Django Django
Django Django began with, and remain driven by, the core of Dundee-born Dave and Vincent Neff from Derry, Northern Ireland, who met at Edinburgh school of art. Dave was, and is, an obsessive music collector who’d started DJing spacey jungle / drum’n’bass until an older DJ in Dundee told him in no uncertain terms not to get locked into one groove – by the time he and Vinny met he was playing, and producing all kinds of electronic and experimental grooves from dancehall to krautrock and library music, but with a solid heart of raw American house and techno. Vinny meanwhile had grown up on rave and indie from his older sisters and was finding his own voice as a singer-songwriter.
They became partners in musical enquiry on the uniquely passionate club and gig scene of Edinburgh and Glasgow, and on moving to London post college began making tracks together. Initially the dynamic was Vinny’s songs and Dave’s arrangements – but it quickly blurred with both writing and structuring songs. Vinny’s natural facility with writing harmonies became a key part of the sound, and with the addition of keyboardist Tommy Grace (who’d been Dave’s flatmate in Edinburgh) and bassist Jimmy Dixon, they became the fully-fledged band that has carried on to today.
In the warehouse party-oriented of scene 00s Dalston they were surrounded by postpunk revivalists and “guys with wacky haircuts playing wonky keyboard lines and shouting” as Vinny puts it. But somehow through trial and (a lot of) error they honed their unique cosmic fusions of three part harmonies with garage rock, spaghetti western atmospheres, classic psychedelia and various flavours of electronica, and bit by bit accumulated a diverse but passionate fanbase. By the time their self titled 2012 debut came out, they were bigger than they imagined: a Mercury prize nomination and sell-out tours ensued, and the ride really began.
With each step since, there’ve been big shifts. The home-made Django Django was far from being the “underground album that would sell a few hundred copies” that the band expected it to be. The groundbreaking debut album catapulted them to an unforeseen levels of success, culminating in a Mercury Prize nomination, mentions in end-of-year polls from both NME and Rolling Stone, and features in video games including FIFA 13 and Grand Theft Auto V.
It was followed by the exploration of big studio possibilities in 2015’s Born Under Saturn, then the more back to basics “being a band” approach of Marble Skies in 2018, and 2021’s Glowing in the Dark – conceived with the band now geographically dispersed – was an album about escape, lightness and flight, with stark dance beats and gorgeous bleeps providing a beacon of hope in the COVID-19 era. But every one of them sounds like a Django Django record above all else. There’s a golden thread running through them, or more prosaically as Jimmy says “we can’t escape being us, how we play, how our voices sound together!”
Off Planet in 2023 was originally conceptualised by Django Django co founder and powerhouse Dave Maclean, buzzing on ufology as “a way to go beyond”, to bring new voices, new rhythms, new experimentation into play. Released in four separate parts, the plan was to treat each as a separate “planet” and effectively to deconstruct the band’s identity. It was an anarchistic approach that could have ended in chaos. And, well, it has certainly pushed the envelope in all directions: it’s the biggest, boldest, and most varied statement they have made, with a cavalcade of extra voices – Self Esteem, Jack Peñate, Stealing Sheep, Toya Delazy and many more, all of them either friends of the band or personally sought out by Dave – bringing entirely new creative angles into play. From bluesy pop and Middle Eastern cabaret goth to Afro acid and piano rave, to call it kaleidoscopic is putting it mildly.
