NIGHT TRAIN TRACK BY TRACK #6: YOUR LOVE

The sixth Night Train track-by-track video, features Tom chatting about Your Love, in which lead vocals are handled by Tim.Track 5: Ishin Denshin (You've Got To Help Yourself)Track 4: Clear SkiesTrack 3: Stop For A MinuteTrack 2: Back In TimeTrack 1: House LightsNight Train is out tomorrow! You can order it from the official Keane store by clicking here.

TIM INTERVIEW IN TODAY'S INDEPENDENT

There's a great interview with Tim in today's edition of the Independent newspaper, here in the UK. Click here if you'd like to read it online.

NIGHT TRAIN TRACK BY TRACK #5

Our fifth Night Train track-by-track video, features Tom chatting about Ishin Denshin (You've Got To Help Yourself), which features Japanese MC Tigarah.

Track 4: Clear Skies
Track 3: Stop For A Minute
Track 2: Back In Time
Track 1: House Lights

Night Train is out on May 10. You can pre-order it from the official Keane store by clicking here.

NIGHT TRAIN TRACK BY TRACK #4

The fourth of our Night Train track-by-track videos, sees Tom chatting about Clear Skies.

Track 3: Stop For A Minute
Track 2: Back In Time
Track 1: House Lights

Night Train is out on May 10. You can pre-order it from the official Keane store by clicking here.

TOM INTERVIEWED IN TODAY'S SUNDAY TIMES

There's an enjoyable interview with Tom in the Culture section of today's Sunday Times newspaper, here in the UK. You can read it in full on the Times' website, by clicking here.

NIGHT TRAIN TRACK BY TRACK #3

In the third of our series of Night Train track-by-track videos, Tom discusses Stop For A Minute. You can download that track from iTunes by clicking here.

Night Train is out on May 10. You can pre-order it from the official Keane store by clicking here.

TOM ON GAY TIMES COVER: UPDATE

The brand new edition of Gay Times here in the UK features our very own Tom Chaplin on its cover - he looks rather dashing, don't you think?.

Click here for a preview of Gay Times' interview with Tom on their website (NB: the site contains some adult themes).

22.4.10 UPDATE: Goodness - we didn't think this story would provoke such a heated response! For the record, Tom is not gay, but that would certainly not stop him from agreeing to be interviewed in a gay magazine. We posted this story - just as we always do when there's a big feature on the band - because we thought you'd be interested to see the new pics and read the interview.
While we always value your comments on news stories here on km.com, please note that any offensive or abusive posts - on any topic - will be deleted.
Thank you,
Keane HQ

TOM ON GAY TIMES COVER

The brand new edition of Gay Times here in the UK features our very own Tom Chaplin on its cover - he looks rather dashing, don't you think?.

Click here for a preview of Gay Times' interview with Tom on their website (NB: the site contains some adult themes).

NIGHT TRAIN TRACK BY TRACK #2

Yes, it's the second of our series of videos (made at the Stop For A Minute shoot) in which Tom discusses the 8 tracks on Keane's upcoming new release, Night Train. This one is about Back In Time.

Night Train is out on May 10. You can pre-order it from the official Keane store by clicking here.

NIGHT TRAIN TRACK BY TRACK #1

Today, we're kicking off a new series of videos (made at the Stop For A Minute shoot) in which Tom discusses the 8 tracks on Keane's upcoming new release, Night Train. We begin with a short but sweet look at the EP's opening track, House Lights.

Night Train is out on May 10. You can pre-order it from Play.com (with free delivery to many countries) by clicking here.

TOM INTERVIEW ON BBC 6 MUSIC THIS EVENING: UPDATE

UPDATE: The interview has now taken place - click here to listen to it on the BBC's website, where you'll be able to play it for the next 7 days (Tom's on after about 1h 41m).

This evening, just after 5.30pm UK time, Tom will be interviewed live on Steve Lamacq's BBC 6 Music show, where he'll be chatting about Night Train. You can listen online by clicking here then clicking the button at the top which looks like this:



In fact, clicking that button itself should work too.

Then, on Monday next week (March 8), Lamacq will be playing Clear Skies, from the Night Train EP.

Remember, Night Train will be released on CD and download on May 10 - and you can pre-order a special numbered edition of the EP through the Keane Store right now by clicking here.

TOM INTERVIEW ON BBC 6 MUSIC THIS EVENING - LISTEN ONLINE

This evening, just after 5.30pm UK time, Tom will be interviewed live on Steve Lamacq's BBC 6 Music show, where he'll be chatting about Night Train. You can listen online by clicking here then clicking the button at the top which looks like this:



In fact, clicking that button itself should work too.

Then, on Monday next week (March 8), Lamacq will be playing Clear Skies, from the Night Train EP.

Remember, Night Train will be released on CD and download on May 10 - and you can pre-order a special numbered edition of the EP through the Keane Store right now by clicking here.

LISTEN AGAIN TO RICHARD ON CHERRY TREE RADIO

Yesterday afternoon, Richard did a live interview on Cherry Tree Radio in the US. The interview will be repeated tomorrow (Sunday 28th) at 9am and 6pm PST - and you can tune in online wherever you are at www.cherrytreerecords.com/radio.

Have a good weekend y'all!

TOM AND TIM TALK BRITS WITH ITN

Hello folks - and welcome to another week! Here's a video clip from an interview which Tom and Tim filmed last week, in which they discuss the nominations for this year's Brit Awards (where Keane are up for the Best Album of 30 Years award).

BETH ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS & TOM DESKTOP WALLPAPER

Hey folks. We thought you might like a big version of one of our Tom pictures from yesterday's video shoot live blog to use as a desktop wallpaper. Click on the thumbnail below to get the full-size one.


You might also remember that during the live blog, we ran out of time to ask Beth (Keane's personal assistant) some of your questions, so we picked a few, emailed them over and Beth very kindly sent back some answers...

Which one is your favorite song on the Night Train and why?
Simoninha (brazil)
Beth: It's a hard choice as they are all very different but I think Clear Skies is probably my favourite. How annoying that I can't give you any clues to how it sounds ;-)

Hello Beth, what book are you reading at the moment? I'd like a book recommendation from a female (no offence Tim!)
Sam, UK
Beth: This may cause a bit of controversy within Keane as many a debate has been had about the subject of the paranormal, usually between myself and Tom.... I am reading Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts.

Which, if any, of the band do you think you could take in a fight, and why?
Drinky
Beth: With one of my hard looks, all of them at once. Although I'm not sure they'd agree!

Beth, it’s going to be a year already since last time all of you were here in South America. Did you enjoy that last visit? x
Samanta G from Mexico
Beth: Speaking for both myself and the band it was an amazing trip. There's lots to love about South America - new experiences, the passion of the fans and last time, for me, a tango lesson in Argentina!

What is Beth doing during a period when the band is 'inactive' for several months and she doesn't have to iron shirts and buy Marmite? ;-) Silvia, Switzerland
Beth: There are a multitude of things to do whether the band are touring or not.... The wheels keep turning!

Hello Beth! Do you have a favourite Keane song?? Carol, Brazil
Beth: The hardest question! I have been asked this before and have said You Haven't Told Me Anything but there are tons more too. Clear Skies from Night Train is a "new" favourite as I mentioned above.

Hi Beth! From what i gather from Tom and Richard, video shoots aren't much fun, but which video shoot has been the most memorable for you?
Emma, UK
Beth: They aren't always a whole lot of fun - there is an awful lot of waiting around. Yesterday was memorable for two reasons - 1) It was indoors and nice and warm and 2) it was only 12 hours from start to finish, neither of which happen very often!

TOM ON Q MAGAZINE'S ARTISTS OF THE CENTURY: UPDATE

The new issue of Q Magazine has just hit the shelves in the UK, featuring a very special triple gate-fold cover. It highlights Q's Artists of the Century which, we're pleased to say, include Mr Tom Chaplin of Keane.

Q Editor Paul Rees had the following to say about this end of the decade issue: “All of the 34 artists who feature on the cover of the Artists Of The Century issue are there because they have significantly shaped or connected with our readers’ lives during the past 10 years – and as such they represent a reflection of the breadth and diversity of Q’s musical world. It took us a year to put together the Artists Of The Century issue, but I think the end result makes all that time and effort more than worth it.”

Get it from your local newsagent if you're in the UK, or order online by clicking here.

8 OUT OF 8

KEANE fans will either love it - or EIGHT it.

For the band are about to put out their most bizarre record yet... a "not quite an album" offering including a guest appearance by a RAPPER and a song in JAPANESE.

And all written and recorded entirely on their world tour.

In the band's first interview about their experiment - called Night Train - singer Tom Chaplin told Rated: "It isn't quite an album, but it's too important to be dismissed as a mini-album. We're just calling it an eight-track.

"Bands have been saying for a while that the internet means you can release what you want, when you want, and it's time a band like us proved that."

The record - due for release in May - will feature traditional Keane ballads like My Shadow and Your Love, alongside thumping dance tunes such as Back In Time and Looking Back, based around the theme from Rocky.

Horrified

But the bizarre element comes in with Looking Back and Stop For A Minute starring obscure Canadian rapper K'Naan. Tom became a fan thanks to his girlfriend Natalie who saw him at Glastonbury in 2006.

"I know a lot of people are horrified that a band with our nice image are working with a rapper," admits Tom, 30.

"And when they hear the songs they'll have to admit we've pulled it off. We don't make music just to confound our many critics. But it's great when we do!

"And I'd hate to be in a band that just sticks to the Oasis formula - making the same kind of record over and over again."

Talking to Rated over lunch at his local pub in rural Sussex, Tom is more relaxed than in his usually guarded interviews.

"It's because London intimidates me," he says. "I grew up in a village with wide-open countrysde and I feel shut in in London, like I don't belong there.

"We're friends with Lily Allen, but we're amazed at how confident she is. Lily came to see us on tour a few times, and whenever she comes backstage that big personality of hers takes over the room.

"Lily is from that showbiz background so nothing fazes her. Whereas we get nervous and defensive in big cities, because it's not where we feel at home." That nervousness helped Tom, keyboardist and songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley and drummer Richard Hughes to create Night Train.

To fight off the boredom between gigs, they visited studios in every city, including Tokyo where they recorded You've Got To Help Yourself, a cover of a 1983 song by Japanese band Yellow Magic Orchestra.

"The chorus is in English, but the verses are Japanese and no way am I singing in Japanese," explains Tom. "I speak good French, but when we did a version of one of our old songs in French, it was so bad that our French record company refused to release it. So a Japanese pop star, Tigarah, sings the verses. We might release it as a single. Why not? It's really catchy."

Nice

Your Love sees Tim replace Tom as singer for the first time. So does this mean Tom might dethrone Tim as Keane's songwriter one day?

"If I think my songs are good enough, maybe," he shrugs. "The songs I write, I'm not sure if they're suitable for Keane." Why not do a solo album, then? "Maybe as well as Keane one day, who knows?," says Tom. "But when Tim's writing as many good songs as he is, it's not a priority."

Night Train will be promoted with on their Tour of the Forests next June and Tom doesn't rule out more Keane songs being written on the road - in between ruining their nice guy image, anyway.

"We're firm believers in the adage 'Be nice to people on the way up, in case you meet them on the way down'," he says of their polite reputation. "But among the three of us on the tourbus, the p***-taking is a disgrace - we're the most vile, disgusting, offensive creatures imaginable!"

Keane tour six forests from June 10-26 in association with The Forestry Commission. Tickets are £32, on sale on Friday from 01842 814642 or www.forestry.gov.uk/music For full dates, see www.keanemusic.com

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TOM ON Q MAGAZINE'S ARTISTS OF THE CENTURY

The new issue of Q Magazine has just hit the shelves in the UK, featuring a very special triple gate-fold cover. It highlights Q's Artists of the Century which, we're pleased to say, include Mr Tom Chaplin of Keane.

Get it from your local newsagent if you're in the UK, or order online by clicking here.

Keane dust down debut and recall how they held no fear

Keane have revealed they had almost given up hope of cracking the charts before recording one of the biggest albums of the decade.

Singer Tom Chaplin, keyboard player Tim Rice-Oxley and drummer Richard Hughes struggled to land a major record deal and were so skint they did their own roadying.

But everything changed when Tim wrote Somewhere Only We Know, which hit No.3 in the UK charts.

The song sparked a change of fortune for the trio and paved the way for their iconic 2004 album, Hopes And Fears.

On November 30, Keane release a new deluxe version of their debut, which sold more than six million copies and also features the hits Everybody's Changing, This Is The Last Time and Bedshaped.

Tim, who knocked back the chance to join Coldplay and then watched his mate Chris Martin shoot to superstardom, recalls the tough times.

He told Email: "We'd all run out of money and had to move back in with our parents.

"I remember sitting at my mum and dad's piano thinking, 'I'd love to write a song like Heroes by David Bowie'. So Somewhere Only We Know was basically just me trying to articulate the feeling of the three of us trying to fight against the world and make something of ourselves.

"I didn't even know if the song was any good or not but Richard came round that evening and said, 'You've got something'."

The single paved the way for Hopes And Fears but the trio admit they had no idea it would become one of the defining albums of the Noughties.

In 2005, they won two Brit Awards for Best Album and Best British Breakthrough Act and Tim scooped an Ivor Novello for Songwriter Of The Year. Richard said: "To win two Brits seemed like a big dream."

Hopes And Fears was also chosen as one of the 50 landmark albums to mark the 50th anniversary of Island Records.

The legendary label, founded by Chris Blackwell, launched the careers of U2, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Grace Jones, Tom Waits, Roxy Music, Stevie Winwood and Free.

"It was pretty nuts when Island signed us," said Richard.

"The first time we walked into the studio, PJ Harvey was recording some vocals in the same space where Bob Marley had worked."

Tim said: "I played Stevie Winwood's organ on Fly To Me, one of our early B-sides.

"We had so many Island records in our own collection. That's why we wanted their famous palm-tree logo on our first album."

Keane proved they were no one-hit wonders when their next two albums, Under The Iron Sea (2006) and Perfect Symmetry (2008), also hit No.1.

Another career highlight for the band was touring with U2 in America and Europe. Tim said: "Just having a conversation with Bono, who had been such a hero, was really exciting."

And Richard added: "U2 were incredibly down to earth. They made us incredibly welcome." Keane are now working on songs for their fourth studio album, which is set for release next year.

Tim said: "We've got nine tracks ready and it's very different from what we've done before."

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Becoming More Keen On Keane...

There's a saying in showbiz, that you should never meet your heroes in case they let you down. Well, I'd like to add that the opposite is also true. Never meet people whose work you're not that bothered about, because they might win you over in other ways.

I mean, how am I supposed to maintain a good head of steam about Keane and their posh-boy pianola guffola, if a brief telephone call is all it takes to convince me that drummer Richard is as thoroughly pleasant and decent a fella as you'd ever hope to clap ears on.

All I had to do was talk to him for a short while about the re-release of their debut album 'Hopes And Fears' and how the past five years in the public eye has changed the band. Surely my mild prejudices and not-that-deeply-held ambivalence wouldn't collapse in such a short time? Surely I could keep my inner snarky blogmonster alive, even if he does reveal a huge admiration for my beloved Ting Tings?

Well, it seems not, as this interview transcript clearly demonstrates...

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ChartBlog: When was the last time you listened to 'Hopes And Fears' all the way through?
Richard: Actually, I haven't listened to the whole thing straight through for a very long time. But we did listen to a few tracks a bit on the tourbus. The last thing we did was a tour of North America and Canada and Tim played a couple of songs on the back of the bus, late one drunken night, and I was amazed at how fresh it sounded. I think I had in my head an idea of how it sounds and it was a little bit better!

ChartBlog: You didn't listen back appalled and thinking "I had no idea I was doing that, and I have no idea why I was doing that..."
Richard: To be honest, when you listen back to it compared to the way we play now, I think we've played something like 500 gigs in the intervening period between now and when it came out, and the way you play songs changes over the course of that length of time. But it sounds relatively politely played, rather than us hammering the songs as loud as we can in the studio or whatever. But I guess that's the way a band develops, so I guess that's pretty interesting...

ChartBlog: [long pause] ...er, yeah! Sorry, I was just...did you say you've done 500 gigs in five years? That's an average of 100 gigs a year...one every three days...or thereabouts. That's quite busy, isn't it?
Richard: Yeah, that's about right. I only know this because we've got an archive of all the gigs we've done on our website, and I was ichatting with the guy who runs our website recently and he said "yeah, you've got 570 gigs in our archive". So I'm guessing that 70 or more of them will have been done before we released 'Hopes And Fears'.

ChartBlog: Sheesh! Could you be the only band in the history of popular music to have a band member collapse with ACTUAL nervous exhaustion?
Richard: It is a lot of gigs but...we like playing live. Which I guess is a good job.

ChartBlog: And you can afford a bass player now...
Richard: Well yeah! For the last year we've had a guy called Jesse Quin with us. He's been with us since before we started 'Perfect Symmetry'. He's a lovely man, I actually play the drums in his band sometimes.

ChartBlog: Yeah, cos what you need is more gigs! Still, he must take the pressure off Tim's right hand...
Richard: Yeah, that's the thing about the development of the band, you try new things.

ChartBlog: There was never any suggestion that you would take up a multitude of simultaneous instruments to try and lend Tim a hand?
Richard: Erm...we have talked about it! [laughs] I think my total lack of musicianship probably counts in my favour there.

ChartBlog: So you escaped Tim pointing at the Ting Tings and yelling "SEE? HE controls the loops and keeps the drums going, now HELP ME OUT HERE!"
Richard: I did go and see them, and I've got to say Jules is pretty impressive the way he does all that. I'm in awe of the way they run their show. I love that there's this two-piece band who do all this stuff on loops and it is actually live. Cos so many people would just press the space bar on iTunes.

ChartBlog: That's what made their first Jools Holland appearance so amazing, cos it's Jools Holland, it has to have been live. They don't let people sing along to backing tapes...
Richard: Exactly. I've seen them a few times. In fact while we were mixing the record Tim and I went along to see them in LA. Cos Tim had been banging on about how great he thought that album was. And I was saying "I like it, but I can't quite get my teeth into it", and then I saw it live and it just clicked. For the entirety of the 'Perfect Symmetry' tour, we used 'That's Not My Name' as the song that we had played on the PA just before we came on.

ChartBlog: Ahh...that kind of works for Keane, doesn't it? Cos that song is all about people feeling misrepresented and devalued, and you've had that ride with the critics and people like me. Do you ever crave a bit more respect?
Richard: I think it took us a long time to get used to the idea that we were never going to be critical darlings. In fact our most recent album got much better reviews that we were expecting, and in a way, at that point it was a shame because we had finally reached the point where we didn't care!

I don't think you can ever claim that it has no effect on you, but definitely I would never have it round the other way. We have fans that travel around the world with us. We got to Australia, there were some British fans that travelled there, and then they showed up in Moscow!

ChartBlog: Just to hear you play the drums, Richard.
Richard: I should probably give the other two a little bit of credit.

ChartBlog: They're not here, they'll never know.
Richard: No...where are they? What are they doing?

ChartBlog: Well Tim's a busy man.
Richard: Yes.

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