Sons Of A Preacher Man

Kings Of Leon may be one of the most exciting rock ’n’ roll bands in the world right now – but their Tennessee upbringing hardly provided them with an orthodox grounding in a life of noise and excess.

The three Followill brothers (Caleb, vocals and guitar; Nathan, drums; and Jared, bass – their cousin Matthew Followill on lead guitar is the final member) are sons of a United Pentecostal evangelist preacher, and the family spent much of their youth on the road, between Oklahoma City and Memphis. In fact, half the band made their musical debuts playing in church: Nathan began drumming at religious services when he was seven.
“Caleb sang in church but he didn’t play guitar until a couple of months before the recording of our first EP,” recalls bassist Jared, who pronounces the six-stringed instrument gee-tar. “He picked one up and had a friend show him a few things. I only learned to play the bass a month before recording. Matt got lessons when he was younger. He was pretty seasoned: he’d been playing for a couple of years when we started.”

So when did these sons of a preacher man decide to form a rock ’n’ roll band and conquer the world?
“It was pretty shortly before recording the EP,” Jared explains. “Nathan and Caleb had started out in a different style. They don’t like to brag about it but they moved to Nashville and started writing country songs. All of a sudden, Caleb said that he was tired of doing that and wanted to go for it fully-fledged and do his own thing. And it worked!”
It certainly did. Within 12 months or so of picking up their instruments, Kings Of Leon were snapped up by RCA in New York and promptly got to work on their debut album, Youth & Young Manhood, which scored a much deserved 8 out of 10 in the last issue of hotpress.

Jared’s laid-back – possibly stoned? – demeanor disguises the fact that everyone in the record industry reckons they’re going to be as big as The White Stripes by this time next year. In the last four weeks alone, they’ve gone top 5 in the UK and Irish album charts, been drooled over at Glastonbury and Witnness and won the celebrity vote by attracting Kate Moss, Stella McCartney, Sadie Frost, Oasis and Supergrass to their London Electric Ballroom club show. Their US assault doesn’t start in earnest until August 19, but with Rolling Stone already indulging in a spot of Springsteen-style “Future of rock ‘n’ roll!” hyperbole you’d have to be a brave man to bet against western world domination.
Are they surprised at how quickly things have fallen into place for them?
“Yeah, it really amazes us,” Jared enthuses. “We just released our record and we’re playing massive shows that are doing great.”

Those sentiments are shared by his geriatric brother Nathan – he’s 23 – who confided to an interviewer back home recently that, “It’s been moving fast and it’s been changing fast. We’re still a young band and all this stuff freaks us out. We don’t know why we’re getting it, and we don’t know why we deserve it, but we’re glad. The fact that we’re getting to play every night, we’re not having to worry about where we’re going to sleep or what we’re going to eat, we’re doing it.”

Being that all-important six years older, he also remembers more about their nomadic childhood existence.
“Growing up, we didn’t have an actual home,” he continues. “We stayed with relatives, one place or other. We lived out of the back of our car – oh man, I’d say there were at least five of those cars. Four of those 14 years we had a travel trailer; the other ten, the church would either put us up in a hotel or we’d stay at the pastor’s house or a parsonage.
“Our dad pastored a church in Mumford, Tennessee from 1986 until 1992. That’s about 30 minutes outside of Memphis – real country, Tipton County, the most redneck place you’ll ever see in your life. That’s the first place we ever got to go to school for more than one year with the same classmates.”

So now you know why they’re not your average band! To these ears their music is very much rooted in old-style blues and rock ‘n’ roll, with a healthy dollop of soul to boot. Is that what it’s about for Kings Of Leon?
“It’s a lot of things,” Jared says evenly. “It’s the Stones, Johnny Cash, Dylan and The Band, The Velvet Underground and The Pixies all meshed into our version of it.”
He could just have easily said Willie Nelson, Lynrd Skynrd, The Go-Betweens, The Allman Brothers and Creedence Clearwater Revival but, hey, he’s the one answering the questions!
Now that their father’s left the United Pentecostal Church – and they’ve embarked on careers as rock gods – does it still play a role in their lives?
“Not really,” Jared chuckles. “Our lifestyles are kinda different from the Church’s views of the way we should live, but we still hold it in high respect.” I suppose the ‘Sex & Drugs & Rock ’n’ Roll’ ethos doesn’t tie in well with their preachings.
“Yeah, you could say that! 10 years ago we all had short hair. We were clean-cut and shaved, living for the Lord, going to church three times a week, being in at a decent hour, all that good stuff. Some of us wasn’t even in high school. So it’s drastically different to now.”

As Nathan told VH-1 recently, Pa Followill hanging up his cassock was “the first chance we had to think for ourselves. We discovered the freedom to look at religion in a light that we wanted to look at it in. That’s when we really started to experience so many aspects of life that, before, we’d never known were out there. I mean, Zeppelin and the Stones and Tom Petty and all that, we got to listen to a little bit growing up, but we never really got to go and buy a record and sit there and listen to the whole thing ten times in a row. Once we heard bands like White Stripes, it just gave me chillbumps because we thought: ‘Maybe we can do this, and maybe we can do it kind of cool’.”

I’m convinced that they’d pass the lie detector test, but not everyone swallows the Pentecostal line.
“We heard the other day that the whole story is a fake,” Jared resumes, “that our mum’s really a college professor and our dad’s an electrician and we’re not brothers and it’s pretty fun.” It’s the rock ’n’ roll norm for siblings in bands to slag/beat the shit out of each other, but unless they’re keeping it well hidden there are none of the tensions in Kings Of Leon that you’d get with, say, Oasis. “Our whole family is really close, from our dad and his brothers down to us,” Jared notes. “We get together every year and have a big family reunion. You just grow up with everybody and I guess that’s how we got so close.” So what does their father, the former evangelist, make of the current madness?
“He’s so proud. He’s probably our biggest fan. He’s made t-shirts with him on it with the band. He’s excited about it. He loves it.”

Dad would’ve been dead impressed if he’d seen the number of people who thronged the On Stage for their Witnness set. Curiosity turned to frenzied boogie stomping as the band ran through such album stand-outs as ‘Red Morning Light’, ‘Genius’ and ‘Molly’s Chambers’ which, despite the title, isn’t the steamy sequel to ‘Whisky In The Jar’.
“That’s a song about a girl that if you ever come across her and you get your opportunity, you’d better take it!” grins Jared who, slow starter or not, is obviously getting to grips with this rock ‘n’ roll lark. Normally, I'd spurn droopy moustaches, page-boy haircuts and t-shirts worn over braces like I'd spurn a rabid dog, but sported by the Kings at Punchestown they're the epitome of Southern cool. And the subject of much female fawning! Pleased by the number of converts they'd made, the unlikely sex symbols finished their set with an orgy of feedback, the likes of which hasn't been heard since Queens Of The Stone Age at The Ambassador. Re-fucking-sult!

The day after Witnness, Kings Of Leon jetted back to the US for a couple of weeks of R’n’R. Next it’s off to Japan for the Fuji Festival followed by the grueling Lollapalooza in the States. It’s going to be a very busy year for them, but it sounds like they’re having a ball.
“You’ve no idea,” Jared gushes. “I’m pretty young so this is all amazing. I’m in a different position to most 17-year-olds.”

The way things are building for Kings Of Leon, that may well qualify as the understatement of the year!

Kings Of Leon’s Youth & Young Manhood is out now on Hand Me Down Records