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 klaxons session
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Black magic and white-hot pop. “Yeah, it’s been pretty crazy,” says Klaxons keyboardist James Righton, referring to his band’s meteoric success. “Jamie (Reynolds, Klaxons singer and bassist) rang me last Sunday to say happy one year anniversary, and it hit me that we’d done so much in just 12 months.” So are the trio who’ve melted punk, pop and pre-millennial dance music into one darkly hedonistic whole feeling dazed by an ascendance that’s seen them go from pub gigs to NME covers in just a few short months? “No, it’s been f**king great, man,” beams James. “We’ve all been in bands before,” he explains, “where the group has just ended up struggling on, drifting aimlessly. With Klaxons we all wanted to work really hard and really make it happen – to go on the dole and do music full-time. So the fact that it’s all happened so quickly has been part of the plan, really. The album’s all done – mastered, ready to go, out in January.”  Klaxons have found themselves unwillingly crowned the DayGlo kings of the NME-invented, possibly non-existent “new rave” scene, a state of affairs that’s seen them thrown in with everyone from Swedish synth-poppers The Knife to Shoreditch electro-dads Simian Mobile Disco. Broached on this, James sounds more bewildered than embittered. “I mean, rave is a part of what we do, but it’s only one small element,” he sighs. “We’ve been lumped in with a load of bands that we’ve sometimes got very little in common with. We’re probably more interested in whatever Timbaland’s working on at the minute.” Ironically, the band that Klaxons feel the strongest kinship with are their sartorial polar opposites, the none-more-black Horrors. “We started out gigging with them, and we definitely feel we’re closer in spirit to them than to whatever cheesy rave image some people might have of us.” Which is perhaps why they chose the disco-goth stomp of Magick as their breakthrough single – a track that’s more Aleister Crowley than Altern-8. “Some people were probably expecting us to release a rave cover as our first charting single, but we don’t want to do what people are expecting of us. Magick is definitely one of our darker tunes. There’s way poppier stuff to come on the album, though. Just wait…”
Joe Madden
Klaxons – Magick, out now on Polydor.
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comment by Neonfabricpaint
Nov 10, 2006
I don't like NME - it's dead annoying how everyone mentioned in their mag is instantly over-written by most music enthusiats who have their heads on straight. They've tapped into some good stuff, as well as the horrfically bad stuff - usually it's just a long while after most of us have already heared them.Antop of the bands you have already mentioned there are the recently departed Test Icicles - who are not disimilar to the Klaxons and were around 18 months before. If your going to mention the knife then you have to mention Metric, who have been around since the new milennium, and if you mention those - then the whole canadian/new york synth/pop/punk scene opens up with bands like DFA 1979, also recently parted, and that blondie-esque band who supported rancid in the states, I forget their names. Clue in to whats really going on!
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