Something’s up under London Bridge station. The winter afternoon renders everything along the Thames a drizzly monochrome, but duck into the dark arches of Weston Street and soon you’re in a world of unseasonal vibrancy and colour. Whoops and giggles echo off the walls, and what you initially took for a few oddly dressed youths turns out to be the end of a 100-yard human chain. But not normal humans, these are under-18s. And not even normal teenagers, but giddy girls and boys decked out in the most garish, luminous party clothes they can piece together. An enterprising bloke with a trolley is busy selling hundreds of those glow-in-the-dark necklaces and bracelets normally seen on Bonfire Night or at music festivals.

If the scene leaves you bemused, then Noah and Jerome, two 16-year-olds in the queue, are happy to explain. It’s Klaxons, innit. They are putting on a matinee show for the throng of young fans they have amassed in the months since coining and then leading the “new rave” pop genre. The band’s penchant for the neon dancewear of the early Nineties has been appropriated and approximated by their fans. This explains why Noah and Jerome are wearing what seem to be reflective lollipop- lady jackets.

“We stole them from school. It looks stupid, but the stupider you look, the cooler you are,” says Noah.

“Once you’re at the gig, no one cares,” chimes Jerome. “It’s a proper rave.”

The queue starts to move, and soon everyone rushes into the cavernous confines of the SEOne club to the pre-recorded sound of swelling piano chords and rumbling bass grooves from their heroes. It’s like watching the children of Hamelin vanish into the mountain (but with added bouncers).

Today Klaxons are in skinny jeans and dark hoodies. In fact, they say, it’s been a few months since they have donned fluorescent rave gear of any kind. Seated away from the crowds in the middle of an adjoining dancefloor, they tell me they are still impressed with the ingenuity and audacity of their younger fans.

“One girl stole three pairs of chemistry goggles. She’s decorated them and wants us to wear them on stage,” chuckles James Righton, the impish keyboardist. “Some of these kids must have broken up for the holidays yesterday and just fleeced their schools for whatever they can wear.”

From beneath a thicket of frizzy black hair, Simon Taylor, the guitarist, quietly suggests that attracting such felonious fans is a significant achievement. “That whole DIY ethic in music never really filtered into the mainstream before. You’d maybe see it at universities, but for it to have now reached the playground is a big thing.” Well, he was much too young for punk.

What you can’t dispute is the rapid ascent of the band. Their first single, Gravity’s Rainbow, was released only in April and today you can tune in to daytime Radio 1 and hear the follow-up releases Atlantis to Interzone or Magick cued between the Kooks and Lily Allen. After a major label tug-of-love, their debut album Myths of the Near Future comes out this month on Polydor. It is produced by the indie-dance impresario du jour, James Ford.

Perhaps the trio’s biggest achievement so far, however, has been to create a media buzz by fusing two thoroughly unfashionable genres — rave music and sci-fi lyrics — to their punk-pop sound.

“We just didn’t want to sound like anything else that’s going on,” says Jamie Reynolds, the beanpole bassist and vocalist. “If you do that, you’re already going to be behind.”

Given that the prevailing indie schtick still remains the me-and-me-mates-down-the-pub variety of gritty realism, the southeast London trio instead developed gloriously daft covers of forgotten rave hits such as The Bouncer (originally by Kicks Like A Mule) or originals with such heroic names as 4 Horsemen of 2012, helping to make them a sort of anti-Arctic Monkeys. Even though the band’s first two singles were limited to 500 copies each, the NME feverishly declared that the group was ushering in a “new rave revolution”, the genre Reynolds unwittingly invented when asked to describe his band’s occasional lacing of guitar-pop with the blaring sirens and sonic euphoria of early Nineties dance music.

Still, it’s worth remembering that Klaxons are all aged between 23 and 26. Righton, for example, would have been only 6 during the 1989 Summer of Love. Might these former students be having a bit of a chuckle at the record buyers’ expense? “We’ve been called a ‘novelty band’,” sighs Taylor with resignation. “We’ve been described as being ‘laced with irony’ too.”

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