“Dancing at gigs just doesn’t happen enough” : The Line of Best Fit meets Django Django

It’s on a damp, cold, grey January day that we find ourselves looking out over a magnificently industrial East London skyline, with a giant, rusted oil tanker framing the construction that will soon become London’s tallest, most celebrated skyscraper. Tommy Grace, synth and keys maestro with Scottish quartet Django Django is showing us the view from the band’s rehearsal room – a juxtaposition of the industrial and the modern, a sight that has come to represent a large part of London, the city that the Scottish band have now come to call home.

The Line of Best Fit have been invited along to Django Django’s rehearsal space to discuss the imminent and highly anticipated release of the band’s eponymous first album, of which preliminary reviews have been very positive. “It’s brilliant. I’m surprised. Or I’m not that surprised, because you know, I like it!” says Grace of the band’s first full length release. “It shouldn’t be getting shit reviews! But it’s really great, because at the end of the day, you might like something but there’s no way you can tell what other people are going to think about it.”

Django Django first made themselves heard back in 2009 with the release of their tracks ‘Storm’ and ‘Love’s Dart’. Bloggers, journalists and music fans alike were quick to pounce on the tracks and the name Django Django was fast becoming the whispered name around music forums and websites. Then it all went a bit quiet for a while, before it was announced that the band had signed to French label Because Music and that an album was on its way.

“Actually signing was a really protracted process, but as soon as we signed, we were like ‘ok, let’s do it!’” explains Grace. “We wanted to release singles and stuff, but the label were like ‘no, don’t do that, just wait until the album’s finished and then we’ll do it!’ They had this whole plan, and we were frustrated at the time but they were right. Then finishing the album took longer than we expected for loads of reasons. One reason would be Dave’s slightly erratic way of doing things, which made it a bit difficult for someone to take what he’d done and make sense of it when it came to mastering and stuff. So, lots of reasons.”

‘Dave’ refers to the band’s drummer and producer, Dave Maclean who, alongside singer and guitarist Vincent Neff and bassist Jimmy Dixon, complete’s Django Django’s line-up. The album was constructed in Dave’s bedroom, following his vision, direction and created under his watchful eye.

“Dave’s totally on it. He’s got good ears.” says Grace of his band mate. “He used to make some really fun, electronic stuff, and he did rhythms and some dance hall stuff. I found a CD the other day from 2007 or something, and it’s great. He’s got a totally astonishing vocabulary of music, and understands so much. He’s got a huge record collection, a massive knowledge and really keen ears. But the problem is he can’t really play all the instruments, and he cannae sing but he’s brilliant at songs! Everything goes through Davey and he has the final say in everything, it’s always his direction when we’re making the songs.”

“It was pretty much all recorded in bedroom so it’d literally be a matter of coming down to his house with your guitar and whatever you had and just playing parts, playing about, playing over the top of what the previous person had put down,” explains Grace of the process of piecing Django Django together. “Then we did a session up at Dave’s folks’ . They have a gorgeous house in this tiny place called Coll Bay which is pretty much the most north-westerly point you can get on the mainland. It’s so remote, it’s amazing and they’ve got a wee house there. We went up for a week and recorded stuff which ended up becoming ‘Zumm Zumm’ and ‘Silver Rays’. So we did some recording up there and finally… Dave moved house into an even smaller bedroom! We did some stuff there, and the last bits were finished up here .”

“It was a bit rag-tag, and when we were putting the album together, it was a bit difficult to get everything sounding the same. We had this problem with acoustics changing, equipment changing but we got it mixed by Dan Carey who outputted everything to tape, and then put the tape back in these analogue machines. That process has got this sort of magic. It’s almost like when you do a painting and all the parts looks a bit disparate, and then you put a coat of varnish on and it coheses everything because every part’s got the same veneer. It’s the same with this tape method, suddenly everything’s recorded in the same timbre or whatever. It just unifies everything.”

When the band began playing their early shows, they soon began to develop a reputation for lively sets, outlandish outfits and a playful approach to and use of instrumentation (see: coconut shells). Their live shows are a riot, allowing the band to showcase all of the energy and exhilaration that went into the creation of their record, and giving fans the opportunity and forum to show the band what the songs mean to them. “Live, we try to make sure that we are doing stuff!” states Grace, referring to the fact that the band work to recreate may of the synthetic sounds from the album live on stage. “It means it’s a lot more of a ruckus and a bit more raw and a bit more sketchy in a way, but that’s all right. It’s more tangible. So we’re comfortable with our live set, but I think having the album out will make a difference with the people coming to see us. They know more about the material and it helps. We’ve been playing ‘Waveforms’ for a while, and it makes a difference – people know the cues and the anticipation on the song, and the response you get from the audience is great.”

Django Django is certainly an album that was meant to be played live. Each of the twelve tracks resonates with excitement and vitality, each having been carefully – if, by the sounds of things, a bit erratically – strung together in order to capture every ounce of the light and vibrancy that this band represent. ” ‘Wor’ is great live, ‘Wor’ is just like a no-brainer, it’s really exciting,” says Grace of the songs’ transference to a live setting. “Half of the set we’re slightly constrained by the click track, a tempo that we can’t really fluctuate from because certain things are triggered throughout the track. But in the later half of the set there are no click tracks, like when we play ‘Wor’ and ‘Default’. Then you can just totally relax and get into it. They’re nice to do, and you know that you’re coming to the end of the set so you really get into it. But recording wise, ‘Zumm Zumm’ was great. There are lots of keyboard parts and it was really spontaneous – recording on the fly and trying to record tracks almost dancing… You need to be up and dancing!”

Having played shows in various settings, countries and colourful get-ups over the past few years, is there a particular show that’s stood out as highly memorable for the band? “The official answer is the Royal Albert Hall gig, because it was the Royal Albert Hall Metronomy] but to be honest, I was concentrating so hard on not messing up that it was hard to enjoy it – ‘Just get me through this, just don’t mess up!’” responds Grace. “It was great and I didn’t mess up once, but at the end, I just felt a bit like… ‘Ah, great…!’ It was a bit weird.”

“It’s nice when you’re doing festivals and people have no idea who you are, and then really get into it. It’s great because it proves that you can stand on your own two feet and it’s just lovely how people show affection about what you’re doing, it’s a really nice feeling. That’s how it should be. Dancing at gigs is one of those things, it just doesn’t happen enough. It should do.”

So Django Django are big dancers at gigs then, are they? “We did dance to this great Ethiopian band at Cecil Sharp House at an event called The Wheel. They were so terrific, these three guys – one guy on a drum, one guy on this bonkers harp-come-guitar and this woman who’s dancing to these pounding beats. It was properly brilliant. But it can be difficult dancing at gigs, partly because you’re so crammed in.”

It seems a bit strange to be discussing Django Django’s first album, as it feels as though the band have been around for enough time as to have already released a couple of records. The quality of this debut album certainly reflects that of an established, accomplished group and the reason for this is the care, the thought and the unique process that went into the creation of Django Django. “We’re just so used to doing everything ourselves, anything else would be weird and unnatural for us and we’d be immediately suspicious of it. We’re just going to do what seems right, whatever fits, we’ll do it as we want to do it.” So the next step for Django Django would be…? “We’re all really, really keen to start the next album now. We’ve got lots of ideas, we just need to get things rolling.”

A final question to close the interview, as the clouds outside thicken over the London skyline – is there a motto that Django Django live by? “Booze, broads and barber-shop chords. That’ll do. Yep, stick to that!”

Django Django is out on the 30 January through Because Music, pre-order the album here. The band can be caught at the following dates in support of the release:

17 Feb 12 – Norwich Arts Centre Norwich UK
19 Feb 12 – Stereo Glasgow UK
20 Feb 12 – Deaf Institute Manchester UK
21 Feb 12 – Shipping Forecast Liverpool UK
23 Feb 12 – Crawdaddy Dublin IR
24 Feb 12 – Bodega Nottingham UK
25 Feb 12 – Cooler Bristol UK
27 Feb 12 – XOYO London UK