Sometimes Airborne Toxic Event’s Mikel Jollett wonders what the hell he’s doing fronting an indie rock band.
“I was all set to be a novelist,” he says. “I was cranking, man. I had an agent who used to be an editor at the New Yorker. Excerpts from my book had been published in [sensitive hipster bible] McSweeney’s. National Public Radio had offered me a column . It was all I cared about. Then I started playing music. Suddenly that was all I cared about.”

He had never contemplated a career in rock until he contracted a potentially fatal auto-immune deficiency. Suddenly, his sense of where he was going in life was spun on its head: did he really want to spend the next 20 years shackled to a word processor ?
“Plus my mom got cancer. It kind of put everything into perspective. What I have is actually no big deal at the moment. It can become pretty hardcore. I quit smoking, which was really tough. I was a two pack a day smoker. Writing without nicotine – it didn’t make sense to me.”
As it happens, he couldn’t have picked a worse time to switch careers. Jollett had just been granted access to the prestigious Yaddo writers’ commune in upstate New York – alumni include Philip Roth, F Scott Fitzgerald and Jonathan Franzen. When he dropped the bombshell, his agent – the guy from the New Yorker – couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“Getting into Yaddo was a big deal. Philip Roth did a bunch of books there. Fitzgerald wrote there. Jonathan Franzen wrote The Corrections there. That was the goal. I was going to go up , finish the novel, have it printed. I was getting in with the editors at the New Yorker. Then I met Darren, our drummer. And that was the end of that.”
With a name like theirs , you might expect Airborne Toxic Event to be purveyors of grinding industrial sludge or head-inducing death metal [it’s actually a chapter title from a Don De Lillo novel]. You certainly wouldn’t guess they were purveyors of epic, heartfelt indie rock – as the band reveal themselves to be on their self-titled debut album (the record is turning out to be a blockbuster – with little publicity, ATE have already advanced to the point where they can book a date at Dublin’s Olympia this autumn). Actually, says Jollett, that’s kind of the idea.
“You name a band The Sofas and you have a pretty clear idea what they’re about,” he reflects. “There are a couple of reasons for the name. We wanted one we could inhabit. Also, we’re 60 years into rock and roll. There are a million names at this point. It’s kind of stupid – who cares what you call yourself? Call yourself anything you want. We wanted something that didn’t provoke some other idea. Our name is awkward, it’s sulky. Sometimes we hear from people that they think we’re going to be dark metal or something. They hear our music and go, ‘Woah’.”
He says the band are looking forward to their Hot Press New Band Stage slot, though he’s had mixed experience of festivals. Several weeks ago, he received the keys to the proverbial magic kingdom when, playing at Coachella in the desert outside LA, he got to hang backstage with starlets such as Lindsay Lohan.
“There’s a lot of bullshit about backstage at Coachella. Everyone is going, ‘Oh, it’s great to be here.’ In fact, it’s like being at some Hollywood bar. There’s all these actresses sizing each other up. I hate that shit. I kind of slunk around and hung out in the dressing-room.”
Jollett’s a laid back guy – but one thing does raise his hackles: constant Arcade Fire comparisons laid at the door of Airborne Toxic Event.
“I love Arcade Fire – I don’t think we sound anything like them. We have a lot more in common with The Clash and The Jesus And Mary Chain. We’re more of a rock and roll band.”
Prior to falling in love with indie rock, he also had a none-too-shabby stint as a music journalist, reviewing records for the Los Angeles Times, editing LA music rag Filter and, to his enduring disbelief, getting to shoot the shit with David Bowie.
“I met him in his studio. It was one of the coolest experiences. He was shorter than I expected and had a slight queeny vibe – he was a bit of a swish. You could tell he was up for anything. He had a real infectious energy – he told stories about Mick Jagger and Lou Reed. We talked about Andy Warhol and then got onto Nietzsche and the death of god and moral relativism. At one point he looked me in the eye and said, [adopts questionable Bowie accent] ‘Do you find it’s hard for anyone of your generation to believe in anything?’ I spent the next few moments working on a book proposal that was supposed to be an answer to that question.”

Airborne Toxic Event play the Hot Press New Band Stage on Saturday July 11