Nathan Followill would like a salad. “What sort of salad?” inquires the tour manager, a hulking Englishman who is fussing over his gaunt young charge with the air of a manic nanny.
“Um,” stutters the Kings of Leon drummer, as if this is the weirdest question he’s ever been asked. “I dunno...a green one, I guess.” He pauses and glances at the journalist, perched opposite and fiddling with his dictaphone, so as not to appear as superfluous as he feels. “You want some salad too?”
This is a strange way to begin an interview. But then, Kings of Leon are not like other bands.
For one thing, they are Southerners, born in Tennessee and raised on the road by their itinerant preacher father (three of the group, Nathan, Caleb and Jared, are brothers, the fourth, Matthew, a first cousin). Strange, you guess, is their kind of normal.
The story of the Followills’ hillbilly-gothic upbringing – a tale that is two parts von Trapp family, one part William Faulkner – is, by now, oft-trodden territory. Some have wondered if maybe it isn’t a little too lurid to be true.
“Being from the south seems to fascinate people,” says Nathan, whose narrow, tanned face and eerie, melted-almond eyes betray his Native American heritage. “It’s exotic to them – even to folks from other parts of America. It’s like we’re from the moon or something.”
Outsiders, he says, cling to romantically grim stereotypes of the south. They imagine Southerners sitting on ramshackle porches and twanging banjos, loaded shotguns cradled in their laps.
On first appearing, the Followills, who are in their early 20s, suggested a backwoods riff on That ‘70s Show. With their cowpoke beards and low-slung cords, they looked as though they’d just fetched up from Nixon-era Memphis (today, the facial shrubbery is gone and they show a fondness for drain-pipe denim).
Our fascination with Kings Of Leon’s origins unquestionably helped their career. It has been decades since a Deep South band penetrated popular conscience as deeply. In an era when every second group seems to hail from New York or provincial Britain, Kings Of Leon transmit a delicious glamour.
No less off-beam is their music, a discomforting, irresistible conjunction of fury and naivety. The Kings trade in blues-soaked heavy rock; by their second album, last year’s Aha Shake Heartbreak, they had raised the pitch to a frightening intensity. When the world ends, you can imagine Aha Shake Heartbreak hissing and hollering on the stereo.
A reek of brimstone lingers about the band, too. The Followills’ father, named Leon like their grandfather, was a Pentecostal preacher. Their formative years were spent in the back of a beat-up station wagon, trekking between evangelical congregations across Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.
Leon Followill was a man hewn of bible belt granite. Rock ‘n roll he considered to be heinous and corrupting. Forbidden the devil’s music, the Followills grew up on gospel.
“I guess my dad thought you could keep someone pure that way,” says Nathan, who, everytime he smiles, resembles a drowsy lizard. “In fact what actually happens is that, when they finally get their independence, they’re going to go crazy on sex and partying, ‘cos this stuff has always been presented to them as a taboo.”
Caleb, who sings, and is, if possible, skinnier and sharper of cheekbone than his older brother nods vigorously. The siblings discovered rock ‘n’roll one summer’s evening, he recalls, when a friend put on the Rolling Stone’s Exile On Main Street.
“We’d never heard anything like it before. We just stood there, thinking what the hell is this? Where did it come from?" he says.
All at once, 30 years of rock history exploded in their faces. Even now, Kings Of Leon are constantly discovering “new” old music.
Caleb tells how he became obsessed with Brian Wilson and the Pet Sounds album. Fed gospel and soul since boyhood, he had never suspected a record could sound so delicate and sweet: “I must have bought that LP six times in a year. I couldn’t go into a record store without picking it up.”
Leon Followill is a preacher no longer. He “divorced” his church several years ago, explain the brothers, before clamming up. They are reluctant to venture further, but say their father is not aghast at the route his sons have taken.
“Naw, he’s cool about it,” says Nathan, who, for the first time in the interview, appears to be choosing his words. “He thinks it’s great that we’re doing something we dig.”
Perhaps he feels they are keeping alive the family flame. Caleb says that, in the Jesus-fearing Sunbelt, their father’s sermons were the nearest thing to rock shows.
Each year, the Followills would embark on a ‘tour’ of congregations; at night dad would select his ‘set list’ of Gospel passages for the next evening. He knew how to work an audience too, whipping them into a pious frenzy with words and gestures.
“Oh, it was a kind of rock and roll,” says Nathan. “He was up there performing. We definitely picked that up from him.”
A quality presumably not inherited from old man Followill was their taste for post-gig debauchery. In the first flush of success, especially, the Kings of Leon flung themselves off the deep end with aplomb. They partied with Kate Moss and Paris Hilton; their after-shows were legendary.
Nathan and Caleb are mystified that their party-hard lifestyle should fascinate so. They were young, beautiful and, all their lives, had been denied these pleasures. Why not, for a little while at least, throw themselves into rock music’s crazed embrace?
Their libertine jinks nevertheless extracted a price. At the time of the band’s debut, Youth And Young Manhood, the youngest Followill, guitarist Jared, was 15 and in the throes of adolescence. He struggled to cope with sudden celebrity.
“Being in a band with your brothers has good and bad sides,” sighs Nathan. “The good side is that you know you can depend on the people around you. When you’re cooped up together all the time, though, it can bring problems. Around Youth And Young Manhood, Jared started coming to grips with adulthood. I’m not sure if we always gave him the space he needed.”
In the months since Aha Shake Heartbreak, Kings Of Leon have lived, more or less, on the road. Yet, already, they are plotting their next foray. Nathan promises a looser, more soulful vision, a step closer to a sort of promised land.
“We’ve got maybe eight songs written,” he says “I’m looking forward to getting in the studio in October and putting them down. They’ve got a real gospel influence – they have the intensity of church music. Can’t get away from Dad, I guess.”