Tim Rice-Oxley is checking his e-mails. In his inbox is the latest update on Tom Chaplin’s condition, which says that it’s unclear whether the singer will be joining us. At worst, Chaplin has a stomach bug. At best, it’s food poisoning. Rice-Oxley and the newly bearded drummer Richard Hughes figure that a bug takes longer to cure — and, with Keane’s second album, Under the Iron Sea, just out, and an MTV broadcast to be filmed in Madrid, the timing couldn’t be worse.
“He’s gotten into oysters a lot lately,” ponders Rice-Oxley as he strides away from the noise of Spain v Ukraine on the TV and into a secluded meeting room. “He can’t pass through an airport without stopping off at an oyster bar. Maybe he’s had a bad oyster.”
Keane’s songwriting keyboardist makes no attempt to conceal his views concerning the compatibility of seafood and singers in acclaimed rock trios. “Who would want to have an oyster before getting on a plane? That would have been my attitude, but clearly the lead singer of Keane has a different answer to that question.”
By way of mitigation, I suggest that air travel makes people do strange things. What, for instance, is it about aircraft that turns everyone into a Bloody Mary drinker? “Yes. And besides, they are a slightly budget cocktail, aren’t they? Let’s be honest.”
Rare is the moment that a member of Keane dispenses an utterance of unguarded poshness. Since their third single, Somewhere Only We Know, made instant stars of them in 2004, the subtext to much of the criticism levelled at them has centred on their background. They’re not the first boarding-school chums to form a band. But their inability or unwillingness to lapse into the vernacular of rock insurrectionists has agitated critics for whom the battleground of class war extends to the airwaves.
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It might be the circumstances of our meeting — or it could be the vindication of having just heard that Under the Iron Sea is currently outselling its nearest competitor by five to one — but today Rice-Oxley has a forthright, unapologetic air about him. If, as a result of Chaplin’s illness, he gets a little free time, he can always spend it doing his very favourite thing — wandering around the art galleries of London.
Last night, though, was spent at Chris Martin’s house — he and the Coldplay frontman attended University College London together — where they compared notes on the vagaries of rock stardom. “It’s amazing,” says Rice-Oxley, “how the experience is similar in terms of the massive mood swings and the reactions to how you’re perceived, and how a little thing can turn a great day into a ridiculously depressing one.”
That Rice-Oxley has had his share of depressing days since the release last year of Keane’s debut album Hopes and Fears is pretty obvious when you listen to Under the Iron Sea. As with Radiohead’s The Bends, the emotional 20/20 vision induced by touring the life out of their debut album has left certain scars.
Atlantic, for example, sounds like a panic attack set to glacial, funereal keyboard washes. Answering a straight question with a straight answer, Rice-Oxley says: “It’s about the terror of being alone.”
Crystal Ball confirms the overriding impression of him being a man who spends a lot of his time deep in thought on aeroplanes. Even when Rice-Oxley manages to bag a window seat the view gets no better. Inspired by An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, the Yeats war poem, Bad Dream has Chaplin singing: “Why do I have to fly/ Over every town up and down the line?/ I’ll die in the clouds above.”
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Is Rice-Oxley ever, um, happy? “Well, I tend to swing quite violently between being really depressed and really sort of happy,” he ponders. Alluding to the well-documented intra-band tensions that precipitated the making of Under the Iron Sea (the track Broken Toy addresses what Rice-Oxley perceived as Chaplin’s dereliction of their friendship), the keyboardist concedes that he isn’t always the easiest person to work with.
He says it’s a good job that he didn’t end up joining Coldplay — he and Martin discussed the idea — “because Chris and I in the same control room would have been very messy indeed. But no, I’m very lucky in my life. I’m very happily married and I love my job.”
That, I suggest, is what well-off depressives remind themselves when asked about their quality of life. “Yes, well you have to do that, I suppose. I’m the kind of person who tends to get bogged down.”
And no more bogged down, it seems, than at Christmas 2004, when a fatigued Keane returned to their homes in the Sussex town of Battle knowing that ten more months of touring lay ahead of them and only three songs had been written for the next album. After the umpteenth time that he said he thought he might never write another decent song, Rice-Oxley’s art student wife Jane started sarcastically agreeing with him.
By his own admission, most of what he ever thinks about is Keane — so perhaps it’s no surprise that it hurts when Liam Gallagher can sing utter nonsense and mean it because he grew up in Burnage, while Keane’s comfortable upbringing is equated with a lack of sincerity.
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But if he thinks that people who equate being working class with authenticity need to be clubbed to death with an authentic yet middle-class Nick Drake box set, he refrains from saying so. Indeed, even when on the defensive, he refrains from dwelling on Keane’s “dark ages” between 1998 and 2002, when the band lived and rehearsed in a shared space in Hackney, financing their ambitions with a range of low-paid jobs. It is left to Hughes to elaborate.
“Did he not tell you about the medical trial? I think it was £80 he got for testing this drug. I remember meeting him for lunch the morning after he did it. It was a schizophrenia drug. I mean, I don’t suppose you’re expected to take schizophrenia drugs unless you’re schizophrenic. And if you’re not, they probably have the wrong effect. I think it was OK, but then you never know if you’re the one who got the placebo. ”
When Chaplin finally arrives, it turns out that he has also taken some pills, albeit of a different kind. “Thank God for Immodium,” he declares.
Only a slight pallor in his normally cherubic features hints at what the past 24 hours have been like.
“Let me guess,” hazards Rice-Oxley. “Oysters?” Not this time, apparently. “Monkfish, I think,” says Chaplin.
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As Rice-Oxley and Hughes amble over to another room for a meeting with the charity War Child, Chaplin orders a restorative cup of camomile tea. “What have you been talking about then?” he inquires.
Oysters and depression, mainly, I tell him. Chaplin confirms that Rice-Oxley’s “obsessive nature” can make a demanding taskmaster of him, but that he wouldn’t have it any other way. “We’ve just devised this way of talking to each other through the songs. Like I know he’s written Broken Toy about me. But then, I get to sing it back to him. It’s like in the playground when someone calls you names and you get to say: ‘I know you are, but what am I?’ “We’ve known each other since we were kids. In that sense, nothing has changed.”
Under the Iron Sea is released by Island X
Keane meet Coogan. Aha!
Alan Partridge loves Abba; Paul Calf hates “student music”; and the less said about Tony Ferrino the better. Lest we confuse Steve Coogan with his alter egos, his interview with Keane goes some way to setting the record straight. In this exclusive series of Times vodcasts, Coogan reveals that during filming for his Laurence Sterne comedy film A Cock and Bull Story, Keane’s Hopes and Fears was a mainstay in his trailer.
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Like his latest creation Tommy Saxondale, he reveals a little of his love for Seventies rock, drawing parallels between Keane’s new album Under the Iron Sea and Genesis. The band seem flattered but unsure of the connection, before retreating with their famous fan to the piano. Here, Coogan tries to find a place for himself in the Keane set-up. Go to www.timesonline.co.uk/podcasts