Crazy music. Crazier dress sense.
A four-piece from the romantic Scottish capital who have been transplanted to the rapidly gentrifying streets of Dalston, Django Django are the sort of band that are infuriatingly hard to explain to other people.
Slightly krautrock, slightly post punk, and weirdly tribal, they sound rather more like a cross between XTC and a military tattoo than the knowingly cool Belgian jazz their name suggests. Not that it’s a bad thing; it’s just that after reading through the band's circular-sounding press release, I’m not that sure that even Django Django themselves really know what they’re up to.
The confusion seems to stop when the guys play live. Decked out in shirts that made them look a bit like indie nerds playing the baddies in Die Hard, they brought a ray of jangly sunshine to last year’s Camden Crawl and were definitelty my highlight of the festival.
Needless to say, expect big things in 2010.
How does Dalston compare to Edinburgh?
Edinburgh, Auld Reekie, the Athens of the North… it’s truly a glorious city, and a very romantic one.
Dalston isn't too unlike the west end of Edinburgh for me, Gorgie and Dalry. It’s rough round the edges but full of characters and charm.
I love the East End of London but even in the three years I have been in Dalston it has changed. No doubt it will soon be like Angel, with coffee shops and posh boutiques, but that's fine. The skint artists and musicians like me will just have to move further out and find a new hovel.
Your songs are particularly crazy – what sort of things influence your sounds?
They don’t seem crazy to me. In fact they seem quite conventional. Maybe that's because I listen to too much Weather Report…
Django Django is a pop band though; at least that was the plan. We're into oddball pop: Brian Wilson, The Beatles, Prince, Joe Meek, Hot Chip, Devo, Bad Boys Inc, that kind of thing..
What have you guys got planned for 2010?
2010 is already looking very busy for us. We're putting out a single in February and doing some shows around that, and then we're playing SXSW and Fence Homegame in March, then hopefully some more festivals in the summer. We're also going to release an album at some point, so it should be a good year for us.
When we've seen you guys play, you've been sporting some particularly gruesome shirts – where did they come from?
Yeah, the shirts are from Turkish and African clothes shops in Dalston. We just fancied a change from checked shirts and t-shirts. We've got a pretty good collection of Django shirts now.
They seem to be getting more and more gruesome but it keeps us entertained. When we see a shirt we like we ask ourselves, “Would Cuba Gooding Jr. have worn this in Boyz in the Hood?” If the answer is yes, then it’s snapped up.
Django Django play Corsica Studios tonight alongide French Kissing.
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