Klaxons

"Nu rave" was not invented by the British press to describe Klaxons. It was invented by Klaxons to make fun of the British press. The term came out of the mouth of the bassist, Jamie Reynolds, who dropped it in an interview as a private joke and later explained the mechanism without any guilt: the idea was to get the media talking about something that did not exist. It worked better than expected. The NME and The Guardian adopted the label, neon bands appeared, features came out about a scene that had been born in a joke, and the band ended up disowning the name it had put into circulation itself. What came next is what almost never gets told: with that album they won the most serious prize their country's industry hands out and they did not know what to do with it. Klaxons' debt to the rave of the nineties, the rave of The Prodigy and the warehouses on the outskirts, was real; the scene was not.

Four blokes in New Cross

Klaxons formed in 2005 in New Cross, in south-east London, and had from the start individual names that the story of the scene erased. Jamie Reynolds played bass and sang, James Righton handled keyboards and the other voice, Simon Taylor-Davis guitar, and Steffan Halperin joined later on drums. Three of them wrote.

The full original name was Klaxons (Not Centaurs), and it is not an internet joke: it comes from the futurist manifesto of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, from 1909, where car horns replace horses as the image of modern speed. That kind of reference was usual with them and is worth keeping to hand, because what they were reproached with for years was precisely the opposite: being a band of fluorescent clothes with nothing underneath.

The joke was called nu rave

The original spelling was another joke. The first poster they printed announced "neu rave", with a nod to German krautrock—Neu!, Can, Kraftwerk—and not to the rave of Manchester. The pun got lost along the way and what was left was "nu rave", which sounds like a real subgenre, and from then on the label became autonomous.

Reynolds never presented it as an honest description of their music. He presented it as a test: if a band invented a movement in an interview, how long would music journalism take to write about it as if it had been there for years? It took weeks. There were lists of nu rave bands, guides to the scene, photos of glow sticks and neon trousers, and gigs where the audience turned up dressed for a genre that did not exist.

The band paid the price. By 2007 they were spending every interview rejecting the term, with the awkwardness of someone who has to deny their own joke, and the label ended up working as a ceiling: it pinned Klaxons to a moment of fashion instead of to a catalogue. The joke came off perfectly and stuck to them.

Ballard, Pynchon and Burroughs on the dancefloor

Myths of the Near Future came out on 29 January 2007, reached number two on the British albums chart and is, in addition, the title of a book of short stories by J.G. Ballard. It is not the only quotation. "Gravity's Rainbow" takes its title from the Thomas Pynchon novel, and "Atlantis to Interzone" names William Burroughs's Interzone, the hallucinated Tangier of Naked Lunch.

The interesting thing is that none of that weighed on the songs. "Golden Skans", which reached number seven among British singles, lasts a little over two minutes and gets chanted like a party track; the references were in the titles and in the imagery, not in any lyrical solemnity. It was a dancefloor record made by people who read, which is a good deal less frequent than a heavy record made by people who want to look as if they read.

The prize and the block

In September 2007 Myths of the Near Future won the Mercury Prize. It is worth being precise about what that is: the Mercury rewards the best album of the year released in the United Kingdom and Ireland and is decided by a jury, not by sales or by the public; the awards of popular prestige are the BRITs. It is the most serious recognition a British album can receive, and that night it was read as a surprise, because the favourite was Back to Black, by Amy Winehouse.

That is where the other story begins. Klaxons were in their early twenties, with a prize that turned their joke into national heritage and a second album they had to deliver. They delivered it, and the label rejected that first version completely. They recorded it again. Surfing the Void only appeared in 2010, three and a half years after the debut, with a harder sound that neither won back the audience of 2007 nor convinced those who were expecting something else.

Love Frequency, released on 16 June 2014, was the last. In 2015 the band went on indefinite hiatus and since then there has been no new album and no reunion tour announced. Seven years of active career, two albums after the prize, and the adjective that fits them best is not "fleeting" but "stuck": what they could not manage was success, not failure.

What to remember

Klaxons did something almost no band manages: they demonstrated, from the inside, how a music scene is manufactured. A bassist said two words in an interview, the press built the rest and for a couple of years half the United Kingdom believed in a movement that had begun as a mockery of the people covering it. That the spelling came from a joke about krautrock and that the band ended up disowning the whole business makes it better, not worse.

The problem is that the experiment worked too well for them. In September 2007 they won the Mercury ahead of Back to Black, with an album that quoted Ballard, Pynchon and Burroughs and that was danced to on the same floor as Faithless. Then came a label that handed back their second album, three years of waiting, two lukewarm records and a hiatus that is already approaching a decade. They invented a scene, won it and got trapped in it.

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Sources

Klaxons were a British band formed in 2005 in New Cross, London, made up of Jamie Reynolds (bass and vocals), James Righton (keyboards and vocals), Simon Taylor-Davis (guitar) and, subsequently, Steffan Halperin (drums). Their original name, Klaxons (Not Centaurs), comes from the futurist manifesto of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1909). The term "nu rave" was coined by Jamie Reynolds himself as a joke aimed at the music press, with the declared purpose of getting the media to write about a non-existent movement; the original spelling, "neu rave", appeared on the band's first poster as a reference to krautrock. The NME and The Guardian spread the label, which the band publicly rejected in the following years. Their debut album, "Myths of the Near Future", was released on 29 January 2007 and reached number two on the British albums chart; its title corresponds to a book of short stories by J.G. Ballard. The song "Gravity's Rainbow" takes its title from the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name, and "Atlantis to Interzone" alludes to William Burroughs's Interzone. The single "Golden Skans" reached number seven on the British singles chart. In September 2007 the album won the Mercury Prize, an award given by a jury to the best album of the year released in the United Kingdom and Ireland, ahead of "Back to Black", by Amy Winehouse, considered the favourite. The record label rejected the first version of the second album, which had to be re-recorded and appeared as "Surfing the Void" in 2010. "Love Frequency", released on 16 June 2014, was their last album; the band went on indefinite hiatus in 2015 and has not announced new recordings or tours. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, the NME, The Guardian, the Official Charts Company and other coverage.