3 Is The Magic Number

Strongly tipped to shine this year, Sussex trio Keane aim to do battle without any guitars on their unique brand of melodic songs.  In the midst of putting the final touches to their debut album, Tom Chaplin, Richard Hughes and Tim Rice-Oxley tell uk-fusion what's yet to come

You have been compared to Travis (and you're due to support them on their forthcoming 12 Memories tour).  It sounds like with both of you on the same bill, it’ll be one long night…
RH: They’ve got guitars so you will be able to tell us apart!
TC: I think we are quite similar to Travis.  There are some different influences in our music that you probably wouldn’t necessarily find in Travis’ but certainly from a point of view of strong melody, honest lyrics, there are very strong comparisons to be made.

Conveying emotions play a big part in your songs.  What can you say about your lyrics?
RH: They’re not overly pretentious – they’re certainly not deliberately obscure.  We try to be as direct as possible and communicate in a way that people will understand and recognise without feeling that we’re trying to hide the meaning. 
Are you bored of being asked why you don’t have a guitarist?
TRO:  It’s not something we’ve done deliberately.  We feel it’s an attractive thing for the band because people find it very refreshing when they come and hear us play with no guitar.  It’s a different sound and a very powerful one as well, so the fact we haven’t got a guitar, is a good thing.
RH: We used to have a guitarist but he left the band.  We have nothing against them, we just don’t play them.
Why did he leave?
RH: He just wanted to do other stuff in his life.  We’ve been a band for a long time, struggled for a long time and got nowhere.  It can be quite draining: getting home from a shitty job, loading up all your equipment and going down to a damp, cold, stinking rehearsal room and unloading all your equipment in the rain after that, and getting up the next day and doing the same thing.  I think he had had enough.
Do you attend the annual fireworks display held at Battle?
(band laugh loudly)
RH: We missed it last year because we were touring but that bonfire, yeah!
TC: That’s great!
RH: I live within walking distance of it so I can just wander down.
TC: You have to get tickets for it, don’t you?
RH:  They spend a whole year preparing the fireworks but the bonfire is massive!  It’s amazing!  Seriously, go down there and check it out, it is really good!  Battle bonfire – you know the date!
Hastings has been listed as one of the 50 crap towns in Great Britain by The Idler.  Do you have anything to say in its defence?
TC: There are pockets of Hastings that are nice.  It’s got a very nice old town, which if you’re in that part of the world, you should visit but there are bits of Hastings that aren’t particularly pleasant.  There’s a nice wine bar called Harpers (get that in!) that I like going to.
RH: It’s like a lot of English towns – it grew up as a traditional seaside town, it’s got a pier and it used to have a glorious seafront and a glorious past but when people stopped coming to it, it suffered terribly.

What can be expected from your debut album?

TC: It’s probably going to be out in May and it’s going to be called Hopes & Fears, which is a line from a b-side.  It’s a culmination of a few years work for us so there’s a lot of ourselves invested in it, a lot of our best songs that we picked from the last couple of years so we’re quite proud of it. 
RH: You need time to sit back and listen to it because it’s such an intense process, recording an album – you only get to make one debut album so the whole process is new to us and we want to get it right.
TC:  We hope we’ve made something that people will want to treasure as an important part of their record collection.