set at the Modular-curated ‘What We Do Is Secret’ party, which brings us back to where we started.
“James [Righton, keyboards/vocals] and I will be playing in Sydney. It’ll be a bit of a mixed bag,” says Reynolds, illuminating on his choice of original beats and club standards stating they’ll be playing “things that we’re into at the time, we play both old and new tracks.”
“[It] is far more personal…This time the songs are about experiences or desires that are expressed through metaphor.”Since 2007, when Klaxons appeared on the scene with their Mercury Award winning debut Myths Of The Near Future, the Brits have cultivated a reputation for producing clever genre-bending pop music.
One only has to look as far as the addictively catchy ‘Echoes’, a track that feels like the beacon for dance pop of Christmas future or the chaotic dance/punk adventure that is ‘Magick’, with the hook “Magick/Without tears” which has led to the most common misinterpretation of their lyrics, “that we would sing about ‘Magick Wheelchairs’,” Reynolds laughs.
While the frontman enjoys his new stint as a record spinner, he’s sceptical that moonlighting as a DJ has influenced the song writing for the band’s third record, their highly anticipated follow up to 2010’s Surfing The Void.
“When it comes to arrangement it’s been the case on a couple of tracks for this new record that we’ve stepped away from the intro/verse/chorus formula and let the music take its own journey,” he says. “That and some acid bass lines and we’re away.”
Lyrically, the band seems to be more influenced by literature than traditional songwriters. Their debut album found its namesake in a collection of short stories by J.G. Ballard.
Its first single, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, lifted its title from Thomas Pynchon’s inaccessible paranoia laden 1973 novel. “For the first record (and in places on the second) we were very much into the Brion Gysin cut and paste technique,” Reynolds reveals about the literary method of rearranging original texts, pioneered by the Canadian artist, “making something original by making a collage of things that already exist. That caused us to make a collection of our favourite things that we could churn up to put back out there and books seemed to rank pretty highly on the list.”
“I know that we’re on at the same time as Mumford & Sons so we’ve got our ‘see you ravers down the front’ heads on and plan to give it our all.”He is allusive when it comes to citing specific references on the third record, yet the new material seems to have forged a path of its own separate to its predecessors.
“[It] is far more personal. Not in a literal sense but this time the songs are about experiences or desires that are expressed through metaphor,” he elaborates. That aside, the crowds at this year’s Splendour will be among the first in the nation to get a taste. “We’ll be playing four or five tracks from our upcoming record,” Reynolds informs.
On average Klaxons have spent three years in between records developing and perfecting their complicated soundscapes. When they debut a new song live, is it possible to gauge the reaction of an audience? “Totally,” Reynolds confirms. “It’s been strange actually as the new material seems to have been connecting in a festival situation better than the old. It’s incredible to watch people going crazy to songs they can’t have heard before.”
As he sees it, festivals in general provide the band with an opportunity to perform in a manner that differs from traditional headline gigs. “It’s nice to be in a situation where you shave the set slightly and play a kind of best of set,” he reasons. “When the time’s less we want to give people what we think they’d want with a few surprises.”
That, in a nutshell, is what audiences can expect in Byron Bay. On that last note, in a heavily saturated festival market how does one choose which offers to accept and which to turn down? “It’s always nice to know we’re in good company,” he proposes in reference to the festival’s line up. “We’ve found that the show works in a situation where we’ve played on a line up that we might not have been included on in the past.
“I know that we’re on at the same time as Mumford & Sons so we’ve got our ‘see you ravers down the front’ heads on and plan to give it our all.”
What We Do Is Secret Lineup
MAIN ROOM:
Klaxons (DJ set)
Movement (live)
Softwar
wordlife (live)
Slow Blow
Club Mod DJs
THE GALLERY: HOSTED BY FBi RADIO
Kilter (live)
Moonbase Commander (live)
Meare (live)
Kato
Mike Who
Kali (Picnic)
Max Gosford
