Tim Fans' Interview part - 2

Second part of Tim's interview from the official website ( www.keanemusic.com ).

ANDREW: I’ve read a lot of your comments about “the state of British music”. How do you think things are doing, given that more people than ever are out at gigs every night? Do you think there are some bands who have made it further than they should have done?

TIM: I think these things ebb and flow really. There are some moments where there’s a barrage of great music, but... I listen to the radio a lot, and I’ve found myself thinking in the last few weeks that actually, there’s not that much that I feel very excited about at this moment in time in terms of new music. Whereas even a year or two ago I felt like there was SO much to take in. I don’t know why that is. It just seems like things do ebb and flow naturally, and it feels to me like there’s not much value put on … it feels like there’s a bit of treading water going on. I think the Arctic Monkeys ‘sound’ and the other bands that might be categorised as…

ANDREW: Riding their coat tails?

TIM: Well, maybe. I like Bromheads Jacket. I don’t know where they’re from, but that seemed to be a similar, very rapid-fire delivery and sound. There seems to be a rash of those bands - of which I think the Arctic Monkeys are rightly still above - of that particular movement in the last few months. That’s the kind of distinctive thing that’s happened in the last year or so, and other than that I’m not sure what else has happened in British music in the more commercial end. I’m sure things will naturally get great again. That’s just my impression. I guess some records seem to have something about them that defines a time for you or say something special to you. I’m slightly struggling to hear much of that. It feels like a bit of a dangerous time – if you think about the bands and artists who were most commercially successful last year, it’s pretty... depressing, for want of a better word. I guess a lot of that is due to the fact that, especially in Britain and America, the majority of records are now bought in supermarkets, and the people who do the buying ar not looking for something challenging. Record companies know that, and artists know that.

CHRIS: I read something recently about this iPod culture where people don't sit and listen to albums in one go - you’ve got something on in the background or you flick between songs. Do you think that’s devaluing albums by not challenging bands to produce 12 amazing songs on one record?

TIM: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely true. For anyone who’s my age, it feels like it’s quite possible that, in a couple of years, the value that has been put on ‘an album’ as 12 songs is just going to be an antiquated concept altogether.

CHRIS: Ash have already said that.

TIM: Everyone is torn at the moment because you never quite know how it’s going to go. I think we, as a band, and you guys, as music fans, value ‘an album’ and not just because it’s an album and a complete concept, but because it has a certain number of quality songs. It feels like you’re getting this ‘multipack’ of quality material. It does feel like that’s not going to be necessary – you’re not going to have to write an album’s worth of great songs. But I’m sure that in itself will make for a different kind of competition between bands. It’s a weird one – I’m reading a book by Geoff Emerick at the moment, and he’s talking about how, in the earlier period of the Beatles’ career, the singles were considered to be more important than the album because they were attracting attention - it was the singles that got played on the radio, and that was driving record sales. Certainly in the very early ’60s, the album was just a few singles and a load of cover versions and fillers. The concept of quality songwriting output was not valued particularly highly. It’s hard to say one approach is better than the other, but I still like having a full album.

ANDREW: Have you ever done anything under a false name, or alias?

TIM: No, I haven't. I was thinking recently that it’d be nice to do an album or something where we were completely released from the pressures of being Keane. It’s a bit of a weird problem because, if you go back a few years or a few decades, bands and artists used to chuck out albums all the time. Now, when you release an album, it’s such a big deal - especially if you’re ‘major league’, for want of a better phrase! There’s so much competition for people’s attention that if Keane released a completely shit album that only sold 5 copies, it’d be very hard to say “Oh, well, we’ll just release another one 6 months time”. I think it’d be almost impossible for any band to come back from a real failure and get people’s attention, because people move on so quickly – I mean, I do. If I hear a band that I like and I go out and buy their record on the merit of their past albums, and then I get home and think “Oh, it’s a pile of shit, they can’t have tried too hard on that one”, then I’m probably unlikely to go back next time round and give them another chance. We’re all so spoiled with the amount of music that’s available to us now that we’re pretty fickle. Because of the type of band we’ve become in terms of commercial size, it’d be hard to put out an album of twiddly Aphex Twin-style typewriter sounds.

ANDREW: Did you enjoy making 'Tyderian'?

TIM: Yeah, I did. It kind of came about by necessity – that was when Tom was in the Priory. It was like “Well... I can have a go now!”. I love doing that sort of thing, but I rarely have time to do it – let alone the incentive of it becoming a B-side or whatever. I loved being able to do that, it was fun and I would have liked to spend a bit more time on it. It was playing at the O2 aftershow, I don’t know why! And when it came on all I could hear was the kick drum, and I thought “That sounds pretty funky” and then I realised what it was! So I felt quite smug about that. It’s pretty basic, and it’s quite sinister sounding, which I like.

CHRIS: Have you been asked to write for any more pop stars after Gwen and Nicole?

TIM: I’ve been asked to do some things that I would have been a little bit coy about… big American pop starlets.

ANDREW: Richard alluded to something that he said you were definitely not doing.

TIM: Right. Well yeah, like Ashlee Simpson. And Britney was another one that came up.

CHRIS: Really?

TIM: Yeah.

CHRIS: You turned down Britney Spears?

TIM: Yeah. That stuff is all fine, but I don’t know. It’s very easy to think “Right, I’m just going to do everything now”. After the Gwen thing, I was offered a lot of things, but both Gwen and Nicole are – I can honestly say – phenomenally talented, and I wouldn’t want to start diluting that level of musical quality, I suppose.

ANDREW: You must have melodies and ideas that you want to save for Keane, too.

TIM: Yeah – more to the point I found that I was starting to spend a lot of time on that stuff, and again realising that I never had time to write songs for Keane. So I just drew a line under it, and I’m not really intending to do anything else.

CHRIS: You were just talking about other projects and 'Tyderian'. That’s got quite a cinematic feel, as has 'Atlantic'. And 'Try Again' has this huge ‘soundscape’. Would you ever consider doing a soundtrack for a film if you were invited?

TIM: Well, I’ve been asked to do stuff before, and we as a band have been asked to do stuff, although more as contributing songs or writing especially to be in enormous films. But the soundtrack thing – I feel a bit daunted by it to be honest. Firstly, it’d be very time-consuming, and secondly, it’s a huge responsibility, because you’re trying to contribute something that is going to be a significant part of someone else’s artistic statement. I think you’ve got to have a particular gift to be able to do those sorts of things. I wouldn’t feel confident that that’s a gift that I have. As I’ve probably said before, I love Yann Tiersen - he’s one of my favourite musicians and there’s good stuff that he’s done for a few films. He’s a similarly prodigiously talented multi-instrumentalist. But where people are producing songs that are pop song length, even if they’re instrumental soundtrack type of things – I think I can cope with the concept of that a bit more! It’s when people want a big orchestral thing, the approach is normally ‘you come up with some nice melodies, and we’ll turn it into a big orchestral piece’. I did try doing it once for a friend of ours called Ed Roe, who did the DVD. He’d asked me to write a soundtrack for this very funny thing he did with Martin Freeman –it’s very good! I actually agreed to do it and it was just the biggest pile of shit I’ve ever written. He didn’t use it in the end, which was fairly humiliating – I didn’t feel very happy or encouraged by that. Anyway, my theory at the moment is that whatever musical ideas the three of us have, it’d be nice to pool all of them into Keane.

CHRIS: Do you still believe in Keane as a unit then, as a whole band which is completely intact?

TIM: Oh yeah, yes – very much so. More so than ever actually, I think. Things were very fragmented last year around the time… I only worked with Nicole because we had that downtime while Tom was in the Priory. It turned out to be a really fun thing, but it wouldn’t have happened if Keane were still on the road. What I feel now is that I want all the energy to go into Keane, because I think we all feel very positive about things and we do feel very close knit, the way we did before. I don’t want to do anything to shatter that.

ANDREW: There’s the Q piece that talked about Tom and his solo project. What’s the status of that, or was it just talk?

TIM: Yeah, that definitely wasn’t ever something that was seriously discussed – not to diminish Tom’s songwriting. Obviously, he’d be more than capable of making a solo album, but it’s a bit like me saying I might be interested in doing an album of twiddly Aphex Twin stuff – it’s something a journalist will think (mimics writing on notepad) “Ah right – ‘planning to do album of techno babble’”. That’s all I can say about it really, I don’t think it’s something we seriously considered. Because of the fallout from the touring, Tom ended up not being as much involved in 'Under The Iron Sea' as he should have been, which I would say is largely because he needed to get away from the band and we went straight in the studio. I suppose he ended up feeling he wanted an outlet for his considerable musical energy, so it was probably some comment along those lines. Hopefully all of those energies will be put into the next record.

ANDREW: Richard said Tom had been in the Barn with a guitar and was writing.

TIM: Yeah! We’ve amassed a lot of songs. The other thing that we didn’t do with the second record was work on the songs before recording them, which we did by necessity on the first record because we were writing the songs and were like ‘why don’t we try to play this one at the Water Rats?’. We’d just rehearse it and change the structure, and Tom would try a bit of guitar or try a bit of synth or whatever, and that’s basically what we ended up recording. So it was very much a band process. Whereas with the second album, I was writing it all the road, doing demos that were quite complete-ish. We started recording in January 2005, long before we finished touring, so there was never any time to go through that process of rehearsing stuff together. That was another reason why it didn’t feel like a very ‘band’ process at all. So that’s something we’re consciously trying to get back to now.