Burned by past leaks, Kaiser Chiefs release their new album today after exactly zero buildup ? and it might well be the world's first bespoke record. The band explain all
In the east London studio purchased with the proceeds of Kaiser Chiefs hits such as I Predict a Riot, Oh My God and Ruby, the group's drummer, Nick Hodgson, shows singer Ricky Wilson an image on his iPhone. "Can you see anything strange about this?" says Hodgson, emitting a low hum of excitement. Wilson correctly points out it's a discarded can of Carlsberg. "Ah, but look closer!" trumpets Hodgson. "Look at the ringpull beside it! It must be at least 25 years old. I was out walking the dog on Hampstead Heath yesterday and it was just there on top of some leaves, as though someone had just left it."
The two 33-year-old musicians attempt to outdo each other with increasingly arcane facts about canned beverages. Wilson recalls the infamous launch of Red Bull in their native Leeds, in which enough empty cans of the energy drink were discarded around the city centre to pique local interest. "Morally, it's a questionable way to launch something, isn't it?" Wilson pauses for a second. "Although, it did work, didn't it? Perhaps they should have done that with [failed 1980s fizzy drink] Quatro."
It's been about six weeks since I last saw Wilson. But the change in his body language between that encounter and now suggests I could almost be talking to a different person. Back then, he arrived late at a dinner party hosted by a mutual friend, and had the air of a man whose thoughts were elsewhere. He was about to run the London marathon to raise money for the Alzheimer's Research Trust (Hodgson's father was diagnosed with the condition in 2008), and his training regime forbade him to eat anything other than salad at that time of night ? though his abstinence didn't extend to a few bottled beers.
Surely a couple of stones lighter than he was when 2008's Off With Their Heads appeared, Wilson explained to the guests that his 26-mile run was to double up as the video for an upcoming Kaiser Chiefs single. Miming along to the song as it played on his iPod, the promo would show him at various stages of the race, until the song's final lyric coincided with Wilson crossing the finishing line. To Wilson's subsequent relief, the BBC refused permission for filming: come the day, the singer collapsed with just two miles to go. "I have no recollection of the final five miles," he says now. "Beyond waving at my girlfriend, it's all a bit hazy. I only know where I went because it was on my GPS. I passed out under Blackfriars bridge and woke up in an ambulance. I didn't even know my own name."
At the dinner party, Wilson suddenly became anxious that he had divulged too much about the video idea. "Nick would be cross if he knew I'd even told you what I just told you," he said. Etiquette stopped me from pointing out that ? much as I like the band ? Kaiser Chiefs' imminent return was hardly a matter of national security. Six weeks later, though, their paranoia isn't quite what it was. As the singer puts it: "We're not naive enough to believe that the world is hanging on our next move. But when you've had a new idea and you can't quite believe that you're the first people ever to have had that idea, you don't dare tell anyone."
And so to The Future Is Medieval. Without any buildup, fanfare or whatever you want to call the pop equivalent of leaving Red Bull cans scattered around Leeds city centre, the successor to 2008's Off With Their Heads appeared on Kaiser Chiefs' website on Friday. In doing so, it effectively heralds the arrival of the world's first bespoke album. Ten songs from a choice of 20 for �7.50 ? no more, no less ? but what those songs are, and the order in which they run, is down to you.
How to pick, exactly? One-minute excerpts allow you to choose between, say, I Dare You, or Dead Or in Serious Trouble ? two examples of the queasy fairground pop that is one of the band's fortes. Each song is represented by an object sitting on a shelf: click on a suitcase full of rats and you get Man on Mars; Saying Something is represented by a wolf riding a horse. "There's a lyrical significance to every object," says Wilson, "although some are more oblique than others." Once you've assembled your album, another area of the site allows you to customise and print the artwork.
For any band, every record beyond their debut album is, in a sense, a reaction to the one before. In the wake of Off With Their Heads, however, Hodgson's immediate reaction was simply not to bother. In some quarters, the group's decision to enlist Mark Ronson on production duties was deemed an act of indie treachery that precluded any reasonable appraisal of the actual songs. Worse still, the album leaked three weeks before its release date. Hodgson ? a man who Googles himself far too much for his own good ? remembers reading blogs by people who had downloaded the album illegally and proceeded to be critical of its contents. "It just seemed like bad manners, really," he says. "Getting it for free ? I don't mind that per se. But how much effort are you going to put into listening to something you didn't pay for?"
By the time Off With Their Heads came out, Kaiser Chiefs' appetite for the fight was decidedly lower than it was in their first year of chart supremacy. Interviewed around the time of the release of their debut album, Employment, Hodgson explained the gameplan behind that unassailable run of early hits. "We always said that if you can see the bandwagon, then you've already missed it. So it was important for us to do something that was (a) a reflection of what we were into, and (b) nothing like what anyone else was doing at the time." On the album's companion DVD, we see Wilson turning the microphone towards the audience for the first time so they can sing the first verse of I Predict a Riot. His reaction when he realises that, yes, they actually know every word, is eye-mistingly sweet.
But after the thrill of doing everything for the first time comes the relative anticlimax of having to do it again and again. "Every band on their third, fourth, fifth record," says Wilson, "they do interviews and they say it feels like their first, and it's just something they say because it's what people want to hear. Then you wake up and you've realised that, actually, you've gone along with all sorts of things that are maybe not in your best interests."
For Kaiser Chiefs, that moment of truth was their appearance on the ITV special An Audience With Girls Aloud. A good six years after the craze for mashups had peaked, they were pencilled in to perform one alongside Britain's premier girl group: a not altogether seamless meshing of their single Never Miss a Beat and Girls Aloud's Sound of the Underground. The band were displeased. But wasn't their distaste suspiciously like a case of indie declaring its superiority to "manufactured" pop? Picking up a packet of Crunchie biscuits by way of illustration, Wilson says: "Not at all. These were manufactured and I think they're great. Much better than if I tried to make them myself. By the same token, it felt like the wrong thing at the wrong time. We tried to pull out, but we were basically ? threatened. That's all I can say about that right now. It's like that clip of Morrissey and Johnny Marr doing Saturday morning kids' TV on the top deck of a bus, surrounded by children. The presenter says, 'Where are we going?' And Morrissey says, 'Around the bend.'"
Always the band's main songwriter ("I'm good at starting ideas, but sometimes I have to rely on Ricky to finish them"), Hodgson wrote Bang Bang Bang with Ronson and submitted I Love You Now to Shirley Bassey's 2009 album The Performance. He also started his own record label, Chewing Gum, to which he signed NME-feted Hull quartet the Neat. His friendship with Kaiser Chiefs bassist Simon Rix and keyboard player Nick "Peanut" Baines extends back to the Bradford school where they met at the age of 11; in spite of that, Hodgson remained reluctant to reconvene the group ? a reticence he now puts down to his father's illness.
Certainly, there's no need to ask how hard recent events have hit his family. By some distance, the most moving song on The Future Is Medieval is If You Will Have Me: an unflinchingly tender address from Hodgson to his father, backed by a string quartet. "And if you will have me/ I want to be the son that I was/ And if you will have me/ I want to be the boy in the photograph." Asked today how his father is, Hodgson merely says: "Not good. I can't talk about it. Not because I don't want to talk about it. But if I do, I'll start to cry."
Though usually Kaiser Chiefs' "chief motivator", this time Hodgson suggests Wilson, a former art-school teacher, was "the difference between this album existing and not existing". Last Easter, while waiting to be served at Rick Stein's fish and chip shop in Falmouth, Wilson found himself wondering why having fans assemble their own Kaiser Chiefs album from a selection of tracks wouldn't work. He couldn't think of a reason. Holidaying with him was Oli Beale, an ad agency creative who achieved a measure of fame after his letter of complaint about the food on a Virgin flight from Mumbai went viral. "The more Ricky and I talked about it," remembers Beale, "the better it seemed. Then all these other ideas just kept slotting into the main idea."
Included among those ideas was what Beale and the band hope will be one of the main incentives for people to pay for these songs. Once you've compiled your album and customised the artwork, you can sell your version of The Future Is Medieval to other people visiting the website ? and pocket �1 for every one you sell. You even get the HTML code, allowing you to sell the album on your own website. "It sounds relatively simple," says Beale, whose company, Wieden+Kennedy, oversaw the creation of the project. "But actually, none of us had any idea what a huge job this is. The mechanics of tracking the royalties of everyone who worked on the album and making sure everyone who sells on the album gets their pound ? none of that has been done before."
Whether or not it'll be done again surely depends on the success of The Future Is Medieval. In the long run, it may take the inevitable career-spanning anthology album to position Kaiser Chiefs as a great singles band. Pending such a moment, Wilson says that this way of working has reignited the creative process. "You're trying to make every song a worthy candidate to be selected for the album.
"When our last album leaked, that was the worst thing. The night before this one comes out, I know I won't be able to sleep. The last time that happened was with our very first record."
? You can hear Dead Or in Serious Trouble from Kaiser Chiefs' new album streaming exclusively at guardian.co.uk/music. We've also got our own special Guardian version of The Future Is Medieval for you to buy, with a tracklisting chosen by Pete Paphides himself. A pound from every purchase will go to charity.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jun/03/kaiser-chiefs-the-future-is-medieval
Ana Hickmann
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