Keane Loves Me

So the excitement about Keane at the Fillmore in San Francisco is twofold. First of all, I live in Seattle, so I got to fly to San Francisco, eat amazing sushi, and ride in taxis with really, really nice taxi drivers. The Fillmore is the historic venue, opened in 1912, that has played host to the legends, the biggies, the nobility of music, like Ike & Tina Turner, James Brown, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead... oh you get the idea. Really amazing history, drop-dead gorgeous venue... yea, I was excited.

So Keane, as you may or may not know, are three guys from England (Battle, East Sussex, to be precise). They've known each other forever... literally. One was in the hospital on the day another was born. Now that's destiny, baby. They all went to school together and thought it would be an excellent idea to form a band, so they did. At first they had a guitar player, but he left after years of the band getting nowhere. So instead of messing with the chemistry and all that, they decided to just be a three-piece and see what they could work with. The guy who played bass decided to jump on the piano, and the Keane we know today was born.

Tim Rice-Oxley plays the piano, bass, keyboards, and writes the songs. He's a busy, busy man. Richard Hughes is the drummer prodigy who has never taken lessons, but is somehow one of the best drummers working today. Tom Chaplin is the singer, and to say his voice is unearthly is an understatement. His voice sounds kind of like an extremely well-trained Thom Yorke, except better, and except Chaplin is not actually trained. I mean, he was in choir... I guess that counts.

Keane have one album out, which was released earlier this year, called "Hopes & Fears." They've been touring around promoting it all year, in a marathon of trans-Atlantic insanity that would drive even the most seasoned musician into a fetal position in the corner of the tour bus. They are right now finishing up a little mini-tour of the West coast (again) before heading to Japan, then breaking for Christmas. San Francisco was their first stop.

So I flew down to the Land of Extremely Friendly Taxi Drivers to see Keane play on Thursday, Dec. 2nd at the Fillmore. Supporting Keane were The Dears, from Montreal. While dining on $13 chicken strips and drinking one too many vodka tonics, The Dears took the stage... all 15,000 of them. Well, that's an exaggeration, there weren't 15,000 of them. But there were a lot of them. They basically blew the lid off the place. In a testament to great support acts everywhere, I am right now ordering one of their disks for my listening pleasure. Go Dears!

Keane took the stage with their traditional show-opener, "Can't Stop Now," a pounder that for some reason reminds me of an old Elton John song, although I can't think of which one. I know, I'm weird. Anyway, it always starts the show off on a high note, and this night it didn't disappoint.

The crowd went crazy, and didn't calm down until the closing strains of "Bedshaped," about an hour later.

How a band with three members, two of whom are strapped behind their instruments, can put on a show with such incredible energy is beyond me.

Richard Hughes puts his whole body into his drums, head nodding, arms and legs beating, face in a huuuuge smile that probably doesn't go away until he's alone in his hotel room at the end of the night. Someone who enjoys what he does that much should be paid double, I think.

Tim Rice-Oxley simply rocks the fuck out. He's standing, he's sitting, he's rocking back and forth, he's banging his freshly-shorn head... he's like a guitar player, only sitting down and the piano. He's just started singing back up on this later leg of the tour, but unfortunately they had his mic turned down so much that I couldn't hear him. Either that or Tom Chaplin's vocals are just too powerful to support a backup singer.

In Keane's early days, a sound tech once told Tom Chaplin that he had the loudest voice he'd ever heard. Well, he still does. In both shows I've seen, he's about to blow the speakers out with those pipes. As usual, the vocals were simply flawless. Not a missed note, not a hesitation, just pure beauty and strength. I'm serious when I say that I'm not really convinced he's human. I mean, he seems normal enough... until he starts singing. That boy's got a gift... luckily he's using it to the fullest.

They played two new songs, "Nothing in Your Way," and "Hamburg Song," both of which will hopefully be on the new album. "Nothing in Your Way" is destined to be another "Somewhere Only We Know," the Bowie-esque anthem from "Hopes & Fears," and probably Keane's best known song. "Hamburg Song," is simply one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard. Chaplin sidled up to the keyboards and did a little sound layering with Rice-Oxley, and it was just breathtaking. For the first song of their encore, they played the delicate "Allemande," which brought the house to a moment of suspended animation.

Tom Chaplin is a fantastic frontman in the making. Though not as energetic this night as when I'd seen him before, he was chatty and humble at the mic, and still threw out some of his Bono-esque strutting, kneeling, and pouting. Much to the shrieking crowd's delight, he changed a lyric in "Somewhere Only We Know," from "so why don't we go..." to "hey San Francisco!" Everyone went insane, of course. He is able to make eye contact with as many individuals in the audience as possible, also. After a show sometime, ask a female audience member if she thought he was singing *just* to her at one point, and invariably the answer will be a swooning, "yeeees!" If every girl in the audience can leave a show thinking, "damn, that singer TOTALLY wanted me," then the singer has done his job, and has done it well.

The band are still working out the rough patches though. The backup vocals should be turned up, the lead vocals need to be turned down (I'm not kidding about those speakers shuttering - the voice is too strong), and Tom Chaplin needs to relax a little more between songs; his chatter sometimes sounds awkward and nervous. The show could also be a little longer, but it's difficult when you only have one album out, so I'm sure the next tour will be more extended. Otherwise, these guys are naturals. Musically, the show is absolute perfection. The sell-out crowd was as enthusiastic as any I've ever seen.

It's always interesting to see a band just on the cusp of breaking big in the States. They're already a supergroup in England, and it's only a matter of time before they're all over the place here. I think the release of the next album just might do it for them.