Kings of Leon: 'There are no punches being thrown any more!'
Something remarkable happened during the making of the eighth Kings of Leon album. For the first time ever, the four Followills – brothers Caleb, Jared, Nathan and their cousin Matthew – got through the recording sessions without any fistfights. “Our bodies don’t work like they used to,” says singer and guitarist Caleb, speaking over Zoom from his home in Nashville. “So there’s no punches being thrown.” Drummer Nathan and guitarist Matthew are joining us from their respective houses a few miles away, with bassist Jared checking in from a holiday in Florida.
“We have kids now,” says Nathan, the eldest. “We leave the fighting to the duelling eight-year-old girl cousins.”
Matthew grimaces when he remembers some of the brawls he’s witnessed over the years, when he would be hunched up at the back of the tour bus thinking to himself: “Oh my God, there is no way we’ll ever play music again after what he just said to him.” The fighting, he says, would often be the result of a day off on tour spent drinking too much, as innocent squabbles took a sinister turn. But that’s all in the past and this is how progress is now measured by Kings of Leon: not in streaming figures, Grammys or ticket sales, but whether they made a record without lamping each other.
This mid-life peace and wisdom is at the heart of that eighth album, the excellent When You See Yourself. They’re a markedly different group from the wild garage band who showed up on British shores in 2003: “Branded,” Jared remembers, “as the new rock revival: us, the Strokes, the White Stripes, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.” They’re different, too, from the arena-rockers who had huge hits with Sex on Fire and Use Somebody a few years later.
Caleb’s alcohol-induced meltdown in 2011 brought on a period of reflection for the quartet. Two solid records on, 2013’s Mechanical Bull and 2016’s Walls, they have transformed into an expansive rock band in the vein of Pearl Jam. The rockier moments are still rowdy but they’re on a leash, while the epic ballads are a little more melancholy. They were once dubbed the Southern Strokes, but these days a more accurate description might be the Cattle-ranch
Coldplay.
Recorded at their Nashville base with Arcade Fire and Florence and the Machine producer Markus Dravs, When You See Yourself ’s release was postponed for a year by Covid. “It’s quite strange when you read the lyrics,” says Caleb. “It very much looks like it was written during quarantine. A lot of the content is prophetic.” You would certainly assume some songs were written during lockdown. Time In Disguise asks “is it a man or a masked machine?” And Echoing wonders if “we’re ever going out / We could be here for ever without a doubt.”
It’s not just Covid anthems that they’ve accidentally written. The chorus of Claire & Eddie, with its warning that a “fire’s gonna rage if people don’t change”, felt eerily prescient as the band watched riots spread across the US last year. “A lot of it has come to pass,” sighs Caleb. “I’m glad we got it finished before it all happened.”
They have a standard procedure. “We bang out a record, says Caleb, “and then hit the road for a couple of years.” But lockdown has allowed them to pause and clear their heads with family time. “I wouldn’t normally be catching some of these milestones that I’m getting to be part of,” says Nathan.
Being stuck at home has thrown up some problems, though. Recently, Caleb walked in on his wife, the model Lily Aldridge, watching a career-spanning selection of Kings of Leon music videos. “I was like, ‘Babe, you gotta turn this off!’ I was blushing so bad I felt like blood was seeping out of my face.” Caleb can’t usually watch or listen to himself. He says the only reason that he thinks 100,000 People, a soulful anthem from the new album, is any good is that when he hears it, he doesn’t cringe or “try to crawl under a table”.
While Jared comes across as a genuine rock star, Nathan is more of an easygoing surfer dude. Matthew is ultra-polite and slightly fretting, while Caleb seems a somewhat reluctant frontman. He has the air of a person who wouldn’t be fussed if his phone ran out of battery, and says some of his closest friends are the ones he plays golf with who care little about his music career. He’s like a man who just wanted a quiet life but finds himself having to headline Reading festival every three years.
“I think that’s fair,” he nods. “I’m happy to have someone else stand in front of the photo or accept the award and give the speech. I love the perks that come with being the frontman but I don’t love the pressure. I’m always happy to take the backseat.”
“He’s a very quiet guy,” says Nathan. “Especially on stage. He just kind of hides behind his guitar. It’s amazing. He can be singing to 50,000 people and still have that little bit of shyness in him.”
Caleb may be best known for hollering “Whoaaaaa, your sex is on fire!” but there is often a vulnerability to his lyrics, as with Supermarket, a song on the new album that has been knocking around for over a decade. It was written around the same time as their 2010 album Come Around Sundown, which was a commercial disappointment. A drunken, mid-gig departure by Caleb in Dallas had observers wondering if they’d reached the end of the road. One line in Supermarket gives you an idea of Caleb’s headspace at the time: “I’ll never be whole again until I get clean.”
“It was a dark period,” he says. “I
didn’t know that it was a dark period at the time. I was a bit of a boozehound when I wrote that and there’s some sadness and some reflection. All these years later, when I hear it, I’m glad I got through that period and I can look back on it. It’s always weird to look at the different version of yourself, or hear where your head was. It’s also therapeutic. It’s kind of nice. I learned some lessons from that period.”
With time for contemplation in lockdown, the band have all been casting their minds back. Jared was recently thinking about their time as guests at the Columbia hotel, London’s historical hub of new-band debauchery, and their first UK show at Buckinghamshire stripbar-come-venue The White Horse: “We were playing to 150 people!” he marvels. “I was 17,” adds Matthew. “I’d never left the country before. I think about how excited I was to come to England. It was a magical time.”
Until their fourth album, Kings of Leon were big in the UK but nobodies back home in Tennessee. “We stuck out like a sore thumb with these big moustaches and bell bottoms and shirts that went to our belly buttons,” recalls Caleb. “All the country boys in Nashville were like, ‘Who the fuck are these guys?’ But then we’d land in the UK and everybody had my same moustache, pants and shirt.”
Sex on Fire levelled things up in the US, but none of them pick it as their proudest moment. Three of them toe the party line and say that it’s the fact they’re still together, making music and getting on better than they ever have – but not Jared. “I’m pretty shallow, I love trophies,” says the bassist. “I love winning Grammys and Brits and stuff like that.”
Back at the beginning, when the quartet all lived together, they would invite people over to their house for a Sunday barbecue. “About one in five would end up with someone in the koi pond or with a lump on their heads from a frying pan,” laughs Caleb. They always knew things had gone too far if Betty-Ann Followill, the brothers’ mother, had to get involved. “If she ever got in the middle,” says Caleb, “you knew it was time to stop fighting.”
• When You See Yourself is out on 5 March.
It was a dark period. I was a bit of a boozehound
Long after Lars von Trier’s Dogme 95 movement has been forgotten, with its tongue-in-cheek commitment to radically low-budget realist cinema, one director is still succeeding in releasing features that are cheaper than student films, composed of people simply talking to each other: in apartments, in restaurants over a lot of alcohol and in the streets with non-actors heedlessly walking past in the background. That director is the South Korean director Hong Sang-soo, who opens this online Berlin film festival with another intriguing and sympathetic vignette: enigmatically entitled Introduction, running at just 66 minutes, despite containing enough backstory detail for a two-hour drama. I’m not sure it is entirely successful, but it demonstrates Hong’s delicate touch in creating films that, like a certain type of short story or poem, suggest more depth and detail than is apparent on the surface.So why is it called Introduction? Some characters are introduced to each other, in different scenes – from different generations, with the polite unease and formality that this entails – and in other scenes, characters are introduced to new ideas and emotions. There is a strange scene in which the lead character appears to introduce himself to his girlfriend for the first time, on a chilly beach, despite their intimacy having been already established in previous scenes, leaving us to wonder, if only for a moment, if it is a flashback or a dream he is having, or if both are a dream someone else is having. The film flits with a dreamlike lightness from country to country, from South Korea to Germany, and back again.
Young-ho (Shin Seok-ho) is a pleasant-looking man whom we see at first visiting his father (Kim Young-ho) at his treatment centre in Seoul. His father is an acupuncturist who is, at this very moment, politely tending to a famous actor (Ki Joo-bong), who we later learn has befriended and had an affair with Young-ho’s mother (Cho Yun-hee), and is perhaps the cause of his parents’ marriage breakdown. Young-ho’s relationship with his father is strained and the older man is going through a spiritual crisis. Meanwhile, Young-ho’s shy, almost childlike girlfriend, Ju-won (Park Mi-so), goes to Berlin to study fashion, staying in the apartment belonging to a stylish and beautiful artist (Kim Min-hee, Hong’s partner and frequent collaborator); she is a friend of Ju-won’s mother (Seo Young-hwa), who is astonished and deeply disapproving of the way her relationship is developing with the boyfriend she thought was safely left behind in South Korea. Later, we will see Young-ho have an uneasy encounter with the actor, in the company of his own mother, at which he discusses the vocational crisis with his chosen career of acting – an ambition that has apparently been inspired by an earlier meeting with this man.Introduction, like so many of Hong’s films, occupies a delicate middle ground between whimsy and poetry, between inconsequentiality and epiphany, between lightweight and light. My feeling is that Introduction is closer to the former in each case, and I wanted to hear more about and more from Youngho’s troubled father. But there is an unmistakable and mature film-making language on display: a simplicity and charm.
To add to the difficulties besetting the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), early TV ratings for its Sundaynight Golden Globes awards showhave dropped catastrophically from previous levels. They are likely to become the lowest since the show returned to NBC in 1996.
Ratings agency Nielsen’s early “fast national” figures reveal that the show was 60% down on last year’s edition, drawing around 5.4 million viewers in the 18-49 age group, compared to 14.8 million for a similar estimate last year. The final total is likely to rise – the 2020 ratings ended at 18.5 million after all data was collected – but the 2021 total is set to fall well below the 14.7 million recorded in 2009.
The poor audience figures underscore problems the HFPA are facing, having signed an agreement with NBC in 2018 that earns the organisation around $60m per year for eight years.
Coronavirus restrictions forced the show into a virtual format, as well as a shift from its traditional January slot, depriving it of strong lead-in shows such as NFL games that helped boost its figures. The delays affecting the wider film industry also meant that the kind of commercial star-driven films that boost audience numbers were largely absent from this year’s ceremony.
More seriously, the stream of criticism aimed at the HFPA for its perceived lack of diversity and ethical lapses, as well as its underwhelming response to complaints, could have longterm implications for the Globes’ credibility. A recent report in the LA Times suggested that the HFPA was unwilling to reform its membership policy for financial reasons. Tina Tchen, CEO of campaign group Time’s Up, criticised the HFPA for offering a “cosmetic” solution.
Hosted by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, the show resulted in big wins for Nomadland and its director Chloé Zhao, as well as The Crown, which took home four awards in the TV section.