2006年7月The Sydney Morning Herald: 地狱之声

SOUNDS LIKE HELL
Bernard Zuel
July 1, 2006

Imagine waking up one morning as Tim Rice-Oxley, songwriter for English trio Keane. Your band sells more than 5 million copies of its debut album, Hopes and Fears, proving that a three-piece band of voice, piano and drums is not an oddity but a viable entity; perhaps, with your sweeping choruses and every-man-has-a-heart lyrics, the “new Coldplay”, even. You tour the world and seem to be living every Boy’s Own Annual fantasy.

Then your second album, Under the Iron Sea, arrives full of songs about anger, bitterness and mistrust with a harder musical edge at odds with your cherubic image.

It becomes clear that some of the lyrics you wrote for your singer – your boyhood friend – to sing, such as “I can’t turn it on / turn it off like you now / No I’m not like you now”, are about him.

You appear on a magazine cover with the headline “To Hell and Back”, your drummer confesses you wanted to kill each other and you tell anyone who asks that “the emotional numbness, nihilism and simmering violence of American Psycho” had been an influence on your new album.

Jeez, Tim, what kind of songs would you have written if you had a bad couple of years? The tall, quietly spoken pianist-songwriter stumbles and mumbles for a while, clearly uncomfortable. “All the success and the sudden acceleration of our lives that you suddenly find yourself living life in such a different way, that manifested itself in the music in many ways,” he stutters eventually. “Like the strain it’s put on our lifelong friendship – we weren’t really prepared for and didn’t really deal with it particularly well.”

Rice-Oxley, even more than singer Tom Chaplin (whose mother met Rice-Oxley’s mother when the boys were newborns) and drummer Richard Hughes, may be a student of rock history, but can anyone ever really be prepared?

“You find yourself thinking, ‘Well, we’re not going to fall into those traps, we’re not going to fall into those rock’n'roll cliches,”‘ Rice-Oxley says ruefully. “We tried really hard to remain normal and so on, to keep each other’s feet on the ground and not turn into typical rock’n'roll wankers. But the truth is even if you do that it doesn’t change the fact that your life has suddenly become this incredibly unnatural existence.

“You can either choose to get into big fights and beat each other up or you can choose to bottle everything up and try to remain normal. The way we did it was to bottle lots of things up that we would have been better off spewing out.”

However, it is not the English way to spew out those emotions to other men? So the three former public schoolboys, well-mannered and deferential, kept working. In fact, the signs were there well before we saw the new album. A DVD released a year ago chronicling part of their 2004 American tour was in many ways an update of Meeting People Is Easy, Radiohead’s notoriously misanthropic tour film, the looks on the faces of Chaplin, Rice-Oxley and Hughes often suggesting despair.

“That was a snapshot of a particularly bad moment, because of physical exhaustion and a certain amount of, well, almost mental illness, really,” Rice-Oxley says. What went wrong? “The thing is you grow up and you spend a fair amount of time with people and you always think that you are all the same person, that you’ve got perfectly matched personalities. The truth is, you have to accept you’re not the same.

“For example, I think our worst problems came when we came off the road and went back into the studio. Tom just wanted to almost escape from being in Keane for a bit, whereas my reaction was I wanted to get straight into the studio and get my head down and work, work, work and put all the stuff into music. We are all kind of stubborn idiots and we always think we’re right.”

But Rice-Oxley perks up, saying: “I think that’s the nature of making music or any art form – you just have to suffer for it and it’s probably best to get over that and get on with it.” Which is still rather English, isn’t it?