2006年10月Malay Mail 访问报道：从铁海中崛起

Cover story: Rising above the iron sea

-by Adly Syairi Ramly –

05, Oct.

Keane exorcises their demons on under the iron sea as exclusively told to us by drummer Richard Hughes.

In rock music, there’s this thing called ‘a difficult album’– the type of album that was recorded with much difficulty, an album in which the recording could break a band apart.

The reasons varies – mounting pressures from the media and record labels; the pressure to outdo their previous work; over-indulgence of the success of the previous album, ego trips and the list is endless.

The good thing is, in most cases that is; if a band survived the gruelling process of recording the album, these difficult albums would turn up to become their best or maybe their greatest. And that would probably best to describe British guitar-less trio, Keane, second album Under The Iron Sea.

As much publicised – Tim Rice-Oxley (keyboards/piano); Tom Chaplin (vocals); and Richard Hughes (drums) – almost broke up while working on the follow up of their five million copies selling debut, Hopes and Fears. Released back in 2004, the album transformed the band from being an indie staple into worldwide superstars.

It wasn’t an easy process though – the band had to pack their bags and hit the road for a steady two years.

Being away from home, performing the same song again and again in front of different people almost every other day, answering the same questions from different curious media, even the toughest nut would crack under such situation.

By the time they were supposed to start work for Under The Iron Sea late last year, the three were clearly battered and bruised. Things were pretty messy – it was reported that Rice-Oxley and Hughes weren’t communicating with Chaplin at all.

As a matter of fact, both Rice-Oxley and Hughes went to producer Andy Green October last year and told him that they feared Keane is over.

Fast-forward to late June this year, the fear was proven unfounded.

After much trouble, the band has successfully completed their second album, and what kind of album it was. With richer instrumentation, bigger sound, endless piano’s sound manipulating and torturous, almost confessional lyrics, Under The Iron Sea is probably their best work to date. As a testament to that, it debuted at No. 4 in the US Billboard 200 chart, 169 places higher than Hopes And Fears.

It looks like the band have exorcised their demon and is happy again to do what they love the most – making and performing their music. Or have they? Thanks to Universal Music Malaysia, Buzz had the opportunity to speak to drummer Richard Hughes in person to find out more when the band was in Bangkok recently.

The success of hopes and fears – what kind of creative pressure did it had on you guys especially in working on under the iron sea?

We’ve always been very ambitious as a unit and we’ve always looked up to bands that develop their sound. For instance how The Beatles transformed themselves from being like a boy band to a band that wants to change the world or Radiohead, from being a sort of archetypal angsty guitar band into this sort of experimental electronic outfit. We’ve always wanted to do that and that’s the sort of pressure we put onto ourselves while making this record. Nothing else.

In article written by vh1, tim was quoted saying that the band almost broke up while working on the album. what actually happened?

Yeah, we did nearly break up. We didn’t really know what’s really going on. There were days when one of us wouldn’t come to the studio and wouldn’t even tell the others. We just kind of lost our way as friends. Luckily, making a record turned out to be the best way for us to work things out. It was a difficult time but it made through a good record, I think.

The album was described as lyrically and sonically bleak. i think it’s kind of uplifting in a way. what say you?

I think it’s definitely an album that asks a lot of questions, the type that if not asked, they’ll sort of sit at the back of your head. So, you got to ask the difficult questions in order to be able to get over them. It’s not a happy album. We weren’t happy when we were making it but we’re very proud of it. It’s definitely pretty bleak.

There were some guitar-like sounding bits made by tim’s piano on this album. is it safe to say that by achieving that, keane has ruled out the guitar in the band’s music?

No, we don’t rule anything out. I play the drums and I don’t rule using the drum machine if we require it. There’s nothing that we won’t use in the pursuit of making interesting sound. For instance, some of the experimentation we did was to put towels across the strings of Tim’s piano. We also used a lot of guitar equipment like pedals and amplifiers just to see what it sounded like. It’s cool because it’s a piano and it sounds different even though he’s using guitar equipment. It sounded like a piano that’s been twisted and messed up. To answer your question, we’ll use whatever, anything…

Do you consider that – not having a guitar – as one of the uniqueness about the band?

Yeah. Definitely is something that makes what we are but it’s not a decision like a painter who decides never to use brushes (laughs).

You toured with u2, did bono ever give you any advice?

Not just Bono actually, the whole band was very welcoming and friendly too. One of the advice Bono gave us was about how important it is to get the song sequence in an album correctly. He said, you could take 10 songs and just play them in a random order, but if really think about the order, you can actually make the whole thing better. We definitely tried that with this album. Album opener, Atlantic, sort of takes you into this weird world and you only kind of come up at the end with The Frog Prince. Yeah, we definitely took his advice to our hearts.

Speaking of the frog prince, were you referring to anyone in particular?

Yes, but I’m not going to tell you who. It’s a singer in a band who decided that he would say a lot of things to us. Music for me is the only thing in the world that can be entirely positive. It’s only negative if you start being negative. The message of the song is to actually be true and honest to yourself rather than trying to get into headlines by bad-mouthing another band which is easy to do. Some people’s entire career was built upon it and it’s just not an attitude that we really relate to.

You were nominated at this year’s grammy’s and the album debuted at no.4 on the billboard 200, looks like america has accepted keane with open hands. how surprising was it for you? after all, it’s pretty hard for british band to break into america?

It is hard for a British band to do well in America. Rock ‘n’ roll music was invented in America and it’s been exported to the world ever since. However, if you go back to America with something a little bit different, I’ll give you an advantage. I think that was some of the reasons why America has accepted our music. Also we’ve toured there regularly and spent a lot of time there. I think some bands just can’t be bothered because it’s huge. You can tour the UK basically in two-weeks but you couldn’t tour Texas in two weeks. As for the Grammy nomination, you don’t join a band in order to try and get a Grammy nomination but if you’re in a band and you do, it’s an amazing bonus, especially being a British band.

The Comparison Of The Band To Coldplay. What’s Your Take On That?

Well, it’s just somebody writing something because they haven’t spent any time trying to think up something better to write. It’s just a really lazy comparison. That’s not meant as a criticism to Coldplay but I think there are many much more appropriate bands to compare us to or so accuse us of ripping off (laughs). That’s just my opinion. No offence but I don’t really read what people write about us. People can compare us to Black Sabbath for all I care (laughs).

The music video, crystal ball. if you were the guy in the video clip, what would you do?

I think it’s a great video that sort of encapsulates the emotional madness and chaos that was going on in our heads when we were making the record. That song is definitely about feeling like the whole world is falling to pieces around you and you’re standing in the middle screaming and no one’s noticing. I don’t know what I’ll do if I was Giovanni Ribisi [the actor in the video] in that. I think I would end up like him. Maybe we should make a sequel.

Before you were small, and now big; how do you response to success?

I think the best way to response to it is to just enjoy what we are doing. I think it’s something we didn’t do when we were touring in support of Hopes and Fears. We were always thinking about the next thing rather than enjoying the amazing things we were doing and that obviously led to many problems. I think we’re trying to just care about each other a bit more this time. Success is great and weird at the same time. Heck, we’re in Bangkok and about to play the biggest Keane’s show we’ve ever done. It’s a very strange life but it’s very f***ing cool.

Why did you choose thailand to be your first destination to promote the new album in Southeast asia?

Our manager sort of said, ‘Do you want to go and play in Thailand?’ I don’t know how he arrived at deciding Thailand but we said ‘Yeah! Great!’ The other day we were talking about how cool it would be to actually go on a proper tour in this part of the world for a couple of weeks. Bangkok is a start so hopefully there’ll be more gigs for us here.