Klaxons - Myths of the Near Future

I have a suspicion people are expecting a shit rave record muses Simon Taylor, vocalist and guitarist with the ubiquitously tipped Klaxons, "but the reality is we've made a shiny, shimmering pop album."

Well, forgive us sir, but is 'new rave/nu-rave' not exactly how you described your own sound less than 12 months ago? Simon audibly winces. "I've heard that word (sic) so many times this year it haunts me. In any case, it's difficult to try and define something that's going on right now, it takes reflection to look back at things and then try to describe what happened. I've noticed at our gigs that people dress up and make a real effort to party. That people should want to do that is nothing new, but it seems that NME have switched on to it right now. I don't know what a new rave sound might be because there aren't any new rave albums."

So you're at the vanguard of a movement you're not sure even exists? Sounds like a theme for a, well, Klaxons tune – come to think of it, what are those lyrics about anyway? "Well, we don't really want to write about a boy, a girl and a bus stop. I mean, there are great songs written about that, but it just wasn't us. We're all interested in sci-fi and fantasy land (their lyrics checklist literary and cultural 'outsiders' such as Richard Brautigan, Aleister Crowley and William S Burroughs) and we just wanted to make a big, escapist pop record."

"Myths of the Near Future was a book (by J.G. Ballard) which we all read before we had the idea of the band and it was a really great starting point. It's like a contradiction in itself - the myth of something which hasn't actually happened, which is kind of like what we were. We just liked the idea of this bizarre, dark fantasy land where Ballard just stretches these ideas and warps them into something else. Working 13 hour shifts in a call centre proved the most inspirational job I ever had, speaking to people who have amazing stories. I spoke to a lady once who met Duncan from Blue in an epileptic fit (now that's unfortunate!) and paralysed people who could only stand up when they saw Kylie Minogue play. A lot of the words are just random ideas, off-conscious writing streams of form. Burroughs offers the ethos of our songwriting – fragmented things. We write the ideas down and then draw links between them with pens and it's all kind of visual. We might name a riff the ice-cream riff, then draw an ice cream van then we'd link that to, say, epic doom or something like that, and just draw between all these things."

Epic doom? How do you draw that? Is that what led you to cover 'The Bouncer' (early nineties 'novelty' rave anthem - "your name's not down, you're not comin'in")? "'The Bouncer' is the first song we learned to play together, after a few cans of Strongbow. What really irritated us was that people called us 'ironic', or a novelty band. There's such a thing as irony, though I'm not sure many journalists have a clue what it is. We had the pleasure of meeting Richard Russell, the head of XL Records, and the guy who wrote the track. He meant it as a deadly serious song, and he was upset that it was labelled a novelty record. Once you've been called that, it's a hard label to escape from."