2007年3月英国Evening Standard:评价Keane在温布利的表演

Keane remain uncool but hot
By John Aizlewood, Evening Standard 01.03.07

Uncool: but Keane singer Tom Chaplin knows how to work a crowd

Poor Tom Chaplin. Seven months out of rehab, Keane’s singer may have conquered his drugs and drink demons, but he’ll never be cool. And that, of course, is the very point.

Ruddy-faced, with the demeanour of a jolly prefect at a minor public school and a pair of long legs simply destined for corduroy trousers, Chaplin ticked every anti-cool box imaginable. Now with a sensible haircut and slimmer than during his wayward period, he demanded arms and mobile phones be held aloft; he hurtled from one side of the stage to the other; he announced most songs “as your chance to sing along” and he admitted to seeing hoary old Page And Plant at this very venue “15″ years ago. The pair made their Wembley debut 12 years ago, but we’ll let that pass.

And yet, Chaplin’s admirable earnestness, his sheer believability as he sang keyboardist Tim Rice-Oxley’s lyrics (they’re mostly about Chaplin anyway) and his instinctive understanding of how to work a crowd won through, even over such nonsense as the recorded voice of The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon reading WBYeats’s An Irish Airman Foresees-His Death during A Bad Dream and the pubby, pipe’n'slippers ballad We Might As Well Be Strangers. Indeed, once the tempo dropped, they struggled and for all Chaplin alluding to Hamburg Song helping him through dark times, its drear drained the show’s momentum.

More encouragingly, the harder they rocked, the more convincing they were. Whenever the pace was quickened, the rarely lauded oddness of a group without bass or (except for a short acoustic-set) guitars took hold, as did Rice-Oxley’s stentorian keyboards and the perturbed tone of their songs, all of which were sung along to by a crowd cool enough to not care about being uncool. Band and audience deserve each other. Bless.