Kasabian
Undefined / Undefined
Passion. Not a word you hear all that often any more when it comes to music, but Kasabian have it by the tractor-load. They’re not making music to be famous, or because it’s a good career, they’re making music because they need to, because it’s etched somewhere deep in their souls. “Why be in a band?” asks singer Tom Meighan. “Because it’s the only thing I could do. There’s nothing else I ever wanted. Nothing, nothing. This is what I’ve wanted to do ever since I was four. This is why I’m here.”
Kasabian grew up in Leicester, a city hidden in a sprawl of suburbs. The kind of place where you listen to music, watch football, get drunk and wander the streets at night singing, because there’s nothing else to do. Except the raves. In the early 90s midlands cities like Birmingham, Leicester, Coventry and Wolverhampton were the focus for hardcore, a music that fused house music with hip hop beats and a dark sensibility. Unlovely and unloved by most of the media, it was the party no one in mainstream club culture wanted an invite to. Instead it appealed to alienated young teens who gradually developed it in all kinds of new and interested directions. Like Jungle/Drum’N’Bass, or like Kasabian’s pounding electronic rock.
“When we were younger, the hardcore years, that was always there,” they say. “The Midlands was the place to be when that was all going on. And it was interesting. It’s like Motown Records-if you strip it down, to Drum and Bass, it’s got a groove to it. That’s what indie music lacks, and always has done, it’s just drone ji8ngle jangle – boring music.”
Kasabian is an honest, unpretentious band that grew out of friendship, first. A proper gang. They were 17 when they began making music seriously. Tom (vocals), Sergio Pizzorno (songwriter, lead guitar, keyboards), and Chris Edwards (bass) had known each other since they were kids. Christopher Karloff (guitar, keyboards) was drafted in after they saw him in a pub and were told he played guitar: “We saw his long sideburns, thought, ‘Hey, he looks the part, we’ll ask him.’”
The Brit-Pop boom gave them the impetus to form a band of their own, but it was their hardcore years that led them to buy a computer. “You need to play with music a bit, and that’s what we did,” says Tom. “We got the computer and we cut Rock’N’Roll Up, because there’s not point in going back to how it was. It’s all about new ideas and creativity.”
Later one of them was reading about Charles Manson, and the name of the family’s pregnant getaway driver, Linda Kasabian, leapt off the page. They were going to use it for a one-off dance project, but it settled on them too comfortably for that. It also turns out to be Armenian for ‘butcher’ – appropriate for a band who work with a cut-and-paste collage of sound, but also for a gang with ambitions to cut the pap out of pop. “From day one when we started this band, I’ve always had the confidence,” explains Tom. “We always had something about us, from the beginning, we believed nothing could limit us.”
The final part of their story came together when they went to a party at a farmhouse in Rutland, about 30 miles outside of Leicester. They got talking to the farmer’s son, and they ended up staying. A former textile mill with what seems like an endless array of echoing, empty buildings, the farm sits in isolated splendor on a hill that slopes gently down to the pretty man-made lake of Rutland water. It’s a beautiful part of rural England. And, once Kasabian had moved in, it proved the perfect place to plot the start of a movement.
There’s a big TV, piles of DVDs and computer games, a sound system that hits you right in the solar plexus and plenty of music to play on it. Upstairs, next to their shared bedroom – “We could only afford to rent two rooms” – they’ve created a studio packed with synthesizers from different eras. And various styles of guitar and percussion. And most importantly, they have all the time they need to play with it.
There were parties, of course. There was even a mini-festival last year when friends came and pitched up t4ents and Kasabian played live in one of the farm’s abandoned industrial buildings. But with most of their friends a 60-mile round trip away, there are also long stretches of time with no interruptions, no distractions. Time to sleep, walk, play music or movies all day and then the freedom to create well into the night. “Dreamtime,” grins Karloff. “When all the best ideas come.”
When it comes to inspiration, these lads eat up music, then spit it out as something fresh and new. “It could be the littlest thing from any track. Even a rubbish track might have a little sound in there.” Some of the ingredients that went into the pot: The Stones, Door and Beatles records in their parents’ collections; Tom’s Mum’s passion for Motown; a love of film and film soundtracks that Karloff inherited from his Dad; the sense of Freedom that came from dancing all night in a field; they rhythms of rave and hip hop, the attitude of Brit Pop, Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, The Four Tops, The Supremes, The Ronettes, Ennio Morricone, Early Pink Floyd, Brian Eno’s ‘Music For Airports’, Kraut Rock. Donna Summer, Joy Division, Eminem, Air-music from now, music from then, anything and everything.
“The ideas start off tiny, and then as the months progress they get bigger and bigger,” explains Sergio. “For some tracks we needed a computer screen the size of a cinema! We were celebrating music, making it for the sheer joy of it.” And if living and working at the farm has given them the freedom to explore whatever directions they want, they also have the discipline to go back afterwards and impose a three-minute structure. Kasabian like songs with a chorus, tunes that connect with the listener, energetic music that Sergio says “Makes you want to fight, makes the adrenaline flow”.
But what really marks them out is their attitude. “There are no characters out there, they’re all just bleak,” says Sergio. “It’s boring, there’s no soul, no rhythm, no balls. No one’s having fun with it any more. We take our music seriously, definitely, but we want to have fun with it.”
“This is not a job to us,” says Tom angrily. “We needed to make this album, and now we need to be out on the road. This is the best life we could ever have. This is what it’s all about. And without it we’d be lost souls. But music needs us as well. British music needs a kick up the arse and Britain needs a new band to breathe life into the British people again. No one’s doing it at the minute. Music feels like it’s in the afterlife right now. We don’t want people to give up on it. The serpent’s going to rise from the sea and scare all the pirates away!”
|