Page One:
FIRST, WE TAKE BRIXTON!
It started with a “minor gig” in London and ended with a mindbiowing victory romp at V. For Kasabian it was the summer they went “fucking mega”
You know you’ve made it when your warm-up shows are at London’s gargantuan Brixton Carling Academy.
It’s a week before their second album, ‘Empire’, drops, and Kasabian have a couple of ‘minor gigs’ booked in at the last minute before they eat V Festival, headlining the Channel 4 Stage. Not that this feels very minor to the people who’ve been huddling round Brixton’s bars and Nando’s all afternoon waiting for the return of the hand they have claimed as their own. Or to the soon-to-be-stamped-out touts circling like ravens as far back as the tube station. Or, for that matter, the same boys NME first clocked all those years ago who now find themselves Britain’s new rock royalty. Backstage in the deepest bowels of the Academy, Serge Pizzorno still can’t quite believe it. “I’m getting into touting man, I tell you, it’s £120 outside! What the fuck’s that about?! That’s fucking mad, that.”
Maybe this is a stupid question, but you’re enjoying being back on the road, yes? “Fucking ace. It’s an exciting time man, to be in this band, I’ve got to be honest. It feels like something’s happening. You know when a band kind of does that album when everything kind of clicks into place? That’s what it feels like right now.”
Right on cue, along bounds hyperactive Boy-Gallagher Tom Meighan, his fangs watering, ready for action.
Page Three:
“I’M TRYING TO GET WISER, I DUNNO HOW I’M GONNA!”
“Oh, it’s mega. Being back on tour is great,” he says. “The tourbus and the shitty air ventilation and fucking beer everywhere, fag ends in the fucking ashtrays and the shit videos, and the Geordie drivers, youknowhatImean? It’s just great man, I love it. You’re going on another adventure again with your people. I love touring, it’s the best thing.”
A few things have changed since this band’s last tour (of America with Jet and Oasis) juddered to a halt in a haze of bloodshot eyes and flashing red lights on Toys ’R’ Us tractors. They’ve survived their first real trauma, with the sacking of errant guitarist Chris Karloff.
“As musicians – which I guess we can call ourselves now – I don’t think he was seeing eye to eye with us anymore,” says Tom. “It weren’t very nice times for us. But he’s clever and he’s good enough to do anything he wants, he knows I’ve got his back and that I’ll be there when he wants to do something else in music.”
In his place is new American blood, Jay Mehler, former guitarist with Mad Action, stepping in for live dates for the time being, with a view to seeing where they are in a year. “I’d love him to join full-time,” says Tom. “He’s a fucking fabulous guitarist. He’s just another loony in our band.” Promoted to full-time member is drummer Ian Matthews, which leaves bass player Chris ‘Dib’ Edwards as the remaining original brother.
“We greet people with open arms,” says Chris. “When you come into Kasabian you don’t come into a band, you come into a relationship. We’re all like brothers.” They’ve also upgraded to Oasis’ security guard, a battle-scarred Paddy-from-Phoenix Nights-alike; while merch guy Tom Sherwin is christened ‘The Cavalry’, “because he’s always there for us.”
But personnel isn’t the only area there have been changes in. Kasabian may have earned their reputation as ultimate rock’n’roll renegade fuckheads with good reason, but these days they’re at least trying to be more responsible. Things still get, in band lingo, ‘big’, like in Ibiza last week where they all ended up in the sea outside Noel G’s villa (Serge: “If you went insane one day, that’s where you’d end up”) but things just feel more together. They all have girlfriends, so potential groupies are kept well out of the way, and chemical rinses are now reserved for extra-special occasions. Is this the new older, wiser Tom?
“I’m trying to get wiser y’know? I don’t know how I’m gonna! You learn not to do too much and excess just destroys you, dunnit? I wanna make sure I can perform the next day, I don’t wanna let people down. And if I ever do a shit gig then I’ll want crucifying for it, because when I’m onstage that’s when I’m in my inner self.”
Out front, call-and-response glamtrooper ‘Shoot The Runner’, a brand new track, signals their return like a cannonball, and Kasabian are, officially, back. Rock’n’roll space ride ‘Last Trip (In Flight)’ goes out to Noel Gallagher, while album closer ‘The Doberman’ is already this year’s prog classic. When they return to encore with ‘Club Foot’ and ‘LSF’, the building seems to lift off the ground. “Even the Monkeys didn’t manage that,” Noel will tell Tom later – and remember how much Noel was dribbling on the floor for that lot. At the end, the five of them take a bow together, West End style. And then Tom comes back, leading a closing chant from ‘LSF’. You can hear the echoes all the way up Brixton Hill.
KASABIAN BA’ITLE THE FAITHLESS
Two days later, the fun bus rolls into Dublin’s Marlay Park for the latest in a string of gigs, playing after The Young Knives and before Faithless.
“It’s good being a support band again,” reasons Serge of the indignity, “because you can get carried away. This is like a reminder that ‘you’re not there yet, lads’. Never lose the vision, man. Never start believing your own hype or any of that shit.”
Today is, indeed, a tiny reminder that they’re still on the upward trajectory. Not that anybody has told Tom; draped in an Irish flag in tribute to his heritage, dedicating half the set to his dad (Tom Meighan Sr is on the road for a couple of nights), howling at Ian on drums and working the alchemy. This is a crowd of bovver-boy Faithless fans and barely-teenage girls in pink boots. This ain’t indie as we know it, but this is in line with Article 5.1 of the Kasabian Treaty, that they shall unite the rockers and the ravers like Moses, or at least like the Prodigy and Primal Scream in ’96.
“Kasabian were absolutely outstanding,” splutters 18-year-old Fergus Stone. “We saw them at Oxegen and they were good. Tonight they were mindblowing, man.” His friend, Mikey Wilson, is wearing a Faithless T-shirt. “Faithless are great,” he says, incorrectly. “But we came to see Kasabian. Electronica and rock, it’s the perfect mix.” Fergus has a theory. “Kasabian’s first album should have been The Stone Roses’ second album. But now Kasabian are better than The Stone Roses.” Upstairs, in what looks like Marlay Park’s drawing room, NME catches a word with Tom senior, a garrulous window-cleaner who’s trying not to cry.
“The gig tonight,” he says commandingly, “was on par with what they’ve done for the last six months, which is growing and growing and growing, and every gig seems to be better and better and better. I think they are a people’s band, and a live band is what these people want to see and what they pay their money for.”
What did you say when your son >
Photo 1 – Kasabian (L-R) Tom, Jay, Ian, Serge, Chris; Aww, group hug
Photo 2 – Tom Jr with his dad: now we can see where the good looks come from
Page Four:
“THE LYRICS IN ‘EMPIRE’ ARE ABOUT DISOBEYING ORDERS” – SERGE
… told you he wanted to go into rock’n’roll?
“It’s taken them eight years to get where they’ve got. And it’s been an uphill struggle. I would say to other young lads in a band, you just try and keep going. So many bands go by the wayside because people have to go to work and so on, as working class people. But I think working class people’s bands are better, because they appreciate that they’ve achieved something through hardship.”
“We are working class,” shrugs Tom in the hotel bar later. “I don’t wanna push that in people’s faces because it doesn’t matter what class you’re from or what genre or what colour you are, race or religious background. We’re just normal, and we can’t wear it, can we? Or pretend to wear it, that’s why we get on with people so well.” Unfortunately, Kasabian’s champions-of-the-people rhetoric has been giving lazy people the wrong end of the stick since about May 2004, when NME united Mani and the boys for a baggy summit and the former Stone Rose clumsily described Will Young as a “gel-wearing poof”. A UK broadsheet misattributed the quote to Tom and called the band out for so-called homophobia. Now they find themselves accused in some quarters of something even more sinister. In the current political climate, calling their new single and album ‘Empire’ hasn’t been going down well.
Tom frowns. “Some knobhead journalist in Germany tried to stitch me up! This snidey fucker going, ‘So you’re the 51st state of America’. And I went, ‘What?’ He went, ‘Empire, the British Empire. They weren’t very nice, were they? They did this and that.’ And I went, ‘Look mate, I don’t give a fuck. I’m Irish. I couldn’t give a shit about the British Empire.’ He fucking read it wrong, man.”
As NME readers will know, ‘Empire’ has long been Kasabian’s buzzword for describing something that’s ‘fucking ace’. “I think it started with, ‘That’s Roman Empire’,” remembers Serge. “You know those old ruins and stuff? Those mad buildings like the Vatican or whatever, Tom’d be, ‘Fucking Roman Empire!’ And then it got ducked down to ‘Empire’. It’s just a fucking mad word, we’re all pissing ourselves laughing. It was the same when we got a song in the charts called ‘Club Foot’. There’s a lot of tongue in cheek about the band that goes over a lot of people.”
In fact, the ‘Empire’ video’s anti-war message couldn’t be more obvious – depicting the band as Civil War soldiers and ending with Tom being shot as the words to Wilfred Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est flash up.
“Maybe we’ve been misunderstood,” is Serge’s final word. “Our job as musicians is to keep the spirit of the people up. In all, like, mad cultures, like Brazil or Cuba, poverty-stricken places, on every street corner there’s a musician, and OK, he’s not bringing down walls, but he’s playing tunes to keep the people that have to work on them, to keep their fucking morale up. That’s where we fit into it, I suppose. ’Cos the lyrics in ‘Empire’ are about disobeying orders, like two fingers up to the machine.”
Tom’s more pragmatic as The Cavalry loads up the bus and we head for Essex. “I know it’s a cliche and it keeps coming up, but we are the people’s band for today, everyone knows it. Arctic Monkeys are the indie princes and we’re running the rock’n’roll show, and that’s how it is. But we’re nice, warm people at the end of the day. We’re not these monsters, man. Well, I can be, just keep me away from the Skittles! Smarties as well. As a kid they used to send me loopy. Doctors were like, ‘Don’t you give him them, Mrs Meighan, he’ll fly…”
V IS FOR VICTORY
Kasabian arrive at V’s Staffordshire site the following Sunday, bleary-eyed from entertaining Liam and Oasis’ drummer Zak Starkey at the Chelmsford leg the night before.
“The party was at our Portakabin,” says a saucer-eyed Tom. “You know when there’s a circus in town and it draws people? It was like that, like a magnet drawing to a fridge. It’s modern science, mate!”
“Liam turned up,” shudders Dib, “and the bus wasn’t leaving ’til three so it all went wrong.”
Serge: “But it’s always been the same. It was like the fucking Wu-Tang Clan, 50 Cent man, turning up. It’s got like, Puff Daddy man, you know what I mean?”
Actually no, we’ve got no idea. But we can guess what’s coming next; the bit where they declare last night’s show the best they’ve ever played…
“We watched the footage on the bus on the way up here, and it looked like Peter Jackson!” laughs Serge. “Like someone had duplicated the first 10 rows with CGI shit. And we started a headlining set at V with a new song that no-one’s heard! And we played seven new songs! ” We leave Kasabian limbering up I to do the same again: to make Staffordshire – as Serge is so fond of saying – “righteous.”
And this is where our week with Kasabian ends and our story reaches its zenith, as their career seems to every single night. Onstage at V, there’s magic at work as Kasabian come together for one last bow, arm-in-arm again to the last strains of ‘LSF’. “We’re not these mischievous little kids fighting the crowd and trying to win,” reflects Tom as we say our goodbyes. “Now, we’re building massive troops and the army is huge. Now I can call us an out-and-out rock’n’roll band. We’ve grown from being these scuzzy little spliffheads to the full-on fucking feather coats.” Have you got a feather coat?
“I want one! Champagne and fucking feather coats! We’re not them scabby little fuckers any more.”
It’s up and on. This empire building has only just begun.
KNOWING ME, KNOWING YOU WITH KASABIAN
Just how well do the boys know each other?
SERGE ON TOM
1 – What is Tom’s favourite colour?
“I’ll say blue.”
✓
2 – What was the first gig he went to?
“Oasis, we went together actually.”
✓
3 – Does he prefer The Beatles or the Stones?
“The Beatles. It’s gonna be a tough one for him that.”
✓
4 – What was the first record he ever bought?
“It was ‘Stutter Rap’ by Morris Minor And The Majors.”
[Tom said ‘Bad’ until we reminded him of this crime]
✓
5 – What is his favourite animal?
“I reckon it’s a dog because that’s mine.”
X [Tom’s favourite animal is the shark.]
6 – What is his favourite Bond film?
“He don’t like Bond, I’ll say Dr Who though.”
✓ [Tom “fucking hates” Bond.]
7 – What is his favourite Kasabian song?
“I’m gonna say ‘British Legion’ because he said it the other day.”
✓
6/7
TOM ON SERGE
1 – What is Serge’s favourite colour?
“Blue.”
✓
2 – What was the first gig he went to?
“Oasis at Earl’s Court. Mine was Oasis and Travis at G-Mex.”
✓
3 – Does he prefer The Beatles or the Stones?
“Stones. Or did he say The Beatles?”
✓ [Serge would have preferred to be in The Stones, but to have written the songs of John Lennon]
4 – What was the first record he ever bought?
‘“I’ve Got My Mind Set On You’ by George Harrison.”
✓
5 – What is his favourite animal?
“Dog!”
✓
6 – What is his favourite Bond film?
“Oh, I fucking hate Bond, I don’t know ’em. Next question.”
X [Serge’s favourite . Bond film is Live And Let Die.]
7 – What is his favourite Kasabian song?
“Aah, that’s a tough one. ‘U-Boat’?”
X [Serge “loves them all equally”, as if they were his children]
5/7
VERDICT: Both Kasabian boys know each other scarily well. But Serge just edges it
Photo 1 – Marlay Park, August 2006: along with his trademark hat and scarf, Serge also uses bandmate Chris as a fashion accessory
Photo 2 – “Cillit Bang in a cup-that should pep me up”