Kasabian’s Serge Pizzorno on taking a break from the band for his solo album
After a string of hit albums and arena tours, Kasabian guitarist and songwriter Serge Pizzorno used a band break to record a solo album. It was a liberating and energising experience, he tells Craig Mclean
The way Serge Pizzorno tells it, the road to his first solo album began 10 years ago, around the time of the release of Kasabian’s third album. West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum, produced by Dan the Automator and featuring band pal Noel Fielding in the video for lead single Vlad the Impaler, was the Leicester band’s stretch for glory, a post-millennial, East Midlands take on The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request.
Trying something so ambitious might have been scoffed at, but potential hubris was swamped by victory: the 2009 album went to No 1, was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize and was named Best Album at the Q Awards. At the following year’s Brit Awards, Kasabian won Best Group.
But if Kasabian were large, their guitarist and chief songwriter was “larging it”. Since the release of their self-titled 2004 debut, Pizzorno had, not unusually, been an enthusiastic partier. But the achievement of West Ryder… made him reassess.
Or, as he puts it with a typically lyrical flourish, “I looked at the hundreds and thousands sprinkled on top and I thought: wipe them off, that’s nonsense. I just want to make a good ice-cream. So that album was the moment, a definite crossroads, where I thought: do I want the mad excess, the boozing and the partying? Or do I want to make records that will be around hopefully longer than I am?”
With that came a further realisation: “I just like being in the studio or on stage, and that’s it. The rest of it can come and go.”
The result – three No 1 albums and a Glastonbury Pyramid Stage headline slot later – is The S.L.P. As solo albums go, it’s both boldly executed and
neatly titled. In old-money speak, it’s the Serge LP. It’s also the definite article work of Sergio Lorenzo Pizzorno.
Recorded in his home studio in Leicestershire, The Sergery – see what he did there? – The S.L.P. is the sound of the musical brains trust of Kasabian going off on one, touching on psych-rock, Italo house, 60s Italian movie soundtracks, hip hop and, with the help of guests slowthai and Lil Simz, the best that young British rap can offer.
It’s framed by three thematically and melodically linked interludes: Meanwhile… In Genova; Meanwhile… At The Welcome Break ;and Meanwhile… In The Silent Nowhere. Songs set in, respectively, his grandfather’s home town, a motorway service station and (perhaps) the darkest recesses of his psyche began as musical passages for the uncompleted soundtrack to a film that was never made.
“But I was inspired,” the 38-year-old begins when we meet for a breakfast espresso in Islington, north London. Beanpole thin and lanky, even at this early hour Pizzorno is ready for his solo close-up. He’s dressed in fashionforward leisure wear; his hair is neatly feathered on top and sides, and cropped and dyed into leopard shading at the back.
“Those [musical] pieces could wither and sit on a hard drive,” he continues, “or I could do something with this comic-book Batman concept: ‘Meanwhile... in the Batcave’,” he says, referencing the 60s television biff-pang-pow version of The Dark Knight.
Armed with a beginning, a middle and an end, this prodigious multiinstrumentalist knew all he had to do was “fill in the gaps in between. And that wouldn’t take me that long, I’d really enjoy it, and it’d give me new perspective on the band.”
As of last summer, Kasabian were meant to be on a year’s break, after two years making and touring their sixth album, For Crying Out Loud. But time off doesn’t come easy to Pizzorno, even though he has a wife and two young children (six and eight) at home. So after a short summer’s break, he was straight back to work.
He knew it would be “scary in a way doing something without the protection of the gang”. But he went for it anyway, keen to find out “what it’s gonna be like, exploring new lands. And it was done really quickly, really instinctively.”
Following those instincts led him all over the shop. Nobody Else wouldn’t be out of place on a Mediterranean dancefloor. The Wu starts off like Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, before going all pumped-up, Hall and Oatesstyle 70s soul. And across the whole, Pizzorno’s vocals – chopped up, multitracked, echoing, or just delivered remarkably sweetly – as well as his firm grasp of melody keep the whole thing together.
“I want to get to the same point, hit the same peak. But it’s delicate and rhythmic and a whole different approach”
Not having the pressure of imagining what would work for 20,000 people in an arena or 50,000 people in a field – anthems, basically – was, he says, like “a switch going – you feel the motor slowing down.” When writing for Kasabian and teeing up their tours, “you have to consider there’s gonna be all those people in front of you, so you have to deliver the goods. And in that headspace, if I pick up the guitar, it’s violence and it’s raw, [albeit about getting to] euphoria and togetherness.
“With The S.L.P. I want to get to the same point, hit the same peak. But it’s delicate and rhythmic and a whole different approach,” he grins, the antic excitement bristling off him.
Ask how this will have an impact on the next Kasabian album, which he’s already started writing, and the reply comes swiftly and firmly: “It’s annihilation music.”
I don’t know what that means, and he’s not saying. But with this new outlet for his “mad” ideas, he says, “now I feel like I can make as near as dammit the perfect Kasabian record”.
And what does his brother-in-arms, Kasabian singer Tom Meighan, make of The S.L.P.?
“He’s been so amazing. It’s testament to the love we have for each other that he’s just been pure positive, and really happy for me to do it. And that’s huge, because that conversation was ringing around my head, telling people that I wanted to do this…
“But we were at a level, six albums in, that, without changing it somehow, all the amazing things you’ve done get overlooked.
“Five No 1 albums on the spin is massive – only a few bands have done that. Headlining Glastonbury, selling out three O2s… It’s massive, but everyone’s used to you doing them. It becomes an assumption.”
The S.L.P., then, is a necessary reset. Or, as Pizzorno puts it with a final outthere flourish, “it’s a planet now. It’s just doing its thing.”
The S.L.P. is released 30 August. Serge Pizzorno plays SWG3, Glasgow on 5 September