INTERVIEW: KAISER CHIEFS
WORDS: CAMERON COOK
IMAGES: ABBEY BRADEN
The much-anticipated return of the Kaiser Chiefs has jump-started a few late-night discussions amongst us Brit-pop savants. Sitting around drinking Earl Grey and polishing our Stone Roses vinyl, we contemplated: would Ricky & Co. try to replicate the breakthrough success of Employment by wheeling out even more of the charming-yet-laddish blue-collar shtick, or would they attempt a more “serious” release, putting a firm end to all that riot-predicting and na-na-na-na-na-ing?
Neither option seemed particularly ideal, and for the few months leading up to the Kaiser Chiefs’ sophomore effort, Yours Truly, Angry Mob, excitement started to give way, little by little, to shallow cynicism in the ’SUP office. Luckily, in a musical coup not to go uncredited, the band managed to ditch the goofiness without coming off as boring pricks who can’t have a laugh.
The element that saves Kaiser Chiefs from repeating themselves this time around is their utterly wry sense of humor. They never forget, for one second, that they are the band that all but trademarked Ricky’s omnipresent chant of “WWWWWWWWWHOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAA!!” and his cheeky, Grange Hill-style outfits. In other words, their self-awareness is their saving grace, the component that, as a band, let’s them create these completely fun and relevant, stadium-size pop hits, and not become Coldplay.
I caught up with the Chiefs while bouncing around the Lower East Side on a sunny winter’s day, and had a nice chat about the road they’ve traveled thus far, from their previous incarnation of Parva to being the band to open Live 8 in America.
When you first formed Kaiser Chiefs, there were a lot of hyped bands coming out of Leeds and the North of England. How much of a hand do you think you had in jumpstarting that movement?
Whitey: There have always been hundreds of bands in Leeds. [To Simon] You used to work in a venue in Leeds with all these bands, what do you think?
Simon: Like anywhere, like America, there are hundreds and hundreds of local bands, rehearsing on weekends, bedroom band sort of things. When we got successful, the media’s eyes sort of started looking towards [Leeds]. The same thing happened with Franz Ferdinand. All the labels went to Glasgow to see what bands were coming out. A lot of rubbish gets picked up as well, and the same thing happened in Leeds.
Ricky: [Deadpan] I mean, yes, I think we did single-handedly do that [laughs]. Before, record labels were so lazy, they couldn’t bother getting a two-and-a-half hour train to get to Leeds, and they expected you to go to them. When we got signed – and that was a struggle – A&R people just thought ‘Oh, they’re from Leeds, there must be loads of other people from Leeds.’ So they started taking that two-and-a-half hour journey up North, and signed some bands. That’s a good thing, but it’s also a bad thing, because they signed loads of shit bands as well as the good ones. Well, not necessarily shit, but people who aren’t ready to get signed get signed, It’s bad for them. I think it did draw a little bit of attention up North, but we don’t have anything to do with the fact that there are good bands from there. That’s always happened.
I’m sure the press plays it up immensely. I mean when you read the UK press, especially in America, it does seem like all these great bands are coming out of this one place.
Nick: England is much smaller than America, so it’s probably the same thing as having loads of New York bands. Leeds is only like 200 miles from London, so geographically it’s not that far away.
Ricky: We play gigs in America and people drive 10 hours to see us. I mean, why bother? I wouldn’t go five minutes to see a band.
Nick: Five minutes? Come on!
Ricky: OK, 15 minutes [laughs]. But you know, if a band is playing Sheffield, I wouldn’t go and see them. That’s 45 minutes away.
Nick: Not even The Strokes?
Peanut: I would!
Ricky: But yeah, geographically speaking, it’s just way smaller [than America].
Peanut: It’s not that cool. Not as cool as New York by any stretch.
Is it cooler that Texas?
Peanut: No.
What Leeds bands are you listening to at the moment, then?
Nick: Well there’s a good band called The Pigeon Detectives, and they’re from Leeds. There’s The Cribs, who are from near Leeds. Um… that’s it [laughs].
Whitey: I think there’s this perception that there are great bands in Leeds because of us.
Nick: I mean you travel 30 minutes south and you’re in Sheffield, where you’ve got Arctic Monkeys, the Long Blondes…
Before being in Kaiser Chiefs, you were all in a different projects –
Ricky: That’s what I’m going to start calling it, a project [laughs]!
It was quite the little collective, wasn’t it? Obviously, now with Kaiser Chiefs you’re massively popular. What was your recipe for success?
Nick: I think we learnt our lesson from making a lot of mistakes in the previous band.
Ricky: Feeling like underdogs, because we thought we were on the verge of success with the first band, but it just fell apart – using that experience, hard work, and never giving up. We were slightly delusional, I think.
Peanut: We got rid of all the songs we’d written over six years, and wrote new ones.
Whitey: I think the recipe was going back and playing music that we wanted to be doing, and not following any trends or trying to fit into some scene so we could get a record deal. A lot of bands’ goal is to get a record deal, not to make music that they want to make.
Nick: We figured that, since no one was paying any attention to us, record contract-wise, we were gonna go for the fans. So what happened was, with “Oh My God”, one of the first songs that we wrote, we would play it for people and they would say, ‘It doesn’t sound like anyone.’ Which was amazing, because that was our ambition.
Whitey: But that scares off record companies, because they say, ‘Who are we going to sell it to?’
Nick: So we decided we’d go for the fans first, and play loads of gigs, and it worked. We eventually got a record deal.
Peanut, it looked like you wanted to say something.
Peanut: No, I was asking Simon what the Leeds score is, but they haven’t started playing yet.
Right.
Peanut: But I agreed with what they said. About us not sounding like anything else.
Whitey: “Oh My God” became the blueprint.
Speaking of gigs, you started doing some to try out some of the new material. How are audiences reacting?
Nick: We were looking at everyone’s faces. When you play new songs, it’s pretty nerve-wracking. I was reading message boards afterwards to see if anybody’s going, ‘Ah, I really like that new one.’
Peanut: It’s good to test songs out to a small crowd instead of some big festival, which is not quite the best idea [laughs].
Nick: YouTube is ace, because we play the songs and then watch them back. Especially as the drummer, I can go, ‘Oh, that’s too slow, or that’s too fast.’
Peanut: For me as well, there were new sounds I was using, and I wanted to hear what they sounded like, as it’s not quite the same as in the studio. It’s quite useful to be like, ‘Oh that sounds good, I’m pleased with the way that sounds.’
Ricky: “I Predict a Riot” is on YouTube about 75 times, everyone screams, it all goes fuzzy, you can’t hear anything, and the camera’s moving around. Then they stop filming it after like five seconds.
Maybe if you had every little five-second clip, you could edit a full version. For any band, the sophomore album is always a big achievement—
Nick: OK.
Or at least I perceive it to be, having never been in a band myself.
Peanut: It’s never too late.
What goals did you set for yourselves when recording Yours Truly, Angry Mob?
Nick: The goal was to make a better album, and to prove to people that we’re – well, there is this perception of Kaiser Chiefs that we’re just giddy and foolish, and we’re not. So one big goal was to defy anyone who’d ever said we were shit. On the first album we felt like underdogs, and in a way, even though it was very successful, we still feel like underdogs.
Whitey: Which is a good thing.
Nick: You just want to feel defiant.
I wanted to ask you more about the new songs, but the advance CD I got doesn’t have a tracklisting on it, because it says it’s by a band called Regretful.
Nick: Oh yeah, did you guys know that? The promos that went out to the press here say No Regrets by Regretful. Bands always have cool names like the Dudes, or the Dicks…
Ricky: Or the Private Zombies!
Nick: The demos we get from really shit bands are always named things like Regretful. So now no one’s going to [steal] the promo…
Whitey: They’re just going to look at it and put it straight down.