2006年5月Q Magazine对Keane的采访报道

Q MAGAZINE
May 28 2006

TOM CHAPLIN HAS never thought of himself as a murderer. But, last October, there it was: the sudden rage to kill Bono. Keane were riding high on the five-million- selling success of their debut album, Hopes & Fears. Supporting U2 in America, Chaplin found himself backstage in the catering area of the venue in Boston getting “the talk” from the U2 frontman. Something about how premium-rate credit-card booking lines bring in affluent, but dull corporate audiences. There must always be a cheapo seat allocation for those hungry to rock, he ordered.

Chaplin nodded in agreement but became fixated by a set of carving knives laid out on a table next to them. “The thought just came to me. I’ll kill Bono. Just like that. Like when you hear a Tube train approaching and get the urge to jump. It was an ego thing. I thought, I could just kill him now. Bono could die at my hands.”

At 2am in the bar in New York’s SoHo district the codes and conventions which keep a trio of “nice young men” on message are beginning to unravel. It’s an unaccustomed rock scenario: the Keane bar crawl. This is the third stop on a well-mannered, slightly zig-zagging mini binge. “I think we have all learnt a little about our inner psychopath in the last two years,” slurs keyboard player Tim Rice-Oxley, as more fancy import beers arrive. “I know I’ve been in touch with mine,” adds singer Tom Chaplin.

Even so, drinking with Keane is civilised fun. Rice-Oxley is quietly cerebral but never less than charming. Drummer Richard Hughes quips most unguardedly: he is particularly funny about Bono and Chris and Gwyneth turning up at Keane’s dressing-room door asking if it was OK to come in. “You’d never say, No Piss off, I’m watching a bit of telly. You want to say, do what you like. It’s your f***ing tour, mate.”

Chaplin is fun too, but as the drink takes hold he has a few old scores to settle. In July 2005 the Guardian ran a story suggesting the band had visited a brand consultant to spruce up their appeal. “First we’re toffs, and clueless and not how a rock band should be, and then they’re suggesting we’ re like some bunch of idiots from Pop Idol. Total bollocks.”

It’s true that, for some people, Keane do not rock, but others have been responding to them on a special “psycho” frequency for some time. Earlier this year, Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh declared himself a fan and has stepped forward to make his video-directing debut for new song Atlantic. And then, last year in Los Angeles, they got a dinner invitation from Bret Easton Ellis. The author of American Pscho cited Somewhere Only We Know as a personal favourite. Ellis, too, is tentatively slated to work on a forthcoming video.

“I think a lot of people who like the band are weirdos, twisted deviants, but very unhip,” says Welsh. “Bret’s probably tapped into that sense of them too. As a novelist you’re always in flight from what is consciously hip. Maybe I empathise because I’ve had the opposite criticism: not having been considered public school or Oxbridge enough for literature. But they are quite posh cunts, though.”
Making the video was a learning experience for both parties. While Welsh barked directions into his bullhorn on a South Coast beach, a girl with a large white poodle wandered on set. “I shouted, Get that dozy whore and her scabby dog off the fuckin’ beach!” remembers Welsh. It was Chaplin’s girlfriend Nat and her pet. “He was a great sport, as was his bird,” he adds.

Six months ago, Keane were in disarray. After seven years of struggle, Hopes & Fears gave them success on a scale they’d long ago stopped believing possible. But following it up was proving another matter altogether. During sessions for the new album Under the Iron Sea. Rice-Oxley and Hughes faught in the study and Chaplin simply disappeared. “He didn’t want to be in Keane any more,” says Rice-Oxley. “Everyone in the band was being led by their inner nutcase.”

Keane’s disintegrations began last summer with Rice-Oxley stranded on a roof terrace bar of a five-star hotel in Nice, fuming. The band were on the road with U2. Throughout the tour, they’d watch Bono juggle various briefs as priest, singer and politician with awe. Meanwhile, their singer was beginning to unravel under the pressures of new fame. Rice-Oxley and Chaplin had been out for a meal and some drinks to examine what was wrong. It was exquisite, top-dollar fare. There they reminded themselves, this was what all bands wanted and they should relish it. They walked back to the hotel and Rice-Oxley suggested a nightcap in the hotel ’s chintzy rooftop bar. Chaplin didn’t show up. He went out and got pissed with the road crew instead. “It sounds stupid now, but I was really upset,” says Rice-Oxley. “I thought we were patching things up and it felt like he didn’t give a s*** about me.”

By November, when they convened at Heliocentric studios in East Sussex, where Hopes & Fears had been recorded, they simply weren’t communicating at all. “I was having a real low,” says Tom Chaplin. “I’d done Live 8 and Madison Square Garden and I’ll readily admit I wasn’t too sure how to handle it. Whilst I was ruminating on my ego, Tim was tying to inspire us to make a great album.”

“I felt intense pressure,” says Rice-Oxley. “There was no violence, but we were just simmering and boiling over. Or just being incredibly f***ing moody. Me and Richard were fighting because I told him what he was doing was not good enough. Tom just didn’t want to be in the band anymore.”

Two weeks into the sessions while recording a song called Crystal Ball, Rice-Oxley couldn’t get Chaplin on the phone. When they eventually spoke, Chaplin wouldn’t come out of his house. Rice-Oxley walked out, got into his VW and drove the hour to Tunbridge Wells. “I shut the front door and thought, That’s it. We’re finished. A really, really terrifying thought.”

IN JERRY’S DINER on Prince Street, Rice-Oxley stands me a gigantic breakfast. He loves New York and its sense of “permission”. Sometimes the city affords new freedoms even when you are asleep. Last night he dreamt he had cut out someone’s intestines and was running through a forest waving them. “I’ve got no idea who or what or why,” he says “I never have dreams like that. ”

Once seated, it’s funny how he fails to notice diner staff checking him our. The waitress pours orange juice into his coffee and squirts ketchup over the napkins as her eyes bore into him.

Though he’s charm personified, he lurks beneath thick protective layers of reserve. His slate-blue eyes avoid contact. Ask for elaboration on a point and his breathing becomes laboured and heavy, and his manner forlorn, as though this was a falsely accused man of quiet honour and decency facing the 10th hour of brutal interrogation.

Conversational riffs are qualifed by an “if that makes any sense whatsoever” or “if that isn’ t an utterly silly thing to say”. Under duress, he fondles his wedding ring like Prince Charles. But he’s fearfully aware of all of this. New track Leaving so Soon? Is about how people at parties get terrified or Rice-Oxley’s diffidence and head for the bar. “I’ d really like to be one of those guys everyone thinks is a good bloke,” he says, and waves of sadness come off him. Since Hopes & Fears was released, Chaplin’s tentative Bono crouches and Freddie Mercury stage runs have seen him evolve into a proper rock star. But he is, of course, singing Rice-Oxley’s songs and words. “I do get envious,” admits Rice-Oxley. “I get frustrated. I really think Tom is the best singer of his generation. But, yes, part of me wishes I could do that. Part of me wonders where the confidence comes from to perform.”

When he was young, Rice-Oxley says he was boisterous, a real loudmouth. Aged 14, he mad a conscious decision to shut up, At the fee-paying Tonbridge School you have to watch your step. It’s a “jock” environment. Sporting prowess exalted. Rice-Oxley’s introspection and love of the Pet Shop Boys were not.

This duality of his and Chaplin’s relationship – the brooding muse and theatrical frontman – makes Keane work. But super-heated by their sudden success it’s a combination that has caused jealously and conflict too.

Originally Rice-Oxley, Hughes and guitarist Dominic Scott formed the core of the band. Then Chaplin, a contemporary friend from school, offered his services. Chaplin and Rice -Oxley had known each other since they were children. Their mothers had become friends after Tom Chaplin and Tim’s younger brother, also Tom, were born almost simultaneously. Chaplin was three years younger, brash and cocky. No wanted him to join. “I wasn’t sure if he’d fit in,” says Rice-Oxley. “My attitude was, Do you really want to give the loudest, most annoying bloke you know a bloody microphone?” says Hughes. But Chaplin had an extraordinary voice.

In 2001 Scott left, thinking success would never come. If you’ ve ever wondered where the melancholia of Bedshaped and We Might As Well Be Strangers from Hopes & Fears came from, it was in part Rice-Oxley’s feelings that his friends and peers were moving on while his band was crumbling. Effectively Rice-Oxley took over. Famously, there would be no more guitars. His keyboards would be the core of all the music. But still it was getting late in the day. After Tonbridge, Rice-Oxley had attended UCL and watched college mate Christ Martin’s band Coldplay rise from nowhere. He’d even turned down an offer to join. It seemed inconceivable that lightning could strike twice in the same place. But when Somewhere Only We Know as released early in 2004, it did. When channelled through his keyboard, Rice-Oxley’s intensity can have an extraordinary effect. On the first day recording for the new album he was the only one in the studio. He plugged in his keyboard and a couple of effects pedals he had bought in junk shops on their American tour. He began playing. What emerged was an electronic overture of impending apocalypse: Keane’s first instrumental, The Iron Sea. But also, Rice-Oxley’s wordless intensity set to music. Undoubtedly it is Rice-Oxley who drives the band on. But what make him an artist means he can never be a star. In February Keane were nominated as Best New Artist at the Grammys. Backstage, Rice-Oxley confronted a triangular arrangement of icons: Bono, Bruce Springsteen, and Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong swigging a beer each. Rice-Oxley was paralysed. “It didn’t seem plausible to say hello as an equal,” he says. Then Tom Chaplin arrived and strode into the megastar huddle.

“THAT ENCAPSULATES THE difference between me and Tim,” says Chaplin. “I have a bigger ego, I thought, f*** it, I’m in a band. I’ll say hello. What’s the worst that could happen? I’m quite prepared to make a tit of myself.”

If Rice-Oxley is all fret and preoccupation, Chaplin is puppyish sunny abandon. He bounds over at Chung King studios in New York’s TriBeCa, where he ahs just sworn his way through an abortive take of a B-side called Maybe I Could Change. It was in the very same building that LL Cool J and Run-DMC laid down their early rap blueprints.

The accoutrements of rock are subtly apparent: tight black jeans, winkle-picker shoes, “rock” sunglasses. Despite some stubble there’s no way of sexing up that ruddy, cheeky face that makes you want to ruffle his hair and hand him and ice-cream cornet. Last night, he says, he had a dream in black and white that he was teaching The Beatles how to write songs. “I’m coming to terms with being an egomaniac,” he laughs.

Chaplin effervesces with the spirit of a young man whose edges have not been worn down, while Hughes and Rice-Oxley are more meditative, perhaps even wearied. Holiday options tell their own story. Rice-Oxley recently went to the First World War battlefields of Belgium and France to ruminate on the nature of mechanised slaughter, while the singer has just booked himself and his girlfriend a holiday to New Zealand to stay with a mate who used to sell the band’s T-shirts. Chaplin is going to turn up unannounced. “He’d better f***ing well be in!” he chuckles.

He does admit, however, that he’s struggled with his role as Keane’s public face. He accepts the harsh judgements on new track Broken Toy, in which Rice-Oxley expresses his feelings about Chaplin discarding him during Keane’s sudden triumph. “It went to my head. I didn’t take enough care of those I love and who love me. I let my ego get the better of me.”

He’s not proud either of what money did to him. At 27 he’d become a multi-millionaire rock star. He could buy expensive gifts, lavish nice trips on people. But he did it thinking he didn’t really need to be there for them any more. The example he gives is moving: his father had been doing volunteer work in Rwanda. Chaplin flew him to New York to see Keane perform with U2 at Madison Square Garden. “And then I hardly saw him. I didn’t make time. I did the extravagant thing but in the end, that counts for nothing. You can’t buy people off. I regret that.”

It’s clear that Rice-Oxley felt ill-treated, too. On Hamburg Song, a choker of a ballad, he grapples with the difference between the two men: “I don’t want to be adored / Don’t want to be first in line, or make myself heard”, before sticking the boo in with, “Fool, I wonder if you know yourself at all”. “I don’t have a problem singing those worlds,” says Chaplin., “Tim’s being honest. And I think as a band that’s what people like about us. We expose real feelings.”

IT WOULD BE easy to see Rice-Oxley and Chaplin as the brooding keyboard wizard and the cocky angel-faced star with Hughes caught in-between. But the drummer is discreetly assertive. At Chung King there is a bread in recording for a band conference on the album artwork. Under the Iron Sea is decorated with dreamlike wood-block prints: horses and soldiers by Finnish artist Sanna Annuka Smith. Some horses images have been sent over for approval. You get the feeling Rice-Oxley would like to listen to several carefully balanced arguments from a committee of art experts before a decision is made. Hughes gets testy: “Any horse. Choose the horse. I’m easy, horse-wise. Then we can get on, can’t we?”

But there is no such indecision when it comes to skewering Keane’s enemies on Under the Iron Sea. Is It Any Wonder? Is about their disaffection with Tony Blair. A Bad Dream – partly inspired by WE Yeats’s an Irish Airman Forsees His Death – is about war. Ex-army officer James Blunt is another target. Showing no public school solidarity, Blunt had a go at them in The Sun, though he later came back to apologise backstage at a festival. “I can’t say we’ve had Back to Bedlam on much on the tourbus.” Smiles Chaplin lethally. He apparently does a good impression of the minstrel solder, but declines tonight.

Under the Iron Sea will make Keane a truly global act, and perhaps Chris Martin will feel like he joined the wrong band at college. But will the trio stand it? Egos will have to be managed, or at least new outlets found: next year Chaplin will begin work on a solo album. Rice-Oxley says he might produce. Hughes will probably drum. But it won’t be a Keane album. “We know what Keane is,” says Chaplin. “My solo album will have a different personality.” And as for Rice-Oxley and Chaplin’s artist / rock star schism, they are under no illusions. “I don’t know if we will survive. I don’t know if we’ll make another album,” says Rice-Oxley. “We started this band because we were outsiders at school. Then we were outsiders in the music business. If we can’t stick together we’re fucked.”

Hughes things the solution is simple. “More beer. When Tim wants to disappear to write a song and Tom wants to head off to a party we just have to remember: us first. Go to a bar. Stick together. This is what we always wanted.”