He Kane, He Saw, He Conquered

Having enjoyed considerable success alongside Alex Turner in The Last Shadow Puppets, you’d imagine Miles Kane would have been pretty confident about his debut solo album, Colour Of The Trap, being afforded an equally enthusiastic reception. Interestingly, however, the Scouse singer admits he felt a degree of insecurity as he set about writing the record.

“I know it might sound crazy, but after we’d finished up with The Last Shadow Puppets and The Rascals had split, it took me a while to get my confidence back,” says Kane, sitting in the lounge of the Fitzwilliam Hotel. “I’m a strong-minded lad and I’m not soft, and I don’t want to be living off The Last Shadow Puppets; I don’t want to wait around until we do another one. It was a bit of a comedown, but the guy who gave me a boost early on was Gruff Rhys, who co-produced the album. I’d sent him all the demos and he was really buzzing off them.
“We went into the studio and he produced two tracks, ‘The King Crawler’ and ‘Take The Night From Me’. That was my first week of doing it, and it was in my mind, ‘I know I can do this. Once I get the record done, I’m gonna get a good band and I’m gonna fuckin’ love this’.”
Nonetheless, it is surprising that you would feel low on confidence having had such a big hit with TLSP’s The Age Of The Understatement.
“I worry about shit,” admits Kane. “There’s probably a lot of people out there who think, ‘You did the Puppets and you’re just a kid. Your best mate’s a star and you’re hanging on his coat-tails’. I’m aware that people think that, but it’s not the case. And if they think that, then listen to this record.”
Like The Last Shadow Puppets’ album, The Colour Of The Trap has a very strong soundtrack vibe, and skilfully blends influences such as Morricone, Bowie, Scott Walker, The Beatles and ’60s psychedelia. Lyrically, what sort of subjects did Kane want to tackle?
“I suppose the majority of is about... fucking feelings,” comes the reassuringly laddish answer. “That old one of birds and what you’ve been through and all that.”
Have you been through a lot?
“What, been through a lot of birds?” chuckles Kane, who dated supermodel Agyness Deyn a couple of years ago. “I’m a young lad and I’ve experienced a lot of things. You write about what you experience – and if it’s about a lot of girls, then that’s it. But then you’ll exaggerate it into a tune like ‘My Fantasy’, and you take little feelings and blow it up.”
‘My Fantasy’ features a guest appearance from Noel Gallagher, the godfather of the lad-rock genre. Though Kane is also rumoured to have made a contribution to Gallagher’s forthcoming debut solo album, he is clearly tired of answering questions about the former Oasis man.
“No offence to you press guys, but you blow these things out of the water,” he shrugs. “I was just mixing my record and he came down to have a cup of coffee and a Kit-Kat. I was gonna put these harmonies on and he ended up doing it. That’s it.”
Is he a mate?
“I’ve only met him a few times,” replies Kane. “When he was down in London he came for a visit. We don’t go out to dinner or anything, but he’s a lovely fella and a hero.”
Indeed, Kane credits Oasis with being a key formative influence.
“When you’re starting out, you’d want to look like that and play a bit like that,” says the singer. “But then I started to discover people like Bowie and Scott Walker. I got into Western films dead early on when I was a kid, and discovered that guitar sound. I wanted to have a guitar sound like that, but with a John Lennon-type vocal. I had a vision of what I wanted my sound to be.”
It seems as if Alex Turner shared that vision.
“He totally gets that,” nods Kane. “It probably opened his mind to other things as well. But I was definitely surprised when The Last Shadow Puppets became such a big thing – we recorded the album in two weeks. We became friends when we toured together; Al liked my guitar playing and we started hanging out. He’d come to Liverpool and I’d go to Sheffield. But yeah, we were well surprised when the album took off. It’s such a pure thing – that’s probably why it did well.”