TIM: FANS' INTERVIEW PT 4

The final part of our exclusive in-depth interview



Yes, we've reached the fourth and final part of our fasincating interview between two Keane fans (Chris and Andrew) and Tim. Big thanks to all three of them for their hard work in getting the interview together. And thanks to Richard for another picture of the boys having their (serious-looking) conversation.

CHRIS: Obviously there’s an element of performance when you’re on stage – would you say there’s an element of performance in your writing, or is everything completely true to life?

TIM: My personal approach, and I think our approach as a band, is it should be true to life. It’s funny - I’m constantly amazed by the amount of people that want to take on a different persona for a song - although there are great albums like 'Nebraska' by Bruce Springsteen which are full of those songs, so it obviously has a lot of merit. But the thing that really amazes me is when people say that they don’t want to write about certain things because they’re personal. I even hear people criticising songwriters for being too personal, which seems very, very odd to me. My view is that the closer to the bone it is, the better. That’s where all the good songs come out.

ANDREW: Do you think that the risk is that you can end up being quite vague with your lyrics, so as to not hurt people? If you’re writing a song that’s very close to home, you end up writing about very abstract themes. A lot of criticism I’ve seen aimed at you is that your songs are vague lyrically, almost as if to achieve universality by non-specificity.

TIM: I think that’s bollocks! I suppose you could say that about some of the first record. I don’t know really. I mean, you could say ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ is vague, but... if it was about a particular street, it wouldn’t be the same song! There’s nothing that I consider to be out of bounds at all in a song - except if a song is about someone who has nothing to do with the band and I don’t feel that they deserve to be dragged into the limelight, so that’s happened like once or twice probably. A song like ‘Broken Toy’, for example - you can’t get much more specific than that. I’d say most of the songs on the second record are pretty specific. I don’t think that anyone could be expected to put ‘This song is about so and so’ on the album sleeve, but beyond that they’re pretty direct.

ANDREW: Is it a lyrical style rather than a good/bad thing?

TIM: Yeah, absolutely – a good song is a good song. I certainly don’t differentiate between those sorts of things. As I’ve often said, probably my favourite songwriter is Paul Simon, and I would say his songs are very, very specifically personal to him and they’re about specific things, but they rarely mention a name or a particular street. I would say that our songs are kind of like that.

ANDREW: It’s funny that you mention Paul Simon, because 'Hopes and Fears' is very close to outselling 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' in the UK. Only a few copies in it now.

TIM: That’s just crazy. Nice to hear, if slightly bizarre! Although those sorts of things do tend to throw everything into relief slightly, because you can find yourself thinking “It’s great that we’ve sold so many records” or whatever, but I don’t think any of us would ever claim that 'Hopes and Fears' is a better album than 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', so you can see that these sorts of things are merely figures.

ANDREW: The demos record that you put out alongside 'Under The Iron Sea' was a great move. Was there any political significance to having two or three of the demos from 7th July 2005 [the day of the London bombings]?

TIM: No, there's no significance, other than the fact it was just after that tour and it was the first time that I’d had a chance to actually record the demos. Inevitably, I tend to deliver batches of demos and those three were what I gave to the band. I’d written all of those songs on that American tour which had just finished, I think. I’d just moved house - we’d bought a house, and we completely stripped it back because it was falling to bits, and it was completely empty. I had this one little room, and I was completely desperate to get on writing some songs, so I got my piano moved up there. I just had this empty house and this empty room with this big piece of polythene on the floor with my piano. I bought a little picnic table and put my laptop on it and did the demos for 'A Bad Dream' and 'Crystal Ball' and finished the one for 'The Frog Prince'. I think you can hear the polythene sheet crackling around in the background.

ANDREW: Did you set out to write a political record with 'Under The Iron Sea'?

TIM: Yeah, I think we probably did. I think we’re all very passionate and emotional people. I don’t think that comes across very much when we’re talking or being interviewed, but it comes out in our music. ‘Is It Any Wonder?’ – it’s fairly obvious where that came from, and we were really just translating our fear and anger and a lot of confusion and negative emotions into a song. ‘A Bad Dream’ is less specifically about the current wars, but it still obviously came from the same place, emotionally. There are other lines on the record just scattered about – you can just feel it coming out. I guess we’re all just hippies at heart, just feeling very angry and impotent about it all.

ANDREW: The band seem to be doing a little bit more campaigning these days than you used to be.

TIM: I’ve always felt that politics and music should mix. I think that’s because a lot of the people I really admire as musicians are people who have been very forthright in that respect – either musically or on stage, or elsewhere. As a teenager, I was a lot more inspired by what musicians said about whatever political issue they happened to be talking about than I was by watching crusty old politicians on the telly. And so I always felt that, if we were in a position to do so, and we felt that we knew what we were talking about that, that we should use that profile to try and make a difference in the world. But, of course, as soon as you get to the position where people will, rightly or wrongly, listen to what you have to say, you open yourself up to a barrage of accusations of being pompous, or preaching – again, especially in the UK. There’s people who say you shouldn’t mix music and politics. There have even been differences of opinion within the band on that issue, or there were, a couple of years ago at least. But I’ve always felt it’s something that we shouldn’t shy away from. One of the reasons people can be cynical about it is that there are so many people who obviously jump on any bandwagon in order to sell records. Obviously, if we’re doing something with War Child, for example, it’s very much more isolated than the big starry world of celeb musicians. That has a very genuine quality to it – they’re not broadcasting to millions of people on TV, so there’s not really much ‘in it’ for people who are just wanting to shift units and up their credibility a bit. But I think we’ve found at Live Earth and at Make Poverty History and anything that has more of a public profile, those things are blighted by people who are in it for all the wrong reasons. I’m sure I’m not being very constructive by saying this, but I was actually disgusted by the attitude of most of the artists at Live Earth, because it was evident that most of them didn’t give a shit about why they were there. It could have been Top Of The Pops, it was just a promotional event where they’d flown in for - especially the Americans. They clearly just didn’t give a fuck about what they were there for, and I found that really heartbreaking actually.

ANDREW: It provided an on-a-plate counter-argument to the event that was a lot more compelling than the event in the first place.

TIM: Absolutely. Those people just don’t care about that. People like Madonna, who just fly in all this gear, and turn it into a thing which is very much about their production. They are providing ammunition for people who want to discredit an event like that, or a campaign like that. The event is just a small part of it. It’s just sickening really, it is just ‘How can I use this thing to sell records and be on telly on something that’s going to be broadcast around the world?’

ANDREW: It is something that is debated on the message board in quite a heated fashion. There’s a great “Climate Change – man-made crisis or natural cycle” topic.

TIM: I think it’s great that you guys are having those conversations at all, but most people don’t have the attention span, or won’t make the time of the day to spend more than five seconds thinking about these sorts of things. The idea behind the concerts is Al Gore saying - he said this to us specifically - that he’s a politician in a suit on the telly, probably indistinguishable to a lot of people from every other politician out there. Music has the ability to reach a lot more people in a very direct way, and the big star celebrity musicians will make people pay attention. The idea of the Live Earth event was just to focus people’s attentions in a way that’s very easy to understand, very ‘bullet point’ – ‘Look what’s happening over here, pay attention over here’, in the hope in that they would then prick up their ears and the things that were being talked about on the day would lead them to enquire further. But I don’t know. I think the gamble you take is that people will - and I definitely felt this with Live 8 - get very concerned, but then they wake up the next morning and they don’t give a shit, because they’re going back to work and everyone’s getting on with their own lives and it’s hard to think outside that. The danger is that it just becomes a big gig on the TV. The point of Live Earth was not to change the Earth, but it to provide a focal point and a ‘kick-off point’, like a whistle starting a football match, to announce the campaign. It remains to be seen whether people will take the issue seriously in the long run. It seems to me that there are a huge amount of good things happening as a result. Generally, people are paying more attention, and generally the issue gets talked about a lot more than a year ago. It feels like things are happening – it’s just that you always need more to happen. Even on a political level, a few months ago, as far as I can remember, George Bush was still arguing – and his official party line was – that climate change is basically made up. Now there seems to be more recognition that the science is irrefutable, full stop. The fact that anyone's even arguing that climate change isn’t happening when pretty much every neutral scientist in the world is saying that it is - and they’ve got no political motivation for saying that – is just crazy. Obviously, then the issues become what the causes of it are, and there are people who, inevitably, don’t want to acknowledge that their zillion-pound business is contributing to the problem, and all the political ties that go with it.

CHRIS: Before we go. Which song are you most proud of, purely from a songwriting point of view?

TIM: Err... I don’t know. Probably 'Atlantic', I think. And I’m very proud of 'Crystal Ball'.

ANDREW: Do you think 'Crystal Ball' should have been a bigger hit than it was, that it was overtaken by events surrounding its release?

TIM: Yeah. I think we were all a bit... disappointed. It was still Number One on Radio Airplay, but it didn’t chart that high and we didn’t promote it at all, which I guess illustrates the previous point. When we play 'Crystal Ball' live, it’s one of the biggest moments of the set – it’s great to play live, and everyone knows it. You come to realise that song’s impact in ways that you don’t expect.

CHRIS: One last question - you're a phenomenally successful songwriter now. What do you think the best measure of success has been for your songwriting? Awards, audience response, Tom and Richard...?

TIM: Well, Tom and Richard are definitely my first port of call. If they don’t like a song, the song won’t go any further. If they do like something, that’s probably the biggest thrill for me and I feel very excited about that. I think a lot of people liking a song, or really falling in love with a song and then telling you that is probably the highest praise, for me. Because you are writing pop music, at the end of the day - call it rock music, call it indie music, but it’s basically pop music. Any kind of genre where you’re trying to get played on Radio 1 or whatever, you’re talking about how people around the world will respond to that. I always feel good if you get people all over the world who are really touched by something, even though you’ve never met them or never even been to that country or don’t even speaking the same language. That’s pretty cool!

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Next up, of course, it'll be Chris and Andrew's interview with Tom. Look out for it on km.com in the next few weeks.