Keane
The next wave
By Gary Graff
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The new sound of Britpop in 2004 was made by three men, a piano and a drum set - along with the occasional guitar, bass and orchestrations. Keane came out of
Chaplin did take time out to go to
Q: Not a bad out of the box start, is it?
Rice-Oxley: We're amazed, really, especially from an American point of view. It's just been incredible. We've played sold-out shows in
Q: Being a three-piece group with only two instrumentalists is unusual. How did you decide on that course?
Rice-Oxley: It certainly wasn't what we originally intended. We started off as a four-piece guitar band with another good friend of ours who's a great guitarist. I was playing the bass, so it was quite a standard set-up and we were the same as a lot of bands. Then our guitarist decided he'd had enough and we weren't getting anywhere, so we were forced into a position where we had to find a different way of doing things. It was quite a chaotic time for us. We ended up trying electronic stuff to start with, we're really into Depeche Mode and Aphex Twin and Kraftwerk and lots of stuff like that. But it wasn't very satisfying once we started rehearsing it and trying to play it live. It wasn't about rocking out, it was about twiddling nobs and making sure everything held together.
Q: So what did you try next?
Rice-Oxley: We just went back to what we liked best. What I really loved was playing the piano, writing songs on the piano...I was always much better at the piano than anything else. So we just said, 'Right, let's do the most simple things and see how it goes,' just Richard playing the drums, me playing the piano, Tom singing. Once we did that, it felt so liberating.
Q: Did you have a sense at the time that what you were doing - voice, piano, drums - was pretty unorthodox?
Rice-Oxley: I guess we'd been through so many ups and downs and different ideas by that point that it didn't seem that strange in a way. As soon as we got out there, though, people made us very aware it wasn't what was kind of normal. It may sound odd to say that it didn't seem that strange to us at the time, but it really didn't.
Q: You achieve such a full and lush sound on Hope and Fears. How was that accomplished?
Rice-Oxley: Well, a big part of it is I still play the bass guitar on the records. You've got a classic kind of drum and bass rhythm section driving it and giving it that rock feel. That's what we love. I don't think we'd be able to live without that, really. We actually love all those bands like U2 and the Smiths, the Beatles and Beach Boys, people who are really into the bass side of things, rocking out. So all our songs have that kind of rhythmic foundation to them. Also, piano is a very versatile instrument. You can make a lot of noise with one, which is pretty cool, or you can pull back and keep it very simple. And there's other stuff on the album as well, old analog string machines, a few blips and bleeps from analog synthesizers. It's a bit of a blend, I guess.
Q: Doing it live is a whole different animal, though. Right?
Rice-Oxley: I think so. The difficulty is that we don't have enough hands. If I had my way, I'd be playing three different keyboards all at the same time, and the bass. So it definitely is a bit more stripped back live, but if anything it's even more rocking. We've discovered since recording the album that taking elements away almost adds energy and adds intimacy at the same time. When it comes time to record again, we'll probably end up stripping things back even more rather than kind of going crazy and adding more stuff, more production, more instruments. It's a learning process.
Q: What kind of fan base are you finding that Keane has?
Rice-Oxley: It's amazing, actually. Especially in America, people seem to be very open-minded. We've got people who are really into Korn and other sort of heavier stuff, Papa Roach or whatever, and get really into Keane as well. People are sort of very open-minded to hearing good music, which is great. That makes any kind of show an opportunity to try to convert people, which is great. I remember playing to a completely empty room, apart from two of our friends, in some horrible town in the middle of
Q: What do you think you'd be doing if not making music?
Rice-Oxley: I don't know. Before, we were all kind of just working, in limbo in a way. We'd all finished studying, but we didn't have any other ambitions. I never wanted to do anything apart from being in a band - I don't think any of us did, really. We were just kind of in a holding pattern, trying to earn money to pay our rent, pay for rehearsal rooms and so on. That went on for quite a long time, it was a fairly depressing period, actually, just this depressing void where we didn't know what lay ahead of us. (laughs) It's weird. We never really considered what else we wanted to do. I guess probably what kept us going was we were so obsessed with our songs and our music. We just battled on and were very, very lucky that eventually it all kind of came to something.
