3-D glasses might become a staple at Keane concerts in the next few years.
The piano-based British pop group is exploring how the latest improvements in 3-D technology might become the norm for concerts to enhance the multimedia experience, says drummer Richard Hughes.
"Music videos could be another direction, or we could have graphics behind us while playing that look like they're interacting with you on the screen and people could see this all in 3-D," he says. "Imagine playing a stadium and there's things flying around the stadium or a lighting rig that's coming out into the crowd. Imagine just the photo from the stage with all these people looking back at you in those glasses!"
Hughes and his bandmates -- pianist-bassist Tim Rice-Oxley and vocalist Tom Chaplin -- have been toying with future possibilities of the technology since streaming a live 3-D gig online from Abbey Road recording studios on April 2. The 23-minute video is still up on the band's MySpace page and their official website.
The trio got the idea for the first ever live 3-D Internet concert after shooting the video for the song Spiralling off their new album, Perfect Symmetry. The production company who worked on the heavily animated clip was dabbling in the latest 3-D technology, so together they developed the idea to stream the show online.
"One of the many cool things about being in a band is you get to work with other people who have crazy ideas, like music video directors and photographers. You unleash your ideas on them and they have ideas too," Hughes says.
"Weirdly enough, if anything, it made us think of potential things for the future rather than being the end. It's definitely coming back. Hollywood is getting into it again. People think of it as old films from the SSRq50s but there's lots of possibilities."
Recently bands including U2 and the Jonas Brothers have released concert movies in 3-D, and Hollywood is back in the game in a big way. Several movies this year, including Up, The Final Destination, Coraline, Monsters vs. Aliens and My Bloody Valentine, have been released in 3-D and many more are planned in the upcoming months.
Keane fans will have to be content with the Internet experience for now -- Winnipeggers will see the band without a heap of special effects when they play the Burton Cummings Theatre Wednesday (tickets are $27.50 and $39.50 at Ticketmaster).
The show is part of a massive worldwide tour for the band that has taken them everywhere from South Korea to Lebanon to Moscow, where Hughes was during the interview last week.
"This is our first time here and it's pretty exciting," he says. "It turns out we've got a lot of fans here, which makes me feel really bad for not playing here before. Tonight is gig 110 of this tour. We're trying to go to places we've never been before. We're sort of a global band, as it turns out."
Hughes has fond memories of most of most the places the group has performed, but Beirut sticks out in his mind because of the resiliency of the people he met there who have overcome hardship and years of war.
"You go to places like Paris and you see bullet holes in buildings from the Second World War and you have some context and feel the world has moved on at some point; then in Beirut you see bullet holes in modern buildings that were built in our time, yet the population there, the crowd and the people at the gig, were amazing.
"One of the most reassuring things in Beirut was that people had come from Syria to see it, which is amazing. The recent past isn't good between those countries and it feels like music is doing what it's supposed to do: bring people together. By the time we left, we talked about going there to record, but we always talk like that when we like a city," Hughes says with a laugh.
One of those cities was Berlin, where the bulk of Perfect Symmetry was recorded. The band had toured there in the past, liked what they saw and decided to immerse themselves in the culture.
"In hindsight, it seems like a calculated metaphor for the reinvention of Keane. It's a city that's gone through so many changes -- it was razed to the ground and built up again and split in half and put back together and recovered," he says. "It's a wonderful place; the graffiti alone is worth the trip."
The reinvention Hughes speaks of is the band's stylistic shift on their latest recording. From as far back as the mid-1990s, when they formed in East Sussex, the group relied on the piano as their lead instrument and didn't use a guitar, although they have run electric keyboards through guitar effects pedals. Their sound, which has drawn many comparisons to Coldplay, earned them a huge fan base over the course of their first two award-winning albums, 2004's Hopes and Fears and 2006's Under the Iron Sea. Last year the two albums were voted No. 13 and No. 8, respectively, in a survey of the best British albums of all time.
On Perfect Symmetry the band dabbles in SSRq80s synth pop, Chaplin plays guitar and Jesse Quin handles bass duties. Quin is now a part of the touring band.
The new direction wasn't something the group sat down and discussed, but evolved organically as the songs came together in London and Berlin, Hughes says.
"We really used whatever sounded best. Spiralling is built around a sliding note, which you can play on a guitar, but not a keyboard," he says, adding the band never wanted to be pigeonholed into a genre.
"You kind of get a name thrust upon you for doing certain things. We came out at the same time as the White Stripes; it was just the two of them and they didn't give a thought that it was just the two of them rocking out on stage. We always wanted to develop as a band and do different things.
"We're just naturally bored people and we're creative people. You just get out the ideas you have and if they sound good you stick with them. In the studio, that's our only rule: to not stick with expectations and take any good idea that comes along."
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