2008年10月《Telegraph》：洒脱

Keane embrace their inner cheesiness
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/10/09/bmkeane109.xml

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 09/10/2008

Tom Chaplin tell Neil McCormick why Keane’s new album swaps seriousness for fun

As Tom Chaplin saunters into a café in the West End, he is greeted by the sound of his own voice, singing out high and proud. Keane’s Hopes and Fears is on repeat play on the in-house stereo.

Chaplin groans and rolls his eyes. “This happens to me all the time,” he says. “I worry that people think I travel around with a Keane CD on me, demanding it be played as I make an entrance.”

Since its release in 2004, Hopes and Fears has become a near-ubiquitous part of the British retail experience, the kind of record you hear endlessly chiming out from coffee shops and fashion emporiums. Among the biggest selling albums of the decade, it is crammed with soaring, richly melodic, instantly catchy hits, but it is also an album without edges, the kind of record you can play without fear of scaring anyone away.

I wonder what shoppers would make of Keane’s new album, Perfect Symmetry? It starts with an exuberant “Whooh!” and proceeds with the mad energy of children playing in a musical toybox, firing off enough brash sound effects and deliriously daft sonic ideas to put sensitive souls off their lattes.

“We had a lot of fun,” says 28-year-old Chaplin, who still exudes a childlike, fidgety energy.

“It was like reconnecting to a teenager’s approach to being in a band, just plugging something in and trying it for the excitement of hearing something new. There was a total spirit of anything goes – and so everything went.”
Hopes and Fears instantly established the piano-led trio as one of the most popular bands in the UK, often compared to Coldplay (contemporaries of songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley at University College, London) as purveyors of a new brand of arty, vaguely angsty, millennial soft rock, heirs of Radiohead with more hooklines and less sonic disruption.

“Those songs were honed over years of playing to the point of complete immediacy, in a blatant attempt to get people’s attention in 30 seconds, because that’s all you get if you’re a new band playing in a bar,” admits the thoughtful, reserved Rice-Oxley, 32.

Yet this very quality of contrivance, allied to Keane’s middle-class manners and aura of good taste, had a predictable response from the class-conscious British music press. Critics hated Keane almost as much as the public (and shopkeepers) loved them.

“We are very easy to hate,” drummer Richard Hughes, 33, cheerfully concedes. “People slag off our music, image, education, Tim’s double-barrelled name – there’s an entire menu of things to mock our band for. But, every time we play a gig, there’s thousands of people singing our songs back to us with more passion than you could ever imagine when you write them. The connection to the audience is pretty staggering.”

The audience stayed with Keane through 2006’s darker, rockier follow-up, Under the Iron Sea.

Going through turbulent times adjusting to fame, it was as if the band were self-consciously trying to divest themselves of their easy-listening tendencies; yet somehow those big, singalong melodies still carried them aloft. “Tim’s songs are so fundamentally strong that you can almost do anything to them,” says Hughes.

The three members of Keane share a supportive closeness that goes beyond rock-band camaraderie. Chaplin has known Rice-Oxley all his life (their mothers were friends). They both attended Vinehall School in Sussex (where Chaplin’s father was headmaster) before boarding at Tonbridge in Kent, where they met Hughes. They have been in a band together since 1997.

“Things run very deep. It’s a very brotherly relationship. We went through testing times, and probably most bands would have gone their separate ways, but I think we felt a sense of responsibility to each other and to our music to try to keep those things alive.”

Chaplin is referring to his very public blow-out, when the apparently cherubic singer succumbed to alcohol and cocaine problems, quitting a tour in 2006 to place himself in rehab.

Part of the problem was the relentless pace of recording and touring. “You have to remember we were a band for years and years before the first album came out,” Rice-Oxley says.

“We were terrified of letting it go, because we knew how valuable it was. You just want more and more, and you can’t always have more.”

But Chaplin also suffered as Keane’s whipping boy: “I was quite surprised by the hatred that was out there. After all, it’s only music.”

“It got under my skin, made me quite a paranoid person, because even walking around I constantly felt I was being judged in a negative way. I’d be constructing mad ideas in my head about what that person might think, or why does this critic not like me. It got out of proportion.”

But he is eager not to apportion too much blame. “As anyone will tell you who goes through something like that, you are responsible for your own ship, and, if you want to sail it into the rocks, it’s your own fault.”

The days of excess seem to be behind him (although he has not renounced alcohol altogether). He says the most important thing about the break was simply the opportunity for rest and reflection. “Having sailed so close to the edge and having nearly lost it all, we just want to make sure we enjoy it.

“In the past, we could be criticised for being very earnest and soul-searching about every little thing. When it came to making this album, the feeling was, ‘Let’s have some fun.’”

On Perfect Symmetry, Keane seem to have shed inhibitions and embraced their inner cheesiness. Rice-Oxley’s songs remain consistently catchy, while Chaplin’s high, pure voice is immediately recognisable, but it as if everything else about Keane has been sprinkled with fairy dust.

Literate lyrics are matched with garish Eighties-style synth hooks and propulsive rhythms, cheerfully referencing childhood pop heroes such as Bowie, Queen, Blondie and Prince.

“I am never sure what makes a pop song and what makes a rock song,” says Rice-Oxley. “Whether it’s a sonic thing, or a threshold of taste and fashion. But rock can be claustrophobic, a very limiting way of making music.

“Pop often leads the way, because it is all about gimmicks and going out on some crazy limb just to attract attention. We definitely felt we were becoming uninterested in trying to be fashionable or cool. We wanted to create something amazing, for the sake of each other.”

Keane can no longer be accused of making coffee-table music, unless you use your coffee table as a makeshift dance floor at an end-of-the-world disco. “I don’t think we’ll ever be cool,” says Chaplin. “But I think we’ve been fearless.”