It's rave but not as we know it. Klaxons are walking the walk, wearing the day-glo and pumping out the sounds, but the only thing they're dropping is the odd literary reference. Keyboard player James Righton talks to Kevin Courtney

IF YOU see a horde of luvved-up teenagers coming over the hill tomorrow night wielding glo-sticks, blowing whistles and sporting scary-looking wizards' capes, don't panic. You haven't been tossed into a strange timewarp of Lord of the Rings and early 1990s rave. They mean you no harm, honestly. They're probably on their way to the Ambassador to see their new favourite band, a frenetic London trio which have captured the hearts and minds of young pop fans with a sound they only half-jokingly describe as "nu-rave".

Klaxons may be named after the Greek word for "to shriek", but these London-based boys share a liking for good, melodic pop made with guitars and drums, although they're not averse to the odd ambulance siren cutting through the mix every now and then.

Formed just 14 months ago, Klaxons have clicked with a fanbase that's fed up with nodding knowingly at gigs and just wanna party like it's 1989. But instead of going to a disco and asking the DJ to play old Prodigy and 808 State 12-inches, they're going down the front at Klaxons gigs and having it larger than life itself. While rock's tastemakers look on with bemusement from a safe distance, the pop kids are voting with their trainers and turning Klaxons gigs into mad celebrations, dressing up in brightly coloured clothes. They're accessorised with all the accoutrements of rave culture, which they've no doubt raided from their parents' attics, hidden there for fear mum and dad will be outed as former e-heads.

Drugs, though, do not seem to be part of the Klaxons equation. It's all about being in the right headspace, and being able to have a good time without the need for endlessly thumping trance beats. Klaxons use guitar, bass, keyboards and drums to make their party sound, and they like to drop numerous references to cult literature into their lyrics, just to keep the fans on their toes. What they don't do is promote mindless, identikit conformity. This is a party where individuality is actively encouraged - although, as keyboard player James Righton notes, Klaxons fans usually don't need much encouragement at all to go mental.

"Yeah, that's one of the most encouraging things, actually," Righton says. "Some journalists have said to us: Is it a bit weird, all this attention you're suddenly getting? And, you know, it's not really, because we've been working on this for the best part of 14 months, since the inception of the band. We started in November 2005 and we put some of our tracks up on MySpace, and the growth was quite organic, quite natural.

"Suddenly people started liking our songs and they started telling their friends who told their friends. And the press got involved, and it was just quite a natural process. We wrote more songs, we went into the studio and recorded an album, and now it's coming out."

Myths of the Near Future sounds like the title of a prog-rock concept album - even its cover reminds you of Todd Rundgren in his Wizard/True Star phase - but its 11 songs shoot by in just over half an hour. Before you can say Tales from Topographic Oceans it's finished, and you're feverishly putting the needle back to the beginning.

Success has come fast and furious for Klaxons, too, but Righton is hoping it doesn't go away as swiftly. "If I look back on it, this last 14 months have gone so quickly, it's quite strange. I'll probably look back on it in 20 years and go, how the fuck did we do that? But we did it."

The seeds of Klaxons were sown at youth discos in Righton's home town of Stratford-Upon-Avon, where he and his mate, future Klaxons guitarist Simon Taylor, used to dance to happy hardcore sounds and listen to such spiky post-punk bands as Josef K and The Fire Engines.

"I didn't know Jamie Reynolds at this point, but myself and Simon used to work in a shoe shop which was next to a cheese shop, and people used to come in and tell us that our shoes smelt, and we'd say, no, it's the shop next door. But no one would ever believe us."

At the time, bassist Jamie was living in Bournemouth and working in a record shop, where he would regularly berate customers for liking the wrong music. He also avidly read cult novels by William Burroughs, William Gibson, JG Ballard and Thomas Pynchon, and dabbled in the writings of occultist Aleister Crowley. These works eventually filtered their way into such Klaxons songs as Atlantis to Interzone, Gravity's Rainbow and Magick, along with echoes of the dance and rave music that soundtracked the boys' first forays into the party zone.

"I'd say dance is as relevant to us as, say, pop," Righton says. "It's as relevant as electronica, as relevant as ambient or experimental music. I wouldn't say it's something we spend more time on than any other genre. We play instruments, but when you're growing up you also like to go out and party a lot, and the music that we would hear going out would be techno and electronica."

All three lament the kind of closed set of influences that many bands share, the usual line-up of classic bands such as The Beatles, Who, Kinks etc. True music fans, reckons Righton, should have their ears open and tuned to every style of music.

"It's quite weird, really, cos when you meet other bands, most of them, they don't seem like music fans. And first and foremost we are music fans. We wouldn't be doing it if we weren't. We like music, we pretty much collect it, but I'm not geeky about it, although I'm usually in the record shop nearly every day."

Righton admits to being a vinyl junkie, but finds record collecting impractical on tour, due to the difficulty of toting albums around the place. He's a big advocate of iTunes, and says he's "wetting" himself for the arrival of the iPhone. Chances are, however, he won't be downloading many tunes from the current crop of Kooks-y guitar-strumming bands busking their way around the gig circuit, or the council estate bards blabbering on about the joys of the local chippy.

"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. And why are these bands singing about, y'know, boys and girls and going off down the chip shop, and going down the pub. Realist pop music.

"And it's not that it's bad. There's a time and a place for a bit of realism, and it's bands like Arctic Monkeys that do it amazingly well. But why do bands have to recycle something that's already been done very well? We wanted to make interesting pop music, and to drop in literary references. The way we write is a real kind of cut-and-paste kind of technique, like William Burroughs, and we just like the idea of getting these literary references into pop music. we just think, why not?

"I think at our heart we are quite subversive and quite dark, but it was great a few months ago to hear a song like Magick on the radio, or hear people coming to our gigs and singing Atlantis to Interzone, y'know, and we're fortunate enough to have kids coming to our shows who are into it, and the people are at that age group when bands mean so much, when a band can be everything to you. Like me, growing up, I was a massive Radiohead fan, and everything they did I was deeply interested in. Like who did their artwork, who did their videos, what's this song about? 'Cos their songs have lots of references too. They had ideas."

Radiohead didn't, however, have smiling fans down the front waving glo-sticks and going completely nuts to Everything in it's Right Place. But there's no reason, argues James, why pop music can't be stupidly fun and cleverly intellectual at the same time. He intends to ask none other than Professor of Pop Brian Eno to remix a Klaxons song. This from a band who played their first gig within a week of forming, had hardly learnt their instruments, and had only three songs in their set.

The band's lack of instrumental prowess hasn't put off their ever-growing legion of fans - in fact, it's ensured that Klaxons will never morph into a three-headed prog-rock monster like that other cape-wearing trio, ELP. But at least they've learned to play their instruments, worked out how to be "professional but keep the party going", and mastered the art the art of writing energetic, electronically charged pop tunes such as Golden Skans, As Above, So Below and Four Horsemen of 2012.

"We're not a laptop band," Righton declares. "All of the stuff we do is live. We haven't got a load of samples or some computer at the back which plays everything, or some special keyboard that makes jazzy sounds and makes your band successful.

"For me, there's nothing better than a live band. We're not musicians by any means, but it's not about being musicians. It's about honesty."

Myths of the Near Future is out on Rinse/Polydor. Klaxons play the NME Tour at the Ambassador, Dublin tomorrow night with CSS, Sunshine Underground and New Young Pony Club