These guys are real nowhere men

Reality bites.

That’s the way the Klaxons see it anyway, and the rising English band has built its music and its considerable mystique on avoiding anything to do with the material or the mundane.

“We just wanted to sing about fantasy and nowhere,” said Jamie Reynolds, the Klaxons’ hulking bassist and chief theoretician. “The only thing that ties everything together on our record is that every single song is about nowhere and there’s no physical representation of anything. It’s all imaginary, it’s all fantasy and it’s all conjecture. . . . That was the goal -- not to have something that you could see or hear or touch or smell.

“When we started, the British pop charts were filled with American R&B; and British bands singing about the reality of living in the U.K.,” Reynolds said. “And for us that held no interest whatsoever, because we don’t feel like we want to represent our country, and we don’t find music that talks about an experience that you can have walking down the street in an everyday situation very exciting. . . .

“We just wanted to challenge the everyday dull, boring pop music that was out there at the time, and it worked.”

It sure worked in England, where the Klaxons (from the Greek word meaning “to shriek”) have become a big seller and major media presence in the nine months since their debut album, “Myths of the Near Future,” came out.

They’d actually made some noise even before signing with Polydor Records (in the U.S. they’re on Geffen, which released the album here in March), generating attention with the independent singles they released not long after forming in late 2005. Guitarist Simon Taylor was studying art at Nottingham Trent University when he met Reynolds, and when they brought in singer-keyboardist James Righton, a friend of Taylor’s, the chemistry clicked and the Klaxons were quickly in gear.

They hit a high last month when the collection was awarded the Nationwide Mercury Prize. The prestigious award, designed to recognize the best British album of the previous year, was widely expected to go to something much more real -- most likely Amy Winehouse, for her intensely personal R&B;, or maybe a second time to last year’s winner the Arctic Monkeys, for their documentary-like songs about living the U.K.

So score one for fantasy. And despite all their irreverent rhetoric, the Klaxons said they were genuinely touched by the acknowledgment.

“We definitely set out to be a well-liked band,” said Reynolds, 27. “I’ve always been surrounded by people who have the hopes and dreams of being a successful band, and they play in bands for years and end up playing the same old circuits.

“You watch people’s dreams come and go and you watch people’s hearts come and go, and that wasn’t the situation we wanted to find ourselves in, spending our time running around hoping that everything was going to work out. We wanted it immediately.”

Disappearing act

Reynolds was phoning in his thoughts from the Denver airport recently, a few days after he dropped out of a Los Angeles interview with the band during its recent U.S. tour. The Klaxons, like many other Brit sensations before them, are facing the uphill challenge of translating adoration at home to enthusiasm in the States. “Myths of the Near Future” has won over 30,000 converts in the U.S., according to the Nielsen SoundScan sales monitoring service, leaving the group with room for commercial growth.

As the four musicians walked through the backstage catacombs at the Music Box @ Fonda on the afternoon of their concert there, Reynolds suddenly made a sharp left into a dark dressing room and collapsed on a couch.

Taylor and Righton joked awkwardly about their slumbering leader as they and drummer Steffan Halperin continued on toward the Hollywood theater’s second-floor patio.

They quipped about psychotic episodes, but Reynolds’ indisposition could be attributed to some heavy partying and jamming the night before. And you have to factor in the effects of the broken leg he suffered in July when he leaped off the stage during a performance in France.

You might not guess it from the sleek sound and catchy melodies of “Myths of the Near Future,” but the Klaxons’ live show is one of the most fearsomely aggressive in rock, with a genuine air of danger and unpredictability.

“It seems you’re kind of instigating this circus and it almost gets to a fever point where you wouldn’t even need to be there to carry on the feeling,” said the short-haired, athletic-looking Righton, 24. “At Leeds, I kind of felt like we were almost trying to catch up with something that wasn’t our doing. . . . It was just ridiculous.”

“We wanted the record to be a kind of shiny, golden document of the songs,” added Taylor, 25, sitting on the patio with his two bandmates in the early autumn twilight. “On the other hand, you have the live show, which is about an energy and momentum and about a performance. . . .

“That’s where we got turned off by a lot of bands recently, especially some on the festival circuit, bands that just seemed to be kind of going though the motions,” Taylor said. “So many bands now have backing tracks and they play to a click track, and they trigger samples off their album. There just seems to be no element of performance or excitement. . . .

“Our shows might be awful or we might play really badly. But at times at least there’s a kind of magic that people like.”

Way out there

In rejecting realism and introspection, the Klaxons have turned to resources that British musicians have long mined for inspiration: the occult, mythology and the kind of dark futurism written by such visionaries as J.G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs.

In the cryptic but evocative lyrics co-written by Reynolds and Taylor, scenarios are set in outer space and Homeric antiquity. “Atlantis to Interzone” reaches from the lost continent to the Burroughs-coined psychic dimension. “Gravity’s Rainbow” references the Thomas Pynchon novel, and “Four Horsemen of 2012” foresees the Apocalypse coming in five years.

But to say there’s “nothing real” in the Klaxons’ music is misleading. Its fantasies capture a spirit of the times that’s real indeed. There’s a pervasive urgency in the fevered, frenetic music, and in such portentous chants as “Light the bridges with the lantern, you know something’s going to happen.”

But the Klaxons and producer James Ford contain the chaos in a sleek musical package, with tight, distinctive vocal harmonies, gleaming textures and supremely catchy melodies.

“We just thought the idea of trying to make a fantastical pop band was the biggest challenge of all,” said Taylor. “That was more of a challenge than making some kind of noise band that two people would watch in a basement. It was the idea of being pop and inserting something that was a little bit weird. I think there’s definitely an element of adolescent playfulness about it.”

These incongruous elements have made the Klaxons hard to pin down to a particular point on the spectrum, but that pop side has taken the band to a wider audience that’s less attuned to its literary references and coded signals.

“We very, very rarely have any form of communication from fans saying, ‘I’ve been thinking about what it is that you’re saying . . .,’ ” said Reynolds. “I think that a lot of it goes over a majority of people’s heads, and I think that’s a fine situation, because that’s the subversion, that’s the excitement. . . .”

And as for the interplay of fantasy and reality, well, that’s a shifting line as well.

“We finished the record and all this nonsense seems to make sense, and the more you sing about it the more you kind of believe in it,” said Taylor. “I think that’s one thing that’s probably scared us a little bit. You’re singing these things every night, and suddenly you convince yourself that they’re real.”

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richard.cromelin@latimes.com