Hot Press meets Kasabian

When a minor tragedy strikes, you don’t expect a bona fide rock star to be the one offering to put an arm around your shoulder. Such is the surreal start to the morning after Alex Ferguson announced his retirement, bidding farewell to Manchester United after 26 years. While there will be some at Hot Press jumping for joy – my near-namesake over in Foul Play for one – I’m still reeling. Serge Pizzorno, lead guitarist and songwriter for rock behemoths Kasabian, is chipper considering the early hour and quick to console his interviewer when he asks about my slightly downbeat introduction.

“Oh shit, of course!” he sighs with empathy. “Wow, so he took over two years before you born! That must be a head trip. There was a programme on last night, a Football Focus thing, and it was quite extraordinary. When he was there statistics got thrown about and you took them in but it’s only now he’s actually gone that you go, ‘Fucking hell, I would not want that job!’. David Moyes, is it? I think Lineker said it – you don’t want this one, you want the one after Fergie. But I’m sure you’ll be alright.”
He offers the last line like a concerned mother. If my mother was a bearded, bandana-wearing guitarist with a soft, Jimmy Page way of speaking. In any case, he’s got his own worries. His beloved Leicester City face their first play-off for promotion to the Premier League that evening (they’ll eventually lose the second leg to Watford in heartbreaking fashion at the death) and he’s a bag of nerves.
“I’m shitting myself mate, to be honest! The fucking play-offs must be the worst murder of all football games. The one thing is, we’ve nicked a place to get in there. It’s not like we were third and we nearly went up. So I’ve got that to fall back on.”
Everyone will know of Pizzorno’s sports connections – he had trials for Nottingham Forest, though he was a bit too flash and the lure of music was always greater – but he’s kept quiet about his love of snooker. Ronnie O’Sullivan’s return and fifth World Championship win might have brought that unpredictable excitement back to the game, but there were a few spectators playing their part too. Pizzorno was spotted in the Crucible with his friend, comedian Noel Fielding.
“It just reminds me of my grandad,” Serge offers. “I have such fond memories of going around his house as a kid, him falling asleep and me watching the snooks. To be honest, if Ronnie wasn’t playing I wouldn’t go. To win it after a year out? He’s a special, special man. Huge fucking name drop, but I went with Damien Hirst! He says, which I get, that he lives quite a stressful life and when he goes to watch Ronnie, the stress of the snooker sort of levels it out. He buzzes off this fucking weird moment where you’re just in a bubble watching the snooker.”
The high stakes bring about a kind of tranquility?
“In a weird-ass way...” he nods, before checking himself. “That sounds like hippy nonsense but whatever!”
This seems to lend credence to reports of Pizzorno toning down the partying since the birth of his son, Ennio. Is this what it has come to, Serge? A former hell-raiser asking Noel Fielding, a man he’s called the modern Salvador Dali, if he fancies a cup of tea and a spot of snooker?
“I suppose. It just adds fuel to the surrealist fire though, right?! Surely! You don’t want to see us falling out of shitty clubs in London, it’s much better that we end up at the snooker. Far more bizarre. Like, ‘What’s that all about?!’”
In truth, reports of his monastic lifestyle have been greatly exaggerated. He’s done the sensible thing of keeping the drugs far away from home, but the road is a different story. In fact, one semi-joking bit of ‘new father’ advice he got from seasoned rock ‘n’ roll dad Noel Gallagher was to basically tour, tour and tour some more.
“Haha, yeah! Touring’s intense because there’s so many ups and downs. But because of the show and the nights out, you get so incredibly high from it all. Literally. You can be on the ceiling and then other days you can be in the basement. Horrendous, feeling the worst you’ve ever felt in your life. So it’s a rollercoaster of emotions.”
Last summer in Marlay Park was one high of note. Pizzorno and his best friend, Kasabian’s frontman Tom Meighan, have always been bullish about never being overawed by other bands. So much so that, rather than crumble when Oasis took them on tour back in the day, they stood up to the challenge and became close friends with the Gallagher brothers. Liam has even pinched their rhythm guitarist Jay Mehler for Beady Eye – the second time a guitarist has departed, so they’re used to it.
That said, their last Irish date seemed like a different kettle of fish. Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds were on before Kasabian, essentially acting as the Leicester band’s warm-up act. Is it not daunting when you’re preparing to go on and the crowd are roaring out ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’?
“Nah, I stood side of stage and enjoyed it. We just see it as an honour. Things like that have never frightened me. The best thing is to just be oblivious to the whole scenario and then you’re fine. If you start taking it in, I think that’s when you go insane.”
Meighan has expressed his bewilderment in the past at the “fight music” Kasabian keep producing, given that he describes his tall, black-haired friend as “a lily pad on water”. Talking to Serge, he does seem a gentle, spiritual sort of soul. Bursting with creativity, the studio is his place of worship and meditation.
“My favourite place in the world is the studio,” he says, solemnly. “I’ve always had a studio high, albeit a bedroom ‘studio’ for a lot of the time. I’ve found the one place where I feel completely at the centre of the world. I don’t need anything other than what I have there. I don’t need to see anyone. I get so much out of it, I’m in another world, disconnected from society. In the studio you just get the ceiling, you never really get the downs.”
They’ve been touring 2011’s Velociraptor! incessantly, foregoing a break this year to avoid boredom. Now early work is underway on the next record. If they continue their journey from synth-tinged terrace anthem rock through the exhilarating, experimental likes of ‘09’s West Ryder Lunatic Pauper Asylum and Velociraptor, we could have something unique on our hands. Meighan has called the new material “really heavy” and “electrocuted”. Pizzorno, in typically mystical fashion, talks about creating something mantric that will hypnotise their live audiences.
“‘Future psychedelia’ is the sort of thing I’m going with mentally at the moment. It’s a very tribal thing. Fields and fields of people getting lost in this tribal beat. If I pull it off, I don’t think anyone’s going to be ready for what’s gonna happen. If I can pull it off. Who knows? I’m very far away from anyone hearing anything.”
Any laddish connotations from their early days should be forgotten. In 2013, Kasabian seem more like heirs apparent to Primal Scream than Oasis. Already indebted to dance, have they ever thought of handing their music over to an Andrew Weatherall figure and going the full Screamadelica route?
“I’ve produced all the albums along the way and I think if I ever met anyone who was into it and was good enough, then I’d do it. But in a lot of ways, the songs don’t really need it. If you think of the tunes that would work in that style, it would just sound like remixing. Maybe one day we’ll do a remix record, which would be quite interesting.”
Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie joined Tom Meighan in expressing his disgust at how sanitised this year’s BRIT Awards were. It’s something Kasabian have been saying for years: where are all the stars?
“That’s been going on for years on many levels, not just music. People seem hypnotised by it at the moment. I’ve been backstage at so many shows and festivals, and there can be some people that are walking around that make you go ‘wow, who’s that?’. But if a David Bowie walked by, or a Lou Reed, you’d be like ‘what the fuck is going on?!’ There isn’t that anymore. It only makes the characters that do still exist very important. We should remember that, the people that are out there doing interesting stuff. ‘Cos it’s so rare now.”
Pizzorno has often waxed lyrical about his admiration for David Bowie. You imagine he was over the moon when the Thin White Duke made his shock comeback earlier this year.
“I think it was very clever. He’s just on it. In this day and age everyone’s trying to figure out how to get their music to people. He’s the zeitgeist, he knew how to do it. He’d not released anything for so long, then he’s not doing any interviews, it’s very mysterious. He’s come out with some incredible tunes, which is the most important thing. Of all the carnival surrounding the release of a record, no-one cares if you don’t have that. I’d love to see him play it live but then again, it would be beautiful if he didn’t and just wandered off: ‘I’m still here, I still got it, it’s that easy for me, seeya later!’”
If the mystery helps Bowie, the guitarist reckons a lack of mainstream exposure is hurting the young guns.
“People in bands are not on the telly anymore. Top Of The Pops was a weekly event that everyone at school would watch. You’d get crap but then you would get New Order or Primal Scream. It has a huge effect on people if they actually know what musicians look like. I don’t think we even know what people in bands look like anymore. I like the tunes and stuff, but it won’t breed any new characters because you couldn’t pick them out of a line-up!”
There was a time when you couldn’t move for Kasabian quotes slagging off their contemporaries. My personal favourite was Pizzorno describing My Chemical Romance as “clowns” who make “ventriloquists’ music” but after an awkward situation where they ended up stuck with said emo rockers on a long-haul flight and ultimately broke the ice with an apology, they re-thought their “attack, attack, attack” strategy.
“We were always prompted, we never really ‘came out’ with one particular thing,” Serge muses. “You know what, everyone’s so bloody polite now, it’s not even worth it. I couldn’t even gripe anymore! It just seems ridiculous.”
Our time nearly up, talk turns to their upcoming Irish show.
“The energy of the crowd in Ireland is like no other. You know a real great buzz when you’re out of your mind? Where it’s not violent, ‘cos some of them have an edge to them? We’ve never felt that edge in Ireland. Although it’s high energy rock ‘n’ roll, there’s an amazing vibe that elevates you to the moon. That Marlay Park show was amazing. It’s nice to do a few gigs in the summer. The gigs we’re doing are special, we couldn’t turn them down.”
When you talk big shows, there was arguably none bigger than Danny Boyle’s London 2012 Opening Ceremony. We’ve heard that the likes of Bowie turned down offers to play. Did Kasabian get a call from Boyle? And if not, why not at least pop up for the Closing Ceremony, considering we got an overdose of Jessie J, Kaiser Chiefs pretending to be The Who and Muse channeling Freddie Mercury instead?
“I’ve got no idea!” he laughs. “We were kinda away on tour for the whole thing so we didn’t really get caught up in the fever. But I think they definitely missed a trick with a tune like ‘Fire’. The whole ceremony ends with the lighting of a flame! It seems pretty obvious to me.”
Forbidden Fruit, then: set to be the show the Olympics Opening Ceremony could have been.