KEANE
INTERVIEW CAMERON COOK
DATE JUNE 24, 2004

Oh, thank you, dear God. Keane’s tour bus is air-conditioned. It’s been a hard, hot, long day. It started around 6pm, when Keane played to a packed cafe area at Virgin Megastore in Union Square. As a million little instant-cameras flashes flickered before them, the band tore through a repertoire that already includes bona-fide hits; their almost painfully pleasant mix of piano-driven pop and arena-rock hooks has rocketed their debut album, Hopes and Fears, to the number-one chart position in England. Twice.
The original plan was for me to interview them immediately before their in-store gig. But, because they’re one of the most in demand new bands on the face of the planet, things got a little – shall we say – hectic. So we bumped the interview back a few hours, after the performance and autograph-signing, to the trio’s tour bus. Only that, too, eventually proved to be fruitless, due to more time constraints. Long story short: I ended up doing the interview with (bassist? singer? pianist? drummer?) Tim Rice-Oxley in the back of the bus, mere minutes before Keane took the stage at the Knitting Factory for their first proper New York show. Oh yeah, and then my tape recorder broke.
Not that I’m complaining. Like everyone else I know, I’d been wailing along to Hopes and Fears for weeks. I might as well have had my hair in pigtails, screaming into a hairbrush. Really good pop music can do that to you. You’re always one sugary chorus away from acting like you’re 13 years old. Ask anyone in the Knitting Factory crowd. With wide-as-fuck grins on their faces they filed out of the club after a killer set that seemingly brought them back to their teenage years, even if only for the span of one song.
Your debut album went to #1. Whoa.
It was fantastic. We’re really happy that people love our songs, basically. It’s as simple as that. It’s as much as you could ever ask for.
What was funny here, since no one really knew who you guys were, not to sound too American or anything –
No, go ahead.
Well, everyone was like, ‘Oh my God, they beat Morrissey in the British charts! Who are they?’ And there was this surge of articles on Keane. That’s how I first came about to hear the album. This is your first tour of the States, right?
Pretty much. Certainly our first headline tour. When I call it ‘headline tour,’ it sounds grand, but we’re just doing tiny clubs. But we are technically the headliners! We did a few dates here last year supporting Rooney. They’re a cool band. They kindly took us along for about ten days, all around the East Coast. So yeah, we saw a bit of the country then, but it’s such a huge place, you could probably tour for six months and not see it all.
I sensed that there was some sort of underlying theme to Hopes and Fears. Lots of the lyrics are similar; songs mirror each other.
I think everything we do is kind of instinctive. Probably the same kind of feelings and ideas crop up in more than one song. A lot of the songs are about non-communication, or, whatever you call it, poor communication. Ill communication, as the Beastie Boys would say. Um, was it the Beastie Boys?
Yes.
I guess there are a lot of songs about not really knowing your place in the world, that sort of confusion. Just trying to find your place, who you are, where you stand. I think those things run through pretty much all the songs, actually. Just because we’ve had a lot of feeling like that over the last few years, being in a band that sometimes felt like it wasn’t going anywhere. It sort of felt like our hopes and dreams, at any moment, were going to be dashed once and for all. That can be confusing as much as anything else. You see people you know and love going off and doing more exciting, or at least, apparently more successful things.
Now that you’re headlining your own tours and selling thousands of records, are those sentiments you wrote a few years ago still compatible with what you’re living today?
Definitely. You still feel quite isolated, although we probably have less to whine about. I mean – you know what life’s like! It doesn’t matter how good things are, there’s always something that preys on your mind. Those are the things that make up the fabric of life, I suppose. Not that much has changed for us. It’s not like we’re super stars, living in Beverly Hills and being waited on hand. We just go out, doing our thing. I’m not saying it’s hard work. We still have those same doubts.
Loads of people have been comparing you to Coldplay, Travis, that whole British soft-rock scene that’s been pretty dominant lately. Do you think that’s accurate?
Well, not really. It depends on where you’re looking at it from, basically. If you’re looking at every kind of music there is, obviously we’re going to be closer to Coldplay and Travis than we are to 50 Cent or Herbie Hancock, or anyone from some sort of completely different field of music. But even then I like to feel that we have things in common with people from outside that particular genre. I don’t think we really think of ourselves as being from any kind of scene, or in the English whiny rock category. We’d very much like to not be a part of that scene. I mean, it’s fine, Coldplay and Travis are both bands that we like. They’re nice guys. But, you know, our interests come from different stuff, as well as traditionally cool bands, like the Beatles, the Smiths and all that. I think we just accept the comparisons as something we have to endure. I think people realize, once they’ve actually listened to our record or seen us play live, that we play a lot of music that you wouldn’t associate with that traditional British indie music. I think it’s more varied, and hopefully more exciting. I dunno. I think we’re our own thing, and people who give us a bit of time work that out quite quickly.