SATURDAY’S SCOTTISH SONG : #74 : DJANGO DJANGO

Another band I hesitated about before including them in the series.

David Maclean (drummer and producer), Vincent Neff (singer and guitarist), Jimmy Dixon (bassist) and Tommy Grace (synthesizer operator) met at Edinburgh College of Art but didn’t get round to forming Django Django until they were all in London. However, David and Tommy are Scottish; Vincent is from Northern Ireland while Jimmy is a native of Yorkshire. David has a family connection to music in that his brother John McLean was part of The Beta Band.

But any doubts I had about eligibility have been smoothed by the fact that both Django Django long-playing records released thus far have been eligible for consideration for the Scottish Album of the Year Award.

Theirs is an infectiously upbeat and joyous sort of electronica that will have you up on your feet and moving around a fair bit if played at a club. They’re also a decent enough live act, albeit like many others whose music comes via machines and gadgets it’s sometimes not the most visual of spectacles – at least it wasn’t on the couple of occasions I saw them promoting the debut LP in fairly small venues…it’s probably a different story nowadays.

That self-titled debut LP back in 2012 was a very confident and assured piece of work that yielded no less than six singles, none of which actually made the mainstream charts. But the critical acclaim was wide and it was a similar story with the 2015 follow-up Born Under Saturn.

mp3 : Django Django – Default

From the debut LP….it might be familiar to some of you as parts of it were used in various adverts

JC