It’s never really all that hip to be square, but it’s frequently very profitable. The best selling album of the ‘60s was neither Sergeant Peppers nor Revolver, but the soundtrack for The Sound Of Music. For all the bright young things to emerge from British shores during the past ten years, only dinner party favourites Dido and James Blunt have made real waves Stateside. And while critics may wail and gnash their teeth, right now Jack Johnson outsells just about anyone you can think of.
Certainly, most would admit that Keane, musically speaking, sound like Mahler’s Rites Of Spring beside Mr. Johnson’s easy strumming. They have, after all, taken home Ivor Novello and Brit awards and were nominated for the fantastically self-regarding Mercury prize. Equally, nobody sane would dispute that the Hastings trio, comprising Tim Rice-Oxley on keyboards, Richard Hughes on drums and vocalist Tom Chaplin, are rather more hip and happening than the insufferably twee Mr. Blunt. And yet, the band seem to inspire any number of elitist diatribes.
Nothing so popular, so accessible, goes the logic, can be truly worthwhile. And heaven help them, more rubbish has been written about Keane than any reasonably well-behaved outfit deserves. Even complimentary reviews – ‘Kid A Radiohead doing A-ha’ or ‘Coldplay sans guitar’ – tend to stress derivation.
More cynical pop commentators have gone so far as to suggest that Keane are an entirely manufactured entity. When it emerged that six months before the release of their debut album, Hopes And Fears, the band had consulted Moving Brands, a London based image consultancy, the music press got very snooty indeed. Moving Brands, went the story, helped them choose their logos, their artwork, even the tranquil shade of green used on the record sleeve.
Well, So Fucking What? It’s difficult to imagine an entire constellation of artists, ranging from David Bowie to Alison Goldfrapp, commanding audiences to quite the same degree without being mindful of their wardrobe. Besides, if Keane are projecting some consultant’s idea of cool, they’re covering their tracks extremely well. Such is their deceptive aura of ordinariness, it’s a bit like reading that Phillip Larkin had a colour co-ordinator.
“Yeah, we want to look presentable,” admits singer Tom Chaplin. “But it’s a difficult one. Too much has been made of it. Your music is the thing people will remember. That’s what’s important to us. If you look at bands like U2 or The Smiths in the 80s, when everyone was busy making cheesy synth pop, they were the two remaining memorable guitar bands. Just being yourself is the most important thing. Maybe getting involved in fashion or a movement can help you in the short term, but ultimately what people remember is great music. Of course, it’s important to dress up and have fun and we are conscious of wanting to look good. But once that overtakes the music you are losing sight of what you are doing. That would never happen with us, I think. So hopefully we won’t be remembered for stupid haircuts and tight trousers.”
Cheery, articulate and every bit as Well Brought Up as one might suppose, it’s difficult to imagine Tom Chaplin getting into a slagging match with Pete Doherty. But everybody seems to have it in for Keane. In addition to various rock journalists’ best-constructed barbs, the band have taken flak from would-be colleagues. Their characteristically mild-response, ‘The Frog Prince’, can be found on the new album Under The Iron Sea – “You’ve wandered so far/ From the person you are/ Let go brother, let go/ ‘Cos now we all know.”
Trust nice old Keane to send Clark Kent in, when anyone else would gear up for an arse-whopping in song. And yes, Tom is far too much the gentleman to name names – though tabloids would certainly point fingers toward The ex-Libertines’ camp.
“I suppose it would be hypocritical to name the person, as the song has a lovely fairy tale setting for it,” he tells me. “Tim and I we were talking on a tour bus a year or so ago about one particular person who was a part of an up and coming band. He had been taking pot shots at all sorts of other bands.”
Tom pulls himself up suddenly for a What Would Dr. Phil Do moment.
“I guess that kind of emperor’s new clothes syndrome can happen to anyone. Where that kind of success makes you think you are better than other people. You can suddenly start pontificating and slagging people off. But as musicians we found that was an unpleasant thing. Basically, for us, all of the bands we come into contact with seem to be people with the same idea. They are big overgrown kids who had a dream to make music. They wanted to be The Beatles or whatever. To start undermining that because you became successful is dangerous territory. Don’t believe your own bullshit.
“Fashions come and go quickly. We’re not getting into a mud-slinging contest here. We’re reaching out to that person and saying – don’t get too big for your boots mate or there will be no one left to look after you on the way down. Hopefully it is a good-spirited song.”
Sadly, for all Tom’s goodwill, Keane-bashing has become something of a national sport. They are, after all, ridiculously easy targets. Born a stones throw from the castle where King Harold fell, their main songwriter, Tim Rice-Oxley, sports a posh double-barrelled surname and the band are called after Tom’s childhood housekeeper, Cherry Keane, thus providing an eternal source of ‘amusing’ quips (‘Perhaps the groomsman’s moniker wasn’t memorable enough’, etc).
The truth about Keane, however, doesn’t sound nearly so privileged or comfortable. While they are often cast as calculating Coldplay clones, ironically Coldplay was a name rejected by Tim and passed to a college friend, one Chris Martin. The ‘no guitars’ policy, an accidental riposte to Queen’s A Night At The Opera, was born out of circumstance, not a flair for gimmickry. And even the most disparaging Keane myth – the one about the white bread, middle class boys who never had to work for it – ignores seven hard years spent in the wilderness.
The band were formed in 1995 by Mr. Rice-Oxley and Dublin born guitarist, Dominic Scott, with Tom, Rice-Oxley’s childhood chum, signing up two years later. They worked the less than glittering pub circuit, playing U2 and Beatles covers, until the release of ‘Call Me What You Like’, their first single in 2000. Their second outing ‘Wolf At The Door’ followed a year later to little benefit. Scott, frustrated by the extremely limited success, left the band in 2001, leaving all song-writing duties to Rice-Oxley and a void where the guitar player should be. The song ‘Everybody’s Changing’ was written to mark his departure.
Their luck changed when Simon Williams of indie label Fierce Panda showed up at a gig in December 2002. He immediately snapped them up for two singles, ‘Everybody’s Changing’ and ‘This Is The Last Time’. ‘Everybody’s Changing’ hardly stormed the charts, peaking at number 122 in the UK, but it was enough to get the band signed to Island Records. Their melodic, dreamy debut album, Hopes And Fears was released in May 2004. It became the second biggest seller that year (losing out on the last day to Scissor Sisters by 507 units) – and has since shifted some five and a half million copies.
“If people only knew,” laughs Tom. “I guess most people just see us as Hopes And Fears. But we have been through all sorts of weird and wonderful guises as a band. At the very start we were a mixture of keyboards and guitars and the three of us singing all our own songs. Then we became a more bog standard acoustic indie guitar band, that kind of Radiohead circa ‘97 thing. Then our guitarist Dominic left and we became more electronic. We listened to loads of Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode and Aphex Twin.
“Some of the songs on Hopes And Fears started out as electronica. You wouldn’t recognise them stylistically. We just sort of stumbled upon the sound of the piano. So we have always been changing and trying new stuff. People have really only seen one snapshot of the progression of Keane – but we will always be moving forward and doing new things. I think that is part of our psyche as a band. We have always been into bands like U2 who progress and don’t stand still, rather than bands who churn out a diluted version of the last album with every new release. God knows where we’ll end up, but that’s part of the fun.”
Having morphed and plugged away for years, Keane were an overnight sensation. Success, however, did not entirely agree with them.
“It was actually horrible”, recalls Tom. “It was one of the things we handled badly. It wasn’t just that we didn’t talk about the things troubling us but we didn’t give ourselves a chance to get a perspective on the good times. We were just touring and going from one thing to the next. We effectively broke up. In retrospect, if you take the day after Live 8, you should kick a ball around or go for a drink. Just little things like that. Those things actually give you a perspective on what it is like to do Live 8, if that makes sense.
“Otherwise you do the thing John Lennon talked about in Beautiful Boy - ‘Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans’. It became tunnel vision. I don’t think we really enjoyed Hopes and Fears as much as we should have done. We were always worrying about what was next or around the corner. With the new record we will factor in time to share some things and try and enjoy it more.”
He splutters in self-deprecation.
“But being in a band and being the people we are, we will probably fuck it up.”
With Keane facing meltdown, Under The Iron Sea became, emotionally at least, a classically Difficult Second Album. The melancholy refrain of ‘Is It Any Wonder?’ might easily pass for The Cure after the Prozac has worn off: “Is it any wonder I’m tired?/ Is it any wonder I feel uptight?/ Is it any wonder I don’t know what’s right these days?/ After all the misery I’ve made/ Is it any wonder I feel afraid?”
“We really didn’t know what would happen when we got back in the studio,” recalls Tom. “The one thing that has always been a certainty in our lives is our friendship. It seems like a contradiction in terms that suddenly, you have all this success and you’re travelling the world, so cracks start to appear. But one of the things we do as a band which we don’t do very well in general life, is to turn all our darkest thoughts and the experiences we are otherwise scared to confront into music and lyrics. ‘Is It Any Wonder?’ is a perfect example of that. Our friendships and the band seemed to have fallen apart at that point. We were thinking that we were going to end up alone and miserable and that we had fucked-up our lives. The songs on the new album are very honest about those particular things. Maybe you have to get to that place to make music sometimes.”
Under The Iron Sea translates this crisis into a darksome fairy-tale. ‘A Bad Dream’, for example, takes poetic cues from W.B. Yeats’ ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ and visits to war graves.
“What we wanted to do was kind of turn all the weird and dark stuff that was inside us into something musical,” explains Tom. “I suppose the way of doing that is often poetic. We wanted to create this other world. I think Hopes And Fears did not have the sense that you are being taken down to this place and that’s where you stay till the end of the record. So we wanted a cohesive feel to reflect where we were. ‘A Bad Dream’ is a good example. Tim has this strange fascination with war graves and memorials. And it is interesting to imagine what it would have been like for people in the Great War and World War II. It is endlessly intriguing to imagine what it would have been like to have these heroic ambitions of fighting for king and country. For a lot of people those hopes were dashed and ended in death and destruction. That’s particularly pertinent in the context of modern times when there are a lot of soldiers going off to war. I think the combination of being at one of those huge war graves, the Yeats poem and inner turmoil all come together in that one song.”
To match the new sombre mood, Irving Welsh was drafted in to create the promotional video for ‘Atlantic’. I wouldn’t have imagined the Trainspotting author to be, well, mellow enough to hang with Keane.
“Hmm. Are we mellow?” he wonders aloud. “I think we are with our music. And I guess we ask a lot of questions and we are very aware of being human beings and members of the planet. That’s really why we got into making music – we wanted to make statements about things. I know it’s not the most obvious collaboration. It just happened that the song ‘Atlantic’ was really taking shape when he came down to the studio. He heard it and was like, ‘well, this is perfect for my weird and wonderful imagination and I would love to write a treatment and film something’. What he came up with was as brilliantly bonkers as you might expect.”
So is everything okay again? Can we expect the new grittier Keane to let their hair down?
“Well, I think we’re going to communicate better from now on. We don’t want to jeopardise our relationship again. But for all our problems, we did have fun and wild times occasionally. I mean, we don’t really talk about that stuff as some way to promote our music, but the whole sex, drugs and rock and roll thing does become your normal life. But to be honest, I hate when someone talks about that up to make themselves seem cooler.”
Well, even if he won’t regale me with stories about entertaining Rachel Stevens In Las Vegas, it’s comforting to know that Keane are more Spinal Tap than many might have supposed.
“Oh sure”, says Tom. “We get lost on our way to the stage all the time.”