THE COMING RAPTURE : KLAXONS ARE RUNNING OUT OF SEROTONIN

L’album des Klaxons est sorti il y a un mois je crois, un plan comme ça. Nous on aime bien. C’est pas super snob d’aimer les Klaxons en ce moment mais l’album est quand même un excellent disque pop, c’est réglo. Genre Two Receivers et Golden Skans sont de très bonnes surprises, la reprise de Grace arrache aussi. Il n’y a pas de grosses fautes à part la 6 là, « Isle of her », qui ressemble à un morceau dégueulasse de Korn époque Follow the Leader. Je les ai interviewés il y a quelques mois dans leur hôtel à Pigalle : j’ai toujours trouvé que leur coté « prophètes cinglés » et tout leur délire « apocalypse fun » était plus intéressant que leur musique. Et cet espèce de patchwork post-post-moderne que la presse a appelé « nu-rave » est nettement plus marrant et inventif qu’un simple revival.

Everybody describes you as funny fluo-human-glowsticks but you do a lot of melancholic references and especially to the end of the world, so can you tell us a bit more about the apocalypse, is it only some kind of a massive hangover ?
- The apocalypse thing was inspired by my grandad who was a spiritual healer, and he prophesised to me on a number of occasions about the end of the world coming in 2012 with a series of massive world disasters. Unfortunately he died a month before September the 11th. If he had seen this massive world disaster the guy would have gone absolutely psycho.
-And yeah, there is definitely a lot of darkness on the entire record.

Do you have any favourite Antidepressants ?
-No, antidepressants are not good, the thing is that you easily get hooked on it. They don’t actually cure you, they just put off and hide the fact that you are actually not cured. My mom was on Prozac for a long time and it was a fucking disaster.
- I mean at the end of the day, no matter how you look at it, if you’re capable of going mentally insane you’re capable of fixing it...
- That depends on whether it is a fucking chemical thing or not
- Once you’re diagnosed and you start being put on medication, you’re locked in.
- I’m a believer that the brain can do it itself, the brain is a great healer but once you start being put on chemicals you’re fucked. It’s the fucking dark side of it.

There’s something really postmodern about the Klaxons, you do refer to Thomas Pynchon, Burroughs and even Waterworld, did any of you go to school or have you just done this kind of lucky-clever-connections because of too much acid ?
- The Atlantis and Interzone thing which I realized worked together well while working in a cool center. I used to sit there for thirteen hours a day, it was a good time of reading. So I personnally read a lot then, and especially some Jameson philosophy and books that we’ve put into the work that we’ve done recently.
- I studied philosophy but I didn’t complete my course because I was like too busy enjoying myself. Jesus it was really heavy, I had to study subtexts, pick it apart sentence by sentence.

I don’t really understood why all the media defined you as “nu-rave” but anyway, the point is that you were to young to go to a real one back then...
- It’s like getting the ticket that you never had. I saw it in the distance, when I was a kid there used to be this Fantasia that was a big festival organization at the time, putting on big parties in my hometown and I could see it but I couldn’t go to it cause I was twelve. Initially it was the ticket to get where you couldn’t go when you were younger.

So it’s more about reinventing and reinterpreting something you haven’t lived, like the raves, not being some kind of nostalgic but making your own interzone real ?
- Yeah I think it’s actually inventing what you could never experience and representing it, inventing your own reality. And it’s also funny because Atlantis as well is a place which there’s been a lot of books written about. Psychologists have talked about Atlantis as a mental space since people that are mentally ill and going through reahab usually have visions and things about Atlantis. That would actually be a place inside your head, a mental non-space.
I think we’ve invented our own non-space, we’ve created something which is pretty separate from anything else that goes on, a bubble, a place to hide.

ITW & PHOTOS : Maciek