Fume at the top

There’s a lot of posturing in rock and roll,” sighs Airborne Toxic Event singer Mikel Jollett. “The average indie band is four 22-year-old guys in skinny jeans, usually middle-class but acting like they’re working class. They get on stage and do interviews about how they don’t care about anything and how they drink too much and do lots of drugs. It’s all posturing. I thought it was all fucking stupid and I wanted to write about things that were real. And our fans really responded to that. We tell stories. And there’s nothing subversive about singing or rapping about how cool your life is or how rarefied it is or how disinterested you are, because that’s also a pose. Sometimes indie rock looks like a contest to see who can be the most disinterested; a race to see who can walk the slowest or who can whisper the loudest. That’s a very middle-class thing, I think.”

Jollett’s own flirtations with cool ended the week when, as an up and coming journalist, he was diagnosed with auto-immune disorder, his mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and his girlfriend dumped him.
“It was a bad week,” he deadpans. “But sometimes people need something bad to happen to them so that they realise, ‘Oh God, my life is actually happening right now...’ and that allows the disinterested cool to slip away.”
In the fog of that worrisome week, Jollett picked up a guitar and wrote more than 40 songs. He shelved the dusty novel he was struggling with, gathered a quintet of musicians around him and very quickly, thanks to the beneficence of the internet, attracted a large and passionate fanbase.
Perhaps predictably for a frustrated novelist, lyrics are very important to Jollett.
“When bands start off playing in clubs nobody can hear the lyrics so the words sort of become whatever the singer wrote down before the show on a beer-mat,” he explains. “So for most indie bands lyrics are jumbled metaphors that sort of rhyme and sound cool one line at a time.... and that’s totally fine, some of my favourite bands do exactly that. But it’s just not the way that I write. I want the words to make sense as a whole.”
It was important for Jollett that those lyrics found as wide an audience as possible.
“When me and [drummer] Daren first began talking about doing this as a band we knew that we didn’t want to play music that involved staring at our own feet,” he says. “We wanted to sweat and jump and scream and be with the audience and for them to be with us, and to perform songs that meant something and which cut through the static a little bit. That was our goal, so by the end of our first bunch of shows we ended up with 10 friends singing with us on stage. It was very much a communal thing.”
Of course they never expected things to take off so quickly.
“We were immediately touring,” Jollett recalls. “It was all so fast. We were playing New York one month after our first show; we were touring two months after our first show; and we were in the UK six months after our first show. In fact, it all happened so fast that none of our kookier ideas got off the ground. So maybe for the next record we’ll have horn sections, choirs and junkyard drums!”