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Glastonbury 2011: Kaiser Chiefs

“Always leave them wanting more”

Posted 25th June 2011, 11:45am in Interviews, by Dani Beck


After releasing new album The Future Is Medieval earlier this month and having played the first gigs and festivals after 2 years, Nick and Peanut from the Kaiser Chiefs give an insight on what it’s felt like to be back before their Glastonbury appearance tomorrow (June 26).

Do you enjoy being back at festivals, playing new stuff, not just the old ‘hits’?
Nick: I like the gigs. The gigs are good.
Peanut: You go there and play 7 new songs, you know they’re not gonna go crazy. But we gotta do it because of the way we launched the album, it had to be festivals. We normally go on a little tour. But it’s a new challenge and that’s good. Four albums in, a new challenge.

Do you think the new songs are more ‘growers’?
Nick: I remember playing Ruby for the first time, it was in France. And the reaction was weak. The reaction was people staring and in the end I remember talking to a couple of the fans outside and they weren’t really getting it. So I always think about that and I know that it went to number 1. But in general I think the songs are more growers because they don’t have those kind of needy choruses.
Peanut: Starts With Nothing, we all would agree, that’s gonna be a grower. Nick: They’re not needy songs, they’re more confident.
Peanut: It’s more about us just having fun in the studio, pushing it a bit more. And this time we pushed it a bit more on all 20 songs. We play differently.

How did it feel writing 20 songs that didn’t have to fit into an album concept?
Nick: There were more. They all started in my studio and a lot of them started by me trying to learn how to use equipment recording microphones. Trying to record drums, trying to record bass, trying to record guitar. And to actually record something you gotta play something. And so what I was playing, it was only 50% of my brain that was concentrating on what I was playing and 50% was concentrating on how well it records. And I think some of that has come out in a different way of writing.
I think it started with the Shirley Bassey song. I started doing that whilst we were still on tour last time and I thought it was quite a good approach, because I really like that song. But I didn’t have any plans for it, just started singing it. In fact I started that with just the singing and played the chords around it. So I think it is different.
I was into songwriting [before the concept came up], but just not into releasing records. By then I’d already have a CD of 20 songs, well 20 ideas, they weren’t songs. But when Ricky came up with the idea, it totally was scratching me where I itched, because I didn’t wanna do a CD. Because what’s left to give on a CD? I suppose there’s a lot to give, but it wasn’t really attractive.
Peanut: The received worth of it is very little and that is demoralising as a band and particularly for Nick as a songwriter – what is the point? And myself, I was sour. It’s 2011, it’s buying music that has
no value and it still costs us emotional value and also financially, to make the CDs. So we tried to put value back into buying an album.
Nick: The idea suited me a lot when I heard it.


Releasing the album physically, as a CD, is different than just putting it up on the website. Did you have the tracklisting for the physical release set in stone before the site went up?
Nick: Yes. Not set in stone, but we knew what we wanted to put on. Somebody said “Oh you haven’t put Problem Solved on it” – it was on Twitter this morning – “How come Problem Solved is not on it?”, but then everyone’s got it, so why would you give it to them twice?
Peanut: We’re proud of each and every of the 20 songs. We’ve done a lot of interviews and a lot of talking about this. We’ve got 20 songs, we’ve finished them all to the same standard, no singles, no b-sides, no album tracks, just 20 songs. And then therefore we’re happy about any 10 songs a fan picks.
Nick: Basically you have to make them all so that you’re really happy with it, because if you hadn’t worked really hard on the songs, you might end up with someone having 10 shit songs.
Peanut: And that wouldn’t have worked.

Releasing it this way you didn’t just land a huge surprise, but also made sure it was impossible for anyone to put up a leak.
Nick: The thing about leaking isn’t what a lot of people think it is, which is – it’s all to do with money or something. It’s all to do with the occasion. When you put out an album, it’s supposed to be a big day, a celebration, sort of a pinnacle of what you’ve been doing. And then for it go out online and then people to listen to it on their laptop speakers and then to go straight on the message board after hearing it for like 30 seconds...
Peanut: ... finding the one bit they don’t like...
Nick: “This isn’t as good as the last one blah blah blah” and you think ‘ahh fuck yourselves’.
Peanut: And they only do it because they’re the first. The first comment on any review, any youtube clip – it’s just the person getting there first, it’s not the most relevant comment, but unfortunately it gets read by everybody.
Nick: And this way nobody knew anything about what we were doing. We were able to keep the secret and give 20 songs out like that. And I remember the night before was so exciting. It was basically the night editor of Guardian online or whatever who must’ve been going “right, let’s stick this out and I’ll go to bed” and it was a bit too early but it was kind of perfect.
Peanut: People were still up late, it was about 2 o’clock in the morning. I fell asleep on my sofa at about 3 o’clock, woke up at half 7 and I was dead excited, looking at all the twitter things, message boards, to see what is going on. And it was like... it’s here, it’s finally here, it’s actually here. And in history of Kaiser Chiefs, things like that don’t usually go very smoothly. And it totally went smoothly ... and it was like: it’s finally happened. And it’s exciting hearing people telling them about their experience on the website.
Nick: Because we’d known for a year.
Peanut: “I spent an hour making my album” or “I had to write it down on paper, all the songs I wanted, otherwise I couldn’t remember all the bits”. And giving people that sort of experience with a digital download, hasn’t been done. And it feels really good to be the ones who did it. It’s a good glimpse into the future what could be possible.

Are you surprised about the people’s tracklistings?
Nick: No. I don’t even know, I haven’t looked at them. I’m not even interested what people have picked, which is bizarre.
Peanut: Any 10 that get picked, I’m happy with. You can call any variation of these 20 songs The Future Is Medieval.
Nick: Also people picked them on 60 second clips so I don’t think it’s decisive, I think that was essential to the thing, otherwise people would be on the site for 3 hours or something.
Peanut: And they’d spend an hour just listening to the songs.
Nick: So that was essential to the process. Because that’s why I think a lot of people picked Problem Solved, because in that 60 seconds it sounds the best. But I’m pretty confident that there’s other songs that are better.
Peanut: Even in these couple of weeks we’ve been playing them live you can tell there’s some songs are sort of more instant winners.
Nick: There’s Kinda Girl You Are as well, we’re shocked by how well it’s going down live. Everyone seems to get it immediately, which is great, and that’s not even in the 20.
Peanut: And it’s gonna be on the CD, so at least it’s got its place somewhere and doesn’t just become some download extra track and it’s actually got its place forever on the CD. And it’s a nice little addition.

So how come you’re so pro-social networking now? Putting news on Facebook and Twitter, releasing albums via websites…
Nick: We’re not one of those people that ignore things and pretend that they don’t exist. But even when we first started, the first thing the band did in 2003 was get a website. I made the Parva website and the Kaiser Chiefs website and even in Runston Parva we had a message board and that was 10 years ago. And we were using the internet then.
We kind of just missed myspace really, because we just got signed when myspace was just starting to get really big. But there is no point in ignoring stuff and pretending it doesn’t exist and hoping that people will listen to your records on vinyl on headphones, it’s not happening. But I don’t have a facebook account. It takes up too much of my time.
Peanut: It’s useful as a band. We have hundreds of thousands of people on facebook. So we got the Kirkstall Abbey gig and you know that hundreds of thousands of people are gonna see there’s a gig at Kirkstall Abbey - or a tour. It’s not a cynical move, you’d be stupid not to do it. Everyone’s got an iPhone in their hand, everyone wants to know what happens straight away, so why not join in.

You let the people pick the tracklisting in the first place, but is it still Simon who writes the setlists?
Peanut: He’s the first one to think about it. But then, because of all the new songs, it’s more like “I don’t want that one there, I think you should put this one there...”
Nick: And it’s different if you’ve been on the road for a year you know anything will work really. If you’ve just starting out again like we are with new songs at festivals, everyone has to get involved.

Do you plan to extend your setlist? Because you’re still doing the 1h 15mins set even with now 4 albums in the back catalogue.
Nick: I don’t like playing any longer. Do you like seeing bands for longer?
Peanut: Not ages longer. We’ll tour later on in the year and we’ll do our own headline shows and that’s when it’ll be interesting to see which songs have become the growers.
Nick: My grandpa said to me, many many years ago, “Always leave them wanting more.”. And he was right.

So when people say “I wanted to hear that one…”
Nick: That’s perfect! We went off last night, at Hurricane, we did an encore, so everyone was shouting for more, we went back on and then when we left they were calling for another encore and I thought of my grandpa’s words, always leave them wanting more. And we did. Never want them leaving less.
Peanut: If you take it to extremes, then you keep playing more and more songs until 10 people leave, “I’ve had enough, I’m gonna go” and basically there’ll be one person left in the end going [claps] “That was really good, I have got what I wanted!”
Nick: And all I’ve got then is a realization of a nightmare I’ve had many times. The crowd last night at Hurricane was just unbelievable when we played Ruby, I forgot how massive that song is in Germany. There was a proper metal moshpit.
Peanut: To Ruby! To this like soft, 90bpm sort of indie song, it’s weird.

What makes a gig a good gig for you then?
Nick: It’s always the crowd.
Peanut: It helps us raise our game.
Nick: I think we’re only getting really back into it in the last couple of gigs. I think Electric Ballroom was us much more in control and confident. I think Isle of Wight was too early. To do a 70.000 festival on TV in front of all those people after only having done 2 warm ups in 2 years. And I don’t think the setlist was right. If we did it tomorrow, I think it’d be twice as good. So we’ll have to do that for Glastonbury.
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