A few years ago Serge Pizzorno and his son were watching videos of Lionel Messi in full flight. The footie was fantastic – but the music was dire. Believing the beautiful game deserved a beautiful soundtrack, the Kasabian frontman wrote G.O.A.T., a twinkle-toed psychedelic onslaught that references the soccer icon’s status as “greatest of all time”. It’s a highlight of Happenings, the band’s bubbly bulldozer of a new album.
“It came from my boy showing me YouTube TikTok videos,” says Pizzorno, speaking into an iPhone propped against a desk of his home outside Leicester, in England’s East Midlands. “And I’m, like, ‘Oh, the soundtrack is so bad.’ This EDM horrible fizzy crap. ‘You need a new Rocky tune.’ That’s where that came from.”
Much like Messi bamboozling the opposition, G.O.A.T. swerves from banging to bonkers. It starts as a rave, then goes full prog. To Pizzorno, that energy – Prodigy one minute, Pink Floyd the next – speaks to everything he loves about his band.
“It’s a very Kasabian thing,” he says, explaining that the one-time Glastonbury headliners are at their best combining ludicrous ambition with a belief in the communal power of music.
“I love that fine line between preposterous – ‘You’ve got this. Oh, this could go in the wrong way’ – and, ‘Wow, this is transporting me somewhere really uplifting.’ Live, that will be massive.”
That Pizzorno would be inspired by footage of Messi blitzing his way towards the goal is hardly a surprise: few recent bands have done “terrace anthem” as inspiringly as Kasabian, formed when Pizzorno, the band’s former singer Tom Meighan and their bassist, Chris Edwards, were at Countesthorpe Community College in Leicester in 1997. Written off early in their career as Oasis gone big beat, they have, over the past 20 years, emerged as arena rockers for all seasons.
The journey continues on Happenings, which pushes on from the sludgy psychedelia of perhaps their best album, West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum, from 2009, to deliver a suite of feel-good crowed-pleasers that Pizzorno imagines ringing out across heaving festival fields – including Electric Picnic, which they play in August.
“It’s about having those moments, man, where you’re on someone’s shoulders,” he says. “You turn and you see kids you’ve grown up with. You’re there together, the time is now, the sun’s coming down and the music’s great. You’re in that level.”
He believes these golden experiences – that blur of music, friendship and boozy sunsets – sustain us. When the slog of everyday life eventually reasserts itself, it is the memories of better times that give us something to hold on to.
“Six months later you’re grafting away, it’s all gone a bit shit. Then you slip back into that moment and you’re, like, ‘That’s what it’s all about,’” he says. “That’s what I’ve learned from essentially being part of this entertainment night – to make sure the kids feel that. That they have that opportunity to feel that moment. And that it stays with them forever. That’s what it’s all about.”
Pizzorno, with a trimmed beard and a stylish haircut, is upbeat as he dials in. He’s certainly far more buoyant than the last time The Irish Times spoke to him, when Kasabian had sacked Meighan, their original vocalist, and the naturally introverted Pizzorno was feeling his way into his new gig as frontman.
The band fired Meighan when the singer was sentenced to 200 hours of community service after a court heard how he had struck his fiancee, held her by the throat and dragged her by the ankles. (Domestic abuse charities criticised the sentence as too lenient.)
Meighan had always stood slightly apart from the rest of Kasabian – which is why attempts by the UK press to paint “Tom and Serge” as the East Midlands’ answer to Noel and Liam Gallagher always rang hollow. Carrying on without him was challenging but not impossible – following The Alchemist’s Euphoria, from 2022, Happenings is their second album with Pizzorno as frontman.
“It was written off of doing these huge shows and [of it being] a tough time to be in this band and coming through that stronger and bigger than ever,” he says. “And then being in a studio being excited by music and the idea of live shows.”
Meighan has since tried to get his career back on track by performing in smaller venues. This year he played pubs and clubs in Wexford, Kilkenny and Donegal, and he recently performed at the Isle of Wight festival, in the UK. How does Pizzorno feel about his former bandmate starting over?
“It’s a very complicated subject,” he says. “You know what, he’s doing his thing, we’re doing our thing. That’s as much as I want to say about it.”
It’s 20 years since Kasabian released their self-titled debut album. The early tendency to dismiss the group as lairy Oasis clones was perhaps a contributing factor to a one-star review of their second album, Empire, from 2006, which Rolling Stone magazine described as an “artless pastiche” of “Led Zeppelin, Faces, Oasis, Primal Scream”.
The band didn’t try to hide their influences. But they were never paint-by-numbers Britrockers, and they achieved deserved – if belated – critical acclaim with West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum, a meditation on the connection between art and madness that brimmed with slamming riffs and huge, lurching grooves. It was one of the best LPs of 2009. Even the begrudgers came around: a five-star Uncut review heralded Pizzorno’s “whomping monster-rock” and his mix of “bounding riffs and rock-electro”. Then came the ultimate vindication: a prestigious Mercury Prize nomination.
I wanted to have a record that wants to be played in front of lots of people, everyone going, ‘This is the vibe.’ That’s what I want to give
“That was amazing. It was such a wild experience. We had no real sense of what things meant and what things didn’t mean. We seemed to get on this trajectory: everything kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It never bothered me when we were misinterpreted or misunderstood,” Pizzorno says of their journey from critical punchbags to acclaimed rockers.
“I saw the long game. ‘They might say this now [but] ... the next record ...’ It almost gave us an advantage. ‘Wow, they’ve pinned us down as this weird thing. And that is not it.’”
The fun, he says, came in subverting the expectations of the press as Kasabian expanded ever outwards from dance-infused indie into prog, electro and Krautrock.
“The next record it was, like, ‘Oh, okay.’ And then record after that it was, like, ‘Oh, right.’ I felt more excited by freaking everyone out even more. ‘Oh, you’re going to put me there? Okay, we’re going to go deep now.’ And it’s funny that the weird psychedelic record is the one that brought [the critical kudos] in. You have no idea what’s going to work and what’s not.”
Weirdness was always bubbling under Kasabian’s surface if you looked for it. West Ryder went further and leant brilliantly into pretentiousness – the artwork, in which the band were “dressed for a party at an asylum”, was inspired by a record sleeve by the Krautrock group Amon Düül; on the accompanying arena tour, the video displays flashed quotes by Honoré de Balzac and Jorge Luis Borges.
West Ryder was just the start: Kasabian would go on to explore headbanging electropop on the 2014 album 48:13 and upbeat indie on For Crying Out Loud, Meighan’s last album as frontman, from 2017.
“We call it the Trojan Horse, where you’re always trying to get through as much of the weirdness of possible – but it can still be sung on the terrace,” says Pizzorno.
“What is the unique thing about what I’m doing is that it’s coming from the most obscure influences. If you listen carefully they are in there – Pasolini and Jodorowsky are in there,” he says, referring to the Italian film-maker and provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini and the French-Chilean surrealist director Alejandro Jodorowsky. “Sometimes people will want to go down that ‘Oh, it sounds like this’ [route], or whatever, and you’re, like, ‘No, it definitely didn’t start there.’”
One reason they were compared to Oasis is that they were personally close to the Gallaghers. Kasabian have opened for Noel in Dublin, and in 2022 Liam invited the group to support his huge Knebworth gigs. Amid speculation that the brothers may be about to bury the hatchet and work together again, how does Pizzorno feel about a potential Oasis reunion?
“It’s a really difficult question,” he says. “It’s deep; it’s family. For any family it would be great to [have] reconciliation. I don’t know; it’s difficult. It may happen, it may not. They’re both making great tunes. I think be patient and let them do whatever they want.”
Happenings ends with Algorithm, a meditation on artificial intelligence in which Pizzorno laments computers “taking control” and “robots believing they have a soul”. It’s the perfect conclusion to an album that argues that human connection will always trump technology and that people are happiest coming together for shared communal moments – precisely the sort of experience Kasabian will provide in Ireland this summer.
“It’s in terms of where we are with technology: the more and more insular we become, things like gigs, comedy shows, cinemas – these places where we can meet and experience things together – are so important,” he says. “I wanted to have a record that wants to be played in front of lots of people, everyone going, ‘This is the vibe.’ That’s what I want to give.”
Happenings is released Friday, July 5th. Electric Picnic runs from Friday, August 16th, to Sunday, August 18th
