Klaxons
From November 2007
The recent BBC series History of Modern Britain, presented by Andrew Marr, was met with widespread acclaim but one aspect which received very little comment was the choice of background music. In one memorable sequence (i.e. a bit that I can remember) the then newly-elected prime minister, John Major, was seen wandering round a fruit 'n' veg market to the sound of the Happy Mondays' baggy anthem Step On. That really did twist my melon. I was thinking of this (the juxtaposition, rather than a need to buy any fruit or vegetables) earlier this week when I found myself asking: what am I, a 42 year old accountant, doing at a Klaxons concert?
A preview in the NME said "expect carnage" and although I assume that the young man seen staggering out of the crowd on crutches had broken his leg before the gig started, this was a pretty accurate description of the proceedings. When I arrived the support act, Simian Mobile Disco, were in full swing. Disappointingly there were no monkeys involved nor was it a disco in the sense that you could ask the DJ to play, say, Blockbuster by The Sweet. Instead we were treated to two young men, possibly technicians of some description, who with the aid of a pile of electronic equipment created industrial strength techno with the volume turned up to no. 11. When the stage occasionally came into view through the strobe lights they could be seen earnestly making adjustments to computers although whether this was in any way affecting the music being played or they were just checking their emails, it was hard to say. Reminiscent of Kraftwerk, DAF, Orbital & Daft Punk this sort of stuff has long held a strange fascination for me and took my mind off a particularly tricky capital gains tax problem for half an hour.
At this point the crowd were well & truly mad for it, this despite the best efforts of the Edinburgh Corn Exchange fun police who had confiscated everybody's glowsticks and Klaxons themselves who managed to take the best part of an hour to find their way from the dressing room to the stage. As to what "it" is, I couldn't really say. Klaxons have been descrubed as Nu Rave and the influence of the likes of Altern 8, Aphex Twin & The Prodigy is all too apparent. But whereas those bands were genuinely leftfield (and in some cases, simply frightening) I can imagine this lot post-show hanging up their homemade costumes, sitting down to some cheese on toast & cocoa, perhaps checking the evening's football scores, before turning in for the night. Increasingly I find myself saying, or at least thinking, "I've heard it all before" but given that the average age of Klaxons' audience must be less than 20 years, most of them won't have heard it before and for them this is something new. No music form is worth spending too much time analysing in detail, far less getting into an argument about. Klaxons have won the Mercury Music Prize with their debut album and the kids love them. You can't argue with that.