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Creatures of habit: In the studio with Django Django

As Django Django get ready to follow-up their critically-acclaimed album, Dave Maclean admits that they aren’t the biggest fans of change.

11th March 2015

With their debut, Django Django changed the name of the game. Intricate beats laden over experimental synth patterns was all the rage and their melding together of just about every genre soon reaped the benefits. Now, following on from their Mercury Prize nomination and endless live shows, the band are gearing up for it’s follow-up. Unsurprisingly, they’re pretty darn relaxed about the whole thing.

“We didn’t really worry about what it was gonna be, or what it was gonna sound like,” drummer and producer Dave Maclean offers up. The four-piece aren’t really the type to formulate master plans, or map out details. Truthfully, they just like messing around with instruments. “We didn’t have any grand plans. We just go in, muck around, a groove comes out and we kinda follow that. We didn’t change our approach really at all; we just let the ideas take us where they wanted to go. I guess an element of us is that things end up coming out as a bit of a mishmash, almost like a bit of a mixtape, but that’s just us having fun with instruments. We never really worry about what kind of band we are, or how we fit in with other bands. We just try to have fun with it because that’s the bottom line.”

Having such a simple approach to being in a band has seemingly fed into their second album’s creation. Granted, they weren’t in that bedroom anymore, but they still occasionally found themselves falling into old habits.

“We just have a certain way of working,” Maclean admits, candidly, suggesting that even their time on the road hasn’t led them to any miraculous changes in their writing set-up. “You know, with the first record, it was made in a bedroom and we had never played live. We did learn and we tried to keep that in mind, but it’s another thing that comes back to not forcing things much. In the studio, we had this big live room but we ended up in a tiny room next to it, almost recreating that bedroom space. We’re creatures of habit, really. Things get passed along a lot in our band: there’ll be a drum loop, and I’ll pass it on and it’ll change. It’s a little bit Chinese whispers but it’s evolving so we’re happy.

“We’re not ever a band that’d go, ‘Let’s make a live record’, but having a drum kit mic-ed up for the first time, we were able to lay down drums and a lot of that made things so much quicker. Trying to create a drum kit on the first album was crazy because we had one floor tom, so we had to tune it up and down for every snare, bass and tom sound in that one tiny bedroom.”

Needless to say, the last thing that the quartet wanted to do was write the same album twice, so there will be a couple of changes when it comes to album number two. “It feels a bit dancier,” he explains, “and there’s a lot of guitars and a lot of synths. The first couple of singles that we’re putting out are a bit more stripped-back and synth-y, but the album’s not really like that. It kinda goes through heavy guitars and percussion and I think it’s almost like taking what we tried to do with the first album and produce it. It’s like version two, in a way, with us trying to progress with the songwriting. That was a key thing. This was a big learning curve in terms of songwriting and production so for me, this feels like a step up.”

Taken from the March 2015 issue of DIY. Django Django release ‘Born Under Saturn’ on 4th May. Pre-order here. They play Field Day London (6th June 2015).

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