Music > Interviews

Interview with Django Django

30/01/12

This is the most goddamn infectious collection of sounds we’ve heard in a long time. Django Django have siphoned off the best of avant pop from all over the spectrum; it’s like Hot Chip asked them how to make a guilty beat, like Franz Ferdinand (at their best) enquired about marching guitar rhythms, like Jean Michel Jarre was a synth salesman. It’s amassed, yet original – listen and love…

Where are you off to today Dave? To the studio to practice, and to the post office to pick up a pack of clothes my mum’s sent me from Scotland, which I think has been sent back because I’ve only just found the little slip thing!  

Is that an exciting prospect, getting clothes from your mum, or is it one filled with trepidation? Er, well it’s just stuff I left at Christmas, so it’s quite boring really. It’s not like she’s gone and bought me clothes; that would be a drama, but no, it’s just stuff I left!

I was wondering whether, as a musician, you have the same relationship to Monday mornings that we do? No, to be honest; I don’t notice the weekends other than that my girlfriend’s off from work. Our days kinda merge together so I’ve no idea what day of the week it is. I think that’s from not having structure, or something. When you’re at school, or college or a job, you’re always looking forward to the weekend where you always know what’s happening, but for us, it’s the opposite of 9 to 5. On the weekend now, there’s always something to be done. I’ve no structure, which I think takes a lot of self-motivation in a way, which I’m not used to! It can be weird, but I was never one for early mornings, so I don’t have that pressure. Although when you get up early and start work, you’re much less tired and you can work longer. I think it’s that thing about oversleeping. I’m a coffee addict, so that keeps me going.

I am as well actually; I got a flask as a present and I’ve started bringing in a flask every day to work, which is probably the most exciting thing in my life right now… Oh yeah, the flask changes everything. It’s a game changer! No, it’s great to have a flask of good coffee ‘cause I’m a bit of a coffee snob, so I won’t drink crap coffee, so that’s what you need.

So 2012 is already shaping up to be a great year for you, but how did 2011 play itself out? It was just heads down and get the album made really. We spent the year making the album, so it was just the priority, plus learning to play live; just getting ready for this year really, it was a sort of warm-up year. We did a lot of recording; it was all about recording and then this year will be all about live.

And Norwich is the first date on the tour, so does that mean we get the best of you, or… Erm, a bit of both! Maybe we’ll be fresh and on our toes, and a bit nervous, I don’t know. We’ll have done a few shows – we’ll have done a London show and a Paris show, so you’ll be the third, so hopefully it’ll be alright.

Oh good, so you’ll be fresh, but polished for us… Yes! That can be our tagline, “fresh, but published”!

I haven’t heard the album in its entirety yet, but I don’t need to read the reviews, I can ask you – at its extremes of length and breadth, what’s the whole album like? Somebody described it as kaleidoscopic, which is probably true. I think the idea was to have this mad colour palette, if you like, of bright and fun kind of… We didn’t fill it out too much, so some tracks are quite stripped back, they just didn’t need much in the way of much production, but overall it was just like, ‘let’s go for it and chuck in loads of ideas’ and go where the ideas go and let them lead rather than have an agenda. It’s quite a free album, free of sort of restraints we put on ourselves and our sounds – and just quite fun, I guess! Hopefully quite fun.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had a hangover and you’ve gone for a can of 7up and it’s kind of bright in your mouth – I like to think it’s like that… Yes! Definitely, I hope so. Somebody said it was like pouring lemonade in your brain, so I don’t know if that’s the same.

It is kinda the same thing, isn’t it? There’s obviously a carbonated effect to the album… Haha, yeah. Carbonated is probably the watch word!

We could probably make it a music genre just by sticking it on Wikipedia. Haha, yeah! It’s probably hard asking me though ‘cause I’m so close to the album and now I feel like a million miles from it, because I haven’t listened to it recently, so it’s a weird thing for me to know what it is. I’m surprised sometimes listening back to parts of it that we did it, but I guess that’s just the process, then you move on to the next thing really.

You’re on production duties Dave, is that a beast of a burden? It can be, but it’s my own fault really ‘cause that’s how I got in to music; I never thought I was ever gonna be in a band, I thought I was gonna be a producer, so it’s really why I met with Vinny in the first place, to record his songs. I guess the more pressure was put on, and the more serious it got and the more people expected things, the more it became like I’d created a monster or something, but that’s always just a good sign that people wanted more, and people wanted to hear it live, so it kinda snowballed. That’s what I kinda love doing though, being in the studio mucking about, producing, so yeah, it can be a lot of work when you’re the producer and when you’re in the band drumming, ‘cause it feels like two jobs sometimes, but I’m looking forward to getting back in the studio really and getting on with the next one. 

You’re my second art-school born band of the month, and it really does seem that they’re a hotbed of creativity and they teach you the disciplines to be able to control a lot of elements yourself. Would you ever be able to hand over the reigns, say for your second album? No, not at all, I mean the production is… We don’t work in a way that we come up with stuff and then we let somebody produce it, because the production is really the music for us. It’s part and parcel; I think it’d be like thinking of a painting and then getting somebody else to paint it! I mean, they might be able to do a better job or make it technically better, but at the end of the day, what’s the point?! In our lives we could probably always pay someone to do something better, but then we’d all be sat watching telly, waiting for it to be done. I think it’s just about getting stuck in and doing it ourselves. Another thing we’ve found is that it’s a cost thing; producers cost a lot of money and studio time costs a lot of money and we don’t want to have a huge debt around our neck at a label, or something. There’s always a bit of that, but it’s what made us kind of do it all ourself in the first place, ‘cause we were all totally broke. No, I think carry on the way we’re going, but maybe just a little bit quicker!

The label you’re signed to, French label Because, have afforded you that creative control, which is great, but what’s it like being signed to a French label? We get to go to Paris a lot, so that’s a bonus! Or a burden, however you see it… I mean I don’t really think of it as French; they’ve got a London office and I think they’re sort of quite international. They’re just a great label in terms of support and letting us do our daft ideas and they don’t think that things need to be done in a certain way. They sort of just said, ‘well, get on with it and hand it in when it’s done’, and that’s what we did really. It’s great to go to France a lot as well! It’s just great seeing a different side of how things can be done, because it is quite different over there, the way things are done. I mean little things, like the way they stop to eat, or how they work in the office, it’s quite different; and then when you go out to play live in France it’s quite different again because you’ll all sit down with the roadies and drink wine! You feel more part of something, like a family, rather than in and out, grumpy soundmen – it’s treated much more seriously, or something, but I think that’s because it’s subsidised. The live side’s subsidised by the government and everybody has to be paid properly, so you get monitor engineers, where that’s their career.

And you don’t have to eat service station sandwiches so often, I guess, which is awesome! Exactly! That’s right! They don’t take things like we do in Britain; they wouldn’t just accept crap coffee, or service station sandwiches. I really respect that about them because they’re like, ‘no, let’s do things better’, usually. So yeah, it’s good to go over there and see the differences.

They’ve got such an outstanding relationship with dance music and danceable pop as well, that it must be nice to be part of that lineage in your own right? Yeah, definitely, I mean they like a certain sound and I’m not sure yet how we fit into that sound, but they like us, so it’s nice to be accepted. It’s very much a dance scene at Because, I mean, you’ve got Ed Banger, you’ve got Metronomy and all these guys and it’s nice to be part of that because my backgorund’s dance music, so I knew about all that kind of stuff – I was a big Daft Punk fan. I think my dance background might have seeped through somehow and they’ve picked up on it, which is good because they recognise the importance of things like 12” mixes, whereas other people might say that’s a waste of money, or pointless to have a 12” extended mix. They really get all that, so it’s nice to be in that environment.

Now I’d love to hear you guys scoring a film, Ennio Morricone-style, but I wondered if there was any film you’d have liked to have done the score for? ‘Nuns on the Run’, maybe…

Yeah?! No, haha! That’s a good question… maybe ‘The Holy Mountain’ by Alejandro Jodorowsky. He did two of my favourite films, ‘El Topo’ and ‘The Holy Mountain’, so maybe one of those two. Or… a spaghetti western.

Can you see yourself doing something like that, lending your music to film? I’d love to, yeah. My brother’s making a film, a sort of western with Channel 4, so I’ll have to bug him to let me do some soundtracking at some point for him. But yeah, soundtracks are a big part of what we listen to, and a soundtrack always seems to be on the record player at some time, so yeah, we’re especially big fans of weird sci-fi films and you know, like Carpenter films… maybe ‘Escape from New York’ would have been a good one to do another soundtrack to.

I’ve got an image of Robbie Coltrane dressed as a nun running round my head now though. All the serious things you said after that were lost to me thinking about Robbie. Yeah, haha. Maybe screwball comedy is the way forward for us.

Now Dave, you’re coming to Norwich and you’re gonna bring us an awesome show, your fresh but polished little number, but as an audience, what can we do for you? Erm… keep an open mind! Don’t be too harsh on us! Don’t throw hard objects – keep them soft like tomatoes and I don’t know, try and enjoy it. I don’t know, it’s hard to gauge what it’s gonna be like, but maybe listen to the album first and see what to expect from that. There’ll be different twists and turns from the album as well, so hopefully that’ll keep you on your toes.

Emma Garwood

Django Django come to the Norwich Arts Centre on February 17th. For tickets, go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk.