2008年官网的乐队背景资料
2010-03-5 新闻报道 enchinya
Keane wound up the Under The Iron Sea tour on August 5, 2007. A couple of charity gigs aside, they then took time out for family, friends and a well-earned breather, not reconvening again until mid-January 2008. It was to prove the right decision. “With the second record we went straight off the road into the studio when we really needed a break and that sowed the seeds for a lot of problems which have been quite well-documented. We learned from that this time.” says Hughes.
Pooling the first batch of ideas in their ‘Barn’ studio in southern England (somewhere that’s provided a bolthole for the last few years) Keane then decamped to Paris in mid-February, having booked a couple of days recording time with Jon Brion, the maverick producer as regarded for his soundtrack work as that with US pop acts. Though Perfect Symmetry would end up being almost entirely self-produced, Brion’s input in that short time proved revelatory. “We looked at hip-hop records where they have multiple producers and you never get that with pop or rock records,” says Hughes. “That was part of the thinking there, so Jon came to Paris to work with us for three days before setting off to work on the soundtrack for the new Charlie Kaufman movie.”
“Jon coming onboard was a massive influence,” says Rice-Oxley. “We were in a good place already but he gave us the confidence of not thinking; of not self-editing. We were saying that the records we love are the records that, as a musician, you think ‘God, it must have been amazing to be at that session; it must have been really fun’ and his theory was you only get that by just going for it. Not worrying what people are going to think, or even what you’re going to think! Let’s face it: the worst that can happen is that it’s an idea that doesn’t work.” Consequently, Brion and Keane soon found themselves rooting around in the back of the studio for obtuse percussion instruments and recording vocals in all manner of peculiar ways. You can hear the results on the stellar You Haven’t Told Me Anything, one of the most musically ‘out there’ tracks the band have produced to date.
From then it was back to the UK for a couple of weeks before decamping to Teldex Studios in Berlin. It’s a lengthy journey… if you undertake it by train. “We all got on the overnight train and that journey becomes part of the experience,” says Hughes. “You get to go to the bar and just hang out. It was really, really enjoyable, fun and different. We’re desperate to make sure we get out there again as soon as we can, by train.”
The city that had previously inspired them so much on tour – not to say produced such landmark albums in Keane’s formative years as U2′s Achtung Baby and Bowie’s Low – provided another vital cog in the process. Teldex, a massive former ballroom, would help root Perfect Symmetry with its sense of tragic grandeur. It was during this initial visit that Rice-Oxley wrote standout first single proper The Lovers Are Losing and Stuart Price lent his deft production hands for three days, most audibly on Again And Again. A very different worker to Brion, Price proved equally inspirational in underlining that when it comes to experimenting in the studio, basically, there are no wrong answers.
Further songs fell into place between The Barn, Berlin and London’s Olympic Studios over the next few months, with ideas coming so thick and fast that the song Pretend That You’re Alone was being written and recorded in one studio while other album tracks were being mixed in the next.
The result is a huge record made up of songs in the tradition of happy-sad classic British bands from The Beatles onwards. Or, as Hughes has it, “songs that are not that happy but that sound happy.” Pop music that’s anything but throwaway.
Some have already detected an Eighties influence on parts of Perfect Symmetry. If that’s the case, Keane say, it’s in the spirit of adventure, boldness and Big Pop of those times, rather than any attempt at retro pastiche.
“The boldness of that time is something that’s really frowned upon today,” notes Rice-Oxley. “We’re living in a time when it’s cool to be ‘Eighties’ in a retro way, but I don’t think that spirit and unashamed energy of great 1980s pop is particularly prevalent today. If this record sounds like that, it’s probably because I associate some of those songs – Pet Shop Boys, Salt N’ Peppa, Mel & Kim – with a fun, innocent time. I absolutely do not care what is considered to be fashionable or cool or tasteful – it’s much more about following our own instincts.”
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