| Passion. Not a word you all that often any more when it comes to music, but Kasabian have it by the tractor-load. They're not making music to be famous, or because it's a good career, they're making music because they need to, because it's etched somewhere deep in their souls.
"Why be in a band?" asks singer Tom Meighan. "Because it's the only thing I could do. There's nothing else I ever wanted. Nothing, nothing. This is what I've wanted to do ever since I was four. This is why I'm here."
Kasabian grew up in Leicester, a city hidden in a sprawl of suburbs. The kind of place where you listen to music, watch football, get drunk and wander the streets at night singing, because there's nothing else to do.
Except the raves. In the early '90s Midlands cities like Birmingham, Leicester, Coventry, and Wolverhampton, were the focus for hardcore, a music that fused house music with hip-hop beats and a dark sensibility. Unlovely and unloved by most of the media, it was that party no on in mainstream club culture wanted an invite to. Instead, it appealed to alienated young teems who gradually developed it in all kinds of new and interesting directions. Like jungle/drum 'n' bass. Or like Kasabian's pounding electronic rock.
A gang with ambitions to cut the pap out of pop. "From day one when we started this band, I've always had the confidence," explains Tom. "We always had something about us, from the beginning, we believed nothing could limit us."
The final part of their story came together when they went to a party at a farmhouse in Rutland, about 30 miles outside of Leicester. They got talking to the farmer's son and they ended up staying. A former textile mill with what seems like an endless array of echoing, empty buildings, the farm sits in isolated splendor on a hill that slopes gently down to the pretty man-made lake of Rutland Water. It's a beautiful part of rural England. And, once Kasabian had moved in, it proved the perfect place to plot the start of a movement.
There's a big TV, piles of DVDs and computer games, a sound system that hits you right in the solar plexus, and plenty of music to play on it. Upstairs, next to their shared bedroom--"we could only afford to rent two rooms," Tom says--they created a studio packed with synthesizers from different era, and various styles of guitar and percussion. And most importantly, they have all the time they need to play with it.
There were parties, of course. There was even a mini-festival when friends came and pitched up tents and Kasabian played live in one of the farm's abandoned industrial buildings. But with most of their friends a 60-mile round trip away, there are also long stretches of time with no interruptions, no distractions. Time to sleep, walk, play music or movies all day and then the freedom to create well into the night. "Dreamtime," grins Christopher Karloff. "When all the best ideas come."
When it comes to inspiration, these lads eat up music, then spit it out as something fresh and new. "It could be the littlest thing from any track, even a rubbish track might a little sound in there," Tom says. Some of the ingredients that went into the pot: the Stones, the Doors, and Beatles records in their parents' collections, Tom's mum's passion for Motown, a love of film and film soundtracks that Karloff inherited from his dad, the sense of freedom that came from dancing all night in a field, the rhythms of rave and hip-hop, the attitude of Brit-pop;, Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, the Four Tops, the Supremes, the Ronettes, Ennio Morricone, early Pink Floyd, Brian Eno's Music For Airports, Kraut rock, Donna Summer, Joy Division, Eminem, Air, music from now, music from then, anything, and everything. |
