Earlier this month, Alt-J was awarded the Barclaycard Mercury Prize at a ceremony in London. The award is given annually to the artist that produces the year’s best U.K. album, and simply to be nominated is considered an honor. For winners, however, the prestigious prize has been known to launch careers, as it did for bands like Arctic Monkeys and The xx. This year, Django Django was one of the bands honored to be nominated. They were even considered to be one of the few nominees with a legitimate chance to win before Alt-J’s name was announced at the end of the night.
Any description of Django Django’s music or review of their self-titled debut album, which was released in the U.S. in October, is sure to include the word “psychedelic.” The label is appropriate, considering the album’s expansiveness, its warbling, reverberating effects and the wide spectrum of imagery it evokes. To call them a “psychedelic rock band,” however, at least according to songwriter, producer and drummer Dave Maclean, is nearly tantamount to a slap in the face.
“We’re into film and art and ideas being the catalyst for what people call psychedelia, but we’re not sitting around looking at lava lamps,” he explains. “It’s not what we do. To me, acid house and techno are more psychedelic because they have a repetitive, trance-y build. I don’t think there’s such a thing as psychedelic rock, and if there is, it’s a bit tired and cliched. I think we’re just into ideas, symbolism and dreams and painting, all those things that make up escapism.”
The band learned to cultivate such abstract ideas, which aren’t specific to any particular artistic discipline, when they met in art school in Edinburgh, Scotland, where they studied painting and architecture. After graduating in 2002, Maclean and eventual Django Django synth player Tommy Grace ran an art gallery for four years before finally getting around to the whole music thing in 2007, when a pair of songs Maclean put on MySpace ended up receiving a little more attention than he had anticipated. People called for a 7” and people called for live shows, so Maclean rounded up his old classmates and obliged his new fans.
Earlier this year, British newspaper The Guardian gave their first proper album five out of five stars. “That’s when I thought, okay, we’re going to have to step up our game and it’s going to snowball from here,” Maclean remembers. “I think if they gave it two out of five stars we would have been working on our new album already.” Not long after The Guardian’s review they were shortlisted for the Mercury Prize.
Though trained as a painter, Maclean wasn’t without music growing up. His older brother, John, was a member of the Beta Band, a group to which Django Django is often compared, both for their eclecticism and their ability to combine traditional and electronic instrumentation.
“We grew up DJ-ing together. Not making music together, but making music and bouncing it off each other. We both had samplers and decks and stuff set up in our bedroom. I was always more of a producer type and I wanted to go make house and techno, and he was more band-oriented. I kind of ended up being in the band accidentally. It was a weird mixture of what I wanted to do and what I ended up doing.”