The New Cue #281 May 2: Django Django
Hello!
Sheesharama, a Start The Week edition on a Tuesday, this is nuts, so exciting, so maverick, it feels dangerous! We didn’t want to deprive you of your Monday fix but we also didn’t want to interrupt your lie-in so here we are, it’s Tuesday, deal with it.
In today’s freebie, we speak to Django Django leader Dave Maclean about the group’s mammoth new record. Lovely guy, decent chat, some good UFO intel.
Enjoy the edition, see you on Friday,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Django Django’s Dave Maclean
Since emerging in the late ‘00s, Django Django have made music that has often threatened to go out-there but they jump to lightspeed on their new record Off Planet. A colossal project taking in 21 tracks, it is being released in four parts and is the quartet at their most musically shapeshifting, darting from house bangers to hypnotic psych-rock to atmospheric sampledelica to 90s breakbeats and more. It’s a wild and brilliant ride, with guests including Self Esteem, Jack Peñate, Stealing Sheep and many more coming along for the journey. On Friday, Niall spoke to the band’s creative dynamo Dave Maclean about how it came together.
Hello Dave, where are you at the moment?
I’m back in London. I’ve just been in Paris doing some shows, TV things, and I’ve done my back in so I’m just resting.
Ouch. That’s a perilous injury for a drummer.
Yeah, the older you get, the more common it is but I’ll be alright if I rest up.
Hope you’re on the mend soon. Congratulations on the new album. It’s huge!
Yeah, it’s a bit of an epic one. I just got the vinyl back yesterday and seeing all the tracks on one vinyl is quite mammoth.
Take me back to the beginning. Where did it start?
It was in lockdown really, having to work at home and going back to basics, a stripped back little set-up at home and not really being with other band members. I reverted back to making beats and backing tracks, like things I was doing in the 90s on a sampler and a four-track and then at art college. I was making more electronic dance music and stuff before I met Vinny [Neff, Django Django singer and guitarist] and then he brought the sort of psych rock sound and we went in that direction. I suppose the first album’s got more of my DIY electronic music touch, so it was going back to that.
There were shades of it on 2021’s Glowing In The Dark but this album really does meld the sound of your club and DJ background and the band.
I think it’s the closest we’ve got to that working together. I do music that the band don’t really know what to do with a lot of the time because it’s too genre heavy. But with this one, we put those worries to the side a little bit and just forced the tracks, like Slipstream that Vinny is singing on, just made it happen. Then the ones that he couldn’t find a way through on, we put them out to friends basically, that became the features aspect of it.
Yeah, and there’s loads of features on it, almost a whole album’s worth.
Yeah, I’ve always had this want to make a White Album or a Sandinista, just a sprawling, long album thing. You don’t want that all the time but I think sometimes it’s good to delve into that. The features help break it up and make it more like listening to our Late Night Tales mixtape rather than Django Django for an hour and a half.
You mentioned what you were up to in the 90s, give me a snapshot of what your pre-Django musical life was like.
Well, I started DJing in about ’92, playing rave, early breakbeat, hardcore I guess we just called it. I was doing it at school discos and local youth clubs and stuff. The Prodigy’s first album was massive and everyone was into rave whether it was gabber or early jungle, that was the thing at school. I did that a lot and I started getting booked to play bars and clubs and in Dundee and got schooled very quickly by older DJs. A lot of them were Northern Soul heads who introduced me to all different kinds of music, jazz and Detroit techno, there was a good music scene in Dundee and it was always quite eclectic, Gilles Peterson was quite a hero up there at that time because people were just into everything. That pushed my eclecticism even more. Me and my brother [former Beta Band member and film director John Maclean] both had samplers and decks so we were mucking around with making beat loops and stuff and then getting a computer and moving off four tracks was the beginning of Django Django because I was able to widen the scope and understand songwriting rather than just four-track hip-hop loops, I guess I was trying to make music that sounded like DJ Shadow or something. When I met Vinny, I was like, ‘Oh, we can make proper songs, let’s just do that’ and then that was the first album really.
You and your brother had a club night as well, didn’t you?
Yeah, a club night called Bad To The Bone which was great, that was very eclectic as well. There was a loose theme but we were playing things like rockabilly and old Chicago house and it was always pretty wild. That club fed into Django Django a lot because the records I was playing, whether they were The Clash or Eddie Cochran or some Chicago house thing, just seeing the crowd’s reaction fed into the way I was producing Vinny’s songs.
Django Django’s debut came out over a decade ago now. How have things gone compared to what was in your head at the start?
Very different, because in my head pre-coming to London, I wanted to be a DJ and a producer. I hadn’t really put my mind to songs or songwriting but it definitely scratched an itch. I was obsessed with The Beatles growing up and so was Vinny so that was something that was our starting point, The Beatles and The Beach Boys, trying to make songs you were in awe of growing up, not that we’ve ever come close to that but it gives you something to aim to or strive towards. Also, I didn’t really want to be a drummer. I never thought I’d go back to that, I was drumming in indie bands at school, doing Stone Roses covers. I did it because it was a laugh, it was good hanging out with mates, working out cover versions, but I didn’t ever think I’d be touring the world doing it.
And now you’re a “professional drummer”.
Yeah, supposedly. I’m far from professional. I see drummers on tour that are just brilliant, like Anna from Metronomy, and I’m like, ‘Oh, God.’ I guess when you’re doing DJing and production and a bit of everything, it’s hard to put in the hours to becoming a brilliant drummer as well, so I’ve accepted that I’m good enough to get by doing what we do and not worry about it too much.
What is your official job title in Django Django?
I’d say it’s really producer. I end up doing bits of everything. I’ve even ended up singing - there’s a track back on Off Planet that me and my brother wrote in lockdown called Gazelle. Vinny wasn’t around so John was playing piano and I was singing on it, which was quite weird.
That’s cool. Have you written music together before?
I don’t know, we’ve DJ’d together since the 90s but I don’t know if we’ve made that much music together. We used to muck about with four-tracks and sampling and stuff but I don’t think we’d ever sat down to make a track like this. We ended up making quite a few tracks, which I guess will start to come out. Gordon Anderson was even involved, the Lone Pigeon came down to do one so they’ll all kind of see the light of day eventually, but Gazelle fitted into the Off Planet thing. He got quite into early disco and wanted to make a slow disco kind of tune, so it definitely slotted into the idea.
That’s cool. How did all the other collaborations come about?
Rebecca [Lucy Taylor aka Self Esteem] was an easy first call because I’d made that backing track for her. I produced her first EP so that was easy. Then Jack Peñate, me and Jim know his cousin and we’d chatted at Jim’s wedding about how great Jack’s voice was and I was like, ‘it’d be great to have him on a UK garage-y type tune’ because he’s got that sort of blue-eyed soul voice that I thought would fit. Years later, his cousin emailed and was like, ‘Oh, remember that conversation, well here’s Jack’s email’, so it came at the right time and Jack just jumped right on it. Then Yuuko Sings, the Japanese girl, I was searching and searching for a Japanese rapper and came across her and I chatted to her about some references like Q-Tip and Missy Elliott and she just got it straightaway. She just nailed it. Toya Delazy, we’d work together with Damon Albarn at Africa Express, we did a track, so it was easy to reach out to her. Stealing Sheep we toured with so again that was a no brainer…
There’s so many!
There’s a few, yeah! Bernardo, the Portuguese singer, we’d worked with before. Everybody except for Yuuko was already a friend or someone we’ve done something with.
Is there anyone you really wanted to get and it didn’t come off?
There was big names that I knew would just be impossible. I had a track for Mike Skinner and that was never going to happen. I’m a massive fan of The Streets. There’s people there’s no point in reaching out to, like Q-Tip. I don’t know if there’s anyone we reached out to and they were like, ‘no’, except for Mike Skinner. But we had to curve our expectations by who’d actually want to do it, with us not being Gorillaz and not having any money.
Tell me a little about the cosmic themes of the record, why did you decide to go down that path?
That came about through my obsession with sci-fi and reading about Ufology, I’m quite into going down YouTube rabbit holes of UFO videos. I was always an Arthur C. Clarke fan and I’ve always been obsessed with The KLF album Space. Lots of early electronic music was underground resistance and before that, going back to the 50s and the start of electronic music, Radiophonic Workshop, electronic music and outer space just go hand in hand. Things just seem to come back to that somehow without even trying, so that was the loose thing. But there was all kinds of ideas in my head, I really wanted to make a few tracks that reference this sweet spot when post-punk became proto-techno, like Liquid Liquid and A Number Of Names and what became house music or weird disco records, tracks like Dumdrum and A New Way Through were trying to get into that zone.
Have you ever seen a UFO?
I think I have. I’ve seen stuff that I couldn’t explain but I would never go as far as to say it’s like aliens. The term “off planet” actually comes more from these researchers that I’m into that are delving into private space technology, these big private companies that have had contracts with the government in America to make black budget secret craft. Essentially, I think a lot of the things people see are just yet to be declassified military craft. These planes are declassified, and then people go, ‘Wow, that’s so futuristic’ and then it turns out the government’s been using them for 30 years and it’s actually old, that’s why they’ve declassified it. There’s a good writer called Richard Dolan who talks about this breakaway technology, so the public domain gets NASA and rockets and behind the scenes people are working on far more futuristic elaborate things. I’ve come to think the most UFOs people have seen since the 50s are just probably ours and they’re just planes that we don’t know about yet. When you go down the rabbit hole with these things, you come out the other end and you’re like, ‘I know less now than I did when I started’, so God knows.
Where do you see yourself and the band heading in the next decade?
Just carrying on making records. I think we always want to switch it up a bit. The first four albums, we were striving to make the perfect album in our heads. We’re less worried about that now. It’s nice to have concepts, we’re talking about what kind of concept we could have for the next record. There’s things I’d like to try production wise, but then there’s also things I’d like to try with other producers and maybe get producers in to take that off my shoulders and let me get more into songwriting and drumming even. It’s difficult when you’re manning the computer or the tape recorder and jamming or writing the songs. That’s something I’d like to do, go in with a producer and make a record that way. But we’ve got so many ideas and things we want to do. There’s plenty of things still to explore.
ND