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IF YOU FUCK WITH US, WE’LL BE FORCED TO KILL YOU.’
– SERGE PIZZORNO

At some indeterminate time this morning, Serge Pizzorno awoke in his hotel room with a lampshade on his head. Still violently drunk from the night before, the guitarist managed to get himself into a seated position before collapsing back onto the mattress.
Fortunately, bassist Chris Edwards was on hand to help. He got him up and into the bathroom, then tied his shoelaces for him.
By the time both were ready to leave for the soundcheck, some good news had reached them: tonight’s show here in Providence, Rhode Island, had been cancelled by headliners The Music, due to singer Robert Harvey’s sore throat. This was a terrific development, as it meant that Kasabian could go out drinking again.

A taxi was called and, now, half an hour later, Pizzorno is sitting in one of the town’s more upmarket bar-restaurants, the first of many Jack Daniel’s and Cokes in his right hand. It is three o’clock in the afternoon. Six hours from now, he will still be here, flamboyantly wasted, having offended at least one waiter, and verbally abused a lesbian and her pierced partner. He will also have peed his own body weight in what he will come to think of as his own personal urinal.

“Don’t you just love drinking in the middle of the day?” he says. Despite appearances to the contrary, Pizzorno is not only the band’s soul, but also, as chief songwriter, its brains.

This is Kasabian’s inaugural tour of America, and although their self-titled debut album has yet to be released here, the hype from the UK has given their visit a very real buzz, and the American press – “wankers” in Pizzorno’s opinion – are showing considerable interest. In the seven months since its UK release, their debut album has sold 500,000 copies, produced four Top 20 hits and received three Brit nominations.

A self-styled people’s band, Kasabian are in many ways the antithesis to sensitive Coldplay or arty Franz Ferdinand. Their drug-flavoured terrace anthems are closer in spirit to 1994-era Oasis. Key to their popularity is an ever-swelling fanclub called The Movement, the membership of which is believed, by some, to consist mostly of football hooligans.

“Bollocks, that’s not true,” Pizzorno insists. “We are a lads’ band, definitely, but our fans are good people. It’s like ecstasy, people coming together, and so you’ve got football fans as well as kids that read, you know, Tchaikovsky or whatever, all embracing as one.”

Kasabian have clearly resolved to take full advantage of the new world opening up to them. Unlike, say, Keane, who view success with the quizzical timidity of the well brought-up, this lot want only to nurture textbook rock’n’roll rebellion, and fast.

“If there’s a fire,” singer Tom Meighan says, “you can be sure we’ll poke it.” Meighan is a tall, gangly man, possessed of a demeanour that is equal parts naive schoolboy and garrulous charmer. He speaks almost exclusively in cliches, at one point even claiming himself “a lover not a fighter”, and is prone to sudden bursts of earnestness. Five minutes into our conversation, in which we have touched upon everything and nothing in particular, he says this: “Man, this is a deep interview, really psychological, it’s touching my soul.” Pizzorno, meanwhile, is more belligerent, and quickly intervenes. He attempts to grab my shirt collar until he realises I’m not wearing a shirt. Instead, he makes do with some chest hair.

“I’m fired up, man, so let’s talk,” he gabbles. “You should feel my self-belief, it’s off the fucking chart.”

And so while Meighan nurses an amaretto and awaits the arrival of his much meeker bandmates – Edwards from a 7-11 across the road, and guitarist Christopher Karloff, last seen sightseeing in New York with his girlfriend -Pizzorno skips from subject to subject with schizophrenic ease. As he does so, his nose runs steadily.

“I don’t want to sit here slagging off other bands,” he begins, “but Franz Ferdinand, Keane, all that lot, I just don’t believe them. They are not my people, they are not real, and they’ll get found out soon enough. The Beatles were real, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, us. Why? It’s in our blood. What’s in Keane’s blood? Fucking tap water, I’ll bet.”

A waitress passes, and he clutches his heart. “Hello, darling,” he winks, and his pupils double in size.

Despite their overnight success, the Leicester quartet have actually been together for seven years now. Pizzorno, Meighan and Edwards are childhood friends, and were joined by Karloff in 1998. Their first collective dream, to become professional football players, palled when Pizzorno had it explained to him that doing cocaine before a match was heavily frowned upon.

“It was just so fucking robotic,” he scowls, “no place to be a true artist. I wanted to be George Best, a glory hunter, but they refused to encourage that, so I walked.”

And so instead, their dreams became musical. They worshipped the cosmic swagger of The Stone Roses and viewed Oasis’ Definitely Maybe as their Holy Grail. In 2002, aged just 21, they landed a recording contract, but chose to ignore the lure of a London recording studio in favour of renting space on a local Rutland farm.

Serge Pizzorno and Tom Meighan, Providence, Rhode Island, 22 February 2005.

IN BRIEF
They Say: “I see something in Kasabian that’s been missing for 10 years, a great sense of style and doing it because they love it.” – Mani, Primal Scream
We Say: Drunk, disorderly, anthemic, and possibly, just possibly, the new Oasis.
The Proof: Kasabian (RCA album)

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“It was a gang mentality thing,” Meighan explains. “Just us, a bunch of drugs, and the creation of a landmark album.”

Two months after its release, however, he and Pizzorno did venture south to the capital, intent on living the dream, Gallagher-style.

“Man, it was so intense,” Pizzorno recalls. “We went out every night, massively, because there was always some cunt inviting us somewhere. In the end, I just collapsed. If we hadn’t gone back home, I swear, I’d be dead by now.” And so now, all four members of perhaps the country’s most exciting new rock act live at home with their parents. Pizzorno, perhaps fearful for the band’s image, curls his lip.

“Yeah, but it’s not like we’re ever there,” he says.
Presumably, when they are home, they can stay up as late as they like?

“Careful, mate,” comes the response. “You’re taking the piss. We’re a friendly bunch of blokes, but if you fuck with us, we’ll be forced to kill you.”

It was during their London adventure that Kasabian came, fully and aggressively, into the public eye. During a weekender in Paris, Pizzorno even had a stint as a male model. “They asked me when I was on ecstasy,” he grins, “and I thought, Why not? I like the idea of documenting my life and times, even if I look like a prick occasionally. ”

It wasn’t his first brush with the world of fashion. After last year’s Glastonbury performance, a pre-Pete Doherty Kate Moss even requested a date. There was no question of turning her down.

“I’ve never actually told anyone this before, but we had a wonderful evening, me and Kate. She is a fucking brilliant spirit. There was no, you know, no encounter, but to me ‘the woman is Jim Morrison, a true wild child, and God bless her for that. She taught me lots about the world I was entering. You can see the experience she’s had, it’s right there in her eyes, her face, and so to me she’s kind of like Yoda. ”

And the reason their first date was also their last? “Basically, I couldn’t keep up with the girl. I’d been awake for two days, I needed to go to bed. By the end of it, she was talking Spanish, I couldn’t follow her. I told her I had to sleep, and off I went. Never saw her again.” He pauses to drain his latest drink. “And now she’s with a crack addict. That’s weird, isn’t it? You know, I feel sorry for him, for Pete Doherty, and I’m there with the guy. His music is shit, but I’m there with him.”

Serge Pizzorno isn’t given too many moments of introspection, but of late he has been brooding on the subject of women. While he claims to have always been popular with the opposite sex, he finds that his ease with them these days is less down to his own personal charms than the fact that he is a rock star. He could be a complete arsehole, he says, a Nazi sympathiser even, and still they would come flocking.

“And I have a moral problem with that,” he says. Then, reconsidering: “But after a few Jack Daniel’s -well, it’s only sex, isn’t it?”

He recounts a wild night in Tokyo’s red-light district, how he recently came on to “the blonde one” out of Girls Aloud (“she fucking loved it”), and how he now has his sights set on actress Scarlett Johansson. His people, he says, have been conversing with her people. When the band arrive in Los Angeles in a few weeks’ time, they will hook up.

“I’ll be irresistible to her. It’s my Italian blood,” he explains (his paternal grandfather was from Genoa). “And it’s my name. It’s always been a pleasure to tell girls my name. They love that shit.”

All this talk of women has got him in the mood. He suggests we visit a strip bar, but Pizzorno is by now very drunk, very loud and, increasingly, a liability.

When a well-dressed man and his girlfriend arrive at the restaurant, he lurches to his feet, points and laughs. The atmosphere tenses palpably. “Look at his bald head,” he giggles. “It’s just like a bowling ball!”

With Karloff and Meighan long since departed, the responsibility of looking after him falls to the baby-faced Chris Edwards, who elects to take him back to the hotel where, presumably, he has another appointment with another lampshade.
And so Pizzorno’s intended night of debauchery is curtailed at just 9.10pm.

The following evening, Kasabian are onstage at Boston’s Paradise Rock Club. Joining the four-piece tonight is the latest of countless session drummers, Ian Matthews, whose presence might soon become permanent. The two frontmen flail around in pie-eyed abandon under purple spotlights. The stage is tiny, but even amid such claustrophobic confines, the songs – especially Club Foot, LSF and new track 55 – are towering and anthemic.

Afterwards, back on the tour bus, Meighan is stripped to the waist, and mopping his sodden armpits with a couple of baby wipes.
“I fucking stink!” he says with the delirium of a lottery winner. “But did you see the reaction? They loved us! God bless ’em!”

Beside him is Pizzorno. He locks the singer, a man he says he’d “take a bullet for”, into a fraternal embrace.
“Course they did,” he nods. “Great rock’n’roll is a pair of tight jeans, good shoes, a nice shirt and some fucking great anthems. And we’ve got it all. What’s not to love ?”

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