James Righton

“Klaxons was a really great chapter in my earlier life, and now I'm older and happy doing other things.”

“It was kind of obvious to everyone around me that I wasn't going to stay in the town I grew up in - I knew I had a dream of becoming something else.”

“We have been fortunate enough to travel a lot and we focus heavily on melody and that really is an international language.”

“I will probably always be remembered as the person who used to be in Klaxons and there was a period of my life when I was trying to wrestle with that.”

“To play the ultimate Reading set, you need to freak yourself out for a few days beforehand.”

“I remember looking at my iTunes and was like, 'I haven't listened to an album in about three months.' What happened? I was once an 18-year-old kid who would just devour everything and want to know everything about every member of every band I liked. It became this thing where I hated the idea of music, and I didn't know if I wanted to make music.”

“There was always talk that the Horrors didn't have any substance but I think they're proving people wrong.”

“In the band's early days people didn't really know what we were, and they decided to shout at us before listening to the music.”

“Our intention when we first started as a band, was to be a rave band. We kind of just got it wrong. We tried, but we didn't have the talent or the knowledge to make a rave record.”

“With Klaxons I had an instrument, so I had a job to play keys. Everyone's roles get defined early in bands, so you're 'that guy who does this one thing' and it felt too restrictive doing that.”

“Even if you're the biggest band in the world, there's probably something else you want.”

“We are indeed a party band.”

“It was tough to end a band that you've been in for 10 years.”

“We like people who come to our gigs to dress sharp and to impress.”

“For me, my favourite music was things like The Bee Gees, ABBA and 'The White Album.' The 70s is the period that I love more than anything.”

“Within Klaxons, I never wrote the lyrics. I always wrote the melody and music with the other guys.”

“Keira doesn't play much music herself, but 'Breakfast in America' by Supertramp goes down pretty well in our house!”

“You have to set the bar higher and higher.”

“When I first came to London I thought there'd be this amazing music scene, but I was quite let down by how little was going on and how few ideas there were in music. Bands were writing songs that had no melody, and I wondered, why is that, melody is the most important thing in a song. It's the thing that sticks in your head.”

“Even things like Abba - I think it's always got a dark, subversive element to it. You've got these four blonde Swedish people singing about their relationships breaking up while they're all going out with each other.”