It was 20 years ago that Keane released their colossal debut album Hopes And Fears. Their goal was to make a classic, and so the three school mates applied The Okay Computer Test. Tim Rice-Oxley explains: “There’s no way we thought we were making the next OK Computer but you’ve got to try. You ask yourself “how do our heroes do it”. Well, that worked! When it comes to longevity, there is nothing wrong with a bit of creative grand ambition.

In Keane’s new book Hope and Fears: Lyrics and History, keyboard player and principal songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley explains how he and his bandmates took to the idea that the best art (and music) has an ability to create ‘worlds’:

“We weren’t savvy enough to think about any of that when we made Hopes and Fears, but luckily, we found our ‘world’ by instinct – we just put to music episodes from our own lives, set in the streets we grew up on and the places where we spent so much time together. And really the overarching feel of the record is a sense of pushing forward, persevering, not wanting to give up – in its most literal form it’s the story of the three of us trying to stick together, to stop waiting and start living, to break out of the lives we knew so well and to step into a bigger adventure”.

So, that worked out pretty well in the end!

It’s a beautiful thing, school friends getting together to form a band. Whatever the outcome, it’s just the best possible thing a young person can do, isn’t it? But, when that band goes on to achieve phenomenal, global success - commercial and creative world beating success - well that’s not just a beautiful thing but a dream come true. And yet it isn’t ever really like that on the inside. As Tim tells me:

“The number of times people said to us, ‘you came from nowhere and went to the top of the charts’. But many times we thought about ourselves as a very ill advised vanity project or a silly dream. We grew up playing with 100 other bands around Camden and 98 of those fell by the wayside. You have a very strong sense that the odds are stacked against you”. 

The lovely thing about Hopes and Fears (the book) is the intimate glimpse it gives fans to this band’s origins - the lack of savvy, the uncertainty, the wonder, the delusion. Or, was it ambition? Just a very English, repressed and understated form of British chutzpah. There was a lot more of that in the UK music scene 20 years ago. But success and stardom didn’t just ‘happen’ for Keane, no more than it has just happened for Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan or Fontaines D.C. or any other overnight music industry success story we’ve seen in the present year. Two decades after Keane set sail to France to make the debut album, the music business has changed beyond recognition and yet some things stay the same - only a minute fraction of bands get to enjoy what might be called fame. 

The accounts of the early years - from each of the band’s three original members, Rice-Oxley, drummer Richard Huges and ‘cherubic frontman’ Tom Chaplin - are all gently entertaining - like their songs, both brutally honest and mercifully economic. Especially on the subject of the band’s ‘last chance saloon’ trip to James Sanger’s makeshift farmhouse studio, an hour South of Cherbourg in France. 

Still recovering from the shock of their guitar player Dominic Scott’s sudden decision to quit the band and return to Ireland, the now famous threesome turned up to a shambolic set-up, having to cobble together a recording process for a batch of early songs and define a new sound for themselves: as a rock band with no string instruments. 

“What came naturally [to us] was a more openly emotional approach against a background of everyday life in small towns; little snapshots of life that, like the music of The Smiths or Nick Drake, held their emotional power within apparently quite mundane settings”. 

The book is illustrated with old grainy pics (they really did meet each other as tweens), handwritten lyric notes, and Chaplin’s rough sketches. One peculiar entry on page 35 are two lists on the page of a ring bound notepad, titled The OK Computer Test.

“There’s no way we thought we were making the next OK Computer but you’ve got to try. You ask yourself “how do our heroes do it”. But if we knew then what we know now, we might have put ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ at number five instead of first”. 

Of all the bands to grace our company on The Art of Longevity, Keane have ridden the music industry rollercoaster through all the stations of the cross: struggle, success, excess, disintegration and if you’re lucky - enlightenment. Rice-Oxley immediately twigs on:

“Yeah, absolutely. Our struggle was quite long and our disintegration was quite quick, although we clung on effectively for quite a while. I feel like now we are in a more positive and exciting place than the day before Hopes And Fears came out”. 

It’s easy to forget in these days when the monoculture is a dot in the rear view mirror, that Keane really went huge: five consecutive number one UK albums (album six ‘Cause & Effect’ was number two). Their early success carried an unstoppable momentum. Yet behind the sheen of that success, as quickly as their second album ‘Under The Iron Sea’ the band was imploding - a combination of exhaustion and pressure of heightened expectations causing an emotional disconnection between bandmates - a difficult thing to handle for old school friends. 

Every band of longevity should make a book and/or a film. It’s what fans in today’s crowded music landscape deserve really - the scarcity of access to the inner circle, whether that’s present or past. And for Keane themselves it sounds like the book has served a therapeutic purpose in a way. 

“We’re insanely hard on ourselves, to the point where it’s not good. We’d find any feedback and take it as a stick to beat ourselves up with. But we’re finally at a point now where we can say that we are quite good at what we do, proud of our music and our place in the world”.

As Keane heads back into the studio next year, the band is far better equipped than when they headed to Sanger’s French farmhouse 20 years ago - both emotionally and technically. The only problem is that they have set the bar high when it comes to track record. So the creative ambition and self-critical muscles of this band are no doubt twitching away. 

“I know I’m going to have to write a lot of songs to get to the magic. One of the things bands struggle with is quality control - knowing the difference between what’s good and what’s great. There are millions of people out there trying to write songs as well so you have to raise your voice about everything else out there”. 

For the next Keane record I suggest they apply “The Hopes and Fears Test”, just to make sure their new material is up to scratch. 

The book Hopes and Fears: Lyrics and History is available here.