I wasn’t angelic at all
Keane are back with their first album since 2012. Singer Tom Chaplin tells LUCY MAPSTONE how it has been influenced by the personal struggles he and the band’s songwriter experienced
KEANE frontman Tom Chaplin is chuckling over the ‘irony’ at the past perception of the band as a bunch of clean-cut soft rockers back in the day. The alternative rock group from East Sussex, who rose to fame with their chart-topping debut album Hopes and Fears in 2004, were widely loved from the moment they hit the mainstream.
But they were also widely panned, particularly by critics suggesting they were a watereddown version of Coldplay, or ‘posh boys’ without edge thanks to baby-faced Tom.
The years of success and number one albums (all four of their LPs have topped the charts) go above and beyond any critique they may have faced, and Tom looks back at that time with a tolerant and somewhat amused eye.
“All the time that people had that view of us as a band and saw me as an angelic choir boy, my personal life was pretty horrendous,” he laughs.
“I was a massive drug addict and I was for years. Funnily enough, in a way, I was living that very rock and roll lifestyle.
“But it wasn’t really, for me, something that should ever be celebrated or seen as a positive because it was so destructive, so there’s an irony there.”
The Brit Award-winning band are back after a seven-year hiatus with new album Cause and Effect, following a period of great difficulty for both Tom and the band’s keyboardist and songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley.
Tom’s abuse issues have been highly publicised since 2006 when the band were forced to cancel their North American tour while he was being treated for drug and alcohol addiction.
After getting clean, he had a relapse in 2013 when he returned to drugs in a ‘major way’, before sorting himself out in 2015. He has now been sober for more than three years and feels like a “much more robust human being”. And Tim – responsible for the majority of the band’s biggest hits including Everybody’s Changing and Somewhere Only We Know – went through a hell of his own when his marriage fell apart. He split from his wife of seven years Jayne, the mother of his two children, and was also left dealing with the impact of no longer working with Keane. However, from the ashes of his personal life he penned a collection of songs which, after reuniting with Tom and their old bandmates Richard Hughes and Jesse Quin, formed the birth of their reunion.
Having released two successful solo records of his own during Keane’s break, Tom was not sure the band would ever reform.
He explains: “The thing that drew me back to wanting to make the record was the fact that Tim had written this bunch of songs that were so vulnerable, they were so sad, they were songs that were really just about his whole life and the whole world that he’d built over the years coming crashing down.”
Tom says his bandmate’s songs started in a ‘very bleak place’ but, over time, started to introduce themes of hope and looking forward to the future.
“It’s also interesting for me because I was going through a similar experience in my own life, at the same time,” he adds.
Having spent several years not really being in touch after Keane took a break, Tom is keen to make it clear there was no ‘big fallout’ between them.
“We did see each other a few times here and there – I don’t want to characterise it as we’d completely fallen out and that we didn’t want to speak to each other. It wasn’t like that at all,” he insists.
Tom says the band are not too nervous about coming back after such a long time away, thanks to their recent string of gigs.
“As a band, I know that we divided opinion but the people that loved us really loved us and had a very deep connection to the songs emotionally, and so I always felt fairly confident they would still be there,” he says.
Despite not landing mainstream success for nearly 10 years following the band’s formation in 1995, Tom says that opinions changed when they made it big with Hopes and Fears in 2004.
“Suddenly we became much less popular with the cooler publications and all of that, and that spread,” he notes.
“Quite often that’s the price you pay for having mainstream success; you just have to accept that you can’t be the cool kids on the block any more, so we did divide opinion and we probably didn’t help that with our own self-deprecation and all of that.
“At the same time, looking back, I’m proud that we didn’t try and change ourselves too much to try and pander to anyone or anything. “We just did our own thing and maybe that’s what people who loved us respected us for.”
CAUSE and Effect by Keane is out now.
I know we divided public opinion but the people who loved us really loved us, so I always felt confident they would still be there
Keane frontman Tom Chaplin