Interview: Django Django, band

IT’S a small and exclusive club, the drummers who do more than just bash the skins, and the singing sticksmen (and women) include Phil Collins, the late Karen Carpenter, Don Henley of the Eagles, The Band’s Levon Helm, Robert Wyatt when he was in Soft Machine and that bloke out of the Dave Clark Five. Dave Maclean doesn’t sing in Django Django but possibly his role within Scotland’s hottest new band is even more unique. He’s their leader, the man with the plan… and what a weird plan it is.

We spend almost as much time talking about comedy heroes as musical ones. Maclean, together with bandmates Vincent Neff, Tommy Grace and Jimmy Dixon, bonded over a mutual love for Monty Python rather than a shared passion for any particular band. “We’re all art school boys so we’re big fans of that surrealist-absurdist humour,” he explains. “Maybe my favourite Python characters were the footballing philosophers. You know: ‘And it’s Socrates, passes to Archimedes…’ But the sketch which obsessed me the most when I was a kid was the déjà vu one. Those guys probably had a great laugh filming the same thing over and over again: man jumps onto milk float, passes a camp priest and a zoo, goes to the doctor to seek a cure for everything repeating itself. But did they ever think: ‘Will this just end up being annoying?’ ”

In the wrong hands, a band as much in thrall to tribal rhythms as they are to surf guitars, who are in awe of the production gimcracks of Giorgio Moroder and Joe Meek, who dress up in safari suits (shades of the multi-Alan Whickers in Python) and even auditioned for their label in medieval smocks, could end up being very annoying indeed. But somehow the Djangos aren’t.

So what’s with the name? “We wanted one that was a word repeated like Liquid Liquid,” says Maclean, 31, referring to the terrifyingly hip New York post-punkers. Or, um, Duran Duran? “Exactly.” He finds it strange, talking about choosing their handle as if was a top-level summit, when the many pints of heavy in Edinburgh’s studentland would have been crucial to the evening and no-one was fantasising about four-star reviews for the debut album.

If you’re already getting déjà vu over the kind of combo Django Django are – arty, pranksterish and above all psychedelic – then possibly you’re remembering the Beta Band. They had a dressing-up box too – for karate display teams and African dictators – and where they once banged gas canisters for percussion, the Djangos opt for coconut halves.

“When we started three years ago, that was all we could afford and we continue to use them for comic effect,” adds Maclean, whose big brother John played keyboards and sampled for the Betas.

“When people first said we sound like the Beta Band I didn’t get it but I suppose a similarity is inevitable. We grew up together and shared the same record collection and the same bed and basket with the dog. Our parents, both visual artists, have been big influences on us and I think our father’s collages, together with the fact we both got into hip hop DJ-ing, has resulted in this eclectic music where we’re borrowing from everywhere.”

The Betas are much missed and those who loved them wish they could have achieved more. But Maclean says his brother, now a Bafta-winning filmmaker, has no regrets. “He’s happy that they left an intact legacy of the three or four albums they wanted to make, plus all those amazing stage shows – he’s pretty proud. And he’s been very supportive of me, telling us to believe in what we’re doing.”

Hailing from Tayport in Fife, both Macleans are products of Edinburgh College of Art, the Django meeting Neff and Grace there and hooking up with Dixon at Glasgow College of Art through a mutual friend. The Edinburgh contingent lived in student digs that were “pure sitcom” with mice the dominant species and a payphone in the hall. Little wonder the Djangos spent more time in their favourite howffs including Bennets, the Jolly Judge and the Waverley. “We were back in the Waverley recently,” says Maclean. “It had been the venue for a great party in 1999 when 20 of us had turned up in masks of the girl whose birthday it was. I’m pleased to say that one of them is still behind the bar.”

Those crazy Dadaists, but does no one go to art school to become a painter any more? “Well, I have a dream of buying a little studio by the sea one day and I think the others might fancy doing something similar, but right now we’re happy to roll with this. Really, art school is just a building full of people with ideas where you learn there’s no point in, say, waiting for money to make a sculpture; you go out and raid a skip. We applied that attitude to music. Not being able to afford studio-time, we made our record in a bedroom.”

In a previous bedroom, Maclean worked alone with synths and drum machines and got frustrated. “I thought that might be me: a DJ putting out faceless techno. But all that changed when I met Vinny. Here was someone into songs, who had a love of Beach Boys’ harmonies which we could fuse with my weird dance music.” They opened a gallery, the Embassy, as an Edinburgh version of Glasgow’s Transmission (celebrated in song by Franz Ferdinand). And the other Djangos enabled them to expand the sonic possibilities through krautrock, library music, calypso and Bo Diddley. Maclean again: “I’ve always been fascinated by his rhythm section which created this dancefloor-friendly beat without proper drums using just shakers and clapping. To me that’s the beginning of modern dance music but it’s something that dance has since lost.”

This band fizz with ideas. Next week, after a gig in Switzerland, the Djangos will convene at a rented cottage in Pittenweem to begin writing the next album. I ask Maclean if he knows the story of Ian Stewart, the sixth Rolling Stone who hailed from the East Neuk fishing village and was ousted from the band for not being pretty enough. Immediately intrigued, he Googles Stewart, and declares: “I think I’m going to write a song about him.” If you’ve never heard Django Django, you probably think their music must be everything-and-the-kitchen-sink but they’ve restrained themselves. Their highly supportive French label Because gave them their surrealist heads for their debut release, but Maclean admits: “We decided to rein ourselves in a bit. It nearly went completely bonkers.” No point in giving everything away, straight from the off. He’s not ready to paint those endless sea views just yet. «

Django Django play the Eye O The Dug festival in St Andrews next weekend and Dundee’s Doghouse on 13 June. A new single, Storm, is released on Because on 23 April