TIM INTERVIEW on Clickmusic and in Cardiff!

Keane have just kicked off a UK arena tour for their third album 'Perfect Symmetry', one of Clickmusic's favourites of 2008.

We get pianist and songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley on the phone in Newcastle, where he tells us how he feels about the reactions to their most vibrant album to date.

Perfect Symmetry's songs sound far less introspective than those on Under The Iron Sea - were you in a comfortable place when it came to writing them?

Yeah, we all felt happier and more positive, and also the sense that the last record and that kind of introversion... it felt like it was a little bit too self-obsessed. Maybe not too self-obsessed, but when you spend that much time scrutinising your own thoughts, and then playing those songs every night for 18 months, you know, that felt quite emotionally gruelling at the time! We felt happier in ourselves, and wanted to make a record that was more outward-looking and philosophical, and actually said for me about the world at large. All of us are great humanists, if that's not too pretentious an idea, and the record is an infusion of a great love of humanity, and sympathy for everyone on the planet. Expressing that in pop music is not easy and I guess that was an exciting challenge for us.

A lot of your songs seem to be based on friendship, rather than being straightforward romantic love songs. Has that been deliberate?

Not really. There are definitely love songs on all three albums, but they tend to be quite skewed approaches to that subject. Like 'Atlantic', on the second record, is a song I wrote mainly about my wife, and it's basically a song about being afraid of dying alone. So it's not exactly Westlife! I think friendship is a very important thing for me, and that lifetime bond between friends is an amazingly powerful thing. I guess it's a big part of my conscious for one reason or another!

You can read the whole interview here.

And the Cardiff interview...

“Black Burning Heart came from Paris. We thought it would be great to have someone speaking in French on the record.”
Although debut album Hopes and Fears and Under The Iron Sea were both a massive success, Rice-Oxley admits they were nervous about releasing Perfect Symmetry.
“It’s a very different sound for us. You never know what people are going to think when you are doing something new. It’s really reassuring that (debut single) Spiralling did so well.
“It was put up on the website as a download for fans to give them a taster and half a million downloaded in five days. It was suddenly all over the radio. It was a great situation to be in and made us feel a bit more confident. And nothing could be a better conclusion than going to number one.”

You can read the whole interview here.