Songs in the key of strife

Tom Chaplin is in a happy place. And not in a touchy-feely way, either.

“We’re at a little space that we’ve rented where we get together. Just the three of us and no-one else,” says the Keane frontman. “We’re trying to work on some new songs and get vibed up, and enjoy the process of making some music again for the first time in a year or two.”
This positive outlook extends to his personal well-being. After a rocky patch, he seems to be back on an even keel.
“I’ve enjoyed touring a lot. I’ve got fit and healthy and the live show has become a lot more ambitious. When we were touring Hopes And Fears we got stuck in a cycle which left us feeling like robots. Each night felt the same as it had done two or three years before. With this record, it stuttered along to start with as is quite publicly known, but since the end of last year we’ve managed to build and make a real statement with our arena tour. We’ve had that freedom and ambition on stage, which is something I’ve really missed being a part of.”
This public stuttering came to light last August when Chaplin walked away from Keane’s world tour and checked himself into rehab. Did life on the road get to him?
“That was part of the problem. I’ve always been creative, and feeling that I didn’t have that outlet was hard. I began to feel stifled by the whole mechanics of being in a band. There was a privilege that we didn’t realise we had before we got signed, to have days upon days of just hanging out and making music. You don’t realise when your dream comes true that there’s a lot of boring elements to it as well as the good bits. Maybe that was part of my problem, but maybe a lot of it was innately just down to me.”
How hard was it to slam on the brakes, given that Keane were gathering such momentum?
“The band is now a big business and you are one of the lynchpins without whom nothing can go on. It was a huge decision but I knew, as did everyone else, that there was no other way forward. I was incredibly depressed the whole time, I couldn’t extract much pleasure from anything. We’d be in Thailand or somewhere going round some incredible palace and I’d be going ‘this is fucking boring’. I just felt apathetic and miserable the whole time and taking the drugs and everything was just making the situation worse so I had to get out. It was a situation that needed to change or the band had no chance of surviving.”
Yet survive they did. Eventually Chaplin returned to promoting Under The Iron Sea and to start thinking about a new record that will stretch their original sound even further.
“We started as a pretty straight post-Radiohead rock band and then our guitarist left and we went weird for a while – Aphex Twin meets The Beatles – and then suddenly we hit on the idea of the piano and everybody had one impression of us because that first record did so well.
“We’ve always changed and adapted, it’s just that some of it was behind closed doors. By the time it comes to recording the next album we’ll probably have moved onto something else and it would be nice to be recognised as a band that is constantly evolving rather than just ‘the piano band’.”