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Kaiser Chiefs.
There's no denying that music gets stale quickly these days. Once somebody's officially named as the Next Big Thing, suddenly a million copy-cat wannabes emerge and over-saturate the entire market. But every so often somebody comes along and turns pop culture on its head with something so deliciously different that you can't help but sit up and take notice.
Enter a little band called Kaiser Chiefs. Hailed as being one of the top bands in the current "post punk" invasion (another nice buzz word coined by those big international magazines that can refer to anybody from Franz Ferdinand to Bloc Party to The Killers - it seems to apply to anybody with a keyboard and some sort of accent, really), who have taken the world by storm with their infectious single I Predict A Riot. But what sets Kaiser Chiefs apart from the rest is, of course, their story. And drummer Nick Hodgson - thoroughly charmingly with his accent and sense of humour - was more than happy to share a giggle as he vaguely brought us Australians up to speed.
"Well," said Hodgson matter-of-factly, as if he is surrounded by a group of drinking mates at a pub egging him to tell a tale they've heard a thousand times before. "It's quite simple really. We had a band. We wrote some songs, we played some shows. We had a little bit of success and a good regular fan base. Then we got a recording contract, and things were looking up."
But while the rock star fairytale usually ends there with the band riding off into the sunset, gold records and groupies in tow, Kaiser Chiefs (known at that time as Parva) unfortunately hit a bit of a snag which resulted in trashing what had been quite a lucrative six year project.
"The record company that picked us up kind of... well, folded," Hodgson goes on to explain. "And for some reason no other record companies wanted to touch us after that. It was a bit strange.
"So we called a meeting amongst ourselves and decided to take a break for a while. During that break, we scrapped all of our other songs, changed the band's name, and changed our entire direction. Then after a while we started playing some shows as Kaiser Chiefs and suddenly things were happening again. We got picked up, and now our record's being heard all the way across the world and we're playing shows and festivals with some of our favourite bands... So we can't complain really."
And complain they don't. During the recording of their album,
they learnt that former Blur guitarist Graham Coxon was recording
at the same studio and eagerly asked if they could meet him.
"One of our songs [Saturday Night] had the sound of a
motorbike starting. So we asked if we could change it to the
sound of his motorbike starting. He said yes, and there you
go," giggles Hodgson. "Graham Coxon's motorbike is on our album."
Don't believe the story? Check the album's thankyou list.
The result has been an amazing debut, 'Employment' - a disc that's receiving rave reviews the world over. The band have somehow managed to single out the best parts of the British sound and amplify them, without all the unnecessary boring bits. "I guess we've got direction now," Hodgson surmises. "I think in Parva we were all over the place a little bit, just recreating bits and pieces of our favourite bands into one whole sound. Once we stopped doing that, we seemed to flow better. Now we have a direction, we're writing better and we know what sort of music we're wanting to create."
Ryan Smith
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'Employment' is out now through UMG.
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