Django Django Interview

Not many bands receive the same level of acclaim with a debut album as Scottish group Django Django did in 2012 with their self-titled album. Before the band headline the NME tour we catch up with bassist Jim Dixon to find out how the band felt at being nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, plans for their second album and why they went with a terrible band name.

When you started the band were you all quite focused as to what you wanted from the band or has it taken on a life of its own?

Yeah pretty much. I don’t think we had any kind of idea of what it was going to do, we didn’t even think we would get an album out when we first started doing songs, it’s just snowballed. We put a couple of singles out just because we were excited to do that not because we had any foresight as to where that would go. We put the first couple of singles out ourselves with a friend and then we got offered a record deal so we wrote an albums worth of stuff and when the album came out its taken off, its been pretty unexpected but its been great. It’s been pretty amazing the places we’ve been playing, last summer we went all round Europe, we have been to America, Australia and Japan, its totally exceeded anything that we thought would happen. 

How far along is the second album?

Pretty early stages, we are in the studio in the next couple of weeks but we are working on the live set then hopefully we will get some time to work on some new songs. It’s pretty tentative at the moment, we are recording a few ideas ourselves and hopefully we will start working on stuff in the next couple of weeks.

Your fist took 3 years to complete the first album; will the process be different this time around?

I think so because Dave (Maclean – drummer) produced the last album and it was pretty much trial and error as we didn’t really know what we were doing so it took us quite a while. I think now that we are working on it full time things will be a lot quicker than the first album. Everyone was working full time jobs and Dave was in college, we were literally getting together twice a week but hopefully this time will be much quicker. 

 

You are off on the NME awards tour soon, how is the band getting prepared?

We are in a studio trying to polish up the set and reduce the set time and work on a few other updates but apart from that I think we usually play the same set every night. Once we’ve decided on a set that works we just stick with it. We had a load of shirts made for the Mercury’s that we’ve been wearing for gigs recently but the material is really heavy so we have been getting incredibly hot on stage so I don’t know if we are going to work something new out, it just depends on time I suppose. It’s totally draining you end up completely exhausted after the tour.

You were nominated for Mercury Music Prize last year, how did it feel to get that sort of recognition with your first album?

Totally incredible, we got a call maybe a few weeks before it was announced officially and we were all totally over the moon. Just being there was huge for us as its something we have all grown up watching and I remember Primal Scream winning it and Portishead. There have been so many important acts that have been associated with it over the year so it was an honour to be nominated. Its all snowballed, we were expecting the album touring to be over at the end of last year but we got offered the NME tour and I suppose that’s like a big pay off for us, its another amazing opportunity and we were totally stoked to be invited to do.

How important do you think it is for a band to have a strong band name?

I think its kind of important, as it’s the first thing that people see. It’s weird because we kind of stumbled on Django Django really. Dave & Vinney (Neff – singer & guitarist) had a couple of songs that they wanted to put on Myspace and had to come up with a name in an afternoon. Dave saw a record that he had called ‘Son of Django’ and he liked the word django so I suppose in homage to bands like Liquid Liquid we repeated it. It was a happy accident but it kind of works, when we first suggested it to each other we were asking people what they though and they said it was the worst band name that they have heard and we kind of just went with it. We thought at least it would stick in people’s minds even if they hate it. I think it’s important but I think we were kind of lucky to come up with that so quickly because so many people thought it was a terrible name we just went with it.

Quite a lot of music journalists seem to be struggling to describe your sound; what’s the best and worst description you have heard?

The worst ones we get are like folktronica’ weird kind of amalgamations of different genres I suppose journalists, that’s there jobs I suppose to sum things up but I think folktronica’ crops up a lot but we had a Japanese journalist describe us as Polyphonic rockabilly which was good and cosmic tramp rock which was good. 

Published in Yorkshire Evening Post