Keane continue their love-affair with keys (and mainly Yamaha ones)

In the UK, at the very least, Keane is now a household word.

Things were zipping along pretty nicely here in the USA too, until 2006, when, hot on the heels of the release of the band's sophomore album Under The Iron Sea, singer Tom Chaplin checked himself into rehab for who-knows-what abuse and what could have been a fully breakthrough American tour was postponed.

Under The Iron Sea has nonetheless done well for this piano-based British trio, and their Spring 2007 mini tour was enthusiastically received.

We spoke with main writer and keyboard player Tim Rice-Oxley back in 2005 at their show in Berkeley. As noted at the time, Keane's stage looked like a “ revved up Yamaha showroom;” the S90 prominently featured alongside their already-ubiquitously used Yamaha CP70B Electronic Grand and drummer Richard Hughes tastefully thumping his Yamaha kit.

Cut to 2007 and it wasn't quite déjà vu all over again. Admittedly, Keane was back at the Berkeley Performing Arts Center, but the stage, previously minimalist and gear-based, was now dressed and ‘set' very much for the headlining rock act that Keane has now become back in Europe.

Tim's trusty CP70 is still center stage (figuratively, at any rate), but where was the S90? A Motif Rack twinkled coyly in amongst an almost unfeasibly large rack of Line 6 PODs underneath Tim's laptop, but the ‘second' keyboard was a Rhodes, facing directly out into the audience.

The show was a considerable enhancement of 2005's already excellent gig. Though the only guitarist on stage was singer Tom Chaplin's, with his occasional use of acoustic guitar, the already keyboard-based Keane sound has now been developed to include Tom on a second set of keys (Hammond CP60) that were scooted on and off stage at the requisite moments.

The production and indeed the ‘sound' has now been ratcheted up several notches. Tracks from both Hopes And Fears and Under The Iron Sea were delivered with the sort of energy level you'd only think possible courtesy of a trio of Gibson-donning hair merchants. Impressive stuff to be sure.

Afterwards we asked Tim about how the band managed to create and maintain that energy with such limited manpower on stage.

Tim: ”We certainly have to stretch ourselves to put on a big show, and make so much noise, with just the three of us on stage. Speaking for myself, I'm using every limb available – usually playing two keyboards, switching POD patches with my left foot, working the sustain pedal with my right foot, and singing at the same time. And we try to bring a lot of variety into the show by moving around the stage – I'll stand up to play the CP70, move over to stand at the Rhodes, move downstage center for a song or two. Tom ranges all over the stage, onto the drum riser, down into the crowd. On our current UK tour we have a 70-foot thrust going out into the audience, with a B-stage at the end of it, and a raised wing section on either side of the main stage. All of us play on the B-stage, and Tom can use the thrust, the B-stage, and the wings to get closer to the crowd.

“So we do everything we can to get the most out of having only three people in the band! It is pretty physically exhausting, and we've all picked up our fair share of aches, pains and injuries, but it's a very small price to pay for all the fun we have up there.

“I think that having certain limitations forces you to find new ways of doing things, and perhaps pushes you in directions you might not otherwise find – people say the same about using 4-track tape back in the mid-sixties, where the limitations of the medium forced the musicians and engineers to try new things.”

 

Do you write and record with the logistics of having to recreate the track live in mind?

Tim: “Not really. To be honest I think ever since the Beatles started making records that they had no intention of playing live; the record has become ‘the thing'. I certainly grew up thinking of the recorded music as being the pure form of a writer or a band's artistic expression, and concerts as being a performance of those works. It's a bit of a back-to-front way of looking at it, but personally I think it's a good thing. I think a great concert should bring a whole new meaning to the music, and give the audience a fresh perspective on the songs, but our first priority as a band is to write the best songs we possibly can and to make the most potent recordings we possibly can of those songs. So the logistics of playing live aren't really considered until later. I somewhat regretted this approach when it came to rehearsing the songs from Under The Iron Sea before we started touring them last year, because we suddenly realized that the sounds and parts we had committed to tape were pretty complex and hard to reproduce, certainly compared to Hopes And Fears.

“It took me ages to be able to play two separate, syncopated keyboard parts in Crystal Ball, while also singing the backing vocals, for example. And we really had to create a massively complex chain of effects to enable each of the six keyboards on stage (not to mention the several rack-mounted sound modules) to be twisted to our evil purposes!

“On the other hand, we did learn a lot from playing the Hopes And Fears songs live all over the world in all sorts of different venues – from tiny clubs in London to massive stadiums and festivals – and seeing what worked best in those differing environments. And that did affect the way we recorded, I think, just in terms of the feel of the songs. We wanted more songs that were really going to get the audience jumping and that would really fill a big room, which a lot of indie music or so-called Britpop fails to do I think.”

 

Tim: “I sometimes feel frustrated by being anchored at my piano. As I said above, I try to move to different keyboards on different parts of the stage whenever I can, but I still need to have both hands on a piece of gear that I can't exactly lift up and strut around with! But I try hard to express myself physically when I play – in fact my body kind of takes over and doesn't give me much choice in the matter – so I hope that's pretty exciting to watch.

Tim: “The technology going on in the two racks next to my piano is insanely complex and I suspect is unlike anything else being used out there at the moment. To put it as simply as possible, every keyboard Tom or I play during a gig is routed through a POD, as are various sound modules - including the Motif Rack ES. Sometimes a particular POD has to take its input from a module, and sometimes the input has to come from a keyboard, which means a whole maze of patch changes have to happen at the start of each song. (I can already tell I'm not explaining this very well!) There's also a lot of MIDI happening in there, not just keyboards triggering sound modules, but MIDI patch changes coming out of Logic and telling each POD which setting to go to for a particular song.

“Basically the main purpose of the PODs is to enable us to replicate the many and varied sounds we created for Under The Iron Sea. I used a vast array of effects pedals in the studio, and most of them are too old and delicate to rely on in the live environment. The PODs – together with the Line 6 editing software – give us access to almost unlimited chains of ‘virtual' vintage effects, and these chains can be accessed and completely rearranged at the touch a button, or indeed at the sending of one MIDI command!”

 

Tim: “The shameful truth behind that is that the S90 is hidden inside the case of a Rhodes Stage 88 (a seamless piece of engineering by Peter Hayes at Electronic Edge... http://www.elecedge.com/beforeandafterphotos/Keane/keane.html), which I'm sorry to say just looks cooler! But it means we get the benefit of the S90's great Rhodes sounds, as well as having a back-up piano sound available to use if I break a string in the CP70, which I do with alarming frequency! We use the Motif for all Tom's keyboard sounds, using the CP60 as a MIDI controller - Rhodes sounds, piano sounds and a harmonium patch – and also for my Rhodes sounds when I'm out on the B-stage.”

Tim: “They're not MIDI-synced, no, but our LD does hear the same click track that Richard and I use to keep in time with the bass parts coming from Logic. That means he can manually start his lighting programs at exactly the right point every night, and all the video stuff can also be started at exactly the right time. And because the tempo is consistent, the video will always be in sync. This means we can be ambitious with our video footage – rather than just having a random ‘bed' of visual material, we can have video footage that develops and changes at specific points in a song, adding to the story or mood of the song, because we know the timing will be right every night.”

Keane's show now combines theatrics with their artfully created and intensely original-sounding material. The CP70-initiated wall-of-sound that started with the opening number The Iron Sea only occasionally dipped (the adventurously acoustic version of Your Eyes Open), but this is a band for whom musicality is still obviously the deciding factor, live. The band's trademark ralls are still very much in evidence - although one or two numbers, ironically, now sport accelerando endings.

“That's just us wishfully indulging our inner rock gods!” says Tim. “It mainly gives me an excuse to bash the life out of my piano. In these big venues the PA is so loud that I can normally get the CP70 to feed back – and having about 120 strings, it really makes some noise when it feeds back! And speaking of pick-ups, when are Yamaha going to start making CP70s again?”

Indeed. But for the moment the S90ES (and surely the new Motif XS in due course) will have to carry that sonic banner for the world's increasing number of keyboard bands following hard on the heels of Keane and fellow Brits Coldplay.

You can catch Keane in the USA in May. Dates are posted on their website. http://www.keanemusic.com.