James Righton, an English singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, first drew attention in the late 2000s through his roles as keyboardist and vocalist in the London "new-rave" group Klaxons. His visibility grew further during the 2010s after his marriage to the popular English actress Keira Knightley. Following the 2015 breakup of Klaxons, which had issued three trendsetting LPs, he launched the stylistically related yet more polished Shock Machine, whose self-titled debut appeared in 2017. Three years afterward, Righton issued his first solo album, the '70s pop-inspired Performer.
Born in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Righton co-founded Klaxons in 2005 with Jamie Reynolds and Simon Taylor-Davis. The trio initially performed as Klaxons (Not Centaurs), a name drawn from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's futurism text The Futurist Manifesto, before shortening it to Klaxons in 2007—the same year they released their debut single, "Gravity's Rainbow." By channeling the energy of late-'80s rave music through conventional rock & roll instruments, the band earned widespread praise for its first full-length effort, Myths of the Near Future, which also received that year's Mercury Prize. Their 2010 follow-up, Surfing the Void, incorporated metallic psych and dubstep elements that marked a modest departure from the preceding record, yet it still reached charts across several countries. For their third and final album, the 2014 dancefloor-ready Love Frequency, the group worked with producers James Murphy, Gorgon City, Chemical Brothers' Tom Rowland, and Erol Alkan. Klaxons concluded their run the next year with a farewell tour.
Righton initiated the hazy electronic pop endeavor Shock Machine in 2016, releasing its self-titled debut the following year. In 2020 he unveiled his solo debut, The Performer, which drew inspiration from the smooth mid- to late-'70s work of Bryan Ferry, the Beach Boys, Nick Lowe, and Lee Hazlewood.
