2010年5月28日PopMatters采访Richard

All Aboard the Night Train: An Interview with Keane
By Crispin Kott
来源：http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/125879-all-aboard-the-night-train-an-interview-with-keane

Few bands have gotten more from less than Keane. The English three-piece boasts a deceptively simple lineup of vocals, piano and drums—and nothing else. This is the sort of roster more often associated with smoky jazz clubs or family-gathering garage bands made up of your siblings. But Keane somehow manage to get a very big sound out of a very small setup.

Richard Hughes, Keane’s drummer, generously credits his fellow bandmates for what Keane is: a group who can naturally conjure those soaring, arms-aloft anthems which threaten to lift the very roof off of stadiums. Those songs are written by pianist Tim Rice-Oxley and sung by Tom Chaplin, the former bearing the louche insouciance of the bon vivant and the latter the wry and mischievous visage (and, perhaps, voice) of a parochial schoolboy gone spectacularly off the rails. Hughes, himself a dashing fellow with not only the requisite sure, steady hand of the top shelf drummer, but also the inherent ability to know when to fill in the spaces and when to lay back in the cut, is able to carry his strengths over to interviews with equal aplomb.

Of Rice-Oxley, Hughes says Keane’s popularity around the world is owed a great debt to his universal approach to songwriting.

“I just think he has this ability to write melodies that are incredibly catchy,” Hughes says. “It’s interesting traveling around the world. People who don’t necessarily have English as their first language love Keane. We’ve literally been all around the world, and I think there’s something in the melodies that Tim writes that really almost speaks to the people. I’m sure you can say that about classical music, but it sounds stupid to say it about pop music, but you know, there’s something that people can key into somewhere, and I think it’s just the strength of his melodies, and I think the lyrics he writes back that up really well.”

Keane is back after a relatively brief sojourn, releasing this month the hotly anticipated Night Train EP. Three albums into a career that’s seen the band conquer the globe with as much ruthless effectiveness as Julius Caesar. Only, you know, with incredibly catchy melodies.

While their albums have somehow managed to bridge the gap between intimacy and inclusiveness, Keane extended the theme of the latter to collaborating with an outside musician for the first time. K’Naan—a Somali and Canadian rapper and singer—worked with the band in London during a small window in their 28-country world tour in support of Perfect Symmetry, their 2008 album. Indeed, the eight songs on Night Train were recorded piecemeal in studios large and small whenever the band found the time to work on even the smallest piece of the puzzle.

“With K,Naan, we were lucky that we were in a studio together,” says Hughes. “He was over in the UK, and we just went and holed up in a studio together for three days in south London.”

Keane was recording, but it wasn’t necessarily clear at the time where the journey would eventually take the band.

“There was never a plan to put out an EP,” says Hughes. “We were just trying things out going into a studio. And we did some bass parts in Australia, and some drum parts in Washington D.C., and I remember doing some backing vocals in Copenhagen. We were on tour, and we were just trying to get into a studio when we could. It was different, but we didn’t do it with the idea of just putting a record out. At the end of the tour, we were just so many things, and thought if we’d do a couple more, we could put out an EP.”

According to legend, when Mike Love heard the direction Brian Wilson wanted to take the Beach Boys with the now-seminal Pet Sounds, he considered how a steady diet of fantastic singles along a narrow theme of girls/surfing/cars had become their bread and butter and gruffly said, “Don’t fuck with the formula.” Whether the quote is real or not is immaterial. Because while Love was on to something commercially, the album represents for many not only the artistic high point of the Beach Boys’ canon, but one of pop music’s great recorded achievements.

This is not to put undue pressure on Keane, but rather to illustrate simply that sometimes it’s okay to fuck with the formula. Even when the music industry was healthy, and fat label heads lit fatter cigars with weekly chart reports, fucking with the formula must have always made the palms sweat. There’s no indication that Keane has had to suffer various graphs to show how their multi-million dollar string of albums and singles built upon the grand and the lush might be upended by working with an urban artist and, even in the smallest way, fucking with the formula. But then again, there are two different versions of Night Train‘s lead single, “Stop for a Minute.”

“There is a version of ‘Stop for a Minute,’ where radio stations for whatever reason just don’t want to play rap music, they literally refuse, and K’Naan is singing,” Hughes says. “I find that very confusing and really don’t understand why that would be.”

Fans of Keane who aren’t necessarily thrilled with hearing hip-hop influences find their way into the band’s music should still be pleased with the results. The collaboration has a natural and understated feel, in spite of the perils of any group of musicians opening up the creative process to someone they’ve never worked with before. The pop battlefield is strewn with the bloated corpses of awkwardly shoe-horned guest appearances and ill-advised bull sessions between artists cut of disparate and similar cloth alike. But when something happens organically, why not take the plunge? This is where Keane found themselves when heading into that brief initial foray with K’Naan, one which also produced Night Train‘s “Looking Back.”

“It was sort of weirdly easy,” says Hughes of the first-time collaboration. “We just seemed to hit it off really well. [K’Naan] just kind of showed up in the studio, and Tim had sent him a couple of songs that were sort of half-finished, and he had some ideas. It was amazingly simple, really. I’m sure there have been collaborations in the past that felt awkward, but it felt really good. I think we were lucky. He’s a very musical guy, and I guess a lot of music is instinctive, and I guess he had similar instincts to ours.”

Whether by design or happenstance, the songs with K’Naan don’t veer too far from familiar Keane territory, with sweeping choruses guaranteed to lead to untold embarrassed looks at red lights when the listener is discovered singing along to the car stereo at top volume. Fortunately, K’naan fit into the mix perfectly, with his rhymes not remotely incongruous with what Keane already does so well.

“Because Tim had already written the verses and choruses that Tom was going to sing, we knew that those bits would come across as Keane in the same way they normally do,” Hughes says. “The style of ‘Stop for a Minute,’ for example, is definitely different. But I think having that power in Tom’s voice, it’s a pretty classic Tim sort of songwriting thing, and it just seems recognizable. It’s sort of like the Pet Shop Boys; as soon as you hear Neil Tennant, you know it’s the Pet Shops Boys regardless of whatever the style is.”

The aforementioned “Looking Back” doesn’t just arrive with Keane’s familiar grandly theatrical gestures; it was also, at least subconsciously, inspired by “Gonna Fly Now,” the theme from Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky.

“Tim had convinced himself that he’d written that riff,” recalls Hughes. “He’d programmed it and thought, ‘God, I’ve come up with this amazing riff.’ And he played it for some friend, and they said, ‘Wow, that’s a really good idea. I’m surprised no one’s used the Rocky theme before,’ and he was like, ‘Shit! That’s what it is!’ Honestly, when he told me that, I couldn’t control my laughter. It just sort of slipped into his head.”

Keane will hit the road in support of Night Train in June, with U.S. dates kicking off on July 20 in Oakland, California. Playing live is something Hughes says the band looks most forward to.

“It’s a reasonable trip around the States; not just the coasts, but a few places in the middle as well, which is great,” he says. “Obviously, it’s such a huge country. It’s one of the most fun things you get to do in a band, is get on a bus and drive around the states. We grew up in the UK, in a little town in the countryside, and it genuinely is one of the things you dream about doing.”

Hughes says the band is hoping to work with K’Naan on select tour dates, both by having him perform with his own band as a support act and on the songs they’ve done together. And when it’s just Keane on their own, they’ll do what they’ve always done so well: Create a very big sound.

“I think the piano is very good, and the way Tim plays it is very good at covering a large range of filling up sound,” Hughes says. “And also, these days we travel with our friend Jesse [Quin] playing bass with us. And Tom plays a bit of keys and guitar sometimes. In a way, a lot of what we do leaves room for Tom’s voice, which is sort of the biggest instrument we have. Leaving him room makes it sort of easier for us.”

2010年5月24日The Idolator采访Tom

The Idolator Interview: Keane’s Tom Chaplin
来源：http://idolator.com/5511371/the-idolator-interview-keanes-tom-chaplin

Last week Keane’s Night Train EP became their fourth release to top the UK album chart and the third in a row to land in the Top 40 on Billboard’s Top 200 Albums. The set, which was recorded in various studios across the globe while the British trio toured for previous album Perfect Symmetry, found the group collaborating with BET Awards-nominated rapper K’Naan and Japanese MC Tigarah. It also features songwriter/keyboard player Tim Rice-Oxley taking over vocal duties from Tom Chaplin on one of the tracks.

We spoke with Chaplin last week about the process of putting the EP together, as well as their upcoming U.S. tour and getting started on their next album. (P.S. If any of you happen to know the whereabouts of the photo that was taken of Tom and Paul McCartney, he’d kindly like to see it.) Read on!

In your interview with UK magazine Gay Times, you mentioned that you had your picture taken with Paul McCartney years ago, but you’ve never been able to track the photo down. Has it surfaced since you put that out there?
TOM CHAPLIN: I’m still waiting for it! It’s very mysterious. You’d think a photo like that would have seen the light of day. I have searched for it online, but it’s very frustrating—I can’t find it. So, yeah—keep putting out the feelers, see if we can’t get ahold of anyone who’s got it! [Laughs]

Did you guys record Night Train with the intention of making an EP, or did you set out to make a full album that ended up an EP?
TC: Actually, kind of the opposite! We planned on it being a single. It really started off as something much, much smaller than it turned into. We had a couple of songs that we started last April—the two songs that we did with K’Naan—and that was really going to be it. We thought, we’ll release it through our website just for the fans, it’ll be a nice little bonus single—a little curiosity for people—and we were going to put it out last October. But there was just something really great about the sessions with K’Naan that kind of spurred us on and made us want to keep going with it. So while we were out on the road last year we just went into studios wherever we were in the world and just carried on. It turned from two songs into eight songs. But, you know what—it’s quite a body of work. We’re quite surprised by how it turned out.

Well, congratulations on it becoming your fourth UK #1.
TC: We’re actually kind of astonished by the success of it. We’re pretty pleased people have taken to it so much. I think the fact that we did it without stressing about it too much and having some kind of big overarching plan has actually given it this sense of looseness. There’s something about it that people have really responded to. It’s been quite an eye-opener.

K’Naan KeaneHow did you end up collaborating with the rapper K’Naan on two of the Night Train tracks?
TC: The first song we had that kind of sparked the idea was “Looking Back,” which is kind of West Coast-y, sort of laid back. I suppose it’s got a bit of that thing Kanye West does, sort of melding various different styles. Tim wrote the bare bones of “Stop For A Minute” and it just felt like, again, that would be a good song to maybe move into a different area with. We scratched our heads for awhile and thought, who would be a good person to work with on this? K’Naan sprang to mind because he’s not so defined by hip hop as maybe some other artists that we like. He’s more song-based and quite melodic, as well, in what he does. He just seemed like a really interesting person to hook up with. We phoned him up and it turns out he was a really big fan of Keane. He said, “I play your songs all the time in the studio to clear my head if I’m working really hard on something, just to give me a lift.” He came across to London and we sort of sat there nervously for a few hours while we worked on something. But, you know, it actually turned out that we got on incredibly well as people and as musicians, and I think the collaborations reflect that.

Are there any plans to involve K’Naan in your tour this summer?
TC: We played a launch gig for the EP here in London and he came and sang the two songs. “Stop For A Minute” just tore the place up—it was brilliant! All the UK fans knew every single word by heart. I think they maybe knew more of the words than K’Naan could remember! [Laughs] It was pretty cool. We’re going to do another thing with him for Radio 2 here in the UK. We’re hoping that we can keep it going for as many things as possible, but unfortunately he’s got the official song for the soccer World Cup, so he’s actually going to be away for the rest of May and June and a bit of July—which is not the best timing. We’re going to just fit in as much as we can, but he’s a busy man and I think it’s going to be a bit difficult, geographically.

Keane Night TrainWere there any songs recorded during the Night Train sessions that got left off?
TC: I don’t think there were, really. The process of making it was really “we’ve got a song, let’s go in the studio, let’s put it down and if it works, it works.” Actually, luckily enough for us, pretty much everything worked. I don’t think there were any full songs that fell by the wayside. It was a really good process from that point of view, because it seemed like every idea that we put down was a success. And maybe that was just because we didn’t have time to endlessly go over it and soul-search about whether the bass part should go up or down! [Laughs] So what you hear is basically what we did.

Tim does the main vocals on “Your Love,” and I have to admit, sometimes I forget that it’s him because he kind of sounds like you. Did he intentionally aim to do that?
TC: Basically he’s copying my style, isn’t he? [Laughs] I don’t really know. The strange thing is, whenever he comes up with a new song he’ll send me a demo, and it’ll obviously be him singing on it—and I normally am quite impressed by his vocals. I really like his voice—it’s got really great character to it. I think he plays it down, but he can sing. He’s quite a shy guy, so he finds it hard to cross that barrier. And that was a good example of how the whole process worked, because that song, I was going to sing a vocal on but we actually just ran out of time. We were in a studio in Denmark. I recorded “Clear Skies” and then, yeah, just didn’t have enough time to do that vocal. So we just left on the demo vocal. We all thought it was great, so we thought, why the hell not? It made the opportunity to launch Tim’s voice into the world.

“My Shadow” is very “classic” Keane.
TC: Yeah. It’s a very classic Keane song. In fact, it was going to be on [previous album] Perfect Symmetry, but we felt it was so kind of old-school Keane that it would probably sit too much in contrast with the rest of the album. It was finished, I think, before Perfect Symmetry. But we just thought, sod it—we’ll keep it for another time. And again, because this EP or album—or whatever we’re going to call it—was such a mixture of different styles and songs, we just felt it would work really well on there and it was a good chance for it to be heard.

It’s a beautiful song.
TC: I think we might actually release that one as a single in America. We’ve certainly thought about it and I think there seems to be a reasonable groundswell of excitement about it. So we might well end up releasing it in the States.

Keane Night train SunLooking ahead a little bit, have you started thinking about album number four yet?
TC: Actually, we had a meeting today, and we sat down and we listened to the demos that we’ve got currently knocking around. We were talking about who we’d like to work with and how we’d like to go about doing it. So, yeah—that conversation has happened. We’re underway with that process. It’s kind of in the ether. [Laughs] But, practically speaking, it won’t be till October or November before we get in a studio. But, you know, I feel pretty excited. I think this EP has actually—it just seems like things are going well for us at the moment. It’s a nice feeling. The new demos and new songs sound really good, and I would imagine sometime next year we’ll have another record ready.

Do you get requests to appear on other artists’ songs often?
TC: Yeah—we get the odd thing. Tim gets quite a few requests for songwriting. He’s worked with Gwen Stefani, Nicole Scherzinger and Kylie Minogue—lots of really attractive ladies, actually! [Laughs] I’m thinking about it—why do all these attractive women want to work with Tim? Is it just because of his songs? I’m not sure. But his songwriting is actually something that is very highly respected and commanded, I suppose. There are various projects we’ve been asked to get involved in. In terms of really big projects, we kind of feel like we’re still plowing our own furrow, you know—doing our own thing. There have been offers and exciting ideas, but as yet we haven’t really carried any of them through.

You three kick off the U.S. leg of your tour on July 20 in Oakland, California. What cities or areas in the States do you like to hit up when you’re over here?
TC: I think particularly New York is a favorite of ours. And interestingly enough, the more that we go to L.A., the more we appreciate and enjoy it. The atmosphere and the lifestyle of the place are actually quite enticing. [Laughs] To be honest, I wouldn’t really specify any favorites. Normally what we do is we fly to L.A. and then we get on a bus then go up one coast then across and down the other side. It’s just something really magical. As teenagers, we read a lot about U2 and these big bands touring the States and getting on a big bus and carrying on from one city to the next. There’s something very romantic about that. It’s great to sort of emulate your heroes and do that.

By Robbie Daw at 12:31 PM on Mon May 24 2010

2010年5月16日Sunday Mail采访Keane：即将到来的苏格兰演唱会

Keane star set for time in the spotlight as band play Scotland

May 16 2010 Sunday Mail

来源：http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/showbiz/music-news/2010/05/16/keane-star-set-for-time-in-the-spotlight-as-band-play-scotland-86908-22262413/

SINGER Tom Chaplin has threatened to storm off stage when his band Keane hit Scotland to play their favourite venue.

But don’t worry, he’s not about to quit one of Britain’s most successful rock bands.

Instead, Tom wants the spotlight to shine on keyboard player Tim Rice-Oxley, who will sing for Scottish fans for the first time at the concert at Glasgow’s Barrowlands on June 21.

Keane’s new Night Train EP features Your Love, which marks Tim’s debut as a vocalist.

“Tim is very shy and nervous about performing live. But I’m tempted to actually walk off stage when we play Your Love and leave him on his own,” revealed Tom.

“I’ve always loved Tim’s voice so it’s nice it can finally be heard.

It’s probably the first – and last – time Tim will get to sing on a Keane record.

“When he comes up with a song, he’ll often demo it with his vocals. ‘Tim performing “That’s the first time I hear it so it does have a bearing on the way I interpret it.

“The version of Your Love is the demo vocal.

I did try to put my voice on the track but felt it had this atmosphere and it wasn’t worthwhile changing.

“I am excited people will hear Tim’s voice at last.”

The songs for Night Train – which was their favoured mode of on-the-road transport – were written during Keane’s Perfect Symmetry world tour which visited 28 countries including Colombia, South Korea and Lebanon.

Tom said: “We travelled by overnight train as much as we could. One memorable journey was from St Petersburg to Moscow in a rickety old train left over from the Communist era.

“It had a first-class coach – with beautiful wood panels – which was a throwback to when dignitaries and more senior KGB members travelled on it.

“It’s how I imagined Russia to be when I was a child. It was such a great atmosphere. We felt it would be good to reflect the vibe of the EP through our sense of travelling.

“On tour, you have days where you’re treading water, waiting to go on to the next city.

“There’s a danger of getting stuck in a hotel room or venue and not doing anything creative. The ethos behind the EP was to have a creative outlet on the road.

“We’d record during the day, play gigs in the evening and Tim would stay up all night working on his computer, editing what we’d recorded.

“It was a labour of love – something we wanted to do to stay fresh.”

First single is Stop For A Minute, a collaboration with Somali/Canadian rapper K’Naan, who fled the war in his native country to launch his career in Toronto.

Tom said: “I discovered K’Naan by chance. It was one of those Glastonbury moments where my girlfriend saw him perform and said, ‘You must download his album, The Dusty Foot Philosopher’.”

“Keane had songs we wanted to take in a different direction. K’Naan is at the more melodic end of hip hop. We thought he’d be great to work on them. He’s a great wordsmith.”

K’Naan said: “My records are not played on radio. Keane are one of my favourite bands. So to get to work with them was amazing, beautiful and nerve-wracking all at the same time.”

2010年5月14日Daily Mail采访：Keane谈论身不由己的名声大噪

How reluctant stars became
Keane on fame

By Adrian Thrills

Keane’s last world tour was a huge success. Launched on the back of 2008’s career-reviving Perfect Symmetry album, it found the trio playing to packed houses across 28 countries.

But even the biggest global ventures have their humdrum moments. Some bands ease the boredom by turning to drink and drugs. Keane, having fallen into that trap once before, were determined to do something more useful with their spare time.

‘Touring is great fun, but it can also be lonely,’ says songwriter and keyboardist Tim Rice-Oxley. ‘You spend a lot of time alone in a hotel, living off room service. You might do some sightseeing, but usually end up doing nothing. Before you know it, the day has gone.’

Keane, however, are on a creative roll. One of Britain’s most celebrated new acts when their first album Hopes and Fears sold six million, they stumbled in 2006 when singer Tom Chaplin was treated in The Priory for cocaine and alcohol addiction, but have since swaggered back in real style.

Now they are reiterating that new-found confidence with a mini-album, Night Train, which was written and recorded entirely on the road.

Kaleidoscopic and full of surprises, its eight new tracks experiment with blues rhythms, electro-pop and hip-hop.

The record also finds the group working with two unlikely new collaborators in Somalian-Canadian rapper K’naan – ‘a big Keane fan and a sucker for a good melody’ – and Japanese female singer Tigarah.

‘Some bands stop being creative when they go on tour, but we found it refreshing to spend time in various studios,’ says Rice-Oxley. ‘We also learned how to work quickly. In the past, we’d agonise over songs. When you have just one day to finish a track, you can’t do that.’

‘We didn’t set out to make an album,’ Chaplin adds. ‘That’s why the eight songs are so diverse. We thought we might make a low-key single with K’naan, but the whole thing grew into something completely different.’

Chaplin, 31, and Rice-Oxley, 33, are chatting to me over lunch in a restaurant near London Bridge. The following night they will play a celebratory London concert with K’naan, while the summer sees them embark on a series of UK gigs in spectacular woodland locations as part of the Forestry Commission’s Live Music series. After that, they are making a two-month trip to America.

For bandmates who are often said to have an uneasy relationship – Tom is a singer who doesn’t write lyrics, Tim a songwriter who hardly ever sings – the pair are looking forward to spending the next few months together.

There is certainly no sign of tension between them. Then again, they do go back a long way. Along with drummer Richard Hughes, Chaplin and Rice-Oxley were childhood friends who attended the same primary school in Battle, east Sussex, and boarded together at Tonbridge school in their teens.

Their big break in 2004 might have read like an overnight success, but they’ve been writing songs for 20 years.

‘People say Tom and I have a fractious relationship, but there’s not much truth in that,’ says Tim, with a smile.

‘We’ve made three albums, but we’ve been friends for 30 years. We’re not like a new gang who are all best mates. We had that when we were six or seven. We’re more like a family.’

Tom agrees. ‘Tim was one of the few friendly faces who looked after me when I was bullied at boarding school. He took me under his wing and taught me some chords on the guitar.’

Keane’s small-town roots are important to them, too, and Rice-Oxley’s lyrics – occasionally melancholy but fortified with an inner resolve – reflect his rural upbringing.

‘Our background has had a big effect,’ he says. ‘Our songs are about the passions and fears of small-town life. But I think that’s a hallmark of great English pop. You can also hear it in Pink Floyd and Blur.

‘But there’s a fine line between exploring the melancholy areas and being depressing. We have slipped over the line sometimes, but generally we feel pretty good about life.’

The success of Hopes and Fears, which won two Brits, caught the band by surprise.

Tim admits the three old friends ’started to go a bit mad’, while Tom’s stay in The Priory came after a stormy period in which the group nearly split. Looking back, the singer still has mixed feelings about that time.

‘When we made Hopes and Fears we had plenty of youthful ambition,’ he says. ‘But nothing prepares you for the challenges of fame – the hype and the adulation – and I found it hard to adapt.

‘It was a dark, claustrophobic time and my problems were part and parcel of that. But we got back onto the horse after falling off. The touring became fun again, and that spurred us on for Perfect Symmetry and Night Train.’

A lean and healthy Chaplin is also looking forward to a summer that could elevate Keane to the stadium-rock status of U2 and Coldplay. With Night Train picking up rave reviews ahead of the band’s US tour in July, the omens are good.

‘For the first time in our lives, we feel like an established group,’ Tom says. ‘When we toured as U2’s support act in 2005, we were in awe of them. They had 11 albums to choose songs from. We’re now beginning to reach a similar position.’

Night Train is out now. Keane’s UK tour begins in Thetford Forest, Suffolk, on June 10. For details, visit keanemusic.com.

2010年5月17日contactmusic.com采访Keane

来源：http://www.contactmusic.com/new/home.nsf/interview/keanex17×05x10

The last time we saw indie giants Keane was on their Perfect Symmetry world tour, a whopping 121 shows around the world. But we now find out that not only were they performing their album in 28 countries at the time, they were also recording new material at every spare moment. Contactmusic.com was able to have a chat to Tom and Tim from the band about their surprise at how their new EP, Night Train has taken on a life of its own and totally changed their plans for 2010.

It seemed a strange concept for the band to return to the limelight with an EP rather than another album, indeed for Keane it wasn’t even a conscious decision. ‘There wasn’t any attempt at making a cohesive body of work, I think that’s part of the charm of it really’ explains Tim, ‘lots of bands get trapped in this cycle where its big album after big album and now the album campaign has become a huge weight around peoples necks… doing something that didn’t have the pressure of being the next ‘proper’ album was really liberating’. Unlike previous albums, which have seen the band spend hour after hour in the studio agonising over each song, the songs on the EP were all recorded on tour, completely changing the experience and making it much more spontaneous. ‘This was much more of a musical train of thought and we thought we might as well go with it and it actually worked really well, so that’s a lesson to us all!’ says Tom. Each song was recorded in a different country, giving the EP a really multicoloured feel as Tim explains; ‘Obviously we’ve been lucky enough to go all over the world and pick up lots of different cultural reference points, and we feel that we are always learning and absorbing new music all the time. It’s very easy to stop doing that as a band, you get stuck in your ways, you feel that ‘this is what we do’ and we mustn’t deviate from that, but we’ve always had the opposite of that’.

It’s that constant development as a band and really pushing the boundaries that has produced this unusual record. And because it is a step away from what people expected, Tim and Tom are both really pleased about how well the EP has been received. ‘It would be nice to be known for that’ says Tom. ‘It would be a nice bonus if people began to think of Keane as a band who are a bit more surprising than people would expect. I think we were definitely put in a kind of category when we first started out and people assumed that we would never deviate from that, we seem to have broken free of that and done things that are different and I’m glad it’s been recognised’.

So how do you describe an EP with so many different influences and genres? ‘It’s a mess, a lovely mess!’ laughs Tom. Tim agrees, ‘it is a mess, but the idea behind the whole Night Train theme is that we felt that there was no constant thread in the music, the thing that holds it together is more the way it was made and the travelling and the sense of adventure and the sense of being very international and just following our musical curiosity wherever it led us. That in itself is the thing that defines the EP’. So it’s no wonder then that they decided to name the EP after their favourite mode of transport whilst touring. ‘Night trains are very romantic, aren’t they?’ says Tom ‘You feel like you’re in a novel from about 100 years ago! Travelling by plane is so sanitised and boring and there is something kind of adventurous about getting the train. I don’t know, it’s just a very apt description of the way the EP came about’.

That adventurous streak and curiosity led the band to explore different genres and collaborations on the record. The band worked with Somali rapper K’Naan on two of the tracks. ‘We loved his music and he’s very melodic for a hip hop artist’ says Tom, ’so it was more closely allied to what we do than let’s say if we had been working with say Snoop Dogg, there’s that really soulful element to it. We heard he was a fan and he was really excited to come and do it’. The song, called Looking Back also samples the theme tune from Rocky and is a real stand out track on the album. ‘It’s one of those melodies that’s really etched on your brain’ says Tom ‘although, not so etched on Tim’s because he thought he’d written the actual riff!’. ‘Yeah I can see I’m going to have to go through this humiliation at every interview now’ laughs Tim. ‘The sound of the original record is so great, it’s got that real seventies soul vibe, I couldn’t believe that nobody had done it before’.

It wasn’t just the collaborations that were a change for the band. In order to save Tom’s voice for that night’s gig in Copenhagen, Tim recorded lead vocals on Your Love, the sixth song on the EP. ‘It’s another new thing that we’ve never done before’ explains Tim. ‘Bearing in mind that at the time we thought this was just going to be like a little thing for the fans on the website, it didn’t seem so scary then!’ ‘Now you have to sing it live’ laughs Tom. Tim took on production duties too. ‘It was really a necessity because we were doing it round the world on days off. We couldn’t take Rick Rubin around the world with us sadly to be at our beck and call, so we had to do it all ourselves and I tend to be the sort of geek when it comes to that sort of thing’. And although he’s not keen to do it again, the collaboration with different artists have led them to give more control away on their next project as Tom explains ‘It’s inviting someone into the Keane dynamic who has quite a strong impact on what you do, i.e. you’re handing over quite a bit of it to someone else. It would be quite good to work with a producer who has got their own signature or a strong idea of how they want to go about doing things next time.

Keane will be performing material from the EP at a series of shows in outdoor locations on their ‘Tour Of The Forests’ this summer. ‘You make us sound like elves!’ says Tim. But in keeping with the whole ethos of the EP, the band wanted to do something different. ‘We wanted to do a few UK dates but not the big arena show that we’ve done on the last couple of albums. On the hopes and fears tour we did the Eden Project and that was a really magical night being out under the stars, a really hippyish vibe and it didn’t really feel like a gig’ explained Tim. The band are also playing a handful of more intimate club gigs, partly for the fans and partly for themselves! ‘We’ve got to play loads of massive venues now, which is quite exciting but you still hanker for the days of sweaty rock clubs’ says Tom.

So fans will be happy. A new EP, plenty of chances to see the band live and despite Night Train and all the work and promotion that has come with it taking up their precious studio time, the boys still hope to get into the studio later this year. With any luck, we’ll see a new full length album in 2011 and if Night Train is anything to go by, we’ll all be waiting with baited breath to see what Keane come up with next.

Robyn Burrows