Keane - bland middle-class crooners or tub-thumping, stadium-filling songsmiths? Rock journos Vs the great CD-buying public - the debate continues. Keyboard player Tim Rice-Oxley tells Brian Boyd how success brought its own issues for the bank and how the new album came from a darker place.
THE four members of Coldplay are sitting in Slattery's pub on Capel Street thinking of a new name for their band. They've a gig on in the Mean Fiddler (now The Village) in less than an hour and the promoter needs to have the new name. The singer mentions a kind old lady he used to know - her name was Cherry Keane. That will do. But no one at the gig hears the name properly and for one night in Dublin a four-piece band with an Irish guitarist who used to be called Coldplay are known as Cherokee.
"Our founding member and guitarist, Dominic Scott, is from Dublin, so we used to spend a lot of time there," says Tim Rice-Oxley, the sole songwriter in the band now known simply as Keane. "We spent years on the overnight Holyhead-Dún Laoghaire sailing and it was after one of those trips and precisely in Slattery's of Capel Street that we came up with our new name, Cherry Keane. She was this really nice old lady who used to look after Tom, the singer in the band. We though the Coldplay name was too depressing so I ended up giving it away to a guy I knew at college - Chris Martin. I believe he's still using it. After a while we dropped the Cherry part of the name - because of the whole Cherokee confusion - and Dominic left the band [ their song Everybody's Changing is about Scott leaving].
"He was just exasperated at us going for years and getting nowhere. It was all very amicable. We're still in touch. He was at a gig we did with U2 in New York last year. I introduced him to the Edge. That meant a lot to the both of us because, when we began as a four piece with Dominic, we used to play U2 covers".
Because Scott was such a central part of Keane (apart from his guitar work, he also wrote songs and did backing vocals), they didn't replace him when he left. They also dropped their other guitar part - singer Tom Chaplin was their rhythm guitarist - and contented themselves with a drum kit and a keyboard.
If Rice-Oxley sounds nostalgic about Keane's Dublin roots, it's because, he says, those days are such a contrast to the "madness" surrounding the band now. "It also gives me a chance to tell the real story of the band," he says. "To talk about those seven years when we were going nowhere. We couldn't get a record deal, couldn't get a single out and it was a struggle."
When they did eventually get an album out, it was always a constant source of band merriment to hear themselves described as the "new Coldplay" because only they knew they were the original Coldplay. The band now known as Coldplay also found the comparisons amusing because only they knew that they once asked Rice-Oxley to join them as a keyboard player but he turned them down.
Keane also find it funny that the first single off their new album, Is It Any Wonder?, has already been described in hundreds of publications as "having a U2 guitar sound". "First of all, remember our background in playing U2 covers and second, there aren't any guitars on the track," he says. "It's just effects-laden keyboards. People are so obsessed with guitars, but there's a whole world of sounds available to you if you go looking. We could easily have put guitars on this album - Tom is still a good guitar player - but we've been a guitar band before and we're not going back to that sound. Most of the bands we love are guitar bands, but we just found that when Dominic left and we got Tom to take off his guitar, we found we had more space and melodies on the songs. We never really filled in the blanks where the guitar should be; we just left it to Tom's voice to connect with people. Anyway, I truly believe that regardless of how you arrange a song, it's really about atmosphere and the meaning and the way it affects people. It's nothing to do with what instruments you use."
The guitar-free debut, Hopes and Fears, was the biggest-selling UK album of 2004 - or it was for 364 days of that year. On the final day, the Scissor Sisters album sold 502 copies more, nudging Keane into second place. Perversely, Keane's success after what they refer to as "the wilderness years" broke them up. "We did break up - sort of," says Rice-Oxley. "Myself and the drummer, Richard, certainly thought it was over. It got to the stage where I was actually thinking what I was going to do next. To suddenly realise that everything was disappearing was really scary.
"We just weren't communicating with Tom, the singer, at all. It was just a mad time. The first album did so well, far better than anyone expected. We were getting Brit awards, Ivor Novello awards, we were nominated for the Mercury, Tom sang on the Live Aid single, we played at Live 8, we played Radio City Music Hall. . . it was just insane. The highlights were amazing, but there were some ludicrous moments as well. It was the extremes of the differences - from playing Live 8 in front of billions of people to finding yourself the next day drinking a warm can of lager, waiting to go on morning television. A lot of it was down to exhaustion and mental unease and bad things being brought up between group members. I don't know, it's like that thing in Star Trek or Star Wars where they go into warp-speed, or whatever they call it. It was just moving so quickly. And not only were we breaking up, we were doing ourselves a lot of damage. What you're supposed to do in that situation is take some time off from each other but, bizarrely, we decided, even with things as bad as they were, to take all that negative emotion and go straight into the studio for the second album. Don't ask me why, we just did."
The resultant album, Under The Iron Sea, is, for Rice-Oxley, a "sombre and heavy bastard of an album". "Looking back now, I think Hopes and Fears has a slightly melancholy end-of-summer vibe about it, but because this was recorded at a bad time for the band, this is a lot bleaker," he says. "It was written just at the time that we were coming round to thinking about keeping the band together after all. A lot of the songs directly refer to the experiences of the past two years. The Frog Prince is about observing the behaviour of rock stars; Is It Any Wonder? is about how our generation react to events and I wrote Broken Toy about my relationship with Tom. I really believe we went to the darkest recesses on this album - going to a bad place, but getting good songs out of it, hopefully."
He knows the critics are waiting in serried ranks, sharpening their knives on a whetstone. "I was so naïve in the beginning that I really thought that we would be respected for being honest, respected for not pretending to be anything we're not," he says. "We get criticised for our whiteness and our middle-classness - I could tell you about a few bands out there - a few so-called rock'n'roll bands who are a lot more middle class than we are.
"The problem, though, is that a lot of rock critics are white and middle class also, so there's a bitterness there about us. I used to think that rock critics were people who simply enjoyed music, but some seem to have their own agenda when it comes to us. We don't play the rock'n'roll game - the whole leather trousers and drug thing. I like Paul Simon - so what? Should I change him for a cooler name?"
They've given up trying to be cool. "There's too much stacked against us in the battle to be cool," he says. "We're making the same sort of music we were making when we released 500 copies of our first single on the indie Fierce Panda label."
Although dismissive in the main about their critical reaction, he is furious about a story that emerged last year which said that Keane were styled and marketed from day one, with everything, down to what font they used on their album, dreamed up for them by a marketing team. It was alleged that a company called Moving Brands was tasked with giving Keane a "coherent identity" - from their CD covers and videos to their websites, posters and T-shirts.
"Yes I am furious about that story," he says. "We've come through so much to get here, we've done everything ourselves, we have total control over our band. This report that we weresomehow manufactured, styled and branded from the start is just the furthest thing possible from the truth. I think the whole manufactured band thing is a horrible idea. Look, when we signed our record deal, there was a big A&R chase on at the time. We could have signed to a few different labels for more money. As it happened, we took the deal which gave us complete creative freedom. People think there must be a catch somewhere - that someone else is writing all the songs or something, it's just not true. Do you honestly think we pay someone to look like this?"
Under the Iron Sea is released on June 12th
