Jamie Reynolds doesn't remembers much about his first rave, but he remembers enough: strobes kissing the clouds and sci-fi bass rumbles making the hairs on his neck stand on end.
The Klaxons frontman was a 10-year-old cub scout camping with friends in the woods. A glowstick’s throw away the hills were alive with the throb of repetitive beats and the protean glimmer of stage lights. To a middle class kid from the 'burbs, the judder sounded dangerous, alien – the freakiest shit he’d ever heard.
“Klaxons have no direct experience of rave because we were too young,” says songwriter/vocalist Reynolds (26), holding court in a gloomy caff near band’s Chiswick rehearsal space. " On that camping trip in the woods, we could hear the music coming from miles away and see the lights on the horizon. When we came up with the ‘new rave’ tag to describe our music, we were basing it on our childhood idea of what rave was like.”
Not, you understand, that Klaxons, three scrawny Londoners with sideways haircuts and a line in post-modernist blather, ever truly regarded themselves as a ‘rave’ act. In fact, ‘new rave’ – think electro-clash with all the gayness sucked out – started as a ruse by Reynolds: rather than having the media place the band in a box, Klaxons, he decided, would be leaders of their own self-imagined movement (the twist, of course, was that, early on at least, said movement didn’t actual exist).
“We knew journalists would run with the new rave thing. What surprised us was how willing the public was to embrace the idea,” says Reynolds. "It's kind of a self-fulfilling thing. If people want to believe they are at a rave then suddenly it's a rave. They want to dress up like it's 1990 and wave glowsticks. We don't have a say in it anymore.”
Since playing their first shows 18 months ago, Reynolds and bandmates guitarist Simon Taylor (guitars) and James Righton (keyboards) have built an underground following in what is fast becoming the usual manner: via MySpace, rather than record sales. To foster an air of mystique, they pressed a mere 500 copies of their first two seven-inch singles: ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, named after the Thomas Pynchon novel, and ‘Atlantis to Interzone’, a track freighted with William S. Burroughs references.
Last September the ‘new rave’ palaver starting paying off as Klaxons signed to Polydor for a rumoured half million sterling (and reportedly following a four way tug-of-war between labels).
In their wake, meanwhile, has emerged a parade of ‘new rave’ acts: Shitdisco, New Young Pony Club, Teddybears and Simian Mobile Disco (who provided the swirling remix to Klaxon’s third 45’’ 'Magick'). For a scene that started out deep in the echelons of Reynold’s cranium, new rave suddenly seemed rather concrete.
“We must be getting somewhere because Michael Stipe even came to one of our concerts in New York,” says Reynolds. “Although, to be fair, I think he’d wandered in by accident. He had a camera and he was taking pictures of all these girls at the show. A bit creepy if you ask me. We haven’t had many other famous cheerleaders – though I did see Steven McManaman (the former England soccer player) at a gig once. He didn’t have a glowstick and wasn’t really dancing. I don’t think he really knew what to make of it.”
Behind the buzz is a band with real chops. When people wanted to book Klaxons after their first gig and they needed a longer set list, they locked themselves away for a couple of days and hammered out the bulk of their debut album, Myths Of The Near Future. “ By the end,” says Reynolds, “we’d written ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, ‘Atlantis to Interzone’, and ‘Four Horsemen of 2012’.”
Predictably some have been only too glad to dismiss Klaxons as a novelty act, day-glo charlatans whose 15 seconds just ran out (“lurching shout-along chants more suited to the football stadium than the dance-floor,” scoffed one UK broadsheet of Myths Of The Near Future). But the cynics have it wrong. From the bizarro surf-rock of ‘Golden Skans’ to the dystopia electro-punk of ‘Four Horsemen of 2012’, Myths Of The Near Future (title pinched, of course, off a Ballard short story collection) is nothing less than a weirdo pop masterclass. Loathe Klaxons, and, at some quite fundamental level, you loathe pop music.
“Actually, ‘4 Horsemen’ is about my grandfather, who was a spiritual healer,” reveals Reynolds. “Shortly before he died, he had a dream that jet planes would destroy the world. He passed away a week before September 11. He was a very wise man and I think he knew a lot more about the world than he would necessarily let on. I regret not speaking to him more now.”
For Klaxons, however, the snuffing out of mankind is only a point of departure. Further in, Myths of the Near Future turns properly barmy – against an epic clatter of guitars and sirens (they may not be ‘rave’ but they certainly owe a thing or two to The KLF) Klaxons evoke doomsday cults, Egyptian mysticism and occultist Aleister Crowley.
“We just don’t want to write pop songs. We want to create an alternative reality with our music,” says Reynolds. “I realise this sounds slightly pretentious, but I really do believe that escapism is important in the modern world. With Klaxons, the idea is to explore the space between the stuff that is real and stuff that isn’t real. There isn’t enough mystery in music today. We want to bring a little mystery back.”