They're Keane young things

REBECCA BARRY talks to the British trio doing their best to shed the piano-band pansies image


Keane are a smartly dressed, well-spoken, introverted trio who poached their late elderly babysitter's surname, abandoned guitars and bass for a piano and became the coolest uncool band in Britain.

"I didn't want to play one of those big grand pianos because you just look like a ponce," Tim Rice-Oxley chuckles down the line from Chicago, where the band are stopping off on tour. "I play a Yamaha CP70 which is an old 70s touring piano. They break down every few gigs, always in some sort of enormously humiliating moment. It is a bit of a nightmare but it's worth it because it sounds so massive."

Keane's steadily multiplying fans would agree. Rice-Oxley and his bandmates, vocalist Tom Chaplin and drummer Richard Hughes, have spent several months on the road, promoting their critically acclaimed, number one debut album Hopes and Fears and smashing the stereotypes that, on paper, paint them as pansies.

Even so, Keane's songs are unashamedly easy to listen to: classically simple pop motifs, grand arrangements hinged on quavering, high-pitched vocals, well-behaved percussion. As Chaplin airs his emotions, wailing about his "lovesick, bitter and hardened heart" (Bend and Break) he comes on like Morrissey, Jeff Buckley and Thom Yorke all at once. But it's Rice-Oxley's piano that provides the essence of Keane, a clunky old thing that rings slightly with feedback, an authenticity that conjures up images of them messing around in the musty school hall where they began.

Formed at a Hastings high school in 1997, they named themselves after Cherry Keane, an old woman from their village who looked after them as kids. Rice-Oxley remembers fondly that it was she who told him to "stop worrying about being a merchant banker and do whatever you want to do".

That was easier said than done. When their guitarist left the band after four years of fruitless toil, they decided against replacing him.

"I think it was just because, having been friends our whole lives basically, playing in a band, we had such a chemistry and a sort of shorthand between us and such a relationship, that the idea of getting a stranger who didn't have that massive shared history was just too weird."

The following year, with a little less gear in tow, they played an acoustic gig at a bar called the Betsey Trotwood, which was attended by Fierce Panda founder Simon Williams.

Impressed, he invited Keane to record a single, and Everybody's Changing was soon being compared with intelligent pop from artists such as Coldplay, Travis and Radiohead. (Rice-Oxley says he identifies more with young singer-songwriters such as Ron Sexsmith, Brendon Benson and Rufus Wainwright.)

By 2003 the band had a record deal with Universal offshoot Island Records and were touring, including playing in the New Bands tent at the Reading Festival, a chance for them to show off their rock tendencies.

"I think people will be sort of surprised by the amount of energy that comes from us when we're playing live if they just sort of heard that we were just a piano band," he says. "The songs are always the most important thing for us rather than big strutting solos or whatever it is, anything that kind of distracts you from the meaning of the song.

"From a live point of view, the sound that we make is actually kind of rocking and powerful and energetic. We certainly do our best to make it that way. I think people generally don't miss that energy or the power of the guitar live. I think you're always going to get a contingent who feel that the physical aspect of having a guitar is kind of important."

Keane are certainly not the first British band of their era to incorporate keys into their sound - Muse and Coldplay have been doing that for years.

But Rice-Oxley is the first to admit no one plays "air piano" in front of the mirror, a point reflected by the ridiculous tendency for some 80s synthpop to use those silly portable strap-on keyboards.

In his book Lost in Music, (1995) Giles Smith wrote, "The agony of being a pianist is, it seems to me, easily sourced: you aren't a guitarist."

Unsurprisingly, the backlash against Keane has been particularly fierce. One critic whined, "It's as though they read the book on How To Have Chart Success Even If You're A Gutless, Floppy-Fringed Virgin."

Another hard-rock scribe lavished four stars on their album, after sniping, "There is something deeply wrong about them. Their sound is reminiscent of such wildly unfashionable bands as Travis".

Rice-Oxley finds it flattering. "I love the idea that someone can be really wanting not to like us but in the end they have to," he says. "I think it's quite brave. It shouldn't be but the fact is it would be very easy to say, 'They don't have a guitar, I like rock, they're rubbish'.

"I think that in a way you have to be quite brave to do what we're doing as well. You have to be quite brave to stand up and say, 'Right, we're not a bunch of complete rock heads. We're just doing our thing and we might not be particularly cool or macho but we do really care about saying something with our songs and making music that means something to people. It really makes me happy when anyone responds to that."

* Hopes and Fears is out now. See review this page.