Kasabian

Our new record is a classic from one to eleven

Where is the line between self-belief and delusion, confidence and arrogance? Where do you have to ban borderline banter and chatty becomes simply catty?

On Ibiza, the once white isle of paradise, now corrupt and tainted through excess, Kasabian are not holding back in their assault of the world as they hold the music industry up to their scrutiny.

Coiled on the musical eve of the release of their second album, confidently entitled ‘Empire’, they are wrought with nervous energy. But whereas most bands would be simply excited about the dormant possibilities which lie waiting on their coming tour Kasabian, a band of excess in both statement and action, are thrilled at the potential mayhem possible in the coming DECADES. Such is their belief in their own ability to continue to climb the slippery ladder of rock ‘n’ roll fame and eventually piss all over their rivals from a nausea-inducing height.

Serge Pizzorno, the band’s towering catwalk guitarist and principal songwriter describes the band’s attitude to swiping their peers out of their path in his typically quotable manner. “Although Muhammad Ali would go into the ring and abuse his opponents you could still see the love in his eyes for his opponents. We are the same.”

Kasabian (despite claiming to hate whingeing bands) have a history of demanding other bands square up musically with them. Serge admits this has got the band into trouble in the past. He concedes that they are “gobby as fuck” and shifts some of the blame onto his boxing hero of Ali.

“All the bands that we say anything about – I dig them,” confesses Serge. “I don’t hate them but at the same time I want them to be better. It’s the same way that Muhammad Ali man took the piss out of George Foreman: ‘We are going to have to get in the ring together and I want you to be the best you can possibly ever be’. That’s entertainment. That’s entertainment. That’s the circus and that’s the music that will get the people through the door – Welcome to the Coliseum of Music!”

Welcome also to an evening with Kasabian.

Join us and step inside their melodic arena for a night of gladiatorial hyperbole and endless possibility as we take a verbal journey with what could be the most seductively deluded band in Britain.

While the world’s leaders are fucking everything up it’s music’s job to keep the people’s spirits up and our job to give all the people a really fucking good night out.

Naturally, as Serge talks of Rome’s Coliseum, the title of the band’s new album, ‘Empire’, seems to make perfect sense. Regular listeners to Kasabian’s high velocity chit-chat may simply mistake it for yet more bravado, you may assume that they have labelled it ‘Empire’ as they presume to invade the sonic territory of lesser bands. The world right over.

To a degree this is true, however there is also a more personal reason for this grandiose moniker to exist, as singer Tom Meighan explains. “‘Empire’ is something which I have been saying for a few years, it’s just like saying ‘that dude is dapper’ – it’s a slang word. Empire – it just means a good thing. I don’t know where the hell I got it from; it’s just a word I use.”

Clash discovers that before the band recorded this, their second LP, they became obsessed with recording a “classic British rock album”. This is a point which they are heavily fixated upon. Tom lays down his gauntlet: “Our new record is a classic from one to eleven. An absolute classic. I think our fans expected us to better our first record. I think we have come back with something more stronger, more sweeter, more rounder.”

“With our first LP – recording it on the farm and being these pot-smoking haze psychedelic punk electronic band – and us being on the road for three years and doing nearly 300 gigs, we have captured more of a heartbeat. You can hear us breathe a bit more on this LP, we have a bit more flesh on us. It’s more human than the other one.”

His sidekick Serge is equally forthright. “We set out to make a classic British album, where everything fits together, like by Led Zeppelin or The Who – we wanted to go into that alongside those people. Our favourite bands have always released albums that have all been very different – we were never going to recreate ‘Kasabian’. Our first album was amazing, in its own right; it’s a perfect debut album. As for the second record we decided to move on, we wanted to change and we will change on the third album. You’ve always got to be moving on otherwise you’ll get nowhere.”

Over the next few hours Kasabian claim a lot of things. They claim no-one of earth makes music like them. They claim to have made an album that will destroy all their peers. They claim that their latest effort will propel them to immortality. But just don’t call them ‘baggy’.

So? I hear you ask. Are they defiantly correct or just deluded?

Is this new recording going to carry them to into the pantheon of rock ‘n’ roll or merely just round the Earth for one long final debauched dance?

Well… a bit of both to be honest.

‘Empire’ as an album is undoubtedly a progression from their first. It has moved the band from making tracks to forging songs. It possesses intricacies of a live band with ideas, some of which however are lost to the causal listener of their new CD. It witnesses a wider range of instruments with Moroccan strings, Mariachi brass and even the security railings of their studio being thrashed. It sees the scale of the whole band’s sound spectrum scream open. But whether it has the ‘shape’ or the subtlety of a classic British Rock album is heavily debatable.

Produced by Jim Abbiss, of recent Arctic Monkeys fame and who co-produced the band’s first LP, it was recorded very quickly for a classic British rock album; just five weeks. A telling fact of the band’s spontaneity is that around half the album had been written before the recording whilst the other half was cooked up actually in the studio during the time set aside for recording. This includes the album’s epic finale, ‘The Doberman’, which Serge described as a perfect death march and a song he’d like to get buried to.

During this same period the band shed an original member, Chris Karloff, who had been with the band since its hazy farmhouse inception. There’s no scandal or gossip here though. Tom explains it as a gradual separation of two distinct paths. Serge described it as feeling like a slow break up with a girlfriend as touring conflicted with Chris’ engagement: life on the road at odds with his love for his fiancé. Bassist Chris Edwards revealed that Chris only made it to four days of the five weeks of recording, which continued at the usual velocity of Kasabian mayhem; with each day’s labours getting turned up to 11 whilst the band went mental to the soundtrack of the day just spent: trying out the party tunes with an instant party.

As an album it certainly has a momentum and a solid variety of sounds. It even features Serge singing in the style of Dylan to gently plucked strings (in the token slow bit.) It is 11 tracks of dismembered rock ‘n’ roll which may grab some listeners by the balls whereas others may yearn for a lot more of the brief subtleties such as the lovely guitar break midway through ‘By My Side’ or their much hyped tempo change of second single ‘Shoot The Runner’, which is almost guaranteed to be a smash thanks to its irrepressible vocal melody.

And so down to the business of separating the verbal wheat from the chaff…

In a recent interview, Serge called your debut LP “sketchy nonsense” yet when you released your debut Tom told Clash that it was “going to put a hole in rock ‘n’ roll”. Do you worry that with your relentless hype of your own sound you could, on each successive album, smack of the boys that cried wolf?

Serge: Every time you make a new album you have to have a belief in it. You’ve got to improve on the last or try to make it more interesting than the last. So no I don’t worry about that.

Tom: I think writing songs is like life and you get better at it as you age and you get better as a human being and as a person and you can look back into the past and say: ‘that was great but what I am doing now is better’ – that’s what I think, it’s always changing, like science and things you know?

Serge: You have to sell the tickets somehow haven’t you?

You also said that you’ve “left that crazy E-popping rock ‘n’ roll behind and gone for a more classic approach” – was that your deliberate angle of the first LP or just the result of who you were as people at the time of recording your debut LP?

Tom: You can tell on the first record that it’s mashed up and it’s punk and it is electronic and it funky. It’s wiry. You can smell the pot off it.

How would you describe your ‘era’ now?

Chris: This one is us trying to make a dent. The first album gets you on the scene and the second one you’ve got to make a dent haven’t you? Cement what we have already.

Serge: I’d say we are in our 1971 phase.

Tom: ’71 or ’72

Serge: Yeah! ’71 and shitting in people’s handbags with John Bonham.

Have you been doing that?

Tom: I wouldn’t.

Serge: Not yet.

Whose handbag would you shit in?

Serge: Paris Hilton’s.

Tom: Madonna’s. A big fucking steaming turd. Then I’d get an AK47 like Entwistle and fly all her records off the wall and machine-gun them in the air. Everything she has ever done. All that 80’s crap stuff. Destroy it all. Horrible.

You are not a Madonna fan then?

Tom: No. I don’t understand why all the skin is hanging off her body. She’s supposed to be toned and fit but its all hanging. I think it’s a desperate nanny.

Does that mean you are going to call it a day on your rock career when you start to lose your physique?

Tom: When I know I am fake I will let go.

Serge: It’s a difficult question because if it’s born in you to do it… music is something that you can’t just practice. Bob Dylan will never stop touring because it’s born into him and he can’t stop. You can say what you like about the Stones but it’s born into them as well.

Tom: Madonna is different though because she is just an idiot.

Serge: (Laughs) Yeah, but if you are Maradonna who was, in my opinion, the best footballer who ever lived, but at a certain age he has to stop playing. Now I don’t know how that must feel because if someone said to me when I get to 35 you no longer can stand in front of these people and play your guitar. I don’t what that would do to me. It would send me mental.

In March 2004, Tom said: “We are trying to edge something out, something a bit raw, something you could get down to. That’s what sets us apart from the same old five leather jackets. We are trying to put a hole in rock ‘n’ roll instead of going back 25 years”. With your desire to make a “classic British album” are you not simply aiming to be these same five old leather jackets?

Serge: When you have tracks on the new LP like ‘Stuntman’ and ‘By My Side’ then that never really worries me. And I certainly would not be wearing five leather jackets.

Tom: No. No. Because there is a difference between us as a band. I don’t want to sound weird but when I look at Serge and I look at [drummer] Ian Matthews, Chris and myself and [guitarist] Jay Mehler and there is something that separates us and those five leather coats. It’s just there (points to an imaginary level).

He continues after a pause.

“We are different – we’d be the FUR coats. A rock ‘n’ roll star should have a drug habit at least once in their career, they should have a Rolls Royce, should smash the fucker up, should have a big house, should get off his head and THAT is a rock ‘n’ roll legacy. Fucking John Entwistle, the Gallaghers – we are not the leather coats. Calling me a rock ‘n’ roll star in my own mind is bollocks but to other people I am perceived as a rock ‘n’ roll star but all I have ever wanted to do is sing and so obviously I must be a rock ‘n’ roll star. With our new single ‘Empire’, I don’t know a band who have made music quite like that on this PLANET. Especially when the breakdown happens, when we go all electronic with the John Bonham drums and shit, then with all the strings. It’s just pure Kasabian signature.”

Can you not see the similarities between yourselves and other bands who’ve consistently mixed rock and roll and electronics – the main example being Primal Scream?

Tom: Oh definitely, but they are more prog electronic than us aren’t they? The thing is with Primal Scream and us is that we are two separate bands really. Like completely really. I buzz off Primal Scream and their new album is incredible.

Specifically though, two albums ago. Have you heard much of ‘XTRMNTR’ and ‘White Heat’? There are massive similarities with them and your tracks such as ‘Apnoea’.

Tom: Yeah! ‘XTRMNTR’, the great thing about that was ‘Kill All Hippies’ and that was what got us into the electronic side of rock ‘n’ roll. But Primal Scream wouldn’t write ‘Empire’, or ‘Shoot The Runner’ or ‘Doberman’. They would never write ‘Empire’; they couldn’t write ‘Empire’ because it’s not Kasabian.

How will you feel if the press turn up their nose at ‘Empire’?

Tom: (Sighs) I’ll just get on with it like I normally do. There is not a lot that I can do about that.

Chris: I love it so it wouldn’t piss me off. We love it. Everyone that comes to see us loves it – so if one journalist turns his nose up then it doesn’t matter. They are probably being controlled by a suit upstairs anyway.

Serge: We all believe in this music which we have made and that is all we have. It’s the only thing we have.

How concerned are you about your legacy and being included in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame once you are gone?

Serge: Not really… (Pauses for a while) Actually, that is a good question. I’d like to ask myself the same question some day. In fact, fuck it! I DO wanna be that fucking black and white photo next to Keith Richards or next to Pete Townshend, next to Liam, next to fucking Bobby Gillespie. I wanna be that black and white photo, man, why not?

We are a forward thinking band. We are adventurous. We don’t just sit back.

Tom: The legacy stands now. As long as we keep making good records and keeping people interested in us then we’ll make a few more albums. I’m only 25 mate. I’m only on my second record; there is a lot more to be learned and there is a long way to go in this crazy thing which we are doing which is music.

Chris: Getting that legacy is massive. Everyone wants to do it and no-one has done it for a very long time. The bands who have been out in the last five years haven’t done much. Franz Ferdinand had a little grasp on it but the second album has done nothing. Bands coming through but no one has grabbed it yet.

I think there have been a few bands in the last few years that’ve pushed things – what about the Arctic Monkeys for example?

Chris: Yeah I like the Monkeys. They have put a quick dent into things. I like what they do because they put it [their album] down live and it was done as quickly as ours; in fact I think they did it all in a month. They put a small dent into it but whether it will stay remains to be seen.

Your talk of this album as being up there with ‘Definitely Maybe’ – what do you think makes an album pass over a certain line into absolute and undisputed greatness?

Tom: I said that I want it to rank alongside ‘Definitely Maybe’. I said I want it to grab people’s attention with stories and be successful like ‘Urban Hymns’. We HAD to write this record and better the first and in my opinion we have done that.

I will never forget when Serge sat down and started tapping his foot and he was doing the chorus to ‘British Legion’. I thought, ‘I have just witnessed something here. I have just witnessed a bit of the history of modern rock ‘n’ roll in 2006 – right in front of me. I know my band is alright when I hear those chords. That’s when I know it’s game over. When he started playing I just knew it was game over, a new step. I think that our album will make history and I think it should do. Like I said we are Modernists. We are a forward thinking band. ‘By My Side’, the chopping and changes in it are just… There’s no-one else doing that shit. We are adventurous. We don’t just sit back.

Chris: We have pushed the boat out and done things that no one else has done. I think it’s going to stick out. I think its going to pop out of all the mundane jangly shit that is out there. It will shine through.

With all this talk of equalling ‘Definitely Maybe’, one of Britain’s best rock albums in the last twenty years, are you worried that overstatement might shoot you in the foot?

Chris: No. ‘Definitely Maybe’ sold something around 3 million in its ‘time’, on the first cycle. I mean it’s obviously sold a lot more now but we sold 1 million on our first and the way the music industry has gone it is pretty much comparable, because back then the Internet wasn’t swamping everything, through sales. I don’t think it’s overstated. We aren’t messing.

Why are you so convinced that ‘Empire’ can take you over this line?

Serge: I think that having songs like ‘Me Plus One’, ‘Empire’ and ‘Stuntman’ and ‘By My Side’… In the same way that the Stones took from blues but made it sound like Rolling Stones’ blues, in the same way we have taken elements from the past that we adore and made it Kasabian’s take on it all. With tunes like ‘British Legion’ and ‘Doberman’ you play these songs after all the greats and it doesn’t sound out of place. You don’t think, ‘fucking hell this album isn’t even close to that shit’; I really truly believe that. I think we have done it.

Tom: Certain albums stand out like ‘Meat Is Murder’ or ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’, and us calling our new album ‘Empire’ is cheeky but it’s funny. It is one of those names that stands out like Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath albums do. I just want it on the shelf when the kids are growing up. I just want it on the shelf. Legacy is important to us and it’s going to happen to us. I believe that.

Kasabian’s eponymous debut album was recorded and co-produced by themselves on a farm in Leicester where they all lived in one bedroom and rehearsed and recorded in another room. Kinda like the Waltons on Acid.

I spoke to them in February 2004 in the first article I wrote for Clash in our first ever edition. Even then they were lippy, full of swagger and ready to take on the world with, as Tom proclaimed at the time, just “a broken down computer – doing wicked tunes with a good vibe to them”.

Without generalising too heavily, the press largely turned their nose up at the band’s first album. A fusion of baggy influences with a Madchester groove over their own post-Prodigy and (literally) processed beats rang hollow for an older generation. The band however were slowly vindicated by a younger public who embraced their well-honed live shows, the nostalgic gleam of their melodies and their attitude, which could and has often matched that of their rock ‘n’ roll idols such as the Gallaghers.

Using the word “baggy” however in relation to Tom Meighan’s band induces a wild reaction, which suggests he has had it up to his floppy hat with journalists insinuating his band is following in the footsteps of his childhood heroes. He rants: “Fucking ‘baggy’ is the wrong word to use about our band. It’s just fucking, just fucking, the wrong word to say! What? Because we cut up drum loops and using funk – is that fucking baggy is it? Baggy music is fucking keyboard dance music in the early 90s. You’d think anyone in their right minds would have got that right.”

Serge, not for the last time, backs up his boyhood pal. “It’s mad when you listen to the first LP, on songs like ‘U-Boat’ the keys are straight from Krautrock, and it’s more indebted to Can or Tangerine Dream – far more than it’s coming from the Mondays.”

Tom: “I get it when people say we give off the feel of The Stone Roses live, I think we give off that spiritual vibe. I get this feeling you give people, but I was nine when they put that album out; I was listening to Michael Jackson. But I suppose they have to put a pin in it and now with this new record we have shaped it and moulded it, back then it was more about a vibe.”

Despite all Kasabian’s swagger, mouthing off about taking most of the other bands to the cleaners they did admit that, as far as the press was concerned, they felt they had something to prove with their new recording.

As Serge succinctly summates: “I would say that we went into this as underdogs where the media is concerned. We got where we did from fans buying our records and buying tickets. We weren’t a fashionable band. It wasn’t about the clothes we wore or the reviews that got written of us. It was the fans coming to see us that got us where we did. I can imagine we were underestimated going into the studio as people will think that were going to maker another baggy album. It’s nice to prove people wrong. The people who ‘got’ our first album got it properly and they know who they are.”

When Kasabian burst, ecstatically wide-eyed, onto the scene in 2004 with ‘Club Foot’, their EP came obsessively stencilled with a militaristic feel. Their logo depicts a masked raider, a desert bandit. Their early singles also came complete with a spray stencil of this image for their fans to go out and cause some local visual carnage; meanwhile their lyrics often referenced the violent foreign policy of the British Government abroad.

Their new album however has a more political feel to it, not only for its territorial title of ‘Empire’ but for other song names such as ‘Seek & Destroy’, ‘British Legion’ and ‘The Doberman’. So what message is Serge trying to deliver on the new album?

“This album is about very simple things,” the guitarist muses. “It’s about your best mates and your missus. It’s about your own little life and your own circle – it’s not about changing the world; it’s about your own little fucking life you’ve got. It’s about the stuff which became massively important when all the shit was kicking off, about the people that really mattered and about having a fucking good time with your mates.”

Chris agrees, but admits they have been influenced by the world around them. “Having a political feel definitely wasn’t deliberate. The first LP had military imagery because we were writing it as shit was happening abroad with the army. You’d go down the shops and see ‘THE TROOPS ARE ON FIRE’ in the paper and Serge wrote the lyrics and took influence from this. We weren’t for it or against. We just wrote about what was going on. Unless you are going to put yourself literally on the frontline or go out and protest then generally we sit back. If you thought about it too much then it would fry your brain.”

In your video for ‘Empire’ you are about to go ‘over the top’ of the trenches in a war scenario but refuse your general’s orders – what were you trying to say with this?

Serge: ‘Empire’ is about disobeying orders; it’s about the middle finger to the machine. We are in a rock ‘n’ roll band; we are outlaws – we are bandits and we are pirates. We earn a living from being musicians – now that to me is amazing and now ‘Empire’ – we used this as a metaphor in war to disobey the generals when the order was given and the lads said: ‘You know what? ‘Fuck ’em, I’m not doing what you say anymore’ and ‘The Doberman’ is like Kill Bill, Morricone style, A Fist Full of Dollars. I just thought ‘The Doberman’ would make a great cowboy film. And that’s why it’s called ‘Doberman’.”

So the whole of ‘Empire’ is about doing your own thing?

Tom: And the video was based on Shaft and Butch Cassidy.

Serge: (Laughs) … Shaft?

Do you think it’s important to leave your listeners something other than singing about monsters?

Serge: It’s a hard one to call because as long as the tune is good then you could be singing about walruses and it’s still a good song – so whatever is right at the time that’s what you should write about.

If some kids read deeply into your album and says ‘I am going to do my own thing’ then takes radical action in their life, does that power worry you or make you more contemplative?

Serge: Not really, the kids will make of it what they will.

Tom: As long as we make other people happy then I am not really bothered. That’s all music really is. It’s a force of communication so people can escape. Even with people like Buddy Holly or Elvis or The Beatles or the Stones and if I want to pursue a career into politics in later life then I will – but I never will do that.

Serge: I think that it’s an important point, that while the world’s leaders are fucking everything up it’s music’s job to keep the people’s spirits up and our job to give all the people a really fucking good night out. Give them a night out in the middle of all the horrible shit that’s going on and they come to a gig and for that hour and a half they are like, ‘Fuck it! I am alive; it’s great to feel like this’. Look at all the poorer countries, that’s where all the best music gets made, like in Cuba, on every street there’s a guy playing a guitar because they have nothing else.

Tom: I love the fact our band makes people happy, as long as we are happy in what we are doing. That’s all I have been put on this Earth to do is just to stand there and be with the people and that’s why I think he (Serge) was put on this earth as well. Or I could be a pineapple tree or something. [Clash noticed out later there was a pineapple tree behind our table]

Claiming to make everyone happy may not be strictly true. What makes Serge so quotable and Tom a darling of the press (i.e. their stunning overstatement) also rattles a lot of cages.

Infuriatingly in July, Serge was quoted as saying: “Dance music was on its arse before we came along”, whilst Tom chimed in: “And we turned it round and made it our own.” During our chat Serge impressed on me that in fact he didn’t exactly say those words and claims his words were slightly twisted, but having spent an afternoon with them you would not put such crass overstatement past the two of them nor ignore Serge’s cheeky glint whilst defending his patch.

Equally they have been quoted as hating whinging bands before going on to slag off a whole host of peers such as the Test Icicles, The Kooks (whom they feel sorry for) and Bloc Party to name but a few. When challenged for being hypocritical Tom Meighan is delightfully honest: “Well the Test Icicles deserve to get slagged off though don’t they? I do worry about sounding hypocritical about that but I AM hypocritical. Everyone is. Elvis was. John Lennon was. Sid Vicious was. EVERYBODY in the world is hypocritical. The NME was asking us about the bands and we were giving our honest opinions.”

“I bet journalists everywhere are drying up in the desert interviewing bands who they can’t get anywhere with and they can’t anything from. Your job is to get something from me and if you get a good quote from me then you’ve done a good job – you are not waiting in the desert to die with me are you? You are not looking at mirages and dying of thirst? You are not waiting for birds to come and peck your skull? I just feel sorry for journalists having to interview dire and poor, non enthusiastic bands.”

“And you must know what I mean. It must be horrible. That was what I was trying to say. We just speak our mind and we are not going out there and killing another band, to me anyone who writes music and plays it onstage is incredible. All we are doing is playing around in the playground.”

Serge: “A lot of times we get asked about our opinion of another band. Nine times out of ten when we can be bothered to answer the question we tell the truth and this always gets us into trouble. It’s just pub chat. At the same time though I am glad we get people’s backs up. It’s like the kid at school who is told not to touch the fire alarm and he does because he wants to see everyone panic – there’s something quite nice about that.”

It’s this seam of mischief which perhaps explains why the boys have been so comprehensively adopted by Oasis, adeptly fulfilling US support slots whilst Noel caused some degree of disturbance dropping into the Ibiza gig and is regularly found tipping his hat in their direction in the press.

Tom recalls their tour together and the Gallaghers’ company in the highest of orders. “We just get on. We toured in America and it was the best six weeks you could imagine. It was like a pirate ship that tour bus. Us, Jet and Oasis together; we’d hit a town, cause carnage then leave in your ship. It was mental. We just got on. That’s the only way I can describe it. It’s rare to meet people that are as honest as them; it’s real. It’s rare to meet people in this job who are that honest and real as fuck.”

On an equally epic level Kasabian recently toured as the support act to The Rolling Stones. Apart from making all their fathers the proudest in the land, not surprisingly it was something of a watershed for the band. Not least to be playing with the world’s most famous rock ‘n’ roll band. However Keith Richards’ brief few words with Serge sealed what he knew deep down and is perhaps at the crux of Kasabian as an honest band. “The show was incredible. I met Keith and he said “It’s always nice to meet working musicians” and that will stick with me forever. That’s what STILL matters to him and that was our common ground, although it was just a few words that he said to me it was a nod to us saying, ‘All that it’s about is playing your fucking guitar mate.’ ”

When you catch Kasabian play live, you can see how they have achieved their position through hard graft and an obsession with their craft. One could argue that perhaps they could have popped into more nightclubs along their formative path. This may have helped them move past the mainstream influence of chart dance acts such as their well-heeled influence of The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers. However these lads have worked their plectrums down to nothing, both on the farm for years and on the road playing nearly 300 shows in the last two years – and the results are vividly evident during their concerts.

The obvious gripes remain. Their over-hyped boasts, their winding up of other bands, their stupid claims to have saved dance music and “made it their own”, their bizarre inability to recognise any of the heritage of electronic rock bands such New Order, Primal Scream, Depeche Mode, The Rapture, Fad Gadget, Throbbing Gristle and more latterly the diversity of Hot Chip or the DFA to name only a fraction of their successful peers. However despite these minor quibbles, Kasabian remain a significant live band whose fervour on the road and ecstatic live performances have deeply affected audiences and consequently instilled a playful delusion into the talkative musicians that comprise Kasabian.

Yet never one to lie down, Tom Meighan rounds off on the above comments in typical and refreshingly honest fashion.

“What? Kasabian infuriate people? It’s our job innit? We have had some very stale garage bands in Britain recently and we put the beat back into rock ‘n’ roll. People see these statements and get really upset. I am (adopts child of a petulant kid) REALLY SORRY. I am so sorry if I have ruined your year. Its rock ‘n’ roll, man! We HAVE to annoy people!”

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