Sophie Heawood
When you tell people you are joining Keane on tour, your fellow music journalists give you a series of standard responses. “Posh chumps!” “Boring!” “That singer’s big round face! Didn’t he go to rehab for addiction to port?” Or, most commonly: “Oh I don’t like them — well apart from that beautiful song Bedshaped, and Everybody’s Changing, and then Crystal Ball was a tune, I suppose. And Is It Any Wonder? did really well didn’t it? And that new ravey one Spiralling is just bonkers, amazing — in fact, the whole new album is actually a bit, well, brilliant, isn’t it?”
As guilty pleasures go, Keane are surely our guiltiest. So easy to mock, yet through the three albums they’ve released (with sales approaching ten million) their songs have grown as hard to resist as the cocaine that actually dispatched their lead singer Tom Chaplin to the Priory. Now Lily Allen has announced on Radio 1 that they are her favourite band, Gwen Stefani has collaborated with their pianist/songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley and called him “the Clark Kent of pop”, and their biggest fan, Kanye West, has told them he has much more in common with them than with his hip-hop peers. Next week they play the first 3-D gig at Abbey Road, to be watched online with special 3-D glasses. In fact, Keane are now in mortal danger of becoming — whisper it — cool. Just don’t tell them that. They’re having too much fun playing the part of boring, round-faced, posh chumps.
“Nope, we’re definitely right back down the coolometer this week,” Chaplin grins, when I join the band backstage in Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s third city, towards the end of a hugely successful Latin American tour. “What kind of a twat wears a gold jacket anyway?” he muses, looking at the glimmering garment that has shrunk in the wash, before yanking it on regardless. He has been killing time before their gig by sitting at the rehearsal piano and improvising a song that goes “Everybody hates me, everybody hates me, everybody hates me.”
Meanwhile, their new bass player, Jesse Quinn, who may be a permanent addition to the band that was previously known for lacking guitars and a fourth member, is on his laptop, doctoring photographs of his new bandmates. He has replaced Chaplin’s head with the Moon. “Ah, the old moonface gag is it?” Chaplin asks, a smile breaking out on his round visage.
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Three years ago, when I first met Keane, they were fed-up. Chaplin asked me, at the time if, as a journalist, I was going to “go home and f*** us over”. He admits now that bad reviews were among the things that took their toll on him. While touring the second album he lost the plot, getting wasted and going Awol in Tokyo before they were due to go on stage. Shows had to be cancelled, rehab entered, the tabloids went to town. The future looked bleak for the trio from Sussex who had known each other since they were babies (their mothers went to antenatal classes together) and who had started making music working out Pet Shop Boys chords on the chapel organ at boarding school.
But the adventurousness of making their third album, which is something of an up-tempo, synthy departure, seems to have galvanised them as a gang. (They say they get on much better with former foes Razorlight since discovering that they refer to themselves as Razorshite.)
Just as I’m realising that the people who laugh most at Keane are Keane, in comes their tour manager. “Just a quick word before you go on stage, lads.” Everybody groans. “No really, I just want to tell you that you’re my favourite rock band in the whole world. And because I love you so much, please, please will you play my favourite song for me tonight.” Rice-Oxley is rolling his eyes, muttering to himself quietly, “Every night. Every single night.” Meanwhile Chaplin wonders which favourite song he wants: “Clocks?” Nope. “Chasing Cars?” Not that one. “I want the one about the weather!” demands the tour manager, “you know, Why Does It Always Rain on Me!” Everybody laughs at the old gag, because these three songs are by Coldplay, Snow Patrol and Travis respectively, musical classmates accused of the same middle-of-the-road safeness as Keane.
That particular joke may be drying up, too, though, since even Gary Lightbody from Snow Patrol has told Keane that he thought they were brave to release Spiralling. The band were initially unsure about it. Rice-Oxley, who writes all the songs for Chaplin to sing, says: “I played the demo to the others and they said ‘Ye-ah, sounds like it could be good’, which is Keanespeak for ‘it doesn’t sound very good at all’. It felt a bit scary I suppose. But I love all that stuff: that big snare sound is from Man in the Mirror [Michael Jackson], and the song was inspired by When Doves Cry [Prince] and that song, Magic Dance, from Labyrinth, which I love. It took a while to convince everyone that it wasn’t just a bad joke.”
And as for Chaplin’s spoken-word bit in the middle — where he asks if we ever wanted to go to war or fall in love — Keane in unexpected rap breakdown shocker! “I know! Well, when we were still touring the second album, people kept asking if we had any ideas for our next record. And I said something that incorporated more of our love of American pop, R&B and hip-hop influences. So we talked about that a bit and people would laugh and go: ‘Ooh, so you’re gonna have Tom rapping?’ as if that was the stupidest thing that anyone could ever do. But eventually I started thinking, maybe we should have a spoken bit. It’s something people used to do more — Elvis had some good spoken bits, and Debbie Harry, Talking Heads. So we thought we might as well be as perverse as possible. As soon as that song started to come together, it made us braver about everything else.”
It certainly sends the Brazilian fans into apoplexy, though, to be fair, so do all the other songs. Latin Americans respond with fervour to Keane’s onstage passion. Fans line up at airports and outside the hotel just to see their heroes, shower them with homemade gifts and then burst into tears. They have just played in Argentina “to a crowd that’s doubled in size since last time we went”, Richard Hughes explains, “because last time a local DJ was dragged kicking and screaming to the show. He has a huge radio show nationwide and he didn’t like Keane, then saw us play live. He just loved the gig. Went back and played us on his radio show. So now everybody comes. We work bloody hard to make a show that captivates the person in the very last row. I keep asking Tom to put on one of those things that measures how far you’ve walked, because he must do a few miles nowadays; his confidence has just soared.”
Between songs he manages to communicate with the fans with local phrases (having written them out phonetically first.) “Why do you always turn to me and Tim and beam at us after you talk in Portuguese?” Hughes asks later that night, “when we have no idea what you’ve just said. For all we know it could be: ‘Look out for my solo album in the shops just as soon as I’ve got rid of these two losers’.” Cue much mirth — the self-deprecating Englishness can’t be kept at bay for long.
We are draining late-night caipirinhas in a local bar where a TV show blasts a Brazilian covers band murdering Beatles songs. “This could be us in two years time,” Rice-Oxley muses, gazing in muted horror at the crimes being committed against Hey Jude and Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. The others agree, raising a toast to “our future tour of CenterParcs and Butlins.” “Keane: making mediocrity magical,” Chaplin adds.
The next night, after flying to Rio de Janeiro and playing another gig, Chaplin sits up in the hotel bar, drinking red wine, his eyes gazing somewhere happily into the middle distance. He doesn’t drink like he used to when he’s on tour — a couple of glasses and then bed. He’s still a man of highs and lows, though, and when he’s up, he’s a bouncy ball, that twinkle in his eye driving everyone bonkers. Like the time he stole their head of security’s walkie-talkie, faked his accent, announced a major security alert, watched all hell break loose, then doubtlessly escaped reprimand by passing out on the sofa like a little brother who’s just come down off food colourings.
At other times he has what he calls “a blue day” and doesn’t want to join in with anything. He says he made a useless cokehead — wasn’t even any good at being on drugs. As a child, his greatest thrill was being taken to see Norwich FC by his dad. The shouting in the stands, the passion of it all — he was in heaven. He’s always had too much joy, didn’t know where to put it. He loves the American dream, the Yes We Can mentality. “But then after the football match you’d get back in the car,” he says, his voice falling flat at the memory, “and put Radio 4 on, maybe a bit of Schubert.”
So that’s where it comes from, that twinkle in the eye of Britain’s most unlikely frontman, it all began with football. And so this tour will end: when Chaplin gets home, his heavily tattooed, ex-SAS security guy is taking him to Glasgow for a Rangers v Celtic match. Tom is ecstatic about this. But before then he has to make it up to his bedroom, in a glass lift to the 18th floor of a five-star hotel, without looking down. He is terrified of heights.
Keane perform a concert in 3-D from Abbey Road Studios on Thursday at 8pm. It can be viewed online using glasses from keanemusic.com
