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Keane

Signed to label: Island
From: East Sussex, South East England

"... somewhere between a scuffed Coldplay and a frankly bewildered Beautiful South," according to Steve Lamacq.

Biog half-inched from their website....

Vocals: Tom Chaplin, 24
Piano: Tim Rice-Oxley, 27
Drums: Richard Hughes, 28

When Keane finish a day at their rehearsal studio, they fling open their studio doors and find that dozens of cows have appeared, as if by some bovine twist on Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Welcome to Battle: a small, happy-go-lucky Sussex village. Not much has happened here since 1066, and even then Battle's only claim to fame was cruelly taken away. You can't call something the Battle Of Battle, they said, because that would sound stupid. So the honour went to Hastings, leaving generations of Battle residents to sit and wait patiently for something else to call their own. And now they have it: Keane, three men whose beguilingly beautiful music will put not just a sleepy Sussex village but the entire country back on the global music map.

This time last year Keane were utterly unknown, but if you're thinking that the recent frenzy of press and media coverage - and a deal with music goliath Universal Island - seems to have come overnight, prepare to think again.

The story begins back at the tail end of the last century, at a Hastings secondary school. Tim Rice-Oxley and Richard Hughes, both in the same year, are firm friends but new boy Tom Chaplin, a couple of years younger, soon gets chatting about their mutual love of music: he's just bought Michael Jackson's 'Bad', and Tim's still listening to Tears For Fears' 'Songs From The Big Chair'. Nowadays Tom laughs at the suggestion that Tim and Richard were the cool older boys, but he admits to being chuffed when Tim became his "piano guru" for after-school lessons. When Tim and Richard formed their own band with other friends, Tom spent the best part of two years waiting impatiently for an invitation. And when the day came - in 1997 - he was over the moon. "I have since decided that Tim and Richard actually joined my band," Tom laughs. "They just didn't realise."

The three band members would eventually call themselves Keane, after a kind old local lady who'd look after Tom when he was young, but when Tom cleared off to South Africa on his gap year, the pace slowed to a near standstill. Thing is, while Tom was spreading his love around the underprivileged kids of Africa, Richard and Tim were still hard at work on their music. When Richard went to collect Tom from the airport twelve months later, his first words were, "We've got a gig in ten days". The boys still have their setlist from that gig at the Hope & Anchor. Friends loved it at the time, though in light of more recent gigs everyone has admitted it was, in Tom's own words, "a pile of shit". Tom also recalls that the sound engineer told him he had the loudest voice he'd ever heard. He's still not sure whether that was intended as a compliment.

Having now decided that they would Take It Quite Seriously, the band took their equipment and Tom's loud voice out to France for three months, messing around in a studio with analogue synths and some songs Tim had been working on - some of which will eventually see the light of day on Keane's debut album. The tracks were heavily programmed, with synths all over the place and even, sometimes, drum machines where real skins should have been, simply because there hadn't been room in the studio for a proper drum kit. "You can't get better than real drums," points out Richard, the drummer. "After a couple of months we realised that we'd lost sight of what we wanted to do. The electronics went. And once we'd cleared out all the clutter, it sounded perfect.."

When the band returned to the UK they'd start making trips up to London, soundtracked on the van stereo by cheap cassettes picked up in Battle's myriad second-hand shops, and members' personal favourites - Paul Simon, Pet Shop Boys, The Smiths, and "old people's music" (Tom's description) like Jim Reeves. It was a difficult time for the band Tim and Tom shared a flat in Stoke Newington and tried to get money together for rehearsal time - very bohemian, says Tim; very skint, clarifies Tom. Richard took a job as a secretary at the BBC (Tom insists that he went into the office in drag), while Tom worked at a publishing company in a role whose chief responsibility was "carrying boxes".

Suddenly, things began to look up. After signing with BMG Publishing in the middle stages of 2002, Keane decided that they need to get out there and play live because, Tim says, "that's what you're supposed to do". They booked in two acoustic gigs, one at the Betsey Trotwood, another at the 12 Bar Club. Fierce Panda mini-mogul Simon Williams caught the 12 Bar gig, and asked Keane to put out a single on his label.

They chose 'Everybody's Changing', a sweeping, majestic ode to feeling utterly lost when everyone else seems to know the score, which was recorded for zero pence. "The recording session was a little rough and ready - the song was literally made in a room in someone's house," Tom laughs. "And we had to go round to a different house to mix it, because the speakers broke." It would be difficult to find origins more desperately indie, yet 'Everybody's Changing' sounded like a Number One chart hit before you even got to the chorus, and it immediately began turning heads. Steve Lamacq decided that it was one of the best singles in Fierce Panda's entire history - not bad for a label which housed early releases from Coldplay, Idlewild and Supergrass. He declared that Keane were "somewhere between a scuffed Coldplay and a frankly bewildered Beautiful South", hammering the single on his show and eventually calling the band in for a session on BBC 6Music. (Tom still insists that Richard used his time at the BBC to hypnotise Lamacq, though this is not actually true.) Xfm were on the case, too, with Clare Sturgess requesting a session from the band, while a Sunday Times profile noted that Keane were responsible for "three and a half minutes of pure pop loveliness". NME wrote that 'Everybody's Changing' was "indisputably mighty" and compared Keane with 'Kid A'-era Radiohead covering Aha.

What all these people spotted - and what the rest of the world will shortly find out for themselves - is that despite the reference points, Keane's music really isn't like anything else that's out there right now. "Our songs have universal themes and are emotional," Tim nods. "People want emotion. But that seems like quite a rare thing these days. I don't think there are many bands who are making music which actually means anything. There's nothing to identify with." For each of Keane's three members, being able to express themselves through their music is a godsend. "Like a lot of people, we've gone into making music because we're not terribly brilliant at expressing things," Tim explains. "None of us are your bog-standard, confident, outgoing rockstar types." Nor, however, are they clichéd images of the tortured, angst-ridden rock outcast. "Instead of yelling about how emotional we are, it's more a case of, 'Come in. Let's have a chat. Tell us all about it. I'll put the kettle on'. "

Things, at last, were beginning to gather pace. Keane's first UK tour saw Tom, Richard and Tim performing at venues up and down the country to audiences of between five and 300 people. They didn't look like many other bands - there was no guitarist, a factor which might send some purists screaming into the hills but Richard says really wasn't a conscious decision - "if we'd had one more member we'd have been a quartet, if we'd had one less we'd have been a duo". As the live shows gathered momentum, Tom grew into a stage persona every bit as unique as Keane's music. He's not that big in real life, but put him on a stage and he'll fill it. "It's a mesmerising experience," Tom smiles. "One minute I'm getting on stage, the next I realise half an hour has passed and the gig's over." Why the feeling of being at home? "I'm the only one standing up," he reasons, but it's not quite that. "It just feels natural," he concludes - and when you see Keane on stage, you'll agree.

By the time spring 2003 rolled around, the boys were out on the road again, and labels were already putting offers on the table. "All we were after was the opportunity to make the right record with the right people," Tom shrugs - which is where Island stepped in. "We've never wanted to be a small, cult band," Tom adds. "We want to get our music heard by as many people as we possibly can, because that's why we're making it."

Throw in a startling appearance in the New Bands tent at the Reading and Leeds Carling Weekend, and we're right up to date. The boys' second single for Fierce Panda - and their last before officially entering the fold at Island - is another epic, skewed tale of confusion and love, with Tom's vocal gymnastics once again defying belief. And, once again, it sounds like all the bands who've ever meant anything to anyone, but at the same time it only sounds like Keane.

"People often say that they wish they'd been around in the 60s," Tom says. "But we're happy just where we are. We love rock's back catalogue, and now we've got a chance to add to it. After all, tunes never go out of fashion."

September 2003

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