Klaxons: Touching The Void

02 September 2010

by Nell Greco

Klaxons switch their brains off, find their marbles and release their sophomore album, Surfing the Void.

The classic line sings, ‘Girls, just wanna have fuh-hun!’ but on the line from a rainy-day-London, Klaxons guitarist/vocalist Simon Taylor-Davies, tells me fun is for the boys too. “Our motto’s always been huge[ly] about having fun.”

With their latest album, Surfing the Void, in their hot little hands, Taylor-Davies tells me it’s like handing your best friend a birthday present that you’re so excited about you can’t stop yourself from jumping up and down as they un-wrap it - waiting to see the look on their face when they realise what it is.

“We’ve done all the talking – we’re just in that excitable, anticipative stage where we can’t wait for our friends to hear it, we can’t wait for our fans to hear it. We’re super excited for everyone to hear it!”

It’s been over three years since the release of their debut album, Myths of the Near Future, so their excitement is not without reason but a more insightful explanation for the ‘ants’ in the lads ‘pants’, is that in 2007 they never really had the opportunity to ‘unveil’ their debut album before the wave of hype and notoriety hit.

The release of their debut single Gravity’s Rainbow, followed closely by Atlantis to Interzone, saw a slew of touring invites and offers from record labels come flooding in. Klaxons were signed to Polydor Records before they had even released (let alone sold) an EP.

Taylor-Davies agrees, “That’s exactly how it is. For the first record [Myths of the Near Future] we were kind of in the middle of a back to back, weird touring pattern [that travelled] around the planet and in the middle of all that chaos, we recorded a record.” Then of course came the menacing NME categorisation of their music as ‘New Rave’.

He can’t help laughing as he tells me about the Klaxon’s experience upon releasing Myths... “Absolute lunacy!” He squabbles through laughter. “The other day we were reminiscing about the absolute carnage that was going on. We’re certainly – I don’t want to say older or mature - but we’re a bit more ‘experienced’, I would say is the word [for it].”

With its epic tracks and psychedelic nuances, Surfing the Void certainly sounds like an album with a little more attention to detail.

“We went through stages of wild experimental sessions, just recording instrumental noise and ‘60s psych- and all of that lead us to where we are. It’s purely been an indistinctive racket.” I can’t help but imagine what their neighbours thought.

“For us as a band, it’s when you start thinking about music and talking about it that, that’s when the problem arises but the minute you switch your brain off, stuff happens.”

Of course, no album release would be the same without a touch of scandal and melodrama from the media. NME announced early in 2009 that Universal has rejected their latest recordings, adding that Klaxons had been instructed to re-record parts of the album-to-be. Apparently NME are not the music gospel.

“I was in tears for most of it – with laughter! Us getting our album scrapped by Universal? I’ve never been aware that that happened.

“We’ve got an amazing relationship with Polydor in England. They’ve never been anything but absolutely amazing to us.”

The supposedly ‘scrapped’ material was recorded with producer James Ford in early 2009 and “will be released at the end of this year or early next because there’s so much talk of [it]”, he says. Taylor-Davies mentions it was always their intention to release what they’d recorded with Ford but now it’s likely to take the form of a limited edition vinyl press and there’s the suggestion of touring a specialist tour.

Even with another album under their belt, it’s difficult to place exactly where Klaxons fit in the contemporary, musical landscape. Taylor-Davies has difficulty with the task too, preferring to describe the band as ‘chameleons’. For a band that now belongs to a deceased genre (NME announced New Rave dead in 2008), Klaxons scrub up alright.

“We’re just in such a good space with the band and we’re having more fun than we’ve ever had.”