Tom Chaplin is absent today but the relationship between himself and Tim became strained during the making of the Keane’s second album, Under The Iron Sea. We were given the triangle to play in music classes.” As far as Richard and I are concerned, people never thought of us as musical. As kids we weren’t precociously musically talented, well maybe Tom. He used to drive everyone insane doing impressions of Freddie Mercury and nothing has changed. Precocious kids then? “Tom bloody was”, says Tim. “I don’t know what we were arguing about but I guess we were about 11 years old. “My first memory of our drummer Richard is me kicking him in the balls after a music lesson”, says Tim laughing. When you’re on a journey you’re conscious of where you come from as well as where you’re trying to get to.” “I think of Strangeland as being life and particularly that place you get to – that strange land you enter and don’t have any idea what it’s going to be like. “The journey you go on in pursuit of your dream”, he says. This is also an album about what Tim calls life’s journey and not just a look back to childhood. When I was trying to find a way into this album that popped into my head and it was a great unlocking of everything.” I’ve always loved the name of that café and I always wanted to write a song about it. We used to sit in the Sovereign Light Café which is just down the road from here and dream. I love the sea and I love the seafront and the faded glamour of this town. Tom and I used to cycle down here from Battle. Having said that I don’t feel the actual songs are too rooted in childhood. “It feels like the album is very rooted here, it’s where we all live. Tim describes it as something of a journey into the past. The new songs were recorded at Tim’s SeaFog studios next to his Sussex home, with Radiohead and Lana Del Rey producer Dan Grech-Marguerat. The making of Strangeland was all about thinking global (they clearly want mega sales again) and acting local. Tim Oxley Rice, Richard Hughes, Tom Chaplin, Jesse Quin “Somebody said it’s Hopes and Fears in 3D, which I think is a good way to describe it”, says Tim, who has also written songs for Kylie Minogue and Gwen Stefani (he also narrowly avoided joining an early incarnation of Coldplay when he was in college). Strangeland is very much in the windswept and interesting style of their six million-selling debut album, Hopes and Fears, and it may well be a concerted effort to re-establish Keane as the stockbroker rock act they were several years ago. However, after selling ten million albums, they’re in no hurry to dismantle their image as polite purveyors of tasteful piano rock. When lead singer Tom Chaplin (who does perhaps look like British PM David Cameron from a distance) ended up in the Priory for substance abuse five years ago, it was easily the most surprising thing Keane have ever done.
This has all fed the image of Keane as public school boys who are just too nice to rock. “When we were kids there was no rock music for a hundred miles around Bexhill. “Three of the band are from around here”, says Tim. Both speak haltingly and with the crushing modesty of upper middle-class English boys. Up in their dressing room, main songwriter Tim Oxley Rice and ‘new boy’, bassist Jesse Quin sit in readiness for that night’s show. The band are back in town to launch their new album, Strangeland, with a homecoming show in the De La Warr Pavilion, the impressive modernist building which dominates that two-mile promenade also where the young Keane would while away their days as small-town lads. The three founding band members, Tom Chaplin, Tim Oxley Rice and Richard Hughes, all hail from the nearby town of Battle, the actual site of the ding-dong back in 1066 when King Harold got one in the eye from William the Conqueror.įorget crumbling tower blocks and urban malaise these picturesque surroundings scream Keane or rather, say it politely in a nice accent.
Hardly the cradle of rock ’n’ roll creation then, but this is Keane country. In fact, Bexhill-on-Sea is only notable for being the place where Graham Norton has made his home and as the coastal defence outpost where Spike Milligan was stationed during the Second World War.
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Winding streets full of quaint shops lead down to a two-mile promenade that has all the faded seaside glamour of the Edwardian era, and the surrounding countryside is very much in the stockbroker belt. Alan Corr meets the band in their childhood haunt on the southern English coast to talk about their new hopes and fearsīexhill-on-Sea in East Sussex doesn’t look like the stomping ground of one of the most successful rock acts of the last decade. Keane return to their roots both musically and emotionally on their new album, Strangeland.
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