The Kaiser Chiefs aren't short of fans, but with their new album they're out to win their original ones back - the people that bought their very first single and may have since moved on
'I'M NOT BORED talking about the album yet; I'm still interested in hearing what people think about it. It's been busy recently, waking up not knowing where I am. Today, though, I know I'm in Dublin, and talking in a language that I know people will understand. Did you know that the phrase 'practice what you preach' is pretty much untranslatable into German?"
Actually, no, we did not, which adds up to yet another reason why it's occasionally a good idea to talk to reasonably interesting pop stars. Of which Ricky Wilson, lead singer with Leeds band Kaiser Chiefs and the person quoted above, is one. And doesn't he dress sharply? Three-piece suit, patent leather shoes, smartly knotted tie and - how very old school - cuff links. Wilson's chic is, however, undermined by a CND badge on his jacket lapel. The message is clear: clothes maketh the man, but the badge maketh the point.
This 30-year-old former lecturer in graphic design might be dressed up with somewhere to go, but his eventual destination is open to conjecture. Kaiser Chiefs' new album, Off With Their Heads, is the band's third album in three years. Such a strike rate is virtually unheard of for a band of their stature. Haven't they heard of one of the ground rules of the great rock'n'roll swindle: create mystique and enigma by starving the public of your songs, gouge a sense of expectation into their heads so that when a new album is released after five years of hard toil in the studio it is greeted with Pavlovian levels of adulation? Wilson smirks at such a notion. They do that kind of thing in Leeds, apparently.
"Part of the point of writing, recording and releasing the albums so quickly is that we didn't want to get stuck in a routine, and we didn't want to have to make records just to slot into record company schedules. We didn't want to get into the situation of making one by rote every two years, either. Having said that, I don't think we thought we'd make one so soon after the second one (2007's Yours Truly, Angry Mob). But if you make one so soon there's no point sitting on it until it's the 'right time'. You want to release it, so why not?"
Wilson is anti the "event" album release, an attitude that harks back to the 1960s when bands released albums virtually back-to-back (The Beatles: 13 albums in seven years; The Kinks: seven albums in three years; The Small Faces: four albums in two years). He is also of the opinion that certain people place too much importance on what is, after all, just a few pop songs. Some people build it up in their heads to be something it isn't. It's not that I want to blow holes into the process, we work quite hard to make the records, believe me, but it's just music.
"Obviously, record companies are tearing their hair out to come up with ways to entice people to walk into record shops to buy CDs. That's the record company's thing; bands just want to make records, and because of that we don't want to be caught up in the marketing process. This is mentioned all the time at meetings. Bloc Party are doing this, Radiohead have done that. And I really think we should concern ourselves less with how to sell it and more about what's on it.
"Marketing isn't our department; we're very interested in hearing what people have to say, but if anyone had a good idea they'd have done it by now." Wilson says he'd love to have a massive first and second week of sales for Off With Their Heads, but if push came to shove he'd rather have people buying the record over a longer period of time. He has a point, of course.
KAISER CHIEFS' 2005 DEBUT, Employment, achieved its highest UK chart position (number two) a full year after it was released. Surely, asks Wilson, this is more impressive than being number one for a couple of weeks around the time of initial release?
"When records - say, the last Madonna album - are about to come out they receive massive pre-release coverage. You could see the poster ad and magazine cover campaign for Madonna's album starting about a month before it was released, but now I can't even remember the title of the record. It's a weird world; please note that I'm not criticising Madonna, I'm merely commenting on the marketing spend. But I stress that it's all about the songs."
Which is where Off With Their Headscomes up trumps. Kaiser Chiefs set the ball rolling with Employment, a decidedly clever compendium of pop-oriented art school sensibilities reminiscent of The Kinks, Blur and XTC. The quality control dipped with Yours Truly, Angry Mob, but is effortlessly up to snuff with the new one (which is co-produced by Mark Ronson). "What we have managed to get back is the songs," affirms Wilson. "Entering the studio not knowing we were making an album helped us to get back to the way we were prior to getting a record deal. Before you have a record deal that's what you do - you're writing songs so that you can play a set in order to support the headliner. With our second record it was album number two from the start; a different approach, in that you know it's a follow-up to a successful album and you know you don't want to give any ammunition to the critics. Through that, you're locking down and losing some of the charm that made people like you in the first place.
"You're treating every song like a single, you over-produce them, you make it so that no one can criticise it. Our approach was lost in thrall to our success - we forgot our lack of self-consciousness, which was part of the reason our fans liked us in the first place. With Off With Their Headswe have that back. We didn't strive to get it back, it just happened. Which is even better. Initially, we went in to record an EP, but when we had 10 songs we knew we'd go for the album. What's an EP these days, anyway? Can anyone name their Top 10 EPs? No, didn't think so."
And so we prepare to leave the dapper Wilson, front man extraordinaire of one of the best pop bands the UK has produced since Blur. Unlike Blur, however, Kaiser Chiefs strain to remain a people's band; how much longer they can hold onto this notion without losing the run of themselves (NB: a phrase probably not translatable into German) is debatable. There is, Wilson knows, an inherent conundrum.
"We still want to be a band for teenagers, but we play arenas and you can't fill arenas with teenagers. It's going to have lots of different people there. A lot of bands get to play arena-sized venues and don't care about anything other than there being people in them. When we play arenas we want it to feel that we're playing to only a couple of thousand people. You lose the first wave of fans you have when you sell as many records as we do. If I were a fan of Kaiser Chiefs from the first single I definitely wouldn't be into us now. It's the way of things if your favourite unknown band becomes public property - then you move on. It's peculiar, but we understand it. Yet I think we're always striving to win those fans back, because we feel they're the most important to us. Yes, we care about the parents and the under 10s who like our songs, but the core fans are the ones we want to hold on to."
It sounds like wishful thinking on Wilson's part; youth is not on his side, for a start. And yet the songs are. Plus, for Wilson the dream isn't over just yet, which is either charming or pathetic, depending on your outlook.
"Most people I know, and possibly a lot that I don't, have dreamt of being in a rock band. When you're a kid, you play air guitar, sing into a hairbrush and play at being in a band. Some people say that a pivotal moment for them was listening to an album by a particular band, but for me it was seeing Marty McFly in Back to the Futureslide across the school stage on his knees while playing the guitar. That's what I related pop music to being and it looked like good fun.
"And then there was watching Top of the Pops. The greatest thing about that was sitting there feeling so proud of your band, and your mum and dad behind you were going, 'look at the state of 'im'. We did Top of the Popsbefore it went off air - there's nothing quite like meeting up with other pop bands, even if you're in one yourself."
Off with Their Headsis released on Oct 17
