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The Music of Keane

Fourteen tracks from a British band who had no guitarist and became enormous anyway. Keane's piano-led melancholy defined a particular mid-2000s mood.

Keane

Keane formed in Battle, East Sussex, and made a decision early on that shaped everything: they dropped their guitarist and never replaced him. Tim Rice-Oxley's piano, run through effects to fill the sonic space a guitar would occupy, carries the harmony, with Tom Chaplin's high, clear voice on top and Richard Hughes on drums.

That arrangement is why they sound the way they do, and it put them at odds with a British scene then dominated by guitar bands. Hopes and Fears (2004) sold in enormous quantities anyway and made them, briefly, one of the biggest bands in the country.

Chaplin has since been open about the addiction that nearly ended the band, and their later work is considerably darker for it.

What to listen for

"Somewhere Only We Know" is the one everybody knows, helped by a Lily Allen cover that became a Christmas number one. It remains a very well-built song, and the piano figure is doing all the work.

"Everybody's Changing" and "Bedshaped" are the other two from the debut, and "Bedshaped" is the one the band's own audience holds closest — an unusually strange, structurally loose song for a band this melodic.

"This Is The Last Time" appears twice, and the acoustic version from Toronto is worth the comparison — stripped of the effects, the songwriting has nowhere to hide, and it holds up.

"Spiralling" is the outlier: a synth-driven, almost funk record from Perfect Symmetry, and evidence of a band trying hard not to repeat themselves.

"Looking Back" features K'NAAN, the Somali-Canadian rapper, which is the last collaboration anyone expected.

"Try Again," "My Shadow" and "Love Is The End" are the deeper cuts and the most melancholy.

Go deeper

Hopes and Fears (2004) is the album that matters commercially; Under the Iron Sea (2006) is the better record and considerably angrier.

Tom Chaplin's solo album The Wave is about his recovery and is worth hearing.

For the piano-led British lineage: Coldplay obviously, but also Elbow, Doves and further back Talk Talk, whose Spirit of Eden is the record every thoughtful British band eventually discovers.

One last thought on the no-guitar decision. It sounds like a limitation and functioned as an identity — Keane were instantly recognisable on radio precisely because nothing else on it was built that way. Constraints tend to do that. A band that removes its most obvious tool has to solve every arrangement problem differently, and the piano-through-effects approach gave them a sound that a hundred guitar bands of the same period could not touch.

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