Tom Chaplin of Keane performs live on stage as part of the Mencap Little Noise sessions. Photograph: PA Wire/PA
Words don't come easily to Tim Rice-Oxley. The songs he writes for his band, Keane, are earnest meditations on human emotions, modern politics and global violence, and he is quite content to let them speak for him. An introverted interviewee, he will sit for long periods in silence, and much of what he does say (save a few barbed remarks directed at his bandmates) seems wrenched from his soul. So when he says that Keane spent the first half of 2008 experiencing "everything you could dream of as a band", you don't dismiss it as hackneyed exaggeration.
The trio spent those months recording their third album, Perfect Symmetry, travelling to studios around the world, experimenting with guitar riffs and Rice-Oxley's collection of 1980s synthesisers. At night, they "sat up in various bars until four or five in the morning, putting the world to rights - which, for me, is pretty much the ultimate place of happiness". Then came the realisation that they actually had to put the record out. "By the end of that process, we were really proud of what we'd achieved. But the moment we started worrying about everything that comes with an album - artwork, videos, gigs, interviews - you suddenly realise that you've made this thing that is going to be judged. That's kind of a thrill, but I also felt a weird sadness about it having to become a product. You know that the passion and intricacies that have gone into making the record can't possibly be things other people can experience."
Perfect Symmetry wasn't a unanimous hit among critics, but plenty celebrated its exuberance and spirit of adventure. It shot to No 1 in the UK, and is now well on its way to selling a million copies worldwide. In songs such as Spiralling and The Lovers Are Losing, Rice-Oxley's lyrics are as emotionally raw as ever, but this time wrapped up in bright, buoyant, 1980s-influenced pop - a significant departure from the sometimes stolid melancholy of the band's earlier records.
Singer Tom Chaplin thinks these songs have had a marked effect on the band's live performances: "They're so fun and energised; they've made the live show that much more exciting." He isn't being unduly big-headed. I saw Keane play at the Forum in London last September, and it was clear that both band and audience were having the time of their lives.
Keane's enthusiasm is rooted in an awareness that Perfect Symmetry might never have happened. Two years ago, the band were on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Chaplin had abandoned the band midway through a tour of Japan and checked himself in to the Priory, to combat an addiction to cocaine and alcohol. Rice-Oxley and Hughes, meanwhile, were struggling to cope with the pressures of fame. Keane's debut album, 2004's Hopes and Fears, had sold 5m copies, and none of them knew how to deal with such rapid success. "I always imagined that bands would have people around them who knew the drill, knew exactly what was going on," says Hughes. "But we do everything ourselves. We have had to learn from making mistakes - and we've made plenty of mistakes."
Among these mistakes was a prolonged failure to communicate. Much has been made of Keane's background: they have been mocked for being polite, middle-class chaps from a village in East Sussex. What gets ignored, though, is the British reserve that goes with this, the politeness that doesn't want to admit to feelings of unhappiness.
Rather than talk about what were, in fact, shared problems, the three band members stopped speaking to each other while recording their second album, 2006's Under the Iron Sea. This breakdown in their friendship was all the more traumatic because the trio have known each other since infancy: Hughes thinks he and Rice-Oxley may have met "at some village fete when we were about three", and Rice-Oxley has known Chaplin since he was born, because their mothers were friends.
Making music has always been integral to their relationship. Chaplin was nine when he first formed a band with Rice-Oxley, and just four when he started recording his own songs. "I'd press the notes on my little Casio keyboard and sing ridiculous things like, 'I am so cool.'" ("Virtually nothing has changed," notes Rice-Oxley, drily.) "We weren't precocious," says Hughes. "It was more making our own fun. If it was raining, we'd try and find something to do indoors. It was just what we did in the holidays."
Rice-Oxley says that forming a proper band didn't become a serious ambition until "our education ran out. You suddenly think, 'Fuck, what am I going to do with my life?'" He persuaded Chaplin, three years his junior, to abandon a degree in art history at Edinburgh University, and move to London. Because of their upbringing, thinks Chaplin, "people have this notion that Keane were handed everything, but it wasn't like that. We struggled really hard, not just because it's difficult anyway but because we're not particularly natural musicians." It took four years of knockbacks before the band signed a record deal.
Their tenacity was almost their downfall. Getting signed, says Rice-Oxley, became "an obsession that defines your life. And when you do sign a record deal, that goes up by a factor of 10. You want more and more. None of us would have dared to say, 'I don't want to do that tour', or 'Can we just have a break?' We were still in that mindset where we were desperately chasing the thing that we'd been dreaming of for years and years."
At their nadir, it wasn't just Chaplin who was in the grip of addiction; the entire band was addicted to achievement. Rice-Oxley believes that "the drugs were almost an outlet, rather than a fundamental problem. As soon as we started to confront the fame and touring-related issues, everything immediately became much easier."
Chaplin agrees. "A lot of the things people said in the five or six weeks when I was in the Priory I didn't feel were very appropriate to me. The most important thing was that it was the first time in probably four years where we had to stop, and there was no music, nothing going on. It gave me time to think about the band, and my life, and all the things that had happened to us."
The failure to take any time off between their first two albums was the band's other big mistake, and one they won't be repeating. The day they were supposed to start recording Perfect Symmetry in August 2007, says Hughes, "we ended up sitting out in the sunshine chatting - and realised we wanted to do a bit more of that, and a bit less sitting inside a room playing music". So they took the next four months off. If Perfect Symmetry shows signs of Keane travelling in unexpected directions and discovering a lightness of spirit, that's why.
The trio have already started thinking about their fourth album: taking inspiration from Prince and the band's recent "chaotic", semi-improvised gigs, Rice-Oxley hopes it will be a more loose-limbed affair than its predecessors. First, though, they have to tour Perfect Symmetry. Their newly relaxed approach means that they've been able to start appreciating the thrill of performing live again. Before they got signed, says Rice-Oxley, "every person who turned up to a gig, or bought your single, felt like a victory. During the Hopes and Fears tour, we started to take that for granted a little bit."
Just as they no longer take their audiences for granted, they no longer take each other for granted. "We're more carefree," says Rice-Oxley. "If one of us felt that we had to say, 'I just don't want to be in the band any more', I think we're more prepared for that now." And if Keane did come to an end? Chaplin has become intrigued by the Hadron collider and thinks he might study science. Hughes, already a committed human rights campaigner, wants to work for Amnesty International. Rice-Oxley, typically, keeps any future plans to himself. I suspect he wouldn't be out of the music world for long.
Keane play the Odyssey Arena, Belfast (028-9076 6000), on 23 January. Then touring.
