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Keane wants to change your life


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Keane is (left to right) Tim Rice-Oxley, Tom Chaplin and Richard Hughes.
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(CNN) -- Rock lyrics are not meant for reading. Something about the page -- sans voice and charged delivery -- flattens even the best song and makes it, well, silly.

Take "Somewhere Only We Know," for instance. It's the lead track on "Hopes & Fears," the debut major-label release from British pop outfit Keane -- "Oh simple thing where have you gone / I'm getting old and I need something to rely on / So tell me when you're gonna let me in / I'm getting tired and I need / Somewhere to begin."

What on earth does that mean? Not a whole lot on paper, but out of the mouth of vocalist Tom Chaplin -- whose rich, assured falsetto fills out the hollows of the notes until they're bursting with feeling -- those cryptic words have weight.

Chaplin provides the pipes for the emotionally-charged three-piece band that has rocketed to the top of the British charts and just this spring released its major-label debut in the United States. Pianist and songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley and drummer Richard Hughes round out the guitarless trio.

TMR sat down with the band to chat about inevitable comparisons, emotional connection and hard-won success.

TMR: Overnight success takes a long time. What's the story? Now you're being called "Britain's hottest act!"

CHAPLIN: Well, it certainly hasn't been an overnight success for us. I think we did our first gig in July 1998, and in fact knew each other long before that. As far back as we can remember really. ... It's been a long old road to get even to the point of being able to release an album. We don't see ourselves as Britain's hottest act. I think we are pleased to have a record in the shops!

RICE-OXLEY: Definitely, yeah. We've been playing together as a band for years and we've known each other a lot longer -- practically [all] our lives. We've sort of been hanging out, doing things together, what kids do, probably for 20-odd years. I still haven't stopped doing what kids do, like being in a band. ... We played football together; eventually we got into music. ... We thought it would be a great idea to form a band and we thought would be big and it would take a week to become brilliant. In fact, it took about 15 years.

But we did a lot of gigs. Our first gig was in 1998 in London at the Hope and Anchor. It sounded absolutely terrible and then we just worked and worked without getting anywhere, but eventually we had a chance to put out a single. [It] was an amazing breakthrough moment for us and we got on the radio. I don't know, as soon as people started hearing our music beyond our circle of friends and our poor families ... things started going really well for us.

TMR: Well, a lot of people look up to bands like yourselves and they hear the story and they have the passion, but it's those key moments that you talked about -- those little breaks.

CHAPLIN: Well, in 2002 we got a publishing deal. We had done some demos with BMG -- we thought, "Right! This is it, you know? This is our year." And we spent the rest of that year trying to get a record deal and it didn't work really and things got worse and worse ... and we didn't really know what we were doing. And it got to Christmas of 2002 and we did a couple of little acoustic gigs in London and you know we just felt that getting out there and playing to people would be a great first step. And Simon Williams from Fierce Panda turned up. It's basically a brilliant kind of no-frills independent record label and he said, "Just give us a song and we'll stick it out and give us some art work as well and that will be that."

And so a couple of months later we had a single in the shops and I think the fact that we had music out there and it was in the public domain and was on the radio and stuff um really changed everything for us. I think it made us really remember and realize that really music's about getting out and playing to people and putting CDs in people's hands. It's not really about record companies and the business side of it.

TMR: The music press can be a blessing or a curse. How has the music press helped to spread the word about Keane?

RICE-OXLEY: The radio has probably been the best thing. It's easy to forget when you've got so many forms of media on offer. ... It's easy to forget the good ol' radio, just being able to hear the music in its purest form. ... You know there's people here or there that have actually heard our songs and it's great to actually hear our music rather than just reading about us. You can read about Keane and you can read people saying this and that -- some of it probably true, some of it nonsense -- but if people just hear the music and can judge us on that, then that's as much as we can ask for.

TMR: Tell us about making that first recording.

HUGHES: He said to us give us a recording and he'd make it up into a CD and distribute it, so we just had to make a recording. We didn't have any money so we just made it at home and we went to our friend Nathan's house because he had good facilities for mixing the record ... So we just made it at home ... and I mean were not the first people to have done that and I am sure we won't be the last. It worked really well for us we were actually quite proud of it. It was actually quite a difficult song to get right -- "Everybody's Changing" -- and we did sort of tweak it for the album. We made a few changes because I think it would have sounded out of place with all the other songs that have been recorded much more professionally. We re-recorded a few bits of it but basically a lot of that original recording we made at home is on the final record. That's a really satisfying thing to be able to say.

TMR: When you're actually hearing your song coming out of someone's cafe or taxi cab or something, how do you feel when you've actually connected with a bunch of people? Particularly when you see people affected emotionally by your music what kind of response do you have seeing that?

CHAPLIN: Well, I think that's the kind of music we make. So making that connection with people is the most important thing to us above anything else, I think. People say, "What's it like to have ... good reviews and stuff?" Well, it's great, but there's nothing better than someone coming up to you and saying, "What your song did for me really changed my life and came at a difficult time or you know just made me feel better." And live -- the best gigs are always the ones where you feel the crowd you've really connected with them and it's become a two-way thing 'cause then it's not just about the band and the crowd, it's about the whole atmosphere and the whole vibe of the place.

TMR: For the past year we've done very well thank you on reality television pop shows like Pop Idol and Fame Academy. What's all the need for all this emotional music?

RICE-OXLEY: I think the fact is that we haven't really done fine. I think the record companies have done fine. I think people want more than that from you. I am not saying that it's not great entertainment ... but music's such a powerful thing ... that can really enrich people's lives. It can change the world or change people's lives in some way. People want that. ... Really I think it would be stretching the imagination that you can get much of that from the Pop Idol or Fame Academy or the products of those programs. People want to get back to music that can really make a difference to them. ...

TMR: You all have some input in songwriting, don't you?

HUGHES: Well, I play the drums, although Tim quite often has sort of a Dr. Dre drum programming alter ego that creeps out in some of the demos. So yeah, basically Tim and I were obviously the rhythm section when we used to have a guitarist ... and I guess Tom sings.

CHAPLIN: Yeah, people ask me about how easy or difficult it is to sing words that aren't mine but I mean actually for a long time I think people were fooled into thinking that I wrote the words and Tim wrote the melodies which hopefully, without trying to blow my own trumpet, is a testament to the way I can interpret them. We have gone through a lot of these experiences Tim writes about together and a lot of the songs are things we all know about and you know the idea for me is to add something to it. ... I have got my own voice and my own understanding of the songs and give them sort of an added passion.

TMR: How do you feel about being compared to bands like Radiohead and Coldplay?

CHAPLIN: Yeah, it is nice. But it's a double-edged sword -- it gives people a reference point, but at the same time our influences vary and we want people to see us in our own right, not like another band.

TMR: You're at the end of a long tour and you've got more stuff coming out, so it's sort of like a treadmill. How do you feel at this point at your career? When you wake up in the morning, is it like, "Oh man, gotta go do another promo ..."?

HUGHES: We're definitely loving all the stuff we're doing. We've been getting the opportunities to do stuff that we've always dreamt of doing. Sometimes we wake up in the morning and we can't believe the alarm is going off, but you know aside from wanting a couple more hours sleep I mean there hasn't been a day that I can remember that I thought I don't want to be doing this.


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