2008年9月Sunday Herald：清醒振作的Keane

Keane and clean
Craig Mclean talks to the Brit-winning band about drugs, reinvention and being not that posh really

Sep. 28, 2008

http://www.sundayherald.com/arts/arts/display.var.2453758.0.0.php

KEANE WERE in Los Angeles when singer Tom Chaplin got “the call”. It was early 2007, and the caller was Elton John, who wanted to do for the former public schoolboy from Sussex what he had previously done for Robbie Williams and Rufus Wainwright. In short, John wanted to stop Chaplin destroying himself and help prevent him ruining one of the best British pop bands of the noughties: a double-Brit-winning trio who had sold eight million copies of their debut album Hopes And Fears (2004) and 2006′s follow-up Under The Iron Sea. More than most, Elton John knew the dangers of drug-induced flameouts.

“I’m a bit worried about you,” John told Chaplin. The singer had not long emerged from a spell in “celebrity rehab” The Priory. Much to the surprise of those who viewed Keane as polite, middle-class boys in the same musical orbit as goody-two-shoes Coldplay and Travis, Chaplin had, in summer 2006, been revealed as a raging abuser of cocaine and alcohol. The singer had managed – or concealed – his party lifestyle for most of the time Keane had been in the public eye. But two years ago, while Keane were on tour in Japan, the wheels came off.

Without telling anyone, Chaplin abandoned his bandmates, pianist and songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley and drummer Richard Hughes. He flew home alone and checked into rehab.

“The Priory is a bit of a conveyor belt,” says Chaplin now. “It felt like there were a lot of young people there who maybe weren’t supposed to be there, or were there for the wrong reasons. I’m not saying I was there for the wrong reason. Don’t get me wrong: it was a time that helped me to take stock.”

Chaplin later visited Elton John in Las Vegas. “He said, I’m no AA Nazi’,” recalls the frontman with a grin. Chaplin is still appreciative of the “practical” advice Elton John gave him – the touring rock band not being the easiest environment for the recovering addict. “He was more realistic than a lot of people that you come into contact with.”

Clinical treatment, celebrity advice or sheer willpower – something, certainly, has helped fix Tom Chaplin and sort out the tensions within Keane that had contributed to his indulgences and breakdown. The proof: their new album. Perfect Symmetry is brilliant, an exuberant record stuffed with glorious melodies, 1980s sonic squiggles and a bright, encouraging optimism. The band who famously had no guitarist are now rocking out, with guitars. It sounds like they had the time of their lives making it. Stuart Price, one of the album’s producers, remarks that: “They laughed and joked the whole time I was with them. They talked about how it was tense in the past and they’d thought they’d never make it through it. But on this record it was like being at sixth-form college with three guys who were best mates all over again. And on this album they felt like they were on the brim of an adventure.”

In a cavernous former biscuit factory in south London, Keane are rehearsing. Their road crew bustle around, testing the gear that will take them round the world more than once over the coming year. The band rip through recent free, download-only single Spiralling and the title track from Perfect Symmetry. Even before an audience of one (me), their songs already feel like the soundtrack to 2009.

Personally, too, the three band members seem in great form, cracking jokes and bantering. The easy ties that developed during their shared primary and secondary schooldays are easy to see. As Rice-Oxley, 32, says, there aren’t many bands of their young vintage who can claim to have been making music together for two decades.

Chaplin, 29, grew up on the grounds of Vinehall, the Sussex prep school at which his father was headmaster and which Rice-Oxley and Hughes, 32, both attended. It was an “idyllic” out-of-hours existence of running around playing football and cricket. In summer holidays he, Hughes and Rice-Oxley set up their musical kit in the school’s theatre and clanged away at Beatles, Simon And Garfunkel and Pet Shop Boys songs.

Chaplin has wanted to be a performer for as long as he can remember. “Even in nursery school, aged four to six, I was doing plays and stuff,” he recalls, “and I always wanted to be the lead role.” For him, those early musical sessions with his friends were magical. “There was definitely a sense that somehow it was already written that this band is what we were gonna do,” he says.

As university students, they began to take the band more seriously, slumming around the London pub-gig circuit, where they often shared a bill with fellow newcomers Coldplay. At one point, Rice-Oxley was asked by university chum Chris Martin to join his band. They are still friends.

“I think we definitely both have a similar devotion to what we do,” says Rice-Oxley, who is the son of two doctors.

“I have a huge amount of respect for Chris. We definitely have a bond that comes from having started out together, and coming up through playing crappy gigs together to no people. Chris just works really hard and so do I. For some people that’s not really considered to be cool,” he adds with a not-bothered shrug, “and it should be much more slapdash.”

In 2003 Keane signed a record deal. They were an instant success, with Hopes And Fears entering the album charts at number one. Keen to “strike while the iron was hot”, the band went straight into the studio after finishing the heavy schedule of the Hopes And Fears worldwide tour.

That, they all now admit, was a mistake. Success and workloads had taken their toll. Rice-Oxley was butting heads with Hughes, and Chaplin was struggling to cope with the vertiginous effects of being in the spotlight.

“One of the things I found very difficult to reconcile was the notion of being famous,” concedes the singer. “I thought that was gonna be something else. I didn’t really enjoy it. I certainly felt there was an intrusion, even though we’ve never been a publicity hungry band in the sense of falling out of clubs or making controversial statements. But it still felt like there was a prying eye on you. Not just that, but it was sometimes very harsh and very unfair. And quite cruel. And you’ve got no answer.”

Indeed, Keane were accused both of being silver-spoon-in-the-mouth public schoolboys, and of being craven careerists who had consulted image consultants to give them an identifiable “look”.

“And the truth of it is we’re neither,” insists Chaplin. “I really think the only remnant of my public school upbringing is my accent” – which, for the record, isn’t that posh – “and the fact that we all happened to meet there. And pretty much all of my friends, including my girlfriend, are working-class and just normal people. I don’t live in some weird clique.”

Or a castle.

“Yeah, exactly!” laughs this good-natured, ruddy-faced chap. “I don’t! I live in the middle of nowhere in Sussex in a little cottage. I like my garden and the natural world and the simplicity of those things. I do like to think, especially these days, that I am a genuine and real person. And I hate the notion that it can be written about you that somehow what you do is fabricated or fake. Or you just got it because you paid for it somehow, which is nonsense. Starting out, we didn’t have a lifestyle propped up by our parents or anything. We struck out on our own, and in many respects we’re the same as any other band who’ve made it from nothing. And I do resent people saying that we aren’t.

“We worked our arses off to get to being a successful band,” he continues. “And we spent a lot of time doing some pretty mind-numbingly boring and soul-destroying stuff to actually give us the chance to make Hopes And Fears.”

But that boring and soul-destroying stuff drove a wedge between the three members of Keane.

Chaplin may say he didn’t like becoming famous, but to the more reserved Rice-Oxley it seemed like the frontman lapped up his new rock star status. This widening gulf found form in the embittered and personal lyrics Rice-Oxley wrote for Under The Iron Sea. In Hamburg Song, he gave Chaplin this line to sing: “Fool, I wonder if you know yourself at all?”

Was Rice-Oxley apprehensive when he handed Chaplin Hamburg Song for the first time?

“I suppose a little, yeah,” the writer says, his teeth actually gritted. He concedes that he didn’t stop to wonder if he was being too cruel to his lifelong chum. “But I have the dangerous attitude that I’m prepared to sacrifice pretty much anything in the course of making music that really transports me. And I don’t think I’d thought about it enough. Which in a way is kind of indicative of what the problem was. Maybe I should have thought, well, is it really worth sacrificing? You know, putting ourselves through this much pain just for the sake of music.”

Ask Chaplin about singing the occasionally snarky songs on Under The Iron Sea and he replies bullishly: “There’s a ring about those songs that means I felt almost as qualified to sing them back to Tim. That was the kind of relationship we had at that point. We had this great bond and this great trust, and it was really being tested. Although he was probably right in a lot of the things he wrote in those songs, it nevertheless didn’t necessarily feel unnatural to be singing them back to him.”

Little wonder, perhaps, that Chaplin was increasingly more interested in escaping through getting high. But while promoting Under The Iron Sea his night-time habits started getting in the way of the band’s work. “He’s gotten into oysters a lot lately,” explained Rice-Oxley in June 2006 to one reporter, after the singer failed to show for an interview. “Maybe he’s had a bad oyster.”

Chaplin’s apparent illness was also jeopardising a Keane MTV special due to be filmed in Madrid. But eventually Chaplin appeared. As recounted in the printed article: “Let me guess – oysters?” asked Rice-Oxley. “Monkfish,” replied Chaplin.

I ask the singer about this: how his wayward practices forced his friends to lie in public to cover for him. “I feel sad about them, undoubtedly,” he begins hesitantly. “And a certain sense of shame. “

“Well,” he says, clearing his throat, “a very real sense of shame and guilt when I think about them. But I think it’s very apparent from the new record that we’ve taken a lot of very positive things out of very negative things. I’m not saying that any of it’s good. But it’s certainly reality. And it’s not just something that happens to rock stars. Countless families can get torn apart by the mistakes that they make.” he says.

“It tests their strength of character and will. And in our case I feel we have come back stronger than ever – and actually with almost a puerile sense of fun about everything.”

He’s not wrong. Perfect Symmetry is a fantastic album, and an uplifting one. The Lovers Are Losing, the first commercial single, echoes the skyscraping glory of David Bowie’s Heroes, and there are at least another four hit singles in waiting. It’s an album set to burst into even more vigorous life when Keane start touring the world’s arenas next year.

So how is Tom Chaplin preparing for another schlep round the world? Is he confident he won’t slip back into his bad old ways?

“Well,” the singer replies with a shrug and a smile, “I don’t drink on tour. It would just be a disaster. Well, it wouldn’t necessarily be a disaster but certainly, to put on a good show, you can’t be like that. When touring starts I try and become as Zen as possible. I wouldn’t describe myself as a spiritual person, but I try and feel as balanced as possible. Lots of exercise. Lots of healthiness. And approach every gig with a sense of professionalism. And actually, as a result, you enjoy it so much more.”