Interview: Django Django (English version)

This is the trascription of the original conversation in English I had with Jimmy, the bass player from Django Django. The Italian translation is on the wonderful website Infinite Jest.

Your music usually gives good vibes to the listener, and I think they can be especially important in these times, when we’re more isolated and on our own than we use to be. I don’t think this element of your music was influenced by these times, because it was always there, but I wonder if you thought about it while making the album.

For me, music and anything creative is about building your own world, escaping the everydayness of life, and actually, not only the past year, but the past kind of four years felt like uncertain and unsettled, kind of chaotic times. So, for us it probably became even more important to escape and build a different world, we’re all engaged in politics and we can’t help being kind of influenced by climate change and the politics that spread around Europe, America and Great Britain the past kind of four years. These are things we all share and kind of cemented the idea of escaping literally from physically living on planet Earth. We created positivity and good vibes for our own sake and it was important to keep this positivity on the record, both in the songs and in the lyrics.

Another thing that I think it might be directly influenced by the times we’re living is that he two videos released for this album are quite colourful and dynamic, but there’s just one person in them, and I think it’s a good representation of the fact that we can have fun, but on our own and not all together in the same place.

The practicality of being in lockdown meant that we couldn’t get together as a band, also for the videos. So, the kind of situation dictated who was in the videos and how we made them. I think it’s a very real consequence of what’s happening. Also speaking of the music, we had to record tracks separately, on our own, so the making of the album, that is usually a very collaborative process between the four of us, suddenly became much more individual, about individuals doing separate things. So, all of this happened because of certain circumstances, but, as you say, it really points out that a lot of people have to stay on their own and build something by themselves.

On the previous album, you had the vocal featuring by Rebecca from Slow Club, and now you have Charlotte Gainsbourg on this one. Did you write the song specifically thinking of a female voice on it, or did you realize later that it was needed?

No, we didn’t at the beginning, but we realized it was needed because of the way the song unfolded. Me and Vinny had recorded the vocals, and it just seemed that it needed to be a male and a female vocals, exactly the way it happened with the song you mentioned on the previous album, we had recorded vocals but it just didn’t seem to be working with those vocals. So, again it was just like that we needed a female vocals, and we’re massive fans of Charlotte, she’s on our label, so we didn’t see any harm in asking, and luckily she came back and liked the track, and it definitely benefits from her being on it. It’s a song about hitting the road and escaping, disappearing on a kind of a road trip, and I think her vocals is really dynamic and give a cool edge to the track. We’re really happy she was up for it, so, in the end, we didn’t write it thinking of female vocals, but it’s just the way it unfolded.

You have now for albums, and I think that, if I would have been asked for a blind listening on this one, I would have probably guessed it was Django Django, but, at the same time, none of these songs really fit in any of the previous albums, so, any time you do something new, it has its own identity. Is it something you think of?

It’s nice that you say that, because honestly, at least on this record we tried to move on from previous records, since we started the whole process, we wanted to challenge ourselves, starting from our songwriting technique, I think the way we worked on it in the last two albums kind of made us disappear into a rabbit hole because we were being too focused on tiny details. So, when we could still be together, we did something we never did before, which was writing a track every day and leave it like this for a while, without touching it, and a lot of those tracks made it on the record. I think it gives a much more playful dynamic to the album, it’s a little rougher but I’m really pleased that we didn’t worry too much about the cleanliness of the production, and it’s nice to hear that these new songs don’t fit on other records because it means that the way we tried to change our songwriting technique moved us on a little bit. Certainly we wanted to try to bring a little more of the live sound into the record, as I said, we had to record tracks individually, but we wanted to play as a four as much as we could, and we can’t wait to physically do it all together. It’s definitely a conscious thing that we wanted to move on from the last few albums.

Actually, my next question was about the fact that this album has a more live sound, but you already answered… So, now I’m asking about “The Ark”, because I think you never had this kind of song in your previous albums.

The song was pretty much put together by Dave, when he was younger, he spent a lot of time making music with samples, and worked a lot on songwriting too, more than he did with our band. On this album, he was much more involved in the songwriting too, and it made a difference. “The Ark” is definitely an example of that: in some ways, it goes back to our first record, when we were cutting up samples, but having Dave’s hand on the songwriting too is also one of the reasons we think we’re moving forward.

At least a couple of tracks from this album have a bigger acoustic element than in the past, and I know from a previous interview that I had with Tommy that when you worked on your previous album, you had this element too in some songs, but in the end they were left out of the album. Did you absolutely want to have more acoustic sounds this time?

I think we made a conscious decision to include more acoustic tracks, it certainly feels that this record has more peaks and drops, dips and things like that, and the fact that we brought in more acoustic sounding tracks is certainly a reason for that. I write a lot of songs on the acoustic guitar, and they sound like 60s – 70s folk music, and actually there are four or five songs not only for the previous record, but for the last two, that didn’t make it on to the album. So, this time we were certainly more open to allow these kind of dips in the album, we have the knowledge that it doesn’t have to be one million miles an hour throughout the whole album, so this time there are songs like “The World Will Turn” or “Asking For More”, that have a function in the album, and it’s maybe something that we haven’t had the confidence to do before, but I think it works, it gives the album a nice dynamic.

At the moment we still don’t know when it will be possible to play live again, but hopefully, sooner or later it will be, so did you already start working on a new live?

We initially had some kind of socially distanced shows and live record store pencilled for the album release, so we were in a studio after Christmas rehearsing songs for the live set. Then those gigs got cancelled, and now it’s about when we can go back together to rehearse a live set. Personally, I’m desperate to do it, and now it feels weird that the album is out and we don’t know when we’ll be able to tour it. I’m desperate to get a live set working again, and be able to physically go out and play for the people. As soon as we’re all able to be back in London and rehearse, we’ll do it.