2006年6月Sunday Times:是希望，不是恐惧

Sunday Times：Hopes, Not Fears
June 11, 2006

Hopes, not fears
On the eve of that ‘difficult’ second album, Keane are keeping their cool. By Dan Cairns

You could go and make a sandwich, or hang out a wash, in one of Tim Rice-Oxley’s pauses. Ask him a question and his eyes search for a distant focal point — and, slowly, an answer begins to for m on his lips. The 30- year-old keyboardist and songwriter in Keane was the guiding force behind the Sussex trio’s debut album, Hopes and Fears, which sold 5.2m copies worldwide. But he is as cursed with shyness (occasionally, it has to be said, of the attention-seeking variety) as he is blessed with the ability to write songs that lodge, immovably, in your brain.
“Look,” he says at one point, “I don’t sit here thinking, what can I not say? It just takes a long time for the words to get from my brain to my mouth.”

Communication skills have been both Keane’s saviour and the cause of their near downfall. On a global scale, songs such as Everybody’s Changing and Somewhere Only We Know reached the parts most other bands fail to reach. Not bad for three shy retirers from public school who have always felt, says the singer, Tom Chaplin, that: “If we were having a drink with someone at a bar, they were probably wishing they could move on to the next person.”

But on a personal level, the fact that Rice-Oxley, Chaplin and the drummer, Richard Hughes, had been friends since childhood counted for little when what the keyboardist calls the “huge acceleration of fame and success” swept them up in 2004. They ended that year as Britain’s biggest-selling-album band, and spent the next six months on the road. When they reconvened to record their follow- up, they were barely speaking. They had, they say, mislaid the ability to do so. On Hamburg Song, a track from Keane’s new album, Under the Iron Sea, Chaplin sings: “I don’t want to be adored/ Don’t want to be the first in line, or make myself heard. ”

The words are sung by Chaplin, of course, but they were written by Rice-Oxley, and are addressed to the singer and his reaction to fame. “We suddenly had money and adulation,” says Chaplin, “and it affected my ego in a bad way. I began to think I could get away with ignoring Richard and Tim, that I had it all. We were living parallel lives.” We are not, it should be said, talking rock’n’roll debauchery here. That most overrated and least creative of rock’s occupational hazards has never been Keane’s thing.

When, after years of getting nowhere, they suddenly broke through in 2003, they were sensitive about this. People called them Coldplay lite, three toff dilettantes who made music to yak over or do the ironing to. Multiplatinum album sales have allowed them to (begin to) see the funny side. Thus, you listen to a drawn-out anecdote from Hughes about a recent gig in Amsterdam, delivered in a John Major-like, tea-at-the- vicarage voice, and initially find it hard to believe he is the drummer in a world-famous band. Describing being pelted — with what? Knickers? Prophylactics? No, chewing gum — during the concert, he adds, with a tiny but telling twinkle in his eye. “And they subsequently threw a beer mat. And they’d written on it, ‘Sorry about the chewing gum.’” Keane’s fans are as polite as the band they follow.

The manner in which Keane have been treated, however — adored when they released their first single on the indie label Fierce Panda, derided when they dared to sell a lot of albums — illustrates one of the least lovely aspects of the pop world. We have, all of us, at one time or another, chased bandwagons; caught and bought into the latest trend, always at the expense of other acts. But Keane seem to have come in for special treatment. Invariably compared to Coldplay, they strike me as much more like a-ha, who were reviled as purveyors of synthetic, emotion-free pap in their heyday, and are now hailed as masters of complex, yearning pop. The tunes that pour out of Rice-Oxley have the sort of similarly catchy melodies that, after three months of saturation play in Starbucks, will set our teeth on edge, but which, 10 years hence, we will probably be hailing as indispensable.

“Look, we feel like that, too,” says Hughes. “There was a point when you couldn’t watch any television channel without a Keane song being used. But you can’t control it, you can’t stop Ground Force from using your song.”

Chaplin says he isn’t bothered by the criticism. Like Rice-Oxley, he’s comfortably over 6ft, and still looks like a loping, ungainly schoolboy in the final stages of a teenage growth spurt. Yes, this unlikely front man is a touch chubby in the cheek department. But excess facial puppy fat has been allowed to get in the way of the fact that he is also the owner of one of the most remarkable and affecting voices in British pop.

“I just let it wash over me,” he claims, but then adds: “Or maybe I internalise it, and some day I’m just going to burst. When it’s personal, or people are slagging off our albums, I hate that: ‘Oh, Keane are wimpy’, or ‘boring’. But you get into a band because you feel like a bit of a geek.” As for the public-school slurs, he continues, it’s not as if they have ever attempted to obscure their background. “I remember seeing Chris Martin on television, and thinking, if I ever get on TV, I’m not going to start dropping my Ts and Gs. It would be like cutting out a piece of who you are just to please other people.”

Often characterised as the brooding, obsessive spider at the centre of Keane’s web, Rice-Oxley has reacted to his debut record’s success not by writing a deathly-dull album about the woes of life on a tour bus, but by going even further into himself. The songs on Under the Iron Sea are, lyrically, preoccupied with familiar Keane dilemmas: the search for meaning, love, escape, friendship, an antidote to loneliness and isolation. But their current single, Is It Any Wonder?, can also be read as an attack on Blair and his inglorious war, as can The Frog Prince. Keane have always tilled the middle ground between the personal and the political. Yet if any band knows how those twin spheres can morph into one another, it’s this one. “We’re still trying to make sense of the past two years,” admits Rice-Oxley. “How did we get into such a mess?” Recent second albums by huge-selling first-timers (the Darkness, Ms Dynamite and Jamie Cullum among them) have failed to score. Record-buyers are behaving unpredictably. Is Under the Iron Sea heading the same way? Some have noted the album’s darker soundscapes, the introduction of guitars (or, rather, keyboards treated to sound like guitars), the harder-edged production. The band don’t seem concerned. Their label bosses are probably veering between visions of glory and blind panic. But it will surely take a miracle to keep tracks such as Hamburg Song, Crystal Ball and Bad Dream from the top of the charts.

“If you’re going to be good at this,” says Rice-Oxley — and it is clear that this is meant rhetorically — “the chances are you’re going to be a very egotistical person. But at the same time, of all the jobs you could do, it’s probably one of the ones where you need to be most thick-skinned.” Another chasmic pause. “So you’re screwed either way.” Keane, then. Be brave: love them now, not later. You know you want to. And, polite to a fault, they’ll say “thank you” if you do.