MGMT: 'Rock stars? Not us'

At the festivals this summer, there was a stand-out song that the crowds were singing. It was "Kids", the anthemic single from the Brooklyn duo MGMT.

At Glastonbury, the New Yorkers played two sets, and to hear the crowds singing the catchy riff in the tent long after the band had finished was an unexpected experience, not least for the duo themselves.

"That was really crazy," says keyboardist Ben Goldwasser. "That was the first time it happened. Then it happened at T in the Park and Oxygen. It's pretty crazy. We didn't even feel like we played a very good show that first day at Glastonbury. A lot of things were breaking, we were using different amplifiers, the guitar cut out for the song. All this stuff was going wrong, and we were really nervous. But we were really happy with the crowd."

MGMT was one of several bands from Brooklyn to burst on to the music scene last year. While their peers Yeasayer, Vampire Weekend, Dirty Projectors and Celebration favoured Afro-beat-inflected indie rock, MGMT dealt in what they call their "future Seventies" music, incorporating psychedelic-hued synth-pop indie rock matched with an equally colourful dress sense and their trademark headbands.

With Vampire Weekend, MGMT would become the most popular of the Brooklyn exports, being named by Rolling Stone last year as among the top 10 artists to watch in 2008. The BBC's Sound of 2008 poll placed them ninth, and early this year their hugely anticipated debut album Oracular Spectacular went in at No 12 in the UK pop chart and won rave reviews.

What's the secret to the catchy electro-pop hooks that drive their songs? "For me," says the guitarist and singer Andrew VanWyngarden, "it's, like, something pops into your head and you don't try to record it or anything, and if it pops into your head again a month later it's probably good. It takes a lot for the ideas to make it through the first round."

The pair, both now 25, met while studying at the Wesleyan University in Connecticut, a private liberal arts institution whose alumni include Santogold and The Dresden Dolls. They put their hippie look down to their university, where they were surrounded by hippies and their parents. "I don't think we call ourselves hippies but we've got hippie blood in us, hippie heritage," Goldwasser says.

Both their families are musical. VanWyngarden's father, who played guitar and drums in a small-town band, introduced him to the electric guitar; Goldwasser's parents are both pianists, and he was taught to play by his grandmother. "My parents played a lot of Bob Dylan and Neil Young, classic rock stuff, Bowie. It definitely shaped my music," he says. "I found their record collection in our attic in Memphis and went through it one summer and took a bunch of records to college. That was pretty amazing, having those old records. I found a lot of things I'd never heard of."

Goldwasser was never sure that he would play music for a living. "My grandfather was a music professor at university, and he used to say, 'If you really love music don't do it for your job.' But I don't regret it." There was no commitment or ambition in their college days; at the time, they were playing in a number of bands.

"We just started hanging out," Goldwasser says. "We didn't really have any ambition for the band at all. We got to the point where we were making songs and we really liked the pop songs we had written by the end of the year. When we graduated, we weren't thinking about taking the band anywhere. We take it more seriously now, but really it was us making music on a laptop computer. We'd record it sometimes, but we never played outside the campus. It was fun, almost like a joke.

"This band," he adds, "we don't know why we're doing it, it feels like everything we do in this band serves this weird purpose, but the purpose of it definitely is not success or becoming famous or anything like that."

Clearly satirising the rock-star aspiration in their first single "Time To Pretend" ("Let's make some music, make some money, find some models for wives") would point towards a reality they had never envisaged when they started out. "'Time To Pretend' was referring to this fantasy, this joke of us being sell-out rock stars. It's not like we ever set out to have that lifestyle – we didn't really want that, but it's definitely different now we're playing big festival shows and touring all the time. Some of it is true. It's pretty weird. I don't think the fame is really the ultimate part of the fantasy. We wanted to get to the point where we could do really ridiculous things. We want to have some really crazy stage production," says Goldwasser.

MGMT gained a reputation for wild shows early on, and the weird ideas they come up with for their dream stage production would seem to be an extension of that, only now they have more money to play with. Goldwasser is still disappointed that they could not have farm animals in their show: "We were thinking of riding a horse off the front of the stage."

From the laughter that accompanies these somewhat wild suggestions, you'd suspect they might be having a joke at the expense of anyone silly enough to believe them, but it's all genuine. At college, they were in a band called Beauty Enchantment and Horror, producing freaky droning music and having an interest in all things "spooky". "We love spooky places, and spooky castles," says Goldwasser.

This could be a conversation with a couple of wide-eyed schoolboys; they seem firmly planted in their youth, as the song titles "Kids" and "The Youth" show. "'Kids' was a result of us being 19 years old, in this fantasy college world, which is a little bit like childhood because you don't have much responsibility." Nothing has changed, it seems.

The extensive touring – they have travelled all over Europe and Japan, and after their London shows they go to Australia next month for the first time – is taking its toll. VanWyngarden, who has been known to fall asleep in interviews, does not conceal his sleepiness, yawning. "It's been crazy, but we're getting better at getting into the rhythm of it now," he says. "Early on it really hit us hard. I don't know, we were partying too much or something. Now we're learning how to deal with it. It's really fun to go all over the world. Australia is a place we've always wanted to go to. It's weird for us because the album's doing really well there and the shows have sold out, but we'd never been there so there's a lot of expectation."

After graduating, the music was on hold for a while. VanWyngarden moved to Brooklyn, while Goldwasser went to upstate New York with a friend to work on a farm with no electricity.

It wasn't until a year later, when they met up in Brooklyn, that things began to take off. While the other Brooklyn bands were snapped up by independent labels (Vampire Weekend to XL, Dirty Projectors to Domino), MGMT bucked the trend when they signed to the major label Columbia.

But, as ever, nothing was planned. Goldwasser rejoined his comrade for a couple of months to play music together for the first time in a year, and an email arrived out of the blue in late 2006. "It was pretty crazy, because it came after a period of us not talking for a long time," says VanWyngarden. "Ben came down to New York to stay for a month or two and we were working on some songs. We had an email from this A&R on Columbia records on this band email account that we didn't ever check. We thought it was fake, so we didn't respond. We were convinced that our band really sucked and there was no reason why anybody should sign us.

"Then they set up a meeting. At first we were closed to it, just because we were scared of record labels in general and didn't really know if we wanted to do that."

"I think it was a good choice. We're anti-indie," Goldwasser says, with a smile. "We don't have any indie cred, so we have nothing to lose."

VanWyngarden is single, while Goldwasser is in a relationship which, he says, reminds him of the unreal existence he leads in the band. "It's hard to call someone and tell them how your day was when you're, like, 'Oh, we flew in from Hungary and played this rock festival and went skinnydipping, did some interviews, played this show and got drunk. How was your day, honey? Oh, cool.' I don't know, it's weird.

"Sometimes we feel like we don't try to do things so things will get better for the band. We make pretty arbitrary decisions. A lot of times we try to destroy the band, but somehow it keeps coming back." With a Chemical Brothers collaboration in store and a new album in the pipeline that, they say, "will see them being more ambitious," it looks like MGMT may well be indestructible.

MGMT play the Forum, London NW5 on Thursday, and Shepherds Bush Empire, London W12 next Friday (www.whoismgmt.com). The single 'Kids' is out now on Columbia