2006年8月Amplifier Magazine #55：疯狂的传言

Amplifier Magazine Issue #55

Mad buzz

Keane isn’t trying to make a sociopolitical statement with their flagrant non-use of guitars. Fate merely led them to the sound that would take them straight to the top and nearly wreck them in the process.

by Brian Baker
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“The magic thing about our band is that we grew up in the same town sort of independently of each other. I mean, we weren’t brothers or family, we were just three guys with a dream,” says Keane vocalist Tom Chaplin during the band’s recent four day New York press junket.

That dream started in earnest in 1996 and ultimately featuring the effective triangulation of Chaplin’s angelically scuffed falsetto, Tim Rice-Oxley’s atmospheric keyboards and Richard Hughes’ tastefully tribal drums. It would lead the band from their humble beginnings in Battle, England to one of the hottest albums of 2004, the wildly acclaimed Hopes and Fears. The success of that effort almost tore the trio apart before they ever got to the visceral brilliance of their sophomore album, Under the Iron Sea. There were plenty of fascinating twists long before that one.

Keane’s principal members met in primary school years before they reconnected as teenagers at Tonbridge, a semi-posh tuitioned public high school geared more toward daily sports than the cerebral activities that Chaplin, Rice-Oxley and Hughes favored. The three misfits, along with guitarist chum Dominic Scott took refuge in a band that they initially dubbed the Lotus Eaters, a name that they jettisoned when they discovered the existence of that very same band. They finally settled on the name Cherry Keane, after a retired neighbor of Chaplin’s who had been supportive of his musical dream when few others had been. In fact, when Ms. Keane passed away, she left her house to Chaplin and his siblings; the proceeds helped finance nearly a year’s worth of musical exploration.

After realizing that a sexual subtext that was being read into their name, they dropped the Cherry and simply became Keane. Not long after, with no label prospects in sight, Scott departed from the band. Although the remaining trio flirted with the idea of replacing him, they decided against it.

“I think the idea of having someone come in and break up that bond, someone who didn’t have that kind of instinctive understanding that we have would have upset things,” says Chaplin. “We did consider it, but at the time Tim weirdly started coming out with a whole bunch of really great songs – the songs that provided the first album – and we just wanted to find a way among the three of us to play them.”

Fate nearly ended Keane before it evolved when Rice-Oxley befriended a fellow keyboardist during his second year at London’s University College. They shared their songs with each other, and suitably impressed, Rice-Oxley’s friend offered him the keyboard spot in his band. With Keane already picking up steam, Rice-Oxley decided against the move; his friend Chris Martin remained at the piano with his band and Coldplay wound up doing fairly well as a result.

One of Keane’s early explorations was an electronic direction that they liked but that didn’t lend itself to their stage presentation. “We were listening to a lot of Daft Punk and Aphex Twin and Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode, so for a while we were this weird, mutant electronic band,” says Chaplin. “A lot of the songs from Hopes and Fears sounded very electronic and beat-y, but the problem was we couldn’t really play any of them. There was no way of getting out onstage and doing it because there was so much wizardry and technology going on.”

Destiny once again played a part when Rice-Oxley discovered a book called Making Music, a collection of essays from musical movers and shakers that detailed their career paths and ideas behind how and why they do what they do. One essay in particular had a profound effect. “The section that, I think George Martin contributed contained this stuff about using a Yamaha CP-70 piano, which is a real piano with pick-ups that run all down the inside of it and you can break it down into two bits and travel with it,” recalls Chaplin. “So Tim got one of these things and he started using it; the moment we plugged it into our little PA in our little rehearsal room in Tim’s mom and dad’s house and started playing the songs with that kind of set-up, we thought, ‘Ah, we’re onto something here.’”

The addition of the Yamaha caused the songs to blossom into minor epics. The possibilities seemed limitless at that point. “It gave the songs a sense of unity and style that they hadn’t had before, and a kind of fluency,” says Chaplin. “Before that, we’d been fitting square pegs into round holes. We’d been trying to turn songs that had been written on a piano into electronic stuff, but what we needed to do was get back to the essence of the song. In an instant, everything became really fluid and exciting and it was easy to play live.”

After watching the fuse burn for six years, Keane experienced the meteoric rise that they had waited so long to achieve. They hit the road with their newly reconfigured songs, which sparked label interest and got them a record deal. The trio went straight from the tour into the studio and made Hopes and Fears, which vaulted them into the limelight in 2004; ironically, their heavy piano sound got them tagged as “the next Coldplay.”

“The thing we feel is that there’s no point in trying to be like another band or copy another band,” says Chaplin. “Obviously, there are influences and things you pick up along the way but there’s no substitute for finding your own path and doing what comes naturally and instinctively and not contriving any of it. It has to be a pure outpouring, an expression of who you are and not a thinly veiled expression of what someone else has already expressed. The next Coldplay, the next U2, the new Radiohead, whatever the comparisons are, we really don’t care. What we feel is that if we keep doing our own thing and we keep forging our own way ahead, then hopefully we’ll just be seen as Keane and as a band like Coldplay or U2 or Radiohead that’s touched a lot of people but have done it in their own way.”

Keane’s success was swift and massive, and they wound up on the cover of many music magazines in the UK. Their first single, “Somewhere Only We Know,” shot to the top of the charts all over the world and became the rousing sing-along portion of every show (it was known in the States primarily because of its use in a Victoria’s Secret commercial, a promotional deal that netted the band no money but huge exposure and better gigs, such as Late Night with David Letterman).

Drummer Richard Hughes remembers the peaks-and-valleys nature of their arduous touring cycle, spikes that are always accentuated by the amount of success a band enjoys. “I think there were amazing highs and amazing contrasts,” says Hughes. “I remember playing Live-8, and coming off stage and having this amazing rush and then having to go off and play some festival in Belgium. We couldn’t even stay for the sing-along bit at the end with Paul McCartney; we had to be on a ferry to play at 3:00 in the afternoon for half an hour in a field in Belgium. Then coming home, getting the bus straight home that night and collapsing in front of the TV. I remember Tom mentioned something about playing at Live-8 and then two days later getting drunk in front of some crappy daytime TV show called Cash in the Attic, where people try to find antiques to sell at auction so they can afford Botox or go on holiday to Spain. It was an incredible time of highs and lows and they were so mixed up. An ongoing highlight for me is seeing the world. We grew up in a small town, and New York is something you saw in films and on TV. And we’re here.”

The small town boys of Keane were much too grounded to fall victim to the standard excesses of rock stardom, but the extraordinary response to Hopes and Fears had an impact on them, particularly after the touring cycle dragged on and on. “We definitely stopped communicating with each other about anything that was niggling us or getting us down, when in the old days we would have confronted those things,” says Chaplin. “All of us bottled stuff up and internalized stuff and there are a few songs on the new record – and they’re not about being in a band or touring the world – that are about three very close people and how you can allow your life and career and the things that fill your life up to take you away from confronting who you are and how you feel and taking an active role in the present. You can be just too busy thinking about everything else then suddenly be confronted by this fear that if you ignore all those things, they can all disappear. I think we felt, as a group of people, that our friendship was disappearing and we were disappearing and we were fearful of that.”

After a single successful album, Keane was falling victim to a common malady; the collapse of a relationship that had thrived in the face of adversity and struggle, yet foundered in the wake of success. The symptoms began showing up during the trio’s arduous circuit across America. “Tim said he’d gone in the back of the bus to write a song and he had absolutely nothing in his head,” Chaplin recalls. “He said he felt numb, like he’d suffocated himself through ignoring everything. And I think during our last year, we all began to feel like that, a bit hollow and numb. And we were trying to get away from that whole ‘Isn’t it tough being in a band?’ thing, but to empathize, I think that’s an experience that a lot of people of our generation seem to be going through. A lot of our friends seem to be struggling to come to terms with the point they’ve come to in their lives and realizing that they’re actually, underneath it all, really quite scared and wanting to switch themselves off.”

By the time Keane had extricated themselves from the road and began the process of considering options for a new album, the inspiration for new songs in part came from the lack of communication the band had been experiencing. Without ever addressing the conflict head-on, Keane’s songs reflected the isolation and fear that they felt could have dissolved them from the inside. And just as the silence had threatened to break them apart, the communication of writing and recording Under the Iron Sea began to knit them back together.

“This album was written in a shorter space of time, much more in kind of snapshots of moments of feeling,” says Chaplin. “I know that’s how Tim wrote; we’d all be talking about stuff and that would inspire an idea or a song, or he’d see something going by or read something in the paper and it was a snapshot way of trying to digest that and explain it in a song.”

The success of the first album could definitely have been a detriment when it came time to chart out the second one. The intimidation of following up massive acceptance with something that satisfies band, label and fans alike has confounded more than a few bands, but that pressure never had an effect on Keane.

“When we finished the first album, we thought, ‘Wow, we’ve got this thing that we’re in charge of…it’s a big responsibility.’ And the way to handle and respect that success was to think, ‘Right, let’s knock it all down and rebuild it in a completely different way.’ The way bands stand the test of time and have some longevity, as far as we’re concerned, is never standing still, never churning out the same record. Otherwise, you’re like Oasis, where each time you’re turning out a paler rehash of what you’ve done before. Obviously, the early Oasis albums are brilliant, but the bands we really admire and respect—the Beatles, but also Depeche Mode, Radiohead, U2 and the Smiths—were bands that evolved or went against the grain or weren’t scared to lose it all, gamble it all, to make something fresh and exciting each time.”

Clearly the band’s grueling tour schedule had an impact on the sonic approach to Under the Iron Sea as well. Having only done one proper tour before recording Hopes and Fears, the band’s learning curve was significant on the circuit that followed.

“We were less conscious of making everything sound polished and in time and more about having an energy and atmosphere,” states Chaplin. “That’s what touring for so long has given us. The songs from Hopes and Fears, when we played them live, sounded more impactful and exciting that they do on the record, and we wanted to make sure we didn’t make that mistake again. Well, not a mistake because we hadn’t been touring much before we recorded Hopes and Fears, but we wanted to make sure that we caught all that, the mad buzz of a Keane show. It had to come out on this record and inform it.”

The darker, more brooding songs of Under the Iron Sea dictated that Keane’s musical solutions would be equally dark and atmospheric. It was clear that the process of making the new album would be incredibly different than the first. “Tim experimented for weeks with new sounds and new ideas to give the record the kind of diversity of color and texture that it has,” says Chaplin. “And Richard, same with the drums. There’s a lot of messed around beats and sounds that have been treated or recorded in a certain way. Same with my vocals. Obviously, there’s the sound of a couple of years of touring in there, but with every song we recorded, I wanted to make the vocals a real performance. Instead of getting in a sterile vocal booth, I would do the vocals in the control room in front of people with the speakers blowing up. I didn’t give two shits if it made it difficult for the guy recording it. It was much more about getting a spirit and performance on the record. All three of us wanted to push ourselves to make every noise and breath and millisecond be a kind of outpouring. We had so much in us that was kind of bubbling away underneath, and it was almost like we had to puke it all up and it generally felt that way.”

For all the thinking that was involved in creating Under the Iron Sea, it’s obvious that Keane was not coldly contemplating the blueprint of the album as a prelude to creating the perfect second Keane album. “Saying that there was a mindset going into it or claiming to have calculated what we do is probably making us sound too clever, because we just kind of make the music we make,” says Hughes. “There’s no real analysis or strategizing or that kind of crap. We made the record that was inside us. When you go back and start analyzing it, I think it’s clear that over the course of two years of touring Hopes and Fears, the way we play and present the songs has evolved. I’ve become a harder hitting drummer and Tim has really developed the way he rocks the piano to make it like an 80-string guitar. I think we’re surprised at how happy and polite [the first album] is, not to talk it down. It was just us two years ago, going into a studio and playing it down as we’d been playing it down live. Since then, we’ve played for two years and Tom’s sung for two years and we’ve evolved as players. And we’ve also gone through a lot during the touring process. We’ve had great times and darker times and going into the studio coincided with some of the darker times and I think that has come out on the record and has served as a way of addressing some of that.”

The darkness of Under the Iron Sea was probably inevitable, as Keane was experiencing the wider world and the vagaries of success for the first time; it’s almost as though the first album should have been titled Hopes while keeping Fears for this one. But even as the band recognizes the differences between the two works, they’re confident in the results of each one. “It’s still the three of us, it’s still great melodies and very heartfelt, emotional songs, but with a whole different twist,” says Chaplin. “It’s a lot darker and a lot more intense. It’s quite psychological and confrontational, I suppose.”

Although Keane had been evolving in substantial ways long before the first album and the subsequent touring, the fundamental shifts of the past two years were far more concentrated than anything they had experienced in their history.

“It was definitely more intense,” says Hughes. “You play three gigs on and have a night off, and during the days you’re doing acoustic shows and talking about music the whole time, compared to when we were working day jobs and only getting to rehearse two or three nights a week. It does sort of accelerate that evolution. It would have taken ten years of struggling in a back street rehearsal room to do the same thing. But it just kind of happened, really, it was almost like a passive thing. It’s part of growing older and seeing more of the world and thinking more about it. We live in pretty dark times and I think that sort of rubbed off on the record.”

And therein lies the wirewalk of the sophomore album: the opportunity to take chances with your sonic personality and grow without alienating the fans that have supported your success. Chaplin and his compatriots are well aware of the pitfalls of this well worn route. “That’s the gamble you take but I think that’s respecting the people who come with you,” he says. “They’ve put their faith in you and you’ve got to go on a journey yourselves and hope that they’ll want to come with you. Personally, I think people who got into the first album will get into the second album for similar reasons. The first album was very honest and real. I think lyrically it was quite underrated; the songs really said a lot to a lot of people. There’s a lot that we needed to say and it’s been said and I hope people will respect that and come on that journey. It’s an important part of being in a band, never standing still. That’s Keane’s motto.”

Not every song on Under the Iron Sea is an examination of the band’s interpersonal breakdown. The album’s first single, “Is It Any Wonder,” takes a broad and rather dim view of the world situation at present. “It’s Tim’s response, to be brutally honest, to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the sense of being powerless,” says Chaplin. “To know whether that was a good idea or whether to believe politicians or journalists or yourself and the kind of resentment and anger that that seems to have caused for a lot of young people and people in general. It’s the feeling of, ‘If I didn’t agree with it, what the fuck am I going to do about it anyway?’ That culture of powerlessness was something we wanted to get to grips with and some of the songs, and that one in particular, are spiky, kind of angry songs about what it’s like to be a member of our generation on Planet Madness.”

For all the darkness that populates Under the Iron Sea, Keane’s experiences over the past two years have been overwhelmingly bright. If their latest songs are detailed with the global and personal dangers of division and isolation, they can be balanced with the solidarity of spirit that was exhibited at every live Keane show since the release of the first album.

“I think the sense of unity with the people who got into the first album was great,” says Chaplin. “That was the way it impacted on us the best. I used to look out, night after night, to see these faces, all over the world, different cultures, different people, different ages, styles, whatever, and every night I had the great privilege of seeing their faces joined in these songs with us, which were essentially written by three guys from a small town in England. That for me was the way the success of the first record manifested itself in a really great way, those moments where you captured the sense that you’d really said something to someone and had an effect on their lives and they were there to sing about it with you. It’s a great feeling.”