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“WE’RE HERE TO SHAKE YOU. ELECTROCUTE YOU AND BITE YOU ON THE ARSE”
Dig up the Queen Mum! Hang Slash by his hair! Destroy motorway services! Look out, here’s Kasabian, laying waste to a town near you.
Words: Mark Beaumont in Sheffield
Photographs: Sam Jones in London
Kasabian are a black hole of rock’n’roll; the detritus of destruction whirlpools around them. In the support band’s dressing room, groupies slurp from a bowl of ‘ecstasy and Viagra punch’. In the Hades-via-Vegas glitz of the venue upstairs, go-go dancers writhe on poles. From the chatter and snuffles in the toilets, groups of four and five Yorkshire Ryder-likes are trying to snort the entire cistern. The Sheffield Leadmill is being ripped from its roots and spun to oblivion on the typhoon tailwinds of Hurricane Tom (Meighan).
But at the eye of the storm, behind the closed door of Kasabian’s dressing room, the talk is not of powders, pills or porking pole-dancers. Here there are plots of robbing graves and storming palaces.
“Prince Charles just wants slappin’ round the head with his big floppy ears,” says Tom (vocals), as the post-gig discussion bizarrely turns from who can open a beer bottle with their eye socket to the fact that the Prince Of Wales is intending to spend £6million of taxpayers’ money on building a palace for Prince William. “It’s just wrong, mate. Why can’t you give that to the NHS? Why are we building that little shit a palace, y’know what I mean?”
“We’re being lied to,” says crane-framed, tramp-bearded keyboard/guitarist Serge Pizzorno with a malicious glint in his eye. “Storm it.”
“It’s like the Queen Mum getting a plastic hip,” rants Tom. “Leave it alone! You were already 101!”
Well we paid for the thing, so let’s go dig her up and get it back. We might need it one day.
Tom’s eyes boggle out of his head. They often do. “You’re fuckin’ unreal!” he hawks, nudging Serge. “This guy’s unreal! ‘I’m diggin’ er up!’ Sorry, that’s wrong! The woman’s dead!”
Serge snorts. “Fuckin’ old bag!”
“She had a privileged life, mate!” Tom winks, pointing Mani-ishly at NME like the true-born Manc that he isn’t (he’s from Leicester). “She sat on her arse for years scoffin’ cream cakes!”
If this all seems familiar, that’s because you’ve met Kasabian before. They’re the monkey-walkin’, fight-talkin’, ‘mad ferret’ Northern gobshites that have held sway over the British musical landscape since King Arthur necked the first E in Christendom.
Fads in rock’n’roll come and go, but the lineage of the Mashed Manc Monkey God is still strong. Yes, Kasabian were the Mondays in ’88, the Roses in ’89, the ’Sis in ’95 and the Scream in ’99. But Kasabian’s evolutionary contribution to the species was to introduce a special new groove – funky bass beats, druggy dance death-rays and rabble-rousing chants with foggy political undertones.
There are inevitabilities about The Kasabian Story:
1) Their records will saunter cockily into the Top 20 without radio play or industry hype. (‘Club Foot’ hit 19 in May; ‘LSF’ trounced into the Top 10 a few months later).
2) Their gigs will be rammed with electro-indie teens.
And 3) their first NME cover story will include the quote: “We’re the best band in Britain at the minute.”
“We’re the best band in Britain at the minute,” says Tom. “Form-wise you can’t touch us; no-one comes nowhere near, no-one’s on our planet, on our scale. Fuck the Americans – I’m sick of your fuckin’ three-minute scuzzy garage rock shit. Stick it up your arse, mate.
“This year has been outstanding for us and English bands on the whole, and next year can only get better, y’know.”
You’re here to save us?
“People’s eardrums need savin’,” says Tom. “You don’t need to be fuckin’ rocked to sleep and wet the bed; you need to be fuckin’ shook and bitten on the arse.” Ah, the chest-thumping polemic!
The proclamations of salvation! The meteoric rise from burning cars on the estate, to burning…
“Any guy that comes from Stoke-on-Trent with a perm like that and a shit top hat, called Slash, is actually quite slash. Literally piss. It’s fucking wong, innit?”
– Tom Meighan
… down Top Of The Pops! This is the oldest rock story ever told, but it’s still a million-dollar spectacular.
Witness a three-year-old Kasabian, fresh from toilet-tours of pubs and clubs in the East Midlands, with only a limited release of ‘Processed Beats’ and the minor hit of ‘Club Foot’ to their name, stumbling onstage as the opening Other Stage act of Glastonbury 2004 to find 20,000 skanking mentalists there to see them.
“That was the day we thought, ‘Right, our lives are gonna change forever’,” says Tom.
“It was half-11 in the mornin’. You could see ’em all walking down the hill, all coming in,” Serge half gasps at the memory. “To see that many people stood up and goin’ for it (shakes head).”
All summer long the crowds and hits kept coming.
“My fuckin’ knees were jelly the day ‘LSF’ charted,” gawps Tom. “I was in bits, man. I couldn’t feel my arms, me vision had gone, I was stunned. Especially that song, ‘LSF’, the words and the lyrics and what it’s for is, like… how the hell did we do that?”
“We appeal to the masses, man. We’re connectin’. When people come to our show, they feel like they’ve been thrilled; like they’ve been part of summat. Rock’n’roll’s about enjoying music and we’re just giving people a good time again, y’know?” Tom winks.
“These things happen for a reason.”
There’s been reason lurking behind the odd twists of Kasabian’s history. It makes perfect sense that Tom and Serge should meet on a football field at 11. “He ripped me apart, the cocky little fucker,” Tom grins widely. “And that was it, Tom and Serge.”
Serge nods and says, “I’d never met anyone as a kid that had charisma. Y’know, like when you meet someone and you know you’ll never meet anyone like that again, even at such a young age.”
Whether bunking off school, watching Leicester City or trying to become the pubescent answer to the Beastie Boys, they made the perfect double act – Tom the chirpy hip-hop fanatic; Serge the tall, Italian techno-headed wordsmith. It happened for a reason. Just like there was a reason the pair decided to form a Britrock band with their schoolmates – Chris Edwards (bass) and Chris Karloff (guitar) – after discovering Oasis in 1996.
“It was like looking at my mates on telly,” Serge remembers. “You could imagine them hanging around with you. I thought, ‘That looks like a good job’. Then it was like, ‘All the music we’re listening to: Oasis, DJ Shadow, Blackalicious – we should throw it together and create something different’.”
“We told everyone we were gonna be the best band in England when we were 16,” says Tom.
As the techno roots were fusing with the guitar bluster to create a thrilling new cross-breed of indie-dance riot in 2002, Kasabian upped sticks and relocated en masse to ‘The Farm’.
“We just went to this party at this farm,” says Serge. “Met the landlord and we had a look round his house. Two weeks later we all sat around and went, ‘It’d be fuckin’ cool if we all stayed together and finished the record and got our heads together.’
“We didn’t wanna do it in Leicester because you’d get all your mates coming round getting fucked, and London was too much too early – you’d end up going out all night. So we rang him and said, ‘We’re a band. Do you wanna rent half your house to us?’”
“We went down there and I was shittin’ it because I’d never seen anyfin’ like it,” says Tom. “This beautiful but spooky old house. There was the dog in its pen lookin’ like a fuckin’ beast or somethin’. It was quite spooky, wunnit Serge? But we did it. Then we lost it for about six months. We were living like flower power hippies, man. We were spaced out.”
Isolated and alone – except for three bandmates and a TV spewing Iraq war footage – Serge began filling a notepad with visions, thoughts and images from the TV screen that would turn debut album ’Kasabian’ into a state-of-the-planet address.
With the band snapped up by RCA in June 2002, after a demo of‘Processed Beats’ did the DJ rounds, the band delivered an album of brooding fictions, urban violence and creeping loneliness. ‘Cut Off’ tells the story of a scientist who gets so off his choppers on LSD that he decides to bomb a tube train; ‘Club Foot’ is about “having something you love so much, the only way to deal with it is kill it.”
What sort of thing?
“The love for a woman,” says Serge.
Kill the feeling or kill the woman?
“Kill the woman.”
Right. But the most intriguing and sinister lyrics on the record come from Serge’s approach to politics and society. ‘Processed Beats’ is a mishmash of blip-culture images. Witness “breaking bones/stealing mobile phones” (a reference to football violence), and “like a terrorist on a day of rest” (“That’s saying that our music is hard-hitting,” explains Tom. “It’s a nasty image”).
Meanwhile, ‘LSF’ is crammed full of psychedelic warfare – troops on fire, animal messiahs and polyphonic prostitutes.
“It’s Jacob’s Ladder,” Serge explains. “But the chorus is today; the people in power making the wrong decisions. The beauty of it is it’s a celebration. We realise we’re fucked, but it’s the last day on Earth, man. Let’s fuckin’ have a good time.”
“It’s a celebration, man,” Tom adds. “As in that the whole world has gone completely insane. So while we’re here, let’s have a good time. Do one more pill or have one more beer and go fuckin’ mad.
“If you’re the President of the United States, or homeless in Oldham, you’ve still got that threat.We have never been a political band and we never will be. But if it inspires people to get out there and make a change, then I hope it does.”
Isn’t that a bit of a cop-out? Are Kasabian singing about terrorists just to sound a bit dangerous?
“No, I think what we’re saying is the truth,” says Tom. “No-one’s said it, and we’re saying it. It’s quite deadly. No-one’s done it.”
Which lyrics are the deadly ones, exactly?
“Y’know, “terrorist on a day of rest”. You’ve got to have balls to say that shit. A lot of balls.”
But what are you actually saying?
“We’re saying that there are people out there that wanna blow up the world, man. That’s it.”
Well, yup, we’re hardly holding the front page here. What’s your song saying about it?
Serge intervenes: “The opinion is that, having those thousand news channels, it’s in your face all the time, so it’s hard to ignore it. It’s a fuckin’ strange time, it really is. It’s hard to talk about politics – people make out they know about this shit, but they don’t know enough, and we’re no fuckin’ different.”
“When shit gets hard,” says Serge, “music is the only thing that brings people together.
“At the gigs when the lights go bright, you see faces and they’re in another world. People work hard, but for that moment you make them forget, you make them realise that we’ve got somethin’ here to get excited about. Music is the purest thing left. We can give you that little smile and that extra swagger.”
It’s 4pm. Soundcheck time at the Leeds Blank Canvas. The eye of their storm has moved north. And within minutes of reacquainting ourselves with Tom, he’s off on another hyper-charged rant.
From motorway service stations (“Five pound for a sandwich! You’re killin’ me!”) to The X Factor (“These corporate fuckers put all this money into a show and pick the general public out to be humiliated. Louis Walsh, what a little square, a little squashed square. What a horrible little man”), to that Question Time staple: ‘Who’s worse, the Queen or Slash?’
Of the latter Tom argues, vehemently: “Any guy that comes from Stoke-on-Trent with a perm like that, and a shit top hat, called Slash, is actually quite slash. Literally piss. It’s terrible. That kind of wet hairspray – it’s fuckin’ wrong, innit?”
Serge: “Slash’d look better hung. From the gallows. His hair would look good flapping in the wind.”
But Kasabian don’t want to gripe. Not when the revolution’s running so smoothly. These gigs are orgies of euphoria: the ageing baggy victims at the bar lost in nostalgia; the saucer-eyed nu-ravers it the front pogoing holes in the dancefloor; and he songs themselves billow and unfurl, becoming meta-butterflies from the album’s tinny pupae. Staggering in scope and gargantuan of groove, it all hints at monumental noises ahead.
“On our first album, Serge is almost a film director – he’s made these stories up based on his vision and what he’s seen,” says Tom. “We’re a soundtrack. On the second album we’re gonna go into space, take it from planet Earth to Mars.”
Strap yourself in; this black hole’s about to swallow rock whole.
WHO IS KASABIAN?
The grisly tale behind the band’s name
Linda Kasabian was the member of Charles Manson’s ‘Family’ who was selected to drive the car to Roman Polanski’s house where his pregnant wife Sharon Tate and four friends were brutally murdered on August 8,1969.
She was chosen because she was the only member with a valid driver’s licence. It was her testimony which led to the convictions of Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten, and Charles Manson.
Escaping a prison sentence by turning State’s Evidence, she was last known to be living in Washington State where, in 1996, she was arrested for processing methamphetamine, alongside her daughter ‘Lady Dangerous’, who was sentenced to a year in jail for possession of rock and powder cocaine.
OTHER BANDS WITH MANSON LINKS:
The Beatles
The Manson Family were said to have been inspired to kill by tracks from ‘White Album’. Manson code-named the murderous excursion to the Tate house as ‘Helter Skelter’, his name for the race war which he thought would result from his group’s activities.
The Beach Boys
As a struggling singer, Manson became buddies with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, at one point even moving his Family into Wilson’s house in 1968. As well as using one of Manson’s songs on a Beach Boys album (‘Never Learn Not To Love’), Wilson introduced the Family to the Polanski house where they met Doris Day’s son, Terry Melcher.
Marylin Manson
Following his band’s theme of naming themselves after stars and murderers, Brian Warner was drawn to Charles Manson as the Tate murders occurred on the day he was born.
Mansun
Nothing to do with Charles Manson at all, actually, the ’90s psych-rockers were in fact named after the Verve track ‘A Man Called Sun’.