Why I Love Keane

IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
This is really fucking funny

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jun/14/william-boyd-why-love-keane

I bought Hopes and Fears, the debut album. It wasn't just Chaplin's ethereal, plangent voice that won me over: Hopes and Fears is an unequivocally great album – not a dud track and with a melodic generosity that was astounding in contemporary British rock. Tim Rice-Oxley's fuzzed keyboards may be the default Keane sound but his gift for writing great three-and-a-half-minute rock/pop songs is prodigious. The album came into the charts at No 1 with a bullet – the first of their five consecutive No 1s.
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Can't work out if he's deliberately echoing Patrick Bateman but I don't think it is deliberate, I think it's real.

Their early work was a little too new wave for my tastes, but when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He's been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has a far much more bitter, cynical sense of humor.
In '87, Huey released this, Fore, their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is "Hip to be Square", a song so catchy, most people probably don't listen to the lyrics. But they should, because it's not just about the pleasures of conformity, and the importance of trends, it's also a personal statement about the band itself.
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M

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
That's amazing. I wouldn't put it past Keane for it to be deliberate.

I got taken to see them once by the record company - champagne, good weed...even with that I fundamentally, fundamentally didn't understand them, and thus have to think that they're capable of anything. It's over my head, the Keane thing.
 
R

rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
ha thats just what you get when novelists write about pop music. edit - actually, reading the full piece, its pretty honest and sincere. the rest of the piece is just about his relationship with finding out about the band and the short story for their album, not really about how awe-inspiring and astonishing their music is or anything to eyebrow-raising effect like the huey lewis thing in american psycho. i thought it was going to be purple PR prose.

i do actually like a few keane songs (when i hear them on the radio or wherever), despite hating the sight of the band.
 
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benjybars

benjybars

village elder.
was just about to mention the Nat Tate thing.

hope it is a big hoax.. i really love some of Boyd's books
 
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rubberdingyrapids

Well-known member
sorry, i think its for real. dont see why its so far fetched - authors dont have to have great taste in music, and vice versa. and anyway keane, unexciting though they may be, do actually write good (if middle aged) pop songs. its just cool to slam them as shit cos theyre so safe, but yknow, sometimes safe is alright! im actually glad that boyd wrote this without a trace of irony - irony can be a bit suffocating. does anyone know anything else about boyds musical taste (apart from who/what he mentions in that piece, though the artists he mentions do make me think he would def like keane)?
 
Martin D

Martin D

Well-known member
Keane are just a boy band put together by ex-punk manager from Sheffield who wanted to fill the gap between Radiohead and Coldplay, seems to have worked.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
"sorry, i think its for real. dont see why its so far fetched - authors dont have to have great taste in music, and vice versa."
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It's not so much the taste as the writing in support of that and the way that it is so similar to the Bateman stuff. Surely he must be aware of American Psycho?
And, ok, it is the taste a bit as well.
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I read a William Boyd book on a 20-hour train journey once and couldn't be bothered to finish it even though I had precisely zero else to do. Doesnt' surprise me he likes Keane, but it's still fucking funny.
 
blacktulip

blacktulip

Pregnant with mandrakes
Skim-read that as:

"I read that William Boyd took a 20-hour train journey once and couldn't be bothered to finish it"

...which I though was fantastic.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
All I've heard/seen of Keane was a song of theirs I caught on the tellybox a few years ago - I never realized anything could be so radically anodyne. And the singer's got one of those big moony-spoony posh-boy faces like David Cameron.

In the context of compression in modern music production and the 'loudness wars', I read something a few years ago along the lines of "Keane should not be louder than Nirvana". Which I guess means they are, at least on record. Bizarre.
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I can kinda understand that after personally giving up on using my money on pub jukeboxes for anything produced before the mid-90s - can't fucking hear the song...

Never knew that What's the Story Morning Glory was notorious for its loudness, but that fits in with that general feeling given its year of release.

http://www.chicagomasteringservice.com/loudness.html this is pretty fascinating
 
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Slothrop

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Martin D said:
Keane are just a boy band put together by ex-punk manager from Sheffield who wanted to fill the gap between Radiohead and Coldplay, seems to have worked.
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Does that mean we have to have a pop-ist reappraisal and end up thinking they're brilliant, then?
 
J

Joey Joe-Joe Jr. Shabadoo

Well-known member
talking of Bateman...

The reckless, heady abandon at the heart of ‘Call My Name’ is unleashed in glorious fashion here: it’s a song about throwing caution to the wind, and from the magnificent drops into the verses to the tasteful guitar strums, that’s exactly what Royal-T and Cole deliver in combination. “You’ve got me confused by the way I’ve changed,” accuses Cole. It’s a line that means precisely nothing. It doesn’t matter. “My name, my name – SAY MY NAME, BABY!” she commands; and as one both performer and listener let themselves go. Lead becomes gold.
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