Tough act to Followill
Kings of Leon are ready ‘to be cool again’
Sometime not long ago, Matthew Followill pondered taking a break from his multimillion selling family band, Kings of Leon. “I remember being on a plane and thinking, ‘I just want people to not be sick of us,’ ” the guitarist recalls. “I was sick of us. I was ready to just be a normal person at home. I was tired of always talking about Kings of Leon, playing shows. “I just wanted to go home.” It was spring 2011, and Kings of Leon were in the third year of an on-again-off-again world tour that stretched back before their fourth album, Only by the
Night, went multi-platinum and the twin towers of mainstream radio, Sex on Fire and
Use Somebody, propelled them into the musical stratosphere.
At the time, the group was not so much descending as tumbling off the World’s biggest rock band mantle. coming off the actualization of the American dream, the three Followill brothers — caleb, Nathan and Jared, the sire of an alcoholic Pentecostal preacher who were raised as devil-fearing, penniless Southern vagabonds — and their cousin Matthew had spent the majority of the previous decade riding high to the tune of eight million-plus units shifted. but with follow-up album Come Around
Sundown failing to produce a comparably chart-busting single, the Followills could sense the cultural vultures circling above their heads, waiting for the inevitable breakdown to rip them limb from limb.
On a muggy late July night in dallas, less than halfway through their latest 50-date commitment, lead singer caleb Followill served it up on a platter.
Always a hard-living band, that night in dallas Followill noticeably slurred his words, eventually excusing himself to “vomit and drink a beer” before refusing to return to the stage.
“For a long time people didn’t know why they hated us,” Jared explains of the deafening backlash generated from the train wreck performance. “[After dallas] they were like, ‘See, that’s why I hated them!’ ”
In truth, the incident was only the latest in a series of concerns facing the band. After nearly a decade of extravagance — rampant sexual exploits, drugs and booze were
de rigueur for the group in the years leading up to Only
by the Night, where they were capital-r rock stars across the pond — the perils of success were starting to rot the group from the inside. Following the cancellation of the next night’s show in Huston due to “heat exhaustion,” Jared — the youngest Followill sibling — tweeted “There are internal sicknesses & problems that have needed to be addressed … I can’t lie. There are problems in our band bigger than not drinking enough Gatorade.”
Thinking back to that moment two years later, the now 26-year-old takes a deep drag of his e-cigarette before admitting “that probably didn’t help.” Probed further as to the “problems” he was referring to, the bassist blames his frustrated lament to the uncertainty within the group. “We never thought we were going to break up. Not at all,” he exclaims, his Tennessee accent growing thicker as his emotions swell. “The next day after dallas we were all confused, but I don’t think any of us thought, ‘ We’re breaking up!’ We were more like, ‘F--k, are breaking up?’
“Only caleb knew what had happened and it took about a week of seeing doctors where it became obvious that he wasn’t being a dick, he actually had some f--king problems.”
After cancelling the rest of their North American tour the group honoured some final commitments before promising to take no more than six months off. Two years later, they’ve returned with a no-bones-about-it comeback album, Mechanical Bull.
“The band had gotten big, and it needed something else,”
New York Times writer Jon caramnica wrote in his review of the album. “bumpy road there be damned.”
“I remember saying it had to be good,” Matthew Followill says of the band’s mentality leading up to the Mechan
ical Bull sessions. Summoned together by a corporate gig with Pearl Jam, the Followill clan regrouped at the end of 2012 and began putting together new material, eventually heading into the studio in January of this year.
“In our minds it was so important because Come Around
Sundown didn’t happen like we wanted to,” Matthew explains. “So that was the only conversation we had: This record has to be great or we’re not putting it out.”
“After Only by the Night we had nothing to prove and that probably came through in the music,” Jared adds. “This time we felt like we wanted to be cool again.”