Tim Fans' Interview Part 3

Third part of Tim's interview from the official website.

ANDREW: In our interview with Richard, we asked how he felt when you said he wasn’t drumming well enough. Did you feel as though you were marshalling Tom and Richard through it in a way, because you hadn’t played them all together and it was a studio record?

TIM: I don’t know - it’s really hard to know. It’s quite hard to remember as well!

ANDREW: It’s funny that we’re doing this interview all about things that were in 2005 and 2006…

TIM: Well it is funny, because it doesn’t seem like any time ago at all. Sometimes you look back and wonder quite what all the fuss was about, or why we didn’t do things differently, but we were in such an intense head-****** place mentally that we didn’t really know what we were doing. I love recording, I love writing, I love hearing a song come together, and I enjoyed making the record the way we did. But everyone was very tired.

I felt very energised about making the record, and I was having a good time coming up with all sorts of crazy piano sounds and so on. Tom would come and go – he’d come in and do great stuff and then he’d disappear for a week or something. It didn’t feel like there was much energy coming from him. Richard was around a lot, but I guess what I meant when I talked to him about his drumming was that it didn’t feel like there was much enthusiasm coming from all three of us, with any unified sense of “Let’s get these songs down, lets make them sound really good”. It just didn’t feel like that, and I don’t know why - I still don’t really know why. But that was basically the situation. I guess probably because it felt, from the inception of the process, it had become too much ‘my thing’. It’s so difficult to dissect these things and make any sense of them. One of my regrets about the second album and the way we presented it was that we were trying to say “well, there’s some very dark songs on here”, and there’s probably two songs about the intensity and darkness of making it, and our friendships and stuff like that – but, of course, you then go on to explain all the other things, and journalists will just be like “They all hate each other!”. And you know, for every bad day, there was a great day as well.

CHRIS: So would you say there are only two songs about the turmoil within the band? The message board has been full of posts saying “It’s all about Tom, it’s completely about Tom!”…

TIM: Well obviously, a lot of what gets written in the press or on the board is basically conjecture and that’s fine, that’s what liking music is all about – I do that all the time, it’s part of the fun of it. But, let me think. 'Broken Toy' is the only real desperate cry of pain, I suppose. And 'Hamburg Song' is partly about that.

ANDREW: 'Hamburg Song' was one of the earliest songs written for the second record. So had this been going on for a very long time? Because that dates back to around October 2004.

TIM: Well, yeah. I’ve actually thought about it a lot recently. Because like I say, everyone feels very good about the end of the touring now, and it feels like “God, that’s really flown by”. Even though last year was very turbulent in places, it still feels like things have gone very quickly, and everyone is almost a bit sad that touring is over. And really, I think if you look at it, it’s not actually that much shorter than last time. With 'Hopes and Fears' we finished touring at the beginning of October, and this time we finished touring at the beginning of August, so that’s two months earlier. But everything that happened in that initial period after 'Hopes and Fears' was released felt so momentous. It felt like years between the album coming out and 'Hamburg Song' being written, but really it was only 4 months or something. It’s just because we weren’t at all ready for it psychologically – I don’t think you ever can be really.

ANDREW: Despite all the predictions that it would be the biggest success of the year, the decade…

TIM: It’s funny how you feel so disconnected from all that stuff. Even now – you think about 'Hopes and Fears', and looking back it seemed to me like that album was everywhere when it came out. The B-sides were getting played on the radio, and it was Number One again nine months after it came out. All that stuff really only happens once in a lifetime. But it always felt like it was happening to someone else, and we felt like were traipsing around doing our little gigs, and then we’d get a call saying “The album’s Number One again”. But we’d be on the other side of the world, and it felt like we had nothing to do with it. Somehow all that success didn’t help us with building up any kind of thick skin at all. So I guess my point is that it seemed like we’d gone from being great friends on this great adventure in May 2004 to suddenly all going a bit mad and not really talking to each other by October. In fact, I started writing that song quite a long time before that – probably in June in the States? Really, that was probably just a little bump in the road in the grand scheme of things. Hopefully, we’ll look back on everything that happened in the last year as being a tiny little bump in the road, but at the time these things seem so massive, and they just get on top of you. I guess that’s just life really isn’t it? So anyway, it was obviously something that was preying on my mind and it came out in that song.

ANDREW: How do you view Tom as a frontman now? I remember reading that you rated him as one of the best around.

TIM: In order to have that ability to really martial a crowd and race around a stadium, you’ve got to have an incredible amount of energy, and probably some sort of, um, weirdness in your mental make-up! I think it’s an incredible gift that Tom has, but there’s always another side to it. For all of the energy he puts into the band performances, he has to balance that with really retreating. And I think he also feels he’s out there being scrutinised so much of the time, that when he retreats into his shell it’s hard for people who don’t have some sort of emotional access to break down that wall.

CHRIS: He’s a showman at the end of the day.

TIM: Yeah! He feels it so much, he’s a very very passionate and emotional person. But a lot of that gets put into music and again performing, and it’s just like he needs to retreat from it sometimes in order to do that.

ANDREW: How do you think Tom deals with the criticism levelled at him – often either unfair or concentrating on appearance?

TIM: I tend not to get too riled by what's said about us, because that’s one thing that we have gradually gotten used to – people just talking crap basically. But that is something I get very defensive about, mainly because it tends to be aimed at Tom rather than me or Richard. I just find it very rude. It’s not like we’re putting ourselves on the cover of Heat magazine and saying “Look at our beautiful lives and look at my new boobs” or whatever… well, that would be weird. Um, don’t go to the tabloids with that.

ANDREW: “This what they do between records – have them put in, have them taken out!”

TIM: Exactly - I just want to be a woman between albums! Anyway, what was I saying? … It is such bollocks, because we’ve not put ourselves in a position where we’re presenting ourselves as beautiful people with Hollywood smiles. We’ve always presented ourselves as musicians, and that is still the way we present ourselves. That sort of criticism Tom gets seems very snidey and very British. I don’t think you’d get it anywhere else – that sort of jealousy and bitterness and that desperation to cut down the people who rise up or who dare to put their heads about the parapet. It’s just so foul. It’s so untrue – I’ve known Tom all his life, and I’ve never thought of Tom as... moonfaced or whatever. He’s a phenomenal sportsman, which a lot of people don’t know, and he’s very, very fit.

ANDREW: Does he still play village cricket?

TIM: Yeah, sometimes. He plays a lot of sports – he really is annoyingly talented in a lot of ways, and sport is one of them.

ANDREW: Speaking of negativity, talk a little bit about the 'Frog Prince' – because you were very coy about that up until that interview with NME. Why would you write a song which was about someone else in that way? What drove you to it?

TIM: Well, that was one of those things where it’s a bit like ‘You turned down the opportunity to be in Coldplay’ thing, where really the facts of the story are more convoluted and less interesting, so journalists just go for the more obvious, slightly more controversial story.

ANDREW: So this story is more “I was slightly concerned about this particular aspect of something that Johnny Borrell said once” rather than “This song is about…”

TIM: Basically, the way I remember it, I had this song that I had written the melody for – this was on a tour of America, probably the very long tour that made us all want to kill each other. And I can remember finishing writing the melody in a hotel in Washington DC, on a very very cold day. And then I can also remember being in a hotel in Toronto, and I went down to the bar for a beer with Tom and we got talking about other bands slagging each other off, and slagging us off, inevitably, which is just part of being a band - in Britain anyway. I remember Tom was a bit het up about it.

Johnny was one of several people who came up in conversation when I was talking to Tom about it, and the only approach that we ever have to those things is that we tend to feel a bit sad and a bit betrayed, because we never belonged to any gang of musicians or bands or anything – we came from this little town in the middle of nowhere, and then we moved to London and we never got any friends there either. It’s nice when you feel like you’re part of a movement of bands, and we did feel like that at the time and when, occasionally, people would say bad things about us, we’d feel a bit hurt by it, I suppose, and think “Well, why are they slagging us off? We’re all doing the same thing here.” So I think that was basically the way we felt - and after I was having this conversation with Tom about it, I went upstairs and started working on that song all night, and those are the words that came out. But it’s one of those things where, whoever’s interviewing you from Q or NME or whoever it is, they want to know “Can we say ‘Keane dissed X’?”. And of course I think they eventually got sick of me saying “I don’t really want to say who it’s about”! But the song is much more about us than it is about anyone else. I wouldn’t say it’s a song about Johnny Borrell, I’d say it’s a song about believing in the three of us and what we stand for… and **** everyone else. It’s quite a different song for Keane, I think.